Joyce, O'Casey, and the Irish Popular Theater by Stephen Watt (review)

132 Book Reviews Churchill's plays" (6). Actually, the analyses do nor deconstruct at all (there is no reason why they should, beyond Kritzer's fashionable claim, but I wonder if she knows what deconstruction is). Rather, they place the plays in the most conventional format of critical discussion. One would like to see more sense of continuity in Churchill's work, of the ways in which she elaborated key recurring themes, and, most important, of the ways her plays inform each other. Kritzer talks very little about the actual productions of Churchill's plays. More should be said about Churchill's productive collaboration with Max Stafford-Clark, for instance. Indeed, it is ironic that a feminist like Churchill would collaborate so regularly with male directors when there is such an extraordinary pool of female directors in England (Deborah Warner, Katie Mitchell, Garry Hines, Di Trevis, and Hettie Mac~ Donald come immediately to mind), What bothered me more was the lack of discussion of Churchill's relationship to contemporary playwrights to whose innovations she was alert. Orton is fleetingly men~ tioned a couple of times, but without showing, for instance, how the radio play Lovesick is similar to Orton's What the Butler Saw, written the same year (1967). In the last chapter, Kritzer states: "Although the issues and themes dealt with by Churchill may be encountered in the work of other politically oriented playwrights in contempo~ rary Britain, her use of theatrical form to alter the relationship between play and audi~ eoce sets her work apart" (190). One could argue that Churchill's work is part and parcel of a theatrical project shared by many British theatrical artists in the 1970S and 1980s. The Gay Sweatshop, which is fleetingly mentioned, was one group regularly engaged in the same sort of formal experimentation. Churchill does not write in an artistic vacuum. Like many fine playwrights, she is eclectic as well as original. One interesting aspect of Churchill's work which Kritzer neglects is its relationship to the capitalistic enterprise of theater. I remember seeing Churchill's savage, Jonso~ nian satire of Post Big Boom wheeling and dealing, Serious Money, in the opulent Wyndham'S Theatre in London. The theater was packed with well~suited, briefcase~ carrying, champagne~guzzling Yuppies who had come to enjoy this play which not only satirized them. but by putting them on the West End stage, also in a way autho~ rized them. I don't think I have ever seen an audience enjoy a play so much, nor have I ever been so aware of the ironies implicit in contemporary political theater. JOHN M. CLUM, DUKE UNIVERSITY STEPHEN WATT. Joyce, O'Casey, and the Irish Popular Theater. Syracuse: Syracuse University Press 1991. pp. 277. illustrated. $34·95· This book marks an imponant contribution to the study of theatre in late nineteenth~ century Ireland. It demonstrates convincingly that while the long~standing critical neglect of pre-Abbey drama is based on modernist indictments of the popular, the liter~ ary achievements of Joyce and O'Casey are themselves inseparable from conventions Book Reviews 133 originating in Dublin's commercial or "popular" theatre. Thus the book explores the performance and effect of nationalist melodramas by Boucicault. O'Grady and Whitbread at the Queen's Royal Theatre, as well as performances at the Gaiety and Theatre Royal of more widely known plays by Ibsen, Pinero, Sudermann and Jones. In so doing. Watt's study illuminates the existence of vibrant theatre activity in Dublin immediately prior to the foundation of the Irish Literary Theatre in 1897. Indeed, apart from a recent edition by Cheryl Herr and a monograph by Seamus de Burca. this is the first book-length account of the theatre in late Victorian Ireland. As such, this is a major. and welcome. accomplishment. The book's perspective is that of new historicism. Popular theatre is considered as a valid "interpretative instrument" not only because it may be seen as a contextual illumination , but because it is itself regarded as having an important constitutive role in contemporary discourses on nationalism and sexuality. Nationalist meiodrama is presented , then, as a fOml of anti-colonial resistance because of its overturning of...