The Workhouse Ward by Douglas Hyde

First published: 1909

First produced: 1908, at the Abbey Theatre, Dublin, Ireland

Type of plot: Comedy

Time of work: c. 1900

Locale: A ward in Cloon Workhouse, Ireland

Principal Characters:

• Mike McInerney, and
• Michael Miskell, old paupers
• Mrs. Donohue, a countrywoman

The Play

In The Workhouse Ward, Mike McInerney and Michael Miskell, former neighbors, are confined to neighboring beds in an Irish poorhouse. The old men are alone during most of this twenty-minute comedy, the other inmates having gone to Mass, and the action is limited almost entirely to talk. As the play opens, they trade extravagant physical complaints in a rich Kiltartan dialect, moving quickly to invective and a rehearsal of all the quarrels they have had with each other during nearly seventy years of living side by side. Each blames the other for his present poverty, having spent his money building barriers and protecting his property to no avail; Michael’s pigs still ate Mike’s gooseberries, and Mike’s dogs still attacked Michael. Each impugns the other’s ancestry and boasts of his own, as measured by the number of generations buried at the Seven Churches or the screeching of the banshee at the death of a family member. They reveal a history of lawsuits and petty grievances, they bemoan the fact that they are doomed to spend the rest of their lives “chained” together in this place, and they wish each other dead. Mike McInerney’s exclamation is typical of both men:

And I say, and I would kiss the book on it, I to have one request only to be granted, and I leaving it in my will, it is what I would request, nine furrows of the field, nine ridges of the hills, nine waves of the ocean to be put between your grave and my own grave the time we will be laid in the ground!

At this point, a countrywoman enters and identifies herself as Honor Donohue, the recently widowed sister of Mike McInerney, whom she has not seen in five years. She brings her dead husband’s “good frieze coat . . . and a hat in the fashion” and an invitation to Mike to come and share her “wide lovely house” and “a few acres of grassland.” Mike eagerly agrees to join her in what has become in his vivid imagination the promised land:

The goat and the kid are there, the sheep and the lamb are there, the cow does be running and she coming to be milked. Ploughing and seed sowing, blossom at Christmas time, the cuckoo speaking through the dark days of the year! . . . Age will go from me and I will be young again. Geese and turkeys for the hundreds and drink for the whole world!

Michael Miskell, however, is distressed at this threat of desertion by his ancient antagonist: “All that I am craving is the talk. There to be no one at all to say out to whatever thought might be rising in my innate mind!” The specter of the loss of this particular type of intimacy moves Mike McInerney. He pleads with his sister to take both of them, but she indignantly rejects the suggestion; she wants no stranger, and even less does she want an old quarrelsome neighbor. Mike refuses to stir without Michael, and Mrs. Donohue leaves angrily. As the play closes, the two men return to their mutual invective, hurling pillows, mugs, and prayerbooks at each other.

Dramatic Devices

The most characteristic device in The Workhouse Ward, other than the dramatic language discussed above, is its economy of means. The play has been deliberately pared to its essentials: three characters; a spare set consisting of two beds, two blankets, and a night stand; and a swift, efficient development of character and situation. Writing the play encouraged the refinement of these qualities.

The Workhouse Ward was adapted from Teać na mBocht or The Poorhouse (pb. 1903), a Gaelic play by Douglas Hyde based on a lengthy scenario by Lady Gregory, which in turn grew out of her charitable visits to Gort Workhouse near her estate at Coole Park. The Poorhouse had five characters as well as several offstage voices representing other inmates of the ward, and somewhat looser dialogue; according to Lady Gregory, it “did not go very well. It seemed to ravel out into loose ends” and was not popular with the actors or the audience.

When the Abbey Theatre needed a new, easily produced play, Lady Gregory rewrote The Poorhouse for three actors, recasting the dialogue and tightening the structure. In her version, the old men emerge cleanly, without wasted words; their characters are bolder and more forceful, and Mike’s rejection of his sister’s offer is more resonant. The play is swift, concentrated, and delicately balanced. With a few brief speeches, Lady Gregory creates the world of the old men, almost hermetically sealed in its exclusivity; as soon as this world is established, it is breached by Honor Donohue, bringing news of a reality which will destroy their imaginative construct. Within minutes, her reality has been incorporated into their construct and then rejected as unnecessary and destructive. No word or motion is wasted.

