- The Oxford Handbook of Modern Irish Theatre
- Acknowledgements
- List of Illustrations
- Notes on Contributors
- Modern Irish Theatre
- Introduction
- The Inheritance of Melodrama
- Oscar Wilde: International Politics and the Drama of Sacrifice
- The Abbey and the Idea of a Theatre
- Theatre and Activism 1900–1916
- W. B. Yeats and Rituals of Performance
- The Riot of Spring: Synge’s ‘Failed Realism’ and the Peasant Drama
- ‘We Were Very Young and We Shrank From Nothing’: Realism and Early Twentieth-Century Irish Drama
- Modernism and Irish Theatre 1900–1940
- Missing Links: Bernard Shaw and the Discussion Play
- Imagining the Rising
- The Abbey Theatre and the Irish State
- O’Casey and the City
- Design and Direction to 1960
- The Importance of Staging Oscar: Wilde at the Gate
- Irish Acting in the Early Twentieth Century
- Twisting in the Wind: Irish-Language Stage Theatre 1884–2014
- Women and Irish Theatre before 1960
- The Little Theatres of the 1950s
- Urban and Rural Theatre Cultures: M. J. Molloy, John B. Keane, and Hugh Leonard
- Brian Friel and Tom Murphy: Forms of Exile
- Thomas Kilroy and the Idea of a Theatre
- Brian Friel and Field Day
- From Troubles to Post-Conflict Theatre in Northern Ireland
- ‘As We Must’: Growth and Diversification in Ireland’s Theatre Culture 1977–2000
- From Druid/Murphy to <i>DruidMurphy</i>
- Places of Performance
- Directors and Designers since 1960
- Defining Performers and Performances
- Beckett at the Gate
- Negotiating Differences in the Plays of Frank McGuinness
- Drama since the 1990s: Memory, Story, Exile
- Irish Drama since the 1990s: Disruptions
- Shadow and Substance: Women, Feminism, and Irish Theatre after 1980
- Irish Theatre Devised
- Global Beckett
- Irish Theatre and the United States
- Irish Theatre in Britain
- Irish Theatre in Europe
- ‘Feast and Celebration’: The Theatre Festival and Modern Irish Theatre
- Reinscribing the Classics, Ancient and Modern: The Sharp Diagonal of Adaptation
- Irish Theatre and Historiography
- Bibliography
- Index
Abstract and Keywords
The aesthetic principles of education and representation that Yeats and Gregory set out at the founding of the Abbey Theatre enabled the directorate to cultivate a relationship with the state that ensured the theatre’s place as the Irish National Theatre. Yet this was a relationship that demanded compromises on both sides—in the negotiation for a state subsidy, finally granted in 1925, in issues of censorship over controversial plays such as The Plough and the Stars in 1926, and in the uneasy relationship with the Fianna Fáil government that came to power in 1932. Even so, at least during Yeats’s lifetime, the Abbey directors were able to resist the complete ideological co-option of the theatre, and any compromises to artistic freedom were made willingly in order to ensure the continued alliance of the theatre and the state.
Keywords: state subsidy, The Plough and the Stars, censorship, Fianna Fáil, government
Lauren Arrington is Senior Lecturer at the Institute of Irish Studies, University of Liverpool. She is the author of W.B. Yeats, the Abbey Theatre, Censorship, and the Irish State: Adding the Half-Pence to the Pence (Oxford University Press, 2010) and of Revolutionary Lives: Constance and Casimir Markievicz, (Princeton University Press, forthcoming 2015).
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- The Oxford Handbook of Modern Irish Theatre
- Acknowledgements
- List of Illustrations
- Notes on Contributors
- Modern Irish Theatre
- Introduction
- The Inheritance of Melodrama
- Oscar Wilde: International Politics and the Drama of Sacrifice
- The Abbey and the Idea of a Theatre
- Theatre and Activism 1900–1916
- W. B. Yeats and Rituals of Performance
- The Riot of Spring: Synge’s ‘Failed Realism’ and the Peasant Drama
- ‘We Were Very Young and We Shrank From Nothing’: Realism and Early Twentieth-Century Irish Drama
- Modernism and Irish Theatre 1900–1940
- Missing Links: Bernard Shaw and the Discussion Play
- Imagining the Rising
- The Abbey Theatre and the Irish State
- O’Casey and the City
- Design and Direction to 1960
- The Importance of Staging Oscar: Wilde at the Gate
- Irish Acting in the Early Twentieth Century
- Twisting in the Wind: Irish-Language Stage Theatre 1884–2014
- Women and Irish Theatre before 1960
- The Little Theatres of the 1950s
- Urban and Rural Theatre Cultures: M. J. Molloy, John B. Keane, and Hugh Leonard
- Brian Friel and Tom Murphy: Forms of Exile
- Thomas Kilroy and the Idea of a Theatre
- Brian Friel and Field Day
- From Troubles to Post-Conflict Theatre in Northern Ireland
- ‘As We Must’: Growth and Diversification in Ireland’s Theatre Culture 1977–2000
- From Druid/Murphy to <i>DruidMurphy</i>
- Places of Performance
- Directors and Designers since 1960
- Defining Performers and Performances
- Beckett at the Gate
- Negotiating Differences in the Plays of Frank McGuinness
- Drama since the 1990s: Memory, Story, Exile
- Irish Drama since the 1990s: Disruptions
- Shadow and Substance: Women, Feminism, and Irish Theatre after 1980
- Irish Theatre Devised
- Global Beckett
- Irish Theatre and the United States
- Irish Theatre in Britain
- Irish Theatre in Europe
- ‘Feast and Celebration’: The Theatre Festival and Modern Irish Theatre
- Reinscribing the Classics, Ancient and Modern: The Sharp Diagonal of Adaptation
- Irish Theatre and Historiography
- Bibliography
- Index
