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| Life |
[William Denis Johnston]; b. 18 June, 54 Wellington Rd., Ballsbridge, Co. Dublin; son of Kathleen (née King, b.1860, m. Sept. 1894) and William Johnston, later a High Court and finally a Supreme Court judge in 1939; descended from 17th c. Covenanters [dissenters] in Dumfriesshire, Scotland, who settled nr. Magherafelt, Co. Derry; a grandfather, James (d.1906), throve as an enterprising tea-merchant and built houses on Adelaide Ave., Belfast and environs, incl. his own home Dunarnon, Malone Rd.; Denis ed. St. Andrew’s, St. Stephen’s Green, Dublin, and later at Merchiston Castle, Edinburgh, recalled as ‘by far the most horrible period of my life’, and where he was a prefect at the time of the 1916 Rising, during which his family home at 61 Landsdowne Rd (‘‘Etwall’’) was commandeered by Volunteers; returned to St. Andrews, 1917; |
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proceeded to Christ’s College, Cambridge, 1919-23; romantic involvements with Ethna MacCarthy [see also under Samuel Beckett, q.v.] and with Olive Barrett (aetat. 15), 1919; spoke effectively in ‘Ireland a Dominion’ debate and elected secretary of the Union, 1919-1920; elected president, autumn 1921; invited George Lansbury, East-end London socialist, to address Union; attempted to sign on [?enlist] against Republicans in Dublin, 1922; grad. (history and law; 3rd class) 1923; proposed to Olive, summer 1923; saw O’Casey’s The Shadow of a Gunman; proceeded Harvard Law School on Pugsley Schol., travelling out on S.S. Majestic; read and saw plays by G. B. Shaw, as well as expressionist plays of Karel Capek (The Madras House) and those of Kaufman and Connelly (Beggar on Horseback); travelled to Canada and Mexico, working his passage on board the S.S. Spaulding; returned to Ireland on board the S.S. Columbia, July 1924; took law lectures at Kings’s Inns and Inner Temple, called to bar, London 1925; |
joined the Dublin Drama League and played in Benavente’s School for Princesses, meeting Shelah Richards (aetat. 21); active in Dublin Drama League and the New Players 1925-29; successfully sits Irish and English Bar exams, May 1925; buys Triumph motor-bike (“Margot”); plays in Shaw’s Captain Brassbound’s Conversation (Dublin Univ. Dram. Soc.), Iphigenia (Drama League, dir. Lennox Robinson), Strindberg’s Dance of Death and Shaw’s Major Barbara, meeting parental dissent; briefly visited Algiers, 1926, and commenced sketching and “Shadowdance”; serves in law office at Hare Court, London, as pupil to Reginald Croom Johnson, 1926; joins Kensington Shakespeare Soc.; sees Toller’s Masses and Man in an ‘amazing production’ by Peter Godfrey at Gate Theatre (nr. Covent Garden), as also Georg Kaiser’s From Morn to Midnight, with Claude Rains; |
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writes draft novel (now lost) as well as draft plays, ‘Continuous Performance’ and ‘Tuppence Coloured’, the former sent to Lennox Robinson (now lost); returned to Dublin and played Ulysses in Euripides The Cyclops, at Lennox Robinson’s ‘at home’, August 1926; adopts nom-de-plume and stagename E. W. Tocher for professional reasons; fnd. The Dramick, intended as experimental branch of Dublin Drama League, with Shelah; plays in Robinson’s The Whiteheaded Boy, and lectured on Joyce, both for for Irish Lit. Soc. London, 1927; completes two-act version of ‘Shadowdance’, later called ‘Rhapsody in Green’; sends letter to Irish Statesman criticising play-selection at the Abbey and proposing a new reading committee (a suggestion rebutted by AE in an editorial note to same); sends ‘Shadowdance’ to Robinson at the Abbey soon after; acts in Margaret Kennedy’s The Constant Nymph (dir. Richards), May 1927; |
