Setting literary Dublin on its ear in 1929, Denis Johnston's first play remains relevant today in light of the continuing "Troubles." It exposes the energizing yet pernicious effects of romantic nationalism - Irish style - in a dazzlingly original and irreverent theatrical analysis. Robert Emmet, legendary eighteenth-century revolutionary hero, is led, in a waking nightmare created by an expressionist collage of light, song, choral speaking, and massed movement, through the streets, homes, minds, and literature of Free State Ireland. Johnston's anatomization, however, was little to the liking of contemporary mythmakers like W. B. Yeats, who found the play distasteful in its pillorying of the corporate personality of what Johnston called "Dublin and her damned politics."
So "The Old Lady," in this case the Abbey Theatre, said no to the play, and Johnston took its inventiveness to the newly created Dublin Gate Theatre. Its founders, Hilton Edwards and Michael MacLiammor, were also young men eager to exploit the new European experimental dramatic forms and open to the modernist techniques of allusion. In this play Johnston uses both to create a richly textured dialogue of quotation including everything from Dante to Dublin graffiti. The play looks ahead to the new possibilities of television; in fact, a few years later, Johnston became the first dramatist to write television scripts for the British Broadcasting Corporation.
This definitive edition is based on Johnston's final 1977 version, the product of fifty years of revisions, and situates the play in its historical, theatrical, and biographical contexts. It is the first edition to have reference to all private and archival materials and to have the assistance of the playwright in the preparation of its critical apparatus, which includes comprehensive annotations and analyses of all substantive changes in the multiple manuscripts. It will be of enduring interest to scholars specializing in Irish and European theatre history, as well as to students of Anglo-Irish literature and theatre directors.