Lennox Robinson

Lennox Robinson

Esmé Stuart Lennox Robinson (born October 4, 1886 in Douglas , County Cork , † October 14, 1958 in Dublin ) was an Irish playwright , poet and theater producer . From 1923 he was director of the Abbey Theater in Dublin.

life and work

Lennox Robinson was the youngest of seven children in a Protestant and unionist family. His father Andrew Robinson first worked as a stockbroker before becoming a clergyman in the Church of Ireland in 1892 . As a sickly child, Lennox Robinson was educated by private tutors and at Bandon Grammar School . His interest in the theater was aroused when he saw the Abbey Theater Company's productions of plays by Yeats and Lady Gregory at the Cork Opera House in August 1907 . These impressions also gave him sympathy for Irish nationalism.

Robinson's first work, The Clancy Name , was performed at the Abbey Theater in 1908, as was his first play, The Cross Roads , the following year . From 1908 he also worked as an actor at the Abbey Theater and was one of its managers in 1910. After a catastrophic tour in the United States , he resigned in 1914, but was again manager in 1919 and director of this theater in 1923, for which he wrote many plays.

As an Irish nationalist, Robinson showed himself in such plays as Patriots (1912) and The Dreamers (1915). His other stage pieces include The Lost Leader (1918), The Whiteheaded Boy (1920), Crabbed Youth and Age (1924), The White Blackbeard (1925), The Big House (1926), The Far Off Hills (1928), Drama at Inish (1933) and Church Street (1934). At first he took the material for his dramas primarily from the world of the Irish peasants; later he wrote satirical comedies about the middle class in the province. In his works he also addressed Irish history and social issues. He also published Irish anthologies of poetry such as The Golden Treasury of Irish Verse (1925), wrote a biography of the Irish politician Bryan Cooper, who died shortly before, in 1931 and published his autobiography Curtain Up in 1942 and in 1951 under the title Ireland's Abbey Theater. A history 1899–1951 a continuous history of this theater. Robinson was also a theater producer and directed, among others, the 1930 play The Reapers by the Irish playwright Teresa Deevy .

literature

• Robinson, (Esmé Stuart) Lennox : In: Gero von Wilpert (Hrsg.): Lexikon der Weltliteratur , Vol. 1: Authors, 3rd edition, Alfred Kröner Verlag, Stuttgart 1988, ISBN 3-520-80703-3 , pp. 1280.