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
Theatre of the United Kingdom London led to a late Victorian and Edwardian theatre building boom in the West End. At the end of the century, Edwardian musical comedy came to dominate the musical stage. Irish playwrights George Bernard Shaw (1856–1950) and J. M. Synge (1871–1909) were influential in British drama. Shaw's career as a playwright began in the last decade of the nineteenth century, while Synge's plays belong to the first decade of the twentieth century. Synge's most famous play, "The Playboy of the Western World", "caused outrage and riots when it was first performed" in Dublin in 1907. George Bernard Shaw turned the