Riot and Great Anger: Stage Censorship in Twentieth-Century Ireland

8. The Fifties

8 The Fifties Nobody has explained why there is not an official stage censorship here [in Ireland] too. Literature of all kinds is censored and so are films. I cannot isolate the principle which decrees that anything can pass so long as it is animately presented on the stage. If I had my way there would be a very severe censorship based on aesthetic as well as moral standards, so playwrights and actors would be curbed a bit in their tireless search for way to inflicting [sic] pain on us. —Myles na Gopaleen (Flann O’Brien),“Cruiskeen Lawn:Tóstal War,” Irish Independent, 19 February 1958 Cultural activity in present day Dublin is largely agricultural. —Brendan Behan, 1949 At the end of the 1940s, individuals and groups as well as the government in Ireland recognized the need for, and bene- fits of, arts enterprises. The Inter-Party coalition that came to power in early 1948 under John Costello saw the importance of tourism as an industry and the potential of theatre to attract foreign visitors to Ireland. In 1949, the Cultural Relations Committee of Ireland, operating under the auspices of the minister for external affairs , undertook production of a series of pamphlets designed “to give a broad, vivid, and informed survey of Irish life and culture.”1 The next year Seán MacBride founded the Irish News Service. In 1951 the Republic of Ireland established the Arts Council; the first National Fleadh for traditional music was held in Mullingar; Liam Miller founded the Dolmen Press; and Comhaltas Ceoltoiri Eireann was established. Even after the 1951 election returned de Valera and Fianna Fáil to power, the organizational infrastructures to support the arts continued to appear: the Irish tourist board, Bord Fáilte, and Gael-Linn both debuted in 1952. Cork held its first International Choral and Folk Dance Festival and its first International 146 147 The Fifties Film Festival in 1953. Some of these developments may have anticipated the imminent inauguration of regular air passenger service to North America, but all responded to cultural opportunities precluded during the Emergency. These agencies and events all sought to project a positive, progressive image of Ireland. Most importantly , they mark a departure from the isolationism that prevailed in Ireland before and during the Emergency and that characterized de Valera’s tenure as Taoiseach in the 1930s and 1940s. These initiatives celebrated an Irish culture that was more democratic and, hence, more accessible, both to tourists and the Irish, than the Celtic Twilight or the Irish-language fare on offer at the Abbey Theatre in the 1940s and 1950s. Dance, film, and theatre festivals, for instance, announced themselves as “international” in the hope of achieving visibility not simply with tourists, but within larger European and English-speaking artistic communities. Because several of these enterprises were sponsored, supported, or subsidized by the government, they, like the Abbey Theatre when it first received its subsidy in the 1920s, were subject to very public scrutiny and criticism . As earlier in the century, Irish Ireland—isolationist, with a goal of purity in moral affairs—came into conflict with a more permissive , progressive, internationally oriented conception of the nation. The very first publication of the Cultural Relations Committee was Micheál Mac Liammóir’s Theatre in Ireland. Still smarting from the coerced withdrawal of Lennox Robinson’s Roly Poly and the more invidious threat to shut down the Gate, Mac Liammóir penned his short study in “Rome—Marakech—Venice,” anywhere, it seems, but Ireland. He offered a less than sanguine view of cultural opportunities in Dublin: “With her innate resentment of the specialist , her dread of perfection, her conscience-stricken sense of inherent artistic inferiority which leads her at times to assume an attitude that is cynical without knowledge, blasé without experience, and full of the deep suspicion of uncertainty, Dublin of course is not ready for the reception of great drama.”2 Although hardly guilty of boosterism, Mac Liammóir duly celebrated the history of the Irish theatre while acknowledging the formidable obstacles in its path. Mac Liammóir’s perception of Ireland’s “inherent artistic inferiority ” and its hostility toward the arts was shared by many, especially in regard to theatre.3 Eric Bentley wrote that the visitor to the Abbey Theatre in 1952 “feels himself the victim of a hoax, a gigantic hoax that has been written into the...