SOURCE: Hunt, Hugh. “The Free State Theatre, 1923-1932.” In The Abbey: Ireland's National Theatre, 1904-1979, pp. 119-44. Dublin, Ireland: Gill and Macmillan Ltd., 1979.

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.

‘a Nation Once Again’

Ireland in 1923 was not just a nation once again, it was a very different nation from the one about which the founders of the Abbey had written their plays. No longer a romantic anachronism perched on the fringes of western civilisation, the new Ireland was preparing to take its place in a not very ‘brave new world’. It was this reality that the younger dramatists endeavoured, however inadequately, to express: no longer the twilight legends of a heroic past, nor the shebeens of a...