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374 Book Reviews hostile philistines determined to drive them out of town. Hey Rube! took its name from the traditional battle cry of the circus besieged by yahoos. [t is more than irony - perhaps a little less than prescience, perhaps a deep understanding of the cultural battles ahead - that TWP began with a show that forecast its demise. When Luscombe was pur.ged and a brilliant career stopped short, a few voices cried "Hey Rube''', but it ,cQuld have been no surprise to Luscombe that no-one was listening. Neil Carson's history is a fme beginning to the rehabilitation of one of the few geniuses of Canadian lheatre. ALAN FILEWOD, UNIVERSITY OF GUELPH ANTHONY ROCHE. Contemporary Irish Drama: From Beckett to McGuinness. New York: SI. Martin's Press 1995· Pp. 321. $39.95; $17.95 (PB). This book offers close readings of selected Irish plays from the 1950S to the present, and calls for a reappraisal of what the author regards as the predominant critical division that is usually applied to this field. Roche considers it misinformed to posit a separation between, on the one hand, the modernist avant-garde dramaturgy of Beckett and the late Yeats and, on the other, a more dramaturgically conservative and Irishbased tradition as represented by playwrigh'ts such as Brendan Behan, Brian Friel, and Thomas Murphy. To the contrary, Roche takes Irish drama to be important precisely because of its ability "to strike a balance between national and international" through its representation of local speech and situations within "the universal language of theatrical form." If Beckett is seen less as an exile from Ireland than as the "ghostly founding father" of contemporary Irish drama then, Roche contends, the more avantgarde elements of the latter can be revealed. Through an analysis of various plays by Behan, Friel, Thomas Kilroy, and Frank McGuinness, it is argued that Irish drama is characterised by its tendency to show characters "on the verge of cracking up, lamenting the lack of wholeness in their lives" and by its rejection of naturalism, a central character or protagonist, and the linear plot and central situation of the well-made play. In all, Roche argues that theatre in Ireland today occupies a defining position in Irish society and bears witness to a revival that is similar in importance to the drama of the Irish literary revival at the tum of the century. The book has much to recommend it. It offers an informative a~d well-written study that is enlivened by the author's enthusiastic and detailed knowledge of the general area, and by his consistently careful readings of individual plays. In addition, there is a welcome effort to situate the plays within their social con~exts. Roche points out, for example, that the burgeoning of Irish drama in the I950S and 19605 is linked to the modernisation policies of Sean Lemass but that many of these early theatrical initiatives took place in spite of the state-sponsored Abbey theatre rather than because of it. The main difficulty with the book, however, is that Roche's effort at contextualization is not rigorously pursued, with the result that the relation between Irish theatre and Book Reviews 375 politics appears at best superficial. Describing post·war Irish drama as "post-colonial" on the basis (a) that Ireland left the British commonwealth in 1948 (thus rendering invalid Britiish theatre-licensing laws in Ireland) and (b) that recent Irish plays show features of anti-hierarchical characterisation and the lack of a central plot is to grossly over-simplify complex historical relationships between the prestige of theatre as an institution in Ireland and the prestige associated with British colonial power. A similar procrustean strain is evident whenever the book alludes to politics. Thus there is the contention that the central position of strong female characters in plays such as Murphy 's Bailegangaire or Friel's Dancing at Lughnasa implies a species of feminism (Friel, we are told, "puts the Irish stage in touch with the otherness of woman"!) and there is the book's extraordinary silence concerning the relati~nship between the thealIe and the state in Northern Ireland under Stormont. Restricted to a critically appreciative...

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