Abstract
Today the first and last of the No. 1 Company’s performances for the season take place at the Abbey Theatre. May we not take this circumstance as being indicative of the end? The Abbey Theatre is at present in a state of collapse that has arisen out of inability to proceed beyond a point of achievement, which in itself is not of tremendous magnitude. For some considerable time it has been very successfully killing itself. Money is an excellent thing, but a national theatre is something larger. The Abbey has most miserably failed to raise itself to the dignity of a national theatre. The only material upon which such a proud institution might be built has fallen to the level of a touring company. Its extensive touring now includes ‘the smalls’ in England, ‘the smalls’ in America, and last week the second company toured ‘the smalls’ in Ireland.
Irish Independent (Dublin), 9 May 1913, p. 4.
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Notes
See Andrew E. Malone, ‘Brinsley MacNamara: An Appreciation’, Dublin Magazine , July 1929, pp. 46–56;
‘Revelations by a Director of the Theatre’, Irish Independent (Dublin), 29 Aug 1935, p. 7;
‘Resignation of Abbey Director,’ Irish Independent (Dublin), 4 Sept 1935, p. 9;
Brinsley MacNamara, Abbey Plays 1899–1948, Including the Productions of the Irish Literary Theatre (Dublin: At the Sign of the Three Candles, [1949]);
Michael McDonnell, ‘Brinsley MacNamara: A Checklist’, Journal of Irish Literature , 4 (May 1975) 79–88;
Christopher Murray, ‘Brinsley MacNamara’, in Modern British Dramatists, 1900–1945 , part 2, ed. Stanley Weintraub (Detroit: Gale Research Co., 1982) pp. 3–8.
MacNamara was himself from the Midlands, and was about to expose their pusillanimity in his controversial novel, The Valley of the Squinting Windows (Dublin and London: Maunsel, 1918).
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© 1988 Palgrave Macmillan, a division of Macmillan Publishers Limited
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Macnamara, B. (1988). The Abbey Theatre: Is It on the Decline?. In: Mikhail, E.H. (eds) The Abbey Theatre. Interviews and Recollections. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-08508-8_28
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