Irish theatre playwright now stands outside the gallery entrance. He won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1925. A sea change in the history of the Irish theatre came with the establishment in Dublin in 1899 of the Irish Literary Theatre by W. B. Yeats, Lady Gregory, George Moore and Edward Martyn. This was followed by the Irish National Theatre Society, later to become the Abbey Theatre. The history of this theatre is well documented, and its importance can be seen from the list of writers whose plays were first performed here in the early days of the 20th century. These included
Mary Devenport O'Neill Colum, W. B. Yeats, Richard Irvine Best, Frank O'Connor, Francis Stuart and Iseult Gonne. She became particularly close to Yeats, who she confided in. Yeats' recorded their weekly consultations in his diary while O'Neill was writing "A vision" (1925). In his "Oxford anthology of English verse" from 1936, he included one of O'Neill's poems. In 1917, she contributed lyrics to her husband's play "The kingdom maker". She published her only book in 1929, "Prometheus and other poems". After this she occasionally contributed primarily modernist plays and poetry to "The Dublin Magazine", "The Irish Times" and "The Bell". O'Neill collaborated with