OUP's Modern Irish Theatre

THE OXFORD HANDBOOK of Modern Irish Theatre, edited by Nicholas Grene and Chris Morash, is the most comprehensive single-volume reference text on its subject yet published. Forty-one authors in all, many of them leading scholars in the field, cover the history of the Irish stage from Dion Boucicault's mid-nineteenth-century melodramas to new work staged at the Abbey Theatre as recently as 2014. Particularly impressive is the volume's rich diversity of approaches and foci, from key playwrights and plays to key theatre companies and festivals; to key productions, actors, and directors; to such significant issues as national identity and gender equity as these relate to Irish drama. At three times the length of the 2004 Cambridge Companion to Twentieth-Century Irish Drama, to which it will be compared, the present volume is far more comprehensive and wide-ranging. The editors of the Handbook promise a work that "displays not only the diversity of Irish theatre scholarship but also the ways in which it is evolving." They easily make good on this promise.

Following an introduction that stakes out key attributes associated with Irish theatre—"a poetic fluency of language, a mixed skein of comic and tragic emotions, a retrospective concern with past history, and a near-archaic imagined community"—the twelve-part, forty-one chapter handbook follows a roughly chronological trajectory. Doing justice in a short review to the critical riches found in this 700-plus-page volume cannot be done; I will therefore content myself with providing a map of the terrain covered within.

The first twelve chapters of the volume concern Irish theatre history from its nineteenth-century legacies through the early years of the Irish Free State in the 1920s. Following chapters on "The Inheritance of Melodrama" (Stephen Watt) and "Oscar Wilde: International Politics and the Drama of Sacrifice" (Michael McAteer) are four chapters that explore the interrelations of various cultural nationalist projects and figures (Lady Augusta Gregory, W. B. Yeats, and J. M. Synge most notably) and the birth of Ireland's national theatre, the Abbey (in 1903): "The Abbey and the Idea of a Theatre" (Ben Levitas), "Theatre and Activism 1900–1916" (P. J. Matthews), "W. B. Yeats and Rituals of Performance" (Terence Brown), and "The Riot of Spring: Synge's 'Failed Realism' and the Peasant Drama" (Mary Burke). Explorations of drama and national identity then give way to chapters that consider theatre history through the lens of dramatic form and style, specifically "Realism and Early Twentieth-Century Irish Drama" (Shaun Richards) and "Modernism and Irish Theatre 1900–1940" (Richard Cave), and then to a chapter, "Missing Links: Bernard Shaw, the Discussion Play, and Modern Irish Theatre" (Brad Kent), which treats an important Dublin-born playwright not usually associated with the Irish (but rather with the British) stage. Rounding out the volume's first quarter are chapters that explore key events in Dublin (and Irish) political history in relation to the period's dramatic production. "Imagining the Rising" (Nicholas Allen) explores the now-forgotten plays by the 1916 Rising's leaders, Patrick Pearse, James Connolly, and Thomas MacDonagh; "The Abbey Theatre and the Irish State" (Lauren Arrington) looks at the early state's subsidies for and attitudes toward the fledgling national theatre; and "O'Casey and the City" (Christopher Murray) takes on the Abbey's leading playwright of the Dublin tenements, viewing the dramatist's early, unproduced The Harvest Festival as the "prologue to the three great Dublin plays [The Shadow of a Gunman, Juno and the Paycock, and The Plough and the Stars] to which Red Roses for Me is the epilogue."

