Irish Drama and Theatre Since 1950

Patrick Lonergan, Kevin J. Wetmore, Jr.

• Publisher: Methuen Drama
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN:
  9781474262651
• Edition: 1
• eBook ISBN:
  9781474262668
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: English Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Drawing on major new archival discoveries and recent research, Patrick Lonergan presents an innovative account of Irish drama and theatre, spanning the past seventy years. Rather than offering a linear narrative, the volume traces key themes to illustrate the relationship between theatre and changes in society. In considering internationalization, the Troubles in Northern Ireland, the Celtic Tiger period, feminism, and the changing status of the Catholic Church in Ireland, Lonergan asserts the power of theatre to act as an agent of change and uncovers the contribution of individual artists, plays and productions in challenging societal norms.

Irish Drama and Theatre since 1950 provides a wide-ranging account of major developments, combined with case studies of the premiere or revival of major plays, the establishment of new companies and the influence of international work and artists, including Tennessee Williams, Chekhov and Brecht. While bringing to the fore some of the untold stories and overlooked playwrights following the declaration of the Irish Republic, Lonergan weaves into his account the many Irish theatre-makers who have achieved international prominence in the period: Samuel Beckett, Siobhán McKenna and Brendan Behan in the 1950s, continuing with Brian Friel and Tom Murphy, and concluding with the playwrights who emerged in the late 1990s, including Martin McDonagh, Enda Walsh, Conor McPherson, Marie Jones and Marina Carr. The contribution of major Irish companies to world theatre is also examined, including both the Abbey and Gate theatres, as well as Druid, Field Day and Charabanc.

Through its engaging analysis of seventy years of Irish theatre, this volume charts the acts of gradual but revolutionary change that are the story of Irish theatre and drama and of its social and cultural contexts.

CHAPTER 1

‘THANK GOODNESS THAT’S OVER’ – IRISH THEATRE IN THE 1950s

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On 18 July 1951, the Abbey Theatre was severely damaged by a fire. It was forced to relocate to the nearby Queen’s Theatre for what was intended to have been a short stay, but which eventually extended to fifteen years – causing the theatre to enter a period that is dismissed by most scholars and journalists as one of severe decline, both politically and aesthetically.

The 1951 fire signalled metaphorically what had been evident for some years: that the great age of Irish drama that had begun in 1899 with the first performance of the Irish Literary Theatre was now over, and had probably ended with the death of the theatre’s co-founder W.B. Yeats in 1939. The Second World War had delayed an acknowledgement of the Abbey’s decline: international conflict had meant that its actors were prevented from emigrating to London or Los Angeles, and had also prevented competition from visiting companies. But after 1945, the Abbey could no longer postpone facing its problems. Its best actors were leaving, its audiences were declining and it had produced few obvious successors to the great dramatists of its earliest years.

Those problems are movingly encapsulated by the promptbook for the play that was being performed on the night of the fire: Seán O’Casey’s The Plough and the Stars (1926). That document, which is now held at the Abbey Theatre archive, includes the original typescript as prepared by O’Casey himself; we find his additions to the text pasted over discarded passages, together with notes by Lennox Robinson about blocking and lighting effects. That script had been used as the promptbook for the play’s premiere, the now legendary opening that had provoked riots, and it continued to be used for every production of the play (of which there were at least thirty-five) that was staged at the Abbey until the 1951 fire.

The Plough promptbook could fairly be described as a national treasure. It bears the imprint of O’Casey and Robinson and was read by Yeats and Lady Gregory. It is a relic of one of the key moments not just in Irish theatre but in the development of independent Ireland, memorializing the Abbey’s willingness to resist attempts to stifle its freedom of artistic expression – at a time when Ireland was about to enter a period of rigid censorship. But the iconic status of the promptbook also explains much of what was wrong at the Abbey: that it had been performing O’Casey’s play in exactly the same way for a quarter of a century. Eileen Crowe and May Craig had appeared in the 1926 premiere; Craig was still playing the same role (of Mrs Gogan) twenty-five years later. Ria Mooney had played Rosie Redmond in 1926; by 1951 she had taken on the role of director. Even the interval music was largely unchanged (La bohème in 1926, Tosca in 1951) (ATDA, 3051_MPG_01, 3 and 3396_MPG_01, 4). Where The Plough had provoked riots at its premiere, it was now being presented as a museum piece.

