These two plays by two neglected Irish playwrights are being performed concurrently. St John Ervine’s tragedy, Mixed Marriage, premiered at the Abbey Theatre, Dublin, in 1911. Its subject is religious bigotry and rancour and it was very much a propaganda piece; timely then, and timely now, it constantly hammers home its anti-sectarianism message, and accuses the politicians, the press and the bosses of the Belfast shipyards of encouraging the sectarianism, knowing the more divided the work force is the less power they will have. A Protestant man is willing to work with the Catholics if it means they will win the strike for better wages; but he will not countenance his eldest son marrying a Catholic. When the lovers refuse to part, he deliberately stirs up trouble. The result is a riot and the police are called in and the bullets start flying. The four acts are compressed into one act of 8o minutes and Sam Yates’s powerful production, strongly acted by a first-rate ensemble, plays the melodrama realistically and is totally involving.
Lennox Robinson’s Drama at Inish, which premiered at the Abbey in 1933, is a satire on actors and their audiences and is set in a small seaside town in Southern Ireland. A visiting theatre company decides to give the community a repertoire of plays by Ibsen, Chekhov, Tolstoy and Strindberg. The intellectual dramas have an enormous impact on the unsophisticated audiences whose usual entertainment is the circus and variety. Soon they are emulating the characters on stage and introspection, gloom and suicide become the norm. The comedy is spoiled by the over-acting of some of the townsfolk.