The Politics of Irish Drama: Plays in Context from Boucicault to Friel by Nicholas Grene (review)

11 2 REVIEWS Although Knowles disavows any canonical aim, is at pains to acknowledge his own cultural and historical determination (21), and regularly shows how his examples might be read otherwise, the book's main strength is that it brings together a survey of examples within what is, in fact, a consistent theory . Although many of the modes of rupture Knowles discusses are now well known in contemporary criticism, they have not before been applied cohesively in a Canadian context. A study that works with and against a Canadian dramatic canon to open up the social and political dimensions of theatre is vastly useful, especially in a national criticism that has often been conservative . This study is a highly valuable contribution to the body of Canadian dramatic criticism and, in fact; reminds us that theatre can effect cultural change, that it has an aClive purpose. NICHOLAS GRENE. The Polirics 0/ Irish Drama: Plays in COlllexr/rom Boueicaulr to Friel. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999· Pp. 312. $37.50 (Hb); $ 13.95 (Pb). Reviewed by Nick Worrall, Middlesex University Only two of the dramatists treated in this valuable and original study may be considered "political" in any obvious sense, although the "politics" of Sean O'Casey's Dublin Trilogy are more subtle than those of his later, more committed plays of the I930S and George Bernard Shaw's "politics," while a prominent feature of his public persona, do not often find direct expression in his plays (as opposed to his prefaces). Nicholas Grene's acute exploration of significant dramatic texts by major Irish playwrights over a century or more has the salutary effect of making the reader aware of the extent to which, "fwlithin the context of the ever-increasing sameness of global late capitalism and the emptiness of postmodem posturing" (268), Irish drama as a whole may be said to repay analysis in "old-fashioned" terms where the epithet " bourgeois" can still be deployed unapologetically. In his opening chapter, Grene subjects Dion Boucicault's The Shaughraun, Shaw's John Bull's Other Island, and Brian Friel's Translatiolls to the kind of intelligent political scrutiny that reveals that Friel and Boucicault have more in common as political "trimmers" in their mediation of an ostensibly anticolonialist position in the interests of international acceptability than other critics have led us to suspect. By contrast, Shaw's only Irish play (if one excepts 0' Flaherty V.c.) is seen to anticipate Ireland's position at the end of the twentieth century, as it "prophesies the neo-colonial era of global capitalism which will render the long-contested issues of national independence obsolete and irrelevant" (32). Although Grene does not mention it, this might also explain Friel's success in the West End and on Broadway and his canoni- Reviews ][3 cal place on A-level syllabi, as well as accounting for revivals of Boucicault at the Abbey, England's National Theatre, and the RSC. It may also explain the total neglect of Shaw's playas a prescient contribution to our understanding of the Irish political situation throughout the painful years, since 1969, of Britain 's direct re-engagement with its own violent colonial legacy. The section on W.B. Yeats, Lady Gregory, and J.M. Synge contrasts the "authentic truth of being" (62) at the ideological heart of The Travelling Man with the otherworldly mysticism of The Land of Heart's Desire and pertinently identifies an "erotics of death" (67) in Kathleen ni Houlihan that, in its advocacy of "blood sacrifice" (71), would seem to link the play with the reactionary dramatic world of someone like T.S. Eliot. A question to ask here might.be where the difference lies between Kathleen ni Houlihan's call to arms in 1902 and those of Lord Kitchener in 1914 and Padraig Pearse in 1916. The discussion of The Playboy of the Western World, which amusingly puns on "shifts in perspective," is very good in its identification of the elements of grotesquerie and cruelty in the play and makes the point that Synge "remained satirically distrustful of communal values" (108). A point that is not made here, but is made later in relation to Tom Murphy...