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- Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
- Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
- Serie: Cultural History of Literature
- Sprache: Englisch
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.
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Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2013
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Table of Contents
Cover
Cultural History of Literature
Title page
Copyright page
Acknowledgements
Timeline of Significant Events in Irish Arts and Politics
Introduction
Part I: Performing the Nation, 1891–1916
Introduction to Part I
1 Imagining an Aesthetic: Modern Irish Theatre’s First Years
The Gaelic League and the Performance of Irish Identity
From Nationalist Theatricality to Anglo-Irish Drama: the Irish Literary Theatre
Enter the Irish Actor
A National Stage: The Irish National Theatre Society
Yeats’s Early Dramas: A Dialogue of Self and State
Synge and Gregory’s Ethnographic Parables
Acting at the INTS
Will the Revolution be Subsidized? The Abbey Theatre and the Theatre of Ireland
A Drift of Mayo Girls . . .
2 Realisms and Regionalisms
Realism and the Irish Expatriate: Wilde and Shaw
Realism at the Abbey
The Theatre of Ireland’s Urban Realism
The Cork Realists
Northern Voices
Part II: War and After, 1916–1948
Introduction to Part II
3 The Abbey Becomes Institution, 1916–1929
The Revolution Will Be Dramatized
Rites of Inheritance: The Abbey in Wartime
O’Casey’s Mirror up to War
National Theatre Becomes ‘National Asset’
4 New Voices of the 1930s and 1940s
Opening the Gate
At the Abbey, but Not at the Abbey
The Gate Gets a Patron
Women and Irish Theatre in the 1930s
Challenging the Church: Carroll and Clark
George Shiels and the Rise of the Kitchen Comedy
Part III: Rewriting Tradition, 1948–1980
Introduction to Part III
5 Irish Theatre in the 1950s
Performing the Irish Landscape
Beckett’s Landscapes of Irish Memory
Molloy’s Mid-Century West
Freedom to Experiment: The Pike Theatre
6 Irish Theatre’s Second Wave
Fighting for the Land: J.B. Keane
Murphy and Friel’s Historical Remembering
Theatre and the Troubles
Part IV: Re-imagining Ireland, 1980–2007
Introduction to Part IV
7 Theatres Without Borders: Irish Theatre in the 1980s
Playing in the Fifth Province: Field Day
How the Other Half Plays: Charabanc Theatre Company
Gender and the Troubles in Northern Irish Theatre in the 1980s
Frank McGuinness and Political Metatheatre
8 A New Sense of Place: Irish Theatre since the 1990s
Performing the Irish City
Closing the Circle: New and Old Images of Migration
Re-inventing Rural Ireland: Marina Carr and Martin McDonagh
Restaging Irish History
Performing Community
Conclusion: What is an Irish Play?
Bibliography
Index
Cultural History of Literature
Published
Ann Hallamore Caesar and Michael Caesar, Modern Italian Literature
Christopher Cannon, Middle English Literature
Sandra Clark, Renaissance Drama
Roger Luckhurst, Science Fiction
Lynne Pearce, Romance Writing
Charles J. Rzepka, Detective Fiction
Jason Scott-Warren, Early Modern English Literature
Mary Trotter, Modern Irish Theatre
Andrew J. Webber, The European Avant-Garde
Tim Whitmarsh, Ancient Greek Literature
Copyright © Mary Trotter 2008
The right of Mary Trotter to be identified as Author of this Work has been asserted in accordance with the UK Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
First published in 2008 by Polity Press
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ISBN-13: 978-0-7456-3342-8
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Acknowledgements
This project has benefited from the generosity of a number of institutions and individuals. I began work on this book as a professor at Indiana University – Purdue University Indianapolis (IUPUI). I gratefully acknowledge Indiana University’s support of this project through an Arts and Humanities Grant, as well as a Grant-in-Aid for Research from IUPUI. In 2005 I joined the Theatre and Drama faculty at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where I have had the pleasure of discussing this work with new Theatre and Celtic Studies colleagues, and the opportunity to test some of the concepts in this project with students in the classroom. Start-up funds from the Graduate School and the European Studies Alliance at the University of Wisconsin, along with a research grant from the Vilas fund at the University of Wisconsin helped pay for much needed scholarly materials in support of the project as well as academic travel. I am grateful to the librarians at the Berg Collection at the New York Public Library, the Spencer Library at the University of Kansas, the National Library of Ireland, and the Special Collections at Southern Illinois University and Northwestern University, for research assistance related directly to this project.
