Life
?1865- ; [pseudonym of R. J. Brophy]; b. Cork; Cork and Dublin journalist;
[unpublished] Abbey plays, including The White Feather (1909);
The Casting Out of Martin Whelan (1910); The Gombeen Man
(1913), admired by Lennox Robinson as powerful and realistic. DIW DIL
OCIL
Notes
Robert Hogan, ed., Dictionary of Irish Literature (Dublin:
Gill & Macmillan 1979), gives bio-dates: newspapers Kilkenny, Cork,
and Dublin; five Abbey plays, 1909-22; unpublished poss. because of Yeats’s
dislike for them (conjecture by Peter Kavanagh); The Casting-Out of
Martin Whelan, 3 act (1910), poss. based on Canon Sheehan’s Glenanaar;
The Gombeen Man, 3 acts (1913); The Strong Hand, 2 act trag.
(1917), reworks his first Abbey play, The White Feather (1909);
The Moral Law, one act (1922), a melodrama of divided loyalties
dealing with a retired RIC-man and his son, who has killed a District
Inspector. Lennox Robinson comments in Ireland’s Abbey Theatre
that Ray is ‘undeservedly overlooked,’ and Andrew Malone considers
his characters ‘almost incredibly brutal types of humanity’
(The Irish Drama, 1929).
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Princess Grace Irish Library (Monaco)