Stewart Parker's Heavenly Bodies: Dion Boucicault, Show Business, and Ireland

Stewart Parker's Heavenly Bodies: Dion Boucicault, Show Business, and Ireland MARILYNN RICHTARIK Belfast playwright Stewart Parker conceived his 1986 play Heavenly Bodies near the beginning of his career as a dramatist, wrote it when he was at the height of his powers, and revised it as one of the last acts of his professional life. Throughout the long genesis of this stage biography of the Victorian melodramatist Dion Boucicault, Parker used his play to focus his own recurring questions about the price of popular success and the responsibility of a playwright to his own place and people. Over time he came to see Boucicault less as a remarkable individual and more as a figure emblematic both of the demoralized condition of Ireland in the nineteenth century and of the plight of the artist in an inhospitable era. Like Boucicault, Parker was an Irishman who lived and produced plays in North America and England as well as in Ireland, and his subject's "equivocal lrishness" exerted a continued fascination for him. In Parker's opinion, Boucicault's nationality was central to an understanding of his career because, "[I]ike many Irish writers before and after him, he had tumbled headlong out of the country at an early age, only to find his imagination eventually returning there for its truest inspiration" (Parker, "Philosophy "). Parker had emigrated to the United States as a young man but returned to Ireland a mere five years later, and he believed it was no coincidence that Boucicault's most enduring plays are those few among his vast output with Irish settings and characters. Boucicault's cautionary example reinforced Parker's determination to keep writing about Northern Irish subjects when there was little demand for such works in the province itself and when London, Dublin, and New York theatres seemed equally uninterested in producing them. Heavenly Bodies dramatizes Parker's conflicting feelings about his literary and theatrical forebear and embodies hopes and fears regarding his own work for the stage. Through the character of Johnny Patterson another famous nineteenth-century Irish showman whose present obscurity is part of the point - Parker argues in his own voice with a convincing portrayal Modern Drama, 43 (Fall 2000) 404 Heavenly Bodies: Parker and Boucicault of the historical Boucicault. Boucicault is tried on charges of frivolousness and commercialism, with his reputation hanging on the audience's verdict. The life and work of Dian Boucicault have created controversy for over ISO years. While he lived, his arrogance, extravagance, voracious sexual appetite, and vulgar success kept him well supplied with enemies, and since his death in 1890 he has been slighted or reviled as often as celebrated. John Harrington notes that Boucicault's relation to the Irish dramatic tradition has been an ambiguous one, as "[hIe is never entirely absent, and yet he is never entirely approved" (92). Modem detractors point to his "evasion of anistic and political imperatives, his substitution of amusement for education, and his complicity in.the cultural enterprise oflulling a popular audience into complacency " (Harrington 94). James Malcolm Nelson, for example, ends an essay exploring the refinements that Boucicault made to the stock character of the "stage Irishman" - a genially swaggering, drinking, and fighting buffoon who featured in many plays about Ireland for English consumption - on a note of regret that Boucicault, "with all his skill [.. .1did not make stronger points and criticize the many abuses created by 'outsiders' in Ireland" and concludes that, as a "true man of the theatre," the playwright was simply more interested in "providing entertainment and achieving success" than in social criticism ( 104- 5). Other critics, however, including David Krause and Andrew Parkin, as well as Harrington himself, substantiate Boucicault's claim to have "invented the Irish drama" (Boucicault, "Drama and Its Critics").' The great Anglo-Irish dramatists, such as George Farquhar, Richard Brinsley Sheridan, and Oliver Goldsmith, whose work Boucicault emulated at the beginning of his career in such plays as London Assurance (1841) and Old Heads and Young Hearts (1844), had written within an English dramatic tradition for English audiences , setting their plays in England with mostly English characters. Boucicault departed from this convention in his three most successful Irish plays, The...