In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

Reviewed by:
  • The Criticby Richard Brinsley Sheridan
  • David Clare (bio)
The Criticby Richard Brinsley Sheridan. Directed by Lynne Parker. Rough Magic Theatre Company, Dublin, 2–1310 2013 (staged at the Culture Box and the Ark as part of the Dublin Theatre Festival)

Irish theatregoers owe a profound debt of gratitude to Lynne Parker and her Rough Magic Theatre Company. Since the founding of Rough Magic in 1984, it has consistently produced more plays by women than most of Ireland’s major theatres and theatre companies; it has championed the work of the brilliant and underrated Stewart Parker (Lynne’s late uncle); and—of special interest to readers of this journal—it has kept the great, eighteenth-century, Anglo-Irish playwrights in the Irish popular consciousness by consistently mounting high-quality productions of their work.

While these productions have been very well received, concern has rightly been raised in some quarters over the tendency of Parker and company to Hibernicize these plays—that is, to impose obvious Irish elements onto plays that were originally set in England and written for London audiences. This Hibernicizing tendency goes all the way back to the first Rough Magic production of an Anglo-Irish classic from the long eighteenth century: Declan Hughes’s 1991 adaptation of George Farquhar’s Love and a Bottle(1698). Hughes boldly elected to turn Lyrick, an English playwright, into an Irishman and to place him at the centre of the action. One would have thought that Farquhar’s original script was quite Irish enough: after all, it boasts three Anglo-Irish characters (Roebuck, Lovewell, and Leanthe), Farquhar’s most sympathetic Irish Catholic character (Mrs Trudge), and concludes with raucous Irish music and dancing. In the end, Rough Magic’s decision to add a little more “Irish” flavour to Love and a Bottledid little harm, but the same cannot be said of subsequent Hibernicized productions overseen by Parker and/or Rough Magic.

For example, when Parker directed Farquhar’s The Recruiting Officer(1706) at the Abbey Theatre in 2008, she elected to reset the play in the Irish midlands, thereby playing up Farquhar’s Irishness but obscuring his uncompromising loyalist sympathies. As one critic noted, “the Orange banners acknowledged in the programme were absent from the stage” (Eamon O’Flaherty, review of The Recruiting Officerby George Farquhar, Rough Magic Theatre Company, History Ireland16, no. 2 [2008], http://www.historyireland.com/20th-century-contemporary-history/theatre-eye-3/). [End Page 761]

Rough Magic’s latest production of an eighteenth-century, Anglo-Irish classic was their most radically Hibernicized production to date: in autumn 2013, they reset Richard Brinsley Sheridan’s The Critic(1779) in Georgian Dublin. Despite outstanding performances from key members of the cast (especially Eleanor Methven as Mrs Dangle and Karl Shiels as the greatest Puff I am ever likely to see), this production was highly problematic from a dramaturgical point of view.

Act 1 of the play was staged in Temple Bar’s Culture Box, which was dressed to look like the Dangle’s drawing room. When the scene shifted to the rehearsal of Puff’s play, the audience was walked to the Ark, a nearby theatre space usually devoted to shows for children. “Ambulatory theatre” has become exceedingly popular with Dublin theatre companies in recent years, with many edgy productions requiring spectators to walk from one building to another, or at least between rooms within the same building. Because of this, as we walked to the Ark, I heard some audience members grumbling that they were sick of moving from one space to another during theatre shows and that these moves often added little to productions. In this instance, however, I appreciated the change of venue. It was great to move from a period drawing room to an actual theatre, just as the characters in the play do. Of greater concern was what actually occurred in and between each venue.

At the start of Act 1, an Auditor who was seated in the corner explained why Rough Magic had reset the play in Dublin: nearby was the Smock Alley Theatre, which Sheridan’s father, Thomas, had managed, and which would have debuted...

pdf

Share