his play “Shadowdance” rejected by Abbey (on which occasion, ‘... the Old Lady says “no“”’, referring to Lady Gregory); negotiates cuts in the play with Robinson; receives notice that Yeats wanted some parts reinstated, June 1927; leaves lodgings at Bloomsbury House Club and returns to Dublin, July 1927; begins to get legal briefs, espec. in pleas; travels to Berlin, Dresden, Vienna, Budapest, Innsbruck and Mayrhofen; Shelah departs for six-month tour in USA with Irish Players, reuniting in London, though abstaining from ‘normal consummation’ at her request; Johnston appears in Evreinov’s The Chief Thing (Peacock); produces Eugene O’Neill’s The Fountain (Drama League); m. Shelah, 28 Dec. 1928 (St. Anne’s Church, Dawson St.), with whom children Jeremy, Michael, Jennifer and Rory; goes on honeymoon in Fez and Rituan; directs King Lear for Abbey in his own adaptation with F. J. McCormick in the lead, 1929; |
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directs Ernst Toller’s Hoppla for Drama League against moralistic opposition from Gabriel Fallon and others; informed by Yeats at Dalkey that the Abbey would give him £50 to mount “Shadowdance” elsewhere, Autumn 1928; Hilton Edwards agrees to produce it at end of first Gate season; staged by the Gate as The Old Lady Says ‘No!’ (3 July 1929) with Micheál MacLiammóir as Robert Emmet and Meriel Moore as Sarah Curran; a dg. Jennifer Prudence, b. 12 Jan. 1930; influenced by Theodore Dreiser, Johnston joins the Friends of the Soviet Union, 1929; plans an Irish Film Society with Mary Manning; works on Gate Revue (ed. Manning); makes a solo trip through Germany, Austria, Hungary, Romania, Turkey, Greece and Italy; showed the first act of The Moon in the Yellow River to Lennox Robinson; continues writing at Kitzbühel, during a skiing holiday with Shelah and Pet Wilson, Dec. 1930; spends Easter 1931 with Oliver St John Gogarty at Renvyle Hse.; |
supposedly anti-clerical section in his Gate Revue attacked by Hugh Allen (CTS) and others; premier of The Moon in the Yellow River (Abbey 27 April 1931), afterwards played at Birmingham Rep. and later still at Malvern Festival (1933), prob. on the instigation of G. B. Shaw who invited Johnston to lunch in London; joins Dublin University Club; travels to Leningrad, Dec. 1931; New York Theatre Guild applies to perform Moon in the Yellow River for a fee of $500; Johnston purchases Prevost’s Tower, Portmarnock; appt. Director of Gate Theatre in place of Gordon Campbell, 1931-36; beaten into second place in Tailteann Games by a play of Ulick Burke, Nov. 1931; travels to meet Shelah in Cincinnati, where she is touring the Players; The Moon in the Yellow River plays in Philadephia and New York with Claude Rains as Dobelle, Feb. 1932; with F. R. Higgins and others, Johnston supported Jim Gralton, the Roscommon socialist deported to America by the Fianna Fáil government, in Rotunda Meeting, 1932; |
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holidays in Aran Island with Shelah, who had returned in March 1932; purchases the “Seabird”, a 5-ton sloop, for £30, Summer 1932; increasingly involved in rows with Shelah; they holiday together in Venice, Yugoslavia, Corfu, Athens, Constantinople, Scutar and Rhodes with the Hellenic Traveller’s Club; Johnston commences writing A Bride for the Unicorn (Gate Th., 1933); his Lady and Moon appears in Jonathan Cape edn. (1932); has an adulterous tryst with Kate Curling, Sept. 1932; embarks on relationship with the Abbey actress Betty Chancellor (‘Oh, the white, soft charm of her’), late Dec. 1932, becoming lovers in March 1933, and has an illegitimate child, Jeremy, with her; holidays in west of Ireland with Shelah, and observes Robert Flaherty at work on his film, 27 Dec.; premier of A Bride for the Unicorn (Gate 9 May 1933), dramatising J. W. Dunne’s theory of serial time with Pirandellian devices, and using archetypal characters, of which Percy the Prosperous is the most developed; W. B. Yeats walks out early on, accompanied by Lennox Robinson; generally ill-received by Dublin critics; |
