Redemption - Leon Uris [36]
Atty kept quiet about her age. She was seventeen when she arrived in Dublin like a Celtic myth riding out of the west. Her physical stature, keen mind, and willful personality revealed a persona beyond her years. She was more than at home in this moment of Gaelic revival. She spoke the ancient language to perfection and soon discovered the speaker’s platform at street corner rallies where she decried the evils of imperialism.
All of it was euphoric, the ringing cries for liberty by the pamphleteers, the circle of intellectuals, the old games of the Gaels on the sports fields, the spawning ground of awakening.
Shortly after her arrival, three of her closest friends, Lady Gregory, Edward Martyn, and William Butler Yeats declared the beginnings of an Irish National Theatre.
We propose to have performed in Dublin, in the spring of every year, certain Celtic and Irish plays, which, whatever be their degrees of excellence, will be written with high ambition and so build up a Celtic and Irish school of dramatic literature…We will show that Ireland is not the home of buffoonery and of easy sentiment, as it has been represented, but the home of an ancient idealism. We are confident of the support of all Irish people, who are weary of misrepresentation, in carrying out a work that is outside all the political questions that divide us.
Well, that was a marriage in heaven waiting to happen for Atty Moore. A permanent home was found in the rebuilt Mechanics’ Theatre on Abbey Street. Atty followed her physical stature and commanding presence onto the stage. In the beginning her presence was so powerful, all she had to do was walk on and stare at the audience to chill them.
She was a star, but there was a problem. Atty’s enthusiasm and her ability as an actress were not quite on the same page. With a blunderbuss cry from the dock or dying of TB from linen mill dust, she could overact to move any Irishman to tears.
Because her acceptance of a script assured a playwright a production, she was heavily courted by aspirants. One playwright who caught her fancy was a young journalist out of Donegal.
Atty sensed from the onset that, despite her power, Seamus O’Neill did not seem quite as awed as those in her court.
Seamus had written two ten-minute readings, the kind of lyrical prose that any actress would want as a part of her repertoire. She sensed that he was not happy that she merely took his writing for herself, when in fact she had been expecting Seamus to swoon over the honor.
They went to work, one-on-one, and he rolled his eyes to the heavens once too often. Down flung the script and off stomped the actress. Seamus picked up his pages and repaired to an always handy pub.
“Well?” she said, slipping alongside him at the bar twenty minutes later.
“You’re not Joshua,” Seamus said, “you aren’t going to knock down the walls of Dublin Castle by blowing a trumpet.”
Atty passed through several stages of fury. Well, she did ask him and the little bastard had the right to his opinion. What hurt was that he had hit the bull’s-eye. Atty was going nowhere except as a big busted trumpet.
“Should I go out and buy a harp?”
“Keep Atty off the stage,” Seamus said. “Bring on the stage the woman whom the playwright wrote. Otherwise, you’re going to end up as a dog with one trick, shout your way through your roles. You don’t trust the words.”
“I’m trying to decide if I should spit on you or ask you to help me,” she said.
“Theatre of this sort is new. I’m not a director. No one is yet in Ireland.”
“I must act,” she said as fiercely as she had ever spoken. “This is what I can do as a republican and I have never known an experience as tremendous, as exhilarating, as powerful as when I’m up there.”
“Colonels and rugby players and women giving birth have the same experience. You’ve got to look inside you and ask God if you can play someone other than Atty.”
“Can you give me a hand, sir?”
“How deep can you look into other people’s joy and pain without becoming frightened and locking them out?”
“I’m going to