The Urban Plays of the Early Abbey Theatre: Beyond O'Casey by Elizabeth Mannion (review)

The international reputation of Ireland's Abbey Theatre is strongly influenced by its early dramas about peasant life in rural Ireland. From Kathleen ni Houlihan (the 1902 W. B. Yeats and Lady Gregory drama that is sometimes credited with inspiring the 1916 Easter Rising) to Synge's riot-provoking Playboy of the Western World (1907), the most famous plays of the Irish dramatic movement celebrated the rural as the source of an authentic Irish identity. The anomaly in that pattern was Sean O'Casey's Dublin Trilogy of 1923–1926, three now-classic plays set in inner-city Dublin tenements. But despite the urban setting of the Trilogy, the tendency in scholarship has been to see plays like Juno and the Paycock (1924) as peasant dramas by default—as being grounded in the extravagant speech patterns and antiheroic outlook that we find in Synge's Playboy. In other words, O'Casey's plays are seen as part of an unbroken and coherent tradition of representing Irish life on the stage of Ireland's national theatre, their urban setting regarded as largely incidental.

Given this context, Elizabeth Mannion's Urban Plays of the Early Abbey Theatre is a book with apparently modest ambitions that has undeniably major consequences. It provides a survey of plays produced from the founding of the Abbey in 1904 to the destruction by fire of its first building in 1951—which means that some readers might be tempted to overlook it on the basis that it is exploring minor works. But the book's urgency for Irish theatre scholarship lies in its persuasive claim that we must revise our understanding of the early Abbey, Sean O'Casey, and much else besides.

Through engaging in a process of intensive archival investigation, Mannion has identified fifty-one urban plays that premiered at the Abbey before 1951. The word "urban" is used broadly, to encompass both setting (plays that happen to take place in one of Ireland's cities) and theme (plays that explore the distinctive characteristics of urban life). Thus the book necessarily considers both the practice of playwriting and the practical use of stage space.

That figure of fifty-one plays is from a total of 370 new Irish dramas, representing roughly 14 percent of the overall output during the theatre's first half-century. Most are unknown, many are out of print, and few have been revived. That might seem like a small proportion of a relatively unimportant body of work, but it does represent an average of one new play each year—and, in helpful chronologies at the start and end of the volume, Mannion demonstrates that they did indeed appear at roughly annual intervals. And although many of those plays imitated the themes of the Abbey's peasant plays, others used their urban setting to explore topics such as social class, housing, and labor. In summary, Mannion provides compelling evidence of a distinctive tradition running over several decades. The book's subtitle, "beyond O'Casey," is therefore particularly apt.

One of its strengths is that Mannion's close reading of several plays is complemented by an awareness of the practical demands of making theatre. She is comfortable discussing the relative aesthetic merits of key works, but she is also able to draw on data such as box-office receipts to explain audiences' enthusiasm for one work over another. For example, she notes that a five-day run of a drama called Money sold only a third of the tickets that a three-day revival of Juno and the Paycock had generated, a variation that demonstrates that audiences liked some urban plays more than others (35).

Similarly, she provides revealing context for the arrival to the Abbey stage of the first urban plays, which were written by W. F. Casey. Appearing in 1908, his two plays replenished the Abbey coffers at a time when its financial security...