Abbey Theatre Research Articles

P. J. Lynch: Ireland ⋆ Illustrator

P. J. LynchIreland ⋆ Illustrator Tia Lalani Born in Belfast Ireland in 1962, the youngest of five children, P. J. Lynch has noted that "burying [himself] in books, and the little worlds they created on a page, was a good way of escaping for a while from the horrors that were happening around [him] in the real world." Lynch pursued his own personal form of escape and studied under Raymond Briggs at Brighton College of Art. Studying in Brighton lead directly to Lynch's first publication, the illustrations for a collection of tales from England and Wales titled A Bag of Moonshine, which won him the Mother Goose award in 1986, and he has won several awards since. Lynch's impressive use of light and contrast creates his characteristic serious style. Instead of simply describing the text at hand, Lynch works hard to point the reader towards his or her own observations about atmosphere and emotion, using warm colors or cool colors where appropriate. Lynch's original illustrations only made use of ink and watercolor, though he has now includes oils, and uses computer graphics when he begins a project. The way Lynch goes about his illustrations proves just as interesting as the finished product. He takes his time in researching image and text before he even attempts a story, and often uses photographs or real life models on which to base his characters. Although Lynch does not have a large body of work, his meticulous attention to detail inspires the reader to go beyond the surface in each and every one of his illustrations. The work itself is also quite varied, as Lynch's images can quickly go from endearing to grotesque, and he demonstrates skill in portraying an epic landscape on one page while conveying the intimacy of a domestic scene on the next. Lynch has illustrated stories from some of the greats, including Edith Nesbit, William Butler Yeats and Oscar Wilde. He has also created posters for Opera Ireland and the Abbey Theatre, as well as a Christmas stamp collection for the Irish post, and in 2006, completed two largescale oil murals depicting scenes from Gulliver's Travels at the Cavan County Library. Lynch's ability to branch out of the conventional mold of a children's book illustrator is a testament to his diverse skill, and although Lynch professes to draw not only for children but also for all ages, he has had great success in the field of children's literature. Selected Bibliography • A Christmas Carol. Text Charles Dickens. UK: Walker, 2006. Print. Google Scholar • The Christmas Miracle of Jonathan Toomey. Text Susan Wojciechowski. UK: Walker, 1994. Print. Google Scholar • Mysterious Traveller. Text Mal Peet and Elspeth Graham. UK: Walker, 2013. Print. Google Scholar • The Steadfast Tin Soldier. Text Hans Christian Andersen. UK: Andersen, 1993. Print. Google Scholar • When Jessie Came Across the Sea. Text Amy Hest. UK: Walker, 1996. Print. [End Page 30] Google Scholar Copyright © 2014 Bookbird, Inc.

Unlikely Heroes: Katharine Tynan's The Story of Bawn, the Irish Famine, and the Sentimental Tradition

In this article, I argue that the effort to write the ‘unwritten’ Famine is not only visible in canonical Irish writers of the Modernist moment, but also in its less canonical writers and genres – particularly, in this essay, the sentimental fiction of Katharine Tynan. This essay functions to recuperate Tynan's fiction from a qualified reputation understood through her friendship with W.B. Yeats, and informed by his assessment of her work. In particular, an extended analysis of Tynan's The Story of Bawn demonstrates the narrative strategies through which Tynan's sentimental romances offered scathing critiques of Ireland's politics, economics, and gender inequities. Through these strategies, Tynan sought not only to entertain, but to educate middle-class women about their world in a method comparable to the satires produced by the Abbey Theatre and anticipating the strategies that would be taken up by the avant-garde Modernists on the Continent.

