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Theater 32.3 (2002) 148-150



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Recharting Irish Theater

Amy S. Holzapfel


Theatre and the State in Twentieth-Century Ireland: Cultivating the People By Lionel Pilkington 2001: Routledge
A Century of Irish Drama: Widening the Stage Edited by Stephen Watt, Eileen Morgan, and Shakir Mustafa 2000: Indiana University Press

If Irish theater has experienced a "third wave" at the turn of this millennium, all the more reason to rechart the history of its tempestuous seas. Two recent publications offer revisionist overviews, addressing, in particular, the ideological implications of Ireland's most contentious cultural apparatus—the National Theater.

The great paradox of the Irish National Theater relates to its dual role as a nationalist institution, pressured to speak to and for the concerns of a population on the cusp of a War of Independence, and an artistic refuge, striving to operate, in the words of the famous mission statement by W. B. Yeats and Lady Gregory, "outside all political questions." In Theatre and the State in Twentieth-Century Ireland: Cultivating the People, Lionel Pilkington sets out to repoliticize what he sees as a critically depoliticized history, bringing to the fore the conservative and pro-unionist bias of the National Theater in its early years. Juxtaposing detailed political contexts with iconic productions, he cites, for instance, the staging of J. M. Synge's Playboyof the Western World as the crystallization of an ongoing tension in the early Irish theater between organized opinion and individual thought. Placed against a backdrop of increasing opposition to British rule, Pilkington argues, the play masks a larger anxiety on the part of the National Theater's founders regarding the "role and outcome of a minority within the context of majority self-government" (55). As he sees it, the Irish National Theater was a lifeboat intended to keep the self- professed Irish cultural elite, with their roots in fin de siècle southern Protestant unionism, afloat through the stormy swells of the Irish National Revolution.

The major problem with Pilkington's book lies in his reason for writing it, which he explains in his introduction as an "attempt to counteract the long-standing assumption that Irish theatre exists outside politics and apart altogether from the determining power of the state" (1). The reader is forced to ask, exactly what long-standing assumption is he referring to? Other than citing passages from primary documents—Lady Gregory's whimsical tale of the Abbey's origins, Our Irish Theatre, or Yeats's nostalgic essays—Pilkington offers his readers little else in support of an argument. He implies that no one writing about Irish theater has ever engaged the subject of theater and state, and he treats it as headline news that the leaders of the original National Theater were Anglo-Irish Protestants and may have had pro-unionist sympathies and agendas. What's more, Pilkington never seems to move beyond implicating the early National Theater in a plot to espouse its own constructive unionist or anti-Catholic views. His treatment of the topic offers little to theater practitioners and scholars seeking a larger, more complex picture of the early years of this fruitful artistic movement.

Pilkington's localized approach to the subject differs from the continental reading offered by John P. Harrington in his essay, "The Founding Years and the Irish National Theatre That Was Not," from A Century of Irish Drama: Widening the Stage. Harrington focuses on aesthetic reasons for the theater's alienation from popular, predominantly Catholic, culture. [End Page 148] Viewed from a European perspective, the National Theater, according to Harrington, "seemed ingrown but was in fact a maze of international debts and ambitions" (15), formed, like many avant-garde movements, "more as a reaction to contemporary culture than a fully formed assertion of independence" (5). Alternative productions staged at the theater, such as Molière's The Doctor in Spite of Himself (translated into Kilkartan by Lady Gregory) or Maeterlinck's The Intern, Harrington argues, deserve as much critical attention as the more quintessentially "Irish" plays of Lennox Robinson, Padraic Column, and others from the period. Harrington takes a broader, more sophisticated approach to...

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