"A Tale of a Town" was put on for the first time at Molesworth Hall, Dublin, late in October of 1905, by Cumann nan Gaedheal, not very notably, but it was hailed by the Irish Ireland newspapers as admirable propagandist material, "The United Irishmen" declaring that "an Irish play which brings home to us, as this does, the secret of the endurance of foreign government in this country, is a national asset."
Mr. Martyn has not cared enough for "The Place Hunters" (1905) to publish it in book form, contenting himself with its printing in a little periodical. It is, as its title indicates, a fellow of "A Tale of a Town," but it has not back of it intensity of feeling enough to lift itself out of farce.
Between "The Place Hunters" and "Grangecolman" is an interval of seven years, but it is the Mr. Martyn of earlier plays, still faithful to Ibsen and still of a dialogue more formal than that of life, that we find in this play of his middle age. As you read "Grangecolman" you think of "Rosmersholm," as you thought of "The Wild Duck" when you read "The Heather Field." "Grangecolman" is the story of a daughter's frustration of her elderly father's intention to marry his young amanuensis, by playing the rôle of the family ghost, long fabled but never seen, and being shot by the girl she feels is driving her out of her home. Katherine Devlin is another creature of her maker's misogyny. She is a bitter, barren woman of suffragette type, whose marriage and career as a doctor have been alike failures, and who has alienated herself from all, even her mild father, by her selfishness and discontent. It is she who has brought Miss Clare Farquhar into her father's home to render him those services in his pursuit of heraldry and genealogy that were irksome to her, and so she herself is responsible for his dependence on his secretary, which, when once the daughter recognizes it, threatens annihilation of what little pleasure she has in her life. Her husband is a dreamy sort of man, slack-fibred and pottering, who goes about waving the banner of the ideal and refusing to work. The fifth character of the play is the butler, Horan. All are clearly characterized, but if the dialogue is less stiff than that of the earlier plays, it is little more distinctive of the people who speak it, and in the latter part of the play labored and stodgy. "Grangecolman" is a picture of life as we all know it, and there is in it a fidelity of purpose that gives it a kind of effectiveness. There is not in it, however, any keenness of vision, any deep reading of life, any great underlying emotion, to relieve its abject sordidness. There is no gusto, no beauty, no intensity of bitterness even, to make its sordidness interesting in any other than a pathological way.