Irish Drama

Introduction

“Let us learn construction from the masters and language from ourselves,” William Butler Yeats, one of the founders of the Abbey Theatre, advised aspiring playwrights. Indeed, an aptitude for language and humor was a distinctive feature of drama written by Irish authors, but not until the establishment of the Abbey Theatre in the early twentieth century was it possible for Irish playwrights to draw on historical precedents, distinct from those supplied by England’s literary tradition. Since the seventeenth century, as Irish dramatists looked toward London for their audiences, Irish drama had taken British theatrical conventions for its own. As the central arena of the cultural-political movement known as the Irish Literary Renaissance, the Abbey Theatre placed the island’s resources of myth, social custom, folklore, and language at the service of a generation of dramatists whose work is recognizably Irish. The success of this national theater continued, with some qualifications, through the years, but by the 1920s, a reaction to the preoccupations with national history and identity, rural mores, and religion led to the internationalization of theater in Ireland. As a result of these developments, dramatic writing in Ireland began producing works of various characters: provincially British, discretely national, or Continental. Similarly, a historical account of Irish drama falls into three main phases: Anglo-Irish, Irish-national, and contemporary drama.

Anglo-Irish Precedents

Through most of the nineteenth century, Ireland retained some regional vestiges of mumming. This traditional folk drama ritually reenacted significant events in the community's memory. Literary drama set its first roots in Irish soil in the early seventeenth century. The founding of a small theater on Werburgh Street in Dublin in 1637 was followed later in the century by the Smock Alley Theatre. After that, the city had a continuous theatrical presence, and many provincial centers had seasonal houses. However, from its beginnings to the late nineteenth century, Irish drama was primarily colonial, only slightly distinct from performance on the stages of London or provincial England. With the collapse of the Gaelic social and political order in the early seventeenth century, the cultural traditions of Ireland were abandoned, and no Irish institutions remained to graft that inheritance to the life of the cities and new institutions of the stage. Until the end of the nineteenth century, the only contact with the ancient civilization available to the serious artist was relatively inaccessible relics in the folklore of the countryside and the manuscript rooms of museums and academies. These repositories held a rich lode of heroic, romantic, and folk legends that bore witness to a sophisticated Celtic civilization.

Although many distinguished dramatists writing in English between 1700 and 1900 were born in Ireland, their works were written according to the idiom and conventions of the English stage. Neither the spirit of the times nor the conditions in Ireland were conducive to reflections on what were considered accidents of birth. Scions of the Anglo-Irish Protestant ascendancy, these writers typically attended an Irish grammar school and Trinity College, Dublin, before emigrating to London to pursue professional or theatrical careers. Many of them were Grub Street hacks, writing sentimental commercial comedy, melodrama, or farce, as the commercial market demanded, but the most distinguished of them were the pioneers of new developments in English drama. Two of the earliest Irish-born dramatists were the seventeenth-century Nahum Tate and Thomas Southerne, best known, respectively, for their popular adaptations of William Shakespeare’s plays and Aphra Behn’s novels. William Congreve, whose Love for Love (pr. 1695) is the masterpiece of the comedy of manners, and George Farquhar, author of the genial and entertaining comedies The Recruiting Officer (pr. 1706) and The Beaux’ Stratagem (pr. 1707), perhaps derived from their Irish birth some of the detachment and humor that enabled them to develop a satiric style. The sentimental comedy of the eighteenth century had its chief exponents in two Irishmen, Sir Richard Steele and Hugh Kelly, before the arrival of Oliver Goldsmith. In his 1773 “An Essay on Theatre” and his classic laughing comedy She Stoops to Conquer; Or, The Mistakes of a Night (pr. 1773), Goldsmith ended sentimental comedy’s effete mélange of tragedy and comedy by purifying once again the springs of humor. Richard Brinsley Sheridan continued this refreshing departure in English comic style in The Rivals (pr. 1775) and his classic The School for Scandal (pr. 1777).

