Maynooth academic Graham Price writes this rave review of the Abbey Theatre’s recent production of Mary Manning’s Youth’s the Season-?
Mary Manning’s Youth’s the Season-? was originally performed in the Gate Theatre in 1931 and written when Manning was just 26. It is a play one could describe as being a rewarding cross between Chekhov and F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby. The title refers to a line from John Gay’s The Beggar’s Opera: ‘Is youth really the season made for joy?’. By removing the final part of the question from the title of her drama and thus creating a sense of confusion, Manning perfectly encapsulated one of the play’s central themes, which is the uncertainty of both youth and also of early independence Ireland; when the Irish Free State was grappling with its desire to be both reassuringly traditional in its Catholicism but also wishing to embrace some of the modernity of the Bohemian zeitgeist that was permeating Europe, and had been all the rage during the pre-1929 crash in America: A period that was known as the American ‘jazz age’. Near the beginning of the drama, one character jokingly says that he would hate to be a hero in a Chekhov play, only to have that role tragically thrust upon him at the climactic moment of the play.
The play centres on a group of vibrant young Irish people living in the centre of Dublin. These Hibernian Bright Young Things include Toots (Ciara Berkeley), Connie (Molly Hanly), Deirdre (Sadhbh Malin), Desmond (David Rawle), and Gerald (Jack Meade). These characters joyfully celebrate the freedoms and opportunities that the newly independent modern Ireland has to offer them whilst still being uneasy about the precarious future that is very possibly in store for them. The possibility that these young people’s studied urbanity might be a mask designed to cover desperation is always lurking just under the lush façade that characterises the performances of their daily lives.
The most striking moment of Youth’s the Season-? occurs in the second part of act one when a supremely Bacchanalian party is held in the house of some of the central protagonists. The directorial style of this scene encompasses period realism and also that of the symbolist, expressionistic theatre that one would associate with a play such as Oscar Wilde’s Salome (1892). This memorable portion of the play, in both style and in content, encapsulates the liminal position in which these young characters, and the youthful Irish Free State, found themselves during the time this theatrical work is set. Youthful exuberance and a frighteningly uncontrollable sexuality are staged and performed in a manner that reminds one of what one of Jay Gatsby’s parties might have looked like should Mary Manning have undertaken the task of bringing that great novel’s West Egg ragers to the stage.
This ‘modern’ production of Mary Manning’s Youth’s the Season-? by director Sarah Jane Scaife enacted a moment of retrospective recovery by explicitly staging what was only implicit in the play’s first production in 1931: An openly gay male interacting with a man who is probably his same-sex romantic partner. If the play had been performed then the way it was in 2025 it would have been the first Irish drama to stage a gay man and a homosexual partnership. The history of Irish drama instead states that the first gay character appeared in Thomas Kilroy’s The Death and Resurrection of Mr Roche (1966) and the first gay couple in Brian Friel’s The Gentle Island (1972). This is an example of how new productions of old plays can radically reactivate the energies from the past, and use them to animate the democratically undecidable future for Ireland and Irish Studies that will happily embrace all forms of Otherness. Certain audiences at the time of the first production were well aware of the queerness of the characters in Youth’s the Season-?, but in Dublin this remained largely unmentionable and apparently unnoticed while in London, critics responded with distaste at the characters’ ‘unnatural’ inclinations.
The Abbey’s revival of Youth’s the Season-? allowed for a timely reminder of one of Irish Theatre’s ‘unjustly neglected and (sometimes) forgotten female dramatists’. Along with Teresa Deevy, and others, Manning is one the Irish woman playwrights who is certainly deserving of that description. This production retrospectively showcases the radicality, daring, and modernity of her dramatic aesthetic. One can only hope that it will not be too long before another major production of one of her plays graces the Irish stage again.
5/5
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