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Irish Dramatists Today
From: Cambridge University Press
| By:
Nicholas Grene |
EDITOR'S INTRODUCTION |
Even before the world's first national theatre was established in Dublin in 1902, Irish dramatists had for centuries been entertaining the world. By looking to the social margins, utilising folklore and myth, Irish playwrights have been able to employ a representational style which is unlike the naturalism of their European counterparts. Nicholas Grene of Trinity College, Dublin, examines what it is that continues to make Irish drama so distinctive. |
 he Irish plays keep on coming. In July 1997 The Weir, a new play by 26-year-old Conor McPherson, opened at the Royal Court Upstairs to such an enthusiastic reception that it transferred to the Royal Court main house in February 1998, to go on to be performed in Brussels and Toronto, a run in Dublin, a return to London, and on to Broadway in April 1999. The Weir is not a play about Ireland as such. The title refers to a local weir built by the Electricity Supply Board in 1951 'to regulate the water for generating power' in the western area of Sligo-Leitrim where the play is set. It acts as a metaphor for the controlled release of emotion through talk and story-telling among the five characters, not as a symbol of a stage in the modernisation of Ireland. As McPherson himself says about the play, 'I wasn't concerned with geography or politics. I am from the Republic of Ireland and that's where my plays have their genesis, but not from any need to address anything about my country' (C. McPherson, "If you're a young Irish playwright, come to London," New Statesman, 20 February 1998). |
Still, The Weir is identifiably, recognisably, an Irish play, and a dimension to its (well-deserved) success comes from that recognisability. The small rural pub scene is familiar from as far back as the Playboy. The full-length action, uninterrupted by any interval, consisting in nothing but an evening's drink-talk, has a precedent in Murphy's Conversations on a Homecoming. The Weir is written in the idiom of the Irish play, relying on certain standard recurrent motifs associated with an Irish rural setting: the opposition of country and city, village and small town; persistent celibacy or late marriage among the men; woman as edgily desired sex-object in a heavily repressed society. This is the more striking coming from McPherson whose earlier plays (Rum and Vodka, The Good Thief, This Lime-tree Bower) showed a much less familiar contemporary urban Ireland of hard men and hard drinking, casual sex and organised crime. In The Weir also the one female character Valerie belongs to a Dublin world of the 1990s as a lecturer from Dublin City University who has retreated to the country in breakdown after the accidental death of her child. The remote Irish pub setting, though, remains an archaic place rendering possible and plausible the rehearsal of the set of stories of the supernatural through which the play builds its drama Its remoteness and difference from the reality inhabited by audiences in London, Brussels, Toronto, New York--or indeed Dublin--is part of what makes it funny and moving, what makes it creditworthy. Ireland in the Irish play is a world elsewhere. |
To London and back
The Irish play is a distinct and distinctly marketable phenomenon. 'It is Ireland's sacred duty,' wrote Kenneth Tynan in 1956 about Behan's The Quare Fellow, 'to send over, every few years, a playwright to save the English theatre from inarticulate glumness' (Observer, 27 May 1956). This Irish theatrical rescue operation has been happening with increasing regularity in the 1990s: The Weir is only the most recent of a whole series of notable London productions of Irish plays by Frank McGuinness and Sebastian Barry, Billy Roche, Marina Carr, and Martin McDonagh. In some cases this has also involved a variation on the common pattern of successful Dublin plays transferring to London. The Steward of Christendom followed exactly the same trajectory as The Weir, initiated at the London Royal Court and only coming to Ireland as part of a triumphant world tour. Martin McDonagh's The Beauty Queen of Leenane, though staged first by the Druid Theatre in Galway, is an Irish play made in London by a London-Irish dramatist.