I am fortunate indeed to have benefited from the generosity of many scholars around my work, including former and current colleagues at IUPUI and UW; but I do want to single out a few of the many persons who have been particularly supportive of this project. First, I am grateful to Andrea Drugan, Jonathan Skerrett, and the two anonymous reviewers of an early version of this manuscript for their enthusiasm and advice about this book. The good humour and boundless intellect of Irish studies colleagues Susan C. Harris, Liz Cullingford, Helen Burke, and Sarah McKibben have always been an email away; and the friendship and inspiring scholarship of Barbara Clayton, Joan Dean, Sean Farrell, Sandy Pearce, and Scott Boltwood have inevitably kept me serious about what is important, and less serious about what isn’t. I am especially grateful to colleagues Ann Archbold, Margot Backus, Gail Brassard, Tracy Davis, Heather DuBrow, Jon Eller, the late Christian Kloesel, Michael Peterson, Susan Sweeney, and Manon van de Water for their intellectual inspiration and their support during life and work transitions. Paige Reynolds’s advice and friendship has been invaluable. Finally, my husband and my heart, Robert Kaufman, offered shrewd edits and sensible suggestions throughout the writing of this work, as well as patience and support. I dedicate this book to him.
Timeline of Significant Events in Irish Arts and Politics
Introduction
Theatre is a community activity that requires its producers to draw in the attention and participation of audiences who, through their reaction to the performance, participate actively in the construction of meaning in the theatre event. The nature of theatre, therefore, makes it an important potential site for the imagination and solidification of new community formations. Thus, it is not surprising that when the cultural nationalist movement arose in Ireland in the 1890s with the active purpose of creating a sense of identity and belonging among Irish people outside of British stereotypes or ethnic, religious, or class divisions, theatre quickly was marked as a vehicle for imagining what this anti-colonial Irish community could be. Making and attending theatre was recognized as a means of identifying oneself as part of the nationalist community. The first plays to emerge out of the Irish nationalist movement were humble and amateur affairs, but earnest in purpose. Within a decade, however, the Irish theatre would have an identifiable aesthetic, and professional players to perform it. And, by the 1930s, Irish plays were being performed internationally and inspiring theatre movements interested in ethnicity and identity in the United States, Europe, and Asia. At the same time that Irish theatre was achieving this international notoriety, however, amateur theatre groups across Ireland continued to write and perform plays locally about their communities and their culture. In the second half of the century, when statehood had been achieved in part of the country, but six counties remained connected to the United Kingdom, Irish theatre re-emerged out of what some considered a self-satisfied and conservative aesthetic to address the social and political crises fomenting in both Northern Ireland and the Republic. And in the twenty-first century, Irish theatre’s legacy continues, with companies outside Ireland committed to performing works from the Irish dramatic repertoire, and a new generation of playwrights, directors, and performers working inside and outside Ireland’s geographical boundaries who identify themselves and their work as part of this cultural tradition.
This book traces the history of Irish drama over the long twentieth century as a communal and community-building art form. At its worst, Irish theatre has offered uncomplicated recitations of dramatic tropes that fit too easily into artistic and ideological clichés. At its best, it has addressed the complexity of Ireland’s history, and the diversity of opinions about nationality or identity in ways that provoke its audiences to find new approaches and to think in new ways. But Irish theatre’s power as a cultural force, historically as well as in the age of YouTube and DVDs delivered to your door, lies in its ability to engage local and national audiences, to make theatre communities. The commitment to Irish theatre today can be seen in the high degree of government support for both major theatres and small companies since the 1980s, and the number of productions of Irish plays abroad. It can also be seen in the number of people who choose to participate in Irish theatre’s production and reception, and the ways in which Irish performance is reinventing itself during these rapidly changing times. This sustained commitment to political performance in Ireland is really the continuation of a century-long conversation among Irish persons from a range of identity backgrounds, living and working both inside and outside Ireland’s borders, using theatre as a vehicle for cultural definition and social change.
