William Fay (1872-1947)


Life
[William George; fam. “Willie”] b. Dublin; younger br. of Frank Fay [q.v.]; ed. Belvedere College to age of 16; ran away to join touring ‘fit-up’ theatre, experiencing all aspects of theatrical work; spent six years on the road to 1897 as fit-up theatre manager before setting up in Dublin; the Fays production of Alice Milligan’s Red Hugh seen by W. B. Yeats in Aug. 1901, causing him to invite them to produce plays for the Irish Literary Theatre; the Fays produced Hyde’s Casadh an tSúgain (1901); staged Yeats’s Cathleen ni Houlihan, April. 1902; Yeats joined Fay’s Irish National Dramatic Society with Lady Gregory in 1903, the society becoming Irish National Theatre Society, with W. G. Fay as stage-manager;
 
produced plays for the nascent Abbey Th. from Dec. 1904; renamed National Theatre Society, 1905, forming a nucleus of actors at the Abbey Co.; under the Abbey’s policy of distinguishing between ‘poetic plays’ and ‘peasant drama’, William undertook the direction of the latter; he appeared in Yeats’s The Hour Glass (1903), and played Martin Dhoul in The Well of the Saints (1905); created the role of Christy Mahon in The Playboy of the Western World (1907), aggravating the riotous response by substituting ‘Mayo girls [...]’ for ‘chosen females in their shifts alone’;
 
engaged in open contention with actor Wm. Kerrigan, et al., occasioned by his hot temper; actors’ group splits from authors’ group in 1908; resigned January 1908, failing to secure authority of Manager-Producer; travelled to America with his brother in 1908, returning to London in 1914, rather than to Dublin (as his brother did); published with Catherine Carswell The Fays of the Abbey (1935); his is one of the signatures on Lady Gregory’s ‘Autograph Tree’ at Coole Park. DIB BREF ODNB DIH MAX OCIL FDA
 
[ See also details and commentaries under Frank Fay [q.v.]

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Works
with Catherine Carswell, The Fays of the Abbey (London 1935); Abbey Theatre: The Cradle of Genius ( NY: Macmillan 1958), ills.

 

Criticism
Ann Saddlemyer, Theatre Business (Gerrard’s Cross: Colin Smythe 1982). See also often-contested contemporary versions of Abbey history featuring Fay given by Lady Gregory, Lennox Robinson, Hugh Hunt, et al.

 

Commentary
W. B. Yeats: ‘We owe our National Theatre Society to him and his brother, and we have always owed to his playing our chief successes.’ (Samhain, No. 3, p.8; rep. in ‘The Play, the Palyer and the Scene’, Explorations, pp.173-74).

Ernest A. Boyd, Irelands Literary Renaissance (Dublin: Maunsel 1916) - “The Dramatic Movement: Second Phase” [Chap. XIII]

