Irish National Theatre Research Articles

“All that I Am Craving Is the Talk”: Collaboration, Translation and Lady Gregory’s Workhouse Ward

ABSTRACT Central to the collaborative dynamics of the Irish Revival, Lady Gregory had a particularly fruitful working relationship with Douglas Hyde (Dubhghlas de hÍde), whose plays she translated and, in many instances, co-authored. This article takes as its case study Gregory’s 1908 play The Workhouse Ward, which arose out of a dramatic scenario she provided to Hyde as the basis for his Teach na mBocht (1903) – translated by Gregory as The Poorhouse (1903). By studying Gregory’s scenarios and draft translations alongside the various published versions, the article responds to Hélène Buzelin’s call for a “process-oriented kind of research” into translation practice. Through this genetic approach, the article allows us to better understand how language and gender politics shaped key plays of the Irish national theatre movement and argues that future editions of Gregory’s and Hyde’s works should include all plays in which each author had significant creative input.

The Sewing Machine and Spectral Presences: Connolly, Shaw, and O’Casey

The Sewing Machine and Spectral Presences: Connolly, Shaw, and O’Casey

Seanchan 's Quest Restoring of the Poet's Right in Yeasts' Play The King's Threshold

William Butler Yeats (1865-1939), the prominent Irish poet and dramatist was one of the foremost figures of twentieth-century literature. He was a driving force behind the Irish Revival, and together with lady Gregory and Edward Martyn established the Abby Theatre, and served as its chief playwright during its early years. He was awarded the Noble Prize in literature for his always inspired poetry which in a highly artistic form gave expression to the spirit of a whole nation. The paper aims at analyzing the poet's quest for social freedom and poet's right in the state. The King's Threshold was first performed by the Irish National Theatre Society at the Molesworth Hall, in Dublin on 7 October, 1903. It is founded upon a Midieval-Irish story of the demands of the poets at the court of King Guaire at Gort, Co. Galway; it was also influenced by Edwin Ellis's play Sancan the bard (1905) which was published ten years earlier, by Edwin Ellis.

Eglantina Remport, Lady Gregory and Irish National Theatre: Art, Drama, Politics

The impact of the Irish Literary Revival on the development of English and Irish language literature in Ireland and on modern literary criticism cannot be overestimated. Albeit challenging to quantify in its totality, critical appraisal of the Revival and its key figures are wide-ranging. They take the form of biographies on the life and work of individual artists and thinkers: Roy Foster’s tome on W. B. Yeats (W. B. Yeats, A Life, vol. II, The Arch-Poet, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2003...

Lady Gregory and Irish National Theatre: Art, Drama, Politics

Lady Gregory and Irish National Theatre: Art, Drama, Politics

St. Patrick Meets St. Louis: The Display of the Irish at the 1904 St. Louis World's Fair

St. Patrick Meets St. Louis:The Display of the Irish at the 1904 St. Louis World's Fair* Jeffrey O'Leary (bio) A short time after the 1904 St. Louis World's Fair opened, a controversy erupted within the Irish Industrial Exhibit, Ireland's showcase at this venue. Members of the Dublin-based Irish National Theatre, who crossed the Atlantic to perform the works of Irish writers, claimed that the leadership of the Irish exhibit permitted the use of the stage Irishman persona in order to boost ticket sales. These Irish actors asserted that they received assurances from exhibit organizers before their arrival that only "Irish classics" would grace the stage. When these actors objected to negative portrayals of the Irish and refused to participate in further productions until removal of this caricature occurred, they lost their jobs.1 After a series of reports and editorials in the press, the organizers of the Irish exhibit declared that they were "sufficiently qualified to judge of, and to maintain what is due to the respect and dignity of, the Irish character."2 The paradox [End Page 142] of this response was that the primary individuals with oversight of the Irish exhibit were St. Louis-based American Irish who argued that their agency regarding the display of Irishness on this fairground was supreme and criticism by outside voices, even Irish ones, were mistaken.3 This article investigates the presentation of Irishness at the St. Louis fair as a mechanism of influencing ethnic-identity construction within the transatlantic world and explores how this fairground emerged as a unique site to mediate memory and commodify Ireland's heritage within an expansive American marketplace. I argue that this world's fair permitted the American Irish community to engage in oversight and presentation of Irishness within the public sphere to increase the commercial visibility of Ireland, its people, and goods with the intent of bolstering investment in Ireland to revive a floundering economy. What differentiates the St. Louis fair from other world's fairs regarding an Irish display is that this event was the first in which a coordinated effort by prominent American Irish business and civic leaders through an enterprise based in the United States, known as the Irish Exhibit Company, worked with an entity of the British Parliament called the Department of Agriculture and Technical Instruction for Ireland (DATII) to ensure that the Irish exhibit came to fruition. The DATII, created by an act of Parliament in 1899, became the primary British institution that assisted Irish farmers and workers in the resolution of agrarian- and industrial-oriented problems in Ireland. By the start of the twentieth century, the DATII became an important body in representing Ireland at international exhibitions.4 Although Irish workers and performers appeared within the Irish Industrial Exhibit at the St. Louis fair to provide an authentic experience for its visitors, planning and implementation of this project occurred under the auspices of Ireland's descendants in the United States. The Irish, in fact, had [End Page 143] limited agency in how their heritage appeared within the confines of this world's fair. World's fairs are sites that reinforce or contest notions of identity. In particular, these international extravaganzas provided visitors of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries with myriad outlets to absorb numerous constructs of ethnicity, including Irishness, and became social texts that commodified ideas of self and portrayed a manufactured reality for fairground visitors. This process within the Irish Industrial Exhibit at St. Louis relied on "performing" Irishness for guests who purchased a ticket to "visit" Ireland without leaving the United States. The power to control these performances and determine the environment in which ethnic remembrance occurred in the Irish exhibit afforded the American Irish organizers enhanced agency over their Irish-born brethren. My examination of the display of Irishness at the 1904 St. Louis fair expands Jeffrey Alexander's work on cultural pragmatics, with its emphasis on social performance and power, as a means of analyzing authenticity "as an interpretive category" that allows for greater comprehension of the dissonance that resulted from contested interpretations of Irishness.5 The episode of the Irish actors who expressed extreme displeasure about...

