LILT

The Glittering Gate is a short one-act play for two actors, written by Lord Dunsany (1878-1957) and first performed in Dublin in 1909.  Edward John Moreton Drax Plunkett, 18th Baron of Dunsany, was one of the most prolific, original and influential Irish writers of the twentieth century. Friend of W.B. Yeats, inventor of the modern fantasy genre, soldier, international chess master – strange to think, then, that he has been all but forgotten by history. Amongst his many accomplishments, Dunsany was also an extremely successful dramatist; at one point in the 1920s he had five plays running simultaneously in London. The Glittering Gate was first performed in Dublin’s Abbey Theatre.

The Glittering Gate tells the story of two burglars trapped outside the gates of heaven. In its mixture of comedy and existential bleakness, the play anticipates the work of Beckett, and clearly was a major influence on Waiting for Godot in particular. The delineation of characters haunted by a malignant universe anticipates similar scenarios by the likes of Beckett and O’Brien by half a century.

With Tom Galashan as ‘Jim’ and Isaac Nixon as ‘Bill’

Directed by David Llewellyn and Jade Thomson