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that I learn from the references to it in newspapers is that it is a
one-act ironic comedy about matchmaking. Mr. Murray brought his next
play, "Birthright," to the Abbey Theatre, where it was performed on
October 27, 1910. If "Maurice Harte" (1912) stands the test of time and
travel as has "Birthright," Mr. Murray has come to the Abbey Theatre to
take a place of prominence among its playwrights. Some of the appeal of
"Birthright" is in its story, the story of Cain and Abel, if you like, a
story that is as lasting in its appeal as is "The Eternal Triangle," but
there is as much appeal in the characterization, which you feel as you
read almost as intimately as you come to know it on the stage. There are
many plays that are altogether colorless in the reading unless you have
unusual power of visualization and can see them as you sit in your study
as if they were embodied before you on the stage. Such plays,
visualized or unvisualized in the study, are often real enough on the
stage. "Birthright," as I have said, is not one of these. It visualizes
itself for you, with no effort on your part, as you read it, though of
course, as every real play will, it moves you more in the playing. It
was admirably cast on its first production at the Abbey Theatre, and it
was just as admirably cast on the American tour of 1911-12, Miss
O'Doherty's Maura and Mr. Morgan's Bat Morrissey being wonderful
pictures of a doting mother and a stern father troubled by their
preferences, the one for the elder, the other for the younger son. The
rival sons were done to the life by Mr. O'Donovan and Mr. Kerrigan, and
the neighbor of Mr. O'Rourke was, too, a complete realization of the
Irish peasant of the valley of the Lee. It is a stern and patient
realism this of Mr. Murray in telling of how Hughie, the elder son, the
apple of his mother's eye, the idol of the parish for his hurly playing,
and his verse-making, and his free and pleasant ways, is disinherited
and condemned to seek his fortune in America by his father because his
younger son was the better man on the farm. There was back of Bat's
decision, too, his feeling that his eldest-born was more of his mother,
whose blood was part gentle, than of himself, the grubber of the earth.
Shane, like his father, was the peasant plowman, Hughie something of the
sporting gentleman. The end of it all is murder, the younger son killing
the elder with the hurly when he is accused by his brother of plotting