The Colleen Bawn

“The Colleen Bawn,” (from the Irish cailín bán ‘Fair-haired girl’) premiered at Laura Keene’s Theatre in New York City on 29 March 1860. This three-act play was adapted from Gerald Griffin’s The Collegians, and, according to Boucicault, was composed in five days. The play proved an immediate success, and ran until the end of the theatre season in May 1860. Boucicault’s wife, Agnes Robertson, was praised for her role as Eily, the titular Colleen Bawn, but it was Boucicault’s portrayal of Myles-na-Coppaleen, the dashing scamp with the charming brogue, who stole the show. His spectacular dive into an onstage ‘lake’ to save the drowning Eily delighted capacity audiences for decades, and this type of ‘sensation scene,’ coupled with just the right amount of Hibernian flavor and character, became the template for Boucicault’s success for years to come.

After the success of “The Colleen Bawn” in New York, Boucicault took the play to London, where it was an overwhelming success. It premiered at the Adelphi on 10 September 1860, and ran every available night for an unprecedented 230 performances, making it the first long run in British theatre history.

USF Libraries houses several prompt books for “The Colleen Bawn,” and they are fascinating in their own right: one, dating from 1861, was intended as a gift for the Queen’s daughter Princess Alice, and another appears to be a slightly reworked version that was staged in Melbourne, Australia on Boucicault’s trip there in 1885.