The Palgrave Handbook of Contemporary Irish Theatre and Performance

Eamonn Jordan, Eric Weitz, Eamonn Jordan, Eric Weitz

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN:
  9781137585875
• eBook ISBN:
  9781137585882
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Performing Arts

This Handbook offers a multiform sweep of theoretical, historical, practical and personal glimpses into a landscape roughly characterised as contemporary Irish theatre and performance. Bringing together a spectrum of voices and sensibilities in each of its four sections — Histories, Close-ups, Interfaces, and Reflections — it casts its gaze back across the past sixty years or so to recall, analyse, and assess the recent legacy of theatre and performance on this island. While offering information, overviews and reflections of current thought across its chapters, this book will serve most handily as food for thought and a springboard for curiosity. Offering something different in its mix of themes and perspectives, so that previously unexamined surfaces might come to light individually and in conjunction with other essays, it is a wide-ranging and indispensable resource in Irish theatre studies.

Part IHistories

© The Author(s) 2018

Eamonn Jordan and Eric Weitz (eds.)The Palgrave Handbook of Contemporary Irish Theatre and Performancehttps://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-58588-2_2

Begin Abstract

The Mainstream: Problematising and Theorising

Shaun Richards¹

(1)

Staffordshire University, Stoke-on-Trent, UK

Shaun Richards

Email: [email protected]

End Abstract

In his 1955 article “The Future of the Irish Theatre” Gabriel Fallon gave a gloomy prognosis, lamenting the fact that the Abbey, “a theatre begun in poetry should find itself after fifty years deeply sunk in the pit of naturalism”.¹ While he claimed that his essay was written “in the optative mood” it is the sense of frustration at the failure of Irish theatre as a whole that is most striking, for as there was “little sign […] of the promise of lively new dramatists” the theatre seemed condemned to “a further term of naturalism” as the dominant form of Irish theatre.² Fallon was writing from the perspective of conservative Catholicism, his hope being that naturalism would be replaced by verse drama of a spiritual nature, but his analysis captures a more widespread sense that “a spiraling entropy […] had existed since the mid-1920s” and the national theatre was its paradigmatic expression.³

Fallon focused on the Abbey because “the Irish theatre is the Abbey Theatre”,⁴ but as Ernest Blythe, the theatre’s managing director from 1941 to 1967, “didn’t want anything that wasn’t a three wall set”,⁵ the result was an “oleaginous conformity”.⁶ Although this lack of innovation was resisted by Ria Mooney, the Abbey’s artistic director from 1948 to 1963, she acknowledged that often the only set decision was where to place the door and, indeed, recalled that “many of the plays were so monotonously alike that I honestly can’t remember even the names of many of them”.⁷ However, despite this creative inertia at the heart of the theatrical establishment, there was a resistance to formulaic naturalism. The Pike theatre produced Beckett’s Waiting for Godot in 1955 and in 1957 gave the Irish premier of Tennessee Williams’s sexually outspoken The Rose Tattoo, which led to the arrest of the theatre’s director, Alan Simpson, and ultimately the closure of the theatre itself. But although the Pike, the 37 Theatre Club and above all the Gate, refused to conform to the naturalism which was “the signature tune of Irish theatre”,⁸ the reality, as the Gate’s co-founder Micheál Mac Liammóir observed in 1959, was that “the search goes on for those authors who will deliver [Irish theatre] from the cumbersome drawingroom and library set, […] from the limitations of those literal and representative surroundings”.⁹ In the same year, the playwright and critic Thomas Kilroy noted that “During the last twenty years few Irish dramatists have been in any way exciting technically” and so the challenge was to “create an environment which will help to inspire new Irish plays and keep playwrights alive to the experiments and advances of modern stage-craft”.¹⁰ The mainstream of Irish theatre flowed through the 1950s as sluggishly as the Liffey.