Thus, at the close of its second season the Irish National Dramatic Company, under the influence and direction of the brothers Fay, had traced, as it were, the boundaries of the domain in which the Irish Theatre was to become master. They had prepared the ground, collected the company and created the tradition of acting which was to give the fullest play to the peculiar quality of our national folk and poetic drama. Once they had the collaboration of playwrights whose work corresponded to their histrionic genius, the framework of a National Theatre was rapidly constructed. But this framework was essentially determined by the Fays, inasmuch as their limitations imposed the lines within which the drama was enclosed. We can now see why the second phase of the Dramatic Movement was dominated by that element which is at once its [312] strength and its weakness. When W. B. Yeats and Lady Gregory turned to the Irish National Dramatic Company they had not the freedom enjoyed by the Literary Theatre. They had to accept, for the furtherance of their purpose, a medium already formed, and with certain pronounced characteristics. It so happened that these characteristics harmonised almost miraculously with their own conception of what the greater part of Irish drama should be. But a limit was necessarily imposed upon the development of the drama, outside of which failure was obvious. It became, therefore, the duty of Yeats to explain why the limitations of a theatre where only subjects drawn from legend and peasant life could be treated, were preferable to those of the theatre which Edward Martyn desired. To this question Yeats as editor of the Theatre’s organ, Samhain, devoted many eloquent pages, to which we shall return.
 In 1903 control passed out of the hands of W. G. and F. J. Fay, when the Irish National Theatre Society was formed, with W. B. Yeats as president. In a prospectus the Society claimed “to continue on a more permanent basis the work of the Irish Literary Theatre,” whereas its real purpose was to carry on the work of the Fays, who remained in the Theatre until 1908, giving the best of themselves and helping it to distinction in a measure only surpassed by J. M. Synge. Indeed, the latter’s stage success, as distinct from the recognition accorded to his published work, was due to them; to W. G. Fay for his wonderful interpretation of the title role in The Playboy of the Western World, and his creation of the chief male part in every other play of Synge’s previously performed in Ireland; to Frank Fay for the training of a company, without which the Irish Theatre [313] would have been deprived of its most valuable asset. It is noteworthy that its decline dates from their departure, when the spirit which made the tradition upon which the Theatre now lives began to fade. But at this time there could be no question of decline, for the Dramatic Movement was surely approaching its apogee. The year 1903 saw not only the production of Yeats’s admirable poetic plays, The King’s Threshold and The Shadowy Waters, but also J. M. Synge’s In the Shadow of the Glen and Padraic Colum’s Broken Soil, with which the two most notable of the new dramatists introduced themselves as remarkable, but totally dissimilar, exponents of peasant drama. Then the Irish Literary Society invited the players to London, where the appreciation of disinterested critics confirmed the wisdom of the enterprise, the more so as it took, in one instance, the form of a substantial deed. Miss A.E.F. Horniman was so favourably impressed that she granted the Irish National Theatre Society an annual subsidy, provided the Abbey Theatre, and leased it to them rent free for a term of six years. From 1904 on we have been possessed of a National Theatre, in the material as well as the literary sense of the world. The fact was signalised by the adoption in 1905 of the title, The National Theatre Society, the ultimate metamorphosis of W. G. Fay’s Irish National Dramatic Company, and the final variation of its nomenclature.

pp.311-13; see full copy in Library > “Critical Classics” - as attached.

Maire Ní Shuibhlaigh, The Splendid Years (1955): ‘As Christy Mahon, the weak-willed Playboy who strives for the admiration of the community and the love of the girl, Pegeen Mike, Willie Fay was a revelation. He broke completely new ground as the weak-willed poetic Mahon. Never will there be a Playboy to equal his. One forgot his diminutive stature and sharp features in the utter mastery of his playing. His love scene with Pegeen, played exquisitely by Maire O’Neill, was one of the most beautiful pieces of acting I have ever seen.’

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Quotations
Forget realism: ‘If the theatre is to continue to live under present conditions it should return to the beginning. It should return to theatricality, and forget the alleged realism that has crept in during the last twenty years. The attempts to make plays real in the photographic sense belongs to the tradesmen f the theatre and not to artists. No Art is real in that way. The theatre never was real and never can be.’ (‘The Amateur and the Theatre’, March 1930, pamphl [NLI , MS 5974]; quoted in Una Kealy, “George Fitzmaurice”, PhD UU 2005.)

 

References
Brian de Breffny, Ireland: A Cultural Encyclopaedia (London: Thames & Hudson), Frank, 1871-1931; bros., b. Dublin, own company till joining Irish Lit. Theatre in 1902; Willie created economic style of Abbey Theatre productions, as well as parts of Christy, Bartley, and Martin in Well of the Saints. Frank noted for verse-speaking, created Naisi in Deirdre, Cuchulain in On Baile’s Strand, and Sean Keogh in The Playboy, and Hycacinth in Hyacinth Halvey. The Fays left the Abbey in 1908 and produced Irish plays in USA, Willie going on to a London stage career after 1914. Port. by John Butler Yeats, Municipal Gallery, Dublin.

Kevin Rockett, et al., eds, Cinema & Ireland (1988), Fay, WG, 153 [Fr. Tom in Odd Man Out, 1947.]

 

Notes
Portrait by John Butler Yeats, inscribed ‘Irish National Theatre, A [Pot] of Broth’ [Abbey Theatre]; another, pencil drawing, 7 Aug. 1904, purchased in Lady Gregory collection sale., 1932 [NGI].

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