Irish Theatre: Conditions of Criticism

Irish Theatre: Conditions of Criticism KAREN FRICKER AND BRIAN SINGLETON It is apposite that this collection of essays about (and of) Irish theatre criticism is appearing in the pages of a theatre journal published in Canada, for it was a work of Canadian theatre scholarship that inspired the conference at which these papers were first presented. In the titular essay of Producing Marginality : Theatre and Criticism in Canada, Toronto critic Robert Wallace places the practice of contemporary, mainstream theatre criticism in Canada in the larger context of Canadian society and cultural politics, exposing the implicit ideologies behind a critical practice that he judges to be far too determined by individual taste and a "common sense" approach. An honest and functional critical practice must start with an acknowledgement that ''judgment is relative and evaluation is political" (123, emphasis in Oliginal), argues Wallace, quoting John Leonard's call for a "Canadian theatre criticism that is partisan, subjective and interested - as it is now - but explicitly so," a criticism, Wallace continues, that "recognizes its symbiotic connection to Canadian theatre" (133, emphasis in original). Wallace's statements struck a chord with the editors of irish theatre maga· zine, a quarterly founded in 1998 that provides a forum for reviews and topical coverage of theatre in the Republic of Ireland and Northern Ireland. Much of what inspired the creation of itm was a general feeling in the Irish theatre community , shared by the magazine's founders, that mainstream Irish theatre criticism was underdeveloped, debased, and without professional standards for its practitioners. itm has aspired to raise those standards by dictating a longer review length (750 words) than was available in other outlets; by working with writers who had verifiable knowledge and expertise in theatre and writing ; and by providing on-the-job training, in the form of rigorous and interactive editing, for emerging and established critics. And yet, while itrn could, in the year 2003, stand over five years of solid work in developing the field of Irish theatre criticism, there was still a strong Modern Drama, 47:4 (Winter 2004) 561 KAREN FRICKER AND BRIAN SINGLETON sense that, overall, little was changing in critical practice in the mainstream outlets of newspapers, magazines, radio, and television. Clearly there were forces, attitudes, and pressures at play that were keeping theatre criticism in Ireland stagnant and ineffective. This was in contrast, however, to the field of academic scholarship on Irish theatre, which has burgeoned over the past fifteen years. While past studies of Irish theatre had been preoccupied by what Shaun Richards calls in this issue the "meta-narrative of nationalism:' a new generation of scholars is applying new critical methodologies to the study of Irish theatre history and practice, and setting that study in wider and more varied contexts.l The idea, then, behind itm's Conditions of Criticism conference, held in October 2003 in association with the School of Drama, Trinity College , was to bring a group of these scholars together to look critically and analytically at the conditions in which Irish theatre criticism has been, and continues to be, written; to explore the particular role of criticism in negotiating the unusually intimate relationship between theatre and nation-building in Ireland; and to examine the contemporary conditions of criticism in the context of a postrnodern, globalized Ireland. The essays here are the result of that conference, many of them rethought and rewritten in response to the discourse that developed over the conference weekend. One point clearly driven home by many of these essays, separately and together, is that it is artificial and unhelpful to assert a divide between critical and cultural practice. Cultural practice is itself critical, a point made literal in late-nineteenth-century Ireland when, in Vic Merriman's words from an article in this issue, "a group of dramatic artists set out the terms of a necessary debate on the nature of civil society, and the constitution of a national 'we'" t!trough the foundation of the National Theatre Society Ltd. - .the Abbey Theatre . In his essay here, Ben Levitas underlines the extent to which both Abbey co-founder Yeats and one of his star playwrights, J. M. Synge, were aware of...