The reasons for this state of relative stasis are clear. As noted by Nicholas Grene, “In so far as Irish drama is centrally concerned with the explanation and interpretation of Ireland there is a bias towards the representational within it” and this had a specific impact on Irish women as dramatic form underwrote state policy in an effective denial of female agency.¹¹ As Melissa Sihra argues, “The recurring interior of the home on the Irish stage has come to signify an enduring association and conflation of family and nation”¹² in which, as in Article 41 of the Irish Constitution, women’s domestic life “gives to the State a support without which the common good cannot be achieved” and therefore they “shall not be obliged by economic necessity to engage in labour to the neglect of their duties in the home”.¹³ Any dramatic denials of this orthodoxy were largely suppressed during the autarchic 1930s and 1940s, when the stage was expected to present an indivisible people united within a common culture.¹⁴ However by 1958—when the parlous state of the economy established emigration as a fact of Irish life that fragmented families—state policy on the family and its theatrical confirmation were under strain. The conclusion of T.K. Whitaker’s 1958 Programme for Economic Expansion was that “It would be well to shut the door on the past and to move forward”; an injunction that applied to more than the economy.¹⁵ Irish society was changing and its theatre needed to engage with that fact. Indeed, as argued by Fintan O’Toole, “From the late 1950s onwards, ‘Ireland’ as a single, simple notion which might underlie and give coherence to a work of theatre began to seep away […] The theatre of naturalism […] became virtually impossible.”¹⁶

Cultural change, however, was rarely as absolute and, as Raymond Williams observed in Marxism and Literature (1977), nearly always involves a mix of dominant, residual and emergent forms—a factor that would lend complexity to Irish theatre over the next several decades. But there was a sense that Irish society was in a state of upheaval and Brian Friel wanted to dramatize that moment: “I would like to write a play that would capture the peculiar spiritual, and indeed material, flux that this country is in at the moment.”¹⁷

Friel’s comment was made in the course of a discussion published in the Irish Times on 12 February 1970 whose title, “The Future of Irish Drama”, echoed that of Fallon’s article some fifteen years earlier—and again naturalism was the issue. It was not, however, a case of a frustrated yearning for a poetic theatre, rather it was a search for, in Seamus Heaney’s phrase, a form “adequate to our predicament”.¹⁸ Hugh Leonard, who participated in the discussion, along with Friel and John B. Keane, identified the question of form as central, noting that “Brian Friel and I share a desperate search for form […] Irish playwrights as a whole are trying to break away from a naturalistic form”.¹⁹

Friel did not respond to Leonard on this point and appeared to refute it in his 1972 statement that “[m]atter is our concern, not form”.²⁰ But his 1974 comment to Seamus Deane, “I’m as sick of the naturalistic style as I’m sure you are”, makes clear that he was significantly concerned with the dominance of naturalism, but in a way which sought its modification rather than its outright rejection.²¹ The two plays that ushered in contemporary Irish drama, Hugh Leonard’s Stephen D. (1962) and Friel’s Philadelphia, Here I Come! (1964), were staged at the Gate theatre during the Dublin Theatre Festival—a major influence on the development of Irish theatre through its introduction of international drama. Kilroy noted that they had many traditional features in terms of situations and characters, “but the sensibility of both writers is what is striking: modern, alive to the dislocating perspectives of the mid-century and the fluidity of expression possible on stage with modern lighting, design and direction”.²²

Stephen D., an adaptation of James Joyce’s novels concerning Stephen Daedalus, was described by Leonard as “a very flexible piece of stage material” but one which was clearly non-naturalistic as, in the first production, “the dialogue between Stephen and the President was delivered as they walked down into the auditorium and completed a circuit of the stalls, during which time the house lights were switched on”.²³ Friel’s play is seemingly less radical in staging the kitchen set with all its resonance of “Peasant Quality”—the criterion of dramatic value in the Literary Revival—but it then fragments it. In addition to the kitchen, the set also contains a bedroom, which are lit according to whether they are the location of action, and “[t]hese two areas – kitchen and Gar’s bedroom – occupy more than two-thirds of the stage. The remaining portion is fluid: in Episode I for example, it represents a room in Senator Doogan’s home”. The protagonist is also divided, on-stage as Public Gar and Private Gar, the latter is “the man within […] the secret thoughts”. When the play concludes with Gar’s response to the question as to why he is emigrating, “I don’t know. I—I—I don’t know”, Friel articulates the uncertainty of both his character, the society and its theatrical expression, poised between traditional themes and modern forms.²⁴

Friel then interrogates these themes—emigration, generational conflict, the clash of tradition and modernity—through the disaggregation ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Front Matter
• Introductions/Orientations
• Part I. Histories
• Part II. Closeups
• Part III. Interfaces
• Part IV. Reflections
• Back Matter