Until the nineteenth century, the most visible Irish feature of the drama was the convention of the stage Irishman: a humorous character, either gentleman or peasant, whose distinctive features were his outrageous dialect, proclivity to “Irish bulls” (blunders in speech or logic), and pugnacious disposition. This endearing caricature has many variants (soldier, priest, gentleman, fortune hunter, servant). It can be found in the English theater from Tudor times—notably in Farquhar’s Roebuck (Love and a Bottle, pr. 1698) and Sheridan’s Sir Lucius O’Trigger (The Rivals), evolving in the nineteenth century into the Conn (The Shaughraun, pr. 1874) of Dion Boucicault. Boucicault was the most prolific and successful Irish dramatist of the nineteenth century, especially with London Assurance (pr. 1841), a comedy of manners, and several Irish melodramas, including The Shaughraun. By the 1890s, two other Anglo-Dubliners had begun to establish themselves in the tradition of stage comedy established by their forebears: George Bernard Shaw and Oscar Wilde. Shaw soon became the leading social satirist and comedian of ideas in the modern British theater, and Wilde, by his brilliantly witty comedies, especially The Importance of Being Earnest: A Trivial Comedy for Serious People (pr. 1895), was the most celebrated—and infamous—of the Decadents. The Irish origins of these dramatists enabled them, like so many Anglo-Irish writers before them, to view with some dispassion the English class system, English social customs, and habits of feeling and speech, and their own socially indeterminate position (as outsiders in Ireland as well as England) gave them a sense of independence and contributed to the skepticism with which they treated their English materials. On the other hand, except Shaw’s John Bull’s Other Island (pr. 1904), neither explicitly used distinctively Irish themes.

Irish-National Drama

By the late nineteenth century, however, the Irish Literary Renaissance had introduced to the stage the resources of Ireland’s long-neglected cultural tradition. The father of this movement was the poet William Butler Yeats. Influenced by John O’Leary, an aging revolutionary and littérateur, the young Yeats turned from a career begun in the spirit of late Victorian English letters to the folklore of the west of Ireland and the heroic legends of Celtic literature that were, by the end of the nineteenth century, becoming available in contemporary English translation. In the company of Lady Augusta Gregory, a folklorist and folk dramatist, and Edward Martyn, a landed gentleman with strong affinities for Henrik Ibsen’s social, symbolic drama, Yeats founded the Irish Literary Theatre in 1899, which, within several seasons, became the showpiece of the national literary movement: Dublin’s Abbey Theatre.

The founders of this theater took their cue from the presence of several European precursors: Ole Bull’s in Norway (established in 1850), André Antoine’s Théâtre Libre in Paris (1887), Germany’s Freie Bühne Theater (1889), J. T. Grein’s Independent Theatre in London (1891), and the Moscow Arts Theatre (1897). In contrast with these antecedents, however, Yeats, Lady Gregory, and Martyn were beginning as pioneers. Although this group had a diversity of talents, sensibilities, and inclinations, they agreed on the necessity to replace the caricature of Irish life on the stage with serious and authentic drama, which would be popular yet not ruled by political orthodoxies. They committed themselves to experimentation with an imaginative and poetic drama that would harness heroic legend to the demands of the modern stage. Yeats developed his dramas from indigenous folk and mythic materials, the French Symbolists, Ibsen’s poetic dramas, and, later, Japanese Nō drama; Martyn modeled his work on the more social and realistic of Ibsen’s works; and Lady Gregory drew on folklore, local history, and heroic sources that she collected or translated, shaping these materials with the techniques of French comedy.

The Irish Literary Theatre opened in May 1899, with Yeats’s poetic play The Countess Cathleen (pr. 1899) and Martyn’s problem play The Heather Field (pr. 1899). This initial double bill was to foreshadow the character of the Irish theater’s repertoire during the ensuing decades. The company's low-key, naturalistic acting style, led by William and Frank Fay, and the financial patronage of Annie Horniman soon won the Irish Literary Theatre a solid reputation. By 1904, it found a permanent home on Abbey Street (thus the name Abbey Theatre), and the dramatic movement was attracting many talents in the rising generation, including John Millington Synge, George Fitzmaurice, and Padraic Colum. Meanwhile, under Bulmer Hobson, the Ulster Literary Theatre was providing in Belfast what the Abbey Theatre had begun in Dublin.