The phenomenon of Irish drama as a commodity of international currency has produced mixed results. It has allowed early success to very talented writers such as McGuinness, Barry, McPherson; it has enabled McDonagh, a playwright of much more doubtful originality, to achieve quite astonishing success by manipulating the formulae of the Irish play. Some Irish plays have travelled better than others: Friel's very sophisticated versions of pastoral are more readily assimilable than the anti-pastorals of Murphy. What is significant in the international reception of Irish drama, beyond the mere vagaries of the theatrical market, is the extent to which it constitutes a separable category, fulfilling its own contrastive function in relation to the metropolitan mainstream. Sebastian Barry was hailed by Newsweek as 'the new crown prince of Ireland's majestic theatrical tradition'; the Guardian called The Steward of Christendom 'an authentic Irish masterpiece', particularly for the quality of its writing: 'I venture to suggest that not even O'Casey or Synge wrote better than this' (quoted in publicity for S. Barry, Plays: I, 1997). The latest successors to Synge and O'Casey are received into the canon by virtue of the difference of their language. For, as Tynan said, without the periodic incursions of the Irish dramatists English theatre would be doomed to 'inarticulate glumness'. |
Figured in these expectations of Irish drama may be traces of the Arnoldian notion of the eloquent Celt or his vulgar cousin the Irishman with the gift of the gab. But the idea of Irish drama constructed on difference, its language worked from Hiberno-English variations on the received standard forms which are by implication those of its audience, has been a determining condition within Ireland as much as outside of Ireland. When Synge wrote of his 'collaboration' with the Irish country people in the creation of the language of his plays, when he praised their 'popular imagination that is fiery and magnificent and tender', he was addressing a readership of those like himself distanced from such language by class and education. He would only have spoken the phrases used in the Playboy 'in my own nursery before I could read the newspapers' (J. M. Synge, Collected Works, IV, pp. 53-4), and he is implicitly writing for others who went from nursery to newspapers. Where Irish drama is received abroad as different by virtue of its Irishness, in Ireland that difference is turned on a gap in social milieu between characters and audience. This is true not only of the western peasants of Synge, Yeats, Gregory, the small town denizens of Murphy or Friel, appearing on the stage of the national theatre in the nation's capital, but even of O'Casey's Dublin trilogy where norms of middle-class perception frame the spectacle of the tenements. The spaces of Irish drama, like the language of its people, are predicated as being authentic, truly reflecting the speech and behaviour of a reality out there--hence Synge's strenuous efforts to protest the genuineness of his dialect and audience resistance to those claims. But it is always out there, somewhere other than the metropolitan habitat shared (more or less) by playwright and audience alike. |
This is what has made representational styles in Irish drama distinctively unlike their counterparts in European naturalism. Zola aspired to a naturalist theatre which would remake 'the stage until it was continuous with the auditorium', forcing a middle-class audience to see their own lives recreated on stage with scrupulous impartiality (quoted in E. Bentley, The Theory of the Modern Stage, 1968, p. 351). 'Have a look at yourselves,' Chekhov wanted to say to the people who watched his plays, 'and see how bad and dreary your lives are' (quoted in D. Magarshack, Chekhov the Dramatist, 1980, p. 14): your lives, you in the audience. But the impulse towards an equivalent middle-class naturalism in Ireland was stillborn with the failure of George Moore and Edward Martyn, who favoured such a model, to wrest control of the Irish national theatre movement from Yeats. Although there have been latter-day Irish dramatists such as Hugh Leonard and Bernard O'Farrell who have made middle-class urban and suburban Dublin their subject, on the whole Irish drama has continued to look to social margins for its setting, whether the western country districts or the working-class inner city. It is thus typically other people that a largely middle-class urban audience watches in an Irish play, other people who speak differently--more colloquially, more comically, more poetically. So, for instance, T.S. Eliot in canvassing the issues of a poetic drama could see Synge as a special case: 'Synge wrote plays about characters whose originals in life talked poetically, so that he could make them talk poetry and remain real people' (T. S. Eliot, Poetry and Drama, 1951, pp. 19-20). The naive acceptance that in real life Irish peasants 'talked poetically' by a critic as subtle and sophisticated as Eliot is a testimony to how potent are the conventions of Irish otherness on which the drama is founded. |
Representing the nation
The recognisable difference of the Irish dramatic scene could be turned towards allegory by Yeats and Gregory with the trope of the strangers in the house, where the country-cottage family stood in for the whole nation's life. In its imagined wildness, it could serve as a site of carnival in Synge's Playboy; in its bare simplicity it allowed the uncovering of tragic archetypes in Riders to the Sea. In so far as Ireland is posited as a place of the pre-modern, Irish drama has been able to reach down through folklore to underpinning myth and ritual. This was a very obvious feature of the early national theatre movement with Yeats and Synge seeking below the surfaces of Catholic Christian belief a pagan substratum that was primal, deeper, truer. Towards the other end of the twentieth century, the tendency has been developed again, in particular in Friel's later drama. In Faith Healer, the circumstances of Frank Hardy's violent murder suggest glancingly the sacrificial death of the king who must be killed to 'renew the life of his country, a motif much more explicitly dramatised in Wonderful Tennessee. Dancing at Lughnasa uses its master-image of dancing to link the suppressed harvest festival practices of a pre-Christian Ireland with equivalent African rites of celebration. Yet such ritual patterns remain buried within the representation of a believable social reality. They remain traces of the mythic rendered credible by their semi-archaic Irish setting while still camouflaged within a more or less naturalistic surface. It is in this context that the fully non-representational drama of Yeats, using stylised verse dramaturgy and the (for most audiences) unfamiliar materials of Celtic mythology has failed to win its way into the regular repertory of Irish theatre. The pagan harvest god Lugh might be glimpsed behind the 1930s radio in Dancing at Lughnasa, but the figures of Cuchulain and Deirdre on a modern stage tend to remain alien and embarrassing. |
