Contexts for Frank McGuinness's Drama (review)

Helen Heusner Lojek has already published a series of significant articles on Frank McGuinness's plays, and edited The Theatre of Frank McGuinness: Stages of Mutability, the first collection of essays on the playwright and his work. With Contexts for Frank McGuinness's Drama, Lojek follows Eamonn Jordan's pioneering The Feast of Famine: The Plays of Frank McGuinness and Hiroko Mikami's Frank McGuinness and His Theatre of Paradox to produce the third, and most successful, monograph to date about this dramatist, whose impact has arguably been greater than any Irish playwright since Brian Friel.

As she explains in her introduction, Lojek has directed this book at an audience outside of Ireland and less familiar with its contexts, thus providing a work "useful both to newcomers and to those who . . . have long both appreciated and been puzzled by the plays." The book functions as an advanced introduction to McGuinness, whose best plays resist simplification and whose strengths depend, as she puts it, on "risking absurdity." She approaches McGuinness here in light of what she persuasively identifies as a central value and challenge in his work, that "he allows conflicting realities to jostle against each other without achieving the synthesis of a simplistic and unified vision." Lojek applies this insight, not only to more widely read plays like Someone Who'll Watch Over Me, but also to less frequently considered plays, including Dolly West's Kitchen, and to plays usually considered difficult, such as Mary and Lizzie—which she astutely terms "a populist play with a specialized audience."

As part of this contextual approach, Lojek makes exemplary use of extensive interviews with McGuinness and of his archives at University College, Dublin. Judicious references to his manuscripts support her arguments about The Factory Girls and Mutabilitie, among other plays, enriching her argument without overwhelming it. Some of this material was already referenced by Mikami, who included a lengthy catalogue of archival McGuinness materials, but who—unlike Lojek—did not consistently draw on this rich resource. In particular, Lojek provides valuable access to McGuinness's drafting and revision methods. These archival materials also allow the book to draw on details of specific productions and biographical contexts, including McGuinness's passion for popular culture. Though Lojek could profitably have expanded her brief connection of postcolonial theory to these contexts, this balance of close textual readings, astute archival study, and the consideration of fundamental staging questions allows the book to move productively away from a familiarly rigid divide between text and performance.

Contexts for Frank McGuinness's Drama consists of five chapters defined by thematic emphasis: "Origins and Influences," which establishes the book's approach; "Portraits and Artists"; "Acts of Class and Power" and "Gay Characters and Domesticity," themes familiar to McGuinness's audience; and "Space and Place," which includes a strong focus on staging as it argues that McGuinness plays are rarely well served by naturalistic productions. This structure emphasizes the breadth of McGuinness's work—itself one of the book's key points—and does so in part by not subordinating that breadth to a single issue, though Lojek regularly returns to issues of "individual responsibility." This structure also facilitates useful comparisons among plays through Lojek's broad set of discussions about McGuinness's diverse canon, a diversity that frustrates a clear narrative of development from one play to another.

These strengths, however, come at the expense of a more overt set of arguments, with the result that the book reads at times more like a collection of essays than like a monograph. Lojek's discussion of The Factory Girls, for example, is spread across three chapters, while her discussion of Observe the Sons of Ulster Marching Towards the Somme takes up parts of four chapters. There is little repetition between chapters, but the examination of certain plays is still broken up, a shortcoming mitigated by the detailed index. Despite such limitations, Lojek's choice of structure and thematic emphases together result in a book that...