The Abbey’s fidelity to the original staging of The Plough was not unusual for its era, but it shows how the theatre had lost its dynamism and drive. Indeed, that complaint had been levelled at the Abbey during a previous run of The Plough in 1947, when Valentin Iremonger had made a speech ‘lambasting the present directorate’s artistic policy, describing it as being characterized by “utter incompetence” ’ (qtd by Welch, 1999: 153). Together with Roger McHugh, he publicly protested that the 1947 The Plough was a betrayal of a great play.

Such deficiencies have usually been attributed to the management of the theatre by Ernest Blythe, who took over as its director in 1941 and occupied that role until 1967. Blythe is mostly remembered for the writers whose work he rejected, but he has not been given much credit for those whose early plays he supported (such as Brian Friel and Hugh Leonard). He is criticized for having dedicated so much attention to the promotion of the Irish language but, as I’ll discuss later, that policy allowed directors such as Tomás Mac Anna to devise innovations in both theme and design in ways that might not have been permissible in English. Irish-language plays also gave important actors such as Siobhán McKenna their earliest professional experiences. Blythe did show a preference for comedies over more serious works, but towards the end of his career, he would explain that this approach meant that difficult issues such as partition could be discussed ‘coolly and with an eye to the future’ – an assertion that was self-serving but which should not be dismissed (1963: 21). Finally, he kept the theatre in business during a difficult period, and did so with a tiny annual subsidy from the government – one that, as an Irish Times editorial pointed out, would not even have covered the operating costs of the Gaiety Theatre’s annual pantomime:

For years the theatre has been operating under conditions of such difficulty that no producer from an outside national theatre could be brought to believe it possible that anything could be effectively staged at the Abbey … Scene ‘flats’ after fifty years use, had become so threadbare that they could not stand another coat of paint, but the theatre’s treasury could not afford new ones. Dressing-rooms, wardrobe, and property storage space were inferior to their equivalents in the average village hall in Scandinavia

The Irish Times, 19 July 1951

It is revealing that this editorial saw the Abbey fire as an opportunity finally to oblige the Irish government to fund the theatre properly.

Leaving aside the funding (what theatre ever has enough money?), a further difficulty is that the Abbey was remaining static at a time when the nation it purported to represent was undergoing major changes. The Second World War had created a firmer division between the north and the rest of the island. As part of the UK, Northern Ireland had fully participated in the war, sending thousands of soldiers to fight in the British Army, and experiencing attack by the German air force. The rest of Ireland adopted a position of neutrality, and although many of its citizens left the country to contribute to the war effort anyway, its experience of the period was different from that of almost every other country in Europe.

As a further signal of Ireland’s distance not only from Northern Ireland but also from Britain, the government declared the country a republic in 1948, leaving the Commonwealth and severing all ties with the British Crown when that act became law the following year. In one sense, this appeared to achieve the goal of the 1916 Rising, which had been fought to achieve an independent republic – but in fact the 1948 declaration was seen in some quarters as a betrayal of those goals, given that the state envisaged by the Rising’s leaders was to have comprised the whole island. Implicit in the declaration of the Republic was an awareness that the partition of Ireland into two separate states was likely to persist for the foreseeable future. Acknowledging this likelihood in turn created the circumstances that allowed Ireland to play a more active role internationally, joining the United Nations in 1955 and, in 1961, applying for the first time to join the European Economic Community (EEC). Ireland’s position in the world was therefore evolving rapidly at a time when its national theatre was homeless, underfunded and under the management of someone whose artistic outlook could not have been more different from that of Yeats and Gregory.

