Lennox Robinson

(Oct. 4, 1886 – Oct. 14, 1958) was born in the small Irish town of Douglas, County Cork.  His lifelong association with Cork, coupled with his plays’ salty depiction of peasant life, led some to label him founder of the “Cork realists,” the post-Yeats school of grim Irish realism.   Robinson dismissed any such moniker.  The author of more than 30 plays, his style defies categorization.   During his prolific career, Robinson penned comedies, tragedies, radio plays, poetry, an historical novel, and short stories.

Robinson was a frail, lonely child.  He was too ill to attend school regularly with his older brothers, but his father, a Protestant minister, taught him a little Latin, and Robinson taught himself to play the violin and the organ.  He began to write poetry in his teens, vaguely dreaming of a career as a poet or musician.  In August, 1907, when he was 20, he saw a touring production of the Abbey Theater.  The Abbey was established by W.B. Yeats and Lady Gregory in 1903 to revitalize Irish drama, building on the success of the Irish Literary Theatre, founded in 1899.  

The performance changed Robinson’s life.  For the first time, he realized the power of his own Irish heritage as subject matter.  “It came to me in a flash, as a revelation, that play material could be found outside one’s own door at one’s own fireside,” Robinson wrote.

He was promptly inspired to write his first play, The Clancy Name, a realistic drama about a patrician Irish family who is willing to destroy itself just so its good name can be preserved.   The short play was produced at the Abbey in 1908.  It caught the attention of W.B. Yeats, who promptly hired Robinson, despite his lack of experience, as the theater manager.  Yeats felt that running a theater was the best education Robinson could have as a playwright.  

Before he began his managerial post, Robinson gained more experience by working as George Bernard Shaw’s personal secretary for six months.  The job required little actual work, but Robinson got to observe Shaw and colleague Harley Granville Barker in daily rehearsals

At the Abbey, Robinson weathered many storms—he was nearly dismissed in 1910 for refusing to observe mourning for the English king, and he was fired in 1914 after a flop American tour, only to be re-hired later by Yeats.  Despite the turmoil, he directed plays, managed the theater’s finances, and wrote and produced his own plays.  

Robinson began his career writing tragic realism, such as The Cross-Roads (1909) about a woman trapped in a loveless marriage.  But it was comedy that would make his name. His early masterpiece, The White-headed Boy (1916), about the ridiculous heights a family climbs to pay for their favorite son’s education, was the most performed Abbey comedy after Synge’s Playboy of the Western World.   Drama at Inish (1933), re-titled Is Life Worth Living? for its London run, played to sold-out houses in Dublin, London, and New York.

By 1948, Robinson was a permanent fixture on the Abbey’s board and had received an honorary doctorate from Trinity College, Dublin.  His plays, however, had fallen out of fashion.   His last play, Speed-the-Plow, was never published or produced.   Robinson became an alcoholic, and he died alone and penniless in 1958. 

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