'Buffoonery and Easy Sentiment': Popular Irish plays in the decade prior to the opening of the Abbey Theatre
Edited by : Christopher Fitz-Simon
Publication Date 10th, January, 2011
ISBN 978-1-904505-49-5
Cost €20.00
In this fascinating reappraisal of the non-literary drama of the late 19th- early 20th century, Christopher Fitz-Simon discloses a unique world of plays, players and producers in metropolitan theatres in Ireland and other countries where Ireland was viewed as a source of extraordinary topics: At once contemporary and comfortably remote: revolution, eviction, famine, agrarian agitation, political assassination.
The form was the fashionable one of melodrama, yet Irish melodrama was of a particular kind replete with hidden messages, and the language was far more allusive, colourful and entertaining than that of its English equivalent.
There was much diversity, as shown in plays as different as Murray & Shine’s An Irish Gentleman, Hubert O’Grady’s The Priest Hunter, J.W. Whitbread’s The Victoria Cross and Edward Selden’s McKenna’s Flirtation.
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About the Author(s)
Christopher Fitz-Simon
Christopher Fitz-Simon is a former Artistic Director of the Lyric Theatre, Belfast; The Irish Theatre Company and the Abbey Theatre, Dublin. Among his books are THE BOYS, a biography of the Dublin Gate Theatre's Hilton Edwards and Micheal MacLiammoir and ELEVEN HOUSES, a memoir of the 1940s.
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See also...
'Echoes Down the Corridor': Irish Theatre - Past, Present and Future
Irish Theatre in England, Second in the series: Irish Theatrical Diaspora
Irish Theatre on Tour
