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Part 2 profiles Irish playwrights "who created the engine of 20th-century drama," says host Richard Eyre. The most notable: Oscar Wilde and George Bernard Shaw, as well as John Millington Synge and Sean O'Casey. Eyre also explores Shaw's association with director-playwright Harley Granville-Barker at London's Royal Court Theatre and its ramifications; and the theatrical contributions of poet W.B. Yeats. He ran Dublin's Abbey Theatre and, says Eyre, "showed that theater in Ireland didn't need to be insulated from life."