ABSTRACT

In July 1966, the President of Ireland, the now elderly Eamon de Valera, conducted the official opening of the newly rebuilt Abbey Theatre. Among the ensuing ceremonies was the performance of a composite history of the NTS which included a parody of the 1907 and 1911 protests against The Playboy of the Western World, as well as a lampoon of Cardinal Logue’s condemnation of The Countess Cathleen in 1899. That this revue took place apparently much to the delight of the assembled state dignitaries indicates the extent to which the cultural role of Ireland’s national theatre had now changed (Irish Times, 18 July 1966: 1). Like the occasion in 1968 when the Abbey Theatre players donated to the Pope (apparently without irony) a white, leather-bound copy of Synge’s The Playboy of the Western World (Kilroy 1971: 97), what was here demonstrated – on the stage and in the auditorium – was the accelerating momentum of Irish modernization. Not only had Irish audiences stopped rioting, they were now laughing at the very idea of such behaviour. With its championing of Brechtian dramaturgy at the Peacock (Welch 1999: 186), its attempt to establish a working-class theatre project in the Cabra area of Dublin in 1967, and the strong socialist emphasis of the newly established Abbey Theatre Playwright’s Workshop, Ireland’s national theatre demarcated an ambitious cultural agenda. Blythe’s conception of the NTS as a symbol of national consensus was now replaced by a range of cultural functions. By the late 1960s,

that is, the NTS presented itself not only as a forum for national representation, but as a space for artistic experiment, and as a catalyst for social and political change. Apart from the 1966 visit by the octogenarian de Valera, the newly built Abbey Theatre appeared to have transcended the long years of its nationalist beginnings.