Page:Irish plays and playwrights (IA irishplaysplaywr00weygrich).pdf/39

 Rh actors whom I have mentioned as leaving the National Players eventually found their way into the conventional plays, but almost none of them made successes there comparable in any degree to their successes in folk-drama or in plays out of old Irish legend. Nor can it be said that actors trained in the dominant forms of present-day English drama, even when so skilled as Mrs. Patrick Campbell, were wholly satisfying in their assumption of rôles in the plays of the Renaissance. It was Miss Allgood, chief musician in the London performances of Mr. Yeats's "Deirdre" in 1908, who won the greatest approval from the London critics, and not Mrs. Campbell as Deirdre herself.

Miss Allgood had played principal parts with the Abbey Company from 1904 on. In 1906, her sister, who plays under the name of Miss Maire O'Neill, came into the company, assuming the more romantic rôles with a success as great as that of Miss Allgood in character parts and comedy. From 1906 they have shared the principal women's rôles, but, owing to Miss O'Neill's inability to come to America in the fall of 1911, Miss McGee fell heir to many of her rôles. After the departure of the Messrs. Fay, Mr. Sinclair, Mr. O'Donovan, and Mr. Kerrigan became the leading men. It is not altogether accurate, however, to speak of any actor or actress of the company as leading man or leading woman, for not only is one "a leading lady" one night, as was Miss McGee as Pegeen Mike in "The Playboy of the Western World" on the American tour, and one of the village girls in "The Well of the Saints" the next night, but the men and women