Modern Irish Theatre

Mary Trotter

• Editorial: Polity
• Año: 2013
• ISBN:
  9780745654478
• Edición: 1
• Categoría: Literatura
• Categoría: Crítica literaria inglesa

Analysing major Irish dramas and the artists and companies that performed them, Modern Irish Theatre provides an engaging and accessible introduction to twentieth-century Irish theatre: its origins, dominant themes, relationship to politics and culture, and influence on theatre movements around the world. By looking at her subject as a performance rather than a literary phenomenon, Trotter captures how Irish theatre has actively reflected and shaped debates about Irish culture and identity among audiences, artists, and critics for over a century.

This text provides the reader with discussion and analysis of:

• Significant playwrights and companies, from Lady Gregory to Brendan Behan to Marina Carr, and from the Abbey Theatre to the Lyric Theatre to Field Day;
• Major historical events, including the war for Independence, the Troubles, and the social effects of the Celtic Tiger economy;
• Critical Methodologies: how postcolonial, diaspora, performance, gender, and cultural theories, among others, shed light on Irish theatre's political and artistic significance, and how it has addressed specific national concerns.

Because of its comprehensiveness and originality, Modern Irish Theatre will be of great interest to students and general readers interested in theatre studies, cultural studies, Irish studies, and political performance.

Part I
Performing the Nation, 1891–1916

Introduction to Part I

Since the seventeenth century, theatrical performance in Ireland has served as a site of social and political contest at home, and a product of cultural export abroad. Theatre from Ireland dominated anglophone dramatic writing and theatre practice, with many of the great ‘English’ playwrights and actors, Goldsmith, Sheridan, Macklin, Woffington, Shaw, and Wilde, actually having Irish roots. But Irish theatre did not fully exploit its propagandist potential until the end of the nineteenth century, when a perfect storm of political and cultural events in Ireland led to tremendous shifts in the aesthetics and the purposes of the form. Throughout this period, amid heated artistic and political conflicts, theatre prevailed as a vital mode of entertainment and activism, with the stage becoming a kind of laboratory in which different models of Irish identity and experience could be performed and watched by the very individuals working for an independent Ireland in their everyday lives. A national tradition of great playwriting and acting became a nationalist dramatic movement. That dramatic revolution, working hand in hand with the political efforts of the day, would contribute to Ireland’s self-refashioning in the Irish revival, and would come to influence modern drama for the century to come.

While interest in Irish culture had been on the rise in Ireland since the 1870s, and was especially apparent with the founding of the Gaelic Athletic Association in 1884, Irish cultural activities developed an increasingly nationalist dimension in the 1890s, largely in response to a lack of faith in legislative attempts to earn Irish home rule. For years, Charles Stewart Parnell, the head of the Irish Parliamentary Party and one of the greatest statesmen of the Victorian age, fought valiantly in the UK parliament for Irish independence from the United Kingdom, and was even jailed briefly in the early 1880s for his efforts to obtain land reform. But his practically cultic status among the Irish people disappeared when it was learned that he had been having an affair with Katherine O’Shea, the wife of another Irish MP, and was even the father of two of her children. Parnell went from having complete control over votes by Irish MPs in Westminster to losing his seat in parliament in a matter of months. He died a year later.

For many nationalists, Parnell’s death signalled the demise of their hope in a diplomatic solution to Ireland’s forced inclusion in the United Kingdom, and they turned their attention to developing a strong sense of national identity and purpose at home. And, indeed, the radical events in Ireland throughout the nineteenth century did put its cultural identity in a state of flux and crisis. In the 1830s, the island held over 8 million people, the majority of whom spoke Irish exclusively. The famine of 1846–9 led to the deaths of approximately 1 million people, and the emigration of millions more, so that by 1891 Ireland held only around 4 million people, with English rather than Irish as the dominant language, and more people living in eastern Ireland, where British influence was strongest, than the more isolated and economically disadvantaged west. The Irish who had moved into the cities, many nationalists feared, were abandoning their Irish heritage for the material comforts and social benefits of ‘modern English’ ways. In other words, economic and political domination by the English had established a kind of cultural imperialism over the Irish people.

