Author argues Abbey history is one of not challenging State

Parnell Summer SchoolThe Abbey Theatre has historically been elitist, anti-nationalist and anti-republican, and its plays critiqued the "pretensions of Irish peasant culture", according to author and lecturer, Dr Lionel Pilkington.

The NUI Galway academic told the Parnell Summer School there was always a reluctance by the national theatre to criticise State policy, especially on the North and on capitalism and its inequalities "with anything like the same vigour it directs, time and again, to what it sees are the follies of republican/nationalist demands".

Speaking on the theme of "100 years at the Abbey Theatre", Dr Pilkington prefaced his remarks by saying his comments were not intended to denigrate the massive achievement of the Abbey over the past century.

The author of Theatre and State in 20th-Century Ireland said the Abbey has been viewed as an "exclusively nationalist phenom- enon", but while it started with broad nationalist support, it quickly developed as a "cultural force that was ideologically highly conservative" and embodied the idea of a "qualified democracy - a democracy subject to the qualification of the interests of an elite".

Dr Pilkington said the Abbey also aimed to "educate the public to a better understanding of where its interests lie"; an editorial in The Irish Times in 1925 praised its efforts in "purging the superstitions and prejudices of a barbarous age".

There was evidence of a new experimentalism in the late 1960s and early 1970s, but the impact of the Northern Ireland conflict "sent the Abbey back to its old agenda - demystifying the utopian visions of republicanism".

Former Abbey artistic director Mr Christopher FitzSimon looked at a century of production at the theatre, which included some 700 plays.

The dramatist, whose play Speranza of the Nation is currently showing at Andrew's Lane studio, showed a dozen slides including advertisements for productions in the Queen's Theatre of dramas such as Hubert O'Grady's The Fenian and J.W. Whitbread's Sarsfield.

"They were not history plays but heroic dramas, lavishly and professionally staged." He said Yeats and Lady Gregory dismissed those productions as "buffoonery and easy sentiment".

Ms Lelia Doolan, a former artistic director of the Abbey, said that of the 700 plays produced at the Abbey, 80 were written by women, of whom only three or four are remembered.

She noted Dorothy McArdle, an ardent republican from Dundalk, who wrote Atonement produced in 1918, Anne Kavanagh in 1922 and The Old Men, performed in 1925.