Re-Imagining the Emigrant / Exile in Contemporary Irish Drama

Re-Imagining the Emigrant / Exile in Contemporary Irish DramaI MARY TROTTER In 1897, when the founders of the Irish Literary Theatre spurred on the Irish dramatic movement by proposing "to have performed in Dublin, in the spring of every year certain Celtic and Irish plays" (qtd. in Gregory 8), they probably had no idea how uncertain the definition of "Celtic and Irish plays" was within the nationalist community, or how hotly the question would be contested in the coming decades. But the definition which ultimately won among most theatre workers in Ireland in the first decades of the twentieth century was a theatre that would serve as, in Christopher Murray's words, a "mirror up to nation" a realist theatre that represented images of Ireland and its people counter to anti-imperialist stereotypes, and that served to develop, affinn, or critique a national identity for individuals living within the borders of the Irish nation.' But for Irish playwrights working within Ireland, the desire to create images of Irish experience within the thirty-two counties almost always superseded any interest in representing life within Ireland's emigrant communities. In fact, when the theatre in Ireland during the first decades of the twentieth century did represent the emigrant, it usuaUy adapted the romantic representation of the emigrant as exile, reflected in one of the founding documents of the Irish Republic, the Proclamation of 1916, which made a clear distinction between the Irish nation and its emigres abroad. While that document called "Irishmen and Irishwomen" to arms; it saw the nation "supported by her exiled children in America [...Jbut relying in the first on her OWl! strength" (qtd. in Ward 232 , my emphasis). As Patrick Ward points out, the Proclamation, while registering an all-inclusive generosity and gesturing towards all those who would lay an affective claim to Ireland - a stake in its future and a share in its pastrejects , dispossesses and denies those whose existence complicates and transforms simplistic, essentialist, constructions of Irishness. (233) Modem Drama, 46:1 (Spring 2003) 35 MARY TROTTER Likewise, nationalist theatre, in its drive to represent and affirm the existence of a geographical nation - a physical as well as an imagined state - ignored the complex relationships among the Irish nation and its diasporic communities . Thus, when Irish playwrights living and working inside Ireland's thirtytwo counties portrayed emigration on stage, they tended to represent the emigrant at the moment of leaving or returning to the home country, and the effect of emigration on the community remaining at home, rather than creating images of the emigrant abroad. Many contemporary Irish playwrights, however, are rethinking this paradigm by engaging imaginatively with the issue of Irish emigration from the point of view of the emigrant, producing sensitive explorations of the impact of Irish emigration on emigrants, Ireland, and the world, and the political, social, and economic forces that inspired emigration both before and after the fonnation of the Irish Republic. Further, by imagining and representing an Irish experience occurring beyond the nation's geographic borders, these playwrights open up new ways of thinking not only about Irish emigration, but also about the very nature of Irish identity, thus complicating the essentialist, spatiallybound constructions of Irishness established at the start of the twentieth century. In other words, contemporary Irish theatre is shifting from representing a geographical understanding of an Irish nation to exploring a demographic exploration of Irishness that takes into account the transnational identities of the Irish abroad. Fintan O'Toole writes: The geographical Ireland, the bounded island, is a place that can be read. It can be imagined, albeit problematically. as the result of agiven past, as the present form of an innate and immemorial Irishness. The second, demographic Ireland is a nation that cannot be read but must be written. And because it must be written, it could be written otherwise. Existing, as it does, imaginatively. it is always open to the possibility of being re-imagined. ("Ex-Isle" 161) As Ireland experiences the tremendous economic and social changes of these last decades, as well as engages critically with the ways it has read and represented its past, its playwrights are returning to the question of Irish emigration...