Druids, Dudes and Beauty Queens: The Changing Face of Irish Theatre ed. by Dermot Bolger (review)

Reviews 315 Company needs the context of its nationalist agenda so that its acceptances and rejections can be understood in that light. James Hurt applies Benjaminian historiography to the work of McGuinness, but what most would acknowledge as more pertinent to the subject is a comprehensive queer reading of his work, both pre- and post-legalization of homosexuality in Ireland. And this is my way into a conclusion of a review of this book: the over-emphasis on dramatic literature might have been balanced by a good conclusion or, at least, an introduction to each section that provided the necessary contextualization. Trotter's monograph proves that Irish theatre history is moving beyond text analysis, and while the edited collection is rich, varied, and at times a mine of thought-provoking analysis, we are still a long way from an exploration of the complexities of nation and theatre, since the historiography is still largely being constructed and constricted by text. DERMOT BOLGER, ed. Druids, Dudes and Beauty Queens: The Changing Face oflrish Theatre. Dublin: New Island Books, 2001. Pp. 302, illustrated. $18.95 (Pb). Reviewed by Mary Trotter, lndiana University-Purdue University indianapolis The economy is not the only thing prospering in Ireland. Since the 1980s, an explosion of new playwrights, companies, and ideas has emerged on the Irish theatre scene, leading to the heralding of a "third wave" of Irish drama. This new and diverse theatre movement reflects both the poetic intensity of Yeats and Synge and the gritty wit and irony toward history of Friel and Murphy, with a healthy dose of experimentalism thrown in. Like the Irish plays that have come before it, these dramas, diverse as they are, still engage in questions of personal or community identity in [reland's rapidly changing culture. Druids, Dudes and Beauty Queens, edited by playwright and novelist Dermot Bolger, celebrates these new trends in contemporary Irish theatre, with fourteen essays expressing very different points of view. Conceived as a Festschrift to honour Phelim Donlon, the Drama Officer for the Arts Council of Ireland from 1984- 2001 (roughly the period of this latest Irish revival), this text is a lively tribute to Donlon and the theatre world in which he worked. Its contributors include academics, journalists, playwrights, and practitioners; its methods range from theoretical analysis to anecdotal account; and its topics include internationally famous dramas as well as influential but relatively obscure performance events. Thanks to Bolger's feisty, open-ended editorial style (he offered suggestions but allowed his authors to write about whatever they wished), Druids, 3[6 REVIEWS Dudes and Beauty Queens provides interesting twists on even its most famous subjects. Maria Kurdi and Csilla Bertha's discussion of the work of Brian Friel, for example, includes general insights into Friel's plays, but it also movingly describes his deep impact on Hungarian audiences and the relationship of his work to that of Hungarian playwrights like Andras SOlo. John Waters' essay praises the underlying insights about rural Ireland he finds to be inherent in the characters and situations of Martin McDonagh's Leellane Trilogy. In the next chapter, however, Vic Merriman argues that McDonagh's success (and that of a very different style of playwright, Marina Carr) derives from the seduction of upwardly mobile audiences by high production standards and a need to distance themselves from those left behind amid the economic success of the Celtic Tiger. "The journey from Synge to McDonagh [and Carrl," Merriman argues, "takes us all the way from images which challenge the submerged ideological positions of an emergent neocolonial elite to those which collude in reinforcing them" (62). Merriman's essay then touts, as an alternative to what McDonagh has elsewhere called "the theatre of tiger trash" ("Decolonization Postponed"), the more intimate theatre of Donal O'Kelly, whose beautifully written yet politically charged dramas deal with such topics as the impact of globalization on Ireland's relationship to both Europe and the third world. While Anna McMullan agrees with Merriman that Marina Carr writes about Ireland's disposessed, she reads Carr's characters much more positively , arguing in her essay "Unhomely Stages: Women Taking (a) Place in Irish Theatre" that contemporary women playwrights like Carr...