Ireland's National Theatres: Political Performance and the Origins of the Irish Dramatic Movement by Mary Trotter, and: A Century of Irish Drama: Widening the Stage ed. by Stephen Watt, Eileen Morgan, and Shakir Mustafa (review)

Reviews 311 Roll Circus and Club Swing, and RoberI Wallace's reconsideration of John Herbert's Fortune and Men's Eyes. Wallace effectively clears the critical air around HerberI's work to pronounce it unequivocally a gay play, a pronouncement so well supp0rIed by analysis of both the text and its historical reception that it should end any fUrIher dispute. RoberI Nunn introduces a new and interesting view of margins in his study of Judith Thompson. Her margins, he writes, "are situated between conscious and unconscious, dream and waking, sanity and madness, life and death" (31 I). This approach leads to a rich exploration of Thompson's subjectivities that bears re-reading as one of the book's most challenging chapters. Reid Gilbert offers a similarly unconventional treatment of the idea of margins in George Walker's Suburban Motel plays, concentrating on Problem Child and Risk EvelYthing. He positions Walker as the colonizing playwright, manipulating characters and audiences. I was bothered by Gilbert's sweeping assumptions about the monolithic receptivity of "bourgeois theatre spectators" (326), his disclaimer about the danger of generalizing about audiences notwithstanding . NeverIheless, the essay probes into a difficult area of interpretation and deserves close reading. MauforI and Bellarsi have assembled a remarkable collection in Siting the Other. The book cannot be skimmed: it requires serious study, but it yields rewards. The contributions relating to Canada were stimulating, and I felt richly infonned by the essays on Australian drama, theatre, and cultural politics. MARY TROTTER. Ireland's National:Theatres: Political Performance and the Origins of the Irish Dramatic Movement. Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 200!. Pp. xxiv + 207. $49.95 (Hb); $19.95 (Pb). STEPHEN WATT, EILEEN MORGAN, and SHAKIR MUSTAFA, eds. A Century of Irish Drama: Widening the Stage. Pp. xxviii + 332. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2000. $49.95 (Hb); $19.95 (Pb). Reviewed by Brian Singleton, Trinity College Dublin A century after the Irish theatrical revival itself, Irish theatre historiography is finally beginning to reveal not only how a nation was imagined and written on the stage, but also how a very limited view of both theatre and nation has been propagated in the intervening period. The struggle for the representation of the nation on Irish stages was not only between Ascendancy modernists and middle -class Catholic revolutionaries but between a host of competing companies and groups, many representing the micro-politics of minority interests often silenced by the needs of the greater macro-revolution for an imagined commu- 312 REVIEWS nity. Further, and right up to the 1990s, when Irish theatre began to adopt a heterogeneity of approach to both form and subject of representation, practitioners have felt burdened by the weight of nation-expectation, which promotes , allegorically, a simple country-kitchen location to the rank of nation's bosom. Historians, similarly, have been trapped by the "writing of the nation" trope and have focused largely on canonical texts, skewing theatrical historical events to fit into the myth often created by the texts themselves. History, till now, has taught us how audiences reacted against texts (Playboy riots) or embraced texts (Cathleen Ni Houlihan), but rare, till recently, are the histories that provide socio-historical contextualization of these events, let alone that reposition the Abbey Theatre in its time of creation and proyide a wider lens to the notion of what constitutes both nation and theatre history. Mary Trotter's very necessary book pluralizes the notion of a national theatre , setting Lady Gregory and W. B. Yeats's Abbey project in the context of other, less-championed theatrical causes of the time. Whereas the Abbey aimed at creating a body of dramatic literature of national proportions, other contemporary projects "focused their energies on creating a theatrical moment of political efficacy" (xvi). These projects included the melodramas produced at the Queen's Royal Theatre, the work of Inghinidhe na hEireann (Daughters of Erin), and the plays of Padraic Pearse. These three chosen Dublin examples are the result of Trotter's self-imposed limitations, and she is careful to acknowledge that neither the revolution nor theatrical nationalism were con~ fined to within the pale or to the English language. Naturally, since it was to evolve into the...