Sacred Play: Soul-journeys in Contemporary Irish Theatre (review)

In this new book, Anne F. O'Reilly re-evaluates contemporary meanings of "soul" and "spirit" as a way to think about and study twentieth-century Irish plays, and argues for "an interpretation that pays attention to the religious or spiritual dimension of human experience." Taking her cue from theater director Peter Brook, she is also interested in the "empty space" of theater as an alternative sacred space where communal experience translates into the potential for healing and transformation. O'Reilly's project attempts to equate the transformative qualities of theater with the Irish dramatic text—which, she argues, is an exemplary site for this kind of spiritual work. Refreshingly, O'Reilly circumvents the often conventional discussions of religion in the context of Irish literature; by broadly reading the theme of spirituality across a range of diverse texts, she disengages commonly held conceptions about the soul and spirit from a strictly Western or Eastern tradition.

Divided into five chapters and covering twenty-eight plays, fifteen playwrights, and a span of three decades, O'Reilly effectively navigates the reader through theatrical territory that, at first glance, is not easily captured in the same analytic lens. Yet she makes connections between the plays by exposing key spiritual elements, what she describes as the protagonist "soul-journey" or "soul-loss," as well as by arranging the book as a kind of odyssey. The plays in Chapter 1, "Journeys Through Memory," are primarily concerned with traumas of the past while plays in Chapter 5, "Journeys and Vision," look forward to a newly imagined future.

In contrast to most other critical studies of Irish theater, O'Reilly's analysis covers a limited span of time, 1975 to 2002, and operates within the specific theoretical framework of feminism. O'Reilly's book is both appealing and insightful for the multiple strategies she employs in her analysis and for the breadth of Irish plays her work encompasses. Her transitions among concepts—for example, chapter two concerns Victor Turner's theories of ritual (liminality and communitas), while chapter three addresses Adrienne Rich's theories on mother-daughter relationships—help create a readable, complex, and multilayered book. O'Reilly examines the plays by such canonical playwrights as Brian Friel and Tom Murphy, as well as by such less well-known writers as Patricia Burke Brogan and Paula Meehan.

The author utilizes contemporary feminist theories that "draw attention to the place of women, language and subjectivity within the cultural symbolic," and she looks to retrieve or re-envision women's narratives that have been neglected or ignored. While O'Reilly does not fully articulate why feminism is useful in approaching questions of soul-journeys or soul-loss, she does suggest that a contemporary search for spirituality includes one that is more earth-based, body-centered, and cyclical. O'Reilly cites such European and American feminist writers as Luce Irigaray and Sue Ellen Case to advance her argument that these Irish plays by women, which feature women as protagonists, resist the dominant patriarchal structure, and that by remembering women's stories and histories, these stories are reinscribed into the cultural sphere and are given new voice and new life. The result is a transformative act of soul-journeying for the audience, playwrights, and performers.

O'Reilly's approach for identifying each play's soul-journey avoids being tethered to any particular theology, an unusual maneuver in a religiously determined culture. She argues, though, that "increasingly people are looking for spirituality both within and beyond the confines of traditional religions" and asserts that both Christianity and Buddhism influence her work. O'Reilly espouses a broad "contemporary understanding of soul and spirit" from "classical religious and contemporary sources." The author's reluctance to define precisely or theorize her key terms, "soul" and "spirit" leads sometimes to confusing argumentation, and to flights of abstraction. When she does attempt to disencumber these terms from received meanings, or to more sharply focus her...