Propaganda is the defeat of criticism, to paraphrase Louis MacNeice, that diffident Irish political poet. MacNeice heaped censure on fellow leftist Leslie Daiken’s 1936 anthology Good-bye Twilight: Songs of the Irish Struggle for its failure to accept the burden of that distinction.

Whatever the justice of MacNeice’s verdict, the literary left of 1930s Dublin was far from homogenous in assuming an uncritical relationship between art and activism. As the young Tyrone-born poet Charles Donnelly wrote to artist Cecil Salkeld from the front line of the Spanish Civil War, ‘the attitude of mind which goes for partisanship is surely the antithesis of that liable to produce poetry, whose richness of associations and highly specialised use of language are possible only to a completely detached mind, which doesn’t mean a neutral or purblind one.’ What enthusiasm of assent those finely balanced phrases win: they could come from Donnelly’s beloved Keats.

A critical, intelligent programme of left literary politics in Ireland of the 1930s and early ’40s can be found in the New Theatre Group, a now utterly forgotten venture which played to eager audiences in Dublin’s trade union halls and the Peacock Theatre. The group had an outsized representation in the august roll call of Irish enlistees in the International Brigade, and it was the New Theatre which ultimately launched the career of Mary O’Malley, whose Lyric Theatre in Belfast is part of the fabric of Irish cultural life.

In February 2020, historian of the Left H. Gustav Klaus died after a short illness. Klaus was Professor Emeritus of Literature of the British Isles at the University of Rostock, and his life’s work on Marxist literary criticism, working-class literature, and cultural studies deserves to be better known. One of Klaus’s particular interests was the literary life of the Irish left in the 1930s, work that led him in the early 1990s to an old suitcase full of playbills, little magazines, and Spanish Civil War correspondence—a treasure trove of leftist literary activism.

The suitcase belonged to the late Thomas O’Brien, founder of Dublin publishing house, the O’Brien Press. Klaus uncovered the work of the New Theatre Group, of which O’Brien was a founding member.

The New Theatre opened in April 1937 with a production of Clifford Odets’s Waiting for Lefty. Taking cues from leftist theatre troupes in England, such as the Communist Party-aligned Unity Theatre, and the Left Book Club with which it shared members and, occasionally, digs, the intention was to found a living workers’ theatre in Ireland. As founding member Alec Digges wrote in Labour News, March 1938, ‘until recently, there was no Workers’ Theatre in Ireland… no group with a definite and clear-cut policy which endeavoured to bring the more outstanding representatives of workingclass culture before the masses.’

Digges related that ‘The New Theatre Group is not tied to any political Party, but is pledged to fight the growth of Fascism, poverty and war’, and to stir the audience to action. It certainly stirred its actors into action—Digges, O’Brien, and several others went out to Spain the following month, despite Franco’s victory looking increasingly certain.

Membership of the New Theatre Group was a who’s-who of the Irish left in the 1930s: O’Brien, Digges, Valentin Iremonger, Ruaidhrí Roberts, Flann Campbell, Ann Sevitt (daughter of Ukrainian Jewish immigrants), James Connolly’s children Nora Connolly O’Brien and Roddy Connolly, and Seán Ó’hEidirsceoil, to name a few. Many, but not all, were in the Republican Congress.

Between 1937 and 1942, the group produced plays by international leftist literati such as Sergei Tretyakov, John Steinbeck, and Archibald MacLeish, ‘workers’ theatre’ dramas by proletarian writers, as well as their own originals. In 1938, they staged Where’s That Bomb, a burlesque by Unity Theatre-affiliated London cabbies Herbert Hodge and Robert Buckland about a leftist engine-fitter and poet, Joe Dexter, who is co-opted by The British Patriots’ Propaganda Association Group to write reactionary verses on toilet paper in public lavatories:

On every sheet will be a verse or a little story so designed to instil into the mind of the worker his duty to his employer, his duty to his country, and above all, the dreadful danger of attempting to think for himself. No dryly, you know, not dryly. But beautifully, poetically, romantically.

The play includes an on-the-nose précis of the British press’s hysteria towards the Left: ‘With my Russian gold I caper / I seduce your wife and rape ’er / it’s true, it’s in the paper! / I’m a Red’.

Curiously, many of the New Theatre’s original plays appear to have been verse dramas (several members, like Iremonger, became better known as poets). Tom O’Brien contributed The Last Hill, set during the Spanish Civil War. Sometime IRA member O’Brien had joined the Communist Party in the mid-thirties, and like fellow Party member Digges had been in the International Brigade.

