Last night, I took part in a spirited public discussion of Bernard Shaw's play John Bull's Other Island sponsored by the W.B. Yeats Society of New York and hosted by Gingold Theatrical Group.
William Butler Yeats commissioned Shaw to write the play for the group that eventually became the Abbey Theatre in Dublin. Plays by Yeats and Shaw had previously been staged together at the Avenue Theatre in London, when Yeats's The Land of Heart's Desire was performed as a short curtain raiser before the premiere of Shaw's Arms and the Man.
The stipulation was that the play should have an Irish theme, and Shaw at first struggled to write it. In a letter to Lady Gregory, one of Yeats's artistic partners in founding the Abbey Theatre, Shaw wrote in June of 1904 that he had "Not a word of the play yet on paper" but he was "Seething in the brain." The play he eventually came up with had four acts and six different scenes, which would have undoubtedly been a challenge for the small company just trying to start out in the world.
At the end of August, Shaw wrote to Yeats to see if the new theatre might have "a hydraulic bridge" to accomplish the two scene changes that occurred in the middle of acts. Eventually he did finish the play, but it proved to be too long and difficult to stage for the company. The "inevitable cutting" Yeats wrote back, would adversely affect the "seriousness" of the play. Ultimately, the theatre allowed Shaw to look for another home for the piece.
This was not difficult, as Shaw was a successful playwright by 1904, and John Bull's Other Island was premiered instead by the Royal Court Theatre in London, with the actor Harley Granville Barker playing the defrocked priest Peter Keegan.