Yeats himself experimented with several dramatic styles, including peasant realism, farce, and modern naturalism, but his genius found its true métier in a highly sophisticated drama that combined poetry, dance, mask, and symbolic action to represent a world of ideals and pure passion. These plays borrowed from the Japanese Nō for their form, from Celtic heroic tales for their subjects, and expressed Yeats’s view of the primacy of imaginative or spiritual realities of which historical change and the differentiation of humanity are emanations. In all of his work, but most comprehensively in his plays for masks, Yeats’s enmity against modern realism can be seen. An attitude of detachment and impersonality shapes his works into intensely ritualized expressions, having affinities with both ancient religious drama and modern absurdism.

In Cuchulain, the central figure of the Ulster Cycle of Celtic tales, Yeats found a symbolic conjunction of the virtues of heroic individualism, eloquence, aristocracy, and pagan self-realization—values that he sought to insinuate into the character of modern Ireland. In his Four Plays for Dancers (pb. 1921), and especially in The Only Jealousy of Emer (pr. 1922), the convergence of Japanese technique and the Celtic subject is most evident. Beyond the plays themselves, with their masterful fusion of private passion and public vision, Yeats’s legacy to Irish drama consists of haughty artistic independence and a heightened awareness of the possibilities for verse drama in a hostile age. Following his example, verse drama has had a small but persistent tradition in Ireland, notably in the works of the poet and and in the productions of the Lyric Players Theatre, Belfast.

Before long, however, the Abbey Theatre had developed its distinctive blend of naturalism, romanticism, and poetry, as exemplified principally by the plays of John Millington Synge during the first decade of the twentieth century and of Sean O’Casey during the 1920s. Synge was the first Irish dramatist to successfully combine the influences of Molière’s design and humor, Jean Racine’s musicality, Irish myth and folklore, and the extravagant dialect of English to be found in the remote regions of Ireland. Synge was the first major success of the Abbey Theatre in realizing its theoretical objectives and becoming the focus of consciousness for the emerging nation. Synge’s reputation rests on the output of the last seven years of his brief lifesix plays, two of which, Riders to the Sea (pb. 1903) and The Playboy of the Western World (pr. 1907), are masterpieces. These plays, in particular, exhibit the characteristic qualities of intense, lyric speech drawn from the native language and dialects of Ireland, romantic characterization in primitive settings, and dramatic construction after the classics of European drama. Three central themes dominate Synge’s work: the enmity between romantic dreams and life’s hard necessities, the relationship between human beings and the natural world, and the mutability of all things. The production of some of his plays, notably The Playboy of the Western World, aroused public controversy, provoking riots and a bitter public debate over the play and freedom of expression on the stage. In retrospect, The Playboy of the Western World is universally acclaimed as one of the classics of dramatic comedy and marks the zenith of the Abbey Theatre’s early years. Synge had considerable influence in shaping the style and theme of subsequent Irish drama, as exemplified by the works of Fitzmaurice, Michael J. Molloy, and John B. Keane, and some influence outside Ireland, most notably in the work of Federico García Lorca and Eugene O’Neill.

Although Synge’s work was the most accomplished transmutation of Irish rural life into lyric realism, other dramatists in the literary movement made worthy contributions to the style that was to become the hallmark of the Abbey Theatre: Lady Gregory’s many comedies based on folklife rendered in humorous and colorful “Kiltartan” dialect, Colum’s realistic tragedies of peasant life set in the midlands, Fitzmaurice’s fantasies and realistic tragedies set in his native Kerry. These writers had many inferior imitators, and the Abbey Theatre went into a decline. That decline was arrested, however, by the arrival of O’Casey in 1923.

In many ways, Synge’s city equivalent, O’Casey, brought the language, the humor, and the sufferings of the Dublin poor to the stage, especially in his three “Dublin plays”: The Shadow of a Gunman (pr. 1923), Juno and the Paycock (pr. 1924), and The Plough and the Stars (pr. 1926). In these works—set against the political struggles of the previous decade—he showed himself a master of tragicomedy and a trenchant critic of personal and national self-deception. When submitting his play The Silver Tassie (pr. 1929) to the Abbey Theatre, co-directors Yeats and Lady Gregory rejected it, citing an ill-conceived expressionist second act. An acrimonious public exchange followed, and O’Casey severed his relationship with the Abbey Theatre. His later plays are marked by a more strident Marxism and by less certainty in handling the Irish materials that he continued to employ throughout his long removal to the south of England.