“Irish Nights”: Paratheatrical Performances of Melodrama on and off the Belfast Stage

Until relatively recently, melodrama has been an unfairly maligned genre of theatre history; its pejorative associations based on the prejudiced assumptions that its aesthetics of excess (in terms of its extravagant emotion, sensationalism and popularity amongst predominantly working class audiences) meant, therefore, that it was for simpletons. What Walter Benjamin excoriated as the “ancient lament that the masses seek distraction whereas art demands concentration from the spectator” fuelled bourgeois disdain for this theatrical form and the derision of theTheatrical Inquisitor’s dismissal of melodrama as “aris[ing] from an inertness in the minds of the spectators, and a wish to be amused without the slightest exertion on their own parts, or any exercise whatever of their intellectual powers” remained the dominant critical response throughout the nineteenth century. Indeed, such views continued well into the twentieth century and certainly characterized the modernist reactions of the founding figures of the Irish national theatre in this period. Frank Fay, cofounder of the National Dramatic Society, denounced both the aesthetics of Dublin's Queen's Theatre as the “home of the shoddiest kind of melodrama,” and the intelligence of its audiences who, “wouldn't,at present, understand anything else.”

Yeats, The Arrow, and the Aesthetics of a “national, moral culture”: The <em>Blanco Posnet</em> Affair

In the Irish National Theatre’s little magazine, The Arrow , William Butler Yeats manipulated the public debate regarding George Bernard Shaw’s play, The Shewing-Up of Blanco Posnet , to position the National Theatre at the center of nationalist movement. The result was a masterful display of political acumen that advocated the following principles: The Irish are a rational and intellectual people who possess the ability to participate in a measured and deliberate debate. They support the free expression of ideas and their authority comes from a consensus derived from discussion rather than by decree from the Crown or its representatives in the censor’s office or in Dublin Castle. The Arrow put forward these ideas and framed the oppositions’ ideals in such a way as to place the National Theatre at the center of the debate regarding Shaw’s play but also in a position of leadership within the Nationalist movement.

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...

"It's All True?": A Report on "'Outside his jurisfiction': Interrogating James Joyce's Non-Fiction," University of York, 23-25 March 2012

