Politics & Irish Drama

BOOK REVIEWS such as Barry Fitzgerald, Michael Mac Liammoir, Cyril Cusack, and Siobhan McKenna. A regrettable shortcoming of the book, probably attributable to the prohibitive cost, is the almost total absence of any photographs of the actors or production stills of the performances. One more strand of Welch's history chronicles a hundred years of struggle and strife among the managing directorate, from the high heroic days of Yeats and Lady Gregory, to the latest, and stabilizing, reign of current artistic director Patrick Mason. The story can be rather heavy going at times, as directors come and go and come back again, and as Welch conscientiously notes every shift of power and authority in the Abbey's nomenklatura. And "conscientious" may be the crowning accolade for this unflaggingly thorough and enthusiastic history. Compiling it must have been a labour of love, but the labour does get a bit too evident , as Welch tacitly acknowledges in his prologue, when he speaks of the "self-punishing instinct" that seems to propel him into a succession of onerous literary endeavours which have included the editorship of The Oxford Companion to Irish Literature. Robert Fothergill ______________ York University, Toronto Politics & Irish Drama Nicholas Grene. The Politics of Irish Drama: Plays in Context from Boucicault to Friel. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1999. xvii + 312 pp. Paper $22.95 THIS IS A DEEPLY satisfying, original book. For a small country —about four million, the number falling through most of the twentieth century—Ireland has been the place of birth, and the subject, of sundry playwrights. Can one think of a group of American playwrights to weigh against the following—Shaw, Synge, O'Casey, Beckett, Behan, Friel, and the recent swarm of Frank McGuiness, Stewart Parker, Martin McDonagh, Conor McPherson, and, at present, Marina Carr? Nearly every season, one or another brings to London or New York an "Irish play." Nicholas Grene straightforwardly sets out to define just what that sort of play is. The mainspring of the "Irishness" of the Irish play, Grene concludes, is the colonial and then post-colonial condition of the country. Ireland— not yet a nation when the "Irish Literary Theatre" got underway in 1899—needed to be explained to outsiders, and Irish audiences needed to be represented to themselves. The colonial/post-colonial suspicion 493 ELT AA : A 2001 was that how they had been seen before had never been true, or at least was true no longer, so each playwright came—and still comes—claiming at last to hold up a mirror to nationality. Strangely enough, Grene notices that the mirror is almost never turned toward the Dublin audience, but off to the western countryside or (by O'Casey) in the direction of the tenements of North Dublin. Ireland is a place apart, even to those who live in its capÃ-tol—"perspicuous," as Grene puts it, by being elsewhere. In consequence, Irish drama became realist in its properties, costume, and plotting, but not realist in another sense: it did not stage the contemporary problems in the society of its audience. The political need of a people to have its ancestry represented, to be recognised as one people and explained to outsiders, gave rise to another key feature of the Irish play: the use of stage interpreters. On stage, one character would stand between natives and non-natives, and translate the otherness of representative Irish characters for the benefit of the purchasing public. It's a curious fact that in its first years, the Irish National Theatre Society split over whether to do agitprop dramas, and those that seceded (the more political actors) went off to exhibit themselves and their plays at the 1904 St. Louis World's Fair, along with a whole village of bushmen and lots of others seen in the American midwest as exotic. The dynamic between self-assertion and self-prostitution is dangerously energized by the Irish play, and Grene is masterful in showing its rapid transfers of force in his studies of Boccicault's The Shaughraun, Shaw's John Bull's Other Island, and Friel's Translations. One of the good things about this book is that it has an argument to make, and it...