SOURCE: Saddlemyer, Ann. “The ‘Dwarf-Dramas’ of the Early Abbey Theatre.” In Yeats, Sligo and Ireland: Essays to Mark the 21st Yeats International Summer School, edited by A. Norman Jeffares, pp. 197-215. Gerrards Cross, Buckinghamshire, United Kingdom: Colin Smythe Ltd., 1980.

In the following essay, Saddlemyer discusses contemporary artistic and political reactions to the poetic and peasant plays produced by the Abbey Theatre during the early years of the Irish Literary Renaissance.

‘No one act play, no dwarf-drama, can be a knockdown argument’.

With these words James Joyce dismissed Riders to the Sea and, by implication, the Irish dramatic movement, adding that Ireland needed ‘less small talk and more irrefutable art’.¹ Yet when this discussion between Synge and Joyce took place in Paris early in 1903, W. G. Fay's small company of nationalist amateurs had already started to make its name with one-act plays in both Irish and English: Douglas Hyde's...