Abbey Theatre

In John Millington Synge’s dramas The Tinker’s Wedding and The Well of the Saints (1905) and The Tinker’s Wedding (published 1907), peripatetic characters unconscious of ageing, sinfulness or ugliness live in a pre-lapsarian state that is disrupted by contact with the fallen realms of the Church and proprietorship. At the close of both, the by now tainted nomads reject any further dealings with the corrupting and implicitly entwined ideologies of capitalism and established religion and attempt to return to their original condition. The plays both centre on the loss of innocence of the wanderer foolish enough to initiate dealings with God’s representative and the earthly values that he is ultimately seen to uphold. In a reversal of the folkloric associations of the rambler from which the plot of The Tinker’s Wedding derives,  worldliness is represented by the dogmatic churchmen and their nominally pious congregations, naivety and a genuine closeness to real divinity and pre-capitalist artlessness by the animistic peoples of the road. In short, despite their mythic echoes, both of these plays are deeply engaged with Revival-era debates on religious practices, economic transformation, and cultural difference and constitute significant responses by Synge to the wider cultural shifts of late nineteenth-century Ireland.

1916 marked an important moment in the development of modern Ireland. The continuing resonance of the Republican Rising that took place in that year was evident in the now much quoted editorial of The Irish Times (18 Nov 2010) the day after it was announced Ireland was to receive a financial bailout from the EU and IMF. "Was it for this?" the editorial asked, "the men of 1916 died." However, the Rising was but one of a range of significant events in 1916. Beyond the political sphere, 1916
marked the publication of James Joyce's first novel, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, and also saw the foundation of Ireland's first indigenous film production company, The Film
Company of Ireland, whose co-founder James Mark Sullivan was arrested after the Rising and charged with complicity. 1916 was also the year in which Ireland was aligned to Greenwich
Mean Time for the first time, supplanting Dublin Mean Time, bringing the island temporally closer to the rest of the United Kingdom in the same year that would mark an important point in the changing political relationship between the UK and Ireland.
Towards 2016: 1916 and Irish Literature, Culture & Society is cognisant of the multiple perspectives
and events that are associated with 1916 in Ireland and their continuing relevance to Irish literature, culture and society. The collection considers a broad range of cultural forms and societal issues, including politics, theatre, traditional music, poetry, James Joyce, greyhound sports, graphic novels, contemporary fiction, documentary, language, political representation, and the Irish economy with contributions from both emerging academics and established scholars. Also featured is an interview with acclaimed film director and novelist Neil Jordan (conducted by novelist Patrick McCabe) on his life and work, including his biopic Michael Collins (1996), a work which includes one of the most memorable renderings of the Rising and its aftermath. Among the questions considered in the collection are: What were the formative influences on one of leaders of the Rising, James Connolly? What effect had the Rising on Ireland's fledgling labour movement? What impact did the Rising have on the Abbey and Irish theatre? What connects 1916, James Joyce, and the Cuban Revolution? What is the relevance of 1916 to Irish traditional music? What place has 1916 in contemporary Irish fiction and poetry? What are the relations between the Rising, sequential art, popular culture, and memory? A century after the 1916 Proclamation spoke of equality between women and men, could Ireland be finally about to realise equal gender distribution in politics? Does 'Irish sovereignty', a central concern of the Rising leaders, have any relevance for Ireland in the contemporary globalised and European Union context?

Cathleen ni Houlihan’s resonant central image of the nation-as-woman/queen has become one that later generations of Irish dramatists respond to and critique. This exploration will suggest that this image inspired little respect in the drama produced by the conflicted post-war Irish in England in particular, who felt allegiance neither to the motherland they were obliged to leave nor to their adopted mother, Britannia. This outlook will be linked to the punk movement of 1970s Britain, which was arguably one in which the offspring of post-war Irish immigrants played a pivotal role and whose anarchist message was disseminated worldwide by a defaced image of Queen Elizabeth II. Such analysis will be used to contextualize the work of British-Irish playwright Martin McDonagh, who has been repeatedly labelled a “punk playwright,” and to suggest that the reduced “queen” of his most iconoclastic play, The Beauty Queen of Leenane (1996), negates both the female sovereign of the land of his birth and Yeats and Gregory’s seemingly failed Irish alternative.

