Lennox Robinson talks about W. B. Yeats as a dramatist.
'The Old Abbey Theatre as the New Begins' was a radio documentary broadcast when the theatre opened in a new building in 1966. In this piece recorded with Lennox Robinson in the 1950s he talks about William Butler Yeats
The Abbey Theatre was founded by William Butler Yeats and Lady Augusta Gregory in 1904. Lennox Robinson became manager and director of the theatre in 1909 and would go on to be director of the Abbey School of Acting.
Robinson says that Yeats was a dramatist with "an unerring eye for situation". The only dramatist Yeats himself cared for was Shakespeare. When he started writing for the stage in the early 1890s, London theatre was at a low ebb, but the tide was about to turn with "the kind of play he least cared for, Ibsen and the early Shaws and the English realistic work".
