Avant-Garde Nationalism at the Dublin Gate Theatre, 1928-1940

Download or read book Avant-Garde Nationalism at the Dublin Gate Theatre, 1928-1940 written by Ruud van den Beuken and published by Syracuse University Press. This book was released on 2020-10-15 with total page 280 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In 1928, Hilton Edwards and Micheál mac Liammóir founded the Dublin Gate Theatre, which quickly became renowned for producing stylistically and dramaturgically innovative plays in a uniquely avant-garde setting. While the Gate’s lasting importance to the history of Irish theater is generally its introduction of experimental foreign drama to Ireland, Van den Beuken shines a light on the Gate’s productions of several new Irish playwrights, such as Denis Johnston, Mary Manning, David Sears, Robert Collis, and their patrons Edward and Christine Longford. Having grown up during an era of political turmoil and bloodshed that included the creation of an independent yet—in many ways—bitterly divided Ireland, these dramatists chose to align themselves with an avant-garde theater that explicitly sought to establish Dublin as a modern European capital. In examining an extensive corpus of archival resources, Van den Beuken reveals how the Gate Theatre became a site of avant-garde nationalism in the Ireland’s tumultuous first post-independence decades.