Historicising Is Not Enough: Recent Developments and Trends in Irish Theatre History

Historicising Is Not Enough: Recent Developments and Trends in Irish Theatre History LIONEL PILKINGTON The Catholic community gives us most ofour best actors and actresses. Derived chiefly from Gaelic stock, its people take naturally to the theatre. Almost evelY parish has its dramatic society, its talented pelformers,for whom the heightened traffic of the stage is hardly to be distinguishedfrom the vivid emotional experiences ofeveryday bfe. - David Kennedy Arguing in favour of Ulster regionalism - an advocacy movement that sought to use the idea of a distinct "Ulster" culture so as to naturalise the recently established and highly contested six-county unit of Northern Ireland - David Kennedy advances the idea that Irish Catholics "take naturally to the theatre." That "Gaelic stock" are those for whom "the heightened traffic of the stage is hardly to be distinguished from the vivid emotional experiences of everyday life" is not a new assertion. Whether to act the mick, to indulge the blarney, or to engage in periodic acts of spectacular insurgency, Irish culture regularly conveys an impression that it is peculiarly theatrical, and yet lacking the discipline of the theatre as an institution. As with the Compact Oxford English Dictionary 's fourth definition of the word Irish - "Irish in character or nature; having what are considered Irish characteristics; specifically, used of seemingly contradictory statements" (877) - Irishness sometimes denotes a kind of refractory logic that seems to have all the gratuitousness and the intransitivity of the theatrical. When in 1919 the Irish Times referred to the first Irish Dilll (or parliament) as "a stage play in the Mansion House," what was being asserted was clearly pejorative: a fundamental existential confusion. For the unionist and pro-British Irish Times, the illegal but democratically elected DOil, meeting for the first time in Dublin's Mansion House, was staging a performance , not engaging in a momentous political act to be taken seriously. A similar usage occurs in W. B. Yeats' 1926 letter to his friend Sir Herbert Modern Drama, 47:4 (Winter 2004) 721 722 LIONEL PILKINGTON Grierson in relation to the protests directed against Sean O'Casey's play The Plough and the Stars: You may have noticed that we have had riots in.the theatre again. I was with you when word reached me of the Playboy row.This time we had a packed theatre every day while the play was running, indeed numbers could not get in. The riot was soon over and displayed one curious effect of fine acting. When the Republicans rushed the stage a man caught up a girl, who had been playing a consumptive invalid. and folded her in acloak as apreliminary to carrying her from the stage - she was not the actress in his eyes but the consumptive girl. (Letters 71 1) In this instance, also, an anti-state militancy (here associated with anti-Treaty republicanism) is shown as primitive and myopic because of its apparent inability to tell the difference between the theatre and ordinary life. Rushing the stage, Yeats' letter implies, exposes the republicans' engrained perceptual ingenuousness: their unawareness of the role of the theatre as an arbiter of a commonsense distinction between the "fine acting" of the play and the ordinary unhistrionic and unscripted actions of the everyday. As for many other literary and political commentators in the early 1920S, Yeats and O'Casey equate social and political militancy with histrionics. Along with this reputation for unlicensed theatricality, Ireland has also been regarded as a country woefully in need of the educational function of theatre as an institution. For Yeats the ameliorative role of a national theatre was that it could transform "the mob" into "the people" and thus it could perform a powerful function in the constitution of citizenship for the modem state (Uncollected 141). For a culture still dominated by the rhiwmic communal loyalties of an oral tradition, the theatre as an institution was seen as a benign modemising antidote. As Yeats and Lady Gregory wrote in their prospectus for the Irish Literary Theatre, "We hope to find in Ireland an audience trained to lislen by Iheir passion/or oratory" (Gregory 9, my emphasis). That dangerous , rabble-rousing oratory so evident in the "Monster Meetings" of...