Dissident Dramaturgies: Contemporary Irish Theatre (review)

Ironically, the first crop of books on Celtic Tiger literature and culture hit the market right around the time that the global economic crisis smashed the Irish miracle to smithereens. Unlike some of his less fortunate predecessors, Eamonn Jordan had time to incorporate the bust into the boom narrative before his book went to press. Jordan notes, in his introduction to Dissident Dramaturgies, that the spectacular implosion of the Irish economy and the investigations that followed indicate that the Celtic Tiger ultimately was as mythological a beast as the unicorn: "These factors suggest that many of those local prosperity and wealth gains were driven by spurious speculation as much as by anything else and are now about to recede" (3). Jordan contends, in his introduction, that "while a great deal of the work under consideration [in Dissident Dramaturgies] was first performed just before or during the period of the Celtic Tiger, it is vital to remember that the work did not necessarily bear much relation to that reality" (10). Tigers come and tigers go, but they have, in Jordan's view, little intercourse with the fabulous beasts populating contemporary Irish drama.

Unlike, for instance, Patrick Lonergan's Theatre and Globalization: Irish Drama in the Celtic Tiger Era (Macmillan, 2009), Dissident Dramaturgies is not focused on how contemporary Irish theatre was transformed by the global economic and cultural matrix into which Ireland was fully integrated during the 1990s. Jordan amply demonstrates his awareness of recent work that has insisted on reading "Irish" literature as part of a global system of exchange, and he acknowledges that "[a]lthough this book has the word Irish in its title … Ireland does not provide either the coherence or composure of a metanarrative" (9). But while he goes to considerable effort to discuss all the ways in which the very concept of "contemporary Irish drama" has been challenged, Jordan forges ahead with his study of it all the same. Under the rubric of "dramaturgy," which opens up his analysis to theory and production as well as the dramatic text itself, Jordan organizes his analysis around "six very specific, if restricted, dominant patterns, configurations or constructions that shape the blatant dramaturgy of primarily text-based Irish theatre" (13). These are history and memory, innocence, the pastoral, myth, and storytelling (this last theme is split into two chapters, one on narrative in general and the other on the "Glut of Monologues" in contemporary Irish drama). Most of the plays considered date from the 1980s or later; the authors who garner most of the attention are Brian Friel, Frank McGuinness, Martin McDonagh, Marina Carr, Conor McPherson, Mark O'Rowe, Thomas Kilroy, and Marie Jones.

The greatest strength of Jordan's method is his close attention to performance, which adds complexity to his readings of the plays and makes Dissident Dramaturgies, among other things, a valuable record of these original productions. Dissident Dramaturgies also has its shortcomings. The most important is a curious disconnect between the book's extremely well-informed discussion of relevant criticism and theory and the actual readings of the plays. During his discussion of the global turn in Irish studies, for instance, Jordan points out that others have suggested that McDonagh's true context is the "British In-Yer-Face theatre movement" spawned during the 1990s at the Royal Court Theatre (10). He also notes that the Royal Court co-produced McDonagh's Leenane trilogy and that his next two "Irish" plays were premiered in London by the National Theatre and the Royal Shakespeare Company (136). Jordan opens his discussion of McDonagh's The Pillowman by pointing out that it was "substantially drafted" in 1993–94, before McDonagh's Irish plays were produced, and that it has "more in common with the work of contemporary British writers, like Mark Ravenhill and Sarah Kane" (203), the props of the aforementioned "In-Yer-Face" movement. There is, however, no sustained discussion of the work of Kane and Ravenhill; or of the Royal Court's cultivation...