Irish Playwrights and the Dunedin Stage in 1862: Theatre Patrons Performing Civility

Abstract

A mere 14 years after it was founded by Presbyterians as a distinctly Scottish city that was ―in the world but not of the world,‖ Dunedin possessed two splendid theatres that during their first decade of operation staged some 300 performances of Irish plays and plays by Irish playwrights. How did this happen? Why Irish plays? Why Irish playwrights? And why were two theatres, with capacities of 1500 and 1330 persons, opened in Dunedin a year before Otago Boys High School was founded, five years before the foundations of First Church were laid, and seven years before the Provincial Council turned its attentions to establishing a University? 1 Initially, it was the theatres that were a source of civic pride. According to an 1862 issue of the Otago Witness, Dunedin possessed ―two of the handsomest theatres in the Australian colonies.‖ 2 While there are doubtless many explanations for this rush to build theatres, the short answer is that the city was overtaken by the very world it had sought to isolate itself from. But this is an answer that invites explanation. First, it has to do with what was on offer on stage. It has been well established by theatre historians that Irish playwrights (particularly Dion Boucicault) and Irish plays (particularly comedy and melodrama) dominated the nineteenth-century stage—whether in Dublin or London or New York. 3 It is also well known that, by the time the Theatre Royal and The Princess Theatre were opened in Dunedin, the ―legitimate drama‖ 4 had become widely if not firmly established as the secular vehicle for social and cultural improvement. For example, the editor of the Daily Southern Cross assured his Auckland readers on 8 July 1856: ―Believing, as we do, that the drama in good hands, has an elevating, rather than a demoralizing tendency—that it is calculated to assist the moral and mental development of a community;— believing, also, that, a taste for dramatic entertainments having already been acquired, the people of Auckland would feel a deprivation, were the Theatre to be finally closed.‖ 5