ABSTRACT
This chapter provides some of the origins of Baron Dunsany's sui generis stage world and considers his work as part of the everyday occult. Dunsany comes closer to the Symbolist playwrights who, while having their own beliefs in suprasensible realities, essentially found in the occult revival a rich resource for a non-naturalist secular theatre. In describing Dunsany's play as a "puzzle", the Evening Herald was reacting to its Symbolist aspects, with its mysterious glittering gate and suppressed allegorical resonances. Dunsany's subsequent work seems to drift further away from Symbolism, and from the occult revival towards the mainstream popular. He reworked the same moving-statue effect in the grand guignol one-act piece A Night at an Inn, which had its first production in 1916 in New York, where Dunsany had become the talk of the town, or at least of its theatregoing set.
