Life
?1865- ; [pseudonym of R. J. Brophy]; b. Cork; Cork and Dublin journalist; [unpublished] Abbey plays, including The White Feather (1909); The Casting Out of Martin Whelan (1910); The Gombeen Man (1913), admired by Lennox Robinson as powerful and realistic. DIW DIL OCIL [No entry in RIA.]
[ top ]
References
Robert Hogan, ed., Dictionary of Irish Literature (Dublin: Gill & Macmillan 1979), gives bio-date; newspapers Kilkenny, Cork, and Dublin; five Abbey plays, 1909-22; unpublished poss. because of Yeats’s dislike for them acc. conjecture by Peter Kavanagh; The Casting-Out of Martin Whelan, 3 act (1910), poss. based on Canon Sheehan’s Glenanaar; The Gombeen Man, 3 acts (1913); The Strong Hand, 2 act trag. (1917), reworks his first Abbey play, The White Feather (1909); The Moral Law, one act (1922), a melodrama of divided loyalties dealing with a retired RIC-man and his son, who has killed a District Inspector. Lennox Robinson comments in Ireland’s Abbey Theatre that Ray is ‘undeservedly overlooked,’ and Andrew Malone considers his characters ‘almost incredibly brutal types of humanity’ (The Irish Drama, 1929).
[ top ]