Staging the Easter Rising: 1916 as Theatre (review)

The first chapter of James Moran's Staging the Easter Rising begins with a "blunder" that occurred on the night before the rebellion, the mythic moment of origin for the Irish Republic. While the rebels prepared for the Rising, an "unsuspecting visitor" (15) wandered into Liberty Hall and inquired about the progress of rehearsals. He had mistaken the pending military action for preparations for a play. This is not surprising, as the nationalist headquarters was also a venue for theatre performances. Furthermore, in their everyday lives, many of the rebels wrote, directed, and acted in plays at Liberty Hall. Moran argues that this collision of theatre and revolutionary nationalism was no mere coincidence: the Rising was "rehearsed" in plays that advocated rebellion; the fighting occurred amid Dublin's theatre district; and, perhaps most significantly, the battle was waged without hope of military victory. As Moran argues, the Easter Rising was guerrilla theatre designed to motivate an unsupportive public—imagined as an audience—to participate in the struggle for independence.

Although Moran's reading of the Rising as theatre is compelling, he quickly moves through historical events to an examination of the mythology of 1916. The book looks at plays, historical productions, and their cultural contexts to offer "an analysis of certain moments at which Ireland has needed to repeat or reappraise its foundational cultural myth according to different and mutually antagonistic political agendas" (4). This is necessary, Moran argues, because the Rising was not based on an ideologically coherent nationalism, but rather "diverse and often contradictory nationalisms" (5), ranging from radical socialism to paternalistic elitism, Gaelic revivalism to conservative Catholicism. Women's role in Irish society was central to all of these nationalisms, and questions of sex, gender, and reproduction take center stage in Moran's book. While martyred "proto-feminist" rebels like James Connolly and Thomas MacDonagh believed that women's liberation was a necessary component of Irish freedom, the conservative Catholic nationalists who dominated the post-1916 Irish government, particularly Éamon de Valera's Fianna Fáil party, disagreed. In what Moran calls a "wearingly familiar post-colonial maneuvre" (6), the conservatives worked to establish rigid gender norms, including an image of women based on Cathleen ni Houlihan, the Shan Van Vocht, and the Virgin Mary: passive, sacrificial mothers, proud to raise young men to die for Ireland.

Moran's convincing reading of Sean O'Casey's The Plough and the Stars (1926) and W. B. Yeats's The Dreaming of the Bones (1931) in chapters 2 and 3 focuses on the juxtaposition of Easter-week rebels with unconventionally gendered women. O'Casey's play pairs the words of Pádraic Pearse with Rosie, a prostitute, thus challenging the conservative mythology of 1916 by displacing the sacrificial mother. Moran argues that it was this gender critique that provoked the infamous riots at the Abbey Theatre premiere. Yeats's play offers a similarly subversive blending of signifiers. Here, a rebel escaping the fighting at the General Post Office meets the adulterous Diarmuid and Dervorgilla. Although the rebel rejects the couple's request for forgiveness, the pairing of sexual deviants with a rebel undermines the gender purity of 1916. By emphasizing these gender constructions, Moran challenges the common reading of the plays as attacks on the Easter Rising; instead, he claims they were attempts to subvert the conservative narrative of 1916 that was taking hold of Ireland.

The gender trouble of these plays provides a counterpoint to the reading of Fianna Fáil's 1935 commemoration of the Rising in chapter 4. In addition to revisiting canonical plays of the Irish theatre, Moran includes a variety of texts under the rubric of performance, including nonliterary theatre, mass spectacle, film, and television. In the case of the 1935 memorial parade and festival, he reads de Valera's scripting of the Rising as erasing the memory of women warriors. None of the female veterans of the conflict was given a featured position in the procession or on the speakers' platform...