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.
(left) Mrs. Patrick Campbell as Deirdre in Yeats's "Deirdre". (right) The Old Abbey Theatre, Dublin.
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."
The Plays
The Countess Cathleen
The Cat and the Moon
On Baile’s Strand
The Land of Heart’s Desire
The Pot of Broth
Purgatory
A Full Moon In March
Cathleen Ni Houlihan
At the Hawk’s Well
Calvary
Deirdre
The Hour Glass
The King’s Threshold
Oedipus Rex
The Resurrection
The Shadowy Waters
The Words Upon the Window Pane
The Green Helmet
The Only Jealousy of Emer
The Unicorn from the Stars
The Player Queen
The Dreaming of the Bones
The Death of Cuchulain.
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