Old Stories, New Styles: Irish Theater in 2012

Old Stories, New Styles: Irish Theater in 2012 Nelson Barre Theater in Ireland continued its long tradition of storytelling and remembering the past in 2012. It was a season dominated by two giants of the Irish canon: James Joyce and Tom Murphy. Adaptations of Joyce’s work were numerous and frequent, as companies large and small celebrated the end of copyright restrictions on the author’s work. Revivals of works from Murphy’s oeuvre, as well as those of internationally renowned writers, represented another large portion of the theatrical year. Notable original productions, such as Shaun Dunne’s Death of the Tradesmen or WillFredd Theatre’s Farm, told old stories in innovative ways, even though a larger number of these plays focused on the past and new ways of reconciling with it. Such writers as Emma Donoghue and Declan Hughes took audiences back in time with their plays, while such groups as Dublin-based Pan Pan Theatre Company and thisispopbaby thrust stories of the distant past into the present. Both companies exercised their experimental performance styles by repurposing canonical stories for contemporary audiences. From the traditional play to the post-dramatic, Irish theater looked backward in order to speak to audiences here and now in new ways. Irish theatrical projects in the past year took up themes of repressed identity, emigration, and the need to move forward; projects ranged from major touring productions about people leaving and returning home to low-budget shows in which on-stage figures encouraged the search for a place in the global landscape. On the first day of 2012, the copyright on James Joyce’s writings expired, signaling the start of a year of adaptation and performance. The demise of this copyright granted freedom and access for scholars and artists to use the words as much or as little as they liked. Companies that had been itching to perform or adapt Joyce could finally do proper homage to the author who is, after all, one of Ireland’s best-known exports. Best among the adaptations was Corn Exchange’s version of Dubliners, one of the main offerings of the Dublin Theatre Festival. Corn Exchange needed to make their style accessible for the larger scale of the Gaiety Theatre (which seats close to 1,200); it is usually geared to smaller venues such as Dublin’s Project Arts Centre, which suits the Corn Exchanges’s commedia background and the company’s precision of facial [End Page 87] expressions and physical gestures. Their Dubliners ran to almost three hours in performance, and that was with several of Joyce’s stories excised for length and lack of dramatic translatability. Director Annie Ryan and playwright Michael West adapted Joyce’s works and showed that any audience could enjoy the production, whether they were intimately familiar with or had no previous knowledge of the stories. Under the bold physicality of Corn Exchange’s treatment, Joyce’s short stories pulsed with a dramatic energy that both captured the original source and allowed experimentation in the staging process. Corn Exchange left the text mostly intact. It was the style of delivery that provided the originality. During the performance, characters shifted between direct address to the audience and dialogue within the scene, intermingling narrative and action. The exaggerated physicality and commedia-style makeup heightened an emphasis on the comic elements. This style gave the production a somewhat jarring pace at times, but often allowed the performers latitude for playful invention. Several of the pieces—notably “An Encounter,” “Two Gallants,” “Counterparts,” and “A Mother”—provided plenty of the company’s customary physicality while also adhering to the stories. Of particular note were Mark O’Halloran’s pedophilic mannerisms leading to onstage masturbation in “An Encounter” and Stephen Jones and Nick Lee’s slapstick-style routines and repetitions in “The Boarding House,” which displayed the company’s ability to take a canonical text and hilariously tell its story in their own way. The Abbey Theatre presented The Dead, adapted by Frank McGuinness, appropriately just in time for the Christmas season and beyond. The playwright’s adaptation resulted in a more focused version of the final tale in Dubliners than the twenty minutes allotted at the...

Conflicting Counter-Hegemonies?: The Dramaturgy of James Connolly and Sean O' Casey

This paper examines the radicalism of James Connolly through the optic of theatre and performance. In particular, I test his only extant play-script—written shortly before his death—against the hostile critique of the dramatist Sean O’Casey. Despite the biographical similarities between these two men, O’Casey expressed deep disappointment with the climax of Connolly’s career as a labor agitator, organizer and revolutionary socialist, criticizing him for having travelled from socialism to nationalism, a journey which O’Casey had seemingly made in reverse. I offer a rereading of Connolly’s play to show that the situation is more complex than that envisaged by O’Casey. Although his dramaturgy is indebted to the nationalism of Yeats and Gregory, Connolly is eager to distance his play from the economic and social ordering endorsed by those Abbey Theatre directors. Furthermore, this essay subjects O’Casey’s own critique to revision in the light of his own later playwriting. By examining his little-known Oak Leaves and Lavender I show that O’Casey was—like Connolly—ready to endorse military action in the name of nationalism, if such action provided the hope of ultimately advancing the cause of the left. The paper concludes with some reflections on O’Casey’s late endorsement of English and Welsh nationalisms, by considering how the expression of socialism in colonized Ireland (1890-1916) might contrast with the expression of socialism among expatriate or secondgeneration Irish men and women in wartime/post-war Britain (1939 onwards). I therefore finish by examining the work of the Connolly Association, the plays of Margaretta D’Arcy and John Arden, and genesis of The Dubliners’ 1970 LP, Revolution, to show how—as the twentieth century continued—the expression of Irish socialism may have continued to develop through contact with very different kinds of national sentiment.

