Masculinities and The Contemporary Irish Theatre by Brian Singleton (review)

A joking remark at the book launch of Melissa Sihra’s 2009 Women in Irish Drama prompted Brian Singleton to write this book, a volume that explores new territories of Irish representations of masculinity. In addition to seeing more stories told by and for women, the past twenty years in Ireland have been characterized by the appearance of new types of Irish male. Singleton argues that Irish masculinity is described by no single narrative, but rather by a plurality of new voices spawned during the last decade of the twentieth century. The decriminalization of homosexuality, along with the shifting cultural and economic climate of Ireland before, during, and after the Celtic Tiger economic boom has sparked a theatrical creativity among men that “tears apart the notion that masculinity is a pre-ordained or fixed identity and to pluralize the construction of that identity” (3). Singleton’s book restructures the conversation on masculinity, shifting the dialogue from long-held views of Irish theatre as a stage for conventional masculinity to a space that houses a multiplicity of experiences and stories of Irish men who perform their masculinity—and “Irishness”—in nontraditional ways.

Singleton’s focus is the 1990s and onward, a period characterized by significant social and political changes. The author looks at historical contexts and developments as theatre flourished well beyond the major Dublin theatres to smaller, experimental, regional companies. He introduces readers to more than seventy performances from new companies like The Corn Exchange and THISISPOPBABY and playwrights like Conor McPherson and Martin Mc-Donagh that appeared during this period, articulating how their stories and styles from the margins deconstructed traditional “kitchen sink drama,” with its patriarchal Irish values and their attendant gendered stereotypes. Singleton uses a spectrum of interdisciplinary analyses—including gender performance studies by R. W. Connell and Judith Butler, the postcolonial theory of Frantz Fanon and Declan Kiberd, and Irish theatre scholarship from Nicholas Grene and Patrick Lonergan—to scrutinize the “canonized” representations of masculinity in Ireland. In his rich analysis, contesting the canon becomes an act of remaking the traditional subjectivities of Irish identity into variations that embrace Other masculinities that do not simply conform to the stereotypes of white, male, Catholic.

Singleton begins by moving chronologically through Ireland’s theatrical history since the Irish literary revival of the early twentieth century, examining the creation and distillation of a patriarchal masculinity that dominated the stage in Ireland for nearly a hundred years. In particular, he attends to notable productions (including Garry Hynes’s re-envisioning of Sean O’Casey’s The Plough and the Stars and several re-stagings of J. M. Synge’s The Playboy of the Western World) that dispelled sentimental myths about a singular Irish national masculinity. Singleton argues that recent cultural trends in modern Irish society resist the pastoral idyllic or nationalistic traditions and finally join a globalized discussion of identity.

Singleton is particularly strong when he unpacks the conflicted patriarchal narratives of performances like Sebastian Barry’s Hinterland and Enda Walsh’s The Walworth Farce. He contends that staging father/son relationships poses metaphors for Irish culture and its gendered international perception, renouncing its place under the patriarchal colonizer Britain. Here, Singleton identifies Ireland’s history of performing the masculinist social order while simultaneously staging “theatrical patricide.” He notes, however, that this move is often critiqued as the “arrested development of the son”; that is, Ireland may have killed the father, but the nation remains cyclically emasculated (61). Singleton finds similarly self-abnegating trends in monologue plays where recent male playwrights stage the antithesis of (dominant) masculinity, presenting “socially subordinated males . . . performing their own abjection in a society in which they have lost their place” (71). He notes that these personal acts of revelation fall within a much-lauded storytelling tradition, but with tales full of self-loathing, alienation, and an inability to cope with the expectations of society. Singleton argues that this refusal to perform normativity represents a major shift in Irish theatrical history...