- Mapping Irish Theatre: Theories of Space and Place by Chris Morash and Shaun Richards
Mapping Irish Theatre makes an exciting case for the primacy of an understanding of the roles of space and place in the evolution of Irish theatre from the nineteenth century up to the present. Morash and Richards open with an acknowledgement of the French structuralist tenor of most of the theories of space they use as a basis for their own project. Henri Lefebvre, Michel Foucault, Pierre Nora, Anne Ubersfeld and Yi-Fu Tuan provide the conceptual tools used throughout to analyse the social, political and cultural significations of the spatial in relation to theatre. Sketching the twentieth-century genealogy of practitioners attentive to theatre as space ranging from Peter Brook in the 1960s back to Alfred Jarry’s Ubu Roi in 1896, the authors situate W.B. Yeats “at a crossroads in European theatre, when choices were being made between a spatial relationship in which the boundary between stage and auditorium was becoming ever more fluid, flowing finally into the streets beyond, and one in which the space of society was contained within the frame of the stage” (2). It is the dynamic and evolving relationship between theatrical production of space and social space that animates the book.
Morash and Richards contest Peter Brook’s suggestion that theatre begins in an “empty space.” Their referencing of Lefebvre’s triad of types of space - physical, mental and social – that differ in their “mode of production” (7) permits a nuanced investigation of the “interaction between perceived space, conceived space and the lived” (9). In Irish theatre scholarship these interactions have been predominantly, though not wholly, understood in relation to the nation. Morash’s A History of Irish Theatre, 1601-2000 (Cambridge, 2002) is, of course, a landmark work corrective of the impression partly cultivated by the founders of the Irish Literary Theatre that their work was launched in an apparently empty space. Similarly, Morash and Richards set the conceptual and ideological roles of a national theatre in a long-range perspective, considering the geographical distribution of theatres in the country in the mid-seventeenth century. If in 1897 the Irish Literary Theatre aimed to redraw this map then as Morash and Richards remind us, the title ‘national’ was both speculative, in the sense of Benedict Anderson’s imagined communities, and contested. As the authors note, “the idea of a national theatre constitutes in Lefebvre’s terms, a conceived space, and the infrastructure of theatre sites constitutes [End Page 66] its perceived space” (14), however there is always “a disjunction between the perceived space of performance and the conceived space of the nation” (18). A spatial analysis of Irish theatre, they assert, must take into account context in which work produced and received.
W.B. Yeats and John Millington Synge are, predictably, major presences in the early chapters, though disappointingly the plays of Lady Gregory are set aside. That reservation notwithstanding, the observation that “one of the defining features of Irish theatre space in the first half of the twentieth century would be a tension between this utopian offstage space and the constraints of a visible onstage space” (21) is a resonant one. The early Abbey’s diminutive physical or perceived space was offset by an intense emphasis on the conceived space of performance that rejected naturalism and gestured towards the utopian offstage. It was an ambition that was to dwindle into a largely conservative realism as the century progressed. Before broaching those developments, Morash and Richards survey modernist counterpoints to the evolving realism of Irish theatre in this period, teasing out the contrasts in attitudes to spatial orientation and “place-making” (76). The highlights of the book, for this reader at least, come when the authors turn their attention to more recent playwriting and theatre-making. Across chapters titled “The Calamity of Yesterday”, “The Fluorescence of Place”, “Theatre of the World” and “Theatre of the Street” Morash and Richards advance an impressive analysis of...