"TIME'S POCKET."

STATEMENT BY MR. FRANK O'CONNOR.

_Frank O'Connor_, Director, Abbey Theatre, writes:—I have been very
interested in the controversy regarding "Time Pocket" at the Abbey
Theatre; all the more because exactly the same sort of controversy,
took, place at the time "The Invincibles" was produced. An author may
consider himself lucky when the critics abuse him, and people write
letters to the newspapers in his defence, because this is usually the
first sign of a new literary movement. Literary movements begin in a
conspiracy between an author and a small section of his audience. The
critics have no part in the conspiracy; they think only of
"construction" and "action" and "development" and "psychology"—all of
which have about as much to do with the theatre as the man in the
moon.

Chehov was scarified by the Russian critics; Ibsen by the Scandinavian
ones, but members of their audiences went on thinking obstinately that
Chehov and Ibsen were saying the things they wanted said. The same
thing happened in Ireland! with Synge and Lady Gregory, and the
position to-day is not so different.

Five years ago I tried to summarise it by saying (in an attack on the
Abbey as it then was) that we had had two civil wars, and a whole
generation of embittered men and women who had known the heights and
depths of human emotion, and the Abbey had never even become aware of
their existence. Now the Abbey is aware of them—not very much, I must
say. The first hint I got of a new life in the theatre was in Higgins'
"Deuce of Jacks" abused by the critics. I got it again in Carroll's
"Shadow and Substance," which the critics praised not for its
originality and daring but for its "construction," though whenever the
construction became visible, as in the farcical portions, the play
went stone dead. It is in O'Faolain's "She Had to do Something"
—abused as well.

There is something about a critic's job which makes him blind to the
things that are happening in the world about him. I and the young men
who wrote that very witty letter, know somebody who resembles "Martin
Conlan" in the play; we know how he tyrannises over Irish life; but to
the critics he simply "delays the action"—the action, as all good
critics know, being the only thing that matters. Let the theatre fall
into the hands of showmen and buffoons; let all thought and
imagination and idealism be driven out, but dont touch the "action:"
"the action, the whole action, and nothing but the action." That will
be the critics' motto.

For Mr. Dermody. I fear there is no redemption. As a producer he has
committed the unforgiveable sin—that of being one of the mere
Irish. As a Gaelic poet put it so many hundred years ago:—

  B'fhearr leo Jones no James, no Jackson
  Na cead sron d'a short ar maidin.

Irish Independent, 1939-06-01, p. 6