A Pair of Muddy Shoes by Lennox Robinson

A Pair of Muddy Shoes by Lennox Robinson

Lennox Robinson was an Irish author, poet, dramatist and theatre produce who was born in Westgrove, County Cork, Ireland in 1886 the son of a Protestant clergyman, who had previously been a stockbroker. Lennox (fully Esme Stuart Lennox Robinson) was often ill as a child and educated by private tutor and at a Church of Ireland (that is the Protestant Anglican Church) School.  He became interested in drama when he saw a production by W B Yeats and Lady Gregory at the Abbey Theatre in Dublin when he was 21.

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His play Cross Roads was produced at the Abbey in 1909 and he became manager there the same year. He resigned in 1914 after a poorly reviewed tour of the USA, but came back in 1919 and was appointed to the theatre’s boar din 1923 and served there until his death in 1958. It is said that he was an alcoholic and often depressed.   

He was Anglo-Irish but was committed to the Irish nationalist cause (like Yeats and Lady Gregory). 

His wife’s mother was a spiritualist. 

A Pair of Muddy Shoes is written in a very naturalistic, conversational style which was fun to read and very different from some of the other things we’ve been reading out recently (Poe, I’m looking at you).  It’s all fun, and I like both styles.

The story is written from an Irish woman’s voice and I read it as an English man. You will know I debate with myself whether I should do accents (which I enjoy) or read a woman ’s voice. The second I have few problems with to be honest, the first is more of a problem because though I enjoy doing the accent there is always someone who’s ear is so finely tuned that it jars and spoils the story.  So, I decided to do this in my native voice. 

The story is about a possession but it’s unusual and fresh in its setting in rural Ireland (I thought of Craggy Island and the big priests’ house looming up from the middle of a bare field, no garden, no path, no nothing leading to it). The spirit of the murderer remains very wicked and his pleasure in the crime infects the shy young woman who is speaking.

There is something about weird juxtapositions like the white cat with the narrator’s face and then when she goes into the house, the victim says that she has the face of a girl, but the hands of a rough man. 

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