"Beware of poetry," said the Belgian playwright Ghelderode, "that announces itself with placards." Nowhere could that be truer than in putting onstage the works of John Millington Synge, whose contribution to the 20th-century Irish Renaissance was a series of plays in which the poetry is precisely the unannounced kind—spontaneous, realistically based, and casually spoken as an only slightly more emphatic form of everyday speech. Dublin's Abbey Theatre made headlines in 1907 with the riot-causing premiere of Synge's... More >>>