SOURCE: McDiarmid, Lucy. “The Abbey and the Theatrics of Controversy, 1909-1915.” In A Century of Irish Drama: Widening the State, edited by Stephen Watt, Eileen Morgan, and Shakir Mustafa, pp. 57-71. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2000.

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.

The history of the early Abbey Theatre offers a good means of understanding the way controversies, like theatre itself, transform the belligerent into the ludic. Three successive controversies in particular constitute a little sequence of causes and effects: the controversy over Bernard Shaw's play The Shewing-Up of Blanco Posnet, which was banned in England for blasphemy and obscenity but which was performed in Ireland in...