Gender, Performance, and Authorship at the Abbey Theatre

Abstract Gender, Performance, and Authorship offers a different way to consider the creation of the major characters of the Abbey Theatre, holding the lines between writing and performing up to scrutiny, and ending with a connection between theatrical and film performance. The book challenges the way that authorship and ownership have been defined as far back as the earliest productions at the Abbey, offering a redefinition of authorship and gender in these plays that reveals the influence and unheralded power of actresses at the Abbey. The book begins with W. B. Yeats’s collaboration with Laura Armstrong in his earliest plays, his work with Maud Gonne on both The Countess Cathleen and Cathleen ni Houlihan, and then discusses J. M. Synge’s productive work with Molly Allgood (stage name Maire O’Neill) first in The Playboy of the Western World and then in Deirdre of the Sorrows, a play she helped complete after his death. A chapter on the six women necessary to the creation of Yeats’s Deirdre follows, before an Epilogue exploring connections between the tableau movement, the Abbey Theatre, and Sara Allgood’s film work.