Irish Drama, Modernity and the Passion Play

Alexandra Poulain

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN:
  9781349949625
• eBook ISBN:
  9781349949632
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: European Literary Criticism

This book discusses Irish Passion plays (plays that rewrite or parody the story of the Passion of Christ) in modern Irish drama from the Irish Literary Revival to the present day. It offers innovative readings of such canonical plays as J. M. Synge's The Playboy of the Western World, W. B. Yeats's Calvary, Brendan Behan's The Hostage, Samuel Beckett's Endgame, Brian Friel's Faith Healer and Tom Murphy's Bailegangaire, as well as of less well-known plays by Padraic Pearse, Lady Gregory, G. B. Shaw, Seán O'Casey, Denis Johnston, Samuel Beckett and David Lloyd. Challenging revisionist readings of the rhetoric of "blood sacrifice" and martyrdom in the Irish Republican tradition, it argues that the Passion play is a powerful political genre which centres on the staged death of the (usually male) protagonist, and makes visible the usually invisible violence perpetrated both by colonial power and by the postcolonial state in the name ofmodernity.

© The Author(s) 2016

Alexandra PoulainIrish Drama, Modernity and the Passion Play10.1057/978-1-349-94963-2_1

Begin Abstract

1. Introduction

Alexandra Poulain¹

(1)

Université of Paris 3-Sorbonne nouvelle, Paris, France

End Abstract

This book originates in a conference hosted by Margaret Mills Harper in Georgia State University, Atlanta in 2009 to celebrate the seventieth anniversary of Yeats’s death. I wanted to speak about Yeats’s ways of exploring zones of contact between our world and the otherworld in his theatre. In many plays he stages encounters between ordinary, living humans and otherworldy creatures or revenants, but I became intrigued with three plays in which the protagonists themselves stand on the threshold between life and death, world and otherworld, in a prolonged, embodied performance of the act of dying. Of these three plays, one was written in the early years of Yeats’s theatrical experimentations (The King’s Threshold, first performed in 1903, then revised many times and finally rewritten as tragedy in 1921), one in the early 1920s (Calvary, 1921), and one was Yeats’s last play, written almost on his deathbed (The Death of Cuchulain, 1939), so that this particular structure in which dying constitutes the very substance of the drama spans his whole playwriting career. While Calvary is an explicit, if wildly unorthodox, rewriting of the Christian Passion, I began to perceive that the other two also recycled, and sometimes parodied, some of the tropes and dramaturgic patterns of the Passion narrative, and transposed them into a secular context. In particular, I was struck by the performative dimension of the death that takes place in all three plays, which is turned into a self-conscious spectacle and addressed to an onstage audience whose response mediates, and sometimes disrupts, the response of the real audience in the theatre. My first hypothesis in this preliminary stage of research was that Yeats’s undertaking in these plays was essentially to find a theatrical form with which he might probe the unknowable experience of death, and make visible the otherworld, if only from the threshold of death. This was in keeping with the project of other modernist playwrights of making the invisible visible, as articulated most forcefully, and relentlessly, by Yeats’s fellow theatrical experimenter and collaborator, English director and stage designer Edward Gordon Craig.¹ However, after completing an article on Yeats’s three plays,² I started to realise that this particular dramaturgical form, based on parodic citations of the Passion narrative and the self-conscious exposure of the dying body, was a recurring feature in the canon of modern Irish theatre, including in plays not primarily concerned with metaphysical issues, such as Synge’s Playboy of the Western World or O’Casey’s The Silver Tassie. What, I asked myself, were those modern Passion plays striving to render visible? What forgotten or suppressed knowledge did the sight of the dying body restore?