But if the 1951 fire diminished the importance of the national theatre, it also had the impact of inspiring new developments. The closure of the Abbey’s smaller Peacock space, alongside Blythe’s determination to stage commercially popular works in order to meet the higher running costs at the Queen’s, meant that the Abbey was moving away from experimental practice, poetic drama and most other forms of risk-taking other than the staging of new Irish-language plays. That left a gap that was quickly filled by the theatre clubs that had been opening in Dublin and Belfast, most of which played to very small (and often very select) audiences of between forty and eighty people. These included the 37 Theatre Club, which had been established by Barry Cassin and Nora Lever in 1951, as well as the Lyric Players’ Theatre, which was established by Mary O’Malley in the same year in Belfast and which would ultimately become the main producing house of Northern Ireland. As Ian Walsh points out, these small theatres did not need to be particularly iconoclastic in order to challenge Irish theatrical orthodoxies. ‘Cassin and Lever did not set out to be leaders of a counter-movement in Irish theatre,’ he writes. They ‘simply wished to produce plays that were “interesting and unusual” … However, a commitment to the “unusual” was a daring act in fifties Ireland’ (2012: 141).

By far the most important of these clubs was the Pike, a sixty-two-seat theatre established in 1951 by Alan Simpson and Carolyn Swift in a converted coach house in Dublin’s Herbert Street. As we’ll see, this was the stage that presented the world premiere of Brendan Behan’s The Quare Fellow, as well as the Irish premiere of Waiting for Godot – and which would set out to do far more than simply produce work that was ‘unusual’. As Walsh points out, even the theatre’s title was a declaration of intent. Swift and Simpson ‘named their theatre after a symbol of military Irish revolt: the pike was the weapon used in the 1798 uprising’ against British rule (2012: 165). Their name expressed a desire not just to revolutionize the theatre but, by doing so, to change their society. As we’ll see in the next chapter, that declaration would draw a retaliatory attack – one that would force the theatre out of business. But the Pike’s legacies would be lasting.

Outside Dublin, a thriving amateur sector staged the first All-Ireland Drama Festival in Athlone in 1953. A competitive event that brought participants from across the island, it hosted productions that complicate the widely held view that Ireland at this time was wholly conservative and priest-ridden. Yes, the amateur sector was dominated by members of the clergy, many of whom directed plays or were otherwise prominent in the organization – but rather than acting as a force of censorship and repression, some encouraged the staging of experimental or provocative work from Europe and the United States.¹ The amateur sector was also (when compared to the professional sector) disproportionately driven by women, many of them university graduates who had been forced to quit their jobs upon marriage. By the end of the 1950s, the status of the amateur sector had risen to such a point that John B. Keane’s Sive – which began life as an amateur production by Kerry’s Listowel Players – was performed on the stage of the Abbey, an admission by the national theatre of the quality and significance of Keane’s play (which Blythe had earlier rejected). Finian O’Gorman writes in detail about this production in Chapter 7.

The amateur sector also allowed people throughout Ireland to realize that they could act, write, or direct, and thus inspired the development of professional careers. That relationship can be seen in one of the most famous anecdotes about modern Irish theatre, which concerns the compositio...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-Title Page
• Dedication
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Acknowledgements
• A Note on Archival Material
• Introduction
• 1 ‘Thank Goodness That’s Over’ – Irish Theatre in the 1950s
• 2 Secularization and the ‘Post-Catholic’ in Irish Theatre
• 3 Internationalizing Irish Theatre
• 4 Repeat and Revise – Recycling Irish Images, Narratives and Tropes
• 5 Encountering Difference
• 6 After the Fall: Irish Drama Since 2000
• 7 Critical Perspectives
• Notes
• References and Further Reading
• Notes on Contributors
• Index
• Copyright