Between the nineteenth and twentieth centuries eventful changes occurred in Irish theatre. Despite the English government’s efforts to give the population a higher degree of homogeneity and increase loyalty to the Crown, nationalist feelings remained strong among the people, along with the consciousness of their Celtic origins.


One result was the foundation in Dublin of the Irish Literary Society, which was followed by a series of stage productions clearly aimed at creating a national Irish theatre.
This movement was brought forward by a group of writers and intellectuals, among whom the most prominent figure was the poet William Butler Yeats, together with Lady Augusta Gregory (1852-1932), George Moore (1853-1933) and George Millington Synge (1871-1909).
They succeeded in providing the Irish National Theatre Society with a stable theatre in Dublin, Abbey Theatre, inaugurated in 1904, where many of these authors’ works were performed. Yeats was born in a Dublin suburb in 1865 and received his initial education from his father, a painter of some renown who came from a well-off family of Irish Protestants.
His profession led him to move his family to England in 1875, from where they returned to Ireland in 1880 without his achieving any artistic or economic results worth mentioning. At the start young William also seemed to be attracted to painting, though he had begun writing verses at the age of seventeen.
He refused to go to university, entering instead the Metropolitan School of Art in Dublin in 1884. Two years later however, he left his art studies and took up literature.
William returned to London again in 1887, where he was gratified with having some of his poems published on English magazines. But his love for Ireland and for his native culture had not declined. The publication of his first play, The Countess Cathleen (1892), revised and staged in 1899, was the starting point for a series of plays revolving around the heroes of Irish lore.
The year 1896 was important for Yeats’ meeting Lady Gregory, who would become a strong collaborator in promoting the Celtic renaissance. The adventures of heroes and heroines such as Cuchulain and Deirdre are at the basis of many of Yeats’ plays, among which On Baile’s Strand (1904), Deirdre (1907), The Green Helmet (1910) and The Death of Cuchulain (1938).
Appointed director of Abbey Theatre in 1906, Yeats became progressively interested in Japanese Noh, and acquired a more multidisciplinary approach to works of art, which should include music, dances, masks and drama. In 1921 Yeats published four works under the title Four Plays for Dancers.
In 1923 he was awarded the Nobel Prize for literature. In his last years, due to problems with his lungs, he was compelled to pass the winter months in milder climates.
He stayed in Majorca in 1935 and then at Roquebrune, in southern France, where he died in 1939.
Departing from existing theatrical conventions, Yeats’ theatre was more symbolic and poetic, and fully comprehensible only within the context of the mythology and the culture of Ireland. His first play, The Countess Cathleen, takes place in an Ireland ravaged by famine. Two wealthy merchants, who are actually demons, are buying the souls of the starving Irish.
Lady Cathleen, seeing the desperate situation, orders her steward to sell all her properties, save for the ancient castle, so to provide food and shelter to the largest possible number of her countrymen without their having to sell their souls to the Devil. Religious though she is, she even comes to sell her own soul so that other people’s may be spared. But at her death her sacrifice does not go unnoticed – her soul is saved and enters Paradise. In his following works Yeats preferred one-act plays, a format that he maintained also in later works, as though he felt the need of enclosing his verses and plays within limited frames of time.
The protagonist of On Baile’s Strand is the legendary hero Cuchulain, an invincible warrior, who in this play is subject to a horrible destiny: he is unknowingly forced to kill his only son; then, mad with grief, he runs out to fight the sea, as if assaulting enemy hordes.
The Celtic cycle comes to an end with The Death of Cuchulain, that Yeats wrote in his final years. The woman who had bore the hero’s murdered son comes forth to demand the head of Cuchulain, whom she considers responsible for the most horrendous of crimes, and therefore to be punished by death. Deirdre is a young lady brought up by King Conchubar to become his wife, who, on the eve of her wedding, takes flight with her lover, the warrior Naoise. Pursued for years by the king’s men, they are finally invited to a banquet of reconciliation. Naoise and Deirdre ingenuously attend the banquet.
The musicians inform her that the banquet is a trap, and that Conchubar plans to murder Naoise and take her for his wife.
After the killing of Naoise, Deirdre uses a stratagem to escape the King’s lust and takes her life. The beautiful woman came to symbolize the quest for liberty of Ireland, which, although deceived, remained morally free. In the heroic farce The Green Helmet, Cuchulain’s friends are distressed by the man in red and by the lunar creatures that accompany him.
Cuchulain’s arrival finally explains the mystery: the man in red has come from the sea to test everybody’s character and select the champion to whom to give the helmet, which in the end will be assigned to Cuchulain, the wisest and most imperturbable of all. In his final years, Yeats tried to free himself from the constraints of blank verse, and in Purgatory (1938) he used a form of metrics based on free alternations of lines of ten and eight syllables.
The play features an old man and his young son, who are presented in an extratemporal dimension.
Before the remains of his childhood home, the old man goes over his past life, from his mother’s union with the worthless stableman who fathered him, up to the slaying of his father in a fire. He then recounts his life of wandering, while we witness a cyclical return of guilt which culminates when the old man murders his son with the very dagger he used to kill his father.
Traslation by Interpres