This book offers an introduction to some of the major trends that have shaped modern Irish theatre’s cultural legacy since the 1890s. While it includes close examinations of particular plays and playwrights, these works are put in the context of the companies who performed them, the socio-political events surrounding them, and the artistic, cultural, political, and social communities they represented. By focusing on the institutional role of theatre, rather than on theatre texts, I hope to reveal the dynamic, even symbiotic, relationship between Irish theatre and Irish culture. To facilitate the flow of this argument, the book is divided into four sections, each representing an important historical period in Irish history. Each part begins with a brief introduction highlighting significant political events of the period and outlining major themes. The chapters themselves look at significant developments, controversies, crises and triumphs within Irish theatre during that period, emphasizing how theatre is relating to its historical moment, and how and why theatre companies are producing particular plays.
Part I, ‘Performing the Nation, 1891–1916’, looks at modern Irish theatre’s origins within the cultural nationalist movement, and the array of theatre companies and ideologies that emerged out of that period. The first chapter focuses on the Irish Literary Theatre and the Abbey Theatre, and their centralizing influence on the nationalist theatre movement. The following chapter, however, considers how the high modernist leanings of the Abbey’s directors were supplanted by the rise of an Irish realist aesthetic that engaged with local communities and concerns.
Part II, ‘War and After, 1916–1948’, examines the impact of revolution, Civil War, and their aftermaths on Irish theatre. Chapter 3 looks at the ways the theatre responded almost immediately to the experience of war through the dramatic works of Sean O’Casey, portrayed magnificently by early stars of the theatre, and watched by participants in and witnesses to the fighting. The fourth chapter explores how Irish theatre looked outward as well as inward during the 1930s, both with Irish theatre touring abroad and influencing other theatre movements, and with groups like the Dublin Drama League and the Gate Theatre performing avant-garde work from Europe and America. It also considers how realist playwrights like Teresa Deevy and George Shiels reacted to the growing conservativism, isolationism, and neocolonialism in Ireland, as well as generational differences, with plays addressing the conflict between the imaginative individual and a repressive culture.
Part III, ‘Rewriting Tradition, 1948–1980’, considers the impact of the establishment of the Irish Republic, economic reforms, European artistic influences, and the rise of sectarian violence on Irish theatre mid-century. Chapter 5 then looks at how Irish theatre in the 1950s and 1960s both continued to develop the Irish realist tradition, while also taking on new forms, influenced by the new revolutions in writing in Europe and North America. Specifically, this chapter considers playwrights and companies who collaborated with innovative theatre activities outside Ireland, like Joan Littlewood’s Theatre Workshop in London, the Guthrie Theatre in Minneapolis, and the Berliner Ensemble in East Berlin. This chapter also looks at how theatre in Northern Ireland responded to the crisis of the Troubles in the 1970s, not by creating diversionary, entertaining theatre, but by addressing head on their community’s crisis.
Part IV, ‘Re-imagining Ireland, 1980–2007’, analyses what some consider a second renaissance in Irish theatre as the Field Day Theatre Company, along with other theatre groups, employed community theatre strategies to address the crises surrounding the Troubles in Northern Ireland. The final chapter considers how theatre companies North and South responded to the tremendous economic growth in the Republic, and the diplomatic advances in Northern Ireland, to develop strategies for representing Northern Ireland and the Republic’s rapidly shifting demographic, cultural, and economic identities.
It is with some temerity that I offer this book as a contribution to the rich library of Irish theatre monographs that have appeared in recent years. I am especially indebted to the insights of recent book-length histories by Christopher Morash, Lionel Pilkington, Susan C. Harris, Ben Levitas, Paige Reynolds, Karen Vandevelde, Joan Dean, Christopher Murray, and Tom Maguire. The bibliography of this text points to other scholars who have enriched the field and influenced this work with their research in Irish theatre studies and cultural studies. I hope that the reader of this book new to Irish theatre history will find it a useful means for entering into the conversation surrounding Irish theatre and culture, and that those with more advanced backgrounds in the field will find in it new perspectives and questions to address.
Part IPerforming 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 movement about how Ireland and Irishness was being represented.
