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St. John Greer Ervine

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St. John Greer Ervine (28 December 1883 – 24 January 1971) was an Irish biographer, novelist, critic, dramatist, and theatre manager. [1] He was one of the most prominent Ulster writer of the early twentieth-century and a major Irish dramatist whose work influenced the plays of W.B. Yeats and Sean O’Casey. The Wayward Man was among the first novels to explore the character, and conflicts, of Belfast.[2]

Ervine was born in Ballymacarret in east Belfast, in the shadow of the shipyards, to deaf-mute parents. Every member of his family had been born in County Down for 300 years. His father, a printer, died soon after his birth and the family moved in with Ervine’s grandmother who ran a small shop. Ervine became an insurance clerk in a Belfast office at the age of 17 and shortly after he moved to London.[2]

In London Ervine met George Bernard Shaw and began to write journalism as well as his first plays, adopting the name St John Ervine "as more fitting for his ambitions". His first full-length play, Mixed Marriage, was produced by Dublin’s Abbey Theatre in 1911. It had several runs as one of the Abbey’s most profitable plays. W.B. Yeats praised Ervine’s plays for depicting the real life experienced by the people of the north of Ireland as Synge’s work had done for those of the west of Ireland.[2]

In June 1913, Ervine was standing beside Emily Davison at The Derby and witnessed her being fatally injured by King George V's horse.[3]

In 1915 W.B. Yeats appointed Ervine as the Abbey’s general manager.[4] Ervine’s tenure was a commercial success, placing the Abbey’s finances on a stable footing, after producing several successful comedies but his demands on the actors led to an open conflict with the company exacerbated by his outrage at the Easter Rising of 1916. Ervine resigned from the Abbey in 1916 and enlisted in the Dublin Fusiliers. He was made an officer but after being wounded in Flanders one of his legs had to be amputated. He was promoted to lieutenant on 1 February 1919 and relinquished his commission due to his wounds on 5 December 1919.[5]

Through the 1920’s and 1930’s Ervine wrote drawing-room comedies that were box-office successes, several had West End runs of up to two years--among them Anthony and Anna (1926) and The First Mrs. Fraser (1929).[1]. In 1936 Ervine’s Boyd’s Shop, "the play that defined Northern Irish drama for decades", was produced.[2] Arnold Bennett hailed him as a playwright "unequaled" in England, with plays that "combined great skill, fine ideals, and perfect sincerity with immense popular success".[6] From 1919 to 1939 Ervine was also a theatre reviewer for The Observer.

Alongside his plays Ervine wrote a number of novels. Of these the most successful, The Wayward Man (1927), was reprinted in 1936 as one of Allen Lane’s first Penguin paperbacks (as Penguin 32). He also produced several major biographies, including of the Unionist leaders Craigavon and Carson, of William Booth, of Oscar Wilde and of George Bernard Shaw. Bernard Shaw: His Life, Work, and Friends (1956) was awarded the James Tait Black Memorial Prize in 1956[7]

Explaining the determination of his character Robert “Darkie” Dunwoody in his novel, The Wayward Man, to leave the city despite the ties that bind him, Ervine wrote “I have never met anyone who was not depressed by Belfast”.[8] Sean O'Faolain accounted Ervine "the only Belfast writer who has tried at all to bottle the 'realism' of the city", but suggested that, "lacking poetry", he "only succeeded in making it taste like reboiled mutton gone cold".[9] Republished in 2014 as "part of what might be called a programme for the reinstatement of certain neglected Northern Irish novelists", Patricia Craig proposes that it is an exemplar of "a kind of Edwardian realism nurtured in the shade of Arnold Bennett and John Galsworthy, and embodying a distinctive Ulster Protestant strain".[8]

By the 1940’s St John Ervine was "Northern Ireland’s most prominent writer but was a highly controversial figure who had developed a remarkable antipathy to southern Ireland."[2] He died in 1971.

Selected Plays

  • Mixed Marriage (1910)[10]
  • The Magnanimous Lover (1912)[11]
  • The Critics (1913)[12]
  • Jane Clegg (1913)[13]
  • The Orangeman (1914)[14]
  • John Ferguson (1915)[15]
  • The Island of Saints and How to Get Out of It (1920)[16]
  • The Ship (1922)[17]
  • The First Mrs. Fraser (1929)
  • Boyd's Shop (1936)[18]
  • William John Mawhinny (1940)[19]
  • Friends and Relations (1941)[20]
  • My Brother Tom (1952)[21]
  • Ballyfarland's Festival (1953)[22]
  • Martha (1955)[23]

A contemporary production of Mixed Marriage played at the Finborough Theatre in London from 4 to 29 October 2011, to critical acclaim.[24]===

Novels

  • Mrs Martin's Man (1914)
  • Changing Winds (1917)
  • Foolish Letters (1920)
  • The Wayward Man (1927) (2014, Turnpike Books, Dublin. ISBN 978-0957233614)

See also

References

  1. ^ a b Steinberger, Rebecca (2007). "Ervine, St. John". In Cody, Gabrielle H; Sprinchorn, Evert (eds.). The Columbia Encyclopedia of Modern Drama. New York: Columbia University Press. p. 247. ISBN 0-231-14032-0.
  2. ^ a b c d e "Turnpike Books: Authors". Turnpike Books. Retrieved 21 October 2020.
  3. ^ "BBC - Archive - Suffragettes - Time to Remember - The 1913 Derby". www.bbc.co.uk.
  4. ^ https://www.abbeytheatre.ie/archives/person_detail/14780/
  5. ^ "No. 31772". The London Gazette (2nd supplement). 9 February 1920. p. 1665. Substituted for notice in "No. 31673". The London Gazette (4th supplement). 4 December 1919. p. 15402.
  6. ^ Lothian, Alice (May 1922). "Plays and Novels of St. John Ervine". The North American Review. 215 (798): 645. Retrieved 21 October 2020.
  7. ^ www.ed.ac.uk/events/james-tait-black/winners/biography
  8. ^ a b Craig, Patricia (6 October 2014). "St John Ervine's 'A Wayward Man': the rediscovery of a Northern Irish writer". The Irish Times. The Irish Times. Retrieved 21 October 2020.
  9. ^ O'Faolain, Sean (1940). An Irish Journey. Dublin: Browne & Nolan. p. 264.
  10. ^ "Mixed Marriage". www.irishplayography.com. Retrieved 14 October 2020.{{cite web}}: CS1 maint: url-status (link)
  11. ^ http://www.irishplayography.com/play.aspx?playid=32129
  12. ^ http://www.irishplayography.com/play.aspx?playid=32143
  13. ^ http://www.irishplayography.com/play.aspx?playid=31878
  14. ^ http://www.irishplayography.com/play.aspx?playid=32146
  15. ^ http://www.irishplayography.com/play.aspx?playid=31800
  16. ^ ?http://www.irishplayography.com/play.aspx?playid=31954
  17. ^ http://www.irishplayography.com/play.aspx?playid=31342
  18. ^ http://www.irishplayography.com/play.aspx?playid=31880
  19. ^ http://www.irishplayography.com/play.aspx?playid=32207
  20. ^ http://www.irishplayography.com/play.aspx?playid=31764
  21. ^ http://www.irishplayography.com/play.aspx?playid=31219
  22. ^ http://www.irishplayography.com/play.aspx?playid=31220,
  23. ^ http://www.irishplayography.com/play.aspx?playid=31227
  24. ^ Billington, Michael (10 October 2011). "Mixed Marriage – review". London: Guardian.co.uk. Retrieved 10 June 2012.
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