7 JULY 1928, Page 24

Some Books of the Week

Wrruour Lady Gregory could there have been an Irish Theatre at all ? Hers was the essential talent and the essential personality which carried the venture through. If her Three Last Plays (Putnams, 7s. 6d.) are really the last, they bring home a notable harvest. Two of them are adaptations : Sancho's Master is an Irishing of Don Quixote; The Would-be Gentleman is Moliere's Bourgeois Gentilhomme. Both have life, the hardest thing to put into a translation. Dave is original and, like most of Lady Gregory's pieces, very simple in structure, almost artless : but it has one thing which very few dramatists except Lady Gregory have brought to the Abbey—tenderness.