Theatrical performance, an event that is created collaboratively by text, audience, actors, space, and historical/cultural context, was quickly recognized by cultural nationalist organizations as one of the liveliest and most complex means for creating and contesting national identity. By the 1890s theatre generally had established itself across Europe as a site for discussing pertinent social issues.1 Thus, it is no surprise that theatre quickly became a common product of cultural activism within the revival, with Gaelic League chapters offering performances at feisianna and regularly holding playwriting contests. Timothy McMahon notes how quickly these performances in the Gaelic League, often begun as Irish language teaching tools, became staples of Gaelic League events (2008). By the mid-1890s, nationalist theatre critics assessed performances both within and without the movement against a nationalist yardstick.
Since Gaelic League plays, like all its other cultural products, were designed to rid Ireland of English influence, the first target to be eradicated from the Irish stage was the stereotype of the stage Irishman. These stage Irish stereotypes, Hyde and other Gaelic League leaders argued, needed to be replaced by images of an Irish ‘folk’ with the qualities upheld by the movement – spiritual, morally upright, healthy and, in order to appear as far removed from British influence as possible, living in an idealized, rural, Irish language-speaking West (Fleming 1995). Realist dramas glorifying the Irish peasants and their way of life emerged as a genre in Irish and English theatre, known as the peasant play, that would serve as the backbone of the modern Irish dramatic movement, and is a genre that continues to influence Irish dramaturgy (albeit often ironically) today. The other tactic was to dramatize a story from pre-Christian, ancient Irish mythology, proving that Ireland had possessed a rich cultural heritage centuries before the encroachment of British imperialism. Since these stories preceded the waves of invasions and plantations that helped form the Irish population in late nineteenth-century Ireland, it was a literary heritage that could be claimed by Irish individuals from all religious and class backgrounds. Also, staging an ancient Irish myth allowed for larger casts (thus more patriotic involvement) and more ornate experimentations in costume and language. P.T. McGinley’s Lizzie and the Tinker (1901), a peasant farce, needs three actors. Alice Milligan’s The Last Feast of the Fianna (1900) requires at least a dozen, and could accommodate more.
These early Irish language performances spread across Ireland in the 1890s. Irish language enthusiasts like Fr Dineen, Alice Milligan, and P.T. McGinley began to write dramas in Irish for performance at Gaelic League events. However, the importance of these performances rarely matched their quality since, as Karen Vandevelde points out, very few individuals in Ireland possessed dramatic talent and training together with fluency in the Irish language (2005; 42). Creating theatre with a group of individuals untrained in playwriting, acting, or design is naturally challenging. Asking these amateurs to perform in a language many are just learning to speak makes the task monumental. Thus, the first Irish language plays performed at Gaelic League events were probably applauded with respect, but not too much pleasure. Fàine an Lae, a journal in support of the Irish language movement, recommended the following strictures for writing Irish language plays: ‘It is not necessary that such a play should be original, probably it would have to be translated. But it should not be long, for three reasons. First, the difficulty of writing; second, the difficulty of learning and speaking the parts; third and principal, the difficulty of inducing the audience to stand it’ (Hogan and Kilroy 1975: 56). Yet these dramas served an important role in both the revival generally and the dramatic movement specifically, by giving voice to the Irish language in public forums, thus increasing the general interest in and comprehension of the language, and by helping to establish dramatic performance as a legitimate nationalist enterprise.2
While the Gaelic League’s populist performance strategies raised interest in both cultural nationalism and theatre throughout Ireland, its ability to flourish into an independent dramatic movement was limited ultimately by a dearth of audience members sophisticated in both theatre and the Irish language, and theatre’s auxiliary position to the Gaelic League’s goals. A parallel attempt at an Irish dramaturgy emerged in the late 1890s that avoided those limitations by working primarily in English and linking itself with the international avant-garde rather than local nationalist initiatives. However, in the process of their work, this modernist attempt to produce an Irish avant-garde would discover new challenges in developing a national theatre for Ireland.
