Re-Staging the 1934 Abbey Theatre Production of Yeats’s “The King of the Great Clock Tower”: An Evaluation and Critique

Abstract

This essay investigates and critiques an attempt from the surviving evidence to re-stage the first performance of Yeats’s The King of the Great Clock Tower at the Abbey Theatre in 1934. This dance-drama was the last of four collaborations between the playwright and the dancer-choreographer, Ninette de Valois, during the period when she established for him a School of Ballet at the Abbey in Dublin. A wealth of evidence survives from which a performance text (as distinct from the printed text) may be inferred. The limitations to be found in various kinds of extant data concerning performance (music scores, set designs, photographs, revisions to play scripts, reviews, correspondence, reminiscence) are discussed in the light of the writer’s experience of bringing such a re-staging into production. The dangers of overly hypothesising or historicising are examined and devices for negotiating gaps in the evidence while being wholly transparent in one’s efforts are discussed. Finally the essay explores the many and diverse levels of collaboration on which a successful staging of one of Yeats’s dancedramas depends. In the course of that discussion the meaning of the word, collaboration, is interrogated and to some degree re-defined.