Gate Theatre

Gate Theatre, Dublin, founded in 1928 by Michéal MacLiammóir and Hilton Edwards to fill the gap left by the Abbey Theatre's concentration on Irish drama in the naturalistic mode. The company played for two seasons at the Abbey's Peacock Theatre, presenting seven plays during their first season including Ibsen's Peer Gynt, O'Neill's The Hairy Ape, and Wilde's Salomé, the last then banned in England. In 1930 the company moved to the Rotunda Buildings, seating 400, its first production there being Goethe's Faust. Over the next few years the productions were equally ambitious, including Shaw's Back to Methuselah in its entirety and Aeschylus' Oresteia. The latter was translated by the sixth Earl of Longford [ Edward Arthur Henry Pakenham] (1902–61), the Irish dramatist and director, who with his wife became patron of the Gate in 1931. The best of Lord Longford's own plays was probably Yahoo (1933), which, with Hilton Edwards as Jonathan Swift, had a great success in both Dublin and London, where the Longford company played seasons in 1935, 1936, and 1937. In 1936 a split developed between the founders of the theatre and the Longfords, as a result of which two separate companies played at the Gate for six months each until Lord Longford's death.

In 1940 Edwards and MacLiammóir, unable to make their usual overseas tours because of the Second World War, presented their plays at the larger Gaiety Theatre and after the war the Gaiety continued to be used. The Gate, under the general management of Lady Longford, was let out to various companies throughout the 1960s, and for a time was even closed. In 1969 a government subsidy was awarded for the renovation of the Gate Theatre under Edwards, MacLiammóir, and Lady Longford, and in 1971 it officially reopened with a production of Anouilh's Ornifle as It's Later than You Think. The resident company mounted productions for six or eight months and made the theatre available to other companies for the remainder of the year. Particularly popular in the early 1970s were the vintage productions of Goldsmith, Shakespeare, Shaw, and Wilde in which the company's style was probably seen at its best; Irish authors were far from dominant in the Gate's programmes, which were drawn from the full range of classic and contemporary drama. The theatre's golden jubilee in 1978 was marked by the publication of a history of the enterprise, Enter Certain Players by Peter Luke. After MacLiammóir's death in the same year the theatre went into decline, but under new management from 1984 it found new prosperity. It marked its diamond jubilee with a second production of Wilde's Salomé.