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Friday 1 July 2011

Abbey Theatre

Dublin's Abbey Theatre, converted from a former morgue, was the gift of an English admirer of W. B. Yeats, Annie Horniman in 1904.

The curtains went up on opening night on December 27, 1904. The bill consisted of three one-act plays, On Baile's Strand and Cathleen NĂ­ Houlihan by W.B. Yeats, and Spreading the News by Lady Gregory. In the Shadow of the Glen by J.M. Synge replaced the second Yeats play on the second night.



J M Synge became the Abbey Theatre’s director in 1906, and staged there his best-known and most controversial play, the comedy The Playboy of the Western World (1907), which caused riots for the frankness of its language and the implication that Irishmen would glamorize a murderer.

In 1925 The Abbey Theatre became the first state-subsidized theater in the English-speaking world.

The original theater was destroyed by fire in 1951.

The present building holds two auditoriums, the main one upstairs devoted mainly to the Irish classics and the Peacock Theatre downstairs, which is largely given over to experimental drama.


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