The Abbey Theatre

Abstract

There are in Dublin three theatre companies; which, in order of their seniority, are the Abbey Theatre, the Gate Theatre and the Longford Players. In a way the Gate Theatre might be called the child of the Abbey Theatre, and the Longford Players the child of the Gate; but the metaphor is a bad one, and one would better convey the relation between them by saying that the Longford Players were a heresy broken off from the Gate, as the Gate was heretical to the Abbey. The Abbey, which is about as old as the century, derived its sustenance from the munificence of the late Miss Horniman. Others helped, but no one should speak of the Abbey without remembering her name, and without it there would have been no Abbey to speak of. Miss Horniman must have been not merely generous, but she must have seen with considerable insight the possibility of a new kind of drama arising far from cities, or at any rate free of the influence of cities, which was at that time gripping the drama very tightly. Supporting her vision materially, she endowed the Abbey, and that vision became a reality. So much for the Abbey Theatre’s material side; but the theatre had not been going long, when there came to it an inspiration that gives it a place above the Gate Theatre or the Longford Players: this inspiration was Synge. His material was the talk of the Irish peasasntry, and one does not have to examine his plays very closely to find three prominent ingredients; poetry, humour, rather grim, and satire.

Extracted from My Ireland (London: Jarrolds, 1937) pp. 259–63. Editor’s title.