During the 1920s, the talented “second generation” of Abbey playwrights emerged: T. C. Murray, Lennox Robinson, and Brinsley MacNamara. These dramatists helped establish domestic realism as the hallmark of the Abbey Theatre, a preference relayed in Belfast by the Ulster Group Theatre in the 1940s. Murray’s work is a stark tragedy. Robinson’s range from farce to historical treatments of the decline of the Anglo-Irish class, and MacNamara wrote many popular comedies of small-town life. As the official state theater, the Abbey benefited from a modest subvention but suffered from some restrictions. A fire in 1951 caused a temporary move, remedied in 1966 by constructing the new Abbey Theatre on the same site and realizing Yeats and Lady Gregory’s plans for a large, commercial auditorium and a pocket theater, The Peacock, for poetic and experimental works.

It was not entirely a coincidence that in the same year as O’Casey’s falling out with the Abbey directorate, Dublin got its second serious theater—the Gate Theatre. Founded by Hilton Edwards and Micheál MacLiammóir, the Gate Theatre set out to bring European and international classic theater to Ireland, in contrast to the perceived introversion of the Abbey Theatre. Almost immediately, with Denis Johnston’s sensational expressionist play about Irish nationalism, The Old Lady Says No! (pr. 1929), the Gate Theatre began its signal service to Irish audiences by importing contemporary European and American drama and encouraging much of Irish playwrights' experimental work.

During the 1950s, three dramatists emerged who represented quite different traditions and social sectors: Brendan Behan, a political dramatist from Dublin’s working class; John B. Keane, author of many popularly successful folk melodramas; and Dubliner , whose inimitable theatrical genius blends some Anglo-Irish coloration into his dramas of persistence in the face of dissolution and death (most notably in All That Fall, pr. 1957). Behan, whose two plays The Quare Fellow (pr. 1954) and The Hostage (pr. 1958) were produced by Joan Littlewood at the Theatre Royal, London, gained an international reputation of spirited tragicomedy.

Contemporary Irish Drama

Irish drama in the last decades of the twentieth century was healthier than in any other period since the 1920s, despite commercial demands and the counterattractions of other media. The annual Dublin Theatre Festival, state subventions to the Gate Theatre and individual dramatists, and local amateur dramatic societies encouraged potential writers for the stage. Although there were regular complaints about excessive accommodation to the tourist trade in theatrical offerings by the main theaters, new dramatists found outlets at the Peacock and many smaller independent and provincial theaters and the National Television Network (RTE). A significant development has been the appearance of a considerable body of work for the stage by dramatists from Northern Ireland, whose work reflects both the social disruption caused by the political violence and the questions of political and cultural identity provoked by the physical confrontations on the streets.

The three senior dramatists in the last decades of the twentieth century were Brian Friel, Hugh Leonard, and Tom Murphy. In Friel’s œuvre of impressive range, from his early success, Philadelphia, Here I Come! (pr. 1964) to his large successes, Translations (pr. 1980) and Dancing at Lughnasa (pr. 1990), his central preoccupation has been the relationship of Ireland’s communitarian past to its present social and political change circumstances. The dominant mood of his plays is bittersweet, and he applies various nonrealistic techniques to realistic situations. In The Freedom of the City (pr. 1973), he wrote one of the best plays on the conflict in Northern Ireland. Friel also founded the Field Day Theatre to develop new plays and playwrights and to accomplish on a larger scale what his plays try to do individually. Besides the encouragement to new playwrights, the most important contribution of the Field Day Theatre was not a theater piece but a series of pamphlets, somewhat in the manner of fellow Irishman Jonathan Swift in the eighteenth century. These pamphlets deal in particular with theater development in Ireland and Irish problems in general. They are grouped as published, under separate titles: The first six pamphlets are collected as Ireland’s Field Day (1985); the next three as The Protestant Idea of Liberty (1985); and the next three as The Apparatus of Repression: Emergency Legislation (1986).

