Playboys, Demons, and the Last Kick of a Tiger: Irish Theater in 2007

Abstract

A man hangs by his entrails from a construction crane high above the Dublin skyline; a woman crawling toward her death asks that what ever is left of the cof fin of her stillborn child be placed on top of hers, so that the baby will sink back into her bones; in West Dublin, in a contemporary working of Synge's Playboy, girls film a pub brawl on their mobile phones. These are some of the novel, memorable images from the 2007 crop of Irish drama. Urban imagery was pervasive. More than a full century after Joyce began to imagine the wanderings of his characters around the city immortalized in Ulysses, Irish drama spanned contemporary Dublin: Ballymun towers, Parnell Street bars, devils in Baldoyle, playboys in West Dublin, flying demons in Dol lymount, and a dramatization of Molly Blooms soliloquy from her Eccles Street bed. Dublin provided the discordant, fragmented, and often violent landscape where theatrical meaning was forged in the Ireland of 2007. (The Dublin obses sion extended beyond theater as well; last year, Anne Enright won the Man Booker prize for her novel The Gathering, a portrayal of a gritty, funny, and trag ic Dublin family.) And Ireland's distinctive association with theater controver sy was recalled in the centenary of the Abbey riots at the performance of Synge's Playboy ofthe Western World, and the fifty-year anniversary of the arrest of the Pike Theatres Alan Simpson at the inaugural Dublin Theatre Festival in 1957 for alleged indecency in the performance of Tennessee Williams's Rose Tattoo. The dominant impression of the year, though, is that it marked a point of change for Irish theater, mirroring the waning of the Celtic Tiger; in 2007, Irish economic and growth indicators were already showing signs of the recession that emerged clearly in 2008. These changes made themselves evident in the way Irish theater grappled with issues of internationalization, and commercializa tion models, with the relationship between popular and artistic success, and with weaknesses in the national theatrical infrastructure. Fittingly, the Abbey staged a performance of a new version of The Playboy in the centenary year of its inaugural production. The centenary was also marked by a DruidSynge production of the Synge classic, and in distant parts, at the 2007 Tokyo International Festival. These two events conveyed the endur