Personal and Political: Irish Theater in 2010

Abstract

Fintan O’Toole, the earnest and bespectacled drama critic and public intellectual, recently posed a compelling question: “Can Irish dramatists tackle the big questions again?” Writing in the Irish Times, he asserted that the unifying factor in Irish theater of the early twentieth century “was its close connection to the public world.” The plays of writers like Sean O’Casey, Brian Friel, and John B. Keane “always had a desire to connect to the large questions of morality and identity, of history and economics.” But, with a few notable exceptions, O’Toole argues, no one is writing “big, ambitious social plays” anymore. During the Celtic Tiger, Irish culture “failed in the most basic way. It was unable to create for Irish people even a vaguely accurate narrative or image of who and where they were.”1 A bold proposition. But is it an accurate one? 2010 is as good a year as any to test O’Toole’s thesis. Last year, theater in Ireland managed somehow to dig its way out of the doom and gloom; judged solely by the number of productions and the relatively strong ticket takes, Irish drama thrived. Theater companies worked as furiously as ever, if not more so. Formal mentoring programs for new playwrights, including one at the Abbey, survived funding cuts. Writers and performers took advantage of an increasing number of stages, festivals, and town halls to produce their shows. And between the bank bailout, the exposure of corruption, and a mass economic hysteria, it’s not as if there wasn’t anything for the playwrights to write about. Irish companies certainly didn’t give up producing those big, ambitious dramas of the past. The Druid Theatre Company’s production of The Silver Tassie, O’Casey’s play about two young footballers transported from Ireland to the battlefields of World War I, was not just ambitious: it was epic. Everything about the production, which toured nationally and internationally, was big: its cast of nineteen (the largest in Druid history), the colossal tank looming over