Of all the Irish playwrights who have arisen in recent years, Lady Gregory has produced most and W.B.  Yeats is the most poetic.  He is more a lyric poet than a dramatist, and is never satisfied with his work for the stage, but keeps eternally chopping and changing it.  His Kathleen-Ni-Houlihan, though a dream-play, always appeals to an audience of Irish people.  Perhaps his one-act Deirdre is the nearest approach to real drama he has done.  Some of Lady Gregory’s earlier one-act farces, such as The Workhouse-Ward, are very amusing; The Rising of the Moon is a little dramatic gem, and The Gaol Gate is touched with genuine tragedy.  Synge wrote only one play—­Riders to the Sea—­that acts well.  The others are admired by critics for the strangeness of their diction and the beauty of the nature-pictures scattered through them.  His much-discussed Playboy of the Western World has become famous for the rows it has created at home and abroad from its very first production on January 26, 1907.  William Boyle, who gets to the heart of those he writes about, has produced the most popular play of the movement in The Eloquent Dempsey, and a perfectly constructed one in The Building Fund.  W.F.  Casey’s two plays—­The Man Who Missed the Tide and The Suburban Groove—­are both popular and actable.  Padraic Colum’s plays—­The Land and Broken Soil (the latter rewritten and renamed The Fiddler’s House)—­are almost idyllic scenes of country life.  Lennox Robinson’s plays are harsh in tone, but dramatically effective, and T.C.  Murray’s Birthright and Maurice Harte are fine dramas, well constructed and full of true knowledge of the people he writes about.  Seumas O’Kelly has written two strong dramas in The Shuiler’s Child and The Bribe, and Seumas O’Brien one of the funniest Irish farces ever staged in Duty.  R.J.  Ray’s play, The Casting Out of Martin Whelan, is the best this dramatist has as yet given us, and George Fitzmaurice’s The Country Dressmaker has the elements of good drama in it.  St. John G. Ervine has written a very human drama in Mixed Marriage.  He hails from the north of Ireland; but Rutherford Mayne is the best of the Northern playwrights, and his plays, The Drone and The Turn of the Road, are splendid homely county Down comedies.

Bernard Shaw’s John Bull’s Other Island, as Irish plays go, is a fine specimen; Canon Hannay has written two successful comedies, Eleanor’s Enterprise and General John Regan—­the latter not wholly to the taste of the people of the west.  James Stephens and Jane Barlow have also tried their hands at playwriting, with but moderate success.  Perhaps the modern drama that made the most impression when first played was The Heather Field, by Edward Martyn.  It gripped and remains a lasting memory with all who saw it in 1899.  But I think I have written enough to show that the Irish Theatre of today is in a very alive condition, and that if the great National Dramatist has not yet arrived, he is sure to emerge.  When that time comes, the actors are here ready to interpret such work to perfection.