Introduction

Abstract

The canonical reading of modern Irish drama begins with the founding of the Irish Literary Theatre that later evolved into the National Theatre Society or Abbey Theatre. It is in the figure of one of the founders and chief international exponent of the Abbey, W. B. Yeats, that the first high point or ‘renaissance’ in Irish drama is said to have lived and died. Micheál O’hAodha, Peter Kavanagh and Una Ellis-Fermor all expound this position in their early influential histories. Later books by Anthony Roche and Katharine Worth on Irish theatre repeat this view but see a resurrection of Irish drama in the tradition of Yeats resurfacing in the figure of Samuel Beckett. Both of these critics claim that through Beckett’s plays the Irish dramatic tradition can be read as not experiencing a death but continuing uninterrupted from the early literary movement right through to the present day. A gap of fourteen years exists in their proposed tradition from the death of Yeats in 1939 to the premiere of Beckett’s En Attendant Godot in 1953. It follows that the plays of this period have been written out of a reading of a linear chronological tradition of modern Irish drama. This study examines the experimental drama that challenges mimetic representational strategies and that could be said to follow Yeats (who conceived of the theatre in anti-mimetic terms) and anticipate Beckett (who extends Yeats’s anti-mimetic impulses by creating drama that negates and complicates representational strategies).