INTRODUCTION

On 28 March 1894, the day before W. B. Yeats saw a play of his produced for the first time, Yeats wrote to John O'Leary of his dreams for the future. Florence Farr, an English feminist turned actress, had persuaded the Manchester tea magnate Annie Horniman to subsidise a season of original plays in English that she would produce at the Avenue Theatre in London. Yeats's fellow-expatriate George Bernard Shaw was working on a comedy called Arms and the Man; but the first night would feature Yeats's one-act The Land of Heart's Desire, followed by John Todhunter's A Comedy of Sighs. If all went well, Yeats thought he might stay in London, and he hoped Farr would produce and star in a play he was writing. Yeats described this play – eventually titled The Shadowy Waters – as

This letter captures a moment when the future of literary drama in English is in flux. The Irish Literary Theatre is three years in the future. Although invested in the idea of an Irish literary revival, Yeats has been concentrating his efforts in London. He doesn't have an explanation for the ‘curious chance’ that brought three aspiring Irish playwrights together in London, or for what it means that Farr has attracted so much Irish talent to a venture with no national ambitions. For Yeats, insulting the ‘regular theatre goer’ is the project that holds the Avenue Theatre season together. The Irishness of the participants matters less than Farr's challenge to commercial theatre.

The future Yeats imagines here did not materialise. On opening night, Todhunter's A Comedy of Sighs met with a catastrophically hostile reception. When equally hostile reviews appeared the following morning, Shaw's Arms and the Man was rushed into production. Arms replaced Comedy on April 21. Yeats's Land of Heart's Desire was soon replaced with The Man in the Street, a one-act comedy by a seasoned London hack named Louis N. Parker.