The State of This Place: Convictions, the Courthouse, and the Geography of Performance in Belfast

The State of This Place: Convictions, the Courthouse, and the Geography of Performance in Belfast MICH AEL MCKI NN IE PHOTOGRAPHER: State ofthis place! WORDS MAN: Halt? PHOTOGRAPHER; It'sf ucking falling down. WORDS MAN: TeJ/ me about it. Tinderbox 33 It has become almost axiomatic in theatre history and criticism that space is a fundamental concern of theatre practice. It has become equal1y axiomatic in Irish theatre history and criticism that the nation has been a central preoccupation of Irish theatre practice, and of those critics investigating that practice. If these two axioms hold true broadly (and it is important not to diminish the differences within research investigating such concerns), it is also the case that they have not yet been tested against each other. To historicise the inscription of space in Irish theatre practice is to encounter the disciplinary limits of the geographic imaginary of theatre studies writ large, and the political imaginary of Irish theatre studies. While space is an increasingly popular issue in theatre research. theatre studies employs various conceptions of the geography of performance. One strand of thought, best exemplified by Una Chaudhuri's Staging Place: The Geography of Modern Drama, considers space and place (which constitute panicular bounded spaces in time) as themes of dramatic literature, or as dramaturgical principles that govern the construction of dramatic narratives. Another strand, which runs through the work of Richard Schechner, treats space as a phenomenological concern, where the co-presence of performer and audience in a particular place frames the making of meaning. A third strand, illustrated by Marvin Carlson's Places of Pe.!ormance: The Semiotics ofTheatre Architecture, employs a historicised semiotic analysis to chart how spatial codes are, or were, inscribed in the production and reception of a theaModern Drama, 46:4 (Winter 2003) 580 The Geography of Performance in Belfast 581 Ire event. Common to all of these strands is a hierarchical conception of the relationship between space and performance; theatre studies has been concerned primarily with the ways in which the contours of a place can be assimilated within the theatrical text or event. As Freddie Rokem comments, "The stage, the fictional world and the theatrical space, distinct visual entities which the spectator experiences simultaneously, are of course integrated in the theatrical event as a whole" (I, my emphasis). Thus if space is understood as a necessary condition of performance practice , the specific places of performance are usually measured only insofar as they serve theatre, and not the reverse. But if it is possible to think of theatre as an event in which audiences participate, geographers like David Harvey and Doreen Massey have demonstrated that it is appropriate to think of place as an event in which they participate as well. Indeed, theatrical events and platial events may exist simultaneously and require each other to function: a place may be a condition of a theatre event, but, at the same time, theatre may be a condition of a platial event. Only by placing theatre and place in a more equal dialectic does it become possible to understand how the site of performance might become, as David Grant comments, the "star" of the event (Loane 267). The political geography of Irish theatre studies, in turn, has been almost exclusively national. This is perhaps not surprising, given that the nation is the principal category of Western theatre historiography (McConachie 143- 44), and that, as David Lloyd points out, the "canonical histories of Ireland" are dominated by "the narrative of the nation and the state" (16). Irish theatre studies differs from Irish history and Irish geography, however, in that its consideration of the nation-state has consistently privileged the nation over the state (see, for example, Murray 3-1 1, O'Driscoll 9- 19, and Trotter xi-xxii).' Until the recent publication of Lionel Pilkington's Theatre and the State in Twentieth Century Ireland, the state has received little direct attention as at least a partly autonomous entity implicated in the production and reception of Irish theatre. Moreover, the operations of the state have often been subsumed beneath an all-encompassing and poorly defined nation for which theatre serves as allegory, an elision that becomes particularly...