From Nationalist Theatricality to Anglo-Irish Drama: the Irish Literary Theatre
The first major attempt to create an Irish theatre dealing with nationalist issues but not stemming out of a particular nationalist group was the Irish Literary Theatre (hereafter ILT), conceived by W.B. Yeats, Lady Augusta Gregory, and Edward Martyn in 1897 (with George Moore joining the group slightly later), and operating in Dublin from 1899 until 1901. Yeats was a rising star in the Irish revival in the 1890s, noted as a poet, but just beginning his career as a playwright.3 Throughout the 1890s, he established nationalist credibility in the Irish revival with his poetry, and also with his activism, being one of the founders of the National Literary Society in 1892. Additionally, he was a disciple of Irish nationalist John O’Leary and joined the Irish Republican Brotherhood. His politics in the 1890s were also deeply influenced by his friend, fellow theosophist and life-long love interest, the radical nationalist Maud Gonne. His most productive collaboration within the Irish revival, however, was his partnership with his friend and patron, Lady Gregory.
Lady Augusta Isabella Persse Gregory, like Yeats, was an Anglo-Irish person with a strong interest in Irish cultural nationalism. Her position as the Protestant widow of the former British governor of Ceylon (now Sri Lanka), and mistress of Coole Park in County Galway made her appear an unlikely revolutionary. But her life experiences were radically different from the stereotype of the conservative Anglo-Irish matron often thrust upon her.4 She travelled regularly in Europe where she had met many of the great modernist thinkers of the time, and even had an affair with Wilfred Scawen Blunt in the 1880s. She also spoke fluent Irish, and turned her Anglo-Irish sense of noblesse oblige into an early ethnographic project, travelling the Gaeltacht, or Irish-speaking areas of Ireland, capturing folktales and stories in their original tongue and translating (and often bowdlerizing) them for a wider audience.
Edward Martyn also joined the venture. Part of an old Irish Catholic family, Martyn was deeply committed to the nationalist cause. He co-founded Sinn Fein with Arthur Griffith and John Sweetman, and was the organization’s first president (1905–8). Martyn was educated in Europe, where he became interested in playwriting: before joining forces with the Irish Literary Theatre, he had already submitted two plays, which had been rejected by an English actor-manager (Hogan and Kilroy 1975: 25). Yet he was also deeply committed to Ireland, and believed that an Irish dramatic movement could do for Ireland what Ibsen and his allies had managed to do for Norway only a few decades before.
As the ILT directors began rehearsals for their first season, they realized they needed a partner with professional theatre experience and called in Martyn’s cousin, George Moore. Although a landed Irish gentleman living in England, Moore came from revolutionary Irish Catholic stock. His great uncle was a leader in the Rebellion of 1798, and his father was a British MP for Mayo and one of the founders of the nationalist Catholic Defence Association. Moore, however, had lived in London most of his adult life, pursuing his interest in naturalism through his novels, but also achieving some success as a playwright: one of his dramas, The Strike at Arlingford, was produced by the Independent Theatre Company in London.5
In its first season, in 1899, the Irish Literary Theatre performed Yeats’s drama, The Countess Cathleen, a folk play about a landed gentlewoman, who, during a famine in her lands sells her soul to the devil in exchange for food for her starving tenants. Cathleen’s soul is saved at the end of the play because of the selflessness of her actions. This early play shows Yeats’s already exquisite talent for verse drama, as well as the influence on his work of members of his theosophical circles, like Florence Farr, the London actress and artist who performed the leading role in the ILT performance.
However, as Adrian Frazier has noted, The Countess Cathleen also reflects Yeats’s early insensitivity to some nationalist sensibilities. Instead of focusing on the historical legacy of the Irish famine and its millions of victims, Yeats glorifies a landlord, a member of the class largely responsible for the national crisis caused by the famine. He also shows Catholics willing to sell their souls to the devil, and, in an earlier version, destroying a shrine (Frazier 1990: 9–17). Yeats’s own identity as a member of the Anglo-Irish class, and a theosophist to boot, only added to concerns about his representation of both the famine and of Catholicism. Before the play was even staged, it had raised a furore throughout Dublin, thanks to a widely distributed pamphlet protesting against the play, ‘Souls for Gold’, by F. Hugh O’Donnell, that accused the play of perpetuating stage Irish stereotypes and denigrating the Catholic Church. His argument led to Cardinal Logue condemning the play, and to some disturbance during its production. The vociferousness of O’Donnell’s attack, as Ben Levitas points out, over exaggerated the offence to Catholic Irish sensibilities (Levitas 2002: 42–5), so the drama ultimately was considered a success. But it was also a precursor to the many attacks on his work in the theatre that Yeats would endure in the decades to come.
