Rising to the Occasion: Irish Theater in 2016

The year 2016 in Irish theater began, inevitably, with an abundance of artistic and theatrical events anticipating the centenary commemorations of the Rising, and climaxing in intensity sometime around Easter. After that, a more varied approach to making theater provided options for commemoration-fatigued audiences—although the entire year was shot through with work that engaged with the historic events. Much of the debate in Ireland around the commemorations focused on inclusivity and balance, with public events also marking those who fought in World War I; the often-overlooked roles that women played in the Rising were likewise the subject of discussion and some official acknowledgement.

In general, theater-making in 2016 was remarkably influenced by political and social agendas. The Abbey, in its seminal role as national theater, responded to the centenary with its "Waking the Nation" program in October 2015, announcing, among other productions, Sean O'Casey's Plough and the Stars, and Frank McGuinness's play about the Battle of the Somme, Observe the Sons of Ulster Marching Towards the Somme. However the program was infamously unbalanced with respect to female theater-makers and generated the Waking the Feminists movement, which continued to grow in momentum throughout 2016.¹

The Gate nodded to the occasion with its production of Juno and the Pay-cock, while smaller companies and independents staged imaginative and varied events. Pat McCabe's Sacrifice at Easter and ANU Production's These Rooms interrogated the meaning and the very notion of nationhood, for instance; other work, such as Colin Murphy's Inside the GPO and ANU's Sunder, brought audiences to the sites of the actual events of 1916.

The site-specific or site-responsive nature of much of the theater engaging with the 1916 commemorations facilitated a sense of community and authenticity for audience members. In some cases, it also allowed the site to compensate for a lack of theatricality. McCabe's Sacrifice at Easter, produced by Corcadorca in collaboration with Pat Kiernan and Mel Mercier, was performed at Elisabeth Fort in Cork City, a stone building from the Tudor period, which provided a historical and militaristic resonance to the performance. Led around the vast walls of the fort, with a view of the city illuminated by the summer evening, the audience also experienced a parallel journey through time as episodic vignettes of Irish life were presented. These installations and spoken scenes offered versions of Ireland as diverse as the John Hinde postcard version circa 1960 (complete with donkey and red-haired child) to scenarios of a country struggling with bank bailouts, emigration, and drug addiction. The individuals representing this nation included the small farmer, politicians, a hunger striker and, unexpectedly, a live cow in an auction scene. Traces of humor turned up in McCabe's script, but Mercier's darkening score and the mischievous aligning of the sanctified, the profane, and the surreal assured that this crowded arena was no soft-focus remembrance of times past.

ANU's These Rooms, a collaborative piece with CoisCéim Dance Theatre for the Dublin Theatre Festival, tells the story of the massacre of fifteen civilian men living in what was a tenement in North King Street in Dublin's north inner city. Recently released archival material—testimony from women who survived the event—formed the basis of the play, which was performed in the house where Sean O'Casey was born on Dorset Street; the original houses in North King Street have since been demolished. In a clever layering of chronology, the first scene is set in a meticulously recreated pub in 1966 on the fiftieth anniversary of the 1916 Rising. The atmosphere in the bar is notably at odds with the jingoistic state rhetoric emanating from a radio discussing the celebrations. As the customers of the bar begin to dance, the claustrophobic impression of 1960s Ireland is fractured and the physical presence of the actors established before the audience is swept back another fifty years to the night of the massacre. Led through the rooms of the house where numerous tenement families would have lived, the audience finds the scars...