The bare set was practical, given the limited physical resources of the Abbey; symbolic, since it evoked the material deprivation of the characters and the extent to which a good frieze coat and a couple of acres of land represent paradise; and dramatically effective, as it fixes the audience’s attention on character and language. The small cast stresses the mutual interdependence and the complementary effect of the men.

Lady Gregory’s stagecraft was influenced by the practices of Molière, two of whose plays—Le Médecim malgré lui (pr., pb. 1666; The Doctor in Spite of Himself, 1672) and Les Fourberies de Scapin (pr., pb. 1671; The Cheats of Scapin, 1701)—she had translated for the Abbey stage by this time with decided success. Like Molière, she discarded the superfluous and constructed a brisk duel of words which could lead unexpectedly to a burst of eloquence, and like him she was drawn to comic irony. Lady Gregory was pleased with the result of this experiment in tight dramatic construction and accepted the challenge to apply this technique to most of her succeeding plays.

Critical Context

For the student of drama, Lady Gregory’s major significance is as cofounder of the Abbey Theatre, with William Butler Yeats and Edward Martyn, and as its continuing godmother, providing direction, ongoing supervision, money, political support, even costumes and food—and plays. Though she had previously written in several other genres, she began writing plays only in her fifties to fit specific needs at the Abbey and to promote specific nationalistic aims. These parameters should not suggest that her plays are mechanical, merely utilitarian, or thesis-driven; on the contrary, once she discovered this form she found both a talent and a desire for drama itself, and quickly became the most prolific of the Abbey dramatists. The spoken language and the interaction with a notoriously responsive audience brought out her genius. She loved the challenge of appealing to a popular audience, and said that if she had not had the Abbey, she would have been drawn to the music halls of England.

The Workhouse Ward assumes its first importance in this context; it is representative of the one-act plays she wrote during the Abbey’s first six years, plays whose popularity helped build an audience, whose brilliance inspired a number of imitations, whose view of the Irish people had a political effect, and whose roots in actual life helped move the Abbey toward a broad-based realism rather than a more esoteric mythic drama.

Her work in general is also valued for its influence on the dramaturgy of Yeats, John Millington Synge, Sean O’Casey, and others. Although they are certainly not imitators of Lady Gregory, all of them were influenced by her handling of language and tight dramatic structure. The practice she gained in writing one-acts—Spreading the News (pr. 1904), Hyacinth Halvey (pr., pb. 1906), The Jackdaw (pr. 1907), The Rising of the Moon (pb. 1904), and The Gaol Gate (pr. 1906), as well as The Workhouse Ward—also contributed to her own success in three-act comedies, tragedies, and folk-history plays.

Aside from its importance to the Abbey and to the Irish Literary Movement, The Workhouse Ward and others of Lady Gregory’s one-acts have been important in the little theater movement in the United States and Europe, both creating interest and providing material. Although they lose some degree of resonance when translated or performed out of their cultural contexts, they are nevertheless effective, popular, and easily produced.

Sources for Further Study

Adams, Hazard. Lady Gregory. Lewisburg, Pa.: Bucknell University Press, 1973.

Ellis-Fermor, Una. The Irish Dramatic Movement. 2d ed. London: Methuen, 1967.

Fay, Gerard. The Abbey Theatre: Cradle of Genius. New York: Macmillan, 1958.

Kohfeldt, Mary Lou. Lady Gregory: The Woman Behind the Irish Renaissance. New York: Atheneum, 1985.

Kopper, Edward A. Lady Isabella Persse Gregory. Boston: Twayne, 1976.

Mikhail, E. H. Lady Gregory: Annotated Bibliography of Criticism. Troy, N.Y.: Whitston, 1982.

Mikhail, E. H. Lady Gregory: Interviews and Recollections. Totowa, N.J.: Rowman and Littlefield, 1977.

Saddlemyer, Ann, and Colin Smythe, eds. Lady Gregory, Fifty Years After. Totowa, N.J.: Barnes and Noble, 1987.