The next quarter of the volume explores Irish theatre following the Abbey's Golden Age (its first twenty-five or so years) and into the mid-century. From various angles the first three of these nine chapters treat the birth and evolution of the Dublin Gate Theatre (founded 1928): "Design and Direction to 1960" (Paige Remolds), "The Importance of Staging Oscar: Wilde at the Gate" (Eibhear Walshe), and "Irish Acting in the Early Twentieth Century" (Adrian Frazier). These chapters are followed by ones on Irish-language theatre "Twisting in the Wind" (Brian O Conchubhair), "Women and Irish Theatre Before 1960" (Cathy Leeney), and "The Little Theatres of the 1950s" (Lionel Pilkington), the most important of which was Dublin's short-lived Pike Theatre, which saw the Irish premier of Behan's The Quare Fellow (1954) and Beckett's Waiting for Godot (1955). Chapters on the leading playwrights of the mid-century—M. J. Molloy, John B. Keane, and Hugh Leonard "Urban and Rural Theatre Cultures" (Lisa Coen) (of which Keane in particular remains wildly popular in Ireland to this day, despite his work's rejection by the Abbey for many years), "Brian Friel and Tom Murphy: Forms of Exile" (Anthony Roche), and "Thomas Kilroy and the Idea of a Theatre" (Jose Lanters)—then follow. The essay on Kilroy, which treats this playwright's important theatrical experiments for the Dublin stage of the 1960s and 1970s (The O'Neill, The Death and Resurrection of Mr Roche, Tea and Sex and Shakespeare, and Talbot's Box), is particularly valuable for bringing greater critical attention to an important dramatist who has never gained a popular audience.

The third quarter of the volume tackles Irish theatre and performance of the past four decades and treats Ireland's dramatic output within the context of a number of key backdrops: The Northern Irish "Troubles" (of the late-1960s-1990s), the "Celtic Tiger" boom (of the 1990s), the birth of Garry Hynes's Galway-based Druid Theatre (1975) and Brian Friel and Stephen Rea's Derry-based Field Day Theatre (1980), and Irish society's recent probings of earlier gender and sexual conventions and identities. These thirteen chapters include "Brian Friel and Field Day" (Marilynn Richtarik), "From Troubles to Post-Conflict Theatre in Northern Ireland" (Mark Phelan), "Growth and Diversification in Ireland's Theatre Culture 1977–2000" (Victor Merriman), "From Druid/ Murphy to DruidMurphy" (Shelley Troupe), "Places of Performance" (Chris Morash), "Directors and Designers since 1960" (Ian R. Walsh), "Defining Performers and Performances" (Nicholas Grene), "Beckett at the Gate" (Julie Bates), "Negotiating Differences in the Plays of Frank McGuinness" (Helen Lojek), "Shadow and Substance: Women, Feminism, and Irish Theatre after 1980" (Melissa Sihra), "Irish Theatre Devised" (Brian Singleton), and two further essays on Irish drama since the 1990s (Emilie Pine, Clare Wallace). Anyone interested in better understanding Ireland's contemporary theatre scene will find this portion of the volume essential reading. The essay "Beckett at the Gate" is doubly valuable for treating this venerable Dublin theatre's more recent evolution (in its post-Mac Liammoir and Edwards years, during Michael Colgan's thirty-three-year stint as Artistic Director, ending in 2017) as well as the contemporary Irish reception of one of the nation's most influential twentieth-century playwrights (Beckett is of course also claimed by the French).

The final quarter of the volume is devoted to the impact and reception of Irish drama outside Ireland as well as to a few additional miscellanea: Ireland's annual theatre festivals, the tradition of Irish theatrical adaptations (of earlier plays and novels, many of which are non-Irish), and the question of Irish theatre and historiography. These seven chapters include "Global Beckett" (Ronan McDonald), "Irish Theatre and the United States" (John P. Harrington), "Irish Theatre in Britain" (James Moran), "Irish Theatre in Europe" (Ondřej Pilný), "The Theatre Festival and Modern Irish Theatre" (Patrick Lonergan), "Reinscribing the Classics, Ancient and Modern: The Sharp Diagonal of Adaptation" (Christina Hunt Mahony), and "Irish Theatre and Historiography" (Eamonn Jordan). Of these essays, those on Irish theatre festivals and on Irish theatrical adaptations are particularly stimulating and innovative for reframing the ways in which these subjects are usually presented.

The Oxford Handbook of Modern Irish Theatre, although conceived as a reference work, nevertheless reads engagingly when consumed straight through. Although even a tome as comprehensive as this one cannot possibly treat all of the major texts, figures, and movements of modern Irish theatre, readers who make their way through it will find themselves well-oriented as to the outlines of and debates surrounding Irish dramatic production and consumption of the past 125 years. Indeed, with its critical depth and range, generous collection of photographs, useful chronology, and exhaustive bibliography of more than 700 source texts on Irish theatre, this volume is required reading for anyone with a serious interest in the subject.