In addition to being celebrated internationally for extraordinary contribution of its novelists and poets to literary modernism, UCD can be equally celebrated for the work of its dramatists, notably those who embraced and shaped modernist Irish theatre in the course of the last century.

Teresa Deevy, though somewhat neglected until recently, contributed much to that development. Deevy entered UCD in 1913, but due to illness moved to UCC before completing her degree. Her plays, especially Reaper (1930) and The Wild Goose (1936) challenge main steam readings of Irish culture and history, and made her a key figure in Irish modernist theatre during the 30s.

Though primarily a novelist, poet and biographer, Anthony Cronin is also one of UCD’s most significant modernist playwrights.  The Shame of It, produced for the experimental Peacock Theatre in 1974 has a modernist thrust which sets it apart from traditional perceptions of Ireland and Irishness. 

Quite apart from his own fiction, poetry and plays, Cronin’s biographical work on writers such as Flann O’Brien and  Samuel Beckett has significantly shaped the way the development of modernism in Ireland is perceived.

Thomas Kilroy has been at the centre of some of the most exciting developments in Irish theatre over the past thirty years or so. Working as play editor at the Abbey during the late 70s and as the director of the Field Day Theatre Company from 1988 he has played a major part in steering the course of Irish theatre away from its traditional preoccupations and towards a universal position.

Field Day Theatre Company founded by Brian Friel and Stephen Rea along with such notable literary figures as Seamus Deane, Seamus Heaney and Tom Paulin, sought to find a vocabulary and stylistic approach suited to convey the complexities of modern Ireland.

Like most modernist movements, Field Day involved a radical reconsideration of theatre’s role in society. In translations of works such as Chekhov’s The Seagull (1981) Kilroy looks beyond Ireland for just such a vocabulary, while Double Cross (1986) engages with Irish and British history to disentangle the politics underpinning wartime rhetoric.

The complex psycho-sexual discourse, pivotal in The Secret Fall of Constance Wilde [1997], demands a wholly modernist approach to production, one in which native reference has little or no place.