The Irish drama has had to be seen to be Irish to be recognised as such, and this has skewed the tradition towards the representational, if not the naturalistic. The tendency has been repeatedly resisted, initially and most arduously by Yeats himself. In a later generation, Murphy with his expressionism, Thomas Kilroy with a radical conceptual drama, Tom McIntyre with a theatre of image and movement, have sought to move away from the conventions of naturalism. But there is a strong pull towards plays which are identifiably Irish by their representation of an Irish scene or subject-matter, the scenes and subjects initially authorised by Synge and O'Casey. So Murphy might begin his career in revolt against the country cottage kitchen setting but return in the 1980s to produce one of the finest country cottage kitchen plays in Bailegangaire. McIntyre, so closely identified for so long with a non-verbal dramaturgy, has turned round to writing quite conventionally language-based plays about Kitty O'Shea or Michael Collins. The need for the Irish playwright to write plays about Ireland has made Beckett the odd anomalous figure he is in an Irish theatrical context. Although All that Fall mocks up the texture of an Irish social scene, it is to other ends than those of representation. Waiting for Godot can be successfully returned to Ireland with Didi and Cogo played in Dublin tramp, but at the expense of the placeless aesthetic which is so crucial to the play's conception. The mainstream tradition of Irish drama is a representational one to which academic critics try as best they may to assimilate the uncomfortably offstage presence of Beckett, or those older Irish expatriates Wilde and Shaw who equally refused to conform to the requirements for Irish dramatists of writing about Ireland. |
Externally, Irish drama is regarded as a thing apart, defined by its national origins rather than by its style or technique. Within Ireland, also, however, there has been a felt need to assimilate into Irish terms theatrical borrowings from abroad. It was one of the aims of the national theatre movement from the start to perform classics of world theatre by way of models for Irish playwrights--hence Gregory's versions of Molière, and Yeats's two Oedipus plays. But Gregory's is a 'Kiltartan Molière' made palatable for Irish audiences by translation into the western dialect she used for her own plays. There has been a similar impulse in the adaptations of Greek tragedy and of Russian drama which have been such a notable feature of Irish theatre of the 1980s and 1990s. Greek tragedy is a sort of common theatrical joint stock, borrowable and adaptable at will in all ages and countries for different local purposes. So The Riot Act, Tom Paulin's version of Antigone, and The Cure at Troy, Seamus Heaney's adaptation of Philoctetes, both produced by Field Day, brought a specifically Irish colouring and political moral to their originals. But the perceived affinity between Irish and Russian drama, above all Chekhov, is more remarkable. Versions of The Three Sisters and Uncle Vanya by both Friel and McGuinness in each case, a Seagull by Kilroy, Turgenev's novel Fathers and Sons and his play A Month in the Country adapted by Friel, all represent a special sort of Hibernicising appropriation of nineteenth-century Russia. In one case, with John McGahern's The Power of Darkness, the disguise was so effective that reviewers failed to recognise the play as an adaptation of Tolstoy's melodrama and attacked it as a strained and implausible rendering of Irish life. What should an Irish playwright be doing if not representing Ireland even while adapting Molière or Sophocles, Chekhov or Tolstoy? |
'A healthy nation,' wrote Shaw in the 'Preface for Politicians' of John Bull's Other Island, 'is as unconscious of its nationality as a healthy man of his bones. But if you break a nation's nationality it will think of nothing else but getting it set again' (Shaw, Collected Plays, II, p. 842). The image may be suspect in its assumption that nationality is as natural a feature of the body politic as a skeleton is to the anatomy of the human body, but the point is a telling one nonetheless. No doubt a large part of the anxious obsession with self-representation in the Irish dramatic tradition originates with the colonial and postcolonial condition of the country. If the manifesto-writers of the Irish Literary Theatre in 1897 aspired to 'bring upon the stage the deeper thoughts and emotions of Ireland' it was to help heal those broken bones of national identity. It is a continuation of the same compulsion that has tied so many later Irish playwrights to the task of reflecting, exploring, re-interpreting Ireland's experience of the past and the present. The seismic changes of 1916-23 demanded the reaction of theatrical representation. The long-promised Utopia of national liberation provoked comparison with the reality achieved in an actual Free State with all its limitations. As the partitioned island has continued to manifest symptoms of its fractured state, so the dramatists have returned repeatedly to probe and examine, to attempt therapies of self-analysis. And it has not only been in the politics of the nation that the national life has found its theatrical expression. The dramatised experiences of the past conditioning the present have been as much those of poverty and deprivation with their consequent deformations of mind and spirit, as the oppressions of political domination. The disposition within the drama to represent in Irish life what is symptomatic of Irish life can be attributed in general terms to the colonial/postcolonial consciousness which leaves the question of national identity always an issue. |
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