I remember somebody, who has nothing to do with any propaganda, saying once that everything becomes a reality when it comes to Ireland.1 We have brought the ‘literary drama’ to Ireland, and it has become a reality. If you produce the literary drama in London, you can get an audience for a night or two, but this audience will be made up of the professed students of the drama, of people who are, like yourself, in protest against their time, and who have no personal relations with that which moves upon the stage. In Ireland, we had among our audience almost everybody who is making opinion in Ireland, who is a part of his time, and numbers went out of the playhouse thinking a little differently of that Ireland which their work is shaping: some went away angry, some delighted, but all had seen that upon the stage at which they could not look altogether unmoved. Miss Milligan’s little play, whose persons are the persons of numberless Irish folk tales; Mr. Martyn’s Maeve, whose heroine typifies Ireland herself wavering between idealism and commercialism; and Mr. Moore’s Bending of the Bough, which leaves no class, no movement, that has had any part in these last ten years of disillusionment, out of the wide folds of its satire, touched the heart as greater drama on some foreign theme could not, because they had found, as I think the drama must do in every country, those interests common to the man of letters and the man in the crowd, which are more numerous in a country that has not passed from its time of storm, than in a long-settled country like England.2 As I came out of the theatre, after the first night of The Bending of the Bough, I heard these three sentences, in which there was perhaps a little of the extravagance of the Celt, spoken by three men, one of whom is among the most influential in Ireland. ‘I wonder will people dare to come and see so terrible a satire’. ‘I feel, as I have never felt before in my life, that there is a new soul come into Ireland’. ‘No young man who came into this theatre to-night will go out of it the same man’. The cheaper parts of the house were the loudest in their applause, for our enthusiasts are poor; and their applause did not pick out mere obvious patriotic thoughts, but was discriminate and subtle. The gallery, which sang Gaelic songs between the acts, applauded thoughts like these: ‘At all events we have no proof that spiritual truths are illusory, whereas we know that the world is’. ‘Respectable causes, is a cause ever respectable’; and this thought very loudly: ‘There is always a right and a wrong way, and the wrong way always seems the most reasonable’.3 All the Irish papers, with the exception of the Irish Times, and our little Society papers, which are proud to represent what they believe to be English interests, have written of all three plays with enthusiasm and at great length.4 The Daily Independent described Mr. Moore’s play as ‘the most remarkable drama which has been given to the nation for many years’, and said, when our week was over, ‘a new intellectual life has arisen in Ireland’; and the other papers had as much, or nearly as much, to say.5 I do not speak of these opinions because I would agree with them, for I am too closely associated with this movement to measure the worth of the plays it has produced; but to show that we have made the literary drama a reality. The only correspondents of English papers who were present do not differ from the Dublin papers upon this point. The correspondent of the Times said of the reception of The Last Feast of the Fianna and of Maeve, ‘The plays were enthusiastically received’; and the correspondent of the Observer said of the reception of The Bending of the Bough, ‘People really had to go to see it. Never, it was said, had such an Irish play been seen on the boards of an Irish theatre. If the business of a dramatist is to hold the mirror up to nature, here, said everybody, it was held up in our faces unflinchingly. . . . When the curtain falls every one feels that there has been no such serious commentary on Irish life and Irish politics given to the world in our time; and on the whole no such just commentary either’.6 The English critics who have read the play and not seen it, and who do not know Ireland, have not understood it, for you must know Ireland and her special temptations to understand perfectly even such a sentence as, ‘There is always a right and a wrong way, and the wrong way always seems the most reasonable’. On the whole, therefore, I have a good hope that our three years of experiment, which is all we proposed to ourselves at the outset, will make literary drama permanent in Ireland during our time, and give the Irish nation a new method of expression.