directs a film of Frank O’Connor’s ‘‘Guests of the Nation’’ to a script by Mary Manning, with Barry Fitzgerald, Cyril Cusack, and Hilton Edwards in the first entirely Irish production, filmed at Ticknock and the Scalp in Co. Wicklow, with improvised cottage set at Etwall, Summer 1933; writes Storm Song (Gate 6 Jan. 1934), completed while staying solo at the Palace Hotel, St. Helier’s (Jersey), and dealing with a film production on Aran (‘Crioch’) with the char. Leo Szilard in place of Flaherty, Gordon King as his mutinous disciple, and Jal Joyce as the love-interest; Szilard dies while filming in the storm having trained the islanders to use harpoons contrary to custom - a collation regarded as ‘an attempt at a ‘popular play’; Johnston fills in for Edwards when the latter was struck down by appendicitis, and simultaneously directs Franz Molnar’s Liliom (Gate, 13 Feb. 1934); Shelah conducts public relationship with Jack Irwin; Johnston directs Mary Manning’s Happy Family; The Old Lady Says ‘No!’ is revived at the Abbey Th. (May 1934); |
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Betty Chamberlain joins the Cambridge Festival Theatre, July 1934; his Storm Song is produced by Shelah Richards and Mary Manning at Shere Theatre Fest., Surrey (July 1934); The Moon in the Yellow River [?also] oproduced at Malvern Festival (26 July 1934); Johnston purchases with Shelah the moored schooner Hermione at Chiswick for £400; acts as stage-manager to Hugh Ross Williamson’s Hand in Glove (Westminster Th.) for Baxter Sommerville as a condition of himself directing The Moon in the Yellow River (24 Sept. 1934); meets J. B. Priestley and the [Robert] Lynds [q.v.]; transfers to Haymarket, West End, to critical acclaim directed by Fred O’Donovan in production by Priestley and Bronson Albery, with Joyce Chancellor as Blanaid (against Johnston’s wishes) and without Esme Percy and Godfrey Kenton from the first production; premier of Guests of the Nation (Dublin, 20 Jan. 1935); |
BBC broadcast of The Moon in the Yellow River (14 May 1935); rejected Dartington College - famously the school favoured by Sean O’Casey - for his dg. Jennifer; his A Bride for the Unicorn revived at Gate (1935) but The Old Lady Says ‘No!’ played instead in ensuing Gate ensuing tour to suit the acting and directorial preferences of MacLiammóir and Edwards (‘the skunks’); breaks the news to Betty that Shelah was pregant; lectures at Amherst College, Mass., as a guest of Curtis Canfield, rehearsing students there in The Old Lady Says ‘No!’; also lectures at Mount Holyoke, Yale Theatre, and Smith College; researches Jonathan Swift at Amherst; The Moon in the Yellow River plays to muted criticism in New York, and attacked in London by St. John Ervine and Denis Ireland; A Bride for the Unicorn plays unsuccessfully at Harvard (dir. Joseph Losey); Johnston takes part of Micheál in film of Riders to the Sea madea t Renvyle in the Hurst-Flanagan production, financed by Gracie Fields; |
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settles at Berlin Lodge, Leinster Sq., Dublin, for the birth of Michael [William Michael Robin Johnston, b. 27 Oct. 1935]; engages as remedy script-writer on Ourselves Alone at Elstree Studios and is shoddily dismissed with others; proposes compromise between ‘The Boys’ [Mac Liammoir & Edwards] and Lord Longford; directs Eugene O’Neill’s Ah Wilderness for Longford in London tour, 1935; Johnston directs A Bride for the Unicorn for Longford as a replacement at the Westminster [Fest.]; his Storm Song ill-received at Embassy [Ambassador’ Th.]; meets H. G. Wells (‘You Irish nave no political sense’); seeks a BBC job at Shelah’s suggestion, and accepts the post of Feature Programme Research Assistant at £700 p.a., offered by John Sutthery (NI BBC Programme Dir.), Oct. 1936; formally quits his law practice and loses his father’s annual subvention of £100; |