The Abbey Theatre, censorship, and the Irish State: adding the half-pence to the pence. By Lauren Arrington. Pp vi, 210. Oxford: Oxford University Press. 2010. €66.

The Abbey Theatre, censorship, and the Irish State: adding the half-pence to the pence. By Lauren Arrington. Pp vi, 210. Oxford: Oxford University Press. 2010. €66.

Liminality in Brian Friel’s Wonderful Tennessee

After the worldwide success of the 1990 play Dancing at Lughnasa, Brian Friel (Omagh, 1929), a playwright known for his search for new ways of dealing with his old preoccupations, created what many critics understood as a sequel to that play.Wonderful Tennessee, which premiered in 1993 at the Abbey Theatre, has been frequently considered Lughnasa’s younger and plainer sister. Whereas the seductiveness of the former cannot be denied, I intend to defend in this article the importance in Friel’s oeuvre of Wonderful Tennessee, a play rich in meaning and original in form that presents a complete rite of passage as described in Victor Turner’s anthropological studies. Friel unites elements that form part of ancient, Celtic and Christian rituals to show what has forever been humanity’s aim: the attainment of the absolute.

Liminality in Brian Friel’s Wonderful Tennessee

After the worldwide success of the 1990 play Dancing at Lughnasa, Brian Friel (Omagh, 1929), a playwright known for his search for new ways of dealing with his old preoccupations, created what many critics understood as a sequel to that play.Wonderful Tennessee, which premiered in 1993 at the Abbey Theatre, has been frequently considered Lughnasa’s younger and plainer sister. Whereas the seductiveness of the former cannot be denied, I intend to defend in this article the importance in Friel’s oeuvre of Wonderful Tennessee, a play rich in meaning and original in form that presents a complete rite of passage as described in Victor Turner’s anthropological studies. Friel unites elements that form part of ancient, Celtic and Christian rituals to show what has forever been humanity’s aim: the attainment of the absolute.

The Shannon Scheme, Rural Electrification, and Veiled History in Conor McPherson's The Weir

The Shannon Scheme, Rural Electrification, and Veiled History in Conor McPherson's The Weir Andrew Hazucha It is a commonplace observation among critics of Conor McPherson (b. 1971) that he is an apolitical playwright, largely uninfluenced by Irish history or Ireland's twentieth-century emergence as a modern postcolonial state.1 A native Dubliner whose plays are typically set in present-day urban environments, McPherson has, in the past, steadfastly resisted references in his works to the longue durée of British colonial rule, or for that matter to the birth, and the associated birth pangs, of postcolonial Ireland. However, in McPherson's most recent play, The Veil (2011)—his first in five years—he has shown himself to be thematically engaged with Irish history and identity; it is a period piece set in rural Ireland in 1822 at a bankrupt Anglo-Irish landed estate, where a bad harvest and starving local peasants bring the household's inhabitants to the psychological breaking point. The play's haunted Ascendancy estate and hostile environs become, as several reviewers have noted, a synecdoche for Ireland—including its troubled colonial history, its centuries-long position as a subaltern culture, its traumatized national psyche.2 [End Page 67] In interviews, McPherson has endorsed this reading of his play, confessing to a newfound interest in Irish historical and political events dating back some two hundred years. In a September 2011 interview with the Guardian, for example, McPherson states that he set The Veil in the 1820s because of the similarities between what he calls the "big economic crash following the Napoleonic wars" and the recent implosion of the Celtic Tiger. Citing the "post-colonial corruption and mismanagement" of the Irish economy, McPherson adds that prior to Ireland's economic collapse he would always have said, "I was born in Ireland, but I'm not an Irish writer—I'm a writer. Now I realise: of course I'm an Irish writer."3 In another 2011 interview, McPherson describes how, as the Irish economy started to disintegrate at the end of 2008, he began taking notes on Irish economic history. "For the first time," he says, "I realised the public can share a dysfunctional psyche, and that psyche can be generational. The Irish Famine is only five generations ago. I began to realise the mess we'd got ourselves into must have come from some tremendous trauma. For the first time, I accepted I am Irish—up till then I'd always felt European or a citizen of the world."4 But is the playwright's political and historical consciousness is an entirely new development, or has been there all along, albeit in less overt forms? It would be easy to accept McPherson's own assessment of himself and conclude that he has arrived at an epiphany at the age of forty. And yet, a rereading of his early breakthrough play, The Weir (1997), which he wrote when he was just twenty-five-years-old, suggests that an attention to a formative Irish historical event—and an awareness of a literary precedent for using that event—were both influences in his formulation of the play dating back to its first production in 1997. The Weir is widely celebrated for the psychological and emotional depth of its characters. Less widely noted are the ways in which it also masterfully links the nascent Free State government's harnessing of natural resources in the 1920s, specifically the damming of the lower Shannon River, with the "New Ireland's" rage for economic development at the cost of a vanishing landscape some seven decades later. In doing so, it also calls attention to Denis Johnston's [End Page 68] The Moon in the Yellow River, a play that made its debut at the Abbey Theatre in 1931 and which is set, like McPherson's work, against the backdrop of the much-trumpetedhydroelectric project at Ardnacrusha. Although McPherson has singled out James Joyce as one of his influences, Johnston's play is clearly the most practical antecedent for The Weir.5 Michael Rubenstein's recent Public Works: Infrastructure, Irish Modernism, and the Postcolonial (2010) has usefully posited that the problem of modernity confronting...

