Modern Irish Drama: W. B. Yeats to Marina Carr, Second Edition

4. The Irish Theater

16 The Irish Theater T H E AT E R C A M E T O I R E L A N D in the Middle Ages with the AngloNorman invaders. Mystery plays, which were based on the Bible, and morality plays, which served as dramatized allegorical sermons, were performed in the towns under the auspices of the church and the guilds on holidays such as Whitsuntide and Corpus Christi. Because Ireland remained mostly Catholic even after Henry VIII brought the Reformation to England and to those areas of Ireland under English control, the religious drama continued unabated until Oliver Cromwell’s assault on Irish civilization. Ireland’s first professional theater, the Werburgh Street Theatre, was opened in Dublin, near Dublin Castle, in 1637, but it lasted only four years. There, the first play on a purely Irish subject, St. Patrick for Ireland, written by resident dramatist James Shirley, was performed in 1639. In 1692, after the restoration of Charles II to the English throne, Dublin’s Theatre Royal, or Smock Alley, opened, and once again Irish playwrights had a local venue. But like the Werburgh Theatre, Smock Alley, located in what is now the Temple Bar district of Dublin, was a provincial stage where the fare was primarily imports from London. In the late seventeenth century and on into the eighteenth century , Irish writers frequently moved to London to try to make their fortunes. One of the most notable was William Congreve, who left Dublin for London in 1689 at the age of nineteen, and his four T H E I R I S H T H E AT E R | 17 great comedies—The Old Bachelor, The Double Dealer, Love for Love, and The Way of the World—were first performed there. Derry-born George Farquhar began his theatrical career as a Smock Alley actor and then moved to London, where his plays Love and a Bottle, The Constant Couple, Sir Harry Wildhair, The Recruiting Officer, and The Beaux’ Stratagem—his masterpiece—were produced with varying success. Many other Irish playwrights followed Congreve and Farquhar across the Irish Sea, and at the same time the great actors of the English stage, including David Garrick, came over to perform in Dublin. In the mid–eighteenth century, the multitalented Oliver Goldsmith, who had left Ireland to seek literary fame in London, achieved theater immortality by writing what is arguably the greatest English-language comedy of the enlightened century, She Stoops to Conquer. The Derry-born actor Charles Macklin starred in famous productions of Shakespeare and other plays on the London stage, becoming in addition the first Irish-born actor-manager. The second , remaining in Dublin to manage Smock Alley, was Thomas Sheridan, who earned actors’ undying affection by banning the practice of allowing members of the audience to sit on the stage and by actually paying actors contracted salaries! His son, the sharpwitted Richard Brinsley Sheridan, wrote two masterpieces for the late-eighteenth-century London stage: The Rivals and School for Scandal. The famous London actor-manager William Macready was also an Irishman. The late seventeenth century and the eighteenth century clearly established that the Irish genius was for comedy. This connection appears as true today as it was then. In the nineteenth century, the great Irish actors were Barry Sullivan and Tyrone Power, ancestor of the American film star of the 1930–50 period. The first Tyrone Power perfected the stage-Irish character, a comic caricature that now seems as painful and out of 18 | B AC KG ROU N D S place as a racial joke. The most commercially successful Irish dramatist of the nineteenth century was the prolific and internationally famous writer of melodramas Dion Boucicault, most admired in Ireland for his sentimental trilogy Colleen Bawn, Arrah na Pogue, and The Shaughraun. From the eighteenth century through the nineteenth century, theaters in Europe grew larger and thus less intimate, in part to accommodate larger audiences (and earn more money for the managers ) and in part because of the emphasis on spectacular melodramas, opera, Shakespearean productions, and various multiscene extravaganzas . The first new theaters in Dublin were on Aungier, Capel, Fishamble, and Crowe streets. Today, two nineteenth-century theaters still survive in Dublin: the Gaiety and the Olympia. Belfast’s Grand Opera House, severely damaged in an IRA attack, has been restored to its former glory. Almost all of the early theaters in smaller Irish towns...