A History of Irish Theatre 1601-2000 (review)

"Irish theatre" is a loaded phrase. It assumes there is such a thing and that it came from "Ireland," an assertion tangled with British colonialization and the debatable existence of a "pure" Irish identity. Traditionally, Irish dramatists were relegated to "English" volumes or studies of "Irish drama" focusing on the late 19th and 20th centuries. The assumption was that pre-Abbey Theatre performances in Ireland were merely entertainment for the English. Consequently, Irish playwrights premiered their work in London or New York. Little has been done to challenge these presumptions since W.S. Clark's The Early Irish Stage (1955); exceptions include Fletcher (2000) and Wheatley (1999).

Christopher Morash's A History of Irish Theatre 1600-2000 is a much-needed study. Yet because Morash includes only theatre performed on proscenium stages, his work collaborates in obscuring the full scope of the theatrical history of Ireland by dismissing in a mere mention the "rich tradition of performance," the catchphrase that too often constitutes the entire discussion on Ireland's oral cultures. To barely acknowledge the legacy of orature in Irish theatre (with only a nod to the druth [Gaelic clown] at Dublin Castle in 1601 [3]) is negligent.

Morash wants to "reconstruct a reasonably accurate picture" of Irish theatre over the centuries, of "what those vanished audiences expected" (1). He includes seven "Nights at the Theatre," each chapter covering a key premiere. But the first audience Morash describes, in 1601, didn't even sit in a theatre. Lord Deputy of Ireland, Baron Mountjoy, invited guests to a candlelit Dublin Castle where "wild men [...] dressed only in clusters of leaves" appeared in a pantomime of Gorboduc, a "tragedy in which a divided kingdom descends into fratricide, rebellion, and civil war" (2). This strategic production of a kingdom in disarray enabled Mountjoy to reinforce his authority over the competing interests of his guests, the Gaelic aristocracy and "New English" plantation owners. And so begins Irish theatre's political leanings.

Morash successfully captures the specific and changing relationship of Irish theatre and politics over time. Whereas Gorboduc endorsed the crown's power, controversies shifted as theatre moved from the court to the public sphere. A theatre opened in 1635 on Werburgh Street, near Dublin Castle, establishing a body of theatre-goers, albeit an elite group:

[W]hile the audience [...] was by no means a representative sample of the predominately Irish-speaking population of the island [...] it did bring together the tight circle of courts, castle and college that would form the foundation of Irish theatre audiences for almost two centuries.

(6)

This audience cheered for some and rioted for others for hundreds of years—but always for very different reasons. Reflecting shifting conceptions of the Irish nation, nationalism on Irish stages had completely different meanings in 1754 than it had in 1899, and again in 1904, 1980, and 2000. In the mid-18th century, for example, landowners in Ireland were loyal to the king but didn't believe their allegiance necessitated "subsidising their English counterparts" (59); hence the 1754 riot in Smock Alley during a production of Voltaire's Mahomet "which showed that the Irish theatre had the potential to expose the gulf between the rhetoric and the reality of Irish liberty; [...] it showed that when that gulf became too great, Irish people would see the theatre as a forum for pursuing their rights, even to the point of violence" (66).

The Catholic Emancipation of 1829 brought some relief from religious discrimination, making room for a new class of Irish audience members with new reasons to riot. Ireland had even bigger problems ahead; by 1845 the first signs of potato blight appeared. The resulting famine, however, barely affected theatre, which had "drifted from the rest of Irish culture in the 1840s" (92). Around the same time, Dublin-born Dion Boucicault was having some success in New York with plays featuring the bumbling "Stage Irishman" stereotypical characters. His popular plays...