Abstract
Denis Johnston’s The Old Lady Says ‘No!’, the final production of the Dublin Gate Theatre Studio’s (est. 1928) second season, was one of the most stylistically radical – and politically pertinent – plays of the Free State years. The young barrister’s debut premiered on 3 July 1929, directed by Hilton Edwards and starring Micheál mac Liammóir. The play features many expressionist elements, but at the same time it is firmly rooted in both Irish history and the contemporary Free State. Indeed, the innovative staging and lighting techniques that Edwards and mac Liammóir were championing at the Gate Theatre provided the means by which Johnston could construct a multifaceted critique of the cultic veneration of Irish revolutionary history, even as he questioned the complacency of believing that the Free State truly embodied the ideals that had led to its establishment. Both satirical and harrowing, the politics of The Old Lady Says ‘No!’ are deliberately difficult to pin down: it reveals how hollow rhetoric can boom powerfully, how blazing idealism can be dangerously beautiful, and how dreams of revolution can animate a people but also drain it of life.
