Irish theatre: A writer’s theatre

Abstract

It was an Irish Literary Theatre that Yeats, Gregory and Martyn proposed in the manifesto of 1897, its aim to establish ‘an “Irish school of dramatic literature”’. From the time of the foundation of the Abbey in 1904, with its three playwright Directors, Irish theatre has most often had the writer at its centre. This has been true of the Abbey in the later twentieth century, with its close associations with dramatists such as Brian Friel, Tom Murphy, Frank McGuinness and Marina Carr; of the Druid Theatre Company that came to prominence with its revivals of the work of Synge; and of the Lyric Theatre, Belfast, originally dedicated to the performance of Yeats’s plays. This chapter will analyze the nature of the writer-centred tradition in Irish theatre, including the international expectations of highly wrought lyrical or demotic Irish English that have helped to win success for such playwrights as Sebastian Barry, Conor McPherson, Martin McDonagh, Enda Walsh and Mark O’Rowe.