The Irish Literary Theatre was founded by Yeats, Lady Gregory, George Moore and Edward Martyn in Dublin, Ireland, in 1899. It proposed to give performances in Dublin of Irish plays by Irish authors.
In 1899 Lady Gregory secured a temporary licence for a play to be given at the Antient Concert Rooms in Dublin, and so enabled the Irish Literary Theatre to give its first production. The play chosen was The Countess Cathleen by W. B. Yeats. It was done by a very efficient London company that included Miss May Whitty (Dame May Webster) and Mr. Ben Webster. The next production given was Martyn's play The Heather Field. In the following year the Irish Literary Theatre produced at the Gaiety Theatre three plays: Maeve by Edward Martyn, The Last Feast of Fianna by Alice Milligan, and The Bending of the Bough by George Moore.
The Irish Literary Theatre project lasted until 1901, when it collapsed due to lack of funding.
The use of non-Irish actors in these productions was perceived to be a failure, and a new group of Irish players was put together by the Fay brothers, among others. These went on to form the Irish National Theatre Society, which led to the Abbey Theatre.
Famous quotes containing the words irish, literary and/or theatre:
“For every nineteenth-century middle-class family that protected its wife and child within the family circle, there was an Irish or a German girl scrubbing floors in that home, a Welsh boy mining coal to keep the home-baked goodies warm, a black girl doing the family laundry, a black mother and child picking cotton to be made into clothes for the family, and a Jewish or an Italian daughter in a sweatshop making “ladies” dresses or artificial flowers for the family to purchase.”
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“The poem of the mind in the act of finding
What will suffice. It has not always had
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Was in the script.
Then the theatre was changed
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