The Black Cat A Play in Three Acts

The Black Cat, A Play in Three Acts is a drama by John Todhunter, the Anglo Irish poet, playwright, and critic who lived from 1839 to 1916. Todhunter was a friend of W B Yeats and a substantial figure in the early stages of the Irish Literary Revival, although his work has not stayed in print to the extent that the work of the more famous Revival figures has.

The Black Cat is one of Todhunter’s plays for the experimental theater that was developing in London in the late nineteenth century alongside the dramatic experiments of Ibsen and Shaw and the various continental dramatists who were beginning to reach London audiences. The play belongs to the broadly serious modern dramatic tradition that was attempting to replace the popular Victorian melodrama with something more psychologically substantial and more morally serious.

The plot involves the kind of contemporary domestic and ethical material that the new drama was working with, with characters drawn from the contemporary educated London middle class facing situations that required them to confront difficult moral or psychological questions. The Black Cat itself functions as a symbolic or atmospheric element in the play, in the manner that the symbolist dramatic experiments of the period favoured. Todhunter was responsive to the new continental dramatic influences and his plays reflect his reading of Ibsen and the various French and Belgian symbolist dramatists who were just beginning to influence English language theater in the 1890s.

The play was produced in London during the period when Todhunter was actively involved in the Independent Theatre movement and the various other experimental theatrical organisations that were trying to create space in the London theatrical world for serious modern drama. It did not achieve the lasting success of the better remembered plays of the period, but it belongs to the broader effort that eventually transformed the English language theater in the early twentieth century.

The play is mostly of interest now to readers of late Victorian and Edwardian dramatic literature and to those interested in the early stages of the Irish Literary Revival.