Setting the Stage

There was no native tradition of theatre in Irish. Thus, language revivalists were forced to develop the genre ex nihilo if there was to be a Gaelic drama that was not entirely made up of translations. The earliest efforts to do so at the beginning of the 20th century were predictably clumsy at best, and truly dreadful at worst. Yet by the 1950s, a handful of Gaelic playwrights were producing plays in Irish worthy of comparison not only with those by their Irish contemporaries working in English but also with drama being produced elsewhere in Europe as well as in North America.