Based on extensive archival research, this open access book examines the poetics and politics of the Dublin Gate Theatre (est. 1928) over the first three decades of its existence, discussing some of its remarkable productions in the comparative contexts of avant-garde theatre, Hollywood cinema, popular culture, and the development of Irish-language theatre, respectively. The overarching objective is to consider the output of the Gate in terms of cultural convergence the dynamics of exchange, interaction, and acculturation that reveal the workings of transnational infrastructures.

You can paint your placards 'til the cows come home, but until you have marched through this town in five inch heels and fishnets, you will never know what it is to truly be a faggot on the front line. Told against the backdrop of Dublin's burgeoning gay rights movement of the 1980s and 1990s and the contemporary LGBTQ+ community of today, Once Before I Go charts the close friendship of Lynn, Daithí, and the luminous Bernard, and sits on the exhilarating edge between comedy, tragedy and melodrama. Exploring the fragile yet resilient bonds of Irish queer lives across three decades in Dublin, London and Paris, the play steps between the early days of the AIDS crisis and today's LGBTQ+ community, living in an era of marriage equality, gender self-determination, and untransmittable HIV. At once political, joyous and heart-breaking, Once Before I Go honours the fabulous people we lost along the way, and celebrates those who fight on. This edition was published to coincide with the world premiere at Dublin's Gate Theatre in October 2021.

THE STORY: The fifth play in a cycle of plays about the author's Irish family, THE STEWARD OF CHRISTENDOM is a freely imagined portrait of the author's great-grandfather, Thomas Dunne, the last Chief Superintendent of the Dublin Metropolitan Police

You used to swing me on our garden gate. In and out, in and out - out and in, me, on top of the gate, safe because I was in your arms, my father's big strong arms. Recalling events that may or may not have happened, people he may or may not have known, an elderly father weaves his life, funny, angry, poignant, as if in a dream.His daughter, perched outside his window, as close as the pandemic allows, responds with conflicting memories. They sing and argue, they broach dangerous ground, their profound love apparent despite themselves, until the visiting hour is up. Written during the Covid-19 lockdown of 2020, Frank McGuinness's The Visiting Hour premiered in April 2021 at the Gate Theatre, Dublin, in the first online Gate At Home production.

In 1928, Hilton Edwards and Micheál mac Liammóir founded the Dublin Gate Theatre, which quickly became renowned for producing stylistically and dramaturgically innovative plays in a uniquely avant-garde setting. While the Gate’s lasting importance to the history of Irish theater is generally its introduction of experimental foreign drama to Ireland, Van den Beuken shines a light on the Gate’s productions of several new Irish playwrights, such as Denis Johnston, Mary Manning, David Sears, Robert Collis, and their patrons Edward and Christine Longford. Having grown up during an era of political turmoil and bloodshed that included the creation of an independent yet—in many ways—bitterly divided Ireland, these dramatists chose to align themselves with an avant-garde theater that explicitly sought to establish Dublin as a modern European capital. In examining an extensive corpus of archival resources, Van den Beuken reveals how the Gate Theatre became a site of avant-garde nationalism in the Ireland’s tumultuous first post-independence decades.

“A wry, funny and touching meditation on loneliness, that private shame of the singleton in the era of the dating app and of fraudulent boasting on social media ... written with a real depth of insight, humour, compassion and a keen sense of the ridiculous...” The Independent It's the early hours of the morning in the aftermath of Laura's housewarming party. Danny, 42, divorced and living with his mother, is the last remaining guest. The flat is in a mess and so are they. One more drink? This sharp and astute two-hander takes an intimate look in real-time at the first fragile moments of risking your heart and taking a chance. Both comedic and tender, it asks questions about mutual loneliness and human connections. Beginning premiered at the National Theatre, London in October 2017. This new Modern Classics edition features an introduction by Sarah Grochala.

One works. One looks around. One meets people. But very little communication takes place . . . That is the nature of this little island. As five apparently unrelated characters meet in a seemingly insignificant garden, the autumnal sun shines overhead and everybody waits for rain. What they discuss is superficially anything that can pass the time. What is portrayed is the very essence of England, Englishness, class, unfulfilled ambition, loves lost and homes that no longer exist. Storey's timeless play is a beautiful, compassionate, tragic and darkly funny study of the human mind and a once-great nation coming to terms with its new place in the world.