Lord Longford tours The Moon in the Yellow River with his own Yahoo in the Irish provinces; Johnston appears with Shelah Richards in Fanny’s First Play (Abbey Th. 1936); broaches separation from Shelah and offers her half of his salary; formally resigns from the Gate Board before his departure to Belfast; meets Nancy Horsbrugh-Porter in Patrick Campbell set, Dublin (‘the real love of my life’); writes Blind Man’s Buff (Abbey Th., 26 Dec. 1936), an adaptation of Toler’s Die blinde Göttin [The Blind Goddess] (1932), arising from a meeting with the refugee-playwright in London, a crime-play dealing with the case of Frank Chevasse, unjustly charged with the murder of his suicided wife in the wake of his affair with Anice Hollingshead, and including successful stage-Irish characters Dominic Mapother and Mary Quirke as the witnesses for the prosecution; attended London BBC Staff College (‘St Beadle’s’), 1937-38; travels to New York with his father, Sept. 1937, meeting Nancy and embarking on a love-affair with her; |
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writes crime-drama “Death at Newstownstewart” (BBC [NI], 7 Oct. 1937), based on events of 1873 and introduced in the Radio Times by his father; broadcasts readings of Somerville & Ross [q.v.], and feature on Harland and Wolff shipyard; The Old Lady Says ‘No!’ is revived (Jan. 1938); writes “Lillibulero” (March 1938), a documentary on the Siege of Derry, prefaced by an article in the Radio Times (‘doughty conflict … what one side lost in charm it made up by rugged dignity, and what the other side lacked in efficiency it made up in colour and warmth’); incensed to find studio production taken over by Sutthery; Nancy marries Barney Heron, 24 June 1938, but continues correspondence with Johnston in a relationship that later provided the subject of his confidential tape-recording “Equinox” (recorded in 1961) which reveals that her first child, conceived weeks after the marriage, might have been his; finally leaves Shelah, 1938; |
adapts A Bride for the Unicorn for ‘Experimental Hour’ (BBC NI, July 1938); writes and produces “The Parnell Commission” and “Weep for Polyphemous”, on Swift, using expressionist alternation between characters and actors; produced and directed two plays of Teresa Deevy (1938); puts himself forward for television, and accepted, autumn 1938, occupying an office at Alexandra Palace (fam. “Ally Pally”), living at first with her Aunt Belle in Barnes; amid resistance from technical staff, he directs “St. Simeon Stylites”, his first TV work; has a passionate reunion with Nancy in Hermione at winter equinox, late Sept. 1938; moves in with Betty, who had become pregnant in October, at Denning Rd., Hampstead; acrimonious confrontation between Shelah and Betty at Aunt Belle’s, 7 Nov. 1938; directs “The Last Voyage of Captain Grant” (Nov. 1938), based on novel of Robert Flaherty; settles in “Glen Ellyn”, Wise Lane, Mill Hill,
London, NW7; |
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adapts The Moon in the Yellow River for television; adapts “Death at Newtownstewart” for television (Feb. 1939); also “The Parnell Commission”; directs his own play The Golden Cuckoo (Gate 1939; revived with Maureen Potter, 1956), a semi-naturalistic farce dealing with the ‘one-man Republic’ of Dotheright (based on real-life Michael Doheny, 1805-63); Jeremy, a son with Betty, b. 7 June 1939; work as director on BBC TV ‘Picture Page’; engaged on rehearsing a play, Queen of Spades when war was declared and TV transmission closed down; moved to ‘American Control Unit’ (later American Liaison Unit); travelled back and forth between London and Dublin during phoney war; The Golden Cuckoo played in London, dir. Hugh Hunt (Duchess Th., 2 Jan. 1940), closing after ten days; revised ‘Weep for Polyphemous’ as The Dreaming Dust (Gate, March 1939), on Swift; |
