Making Theatre in Northern Ireland: Through and Beyond the Troubles (review)

Making Theatre in Northern Ireland is a welcome contribution to the limited literature on theater in Northern Ireland commonly discussed in articles or chapters in books that focus on canonical Irish theater. Maguire investigates the divergent theatrical representations of what came to be known as the Troubles, that is, the political conflict that started developing in 1969 between communities separated by religious and ethnic identity. Interested in theater as cultural intervention within a colonial condition, he explores how and whether the performances have been effective in engaging the audience with the political reality they dramatize. To serve his objective, the critic skillfully counteracts the mainstream Irish theater tradition that gives priority to textual analysis and separates art from politics. Maguire instead brings to the fore the performative dimension of the plays and situates theater in the political context of the conflict he attributes to the failure of the state in Northern Ireland to address the needs of all its people.

The main chapters discuss, in order, the treatment of the immediate conflict, history, myth, and gender, the function of community theater and representations of the post-conflict situation. All chapters open with a presentation of the context that informed the plays analyzed, a choice that allows Maguire to investigate a broad spectrum of political and cultural elements in the history of the crisis as well as the work processes followed by theater companies. The usually mixed reception of the plays is also discussed to demonstrate the diverse responses that can often emerge from the interaction between different perspectives on the conflict in performances and other cultural representations. As the writer convincingly argues, audiences come to the theater with their own assumptions, and the greatest challenge for theater makers is to encourage spectators to question received concepts.

The association of theory with textual and performance analysis is to be commended for drawing attention to and situating theater work within current debates in the field of aesthetics, politics, and colonial discourse. Chapter 1 focuses on the potential of realist and nonrealist modes of representing directly the violent reality of the Troubles without resorting to obscure, simplified, or depoliticized discourses. Analyzing Martin Lynch's The Interrogation of Ambrose Fogarty, Maguire discusses how realism can destabilize the audience's beliefs, asking spectators to reassess their ethical codes by making them witness the reality of brutality, absent from other representations of the conflict. However, such an agitational effect, unexpected for realism, can be compromised since it depends "as much on the disposition of the audience prior to the performance as it does on the experience of the performance itself" (39). By the same token, the distancing techniques of nonrealist representations that are expected to alert audiences to a critical attitude may miscarry, as it happens with Vincent Woods's At the Black Pig's Dyke. The discussion of the interplay between performance and audience reveals the difficulties theater makers face when searching for a form of representation that will satisfy their aims. It becomes evident, as has often been the case with post-Brechtian drama, that the distancing devices are neither inherently progressive nor is realism by definition devoid of a radical potential.

The representations of the past are as contested as those of the present, Maguire argues in chapter 2, where he underlines the great political significance of treating history in theater: historization shows social relations to be changeable while readings of the past may legitimize or question current choices and long-lasting attitudes. The analysis of history plays benefits from the writer's choice in chapter 3 to deal also with plays concerned with incidents before the Troubles. His reading of such plays allows him to show how opportunities that the past failed to appropriate may be reworked in more positive terms in the present given the changed circumstances. But the gist of his argument concerns the treatment of the tension between fact and its fictional narration that always...