George Bernard Shaw provoke, although it was shown at the city's Royal Theatre in November 1907. Shaw later wrote that William Butler Yeats, who had requested the play, "got rather more than he bargained for... It was uncongenial to the whole spirit of the neo-Gaelic movement, which is bent on creating a new Ireland after its own ideal, whereas my play is a very uncompromising presentment of the real old Ireland." Nonetheless, Shaw and Yeats were close friends; Yeats and Lady Gregory tried unsuccessfully to persuade Shaw to take up the vacant co-directorship of the Abbey Theatre after J. M. Synge's death in
Diarmuid and Grania Diarmuid and Grania Diarmuid and Grania is a play in poetic prose co-written by George Moore and W. B. Yeats in 1901, with incidental music by the English composer Edward Elgar. George Moore wrote a novel based on a translation by Lady Gregory of the Fenian tale "The Pursuit of Diarmuid and Gráinne". W. B. Yeats then collaborated with Moore in writing the play. The play, in three acts, was dedicated to Henry Wood, and its first performance was by Frank Benson's English Shakespearean Company at the Gaiety Theatre, Dublin on 21 October 1901; it appeared in a double bill,