Staging the Easter Rising: 1916 as Theatre (review)

One of the noteworthy recurring preoccupations of Irish life is the extent to which the remembrance of important historical events can be matched in scale by the celebration of major literary figures. As this review is being written two major commemorations - the ninetieth anniversary of the 1916 Rising and the centenary of Samuel Beckett's birth - have just drawn to a close. In some ways, it was appropriate that a national debate on the origins of the Irish state should coincide with a reappraisal of one of Ireland's greatest dramatists, since theatre and revolution are intimately linked in the story of modern Ireland. Indeed, critics have often pointed out that the Easter Rising was itself a supremely theatrical event, led by poets and playwrights in flamboyant costumes - a point which the author develops in the early stages of this excellent book.

In terms of methodology, James Moran concerns himself primarily with an analysis of dramatic renderings (including film, television, and pageant) of Easter 1916 from earliest times to the contemporary moment. The author, however, is careful to explore ways in which dramatic versions of 1916 are in dialogue with the cultural moments out of which they are written and performed. Attention to context, therefore, is a primary concern, with an emphasis on the wider cultural significance of the Rising. By sampling the layers of dramatic accretions around the topic of Easter 1916 over time, Moran skilfully reveals ways in which the texts he considers can be read as important repositories of ideological debate. He also usefully charts the shifting orthodoxies that coalesced around the Irish rebellion, showing how a dominant conservative nationalist version of the event, which took hold in the early decades of the twentieth century, gave way to official indifference and calculated amnesia in the early 1990s.

Moran's main thesis is that the Dublin rising was a complex affair which brought together a number of disparate groups, each espousing differing and often competing shades of nationalism, republicanism, socialism, and women's rights. Within this mix, there existed "a strongly theatrical and an avowedly radical element" (5), which was retrospectively disowned and disenfranchised by the power brokers of the new Irish state. Early plays by Maurice Dalton and Daniel Corkery, for example, "remembered the insurrection in a reactionary and conservative way" (35) by celebrating male heroics and female domesticity in equal measure. These plays provide a useful context to understand the iconoclasm and revisionism of Sean O'Casey's The Plough and the Stars, which is best known for debunking gendered notions of heroic sacrifice embodied in the ideal of Mother Ireland. O'Casey's main target, it would seem, was the official construction of the Rising in the early years of the Free State rather than the idea of the Rising itself.

In a similar way, Moran examines W.B. Yeats's 1916 play, The Dreaming of the Bones, as a response to the rise of Éamon de Valera's democratic populism. Like O'Casey, Yeats was disenchanted with "the shibboleths of a sentimental and mawkish kind of nationalism" (53 ). If O'Casey wanted to restore a socialist agenda to the story of 1916 , however, Yeats wished to remind the Irish people that the Rising should be best remembered as a symbolic point of origin for a new noble elite that would lead Ireland to salvation rather than for the mass politics of Fianna Fáil.

In a fine chapter on Roger Casement, Moran brings together the many complex narratives, counter-narratives, and suppressed narratives surrounding this unlikely rebel, including the controversies over the "black diaries," the reburial of Casement in 1965, and the attempts by de Valera to suppress a film of Casement's life in the early 1930s. He also advances the intriguing hypothesis that Shaw's St. Joan may have been inspired in many significant ways by the story of Roger Casement.

An account of later representations of 1916, including the work of playwrights such as Brendan Behan, Denis Johnston...