Retreats from Theatricality in Contemporary Irish Drama

Abstract

Retreats from Theatricality in Contemporary Irish Drama Michal Lachman Irish drama is routinely associated with play, performance, make-believe, and role-playing, and as a result, the characters are very often seen as artists, performers, poets, or simply as creative talkers.1 It has become a critical cliché to picture the protagonists of Irish drama as split, doubled, torn apart, and hetero-topic; in other words, as individuals who are imaginatively engaged with self-fashioned fictions about themselves. However, a closer look at many Irish plays reveals that often their strategic aim is to suspend the sense of theatricality and to subvert the work’s fictional nature. Dramatic characters strive to verbalize their private experience in such a way as to stress the fact that it is presented in a pure, unmediated mode, reaching deeper into the internal truth of the dramatic personae. It is time for critics to reconsider the notions of staged “authenticity” and “actuality” in Irish drama. Usually, what springs from the competitive presence of voices, stories, imagined realities, and fantasy worlds on stage is the characters’ eager need to find their own voice and express the unrehearsed, authentic self. In most plays, the moments in which this need is expressed are marked with an altered diction, and sometimes, in a language of distinctively greater grammatical simplicity and clarity. Moreover, many playwrights make a particular effort to set the scene for sequences of such confessional naturality by marking the passage from acted behavior to authentic presence with rearrangements in set design and space. Just as there are specific ways of presenting the theatrical and staged variety of individual identity, there are also methods of staging authenticity and of creating a sense of an unmediated contact with the character and their self. There are, then, vital questions to be answered: Where is the space for character’s authenticity of expression? How is it possible that the reader is allowed to sense that the moment of truth is coming or that the text is about to bring a vital revelation? [End Page 110] The discussion that follows concerns the literary concept of theatricality and representations of authenticity described in dramatic texts, rather than actual theatrical performances. And this discussion is general, and perhaps selective, as it attempts trace a connecting line that highlights the presence of theatricality in Irish drama. Most of the plays discussed are recent, including works by Brian Friel, Frank McGuinness, Martin McDonagh, and Enda Walsh; but Yeats’s Words Upon the Window Pane (1930) is also a noteworthy text. The key issue is the question of how characters in Irish drama relate to their own stories and fictions they live in—and consequently, of how they investigate, subvert, and circumvent the layers of artifice in the attempt to control them and reach a deeper, more authentic vision or understanding of themselves and the world around them. The character in search of his or her voice raises a complex set of theoretical and practical problems. Central to this discussion is the concept of a dramatic character who is, on the one hand, a generator of stories and producer of fiction and illusion, and on the other hand, a person involved in activities that subvert or question the pretense and theatricality of the fictional world of which he or she is part. This ambivalent attitude toward theatricality—simultaneously accepting it and questioning it—defines the experience of many protagonists in Irish drama, who see beyond the artificial in order to undertake a quest leading to a more direct contact with the self or the world. Frequently, the internal questioning of theatricality and artifice takes the form of a phenomenological “rediscovery” of the world. The known and familiar reality presents itself to the characters in a new way; it reveals itself in its more essential and immediate mode despite the existing layers of theatricality, linguistic bravado, or verbosity. The search helps the characters develop a different attitude toward other protagonists, as well as discover and establish new practices of action. The rejection of artifice and the retreats from theatricality undertaken by dramatic characters remain vital turning points in the structural and philosophical composition of the plays. Even if...