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DRAMA
"I
need a theatre. l believe myself to be a dramatist. I desire to
show events and not merely tell of them...and I seem to myself
most alive at the moment when a room full of people share the
one lofty emotion."
W. B. Yeats,
1916
W. B. Yeats wrote twenty-six
plays. They include farces and conventional folk dramas, verse plays
based on Irish myths, and the experimental Plays for Dancers. All
of the plays show a playwright continually experimenting with dramatic
form, content and style of presentation, and open to collaboration
with fellow artists, among them the designer Gordon Craig and the
dancers Michio Ito and Ninette de Valois.
The first of Yeats's plays to
be performed in the professional theatre was The
Land of Heart's Desire, presented at the Avenue Theatre,
London, in 1894. He completed his last play, The
Death of Cuchulain, a few days before his death in January
1939.
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Mrs. Patrick Campbell as
Deirdre in Yeats's "Deirdre" |
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The Old Abbey Theatre,
Dublin. |
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He has had a significant influence
on the history of world theatre in the 20th century, principally
because he incorporated into his later plays, theatre techniques
from the Japanese Noh to create a minimalist "theatre of the
mind." Many theatre artists, including Bertolt Brecht and Samuel
Beckett, are in his debt.
As T. S. Eliot said of his own
attempts to write verse drama, "Yeats
had nobody, we had Yeats."
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