Sons

Sons Michael Coffey (bio) He should Google it—roses of the unborn—the random phrase flashes through. Meanwhile, he’ll just mince around his midden of sneakers and loafers and those leather ankle boots she bought him that he hates and take another sip—the glass sits in a little sock cubby. It’s dark in here. The liquid burns like distilled fire, which, in a sense, it is. Slow sips, coal smoke, Laphroaig in a California closet. Yessir. Not shit at all. Where was he? Joyce, perhaps. A little too romantic. Auden, maybe . . . Loved roses. The unborn . . . If he had his Blackberry he could check it right now. He thinks he hears something. The She. He knew it. Good thing he’s in the closet. And the She’s out there—her shadow through the louvered door. Quiet now. He laughs—damn! But fuck it, it is funny: I’m a closet drinker is the thought he has just had and it is funny, funny when the figurative becomes literal, that’s comedy, isn’t it. Make a note of it. The door opens and his heart does a gallop. Her face and hair and gray suit right there. “I thought I heard something,” says She. “Imagine my surprise.” He can smell the acid of gone love in her breath, like ashes. “I got lost,” he says to wife number three, who just stands there, adjusting an earring with both hands as if tightening a bolt in a mask. Several beats. “And now you’re found again,” she says in a mock-childlike voice, pivoting. “We’ll be late for the theater.” It’s Kerouac, he remembers, and throws back the rest of his Scotch. “The roses of the unborn behind his closed eyelids.” Big Sur. Borkman, Borkman, Borkman and the shit does not hit the fan. That’s the problem with wife number three: she’s got her own problems that she prefers a blind eye to be cast upon, her Tiresias, and he doesn’t mind, and so she does not even call her man on his Scotch-in-the-closet trick. The quid, the pro, the quo. A classic co-dependency. She smokes and fasts and has her injections of Juvederm and Perlane; he has his five or six drinks a day, the patch, and an online gambling account. She has the indoor gym, he has the little writing studio. Little is done of late in either. But why mention it. Borkman, John Gabriel. Ibsen’s next-to-last play. It’s from the Abbey Theatre, Frank McGuinness directing. They are schlepping to Brooklyn to see it and they are late. Or at least, they hustle down Church Street for the subway [End Page 81] as if they are late. She welcomes the exercise, and he inwardly brightens at the prospect of an early arrival and time for a cold one in the lobby. It’ll work out just like that. Must we narrate the 2 train to Atlantic Avenue? It can be cut, in life’s edit, if nothing happens or too much else of greater interest happens elsewhere or there’s a paper shortage or early death. But give it a chance: they crush through the turnstile one after the other and actually touch, a bit of comedy, Keystone Cop–style, when he hastily steps into the same leg-gap as the She and they jam to a halt, his front touching her backside, till he extricates himself with a backward hop. She actually smiles. “Jesus, keen for Ibsen?” Lost. The train is crowded—it is about 7:20, a Friday night. He checks his messages. She finds a seat, though, down the car; while he hangs on to his spot near the door. He can watch her. But not for long, for she looks at nothing, somehow. At no one or thing. She is no one. If there were a fire before her she would not see it. It would not see her. She’s moved to another world. She’s looking at a child eating an ice cream cone, her self, one knee skinned and her Mary Janes dangling from a...

Review of Shakespeare's Macbeth (directed by Jimmy Fay) at the Abbey Theatre, Dublin, 10 May 2010

This splendid Abbey Theatre production presented a Macbeth that was conventional in its depiction of a crass usurper who bites off more than he can chew, but was often innovative in its depiction o...