sent Betty and Jeremy to stay with Leo Adams, a female cousin school-teacher in Newry; visited Shelah and children in Greenfield Manor, Spring 1940; sent by BBC to make programmes in Dublin with effect of enlisting Irish war support through Overseas Service, and encountered censorship difficulties with George Marshall, the pro-Unionist Regional Director in Belfast; recorded talks for NBC and CBS at Radio Eireann studios; interview with Frank Aiken and broadcast on Home Service feature on Garibaldi; William Johnston d. 29 Nov. 1940, of stomach cancer; produced “Nansen” (BBC 25 Dec. 1940), about the explorer, and “Christmas under Fire”; made half-and-half St. Patrick’s Day programme for Ministry of Information linking NI BBC and Radio Éireann studios, 17 March 1941 (treated as ‘appeasement’ by the Northern Whig); |
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broadcast “Great Parliamentarians” on Burke and Palmerston, and “High Command”, a play with Ivor Vinogradoff, and “The Gorgeous Lady Blessington” (all 1941); Kathleen Johnston moves to 131 Strand Rd.; Etwall converted to flats; Betty under pressure from Leo’s school employers; joined Local Security Force; served as Drama Critic on The Bell; appt. BBC War Correspondent, 1942-45, on capture of Eddie Ward (later Lord Bangor of Castle Ward) in N. Africa; sails for Lagos out of Liverpool on board the Highland Brigade, 9 May 1942; travels by plane to Kharthoum and on to Cairo; keeps War Field Books which would form the basis of Nine Rivers from Jordan (1953), an attempt to ‘puzzle out the war’; carries Ulysses everywhere; moves up to Front, 23 June 1942 and works there at first under Richard Dimbleby, later under Godfrey Talbot; duties incl. interview with Winston Churchill at El Alamein, 22 Aug. 1942; |
makes victory broadcast from Alam Halfa, 6 Sept. 1942; travels to Tel Aviv and Jordan; flies in RAF bombing mission from Tel Aviv to Benghazi, 22 Oct. 1942; follows the rout of Rommel from Cairo, recording Montgomery’s words (‘We’ll hit him for six right out of Africa’); receives surrender of a German officer; rejects stories of German booby-trap atrocities; returns to Britain via Gibraltar, 24 Jan. 1943; spends much of 1943 in Ireland; his returned announced by Patrick Kavanagh in the Irish Press; scripts “The Battle of Egypt” with Alan Moorhead (5 March 1943); has a brief affair with Micheline Patton, a beautiful cousin and an actress, March 1943; resigns from what he perceives as war-propaganda, 1 April 1943; further relations with Nancy, now divorced; writes a programme on Amanda McKittrick Ros (BBC [NI], 27 July 1943); |
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re-enlists to serve as journalist in Italy, 1943, landing at Brindisi; stationed at Vasto (‘Dysentry Hall’); dissensions with his recording truck driver Vizard; fighting up through towns Moozagrogno, Lanciano, et al.; interviews Gen. Montgomery [“Monty”] and is provided with own jeep; posted at Naples to record Christmas Day programme; associates with fellow-reporter Wynford Vaughan-Thomas; visits Partisans on Vis, an island off Dalmatia, bringing back 24 recordings, March 1944, - a venture acknowledged to be a first-rank ‘scoop’; covers Anzio landing at D-Day; witnesses casual bombing of Civita Vecchia from the air; races to Rome and meets German armour en route, June 1944; reaches Bristol via Gibraltar, 20 July 1944; travels to Ireland by mailboat, 26 July 1944; his mother Kathleen d. 29 August, 1944, after period of dementia; Johnston leaves Ireland, 24 Oct. 1944; |
travels to Ostend in an MTB, returning soon afterwards to Dover with a “War Report”; flies to Paris; visits Aachen in wake of of paratroop landings; advances with Gen. Patton’s Twelfth Army; injured in the elbow in fall, and undergoes operation; supplies peripatetic reportage from S. France, Bonn, and Paris; divorced from Shelah Richards, 1945; travels to Ireland on leave to marry Betty in Dungannon, she then appearing acting in Othello (Gaiety), March 1945; returns to duty for crossing of the Rhine; acquires utility vehicle and proceeds to Bonn; attempts unsucessfully to deliver letters by Wehrmacht soldier Georg Sichermann, found in N. Africa, to Annaliese Wendler in Eckartsberga, nr. Weimar; enters Buchenwald Concentration Camp, being among the first to reach it after the retreat of the Germans (‘those who are capable of such things will have to be killed themselves’), April 1945; |
