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
Abbey Theatre Moore, Martyn, Padraic Colum, George Bernard Shaw, Oliver St John Gogarty, F. R. Higgins, Thomas MacDonagh, Lord Dunsany, T. C. Murray, James Cousins and Lennox Robinson. Many of these authors served on the board, and it was during this time that the Abbey gained its reputation as a writers' theatre. The Abbey's fortunes worsened in January 1907 when the opening of Synge's "The Playboy of the Western World" resulted in civil disturbance. The troubles (since known as the "Playboy Riots") were encouraged, in part, by nationalists who believed the theatre was insufficiently political and who took offence at Synge's use