Ireland's national theatre, founded by Yeats and Lady Gregory in 1904, and the building where audiences rioted over Synge and O'Casey.
Founded to invent a country
W. B. Yeats, Lady Augusta Gregory and Edward Martyn set up the Irish Literary Theatre in 1899 with an explicitly nationalist purpose: to show Ireland to itself, in its own voice, rather than through the stage-Irish caricature then standard in London theatre. The Abbey opened in 1904, funded by Annie Horniman, an English tea heiress.
It became the first state-subsidised theatre in the English-speaking world in 1925.
The riots
Two of them, and they are the reason the theatre matters beyond Ireland.
1907, The Playboy of the Western World. Synge’s play about a young man celebrated in a Mayo village for claiming to have killed his father. The word “shift” — a woman’s undergarment — set off a week of disturbance. Yeats came onstage to face the crowd down and called in the police, which nationalists never forgave.
1926, The Plough and the Stars. O’Casey’s play set during the Easter Rising, showing the rebels as flawed and the tenement poor as its victims, with a prostitute among the characters. The audience stormed the stage on the fourth night. Yeats again addressed them, and told them they had disgraced themselves again.
Both plays are now canonical, and the theatre stages them regularly. There is something honest about a national theatre whose founding texts were things the nation objected to.
The building
The original burned down in 1951. The company played in the Queen’s Theatre for fifteen years and moved into the present building in 1966 — a concrete box, widely disliked, which has been the subject of redevelopment plans for decades.
The Peacock, the studio space downstairs, is where the newer and riskier work goes.
What is on
A mix of the canon — Synge, O’Casey, Friel, Beckett — new Irish writing, and international work. The programming has broadened considerably in the last decade after sustained criticism about the proportion of women playwrights, which is worth knowing as context for what you will see now.
Tickets
Previews at the start of a run are much cheaper. There are under-30 and student rates, and a standby scheme.
The other theatres
The Gate on Parnell Square, founded 1928 by Micheál Mac Liammóir and Hilton Edwards, where Orson Welles made his stage debut at sixteen by claiming to be a Broadway star.
The Gaiety for musicals and pantomime. Smock Alley, in a converted seventeenth-century theatre and later church, for the adventurous end.
Project Arts Centre in Temple Bar for new work.
