The Abbey Theatre 1899 1999

A century ago this year, productions of W. B. Yeats's iThe Countess Cathleen/i and Edward Martyn's iThe Heather Field/i inaugurated the Irish Literary Theatre, which was to take its name from its home in Abbey Street, Dublin. Despite riot, fire, and critical controversy, the Abbey Theatre hashoused Ireland's National Theatre ever since: at once the catalyst and focus for the almost unprecedented renaissance of drama witnessed by Ireland in the twentieth century. This is the first history of the Abbey to discuss the plays and the personalities in their underlying historical and politicalcontext, to give due weight to the theatre's work in Irish, and to take stock of its artistic and financial development up to the present. The research for the book draws extensively on archive sources, especially the manuscript holdings on the Abbey at the National Library of Ireland.Many outstanding plays are examined, with detailed analysis of their form and their affective and emotional content; and persistent themes in the Abbey's output are identified - visions of an ideal community; the revival of Irish; the hunger for land and money; the restrictions of a societyundergoing profound change. But these are integrated with accounts of the Abbey's people, from Yeats, Martyn, and Lady Gregory, whose brainchild it was, to the actors, playwrights, directors, and managers who have followed - among them the Fays, Synge, O'Casey, Murray, Robinson, Shiels, Johnston,Murphy, Molloy, Friel, McGuiness, Deevy, Carr, and many others. The role of directors and policy-makers, and the struggle for financial security, subsidy, and new-style 'partnerships', is discussed as a crucial part of the theatre's continuing evolution.

Fathers and Sons at the Abbey Theatre demonstrates how the literary archetype of the clash between fathers and sons and the subsequent depiction of anti-oedipal figures become a major concern for the playwrights writing in a specific and crucial moment of Irish history (1904-1938). The father can be conceived both as a historical / political metaphor as well as a real father in a specific historical and social context. The classical models employed as theoretical tools to nuance the argument--Laius and Oedipus, Ulysses and Telemachus, Aeneas and Anchises, Priam and Hector, Hector and Astyanax--are challenged by the Christian example of Abraham and Isaac, subversively adjusted by Yeats to provide a tragic reading of post-colonial Ireland. All of these pairings provide archetypes for the understanding of complex personal and familial dynamics. The book takes into consideration not only the most famous figures of the Irish National Theatre--as W.B. Yeats, J.M. Synge, Augusta Gregory, and Sean O?Casey?but also overlooked authors such as T.C. Murray, Padraic Colum, Paul Vincent Carroll, Lennox Robinson, Denis Johnston, George Shiels, St. John Ervine, Teresa Deevy. Many commentators have written about the playwrights of the Abbey Theatre, mainly focusing on politics, social classes, Irish identity, cultural issues, and linguistic aspects: no thorough analysis of the clash between generations has been published so far. Those who have tackled the issue have devoted their attention to a single author, or to a single aspect; this study aims to demonstrate that the repeated occurrence of anti-oedipal figures and of the archetype of the clash between fathers and sons?a clear manifestation of the need of emancipation from oppressive authorities and of change in Irish society?must be read as a common phenomenon and as a shared concern. The book is written for people interested in Irish studies, post-colonial studies, and theatre studies.

Gender, Performance, and Authorship at the Abbey Theatre argues for a reconsideration of authorship at the Abbey Theatre. The actresses who performed the key roles at the Abbey contributed original ideas, language, stage directions, and revisions to the theatre's most renowned performances and texts, and this study asks that we consider the role of actresses in the development of these plays. Plays that have been historically attributed to W. B. Yeats and J. M. Synge have complicated histories, and the neglect of these women's contributions over the past century reflects power dynamics that privilege male, Anglo Irish writers over the contributions of working class actresses. The study asks that readers consider the importance of past performance in the creation of written text. Yeats began his earliest plays performing with and writing for Laura Armstrong, a young woman who was a precursor to Maud Gonne in her irreverent challenge to traditional gender roles. After writing his first plays and poems for Armstrong, Yeats met Gonne and developed two Cathleen plays, The Countess Cathleen and Cathleen ni Houlihan, for her to perform, beginning a lifetime of fruitful argument between the two writers about how Ireland should appear onstage. The book then turns to Synge's work with Molly Allgood in creating The Playboy of the Western World and Molly's contributions to Synge's Deirdre of the Sorrows. A section on Yeats's Deirdre shows the contributions of Lady Gregory and the play's performers. The book ends with a reconsideration of Abbey actress Sara Allgood's performances in British and American film as she brought her earliest work in the pre-Abbey tableau movement to American audiences in the 1940s, in ways that challenged ideas of Irishness, American identity, and aging women on screen.

Ireland’s Abbey Theatre was founded in 1904. Under the guidance of W. B. Yeats and Lady Augusta Gregory it became instrumental to the success of many of the leading Irish playwrights and actors of the early twentieth century. Conventional wisdom holds that the playwright Sean O’Casey was the first to offer a new vision of Irish authenticity in the people and struggles of inner-city Dublin in his groundbreaking trilogy The Shadow of a Gunman, The Plough and the Stars, and Juno and the Paycock. Challenging this view, Mannion argues that there was an established tradition of urban plays within the Abbey repertoire that has long been overlooked by critics. She seeks to restore attention to a lesser-known corpus of Irish urban plays, specifically those that appeared at the Abbey Theatre from the theatre’s founding until 1951, when the original theatre was destroyed by fire. Mannion illustrates distinct patterns within this Abbey urban genre and considers in particular themes of poverty, gender, and class. She provides historical context for the plays and considers the figures who helped shape the Abbey and this urban subset of plays. With detailed analysis of box office records and extensive appendixes of cast members and production schedules, this book offers a rich source of archival material as well as a fascinating revision to the story of this celebrated institution.

From folk ballads to film scripts, this new five-volume encyclopedia covers the entire history of British literature from the seventh century to the present, focusing on the writers and the major texts of what are now the United Kingdom and the Republic of Ireland. In five hundred substantial essays written by major scholars, the Encyclopedia of British Literature includes biographies of nearly four hundred individual authors and a hundred topical essays with detailed analyses of particular themes, movements, genres, and institutions whose impact upon the writing or the reading of literature was significant. An ideal companion to The Oxford Encyclopedia of American Literature, this set will prove invaluable for students, scholars, and general readers. For more information, including a complete table of contents and list of contributors, please visit www.oup.com/us/ebl