Edward Martyn’s The Heather Field, the other play on the first season’s bill, inspired less controversy. Written in the style of Ibsen, but set in Ireland, The Heather Field was a more immediately accessible form of modernist dramaturgy than Yeats’s play, and was clearly in line with the national theatre aesthetics coming out of Scandinavia and Germany at the time. In Martyn’s play, an idealistic, artistic man who owns an estate is crushed by the materialistic demands of his wife of ten years, forcing him to descend into insanity, just as the heather field he has tried to tame into arable farmland returns to its wild, natural state. The domestic drama drew parallels between the man driven insane by his attempt to quash his identity as an artist for the sake of his materialist wife, and the Irish people losing touch with their cultural identity in favour of Anglicization. Both plays were well received, with a slight advantage to Martyn, and were even given a performance in London later that year. But without the publicity surrounding them – the Countess Cathleen controversy, the international reviews, the publication of the first number of the ILT journal, Samhain, the dinner for literati thrown by the Dublin newspaper The Daily Express in honour of the season – these performances would have had much less consequence.
Thus, the first year of the Irish Literary Theatre was not immediately revolutionary, but it did put forward the growing interest in nationalist performance generally, while calling specifically for Irish dramatists to write indigenous plays in the modernist vein. In its second season, the ILT expanded its scope by including The Last Feast of the Fianna, a play based on the legend of Oisin, by Belfast-based Alice Milligan. In 1900 Milligan was already established as a writer, editor, and activist within the nationalist movement. She co-edited the nationalist women’s journal, The Shan Van Vocht, with Ethna Carberry from 1896 to 1900, and had written and directed plays and tableaux for Gaelic League events, and for other nationalist groups. As a highly respected figure in the movement, Milligan and her play served as an important bridge between the Irish Literary Theatre’s mostly intellectual audience, and the much larger, more populist, Gaelic League base.
In the third season, the ILT continued to seek the best way to blend European modernist dramaturgies with Irish themes as they were being illustrated within the nationalist movement. Yeats and Moore collaborated on a play from Irish myth, Diarmuid and Grania, which, while indeed written with high ambition, flopped in performance. Yeats and Moore had worked on the piece for two years, in a contentious collaboration often requiring the mediation of the judicious Lady Gregory. The play was doomed by such quarrelsome overwriting before the curtain ever rose on it; but its ultimate failure in performance stemmed from its English actors. Yeats had hired the Frank Benson Shakespearean Company who, utterly unfamiliar with Irish (and apparently unschooled by directors Yeats and Moore), mispronounced Irish names. Caoilte, one of the characters in the play, had his name pronounced as ‘Wheel chair’, ‘Cold Tea’, and ‘Quilty’ by different actors (J.C. Trewin, qtd in Hogan and Kilroy 1975: 96).
The success of the season, on the other hand, was a play in Irish by Douglas Hyde, Casadh an tSugain, or The Twisting of the Rope. Hyde had written the play at Lady Gregory’s home, Coole Park, in three days, with the encouragement and help of his hostess. Performed by members of the Gaelic League, including the author, this one act took a comic look at a community’s cleverness at maintaining tradition while preserving itself at the same time. In the play, Hanrahan, a wandering poet, enters a house where a party is going on. Following Irish rules of hospitality, he is welcomed into the house; but then he begins to woo Oona, a young woman engaged to another man. Fearing that the poet will seduce Oona away from home, but not wanting to break courtesy by kicking him out of their house, her mother and her fiancé ask Hanrahan to help them twist a rope. Hanrahan begins twisting the rope and, as the rope grows longer, begins to move backwards towards the door. When he crosses the threshold, Oona slams the door against him, to everyone’s delight.