The Irish Connection: Tyrone Guthrie and Regional Theater

The Irish Connection:Tyrone Guthrie and Regional Theater Patrick O'Donnell On June 27, 2006, the North American premiere of DruidSynge by Galway's Druid Theatre Company took place in the Tyrone Guthrie Theater in Minneapolis, the first production in a $125 million, three-stage structure on a new site that included thrust, proscenium, and black box stages. The premiere and the dazzling building bespoke newness and originality; but the occasion also reminded attendees of an extraordinary continuity in the Minneapolis company's history. The most conspicuous continuity was the fact that two Irishmen had played central parts in the Guthrie's history. Sir Tyrone Guthrie had founded the theater as a classics-based thrust stage theater and served as its first artistic director from 1963 to 1966. Joe Dowling had become the seventh artistic director in 1995, and it was under his leadership that the Guthrie had been reinvented in this new location. As a local journalist noted, The new Guthrie Theater is the manifest vision of one man—Joe Dowling, a fighter and a visionary, a wit and an emissary of American theatre. But who is he really? When the curtain rises on the new Guthrie, the playhouse will still bear the name of Tyrone Guthrie, the Irish director who ignited America's regional performing arts movement when he opened a theatre in Minneapolis in 1963. But the marquee credit for the $125 million riverfront megastructure that debuts in June belongs to another Irishman. Joe Dowling, artistic director since 1995, has led the Guthrie through a long and sometimes bruising quest for a bold new building designed by French architect Jean Nouvel—and into a new era.1 Dowling was acutely aware of the links; he had, in fact, employed his connection to the Irish roots of Sir Tyrone Guthrie to shape an inspiring and enabling narrative that led to moving, expanding, and re-inventing the theater. In his first press conference at the Guthrie Theater after his appointment, Dowling had declared, "I have all my life been inspired by the life and work of Tyrone Guthrie. People often think that because Guthrie was knighted, he was English. I am here to correct that misconception."2 Dowling brought a comprehensive [End Page 127] sense of Guthrie's Irish connections to his appointment. Guthrie (1900-1971) was very much a living presence among Dowling's theatrical colleagues. Dowling had joined the Abbey Theatre as a student in 1967, was accepted into the company in 1968, and began ascending the rungs of authority at the Irish National Theatre after 1970. Both Dowling's mentors, the playwright Brian Friel and Tomás Mac Anna, artistic director at the Abbey from 1973 to 1978, were deeply influenced by Guthrie. Friel attended the inaugural rehearsals of the Guthrie Theater from April to June, 1963, and completed his masterly evisceration of small-town emotional paralysis, Philadelphia, Here I Come! on returning to Ireland from his Minneapolis sojourn. Mac Anna credited Guthrie's visually stylish 1950 Gate Hamlet with influencing his inventive Irish language pantomimes and invited Guthrie to present both George Shiels's McCook's Corner and Eugene McCabe's Swift at the Abbey in 1968-69.3 Mac Anna would direct Juno and the Paycock at the Guthrie Theater in 1973 at the invitation of Guthrie's protégé, Michael Langham, before returning to Dublin to helm the Abbey and allow his own protégé, Joe Dowling to run the Peacock, the Abbey's second experimental stage. Many of Dowling's other colleagues had been imprinted by Guthrie's passion for theater. For instance Hugh Hunt, the Abbey's artistic director from 1969-70 had encouraged Dowling to set up the Young Abbey, Ireland's first theatre-in-education group, and had served as Guthrie's assistant at the Old Vic from 1951 to 1952. The web of connection can be extended through almost the whole of the Irish theatrical community.4 [End Page 128] Joseph Zeigler, in Regional Theatre: The Revolutionary Stage (1973) categorizes the development and evolution of the regional theater movement in three images: "acorn" theatres, which were small theaters before 1960; "sapling" or intermediary and middle-sized theaters after...

