The Matter of Imperformance: The Theater Worlds of Jack B. Yeats

abstract: This article takes comprehensive stock of Jack B. Yeats’s writing for theater, and the influences upon him as a playwright. For the first time, it suggests the significance of widespread international storytellers, performance artists, and theater makers, introduced to Yeats first in his extraordinary collection of toy theaters and then, with greater sophistication, through his association with leading cultural figures such as Edward Gordon Craig. In surveying Yeats’s various interactions with and creations for the stage, it is possible to develop a more nuanced sense of his attitudes towards Irish culture, politics, and society in his moment, while appreciating his prescient conceptions of what performance might, in fact, “be.”