The performance of Casadh an tSugain broadened both the scope of the Irish Literary Theatre and its audience. Since this season was performed in the large Gaiety Theatre instead of the more intimate Antient Concert Rooms used for the previous two seasons, there were more seats available, and less expensive seats also, many of which were taken by supporters of the Gaelic League performance. When the Gaelic League performers took the stage, therefore, they were greeted with the vocal shouts of encouragement and energetic excitement one would find at a Gaelic League feis – a very different decorum than that expected from the ILT’s usual audience, that tended to obey the codes of respectful and appreciative silence for middle-class and upper-class audiences of the modern commercial theatre. Stephen Gwynn wrote of the performance: ‘I never was in an audience so amusing to be among; there was magnetism in the air’ (‘The Irish Literary Theatre and Its Affinities’, Fortnightly Review (1901): 1055–8, qtd in Hogan and Kilroy 1975: 114). James H. Cousins, who would later write plays for the Irish theatre, called the play in performance, ‘A simple story; but its dressing and dialogue and the energy and delight of the actors were irresistible, and a scene of ungovernable enthusiasm followed, in which I too was carried away’ (Cousins 1988: 2). Indeed the performance of Casadh an tSugain made it apparent that an indigenous, heterogeneous theatre audience beyond the nationalist intelligentsia was prepared and eager to see a modern Irish theatre prosper for political purposes. But Irish texts written with ‘high ambition’ were not enough. Like all Irish items consumed by participants in the movement, it needed to be made only of Irish materials, and by Irish labour.
Enter the Irish Actor
The markedly different audience responses to Diarmuid and Grania and Casadh an tSugain made it absolutely clear that the Irish dramatic movement could not move forward in English or in Irish until it had a body of trained Irish actors to perform its plays. Yeats and Gregory found those actors with the aid of the director of Casadh an tSugain, William G. (‘Willie’) Fay. Fay and his brother, Frank, were well known in Dublin theatre circles: Willie as a director and teacher; Frank as a critic. In 1902, Willie Fay organized the Irish National Dramatic Company, made up of actors from Inghinidhe na hEireann, the Ormond Dramatic Society, and the Celtic Literary Society. The group agreed to perform a mythic drama by George Russell (Æ), entitled Deirdre, with a one-act play Yeats wrote in collaboration with Lady Gregory, Cathleen ni Houlihan, as an afterpiece. The performance of Cathleen ni Houlihan at the Antient Concert Rooms would become one of the most important events in Irish theatre history.
Set in Killalla on the eve of the Rebellion of 1798,6Cathleen ni Houlihan tells of a young man who sacrifices his life on the eve of his wedding to fight for Irish freedom. The play, set in a peasant kitchen, begins with a happy domestic scene – the Gillane family preparing for their son Michael’s wedding. The bride’s dowry and Michael’s wedding clothes are laid out on the kitchen table, symbolizing the economic transaction underpinning the marriage. Michael’s mother, Bridget, shows joy at the economic windfall the marriage will bring to the family after years of struggle: she even ponders the expensive possibility that their second son will go to seminary to become a priest. Then a poor old woman wandering the roads enters the house, and tells the family she is heading to find friends who are going to help her get back her ‘beautiful fields’. When she tells them her name is ‘Cathleen, the daughter of Houlihan’, Michael recognizes the name from a song, and begins to be mesmerized by the woman, and asks her what he can do to help her. The old woman then describes the death and destruction to come in the impending battle, but also the glory awaiting those who die in her service:
Old Woman: It is a hard service they take that help me. Many that are red-cheeked now will be pale-cheeked; many that have been free to walk the hills and the bogs and the rushes will be sent to walk the hard streets in far countries: many a good plan will be broken; many that have gathered money will not stay to spend it; many a child will be born and there will be no father at its christening to give it a name. They that have red cheeks will have pale cheeks for my sake, and for all that, they will think they are well paid.
(She goes out; her voice is heard outside singing.)
They shall be remembered for ever,
They shall be alive for ever,
They shall be speaking for ever,
The people shall hear them for ever.
(Yeats 1966a: 229)
As Michael begins to follow her, Bridget tries to distract him with his wedding clothes, and Delia begs him to stay: yet Michael rushes out to join the other young men following Cathleen to meet the French ships in the bay. After he leaves, Michael’s little brother, Patrick, who entered the house after Cathleen left, is asked by his father if he saw an old woman on the road. Patrick replies, ‘I did not, but I saw a young girl, and she had the walk of a queen’ (1966a: 231).
The text of Cathleen ni Houlihan