Irish nationalists argued that buying into British cultural norms meant accepting the notion that the Irish were a historically inferior race that required the civilizing influence of Britain. As L. Perry Curtis points out in his book Apes and Angels: The Irishman in Victorian Caricature, nineteenth-century Britain was rife with images of the Irish as childlike ‘Paddys’ in need of the guidance and education of a maternal Britannia, or Fenian devils with simian features, who needed to be forcibly restrained from destroying not only their own nation, but Western civilization. The nationalist movement sought to establish a sense of Irish identity and community to counter these British imperialist stereotypes on economic, political, and social levels. And one of the main means to establish that community was through cultural activism.

One of the inspirations for the Irish revival was Douglas Hyde’s speech before the National Literary Society, ‘On the Necessity of De-Anglicising Ireland’ (1892). The Irish people, Hyde argued, needed to return to and embrace Irish language and customs to rid themselves of the colonial sense of inferiority. ‘In order to de-Anglicize ourselves,’ Hyde remarked, ‘we must at once arrest the decay of the language. We must teach ourselves not to be ashamed of ourselves.’ The following year, Hyde founded a non-partisan cultural organization called the Gaelic League, and chapters rapidly spread across Ireland, as well as in its diaspora communities in England, the United States, Australia, and Brazil. The Gaelic League promoted learning the Irish language, and also learning and participating in Irish sport, games, craft, and literature. It also encouraged its members to purchase only Irish goods, thus lessening Ireland’s economic dependency on England.

The Gaelic revival thus encouraged its members to self-consciously perform a notion of Irish identity through their choices of dress, speech, and behaviour. To buy an Irish product, or to wear a reproduction of a Tara brooch, or to speak Irish instead of English was to act out an identity counter to that imposed upon the Irish people from England. This notion of the performance of an Irish identity in everyday life as an act of anti-colonial resistance would inform the practices of nationalist theatres – and their audiences – throughout the first years of the Irish dramatic movement.

In fact, the first theatre events of the Irish dramatic movement were directly linked to political groups and events. Irish playwrights like Father Dineen, Alice Milligan, and Padraic Colum began writing drama for Gaelic League festivals. Likewise, nationalists like Maire O’Neill, Sarah Allgood, and Dudley Digges would become theatre actors as part of their political activism. And, while W.B. Yeats, Lady Gregory, George Moore and Edward Martyn may have relied on less-than-nationalist friends for support of the Irish Literary Theatre, the project grew out of the impetus of activities by groups such as the National Literary Society, and the passion about Irish culture shared (albeit in varying degrees) by its founders.

The bicentennial of the Rebellion of 1798 increased popular interest in Irish nationalism, and local groups readily welcomed new recruits. Thus, by the time an alliance of nationalist groups collaborated to perform the revolutionary play Cathleen ni Houlihan in 1902, theatre had established itself in Dublin as a legitimate site for nation-building, with groups across Ireland holding play contests and offering Irish and English-language performances as part of their cultural national agenda. Even commercial theatres, like the Queen’s Royal Theatre, Dublin, highlighted Irish nationalist melodramas with titles like Robert Emmet and The Famine, and performances of pro-British plays, or plays with stage Irish stereotypes, were roundly criticized in the nationalist press (de Burca 1983). With the opening of the Irish National Theatre Society, or the Abbey Theatre, in 1904, the theatre’s central role in imagining a new Irish state was clear.

Nationalist audiences were deeply engaged in what they were seeing on stage, and were sensitive to the fact that, by going to see a play, they were in fact performing their commitment to the nationalist ideology represented by both the play and the group producing it. And, of course, they sometimes felt as obligated to protest about a play as to approve of it. The Abbey Theatre became a prime target for such protests, thanks to the Anglo-Irish directorate and their British, anti-nationalist patron. Often, complaints against the Abbey reflected not only what was being performed on stage, but also the critics’ own nationalist agendas.

Indeed, the range of ideologies and identity positions within the nationalist community was one of the greatest challenges faced within the nationalist movement. Anglo-Irish, Catholics, Socialists, militants, and liberal nationalists all made up parts of the movement and, while all fought for Ireland’s independence, they did not always stand together in the battle. And Unionists, likewise, grew increasingly vocal in their support of Ireland staying within the United Kingdom. Collaborations among nationalists with different points of view were often uneasy, and sometimes outright hostility was shown among different factions, as was reflected in the riots surrounding J.M. Synge’s The Playboy of the Western World (1907), when audience members of the Abbey argued with voices and fists over whether Synge’s play was an insult to Irish womanhood and a blaspheme against the idea of a national dramatic movement, or an artistic celebration of the Irish west that deserved at the least a polite and respectful hearing.

