“Such Friends”: 100 Years Ago, early summer, 1924, Coole Park, Co. Galway, west of Ireland

He’s only been here 10 minutes and already he feels at home.

Playwright Sean O’Casey, 44, is so pleased to be invited by the co-founder and director of the AbbeyTheatre, Lady Augusta Gregory, 72, to spend time here at her home, Coole Park. As he anticipated, the food is lovely and the conversation is about books and theatre and Ireland.

Coole Park house

Lady Gregory met O’Casey at the Athenry train station, and they took a third-class carriage to nearby Gort, where the Coole “side car” picked them up. Upon arriving at the house, Augusta said to him,

One and twenty welcomes, Sean, to the House of Coole.”

As she has with so many who have spent summers at Coole before him—fellow Abbey founder William Butler Yeats, about to turn 59; playwright and politician Douglas Hyde, 64; the late writer John Millington Synge—Augusta sensed that Sean needs extra care for his digestion and his eyesight.

Two of his plays have premiered at the Abbey, The Shadow of a Gunman last year, and Juno and the Paycock just this March. Both have been such big hits for the theatre that they have already been repeated.

Lady Gregory is hoping that, with a bit of rest out here away from Dublin, O’Casey can maybe come up with a third tragi-comedy about Dublin tenement life, to round out a trilogy of plays about the horrible effects of the Irish War for Independence and the Civil War.

O’Casey is hoping that he can have a much-needed rest, walk down by the lake to see the “mysterious and beautiful” swans Yeats wrote about, and join his predecessors in carving his initials into her copper beech “Autograph Tree.”

Lady Gregory’s Autograph Tree, Coole Park

“Such Friends”:  100 Years Ago… is the basis for the paperback series, “Such Friends”:  The Literary 1920s. Volumes I through V, covering 1920 through 1924 are available at Thoor Ballylee in Co. Galway, a short drive from Coole Park, and as signed copies at Pan Yan Bookstore in Tiffin, OH, City Books on the North Side and Riverstone Books in Squirrel Hill, Pittsburgh, PA. They are also on Amazon.com and Amazon.co.uk in print and e-book formats. For more information, email me at kaydee@gypsyteacher.com.

If you want to walk with me through Bloomsbury, you can download my audio walking tour, “Such Friends”:  Virginia Woolf and the Bloomsbury Group.

Manager as Muse, about Scribner’s editor Maxwell Perkins’ relationships with F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway and Thomas Wolfe, is also available on Amazon.com and Amazon.co.uk in both print and e-book versions.

“Such Friends”: 100 Years Ago, May 10, 1924, Abbey Theatre, Lower Abbey Street, Dublin

At the Abbey Theatre, one long block away from O’Connell Street—up until five days ago known as Sackville Street—the second run of Juno and the Paycock by Sean O’Casey, 44, is coming to an end.

Juno and the Paycock program

When the theatre premiered this, O’Casey’s second play, back in March, theatre director Lady Augusta Gregory, 72, told her co-founder, poet and playwright William Butler Yeats, 59, “this is one of the evenings at the Abbey which make me glad to have been born.”

Now, after its second successful two-week run, in addition to her feelings of pride in the theatre and O’Casey, Augusta is also feeling that this will be a great money-spinner for the Abbey.

The premiere, starring their reliable company regulars—Barry Fitzgerald, 36, as Captain Jack Boyle; Sara Allgood, 43, as his long suffering wife Juno; and Fitzgerald’s brother Arthur Shields, 28, as their disabled war veteran son Johnny Boyle—was such a hit Yeats and Lady Gregory doubled its scheduled one-week run, the first time the Abbey had ever done this.

Arthur Shields

Last month they repeated O’Casey’s first play, The Shadow of a Gunman, for the fifth time.

The Shadow of a Gunman program

Willie and Augusta have no qualms about bringing Juno back again now for another full two-week run—two Saturday matinees!—with the original hit cast. And once again the audiences are packing in.

Lady Gregory wants to have a long chat with young Sean about the possibility of his writing future plays for the Abbey.

“Such Friends”:  100 Years Ago… is the basis for the paperback series, “Such Friends”:  The Literary 1920s. Volumes I through V, covering 1920 through 1924 are available at Thoor Ballylee in Co. Galway, and as signed copies at Pan Yan Bookstore in Tiffin, OH, City Books on the North Side, and Riverstone Books in Squirrel Hill, Pittsburgh, PA. They are also on Amazon.com and Amazon.co.uk in print and e-book formats. For more information, email me at kaydee@gypsyteacher.com.

Tomorrow, Saturday, May 11, is the Greater Pittsburgh Festival of Books at the Pittsburgh Theological Seminary in Highland Park. Stop by the “Such Friends” booth in Writers’ Row.

This summer I will be talking about the literary 1920s in Paris and New York at the Osher Lifelong Learning Institute at Carnegie-Mellon University.

Manager as Muse, about Scribner’s editor Maxwell Perkins’ relationships with F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway and Thomas Wolfe, is also available on Amazon.com and Amazon.co.uk in both print and e-book versions.

If you want to walk with me through Bloomsbury, you can download my audio walking tour, “Such Friends”:  Virginia Woolf and the Bloomsbury Group.

“Such Friends”: 100 Years Ago, March 3, 1924, Abbey Theatre, Lower Abbey Street, Dublin

Abbey Theatre directors and co-founders William Butler Yeats, 58, and Lady Augusta Gregory, about to turn 72, have high hopes for this new kid.

Last April they premiered the first play by Sean O’Casey, 43, The Shadow of a Gunman, about the country’s recent war for independence from the British. A big hit, they have mounted five more productions of it since.

Sean O’Casey

Tonight is the first performance of O’Casey’s latest, Juno and the Paycock, about last year’s Irish civil war. Yeats and Lady Gregory feel this is going to be another winner for O’Casey and the theatre.

Yeats has been impressed with O’Casey’s work. Although, after a reading of this play, when he compared it to a Dostoyevsky novel, Augusta admonished him—in front of the actors—

You know, Willie, you never read a novel by Dostoyevsky.”

Some of the best Abbey theatre regulars are on stage tonight. Sara Allgood, 43, creating the character of Juno; her frequent co-star Barry Fitzgerald, who turns 36 next week, as Captain Jack Boyle, and Fitzgerald’s brother Arthur Shields, 28, as Boyle’s disabled son, Johnny.

Juno and the Paycock program

Fitzgerald gets to sum up the drama with the play’s last line,

Th’ whole worl’s in a terrible state o’ chassis.”

Yeats is already thinking that this is one time they should extend this run well beyond the usual one week.

“Such Friends”:  100 Years Ago… is the basis for the paperback series, “Such Friends”:  The Literary 1920s. Volumes I through IV, covering 1920 through 1923 are available at Thoor Ballylee in Co. Galway, and as signed copies at Pan Yan Bookstore in Tiffin, OH, City Books on the North Side and Riverstone Books in Squirrel Hill, Pittsburgh, PA. They are also on Amazon.com and Amazon.co.uk in print and e-book formats. For more information, email me at kaydee@gypsyteacher.com.

This summer I will be talking about the literary 1920s in Paris and New York at the Osher Lifelong Learning Institute at Carnegie-Mellon University, and about early 20^th century supporters of the arts at Osher in the University of Pittsburgh.

If you want to walk with me through Bloomsbury, you can download my audio walking tour, “Such Friends”:  Virginia Woolf and the Bloomsbury Group.

Manager as Muse, about Scribner’s editor Maxwell Perkins’ relationships with F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway and Thomas Wolfe, is also available on Amazon.com and Amazon.co.uk in both print and e-book versions.