Ireland's Theatre on Film: Style, Stories and the National Stage on Screen (review)

Those of us who work in theatre for a living know that the lure of film projects can disrupt production planning. We might hire an actor to play a character a year out only to find at the last minute that a film project sends us scrambling to recast the role (or roles!). This disrupts the balance of casting and tests the morale of the actors left behind. Conversely, the wide exposure of actors from a single institution can increase its prestige and foster the loyalty of its audiences and artists. For a contemporary example, consider the history of Chicago's Steppenwolf Theatre Company. An early, and important, case study of the relationship between film and theater producers can be found in the National Theatre of Ireland, usually referred to as The Abbey Theatre for its street address in central in Dublin.

The Abbey was founded in the context of the late-19^th Century Free Theatre Movement. André Antoine's Théatre Libre in Paris and Otto Brahm's Freie Buhne in Berlin operated free of local censors by developing subscription audiences who were willing to explore gritty themes in the emerging theatrical style of naturalism. Additionally, the Abbey's founders shared a desire to create a literary culture that explored Irish themes, characters, and values, which distinguished their work from the Anglo-Irish tradition of writers like George Farquhar, Richard Brinsley Sheridan, and Oliver Goldsmith. The Abbey writers and producers helped to define a potent Irish culture that overtly challenged Ireland's colonial status. The power of the Abbey writers was so great that their plays were at the vanguard of the Gaelic cultural revival that led to the Easter Rising in 1916, the founding of the Irish Free State in 1922, and finally the formation of the Republic of Ireland in 1937. A series of American tours and the success of Abbey writers and actors in England helped take the Abbey's core task "to promote new Irish writers and artists" (Abbey mission statement) to a broad and potentially lucrative market.

Recognizing the importance of this single theatre in Ireland's cultural landscape and political history, Barry Monahan's Ireland's Theatre on Film merges theatre and cinema history and cultural studies with insightful, impressively researched discussions of both form and content. Monahan intertwines the stories of the Abbey Theatre and the competing needs of film producers from the end of the silent era to about 1960. He convincingly argues that the desire to bring Irish dramatic content to movie theaters and television in England and America complicated the National Theatre's struggles to build and maintain a top-level acting company and generate new dramatic works for the stage. The era's best filmmakers, such as John Ford and Alfred Hitchcock, were drawn to Irish writers for their compelling stories and lyrical use of language. The National Theatre of Ireland provided experienced actors who could bring the insights and techniques they learned on the national stage to the sound stage. In addition, Monahan interrogates the re-emergence of the "stage Irishman," the stock characterizations of Celtic personae as they appeared in film culture during this period.

Monahan begins his narrative with an anonymous 1946 letter to the Irish parliament requesting an increased subsidy for the Abbey Theatre. Addressed directly to the Taoiseach, Eamon de Valera (Ireland's intermittent Prime Minister between1932 and1959 and President from 1959 to 1973), who was known for his fiscal restraint, the letter asserts that the current subsidy could neither support adequate production budgets nor overcome the theater's 'primitive' auditorium. Furthermore, the National Theatre competed heavily for actors, given "the present craze for Irish subjects in film in England and America" (14). Actors would need to be paid more if there was any hope of maintaining a viable company of players at the Abbey. Foreign film producers seemed to value the Abbey brand more than the Irish...