At the time of the debut of the Playboy in 1907, however, people who did not care for the Abbey certainly had their choice of other theatre companies for nationalist entertainment at the time, including Gaelic League performances, the Independent Dramatic Company, the National Players, the Theatre of Ireland, the Ulster Literary Theatre, and the Cork Dramatic Society. But even companies artistically or politically opposed to the Abbey often rented the Abbey Theatre space for their own performances, and collaboration among companies for actors, scripts, and audiences was commonplace. Also, many of the playwrights of this period got their start in these amateur societies before seeing their works produced at the Abbey. Thanks to the fame of their directors, their international reputation, their physical presence with their own, licensed building in the heart of Dublin, and the comparatively professional quality of their work, the Abbey was already a yardstick against which other companies would measure themselves. And, as the self-proclaimed national theatre, they also became the lightning rod for controversies about appropriate representations of the Irish people, and appropriate ideological perspectives for an Irish national theatre.

Abbey patron Annie Horniman’s cancellation of her subsidy to the Irish National Theatre Society in 1910 created an economic crisis for the self-proclaimed national theatre company, solved largely by the know-how and connections of Lady Gregory, and an increased tour schedule. The Abbey even created a second company that would perform in Dublin while the ‘real’ company toured England and North America. These tours not only helped keep the company afloat, but also increased the fame of the company and its actors. Many Abbey players, in fact, ended up leaving the company to work in England and the United States.

Theatre controversies, however, were a pale reflection of the growing political conflicts in Ireland in the 1910s. Nationalist activity in Ireland had reached fever pitch. Events like the lockout of members of the Irish General Transport Workers’ Union in 1912–13 radicalized many Irish nationalists. In the same year, almost 250,000 Northern Irishmen signed the Ulster Covenant vowing allegiance to the death to the King of England. The Irish Volunteers, a nationalist paramilitary army made up of members of the Irish Republican Brotherhood, began to speak more openly of revolution, and the Irish Citizen Army offered socialist nationalists an opportunity to join in military preparations. The majority of Irish nationalists were following the Irish Parliamentary Party’s advice to continue to work through diplomatic strategies. Yet their voices were being edged out by charismatic figures like Padraic Pearse, whose rhetoric of blood sacrifice to renew the nation informed both his speeches and the plays he wrote to be performed by the children studying at his nationalist schools, St Enda’s and St Ita’s. Pearse would not be the only playwright calling for violent revolution, however. Seven men signed the Proclamation of the Irish Republic on Easter 1916, the start of the military war for independence. Three of those signatories were playwrights.

This section explores the ideological, material, and artistic progress of the modern Irish theatre movement during these years of its tumultuous birth. Chapter 1 traces the establishment of Irish theatre companies as part of the larger cultural nationalist agenda, focusing on the National Theatre Society, or the Abbey Theatre. It concludes with a reading of the riots surrounding the performance of J.M. Synge’s The Playboy of the Western World, considering the events surrounding that particularly famous theatre scandal as a forum for theatre’s role within the nationalist movement. Chapter 2 considers the development of a realist theatre aesthetic across Ireland that came to overshadow, but not obliterate, verse plays and plays written on themes from Irish legend. Realism’s rise both in professional and amateur, urban and rural venues, allowed for a multiplicity of voices that sought to express Irish experience at the level of the regional and the personal. The chapter ends, however, with a close look at the use of theatre to promote military insurrection in the months preceding the Easter Rising of 1916. Throughout this period, nationalist theatre’s relationship to the social drama of imagining a new nation-state was intimate and often intense. Still, the voices that emerged from the movement spoke not only to the movement itself, but also to the world, influencing theatre practice and writing internationally.

