User:BrigitaEhr/sandbox

= Article Evaluation =

Relevancy of the Article to the Topic

 * The article is related to the Abbey Theatre in Ireland.
 * The short history of how the theatre was founded is relevant to the article.
 * The article seems to be jumping from the core founds, Yeats, Synge and Lady Gregory to Annie Horniman, the financial support, several times in the article which could be distracting.

Information Out of Date or Missing

 * Some information could be cited. There are several places where it says "citation needed." This makes the article unreliable.
 * The sources are from 2008 to 2013 with some sources being from 1997. It could be updated.
 * There could be more said about the founders and why they founded the Abbey Theatre.

Improvements

 * More information could be said about the founders.
 * Yeats is not mentioned that much. He is very important to the Abbey Theatre.
 * Surprisingly, not much is said about Lady Gregory.
 * They mention the works of Synge, Yeats and Gregory but not about why they founded the Abbey Theatre and why they wanted to revive Irish theatre in the first place.
 * More historical background should be mentioned. The Irish literary revival needs to be mentioned and why there needed to be such a movement in the first place.

Neutral or Biased?
The article is neutral. They talk about the founders and about the financial support of the Abbey Theatre. They mentioned a brief historical background which states facts about the founders.

Overrepresented or Underrepresented Viewpoints

 * The article should mentioned the viewpoints of Yeats, Synge and Lady Gregory. We do not get any facts about why the founders participated in the literary revival.
 * There are expressed viewpoints of the audience. The reactions to some of plays that were performed at the theatre were expressed however, there was no viewpoint of the playwrights themselves.

Working Links

 * The first link shows a website for the Dail debates but there is no link for the debate for the Abbey Theatre. This link does not seem relevant as there were no debates mentioned in the article.
 * The link to the New York Times is working. Collins, Glenn. "O'Casey's Widow Muses on His Friendship With Shaw", New York Times, 13 November 1989. Retrieved on 21 January 2008.
 * The two last links do not work. The pages no longer exist.
 * "MacConghail takes charge at Abbey Theatre", The Stage Newspaper, 15 February 2005. Retrieved on 21 January 2007.
 * Jump up^ Crawley, Peter. "Downtown Abbey". News. Irish Theatre Magazine. Archived from the original on 10 June 2015. Retrieved 20 July 2013.

Reliable References to Facts?
No, a lot of the times, there would be citations needed. Other times, I do not know if they are reliable references because it would be a book or the link would not work.

Talk Page - Conversations
The conversations have been similar to my critiques. The links are directing people to sources that do not relate to the facts being written. A lot of the details of the Abbey Theatre have supposedly been removed.

Rating of the Article

 * The article used to be a featured article.
 * It is now a C-class article.
 * It has been ranked high importance.
 * It is apart of WikiProject Ireland and part of WikiProject Theatre.

Link: Abbey Theatre

= Article Paragraphs First Draft = Adding paragraph for stage productions:

Due to the huge devastation of the 1916 Easter Rising, several playwrights, decided to create plays that would commemorate the Easter Rising. Their plays would take place during the Easter Rising and each play would have a different theme pertaining to the Rising. O’Casey’s play, the Plough and the Stars, struck controversy and angered the audience. The play did not portray the heroes in a positive way. The events were remembered for the bravery of the revolutionaries that fought for Irish independence yet the play ignores this, and depicts these events as non-heroic. The play was depicting the living conditions of middle-class Dublin at the time and audiences were offended by the depiction of Rosie, an Irish prostitute and they were enraged by Irish drinkers carrying the flag of the  Irish Citizen Army. The audience and critics were also extremely angry at the depiction of the Irish as being thieves and murderers. This posed a challenging question to playwrights concerning how historical events should be re-enacted so as to not anger or offend the public.

