Spreading the News
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Spreading the News is a short one-act comic play by Lady Gregory, which she wrote for the opening night of the Abbey Theatre in Dublin, 27 Dec. 1904. It was performed as part of a triple bill alongside William Butler Yeats's "On Baile's Strand" and a revival of the Yeats and Gregory collaborative one-act "Cathleen Ni Houlihan" (1902). Audiences may have dozed through Yeats's play,[1] but Spreading the News was very successful and it is still acted at the Abbey Theatre as late as 1961.[2] Lady Gregory remarked after seeing an early performance of the play that "the audience would laugh so much at 'Spreading the News' that they lost about half the dialogue. I mustn't be so amusing again!" [3]