Walter Starkie - Abbey Theatre

Abbey Theatre

After the publication of his book on Luigi Pirandello, Starkie became a director of the Abbey Theatre in 1927 at the invitation of W.B. Yeats. Recent productions had been fraught with controversy, and one of his roles was to act as arbitor among the factions. In 1928, while Starkie was away in Italy, Yeats, along with Lady Gregory and Lennox Robinson, the other two board members, rejected Seán O'Casey's fourth play, The Silver Tassie, his lament of the First World War. When he returned to Dublin he voiced his disagreement with the other board members saying that, "This play was written with the purpose of showing the useless brutality of war and the public should be allowed to judge it for themselves. O'Casey is groping for a new kind of drama and the Abbey should produce the play". In light of his previous successes at the Abbey Theatre the rejection caused much controversy and O'Casey severed his relations with the theatre and took the play to London where it premiered on October 11, 1929 at the Apollo Theatre with Charles Laughton and Barry Fitzgerald under the direction of Raymond Massey. To many observers the loss of O'Casey marked the beginning of a decline in the fortunes of the Abbey that has continued to the present day.

The following year (1928) the board rejected Denis Johnston's modernist play Shadowdance, and Starkie was charged with giving Johnston the bad news. In his spindly handwriting he wrote on the draft title-page the five words (referring to Lady Gregory), The Old Lady Says NO, which Johnston used to retitle the play before putting on at Dublin's Gate Theatre the following year to considerable critical acclaim.

At the start of World War II the British were eager to send Catholics down to Spain as their representatives, and so the Irish-Catholic, fiddle-playing Starkie was sent to Madrid as the British Council representative, which took him away from the theatre and nightlife of Dublin, and into World War II Spain. He resigned from the Abbey Theatre on September 17, 1942 and on the same day he accepted the invitation of Hilton Edwards and Micheál MacLiammóir to be on the board of directors at the Gate Theatre.

He was one of the founders of the Centre International des Études Fascistes (CINEF). Its only publication, A Survey of Fascism (1928), had an article by him, Whither is Ireland Heading - Is It Fascism? Thoughts on the Irish Free State? During the 1930s, along with George Bernard Shaw and W.B. Yeats he was an apologist for Benito Mussolini, whom he had interviewed in 1927. In general terms he was influenced by the Irish poet and mystic George William Russell (AE) in his writing on co-operatives. He travelled to Abyssinia in 1935 and later wrote in favour of the Italian campaign there, opposing Éamon de Valera's call for sanctions, fearing they would further isolate Italy and drive Benito Mussolini into an alliance with Adolf Hitler. However soon after his appointment in Madrid his wife dropped her first name "Italia" to avoid being branded an agent of Mussolini.