Panel: The Abbey on Tour

Panel chair: Nicholas Grene

Adrian Frazier

National University of Ireland, Galway

Hollywood Irish: Abbey Actors in Film, 1930-40

This paper is a study of how Abbey Theatre touring in the 1930s led to an increase in the number of Irish actors becoming permanent residents in Los Angeles and frequent character actors in studio films.

Peter Kuch

University of New South Wales, Sydney

The Abbey in Australia in 1922: ‘When the Abbey is gone the mirror of Ireland is broken’

The Abbey Theatre has come to Australia four times - to Sydney and Melbourne in 1922; to the Adelaide Arts Festival in 1990; to the Sydney Arts Festival in 1993; and to the Melbourne Arts Festival in 1999. It is scheduled to tour Brisbane and Sydney in 2004. This paper will focus on the 1922 tour in terms of why the tour was undertaken; the history of association between the Abbey and Australia; the contemporary theatre scene in Australia; and the plays performed and their critical reception.

Anthony Roche

University College Dublin

Lady Gregory: The Politics of Touring Ireland

This paper looks at the reception of a couple of Lady Gregory's plays (notably The Gaol Gate) as they were performed in tours around Ireland. A primary focus will be Gregory's own differing, sometimes contradictory, claims regarding how her plays were received by Irish country audiences. The talk will centre on the Fays' decision to include Gregory's political tragedy, The Gaol Gate, as part of the Abbey Theatre programme to be performed in Galway in January of 1908 and the internal dissension this provoked. Gregory the Galway land-owner opposed the staging so close to home of a recently penned play by Gregory the dramatist on the grounds that, ‘in the present state of agrarian excitement, it would be looked on as a direct incentive to crime’.