Adding to:

In 1909, Shaw's The Shewing-Up of Blanco Posnet led to further protests. The subsequent discussion occupied a full issue of the theatre's journal The Arrow. Also that year, the proprietors decided to make the Abbey independent of Annie Horniman, who had indicated a preference for this course. Relations with Horniman had been tense, partly because she wished to be involved in choosing which plays were to be performed and when. As a mark of respect for the death of King Edward VII, an understanding existed that Dublin theatres were to close on the night of 7 May 1910. Robinson, however, kept the Abbey open. When Horniman heard of Robinson's decision, she severed her connections with the company. By her own estimate, she had invested £10,350—worth approximately $1 million in 2007 US dollars—on the project.

The play, "The Shewing -up of Blanco Posnet" by George Bernard Shaw was censored from the Abbey Theatre by Lord Chamberlain because of its religious implications. If Lady Gregory and W.B Yeats were to  show this play in the Abbey Theatre, there would have been a huge outrage from the public that the Abbey Theatre would lose money and potentially the Abbey Theatre would have been shut down. This play had religious themes but it was not a critique on religion but yet a critique on politics. Before the plays were performed, the script had to be approved by Lord Chamberlain and he had the power to approve the play or to refuse it. For this reason, the Lord Chamberlain refused to have the play performed at the theatre. The emphasis on the two mentioned plays, "The Plough and the Stars" and "The Shewing-Up of Blanco Posnet" is because these two plays created a large outrage and created riots and other plays have not garnered as much negative reaction not just the public but with other playwrights as well.

Abbey Theatre Extra Research
I am adding this citation to the paragraph about The Arrow. There was no citation and there should have been one to back up the information. I found an article which explicitly writes about the arrow reporting on the disagreements of the audience about Blanco Posnet.

McKenna, Bernard. “Yeats, The Arrow, and the Aesthetics of a ‘National, Moral Culture’: The Blanco Posnet Affair.” Journal of Modern Literature, no. 2, 2015, p. 16. EBSCOhost,

The Abbey School of Ballet Ninette de Valois:

Pincus, G.M. "A Dancer for Mr. Yeats." Educational Theatre Journal. Vol. 21(4). 1969. p. 386-391. Accessed December 1, 2018.

Blanco Posnet Wikipedia Article
I will be adding my previous research to the Blanco Posnet article since the research pertains more to Blanco Posnet than to the Abbey Theatre.

Production and Censorship

Bold = my contributions

The play was originally to have been performed in one of Herbert Beerbohm Tree's After Noon Theatre productions at His Majesty's Theatre. However, the censor demanded changes to the text because the statements made by Blanco Posnet about God were thought to contravene the Blasphemy law. This play had religious themes in it, but it was not a critique on religion but yet a critique on politics . Shaw refused to alter the text, insisting that the views expressed were absolutely central to meaning of the play.

The Theatres Act 1843 only applied to the vicinities of London, Oxbridge, and royal residences, and not at all in Ireland. Shaw suggested that the play could be performed at the Abbey Theatre in Dublin. The play was accepted.'''Before the play was performed, the script had to be approved by Lord Chamberlain and he had the power to approve the play or to refuse it. For this reason, the Lord Chamberlain refused to have the play performed at the theatre.''' Despite pressure from the Dublin Castle administration to stop the production, it went ahead. Shaw refused to make any of the changes requested by the censor, but did make two changes in the play at the suggestion of Lady Gregory, as he believed they were improvements, but they had nothing to do with the issues raised by the censorship. The Abbey players' first public performance was in Liverpool on 10 April 1909. Its Dublin premiere on 25 August 1909 played to "a packed house", including James Joyce, who was reviewing it for the Trieste newspaper Piccolo della sera (and was "mightily unimpressed" by it). W. B. Yeats had been keen to put on the play to emphasise that culture in Ireland could be more liberal-minded than England. Before the first performance he gave a speech saying, (...). '''Shaw wrote a letter to the Nation newspaper to discuss the censorship of his plays which started a committee called the Committee for the Abolition of the Office of Dramatic Censor. Most of his past plays passed inspection except for The Shewing Up of Blanco Posnet. Some of his themes were still deemed inappropriate for most of the public'''.