This explores Abbey plays set in Irish cities, from its founding through the summer of 1951. It seeks to broaden the discourse on modern Anglo-Irish drama generally, and at the Abbey Theatre specifically. It shows that although the urban repertoire was in the minority, it was the financial backbone of the Abbey in its early decades and often led to significant shifts in its operating policies.

This article argues that Teresa Deevy's early plays for the Abbey Theatre deliberately intervened in the cultural politics of the Irish Free State. While the focus here is on Temporal Powers (1932), Deevy's first two Abbey productions, The Reapers (1930) and A Disciple (1931), are also considered. Taken together, this article demonstrates how these plays present a striking critique of the new state under the Cumann na nGaedhael administration. Set in 1927, during the Land Annuities crisis, Temporal Powers meditates on the relationship of poor tenant labourers to the land and society they inhabit. In it, Deevy explores themes such as eviction, homelessness, emigration, justice, religion, grief, and poverty. This article introduces this little-known play, contextualises it, and discusses her treatment of key themes through an examination of characters, Shavian influences, dramatic structure and form.

After the awarding of the Nobel prize to William Butler Yeats in December 1923, the production of the Irish poet drew the attention of the Italian press. Among the articles published in those months was an essay by Walter Starkie that appeared in «Nuova Antologia» . In the field of the Italian reception of the Irish poet, Starkie’s is a short but unusually interesting piece primarily because it is the first contribution on Yeats written by an English-speaking critic for an Italian journal. More accurately, it was written in Italian by an Irish critic who, furthermore, was writing from a vantage standpoint: not only was he a theatre scholar, but he also had first-hand experience of the Abbey Theatre and an acquaintance of its founder.

Throughout his life, W.B Yeats believed that that his innate 'timid and sensitive nature' needed to be hidden from society.  Few, save those in his immediate family, knew his true character and to this day it remains well concealed and mysterious. Ellmann writes in "Yeats: The Man and the Masks" that Yeats's image was 'enveloped for the world's view in the habiliments of arrogance and power' (174). His volatile nature shall be analysed in depth in this article, with reference to Yeats's autobiography and other biographical sources. This will support an academic case study I will make involving Joseph O'Connor's contemporary Irish novel "Ghost Light". Yeats is a character in Ghost Light; however, in contrast to Joyce's Ulysses, he is an active participant in the main narrative and his unreasonable behaviour is given close scrutiny. I argue that Yeats is wearing one of his conceptual 'Masks' during the dark and unpleasant period of his life detailed in Ghost Light. From his play The Player Queen (1910) onwards, the 'Mask' would develop into a significant aesthetic concept which would permeate his prose writings (including A Vision) and late poems.  Yeats's 'Mask' is a concept similar to a 'pose' which artists assume and project. In his case, this involved living in a desolate tower in the West of Ireland, wearing a monocle (O'Connor 2010: 79), a sweeping cape and walking with a stride like Hamlet.

Why did Synge vehemently predict the disappearance of a language that he loved and could speak with no small fluency? Brian O Conchubhair’s ground-breaking Fin de Siècle na Gaelige (2009) situates the Gaelic Revival within the broad contexts of contemporaneous European intellectual, social, and literary trends. I show that Synge’s understanding of evolutionary theory (and particularly of Spencer’s misapplied phrase, “survival of the fittest”) suggested to him that a linguistic tradition rooted in “a small island placed between two countries which speak [English]” was not fit for survival. In writing of Irish, Synge deploys the vocabulary of early nineteenth-century linguistics, which depicted language as an organism that grows and decays. For an author forever affected by his initial traumatic encounter with Darwin, the understanding that Irish was a biological entity — and that as such it was subject to the laws of evolution — was potentially alarming. The implication of Synge’s use of horticultural vocabulary to discuss the contemporary linguistic status of Ireland (“blossom”, “decay”, “old roots”, “new growth”) is that the heightened Hiberno-English utilized in his plays is a vigorous hybrid resulting from the grafting of an Irish language shoot onto the stronger stock of English. In Darwinian terms, Hiberno-English is the “new and improved form” that inevitably replaces the outmoded “old forms” of enfeebled Irish and what Synge considered to be the inadequate English of a colonized people.  The popular concept of the perfected nature of the hybrid plant underlines such references to Hiberno-English. In contemplating the future of Irish, Synge ultimately overcomes the nihilism that evolutionary theory had imparted in him during his youth; “pure” Irish might become extinct, but its rhythm and energy would survive in the literary Hiberno-English of Playboy of he Western World and its ilk.