"NORREYS CONNELL"
There have been many other dramatists than these I have mentioned who have had one or more plays produced at the Abbey Theatre. Some of these, like Mr. Bernard Shaw, are Irishmen abroad that have gained the ear of the world and do a play for Dublin out of a sense of duty It was thus that "John Bull's Other Island" came into being, but that play, being considered "beyond the scope" of the National Theatre Society, was not produced at the Abbey, but at the Court Theatre, London, November 1, 1904. When "The Showing-up of Blanco Posnet" was "censored" in London, however, the Abbey opened its doors to it, the "crude melodrama" receiving its premier in late August, 1909. Little as "John Bull's Other Island" was in the Abbey tradition, with moral purpose and unhumanity of its very essence, it was at least a newspaper leader on an Irish subject, but "The Showing-up of Blanco Posnet," a sort of sentimentalized travesty of Bret Harte preaching the usual Shavian evangel, has no more relation to Irish life than it has to literature. It marred the repertoire the Abbey Company brought to America, as would a camp-meeting hymn the music of the pipes.
Out of the Abbey tradition, too, are the plays of "Norreys Connell" (Mr. Conal O'Riordan), whose "Piper" had its day of lesser notoriety of Playboy-like quality on its presentation on February 13, 1908. It is a very obvious allegory, outlining under guise of an incident of '98 the weaknesses of contemporaneous Ireland, its love of talk; its lack of hold-together; its refusal to see things as
