Theatre and the State in Twentieth-Century Ireland: Cultivating the People by Lionel Pilkington (review)

REVIEWS rather than a study of contemporary Australian performance. I must point out, however, that the book's readers outside Australia might not appreciate that these four texts belong within an artistic milieu of three decades of Australia's performance as distinct from its theatre. This performance tradition includes such formative precedents as Keith Gallasch and Virginia Baxter's Open City performances of the 1980s, which deluded the audience into assuming that they were encountering the performer's personal self, which was subsequently exposed as fake: the performer is always a persona. Although it is difficult to become familiar with perfonnance cultures arising in dispersed geographies across this continent, the lack of contextualisation is an issue because there needs to be some acknowledgement of how the forms and theoretical concepts described in Grehan's book have been actively deployed over the years by artists who make postmodem performance in Australia. not to mention in other countries where there are more published critiques of such work. Still, in studying how identity can be represented differently in all its complexity through performance, Grehan is to be commended for drawing attention to its contribution to social understanding. LIONEL PILKINGTON. Theatre and the State in Twentieth-Century Ireland: Cultivating the People. London: Routledge, 2001. Pp. x + 262. $31.95 (Pb). Reviewed by Piet Delraeye, University 01Alberta Theatre and the State in Twentieth-Century Ireland examines the often colluding relationship between theatre and the state and critiques the politics of Irish theatre. The author offers a fascinatingly alternative, and often revisionist, reading of Irish political and cultural history, drawing on scholarship (Adrian Frazier, Nicholas Grene, and Robert Welch, to name a few), exhaustive archival research, and his own demandingly critical (re-)reading of individual plays. The book starts in 1893 with the rejection of Gladstone's proposal for Home Rule, and concludes its historical coverage in the mid-I98os, within a political context of growing intergovernmental cooperation between the Dublin and UK governments concerning a political solution to the Northern Irish conflict. While the table of contents brackets 1992 as the end-date of the book, it effectively wraps up in 1985, without further explanation. The book is divided into eight chapters, each of which focuses on a significant period in Irish political and theatrical history. The first chapter covers the beginnings of the Irish Literary Theatre in 1899, which led to the foundation of the Abbey Theatre in '904. Pilkington argues that nationalists and unionists found a common interest in the establishment of an Irish theatre as an emanci- Reviews 519 patory project of cultural modernization reflecting social consensus. He points out a corollary between the defiantly literary impulse of the early Irish theatre movement and its southern unionist origins, and sees in this a sign of its politically conservative impetus. The second chapter covers J. M. Synge's controversial plays, which contributed to a (rare) period of persistent aesthetics of subversion at the Abbey. The third and fourth chapters, covering the years 1910-1922 and 19221932 respectively, discuss the Abbey Theatre's delicate and often opportunistic balancing between its (progressive) unionist supporters and its need to satisfy nationalist aspirations, reflected in the rising fortunes of Sinn Fein. Pilkington argues that the relationship was one of mutual dependency and opportunism. While the Abbey directorate became less militant in its political aesthetics - carefully avoiding contentiousness - Sinn Fein was increasingly willing to accept - and exploit - the still largely elitist and English-biased perspective of what was becoming a sort of national theatre. With the reality of government of the new post-Treaty Irish Free State came also a realpolitik vis-a-vis the Abbey. The author's reading of O'Casey's The Plough and the Stars (1926) as a subversive play, not because of its critique of violent rebellion , but because of its blatant celebration of (misogynistic) sexuality, is astute and refreshing. Pilkington convincingly argues that the Abbey, as a national institution, was a sort of laboratory whose educational function was to demonstrate "the vitally important distinction between play-acting and real life, between theatrical and non-theatrical action" (87); its impact, consequently, was discouragement of political activism. The Irish pOlitical landscape changed radically with...