The Abbey, Ireland's national theater, is facing serious artistic and financial problems. The Abbey, which aims to promote native Irish theater, was founded by William Butler Yeats and Lady Gregory. It has been facing trade union problems and disagreements between artistic directors and the...

Poor Jane Austen. She should have died hereafter. That way she could have lived to collaborate with Andrew Lloyd Webber and really cleaned up. Not so fanciful a notion as you might imagine. Long before Alison Steadman hooted her way through the BBC Pride...

There's nothing like a little liquor to unlock a play and its characters.And the booze flows freely in "The Seafarer," Conor McPherson's haunting yet often hilarious tale of a memorable Christmas Eve poker night in a dingy Dublin suburb.The play, which opened Thursday at Broadway's...

In the following essay, Flannery considers the political context in which the Abbey was established, focusing particularly on conflicts about the artistic vision the Abbey was to follow.

In the following essay, Hunt—the director of the Abbey Theatre from 1935 to 1971—recounts the plays performed in the early years of the Irish Free State, which was formed in 1923 as a result of the Anglo-Irish War.

In the following essay, McDiarmid argues that three early controversies—the censorship of Shaw's The Shewing-Up of Blanco Posnet, the American response to Synge's Playboy, and the debate over whether to produce Shaw's play, O'Flaherty VC—helped the Abbey define itself artistically and strategically as a national theater.