Keeping a national institution on the stage: Ernest Blythe and the rebuilding of the Abbey Theatre

Historians have, for the most part, overlooked the rebuilding of the Abbey Theatre after its 1951 destruction by fire, a neglect that this article sets out to redress. Debates about rebuilding the Abbey had begun before the fire. The conversations that occurred then, conversations in which Ernest Blythe played an active part, are important to understanding what happened in the years after 1951. Having outlined that context, this article examines the pivotal and underappreciated role played by the Abbey’s managing director Ernest Blythe in securing the reconstruction of the new theatre. Blythe’s familiarity with government proved to be a precious asset in the theatre’s reconstruction, a feat achieved amid some of the most arduous economic conditions in the state’s history. In the fifteen years between the fire and the opening of the new theatre, Blythe liaised with four different governments about the provision of the new theatre. Criticism of the theatre’s work at its place of exile, the Queen’s, frequently made Blythe the focus of personal attack, and he was accused of stifling artistic standards in favour of easy profit. This article identifies the various decisions Blythe made to maintain an agreeable relationship with the government and to emphasise the worth of the national theatre to the Irish state. It also challenges some of the assumptions about Blythe’s tenure at the Abbey and explains the reasoning behind some of his most controversial programming decisions, which, it is argued, he made to maintain government support for the rebuilding of the Abbey Theatre.