W. B. Yeats (1865–1939) was born a British subject in the reign of Queen Victoria and died a citizen of the Irish Republic on the eve of the Second World War. He was a poet, known to the world as the author of, among others, ‘The Second Coming’, ‘Adam’s Curse’, ‘Sailing to Byzantium’, ‘The Wild Swans at Coole’, but also a playwright, critic, folklorist, mystic, politician, the founder of a national theatre and winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature. His poetry came in on the last wave of Romanticism and survived the Modernist backwash. It remained of the moment but out of step, just as the life he lived was intimately of its age and supremely out of time, guided by a mystical (often mystifying) inner life – the intricately personal vision of history, symbol and myth that also inspired his poems – a vision that Yeats enlarged and renewed throughout his life.
Part of this process of renewal was rewriting: not only his poems but the story of his life. Yeats shed styles and convictions as he changed, leaving behind a series of contradictory selves. ‘Three Ages of Yeats’ dramatises that development in the form of three Yeatses, each played by a different actor: Early Yeats, the Republican in a velvet jacket, writing dreamy love poetry for Maud Gonne; the more direct lyric poet, Middle Yeats, writing out of heartbreak and public life; and Late Yeats, indecent, unbiddable, outfacing death with some of his most passionate, far-out verse. In these distinct phases the evening hopes to capture Yeats in triptych.