Colonialism and the recreation of identity: The Irish Theatre as case study

This study aims at highlighting the role of the Irish theatre in reviving Irish culture and establishing a dependent Irish identity. It also seeks to prove that theatre is used as means of resistance to English colonialism; it presents W. B. Yeats as an example of the Irish dramatists who played a significant role in the recreation of Irish national identity as an independent distinct identity. Actually, Yeats’ efforts in the national employment of literature for national purposes were the fountainhead by which he was able to present the national cause of his country. The study concludes that the Irish theatre played a great national role by presenting nationalism-oriented plays that aroused the sense of national feelings of audiences and created a national identity as well. Irish theatre imposingly for grounded itself powerfully not on the literary level, but also on the national level by its role in identity creation. Key words: Colonialism and the recreation of identity, theatre and nationalism, Irish culture, The Abbey Theatre, literature and identity formation, multi –culturalism, new historicism.

Lauren Arrington, W.B. Yeats, the Abbey Theatre, Censorship, and the Irish State: Adding the Half-Pence to the Pence. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010. 224 pages. £66.00 GBP (hardback).

Lauren Arrington, <i>W.B. Yeats, the Abbey Theatre, Censorship, and the Irish State: Adding the Half-Pence to the Pence</i>. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010. 224 pages. £66.00 GBP (hardback).

Avon Calling: The Influence of Frank Benson on the Irish Theatre

This essay reassesses the position of the British actor-manager Frank Benson within the Irish theatrical tradition. Benson has been derided for his involvement in premiering Diarmuid and Grania for the Irish Literary Theatre in 1901, a production described by Gerard Fay as ‘the last time Dubliners had to call in English actors before they could see a production of an Irish play’. However, as this essay argues, that production may not have been as badly received as Fay implies, and in any case should scarcely occlude the long-term influence of Benson's numerous well-received Dublin performances. The earlier productions given by the Benson's company exerted an influence on the dramatic vision of the young Seán O'Casey, who acted out the troupe's most famous Shakespearean scenes, and later incorporated what he had seen into the Dublin trilogy. Likewise Yeats travelled to Stratford specifically to watch Benson perform, and found there a set of ideas about modernity, regionalism, and patronage that would inform the poet's own playwriting and management of the Abbey Theatre in Dublin.

Juno and the Paycock , and: The Veil (review)

Reviewed by: Juno and the Paycock, and: The Veil Andrea Grunert Juno and the Paycock. By Sean O’Casey. Directed by Howard Davies. Abbey Theatre, Dublin. 29 September 2011. The Veil. By Conor McPherson. Directed by Conor McPherson. Royal National Theatre, London. 25 October 2011. Two productions, in Dublin and London respectively, recently revealed the richness of contemporary Irish theatre production and added a new episode to the close and complex relationship between Irish dramatists and British theatre. The O’Casey play that opened Dublin’s Ulster Bank Theatre Festival in 2011 was the first cooperation between the Abbey Theatre and the National Theatre of Great Britain. Directed by Howard Davies, one of the most prolific directors at the National, the play included renowned actors in the leading roles: Sinéad Cusack played Juno Boyle, and Ciarán Hinds played her husband Jack. Conor McPherson’s play had its world premiere at the Lyttelton, one of the three theatres that make up the Royal National Theatre. As with his previous plays, he directed the first production of The Veil himself. His play is set in a manor in the Irish countryside, a hundred years before the events of Juno and the Paycock. Irish literature has not mapped the 1820s very well, but it was a crucial period with regard to the history of sectarian violence in the country. Anglo-Irish Protestant landlords are the protagonists, which is a rare choice in Irish literature. The two plays share many themes and figures: strong female characters, the troubled Irish past, the supernatural and superstition, individual and collective action, and human and political failure. Jack Boyle’s peacock-masculinity prefigures the crisis of masculinity, a topic much cherished by contemporary Irish playwrights, including McPherson, who obsessively explores it in his plays and films and in The Veil contrasts strong-minded women with weak [End Page 427] men who are only braggarts. Moreover, and significantly for the present period of recession haunting Irish and British society, the two productions dealt with poverty. Juno and the Paycock emphasized an overall sense of poverty and deprivation, and although the poor were invisible in McPherson’s play, poverty and misery cast their shadow. The ghostly appearances of starving people were mentioned on several occasions, as well as hatred of the ruling class and the Irishmen who work for it. McPherson’s historical play links very clearly the traumatic effects on the Irish psyche of economic decline after the Napoleonic Wars with the crisis in post–Celtic Tiger Ireland. Click for larger view View full resolution Sinéad Cusack (Juno Boyle) in Juno and the Paycock by Sean O’Casey. (Photo: Mark Douet.) O’Casey and McPherson address historical events and their respective social problems—social decline and impoverishment—through the representation of individual fate and inner conflict. Although deeply rooted in Irish culture, these two works have a transcultural humanist significance. While O’Casey’s concerns went far beyond Irish nationalism, McPherson’s interest in existential questions, the place of the human being in the universe, is clearly situated in its own Irish cultural context. Although the historical and social settings contrast, the two plays correspond both in content (the decline of a family, even if the consequences are different for McPherson’s upper-class protagonists and for the Boyles) and tone (the blend of tragic and comic elements). McPherson’s work fits perfectly into the tradition of an Irish theatre fascinated by storytelling and attentive to the subtleties of language, accent, and idiom. One might ask what there was to interest the contemporary viewer in narrative and directorial choices so obviously inspired by realism. Why did these productions reconstruct the atmosphere of the past in order to address burning contemporary issues like poverty? Realism, as the two productions demonstrated, is not a homogeneous block, but a complex system of conventions and illusions, and both productions explored and transcended this system. Bob Crawley’s set design for Juno and the Paycock immediately revealed the directorial strategy to merge historical veracity and a metaphorical approach. The curtain rose to reveal a huge stage with a table and chairs, an armchair in the foreground, an oven, a small closet...