The story of the Passion of Christ, with its climactic moment of crucifixion, is intrinsically theatrical: the cross is not just an instrument of torture, but a vertical stage on which the tortured body is displayed. In the Christian narrative, the logic of crucifixion, originally intended as a display of Roman imperial power, is reversed to the benefit of the victim. By theatricalising his willing sacrifice, the consenting, martyred body on the cross becomes the subject of his own dramaturgy, and testifies to his own sufferings and those inflicted on silenced others. From the 1880s onwards, with the advent of what Peter Szondi has famously termed “the crisis of modern drama”³ (the declining importance of action in the economy of theatre, and its increasing reliance on narrative elements incorporated into the dramatic structure), the death of the martyr on the stage often becomes the very substance of the drama. Paradoxically, there is both less and more to see on the stage: less action, and the action is no longer geared towards the inevitable catastrophe which, very often, has already taken place when the drama begins⁴; yet more, because the spectator’s imaginative gaze is allowed to probe beyond the surface of the visible into the spirit-world, and to explore all the (spiritual, emotional, political) resonances of the past catastrophic event. If catastrophe has already taken place when the drama begins, theatre theorist Jean-Pierre Sarrazac argues, then the purpose of drama is to testify to this catastrophe, which is often the catastrophe of having been thrown onto the stage of life itself. Quoting Agamben’s Remnants of Auschwitz, Sarrazac recalls that the “martyr,” etymologically, is the witness—he who testifies to his own suffering, not in his own name, but rather in the name of another (possibly another in himself) who has endured such suffering that he cannot express it, and is voiceless.⁵ Thus one characteristic form of modern drama is the Passion play, in which the death of the consenting, martyred hero constitutes a testimony to his own sufferings and those inflicted on silenced others. Paradoxically, Sarrazac sees the death of Socrates as the paradigmatic Passion drama, prefiguring the Passion of Christ. Yeats’s contemporaries found in the Passion play a form ideally suited to capture “the only human drama, that of Man’s Fall and Redemption, of the Passion of Man.”⁶ In the actual theatrical productions of the era, Sarrazac comments, “Mallarmé’s dream of a self-contained, refined drama, originating in the distant past of Medieval Mystery plays, takes the shape of a secularised, lay Passion which no longer displays the sufferings and martyrdom of Christ, but those more modest ones which are inherent in the human condition.”⁷ Ibsen’s Peer Gynt (1876), Strindberg’s autobiographical trilogy To Damascus (1998–1904) and his final play The Great Highway (1909), the German stationendrama of the 1920s, Claudel’s The Book of Christopher Columbus (1927) and The Satin Shoe (1929) are so many experiments with a form in which drama is reduced to “Man’s struggle with the world, that is, with what is out there, the invisible, cosmic, symbolic forces which plot his destiny.”⁸ The form, however, extends well beyond the historical moment of the “crisis of modern drama” and continues to thrive in the contemporary theatre.

In this book I use the term “Passion play” in much the same way as Sarrazac, although for the most part the plays I investigate retain a (sometimes tenuous) thematic, as well as formal, relation to the Christian Passion, which they parody to testify to an experience of extreme, unrecorded suffering. In Ireland, the tropes and images of the Passion narrative have long held pride of place in the nation’s attempts to define itself, not so much because this narrative, and the authority to interpret it, are a disputed issue in a country in which power was long distributed along sectarian lines, but rather because of its intrinsic potential to testify to sufferings which might otherwise go unacknowledged. Thus I propose to read Irish Passion plays as political interventions, as well as existential explorations of “man’s struggle with the world.” By displaying his martyred body on the Cross, Christ testifies to the violence inflicted on him by the forces of the Roman Empire, and thus constitutes himself as a counter-power, unifying the community of Christians around his martyred body. Christ’s death on the Cross ensures the audibility of his voice, and the dissemination of his teaching, long after his own death. The tropes of the Christian Passion offer a privileged medium for counter-hegemonic discourses, and have infused much of the rhetoric and dramaturgy of Irish Republicanism.⁹ In pre-independence Ireland, colonial violence, constantly negated by imperialist rhetoric and projected onto the colonised Other (consistently constructed as backward and atavistically violent¹⁰), is inscribed for all to see onto the displayed body of the martyred Christ-figure. This accounts for the recurrence of the tropes of the Passion in many nationalist melodramas of the nineteenth century, and later in the plays of Padraic Pearse, and in a way the culminating moment of this theatrical tradition in pre-independence Ireland was the Easter Rising itself, staged as it was as a real-life Passion play. The form is just as ubiquitous in the theatre of post-independence Ireland, where bourgeois nationalism continues to enforce the modernising, homogenising agenda first imposed by colonial rule, and attempts to suppress those cultural formations which are, in David Lloyd’s phrase, “recalcitrant to modernity,”¹¹ and testify to the existence of multiple paradigms of Irishness. As we will see in Chap. 3, the strategy which consists in seeking out the tropes and images of the Passion to represent contestations of hegemonic narratives has repeatedly been caricatured as a morbid fixation with self-sacrifice, in a sustained attempt to construct those who challenge hegemonic representations of the national narrative as psychologically unbalanced and politically disempowered. I argue instead that the spectacle of the Passion serves a pragmatic political purpose, which is to make visible the violence directed upon the martyred body—to make visible, in other words, a violence which, in the context of modernity, is never willingly displayed in real life but on the contrary, rendered invisible by hegemonic discourses. In the process, it makes audible another, counter-hegemonic discourse—the discourse of the Christ figure which offers an alternative version of the history of the nation. A key element of the Passion play is thus the articulation between body and voice: it is the spectacle of the suffering, dying body which makes audible the minor voice, the voice of the visionary—the revolutionary, mystic, or artist, often conflated into the same sacrificial figure.

