Flann OBrien: Acting out is the first full-length study to comprehensively address the themes of performance, masking and illusion in the authors fiction, columns, correspondence and scripts. These essays reveal, for the first time, the fullness of OBriens literary engagements with diverse theatrical movements (melodrama, revivalism, tableaux vivant, Grand Guignol, modernist anti-theatre) and playwrights (Shakespeare, Goethe, Boucicault, Synge, Yeats, Gregory, Pirandello, Brecht, Beckett, Capek).