Re-staging the 1916 Rising: Eugene McCabe’s Pull Down a Horseman (1966)

ABSTRACT

The essay addresses one of Eugene McCabe’s lesser-known works, the drama, Pull Down a Horseman, which was first performed in 1966 as part of the cultural wing of the fiftieth anniversary of the 1916 Easter Rising. The play is based on a secret three-day meeting held by Patrick Pearse and James Connolly in the lead-up to the April rebellion, and it captures some of the intractable divisions that obtained between the political visions of the two revolutionary leaders. The essay focuses on the distinctive dramaturgical strategies employed by McCabe in his highly effective evocation of such apparently irreconcilable ideological divergences. Equally, McCabe’s play is an implicit critique of the extant political and social conditions of his contemporary Ireland, half a century after the 1916 Rising. While McCabe is more widely feted as a chronicler of the tolls of human suffering in relation to the Great Irish Famine, the Irish Land War and the Northern Irish “Troubles,” Pull Down a Horseman is diagnostic of the disparities between the skein of ideals that energised the Irish revolutionary period at the outset of the twentieth-century and the grim realities of the nation-state at this mid-century juncture.

KEYWORDS:

• Eugene McCabe
• Pull Down a Horseman
• Patrick Pearse
• James Connolly
• 1916 Rising

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. McCabe, Death and Nightingales, Christ in the Fields and Tales from the Poorhouse.

2. A recent interview with McCabe that provides a useful introduction to his work is Leavy, “Eugene McCabe.”

3. On these aspects of McCabe’s work see my “The Hard Hunger” ; and Eóin, “A Land Poisoned.”

4. McCabe has also authored a play about the aftermath of the 1916 Rising, dealing specifically with Patrick Pearse, Pull Down a Horseman/Gale Day. Gale Day was commissioned in 1979 by the Abbey Theatre and RTE to commemorate the Patrick Pearse Centenary.

5. Evening Herald, April 18, 1966, p. 8.

6. Martin, “Connolly’s “Absence”,’ The Irish Press, Friday and Saturday, March 24 and 25, 1967. The 1967 production of Pull Down a Horseman was subsequently reviewed in The Irish Press: “There is no account of the actual discussion, but Mr. McCabe, with quotations from their works and a certain amount of poetic licence, presents us with a confrontation which is dramatic and decisive. Both are portrayed as credible, human, forceful, and sensitive men, intent on attaining their particular dreams, but realising that these dreams will materialise more readily if they combine forces. Mr McKenna and Mr Toibin worked together with sparkling success. “Triple Bill with a 1916 Theme’” The Irish Press. Reviewing a production of the play a decade later in 1976, Mary Leland concluded that “the script was matched with acting and production of the highest possible calibre. Produced by Frank O’Dwyer the impression was given that these two actors, T.P. McKenna as Pearse and Niall Toibin as Connolly, had a degree of personal interest in the men they were portraying. Eugene McCabe made it easy for them, of course, by providing crisp, intelligent dialogue shorn of literary romanticism, and yet allowing the essential concepts, romantic where they must have been so, to singe through diluted by nothing more than the commonplaces of ordinary speech.” Mary Leland, The Irish Times.

7. The lecture was reprinted as “The Dramatist in Ireland Today..”

8. McCabe, Pull Down a Horseman, 13.

9. For an excellent review of Connolly’s work in the context of commemoration, see Heather Laird, Commemoration, 42–6 and 58–60. See also, Dobbins, “Gregory Connolly, the Archive, and Method” and “Whenever Green is Red.”

10. McCabe, Pull Down a Horseman, 14.

11. Ibid., 16.

12. Ibid., 14.

13. Ibid., 16.

14. On this broad topic see Aglietta, Money: 5,000 Years of Debt and Power and my Form, Affect and Debt in Post-Celtic Tiger Irish Fiction: Ireland in Crisis.

15. See Pearse, “The Spiritual Nation”; and Pearse, “The Coming Revolution.”

16. McCabe, Pull Down a Horseman, 18.

17. On the sacrificial in Pearse’s drama see, Patrick Hogan, ‘The sacrificial emplotment of national identity.”

18. On Pearse’s writing, recent important editions include: Ni Ghairbhi and McNulty, eds. Patrick Pearse and the Theatre; and Ni Ghairbhi and McNulty, eds. Patrick Pearse.

19. McCabe, Pull Down a Horseman, 17.

20. Ibid.

21. Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth.

22. Ibid., 148–205.

23. See note 19 above.

24. See note 16 above.

25. McCabe, Pull Down a Horseman, 21–23. The self-quotation here by Pearse reads in full as: “One man can free a people as one Man redeemed the world. I will take no pike. I will go into battle with bare hands. I will stand up before the Gall [i.e. English foreigner] as Christ hung naked before men on the tree.” This quotation is taken from the 1924 edition of Pearse’s Collected Works, it is cited in Patrick Sheeran, The Novels of Liam O’Flaherty, 1976, 249.

26. Lloyd, Irish Times: Temporalities of Modernity, 72.

27. Ibid., 71.

28. Again, see the work cited above by Laird and Dobbins.

29. McCabe, Pull Down a Horseman, 28–9.

30. Agamben, The Sacrament of Language, 4.

31. On the oath in Agamben’s work see, Ginger Nolan, The Neocolonialism of the Global Village.

32. Agamben, The Sacrament of Language, 69.

33. Ibid.

34. Battersby, “Powerful polemics motivated by injustice.”