Leonard’s eye focuses on Ireland’s recent economic prosperity. He is primarily a witty social satirist of considerable technical virtuosity (refined through much commercial television work). His most accomplished play in this vein is The Patrick Pearse Motel (pr. 1971), a brilliant farce. His greatest critical success, however, has been the autobiographical Da (pr. 1973). A poignant portrait of the complex relations between a gifted young man and his adoptive parents, it is invested with more feeling than his broader social satires. Tom Murphy writes with more force and less nostalgia about the dysfunctional family, the deracination of Irish emigrants, and the decline of religious belief in an impressive œuvre from A Whistle in the Dark (pr. 1961) to Bailegangaire (pr. 1985). His stark and surreal dramas were only belatedly recognized in Ireland.

The leading dramatists in contemporary Ireland include Frank McGuinness, Sebastian Barry, and Martin McDonagh. Two of the most original and powerful plays in the late twentieth century were McGuinness’s Observe the Sons of Ulster Marching Towards the Somme (pb. 1985) and Barry’s The Steward of Christendom (pr. 1995). Set on the western front on the eve of the infamous battle (July 1, 1916), McGuinness’s play examines the ideological cul-de-sac of Ulster loyalism in its inability to accommodate Irish nationalism or an evolved British imperialism. His other plays include The Visiting Hour (2021) and Dinner with Groucho (2022), among numerous other plays, screenplays, and works of poetry.

Barry’s The Steward of Christendom is a memory play that depicts the plight of the Catholic loyalists marginalized by history during the Dublin Lock-Out of 1913. Through the recollections of an aged man confined to a mental hospital, it contrasts the complacency of Victorian Ireland with the ethos of the Irish Catholic nationalist state that was to replace it. McDonagh burst on the scene with great flourish in his series The Leenane Trilogy (includes The Beauty Queen of Leenane, pr. 1996; A Skull in Connemara, pr. 1997; The Lonesome West, pr. 1997) while The Aran Trilogy (includes The Cripple of Inishmaan, pr. 1997; The Lieutenant of Inishmore, pr. 2001; The Banshees of Inisheer, not produced until it became a film in 2022) was sensational in its application of Pinteresque technique to Irish settings. McDonagh's other plays include the Tony Award-nominated The Pillowman (2003), A Behanding in Spokane (2010), Hangmen (2015), On Blueberry Hill (2017), and A Very Very Very Dark Matter (2018). Other plays of considerable note in their analysis of Irish identity are Thomas Kilroy’s Double Cross (pr. 1986) and Christ Deliver Us! (2010), Stewart Parker’s Pentecost (pr. 1987), and Marina Carr’s The Mai (pr. 1994) and Audrey or Sorrow (2024), while other late twentieth-century playwrights of note are Thomas Kilroy (Double Cross, performed in 1986 at the Field Day Theatre), Anne Devlin (whose Ourselves Alone, The Long March, and A Woman Calling were produced and published together in 1986), Bernard Farrell (All the Way Back, pr. 1985, pb. 1988), and Tom MacIntyre (Dance for Your Daddy, pr. 1987).

Irish activist and actress Margaretta D’Arcy, best known for her collaborations with John Arden, is a noted Dublin-born playwright active in examining and dramatizing the political questions of the country. Long productions (sometimes as long as twenty-six hours) revolving loosely around the life and activities of James Connolly (the six-part The Non-Stop Connolly Show was produced through the 1970s but was published in full in 1986) have set her work apart even from the more radical Irish theater. Michael Etherton has described her plays as emphasizing “the central and unresolved conflict between revolution and reform: the relationship of socialism to republicanism in the context of north and south, and the issue of land in Ireland that continues to underscore the struggle today; their particular depiction of women; the emblematic theater that they have recreated and its antecedents in carnival and the Corpus Christi cycle of the medieval theatre.” Her further works include Big Plane, Small Axe, The Mistrials of Mary Kelly (2005), Shell Hell (2005), and Yellow Gate Women (2007).

Another important Irish playwright, novelist, literary critic, and poet, Colm Tóibín, wrote Beauty in a Broken Place (2004), which outlined Irish drama in 1920 in the Abbey Theater. His colleague and friend Michael Colgan served as the director of the theater in the 1970s and then as the director of Dublin's Gate Theatre in the 1980s. Colgan received several awards for his contributions to Irish theater in the 2010s, including an honorary Order of the British Empire award from the queen of England. However, accusations of sexual misconduct during his time at the Gate Theater surfaced in 2017.

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