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in attended Goering press conference at Augsberg, 11 May 1945; returns to London via Paris, 13 May 1945; further encounter with Micheline, detected in flagrante by her parents; returned to Dublin, c.21 May; awarded OBE, 1946; filmed G. B. Shaw’s ninetieth birthday, July 1946; BBC Director of TV Programmes, 1946-47; moved to America and worked for Theatre Guild of the Air, 1948; ‘taught college’ at Amherst, Mount Holyoke, Mass. and Smith, USA, 1952-60; an extract from his “Diary of the War” on his experience at Buchenwald printed in The Bell (March 1951); produced nine plays and works of autobiography including Nine Rivers from Jordan, a wartime narrative (1953); advised Mary O’Malley on production of Mary Manning’s adaptation of Finnegans Wake as The Voice of Shem (Belfast Lyric Th., 1955); awarded Guggenheim Fellow, 1955-1956, resulting in In Search of Swift [1959]; appt to Theatre Dept., Smith Coll., Mass., 1961 |
passed over for post of Director-General of RTÉ, 1962; elected MIAL; wrote and produced The Táin, a pageant about Cúchulainn produced at Croke Park 1956; settled in Alderney, Channel Islands, 1967; returned to Dublin, 1970; broadcast talks from his ‘Records’ [diaries & papers] during the 1970s; issued The Brazen Horn (1976), a novel inspired by an incident during his time as a war correspondent and containing speculations on science in a mystical and philosophical vein; d. 8 Aug. Ballybrack, Co. Dublin; bur. St. Patrick’s Cathedral (outside), with Betty Chancellor; a collection of his papers incl. MSS and typescripts are held at the University of Ulster, Coleraine (“Special Collections”); further papers were presented to TCD Library by his children in 1986; The Old Lady Says ‘No!’ successfully revived by National Youth Theatre in Dublin, 2001, there is a head by Marjorie Fitzgibbon in the RDS. NCBE DIW DIH HOG OCEL KUN FDA OCIL |
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Bibliographical details
Dramatic Works of Denis Johnston: with General Introduction and prefatory remarks on each play, Vol. 1 (Gerrards Cross: Colin Smythe 1977) - CONTENTS: ‘General Introduction’; The Old Lady Says ‘No!’ (1929); ‘A Note on What Happened’; The Scythe and the Sunset; Storm Song; The Dreaming Dust (Gaiety 1940), and ‘Strange Occurrence on Ireland’s Eye’.
Do., Vol. 2 (Gerrards Cross: Colin Smythe 1979), CONTENTS: ‘Preface: Concerning the Unicorn’; A Bride for the Unicorn (1933), The Moon in the Yellow River; A Fourth for Bridge; The Golden Cuckoo; Nine Rivers from Jordan [opera libretto]; The Táin [pageant]; Appendix: ‘Introducing the Enigmatic Dean Swift’. Vol. 3: Broadcast Plays and Essays (Gerrards Cross: Colin Smythe 1979), Contents: Blind Man’s Bluff; Riders to the Sidhe.
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Criticism
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See also Paddy Smyth, ‘Riveting truth in a “non-memoir”’, in The Irish Times (31 Oct. 2009), Weekend, p.10 [which finds that Truth or Fiction by Jennifer Johnston, the writer’s mother, is true to the life of her father Denis Johnston; extract]. |
Contemp. reviews incl. Brooks Atkinson, review of The Moon and the Yellow River, in The New York Times (13 March 1932); Mary McCarthy, review of The Old Lady Says ‘No!’, in Partisan Review (q.d., April 1948). |
| Miscellaneous |
| Articles relating to Johnston incl.: |
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—See National Library of Ireland, Sources [online] |
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References
D. E. S. Maxwell, A Critical History of Modern Irish Drama 1891-1980 (Cambridge UP 1984), lists The Dramatic Works of Denis Johnston, 2 vols. (Gerrards Cross: Colin Smythe 1977 & 1979), with general intro., and with preface and prefatory remarks on each play by Johnston. Also cites cites The Tain - a Pageant; Introducing the Enigmatic Dean Swift, et. al.