Lessons from the Land: Shaw's John Bull's Other Island

John Bull’s Other Island is George Bernard Shaw’s only full-length play that devotes sustained attention to Ireland and Irish issues. The play has often been dismissed by critics as being too much about Ireland to appeal to a wide audience. With the increased interest in recent years toward the role of place in literature, though, John Bull’s Other Island deserves closer examination. Ideas of place, landscape, the built or natural environment, home, and emplacedness have all played important parts in Irish literature. Beyond the aesthetic role that the environment plays, ecocriticism seeks to find ecological messages in literature. These include an “ecocentric perspective that recognizes the interdependent nature of the world,” “an imperative toward humility in relationships with both human and non human [sic] nature,” and “an intense skepticism concerning hyperrationality, a skepticism that usually leads to an indictment of an overtechnologized modern world and a warning concerning the very real potential for ecological catastrophe.” An ecocritical reading of Shaw’s Irish play not only allows the role of place and the human connection to it to come to the fore, but also reveals Shaw’s concern for ecological issues long before the popular green movements of the late twentieth and twenty-first centuries. John Bull’s Other Island takes up the issues of land ownership and land use. The name of the play itself highlights the reality that ownership of the entire island of Ireland rested in England, and not in Ireland itself. The play was written and first performed in 1904, the same year that the Abbey Theatre was es-

Embodying Resistance: Gendering Public Space in Ragtime Social Dance

In this article Holly Maples examines how the controversy surrounding the ragtime dance craze in the United States allowed women to renegotiate acceptable gendered behaviour in the public sphere. In the early 1910s many members of the public performed acts of resistance to convention by dancing in the workplace, on the street, and in public halls. Civic institutions and private organizations sought to censor and control both the public space of the dance hall and the bodies of its participants. The controlling of social dance was an attempt to restrain what those opposed to the dances saw as unrestrained and indecent physical behaviour by the nation's youth, primarily targeting ragtime dancing's ‘moral degradation’ of young women. It was not merely the public nature of the dancing that was seen as dangerous to women, however, but the dances themselves, many of which featured chaotic, off-centred choreography, with either highly sexualized behaviour, as seen in the tango and the apache dance, or clumsy, un-gendered movement, popular in the animal dances of the day. Through ragtime dancing, women performed acts of rupture on their bodies and the urban cityscape, transforming social dancing into public statements of gendered resistance. Holly Maples is a lecturer in Drama at the University of East Anglia. Both a theatre practitioner and a scholar, she trained as an actress at Central School of Speech and Drama in London and completed her PhD in Theatre Studies at Trinity College Dublin. Her book, Culture War: Conflict, Commemoration, and the Contemporary Abbey Theatre, has recently been published in the ‘Reimagining Ireland’ series by Peter Lang.