1

Imagining an Aesthetic: Modern Irish Theatre’s First Years

In Ireland at the dawn of the twentieth century, a person with cultural nationalist leanings would have a wide range of opportunities to enjoy theatrical entertainments that reflected her activist politics. If she felt a little highbrow, she might attend a performance by the Irish Literary Theatre. If she felt a little lowbrow, she could watch a patriotic melodrama at the Queen’s Royal Theatre, Dublin, or some other commercial theatre. Or she could attend an array of performances at nationalist events held by such groups as the Gaelic League, Inghinidhe na hEireann (the Daughters of Erin), or the Celtic Literary Society. As a nationalist, she might even consider it her responsibility to support these activities with her attendance, or to participate as a ticket seller, performer, or playwright. It was out of this rich performance context, with its range of political positions and aesthetic possibilities, that modern Irish theatre emerged.

This chapter traces the development of Irish drama at the turn of the twentieth century by looking at some of the central missions and challenges facing key individuals and groups involved in creating a modern Irish theatre aesthetic, and the diverse ways they went about meeting those goals. The modern Irish dramatic movement in its first years was a consciously political movement, made up of artist/activists wanting to use theatre as a kind of laboratory for imagining an Ireland independent of British control. There was a common interest in creating an image of the Irish people counter to stage Irish stereotypes, and in promoting positive images of the Irish people, their history, and their unique culture. Some were interested in developing dramas in the Irish language. Some wanted to bring avant-garde aesthetics like symbolism and naturalism to the Irish stage. Almost all eventually came to the conclusion that, like other products of the Irish revival’s self-help movement, the theatre needed to be made in Ireland, by the Irish, for Irish consumption. Since most previous Irish playwrights and performers, from Richard Sheridan and Charles Macklin to George Bernard Shaw and Tyrone Power, ended up working in London rather than Ireland, the idea of developing a premiere theatre community at home, and about home, was exciting indeed. It also served to counter Britain’s imperialist argument that Irish culture was dependent on English influence and support. Yet despite – or perhaps because of – their common purpose, theatres and audiences often fought over what kind of theatre was the best way to proceed. Many of these controversies crystallized in 1904, when W.B. Yeats, Lady Augusta Gregory, and J.M. Synge assumed control of the Irish National Theatre Society and, with the aid of an English patron, turned a formerly democratic nationalist theatre made of individuals from different classes and religious backgrounds into a professional theatre run by Anglo-Irish directors, proclaiming their theatre Ireland’s national stage. But debates over the Abbey’s legitimacy as a nationalist project or a nationalist institution merely focused the intensity of the discussion surrounding the idea of establishing a new Irish theatre aesthetic that generated such interest within nationalist circles, and inspired such a range of artists to become involved in, and build the foundation, for modern Irish theatre.

The Gaelic League and the Performance of Irish Identity

The Irish revival, or the cultural nationalist movement, resisted English domination through the self-conscious performance of Irish identity in everyday life. Playing Irish games, wearing Irish fashions, buying Irish goods, learning and speaking the Irish language, were all means of subverting British cultural and economic imperialism, while reaffirming Irish civilization as an ancient, unique, sophisticated and – most importantly – autonomous cultural tradition of a people deserving self-rule. This work was not merely putting on a show, but a call to reclaim a culture under real threat after centuries of systematic attempts at British enculturation, as well as the devastating impact of famine and emigration on the Irish population and its psyche only fifty years earlier. P.J. Matthews points out that this ‘cultural’ activity was indeed ‘political’ because it was ‘revising the imperial narrative of Ireland and relocating the nation at the centre rather than at the periphery of experience’ (10). Quoting Irish cultural theorist Luke Gibbons, he remarks: ‘To engage in cultural activity in circumstances where one’s culture was being effaced or obliterated, or even to assert the existence of a civilization prior to conquest, was to make a political statement, if only by depriving the frontier myth of its power to act as an alibi for colonization’ (Matthews 2003: 10).

But while the revival was widespread, it was far from monolithic. In Imagined Communities, Benedict Anderson argues that the modern nation-state is built upon a commonly established belief in a shared identity and a common past. In practice, however, individuals and groups otherwise united in an anti-colonial struggle will often clash over the means to achieve or maintain the national community. This was certainly the case in the Irish revival, whose participants included individuals with a range of conflicting histories and identity positions. And this diversity naturally led to energetic conflicts within the movemen...