Cultural Convergence by Unknown

Author:Unknown
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9783030575625
Publisher: Springer International Publishing

Familiar Narratives Concerning the Foundation of the Dublin Gate Reviewed

A review of the historicization of the founding narrative of the Dublin Gate needs to go back to the late 1920s and also to extend to the present day. As well as primary documentary resources, such as press reports and subscription literature from the theatre, there are also vital anecdotal reminiscences in published memoirs. Connections between the London and Dublin Gates were outlined in several press reports. In 1929, the Derry Journal noted that ‘[t]he Dublin Gate Theatre is similar in aims and objects to the London Gate Theatre and produces what it considers the best modern plays wherever written’ (‘From the Irish Capital’ 3). Theatre Arts Monthly linked the theatres in a commentary by Dukes, who was very familiar with the London Gate and observed that the new Dublin theatre’s playhouse was ‘at least three times as large as that of its London namesake’ (1930, 383). In the same magazine in July 1931, St. John Ervine mentioned the situation in Dublin in ‘The Plight of the Little Theatre’: ‘In Dublin, in addition to the Abbey Theatre, which seems to be in a period of fallow, two littler theatres contrive to obtain audiences: the Peacock and the Gate (The latter began in admitted imitation of the Gate Theatre in London, but is now developing a character of its own).’ (545)

In published accounts from the 1930s, less emphasis was placed on London. Bulmer Hobson recorded in his early history The Gate Theatre Dublin (1934) that the theatre was founded ‘in association with the Gate Theatre Studio’ (12), but also confirmed that ‘in actual practice its association or connection with the other organisation in England entirely ceased with these initial conversations’ (14). By 1939, the Irish Times reported on a lecture to the Dublin Literary Society given by Mr. Andrew E. Malone, which had surveyed ‘Ten Years of the Gate Theatre: What it Has Done for Drama’. No mention at all was made of any impact or influence from the London Gate. In fact, the view expressed was that ‘[t]he way had been prepared for the coming of the Gate Theatre by the Dublin Drama League and by a number of excellent amateur societies’. The independence of Ireland was rammed home with this remark: ‘When it was contended that Dublin audiences knew nothing of European and American dramatists before the opening of the Gate Theatre, the contention was without ground, as most of the great contemporary dramatists had their work offered in Dublin, often before even London had seen it.’ (‘Ten Years of the Gate Theatre’ 15)

Modernist experimentation in theatre practice has been seen as the key link between the two Gates. But the London Gate’s advocacy for theatrical innovation and reputation for promoting new continental plays was actually only one facet of the impetus for the development of modernist drama in Dublin. Others of significance which occurred earlier were the productions of Yeats’s plays at the Abbey from the 1910s-20s, and the

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