Bernard Share, ed., Far Green Fields, 1500 Years of Irish Travel Writing (Belfast: Blackstaff 1992) incls. extract from Nine Rivers from Jordan (London: David Verschoyle 1953).
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Andrew Carpenter & Peter Fallon, eds., The Writers: A Sense of Ireland (Dublin: O’Brien Press 1980), selects ‘The Abbey in Those Days’, pp.66-70 [a memoir, with photo-port.].
Henry Boylan, Dictionary of Irish Biography (Dublin: Gill & Macmillan 1988) erroneously cites Brazen Head for Brazen Horn.
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Seamus Deane, gen. ed., The Field Day Anthology of Irish Writing (Derry: Field Day 1991), Vol. 3, selects from The Old Lady Says ‘No!’ [176-81]; presented Gate, 3 July 1929; revived 1931, 1934, 1938, and Gaiety 1941 and 1947; Remarks at 171-173 [‘even DJ’s second play, The Moon in the Yellow River, Abbey 1931, forsook experiment for a realism that the Abbey directors indeed could welcome (despite the fact that the play had its origins in a parody of ‘the Abbey play’); its focus on precise political issues in the Free State (although achiev[ing] universal statement on paradox of conflicting ideals) prompts the recognition that much of the success of even The Old Lady [Says ‘No!’] had depended on a sure local knowledge; that had been a quintessentially Dublin play, an extravaganza of local lore, legend and feeling (never travelled well); the universalising theatrical impulses of Expressionism checked by Dublin man’s ambiguous feelings for his native place, metaphysical solemnity … dispelled by Anglo-Irish sprezzatura, a wit bred of excruciatingly complex loyalties [here quotes ‘Strumpet City …’, as infra]; the play concludes identifying Emmet’s terminal condition with a malaise symptomatic of the city’s experience’, ed. Terence Brown, 175]; also 657 [when Johnston wanted to criticise the Free State he had to reject the tenement play for the play of the streets, Fintan O’Toole, ‘Going West, the Country versus the City in Irish Writing’, in Crane Bag, 9.2 (1985)]; BIOG, 232, as above. Works: Collected Plays, Vols. I & II (Jonathan Cape 1960); Collected Plays Vol. 1 (Gerrards Cross 1977); Vol. 2 (Gerrards Cross 1979); Bibl., Gene A. Barnett, Denis Johnston (Twayne 1978); Harold Farrar, Denis Johnston’s Irish Theatre (Dolmen 1973); Joseph Ronsley, ed. Denis Johnston: A Retrospective (Gerrards Cross 1981), critical essays.
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Helena Sheehan, Irish Television Drama, A Society and Its Stories (RTÉ/Mercier 1987), lists TV films, The Dreaming Dust, dir. Michael Barry (1966); The Glass Murder, dir. Peter Collinson (1963); The Moon in the Yellow River, dir. Shelah Richards (1964); the Scythe and the Sunset, dir. Chloe Gibson (1965); That Rooted Man, dir. Tony Barry (1971). Also, silent version of O’Connor’s Guests of the Nation (1936), with Barry Fitzgerald, Cyril Cusack, and Hilton Edwards [Walter Reade Theatre, 1994 Program].
TCD Library holds an extensive collection of diaries, from age 15 until shortly before his death covering his day-to-day life, his work, and the people he knew, together with much correspondence and unpublished writing.
University of Ulster Library (Coleraine) holds a collection of mostly published playscripts, radio talks, newspaper cuttings, microfilms of many of the diaries, &c.
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Notes
Strange Occurrence on Ireland’s Eye (1956): The historical event around which the play turns is the Kirwan murder, documented in Mathias Bodkin’s Famous Irish Trials (1914; rep. edn. 1956). The malefactor, William Bourke Kirwan, a miniature painter and son of a celebrated picture dealer, was accused of strangling his wif Maria Louisa Crowe (known as Sara) in 1852, with whom he shared a home at 11 Lwr. Merrion St. Kirwan had a second menage in Sandymount with one Maria Theresa Kenny and their eight childrenIn June 1852 he went to Howth with his wife on a painting expedition. She was found dead on a wet sheet at Long Hole by boatmen after he reported her missing. An inquest found the cause of death to be drowning but witnesses in Howth later claimed to have heard screams from the island. In spite of a court defence by Isaac Butt, the jury found him guilty in Dec. 1852. The death sentence was commuted to life imprisonment when it was found impossible to hear screams from the island and with the further revelation that his wife was epileptic.
