An exploration of theatre groups in turn-of-the-century Ireland and how they shaped the nation's civic, political, and cultural fortunes. This title seeks to shed new light on to the history of the Abbey Theatre and also examine the diverse groups, political, religious, gender, and class oriented, that consciously used performance to promote ideas about nationalism and culture in Ireland of the 1900s. It details how such groups parlayed theatre into an anticolonial tactic. Under their aegis, popular melodramas defied British stereotyping, rhetoric on martyrdom ignited the stage, and the Abbey players became an ideological site as well as a national theatre.