“Rude Involvement”: Boucicault, Dramatic Tradition, and Contemporary Politics

“RUDE INVOLVEMENT”: BOUCICAULT, DRAMATIC TRADITION, AND CONTEMPORARY POLITICS JOHN P. HARRINGTON on march 17, 1972, the Times Literary Supplement published a special Irish issue with contributions from Thomas Kilroy, Maire Cruise O’Brien, John Montague, and Liam Miller. Though all of the essays and unsigned reviews did not advert to sectarian violence, the occasion for the issue plainly was the worsening situation in Ulster. Denis Donoghue, as introducer , discussed the Unionist and the nationalist positions in order to formulate their literary import: “Irish literature is a story of fracture: the death of one language, so far as it is dead or dying or maintained as an antiquity , and the victory of another; the broken relationship of one religion to another, both claiming to be Christian; the divergence of one Irishman from another.”1 Brian Friel contributed one of his rare essays on drama. In this issue he was identiWed as the author of Philadelphia, Here I Come!, which had opened in Dublin eight years before and then succeeded in London and in New York; he was also an equal interval, eight years, from establishment in 1980 of Field Day with his play Translations. The title of Friel’s 1972 essay was “Plays Peasant and Unpeasant,” an allusion to Shaw, and his purpose was to extract a particular tradition of Irish drama from the confusion of multiple political, social, and literary fractures. His procedure was to “scrap all those men who wrote within the English tradition, for the English stage and for the English people, and . . . go back no further than 1899, on the night of May 9, the opening of the Irish Literary Theatre.” The casualties were Farquhar, Steele, Sheridan, Goldsmith , Wilde, and Shaw, all presumably rejected for dealing in pleasantries and unpleasantries—as in Shaw’s title—remote from the peasant core in Irish BOUCICAULT, DRAMATIC TRADITION, AND CONTEMPORARY POLITICS 89 1 Denis Donoghue, “The Problems of Being Irish,” Times Literary Supplement, 17 March 1972, p. 292. society. The aim, and for Friel the value of Irish literary theater, was recognition “that the theatre was an important social element that not only reXected but shaped the society it served.” The obstacles were the critics and their demands for fashion and formula: “Write of Ireland today, the critics scream. Show us the vodka-and-tonic society. Show us permissive Dublin. Forget about thatched cottages and soggy Welds and emigration.” Friel acknowledged and even celebrated theater riots, speciWcally those concerning Synge and O’Casey: “the robust technique was at least an indication of rude involvement.”2 The loss of that energy is for Friel epitomized when “The Abbey still goes on oVering Boucicault. . . . Irish audiences laugh tolerantly, whether at the play or the Abbey directors does not really matter much.” That point was worth repeating in conclusion, where among irrelevancies the pride of place was given to the fact that “Boucicault capers on the Abbey stage.”3 It is striking that at this moment in 1972 Dion Boucicault could epitomize the enemies of Irish drama. Boucicault, of course, was born in Dublin and achieved his Wrst major theatrical success in London in 1841 as author of the stylish comedy London Assurance. In the midst of quite melodramatic personal, Wnancial, and literary adventures, he emigrated to New York in 1853. Among his major successes there were Jessie Brown, or The Relief of Lucknow (1858), about the Sepoy rebellion in India; The Octoroon (1859), about slavery in America; and then, in 1860, The Colleen Bawn, based on a famous 1819 Limerick murder case by way of Gerald GriYn’s novel The Collegians. Boucicault was at least arguably the Wrst playwright to Wnd a way out of the British tradition into the premise of an Irish one. In a curtain speech on the opening night of The Colleen Bawn, the playwright rather disingenuously conWded to the very large audience at Wallack’s Theatre in New York that I had long thought of writing a play from material gathered from my native country but this is the Wrst time I ever tried it. I hope that the play will lead other greater men, of Wner genius and talents than I possess, to give you plenty...