In 1907, the Abbey Theatre caused riots in Dublin by producing The Playboy of the Western World. Lady Gregory famously sent a telegraph to Yeats to tell him that ‘Audience broke up in disorder at the word shift’, and that week saw booing in the theatre, fisticuffs outside, and a flurry of newspaper articles; all of which helped ensure the central place of Synge's play in the history of twentieth-century Irish drama. Yet three years later, as Paul Murphy's insightful book points out, the playhouse produced a play that asked even more provocative questions about female sexuality. Lennox Robinson's Harvest features an Irish woman who had worked as a prostitute in London, and who refuses to alter her behaviour. She declares, ‘I went into it deliberately with my eyes open. You see, a woman I knew chucked typing and went in for this . . . and I saw what a splendid time she had, and how happy she was’ (quoted on p. 160). Yet despite some huffing and puffing in the press, Robinson's audience remained comparatively calm, and Harvest consequently achieved nothing like the notoriety of Synge's work.

With such juxtapositions, Murphy's study attempts to reorient Irish theatre studies away from familiar assumptions about its ‘canon’. The author gives a negative reading of the most frequently revived Abbey playwrights, J. M. Synge and Seán O'Casey, but restores to prominence others who have so far been neglected, such as George Shiels and M. J. Molloy. He also focuses particularly well on the less fashionable period of the Abbey Theatre that followed O'Casey's departure in 1926. His book is heavily and appropriately theorized, arguing that political hegemony is maintained by the essentialization of various ‘subaltern’ groups. Murphy offers the convincing argument that putting these groups onstage shows the way in which such ‘subalterns’ could become fantasy objects that both support but also subvert prevailing power structures – hence the paradox of Irish women having often been central onstage, yet their presence being figured in ways that reinforced the real-life marginalization of women in Ireland.

Murphy is diligent in naming the actors who first played the roles he describes, but he says little about the original conditions of production, which at times may have nuanced his largely textual reading. For example, he describes the peasant hero of Patrick Pearse's The Singer by saying, ‘There is no evidence in the play to suggest that MacDara underwent class transition or received formal education other than the statement, “I went to school and taught in it for a year”’ (p. 58). Yet the original performance of this play – staged at Pearse's school by Pearse's former students – inevitably linked the fictional hero with the play's author, reminding the audience of the middle-class lawyer, teacher, and revolutionary leader of real life. Nevertheless, Murphy makes telling observations about the way that class and gender assumptions were refigured and consolidated between the anticolonial and postcolonial period.