Acting in the periphery: the Irish theatre

Abstract

Shortly after he took up the position of Deputy Manager and Treasurer at Smock Alley, the Irish Theatre Royal, in 1746, Benjamin Victor, an English newcomer to Ireland, approached the manager, Thomas Sheridan, with a number of suggestions that he felt would result in a better regulated theatre in that location. However, as he later reported in his History of the Theatres of London and Dublin (1761), Sheridan always rejected his proposals as too dangerous, saying ' You forget yourself, you think you are on English Ground .' Theatre historians who have followed Victor in writing on the eighteenth-century Irish stage have generally been guilty of a similar kind of forgetting when it comes to this institution. Focusing on the similarities between the Dublin and London stages, they have concluded that the Irish theatre of this period was either a provincial theatre or a British colonial institution. In this essay, however, I will suggest that the Irish theatre is better characterised as a subaltern site in the sense that the post-colonial critic, David Lloyd, uses the term; a space in the Irish colonial past which was capable of bringing into being new, non-'English' states of culture and practice. In Ireland, as in other imperial sites, the forces of colonialism and modernity generated more politically ambiguous hybrids than properly reformed colonial subjects. As these improper subjects made their way into the Irish theatre - as writers, actors and audience members - they produced forms and practices that resisted British colonial culture while also gesturing at alternative Irish cultural logics. The subversive play of these unorthodox 'actors' is not easy to recover and requires us to shift our historiographic gaze from centre stage to the theatrical peripheries - to the 'shadow play' that was always being staged around the edges of the British colonial theatre and within the interstices of the British dramatic text. What at first looked like imitative acts were, in effect, acts of colonial mimicry which subverted and estranged the dominant cultural script.