In his introduction to Irish Drama and Theatre since 1950 (2019), Patrick Lonergan outlines the genealogy of the #WakingTheFeminists movement, which began as a contestation of how the Abbey’s 2016 Waking the Nation programme marginalised female playwrights and directors, but quickly expanded to raise awareness about the precarious position of women in the Irish theatre scene more generally. By also charting earlier attempts to challenge gender inequalities, Lonergan reveals a disturbing history of forgetfulness, if not outright disregard, so that ‘each iteration [of defiance] occurred as if for the first time.’1 Indeed, in the face of this negligence by both historiographers and the wider cultural sector, Lonergan appeals to ‘theatre scholars [to] think about the choices we make when we document the past.’2The present volume takes this plea to heart in an attempt to recover these and other types of marginalised histories and to demonstrate how the Dublin Gate Theatre played various emancipatory roles in Irish culture and society over the course of its long history. Founded in 1928 by Hilton Edwards, Micheál mac Liammóir, Desirée ‘Toto’ Bannard Cogley, and Gearóid Ó Lochlainn, the Gate quickly became a cosmopolitan mecca in the strongly insular Irish Free State. As Robert Hogan already described in his contribution to the demi-centenary Festschrift Enter Certain Players (1978), their new venture provided Ireland with ‘expertise and craft, education and a honing of taste, a growth of urbane tolerance and a lessening of parochialism, a series of masterpieces that inspired terror, a series of nonsenses that evoked delight.’3 The catholicity of Hogan’s enumeration – and his stress on the emancipatory quality of the Gate’s efforts – is also illustrated in a more comic vein by an incident that the architect Michael Scott recounts in the same volume. When the Gate acquired the Rotunda’s concert wing in 1930, mac Liammóir told Scott that he wanted the toilet doors to be ‘painted black with the words “Fir” and “Mna” in gold leaf,’ but a building inspector protested that the English words for men and women should be used instead. Mac Liammóir’s response illustrates a particularly tenacious streak to his cosmopolitan sentiments: ‘Micheál was so insensed [sic] at the Corporation’s insistence on English that he instructed the painter to put the two words in eight languages.