The Ulster Literary Theatre and the Northern Revival (review)

Scholarship on drama from the North of Ireland and then Northern Ireland (beginning in 1922) has long languished in the shadow of scholarship on drama in the rest of the country. Sam Hanna Bell's pioneering study The Theatre in Ulster (1972), which covers Northern theatre from the founding of the Ulster Literary Theatre through 1971, is now badly outdated. Ophelia Byrne's pamphlet The Stage in Ulster from the Eighteenth Century (1997) is more comprehensive than Bell's study, but its range makes its individual discussions relatively brief. Marilynn Richtarik's Acting between the Lines: The Field Day Theatre Company and Irish Cultural Politics, 1980–1984 (1994) provides a thorough account, focused on one of the major Northern Irish theatre companies after World War II, while Anthony Roche wrote a very fine long chapter on recent Northern Irish drama in his Contemporary Irish Drama from Beckett to McGuinness (1994). Christopher Murray contributed a helpful overview of contemporary Northern Irish drama in his Twentieth-Century Irish Drama: Mirror Up to Nation (1997). Finally, Bernard McKenna's Rupture, Representation, and the Refashioning of Identity in Drama from the North of Ireland, 1969– 1994 (2003) and Tom Maguire's Making Theatre in Northern Ireland: Through and beyond the Troubles (2006) are welcome full-length studies of recent Northern Irish drama in relation to the so-called "Troubles," but their appearance has made the absence of a book-length study focusing on the theatre of the Northern revival in the early-twentieth century all the more embarrassing.

Eugene McNulty's new book fills this critical lacuna with a deft, sure-footed discussion of cultural revival in the North of Ireland in the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries against the backdrop of the gathering Home Rule movement and resistance to that movement in unionist areas of the North. Bulmer Hobson and David Parkhill – founders of the Ulster Literary Theatre, the Northern "answer" to the Abbey Theatre – were some of the prime proponents of a distinctively Northern identity that was also identifiably Irish. Herein, of course, lay the problem for the ULT's dramatists and for other Northern revivalists, such as the radical poet, journalist, and playwright Alice Milligan: how to articulate the North as a site of Irish nationalism in the spirit of the ecumenical 1798 rising that brought together Protestants and Catholics, yet also to suggest the North's peculiar cultural attributes.

McNulty's first two chapters set the idea of the North of Ireland in two contexts: the revival taking place in the rest of Ireland and the increasing religious division in the North because of the gathering momentum for Home Rule in the other provinces in the last decades of the nineteenth century. The first chapter discusses the advocacy for a revived nationalism by a whole cluster of Northern nationalist intellectuals including the Protestant Milligan. In her literary work, Milligan began reclaiming Irish heroes such as Cuchulain as essential to an Ulster-centric nationalism, a manoeuvre that laid the foundation for similarly Northern-centred mythic plays once the Ulster Literary Theatre began operating. A fascinating account of the founding of the Henry Joy McCracken Literary Society in 1895 and its subsequent promulgation of an ecumenical Northern nationalism in the run-up to the centenary of 1798, occupies much of chapter two.

Chapter three's close account of the founding of the Ulster Literary Theatre is especially strong, attending as it does to the notion of identity as performance, the interaction between the forerunners of the Abbey Theatre and the founders of the ULT, and the Feis of the Nine Glens in Country Antrim in 1904, which last event enabled the ULT to posit an area of rural, Gaelic Ulster as a counterpart to the valorized West of Ireland in the Abbey repertoire. In this chapter and throughout the study, Yeats is a favourite whipping boy, characterized as haughty and grudging: for example, he refused, at first, to let the ULT perform his and...