IRISH THEATRE: The Heart of a Nation.

London theatre was the glory of the Elizabethan and Jacobean eras. Yet from the Civil war to a time so recent that it’s almost within
living memory, England produced not one native playwright of genius and only a handful of good ones. In 1820, English theatre was
halfway through a two-and-a-half-century-long coma.  The English theatre had clang to life because of a handful of
playwrights from Ireland. Meanwhile the playwrights from Ireland clung to life by having their plays produced in England. The
 classic cycle of dependence was challenged by the self-propelled arrival of three remarkable Irishmen: George Bernard Shaw,
William Butler Yeats and Oscar Wilde.

All three were born into the Protestant Ascendancy. All were close in age and each was a Dubliner. All three were politically engaged:
Yeats as Irish patriot, Shaw as Fabian socialist, Wilde, under cover of socialism, as the creator of something more subversive.
They made contact, though, at significant moments. (1)

Yeats was the father of an authentic Irish theatre. He dreamt it up, he protected it with tiger-like ferocity, and he created a
structure within which it could germinate and thrive.

William Butler Yeats was born on June 13, 1865 in Dublin. His father was a lawyer turned Pre-Raphaelite painter. In 1867 the family
 followed him to London and settled in Bedford Park. In 1881 they returned to Dublin, where Yeats studied at the
Metropolitan School of Art. Reincarnation, communication with the dead, mediums, supernatural systems and Oriental mysticism
fascinated Yeats through his life. In 1886 Yeats formed the Dublin Lodge of the Hermetic Society. He got involved in theatre
in a roundabout way, through the partly erotic help of two fellow-members of the Hermetic Society. The result was The Land of
Heart’s Desire (1894). (2)

It’s at moments like this that playwrights want a theatre of their own. Yeats was lucky, before a week had passed he found himself
scooped up at a party by Lady Augusta Gregory: forty-two, an Anglo-Irish grandee, widow of a former Governor of Ceylon. They
met regularly for the next two years and in 1897 they hatched their plan for an Irish theatre. This was the birth of the Irish
Literary Theatre. Other likeminded playwrights were welcome on board, provided they conformed to the moody and misty aesthetic.
In 1904, Violet Horniman bought the Abbey Theatre, gave it to the Movement and promised to underwrite it. From this
moment on, its rise was unstoppable. (1)

Although he was influenced by French Symbolism, Yeats consciously focused on an identifiably Irish content and this inclination was
 reinforced by his involvement with a new generation of younger and emerging Irish authors. J.M. Synge was only six years
younger, but he was educated and a linguist. (3) The two men met for the first time in Paris. Yeats told the younger man to go to the
Aran Islands: he stayed there for four summers running. His first play, In the Shadow of the Glen, was delivered to Yeats in 1903.
Synge focused dramatic attention on the rural and peasant culture of County Mayo and the Aran Islands. Yet, Synge's racy interpretation
of this topic was not universally appreciated, and riots erupted at the Abbey opening of Playboy of the Western World in 1907.
Popular playwright William Boyle accused Synge of perpetuating a "gross misrepresentation of the character of our western peasantry,"
and actors feared the consequences of what was considered bad language in the play. Lady Gregory, who was also a student of
Celtic mythology and published such books as Visions and Beliefs in the West of Ireland, similarly, but without the vulgarity, helped
cultivate what one scholar has termed the "imaginary peasant," -- a romanticized figure no more realistic than the shillelagh- wielding
 stereotype he replaced.

The strategy of dismantling mostly imported deprecations of Irishness and returning to more authentic linguistic, musical, and narrative
sources produced a critique of colonialism and a thirst for cultural and political nationalism. (4) And it is due to this thirst
that Sean O’Casey (1880-1964) joined the Abbey Theatre project.

O'Casey's first accepted play, The Shadow of a Gunman was performed on the stage of the Abbey Theatre in 1923. This was the
beginning of a relationship that was to be fruitful for both theatre and dramatist, but that ended in some bitterness. The play deals
with the impact of revolutionary politics on Dublin's slums and their inhabitants. It was followed by Juno and the Paycock (1924)
and The Plough and the Stars (1926), probably O'Casey's two finest plays. Both deal with the impact of the Irish Civil War on
the working class poor of the city. The Plough and the Stars, an anti-war play, was misinterpreted by the Abbey audience
as being anti-nationalist and resulted in scenes reminiscent of the riots that greeted Synge's The Playboy of the Western World in
1907. The success of these plays enabled O'Casey to give up his job and become a full-time writer. In 1929, W. B. Yeats rejected
O'Casey's fourth play, The Silver Tassie for the Abbey. Already upset by the violent reaction to The Plough and the Stars,
O'Casey decided to sever all ties with the Abbey and moved to England, where he spent the rest of his life. (5)

Yeats died in 1939. Late in life he wrote his finest work for the stage: Sophocles’ two Oedipus plays, freely translated into English.
He was a great producer, lacking only one gift: the ability, like the magical puppet-master of a folk-tale, to tiptoe out of the shop at
midnight and let the dolls take over. Reading Synge’s last play, so Celtic and crepuscular, or O’Casey’s foray into botched
experimentalism, it is hard to avoid the feeling that neither writer could really escape the great man’s influence.

Playboy was his triumph. O’Casey’s plays were different: Yeats had never intended anything quite so modern, harsh or working
class. But without him, they would never have existed. He had wanted to found an Irish school of drama, and he had succeeded.
That it would, by the time he died, have succumbed to the national mood of stagnation was something he had not foreseen – but
neither had anyone else. (1)

(2)   http://www.online-literature.com/yeats/

(3)   http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Butler_Yeats#Maud_Gonne.2C_the_Irish_Literary_Revival_and_the_Abbey_Theatre

(4)   http://www.neh.gov/news/humanities/1999-01/irish_theater.html

(5)   http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sean_O%27Casey