Commedia dell’arte and the Gate Theatre

This essay reveals the centrality of commedia dell’arte in defining the Gate’s theatrical style in the first four decades of its existence. In its theatricality, as well as its emphasis on the international and the queer, Hilton Edwards and Micheál mac Liammóir found the commedia dell’arte to be an ideal theatrical precedent for their own ambitions and practice. Drawing on materials in the Gate Theatre Digital Archive, NUI Galway, newspaper archives, research by Christopher FitzSimons, David ...