Exiles (play) Exiles (play) Exiles is James Joyce's only extant play and draws on the story of "The Dead", the final short story in Joyce's story collection "Dubliners". The play was rejected by W. B. Yeats for production by the Abbey Theatre. Its first major London performance was in 1970, when Harold Pinter directed it at the Mermaid Theatre. In terms of both its critical and popular reception, "Exiles" has proven the least successful of all of Joyce's published works. In making his case for the defence of the play, Padraic Colum conceded: "...critics have recorded their feeling that ["Exiles"] has not
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