Ibsen and the Irish Revival (review)

Reviewed by: Ibsen and the Irish Revival Patrick Burke Irina Ruppo Malone, Ibsen and the Irish Revival. Palgrave Macmillan, 2010. xi+223 pp. In some ways, as its title suggests, the thrust of Dr Irina Ruppo Malone’s study runs counter to the integrative approaches to the Irish Literary Revival, currently deemed to be more critically useful, key elements of which have been intelligently examined in “New Perspectives on the Irish Literary Revival,” a special issue of Irish University Review (33/1, 2003). In his Field Day monograph, Revival (Cork University Press, 2003), P. J. Mathews, a contributor to “New Perpectives” and arguably the leading advocate of the integrative approach, names the defining elements of the Revival as the Abbey Theatre, Sinn Fein, the Gaelic League, and the Co-operative Movement. Dr. Ruppo Malone proceeds by a different road: in her conclusion she defines the scholarly ambition of her book: to “use Ibsen and Ireland to examine the patterns of interrelation between literary influence and dramatic reception” (177). To fulfill this aim, discussion of “the international dimension of the Irish Literary Revival, a movement often misconstrued as a narrowly nationalist phenomenon” (176), is a critical essential. The standard accounts of drama in the Revival (Malone, Ellis-Fermor, Robinson, and, more recently, Murray, Grene, Levitas, and Morash) agree in addressing as of central significance the high ambition of Yeats, Lady Gregory, [End Page 365] and others in the 1890s to bring into being a Celtic and Irish theater, which for Yeats would be essentially poetic, having nothing of the “objective” or the journalistic about it; the theatrical know-how of the amateur Fay brothers, without which the Abbey Theatre would never have developed; the solitary and unique genius of Synge; the final triumph within the Abbey of such realists as William Boyle, Padraic Colum, T. C. Murray, and Lennox Robinson. Informative parallel assessments of the Abbey’s rival theaters (the Theatre of Ireland, the Gate) have been provided by William Feeney and Christopher Fitz-Simon, respectively. In Ibsen and the Irish Revival, Ruppo Malone, whose research is exemplary in its breadth and thoroughness, deftly exposes some of the half-truths and skewed emphases to be found in the standard accounts, notably the false assumption that Yeats could not be other than hostile to Ibsen, as if the kind of theater to which the Abbey aspired would of poetic necessity be hostile to Ibsen’s prose. As early as 1894, in his highly positive review of a new translation of Brand, Yeats commends Ibsen warmly, albeit hinting at his own preference for the Norwegian as a poet rather than a realistic dramatist. In 1897, and again in 1901, he was still describing him as “the one great master the modern stage has produced” (Ruppo Malone 40). By 1904, however, the foundation year of the Abbey Theatre, the art of Ibsen had become “terrible, satirical, inhuman,” even if such assessments are based almost exclusively on Ibsen’s 1880s plays of social concern — The Pillars of Society, A Doll’s House, Ghosts, and An Enemy of the People. What had happened in the intervening three years? Tot homines, quot sententiae. As Ruppo Malone invitingly observes, “the question of Ibsen’s influence on Yeats . . . remains under-researched” (6). The title of her work, quite deliberately, in my opinion, invites, by means of that innocent “and,” a charge of lack of focus — Ibsen as an influence on the Revival? The Revival as an influence on Ibsen? Ibsen’s impact on contemporary Irish dramatists? Neither Ruppo Malone nor any other critic is in a position to supply what might have been anticipated in a study such as this — levels of popular or scholarly interest in the rehearsal processes or live performances of Ibsen plays in Ireland: for much of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, very few of the plays had been actually performed. It was 1923 before the Abbey presented its own A Doll’s House, the delay possibly affected by the lukewarm reception given the Ben Iden Payne production of 1911, the absence of political debate on that occasion, and even the suggestion, in the era of the suffragists and suffragettes, that, as the...

"Buffoonery and Easy Sentiment": Popular Irish Plays in the Decade Prior to the Opening of the Abbey Theatre (review)

"Buffoonery and Easy Sentiment": Popular Irish Plays in the Decade Prior to the Opening of the Abbey Theatre (review)

The Darkest Corner: documenting institutional abuse and its consequences at the Abbey Theatre

Documentary theatre, as a theatrical genre, has not maintained a continuous presence in Irish theatre. The Darkest Corner series, produced in 2010 by the Abbey Theatre, Dublin, Ireland's National Theatre is, therefore, one of the first examples of Irish theatre using the genre to address political and social issues. Presenting three plays, Gerard Mannix Flynn's James X, Richard Johnson's The Evidence I Shall Give and Mary Raftery's No Escape, the series examines the widespread abuse of children in state institutions. Before analysing the documentary play commissioned by the Abbey, Raftery's No Escape, this article will begin with an exploration of documentary theatre in Ireland. It will then examine the material used for the play, the Ryan Report, published following the Commission to Inquire into Child Abuse, something of great political and social interest to contemporary Ireland and, finally, the play itself.