Loosely based on his experiences in Spain, The Last Hill was staged in the Peacock Theatre in September 1939. Miguel, a Republican combatant, is cheered by Irish solidarity: ‘I saw them marching past, / singing, when I had forgotten how to sing.’ However, the play refuses to throw false glamour on the Republican war effort: ‘there is no trumpet to glorify war /for soldiers who have known it.’ Another socialist Seán Ó’hEidirsceoil contributed ‘Lock Out’, a Brechtian performance with choral functions and a Commentator, which deals with the Larkin strike of 1913.

One of the most intriguing of the original productions by The New Theatre was Partition, a ‘living newspaper’ drama by Tom O’Brien and William Clare, first staged in October 1939. So far, the script hasn’t turned up, but reviews in the press give a sense of its form, an import from the left-wing theatre of Britain and the US, combined with republican and nationalist themes:

The curtain rose to the flowering beauty of Tschaikowsky’s [sic] music on a scene that entirely contrasted with it—of a lonely poor woman lamenting a lost land before the twisted bare branches of an Irish tree. Like Kathleen Ní Houlihan of Yeats, the lonely woman refers in sorrow first to her four and then to her three fields. The lament is supported by rising men’s voices answering one another with the great culminations of Partition’s history, going back to days before Partition was born. This ends in the single word ‘Ulster’, uttered by the woman. Mairín Ní Eirc treated this in the best possible way by refraining from any deliberate elocutionary effect.

O’Brien’s co-author William Pearse Clare had volunteered for the International Brigade but was turned down, possibly on account of his young age. Unlike O’Brien and Digges, Clare was a committed member of the Labour Party, serving as secretary in the late 1930s. Despite the play’s apparently cliched nationalistic ‘sob-stuff’ imagery, Clare was critical of the Republican movement in its abstentionist, militarist, and Fianna Fáil aspects, and sought to channel its potential into a popular front: ‘only the Labour movement, which is pledged to implement the principles of Connolly and Pearse, can provide a rallying point for those forces, inside or outside the Fianna Fáil party, who feel the Fianna Fáil leadership is weakening in the face of the enemy.’

In a July 1938 article in The Worker’s Republic, ‘Goering in the Bay?’, with great foresight he cautioned against Republican overtures to Nazi Germany, which had ‘stretched its imperialist-fascist tentacles towards Ireland’. Dismissing any alliance with Germany as ‘reprehensible’, he urges connections with ‘the Indian people who are held by the same masters’, the USSR, and ‘the real democratic movement in England itself’.

Clare’s socialist internationalism found echoes in poetry networks stemming from the New Theatre Group from around 1940. Iremonger spearheaded the ‘Assassin Pamphlets’, a New Theatre-sponsored series of homemade poetry pamphlets featuring the work of a particular poet, to appear at intervals. The first issue featured New Theatre stalwart Domhnall Ó’Conaill, his ‘Ireland 1940’ probing the outcome of nationalist sacrifice for the Free State: ‘And crucified a thousand times are / Those who died for foolish freedom.’

The front page promised forthcoming issues dedicated to Clare, northern Protestants Bruce Williamson and Maurice James Craig, Frank McQuoid, Iremonger, and English-born White Stag painter Nick Nichols, but it is unclear if any of these appeared. Iremonger’s editorial is a curious combination of a moral stance with defending the Olympian terrain of the avant-garde: ‘in an attempt to capture a public, to make sure of the necessaries of living, [the avant-garde] played down to it and slung dirt in their own faces. But the days of patronage are past, and now the avant-garde must carry their own canes.’

The pamphlets are a beginning of this endeavour, seeking to unite ‘artists anxious for the elimination of that which is evil and not true.’ In a 1945 essay in The Workers’ Weekly, by which time he had entered the Civil Service, Iremonger was of the opinion that ‘Poetry is not concerned with improving the world. It loses its dignity when it whispers or attempts to present trailers of coming Utopias.’

The piece earned a sharp rebuke from O’Brien in the same paper. But this was after the war, when clever hopes had definitively expired. The Theatre wound up around 1943. William Clare had died tragically at twenty-one in a drowning accident in 1942, while Charles Donnelly’s death in the Battle of Jarama in 1937 was in retrospect emblematic of the beginning of the end.

The New Theatre’s thorny path between aesthetics and commitment belies any image of a monolithic, dumb, insensible Left, an image we are all too familiar with from within the blatant stupidities of our current culture wars. In its pluralistic debates, internationalism, anti-imperialist anti-fascism, modernist experimentalism, and refusal to conflate proper detachment with indifference, it deserves a place in stories of paths not taken, of how a twenty-six county Ireland—nationalist rather than socialist—became, in the words of Seamus Deane, ‘ideologically lamed’.