The school play and the murder machine: Nationalism and amateur theatre in the work of Patrick Pearse and Rabindranath Tagore

Abstract

Using as its starting point the performance of Patrick Pearse’s An Rí and Rabindranath Tagore’s The Post Office at the Abbey Theatre, Dublin in 1913, this article explores the importance of performance in the two men’s approach to anti-colonial theory and practice. It argues that this “oddity of Irish theatre history”, as Robert Welch terms it, brought together two parallel traditions of thought and activism in Ireland and Bengal that found fullest expression in the plays made by Pearse and Tagore for their respective schools. Their treatment of cultural identity suggests the ways in which new formations of indigeneity and modernity were set against colonial modes of instruction whilst also marking a distinctive divergence from developing models of nationalist organization in the colonies. Viewing these school plays as political agencies allows a reappraisal of the importance of Tagore’s and Pearse’s educational theories, and of amateur theatres within postcolonial studies more generally.