The Dublin Tenement Plays of the Early Abbey Theatre

Although the early decades of the Abbey Theatre featured a repertoire noted for plays set in rural Ireland, Irish cities were also very much present on the national stage. From the original Abbey’s opening in December 1904 to its demolition by fire in the summer of 1951, fifteen percent of the English-language plays to premiere there were set in urban centers of the island. These include seven plays set in the city in Belfast, three in Cork, and one in Galway.¹ No fewer than forty-three Abbey plays were set in Dublin.² The plays that constitute the theaters’s early urban repertoire dramatize a broad range of social, political, economic, and historical subjects. Notably, more than 25 percent use a tenement setting, in a range of plays that touch upon economic and social class issues as a thematic concern. Although tenement life in Galway and Belfast does appear in a few plays, it is the tenements of Dublin that dominate the early urban repertoire. The Dublin tenement set is used so often in the Abbey’s first half-century that it came to be the most symbolic setting of Irish urban drama on the national stage, and—as Sean O’Casey’s trilogy famously demonstrates—a play set in a Dublin tenement proved an ideal vehicle for delivering criticism of the nationalist movement by drawing attention to class divisions in the city. Without doubt, O’Casey is the most canonical urban playwright of the early Abbey Theatre, and the one most celebrated for use of a tenement set. However, his trilogy is only one part of the Abbey’s stagings of Dublin tenement life; to examine the tradition as a whole, one must place the trilogy aside and see what lies in its dominating shadow.

The Dublin plays’ propensity for interior sets reflected the limitations of the theater’s stage, and appears to have been borne of practicality.³ The Abbey physical space imposed constraints on the plays’ settings. Although domestic spaces dominated interior settings through 1951, public interiors also appeared on the Abbey stage—including an occasional pub set in several plays. Other non-domestic interiors appear in St. John Ervine’s The Critics; or a New Play at the Abbey (1913) and Lennox Robinson’s modernization of Sheridan’s The Critic, or a Tragedy Rehearsed (1931), both set at the Abbey Theatre itself; Edward McNulty’s The Lord Mayor (1914), set in Mansion House; Denis Johnston’s adaptation of Ernst Toller’s Blind Man’s Buff (1936) and Roger McHugh’s Trial at Green Street Courthouse (1941), both set in Dublin criminal court buildings; and Seamus Byrne’s Design for a Headstone (1950), set in Mountjoy Prison. As with the domestic sets, these were well suited to a proscenium that measured twenty-one feet wide by fourteen feet high, and a stage only fifteen feet deep. There was also limited backstage space, which made the moving of sets and props between acts problematic and contributed to a needed simplicity. Brenna Clarke observes that the stage accommodated a “stage cottage [that] was perfectly scaled to the exact dimensions of an Irish cottage one would find in the West: 12 feet high in front, sloping down to 8 feet at the back wall, 20 feet long and 12 feet wide.”⁴ These physical limitations provide one explanation for the frequency with which the cottage kitchen appears so often in the rural-set plays. Coincidentally, these dimensions approximate the typical tenement room found in a converted Georgian townhouse, of fifteen feet square. This would prove to be a blessing in disguise: the history of converted Georgian homes was rife with drama to be exploited by playwrights creating works set in such spaces.

Georgian conversions were not limited to tenement flats, however. Some were altered by the original owners or by residents adapting to diminished fortunes and attempting to retain their homes. Two Dublin plays of this period are set in converted, non-tenement Georgian homes: Matthew Brennan’s The Big Sweep (1932) and Brinsley MacNamara’s The Grand House in...