A History of Irish Theatre, 1601-2000 (review)

Three things distinguish Christopher Morash's intriguing volume from most other books in the field of Irish theatre history. First, it neither ignores the period prior to 1900 nor discusses earlier work solely in terms of influences on the twentieth century. Second, its lines of period demarcation are specifically Irish. Finally, it self-consciously centers attention on the theatre event rather than on dramatic literature. Any one of these distinctions would be enough to recommend this book. Taken together, they make for a book that delivers its jacket's promise of "an essential, entertaining and highly original guide to the history and performance of Irish theatre." There have been other books that cover the same chronological ground (Christopher FitzSimon's The Irish Theatre comes to mind), but this is surely the most comprehensive attempt to view all of the last 400 years of Irish theatre history as a single evolving entity. Nor does Morash delimit his considerations of pre-twentieth-century Irish theatre to that host of Irish-born playwrights—Farquhar, Sheridan, Goldsmith, Boucicault, Wilde, et al.—whose prominence is primarily an English (or sometimes American) phenomenon.

Morash begins with a September, 1601 production of Gorboduc at Dublin Castle, establishing in very short order a number of motifs which will run through his book, foremost among them his desire to place the theatre—both as dramatic text and as theatrical production—in a cultural and political context. The theatre has been both a galvanizing and an atomizing force in Irish political history, and there were many eras in which the simple act of attending the theatre—or a particular theatre—was to take a political stance. Not surprisingly, the seven "night at the theatre" sections that concentrate attention on the events of a single performance of a single play tend to cluster around moments of audience turmoil, e.g., the night in 1754 when spectators swarmed the stage, disrupting a production of Voltaire's Mahomet; the 1822 "Bottle Riot" that had more to do with who attended the theatre than with what plays happened to be performed that night; and of course the events surrounding the premieres of The Playboyof the Western World in 1907 and The Plough and the Stars in 1922.

The "night at the theatre" sections serve, generally, to highlight specific aspects of the chapters to which they are appended, although there are a couple of instances in which they actually fall into the next chapter's chronological purview. The chapter divisions, as noted above, are of specifically Irish significance, focusing on the ascension of William of Orange, the establishment of an independent Irish legislature, the construction of the Gaiety Theatre, the opening of the Abbey Theatre, the approval of the Anglo-Irish Treaty, the burning of the Abbey, and Ireland's entry into the European Economic Community. Probably the most important thing to notice about this listing of events is an obviously intentional omission: anything to do with the Irish Literary Theatre. W. B. Yeats, Lady Gregory, and their colleagues would have had us believe that they essentially invented the concept of an indigenous Irish drama, which sprang forth as Athena from the brow of Zeus. Morash deftly cuts through the mythologizing and contextualizes not only the Irish Literary Theatre but also the Fay brothers' Ormonde Dramatic Society in terms of movements already afoot in the late nineteenth century rather than as seminal events unto themselves. Even the merging of these two organizations and the addition of John Millington Synge into the mix in 1902 is deemed less significant than the establishment of a permanent space for the Abbey. While this last point is arguable, Morash employs both argument and structure to make the case that turn-of-the-century Irish theatre had a heritage whether it chose to acknowledge it or not.

In general, the book lives up to its promise to recognize that "a history...