The Passion play, which theatricalises the performance of a spectacular process, is always metatheatrical; it not only directs our gaze to the suffering body on the cross but also invites us to recognise that we are engaging in the ambiguous act of watching. This emphasis on optics, and on the subjective gaze of the spectator, inscribes the genre firmly within the cultural matrix of modernity. At the end of the nineteenth century, several crucial technological innovations (such as cinema and X-ray radiography, both invented in 1895) deeply reconfigured both the field of the visible, and contemporary understandings of the gaze. As Jonathan Crary has shown, in the course of the nineteenth century the paradigm of sight was reappraised so that “the eye, like the rest of the body, becomes a stubborn physical fact, perpetually requiring the active exertion of force and activity. In a reversal of the classical model of the apparatus as a neutral device of pure transmission, both the viewer’s sensory organs and their activity now are inextricably mixed with whatever object they behold.”¹² In the theatre this paradigmatic shift results in an increased implication of the spectator’s gaze. The theatre (from the Greek theatron, the place where one sees) was always intricately linked with the idea of directing the audience’s gaze. However, Arnaud Rykner argues that the advent of the fourth wall, first imagined by Diderot and institutionalised by the aesthetics of naturalism in the nineteenth century, turns the theatrical stage into a camera obscura: “theatre thus begins to think itself capable of conveying a more or less raw reality, which spectators can simply seize by looking through an imagined peep-hole.”¹³ However Rykner pursues, naturalism finds its obverse correlative in symbolist drama, in which action dwindles to almost nothing, and the new optical paradigm of modernity results in a heightened interest in the spectator’s active gaze:

with the final extinction of lights in the auditorium (from the 1870s), the space of the drama, now definitely a camera obscura, can at last make room for the Other Stage, which up to now could never be represented according to the laws of the visible. What is inscribed in this camera obscura of modern theatre is the reduced image of the imagination of the spectator, who is now allowed to become involved mentally in the process of theatricalising the real, and to participate in the production of images.¹⁴

In this book I read the Passion play as a specifically modern, highly self-conscious form which reflects on its own optical structure. Consequently, I do not include in my primary corpus the numerous melodramas of the nineteenth century in which the protagonist is constituted as a Christ-figure who endures martyrdom for the sake of liberty, although I refer to them as prefiguring the Passion plays which are a recurrent feature of modern and contemporary Irish drama. In Ireland, the advent of an indigenous modern drama was planned and achieved as a key feature of cultural nationalism by the founding members of the ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Frontmatter
• 1. Introduction
• 1. Synge, Irish Modernity and the Passion Play
• 2. The Passion of 1916
• 3. After Revolution: Re-inventing Ireland
• 4. The Artist’s Passion
• Backmatter