Kirwan was held on Spike Island, Co Cork, and spent a time in prison in a Bermuda penal colony. He was released in 1879 and emigrated to America having rejoined his mistress. Purportedly he revisited Ireland's Eye before departing. There is a life of Kirwan in the Dictionary of Irish Biography (RIA 2008). Note that Frances Hoey (née Johnston) wrote a novel on Ireland’s Eye. (See Stephen Brown, Ireland in Fiction, 1919; also under Hoey, q.v.)
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The Moon in the Yellow River(Abbey 27 April 1931), concerns an extremist republican plot to blow up a hydroelectric power-station, with Darrell Blake as the Irreconcilable, Tausch as the German manager, Lanigan as the policeman who eliminates Blake, and Willie Reilly as Blake’s side-kick; also Roddy Dobelle (played by F. J. McCormick), the occupant of a naval fortress and his 13-year old daughter whose mother’s death in childbirth has blocked his love for her.
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Moon in the Yellow River: On quitting his room in Bloomsbur House Club in 1927, Johnston inscribed on the wall lines from Pound: 'And Li-Po/Also died drunk./He tried to embrace a Moon/In the Yellow River.' (See Bernard Adams, Denis Johnston: A Life, 2002, p.90.)
Hilton Edwards remarks on The Old Lady Says ‘No!’ at its premiere in 1929, ‘It read like a railway guide and played like Tristan and Isolde.’ (See The Old Lady Says ‘No!’, Colin Smythe; Washington; Catholic Univ. of America Press 1992).
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James Plunkett: Plunkett appears to have taken the title of his 1969 novel Strumpet City from The Old Lady Says ‘No! - substituting the phrase ‘so rich with memories’ for ‘so sick with memories’ in the original [see under Quotations, infra]. The erroneous version was reprinted in the Sean McMahon, ed., Book of Irish Quotations (Dublin: O’Brien Press), and repeated [presum. from that source] in The Field Day Anthology of Irish Literature (1991), under Johnston [see References, supra].
Benedict Kiely: Kiely notes that Denis Johnston, and also Philip Rooney, awrote plays about the case of Thomas Hartley Montgomery, a sub-inspector of police, who was hanged for the murder of William Glass, cashier of the Northern bank, in Newtownstewart, for a century mong the most celebrated Ulster murders. (Benedict Kiely, Sing to the Bird, London: Methuen 1991, p.139.)
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Bolder & Bowlder: A corrupted version poem of a Thomas Davis poem appears in Orders and Desecrations following the version sourced by the publisher in Seamus Deane, gen. ed., The Field Day Anthology of Irish Literature (1991), being copied there from a bowlderising Victorian editor.
Records & omnibus: Johnston himself deposited microfilm of his diaries with autobiographical links (‘omnibus’) in the University of Ulster (Coleraine) and seven American universities, these forming the basis of study by Joseph Ronsley, who is reputed to have met unflattering references to himself among them. His papers were presented to TCD Library by his children in 1986 incl. manuscripts and unbuttoned diaries kept continuously from the age of 15, forming the basis of a biography by Adams in 2002.
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Bernard Adams, Johnston’s biographer, was b. in Dublin and ed. at Portora, Enniskillen and TCD (English); BBC journalist in N. Ireland and BBC TV producer in London; full-time writer. (See Clé catalogue, 2002.)
“The Old Orange Flute”: Denis Johnston sang the song (originally by Peadar Kearney but adopted by the Ulster Orange Order) it in St. Peter’s Square to symbolise his freedom from papal thraldom (Nine Rivers from Jordan). Cited by Patrick Maume on the Irish Diaspora List, Bradford (Feb. 2004), going on the call the Nine Rivers ‘an interesting pastiche on Ulysses’.
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Namesake: One Denis Johnston b. Dromahair, Co. Leitrim, in 1869, is represented in W. J. Paul, Modern Irish Poets (1894).
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