"It's All True?":A Report on "'Outside his jurisfiction': Interrogating James Joyce's Non-Fiction," University of York, 23-25 March 2012 Philip Keel Geheber I'll start with the doubly negative statement that Joyce is not known for his nonfiction. Generally, we mine his disparate writings collected in Occasional, Critical, and Political Writings for contextual sources, clarifications of Joyce's early beliefs, or biographical footnotes.1 But for Katherine Ebury and James Fraser, the "Outside his jurisfiction" organizers, it was finally time to query the status of these pieces in their own right. The primary focus of this conference was on how Joyce's nonfiction writing could be properly placed within his oeuvre, an effort highlighted by John McCourt's keynote "Second-Hand News: The Marginalities of Joyce's Non-Fiction." Another common inquiry was what "fictionality" could potentially mean for a writer's corpus that employs so many autobiographical and seemingly factual elements. Hans Walter Gabler's provocative statement the first morning—that Stephen Hero is a non-fiction "perception text" (simply a recording of a series of events)—set the tone for what was a stimulating and absorbing three days, not least because the majority of the quoted Joyce material came from less familiar or forgotten sources: no "nightmare of history" rehashes in York. "Outside his jurisfiction's" main venue was the bright, large-windowed Bowland Auditorium in the recently constructed Berrick-Saul Building. Although we were inside these headquarters for the University of York's Humanities Research Centre most of the weekend, the auditorium's windows let us punctuate our theorizing with glances at the early spring sunshine and the rabbits and geese peeking in with curiosity. The Treehouse, the somewhat misleadingly named circular, glazed, top floor of the Berrick-Saul building, was the setting for a couple of wine receptions and the highly anticipated "workshop" discussion led by Kevin Barry. For those of us unfamiliar with the circumstances in the late 1990s, Barry first recalled how he came to collect and edit Oxford University Press's Occasional, Critical, and Political Writings, after Penguin, for whom he was editing an earlier version, found itself in the Joyce Estate's bad books. Luckily for us, following a Dublin Joyce Summer School talk and Irish Times [End Page 7] write-up, Barry won Stephen Joyce's blessing to publish with Oxford, although some important pieces were then not able to appear in the book, like the dream notebook and anything copyrighted by Faber and Faber. After a roundtable conversation about the discontinuities between these short pieces and the major fiction and within the collection as a whole (especially the almost complete absence of Dublin in these writings), talk turned to the usual Joycean musings of what could go into a new edition in the absence of copyright restrictions. In the end, Barry's experience of editing this collection served as an object-lesson in what we all face as scholars in the absence of unrestricted access to perfect information, simply "making the best of the inadequacies you have to hand." The second morning began with a panel of historicized readings of "Realism and Idealism in English Literature," "The Mirage of the Fisherman of Aran," and "The Motor Derby" by Alastair Cormack, Alison Lacivita, and me, respectively. Cormack read Joyce's essay in conjunction with prevailing public discourses of Revival aesthetics and the Irish National Theatre, and I situated Joyce's sole interview within the proliferation of journalism leading up to the highly anticipated 1903 Gordon Bennett cup. Lacivita spoke on the tensions between economic and industrial modernization and the traditional uses of land and sea and ecological responsibility in the West of Ireland Galway Harbour Scheme, a plan to construct a massive Atlantic port to link Irish commerce and shipping even more intimately with the North Atlantic and simultaneously protect the British Empire from the growing German naval threat. This panel was followed by a biographical turn with J. T. Welsch's paper on the confessional structures of Giacomo Joyce, which he then expanded to consider the larger strain of confession running throughout Joyce's works. Luca Crispi used a wealth of archival detail to recreate the...

Inseparable and No Longer Subsequent: The Relocation and Representation of Women in Irish Theatre Practices

Women as playwrights, directors, designers and actors have played an indisputably integral part in cultivating the theatrical landscapes of Ireland, but their work, however, has largely been overlooked. That said, this is not a new lament: the last twenty years of Irish theatre scholarship have sought to redress this gender imbalance by looking to women's involvement in the ‘imagining’ of the Irish nation. Colm Tóibín's Lady Gregory's Toothbrush (Lilliput Press, 2002) famously confirmed Augusta Gregory's co-authorship (with W. B. Yeats) of Kathleen ni Houlihan (1902). C. L. Innes's widely known Women and Nation in Irish Literature and Society, 1880–1935 (The University of Georgia Press, 1993), shed light on the ideologies behind the iconography of Mother Ireland, and Mary Trotter's Ireland's National Theaters: Political Performance and the Origins of the Irish Dramatic Movement (Syracuse University Press, 2001) revealed the impact of Maud Gonne and the all-women society the Inghinidhe na hÉireann (Daughters of Erin) on the development of the Irish National Theatre Society.

Deep-rooted things: empire and nation in the poetry and drama of William Butler Yeats

Doggett's Deep-Rooted Things is a wonderfully nuanced, deeply thoughtful study which should have a lasting place in Yeats studies. Richly responsive to the twists and turns of Yeats's thinking, profoundly revealing of the currents and crosscurrents in his magnificent oeuvre, this is a major contribution.-Jahan Ramazani, University of Virginia defines Yeats's nationalism in a particularly effective, original, and compelling way. Yeats's nationalism is not a new topic, but many scholars have tended to see it as something that is intellectually simple, divorced from the complexities of Yeats's thought. Of those who acknowledge its complexity, few actually demonstrate this complexity at length, which is what Doggett has done.--Marjorie Howes, Associate Professor of English, Boston College and author of Yeats's Nations: Gender, Class, and Irishness In Deep-Rooted Things, Rob Doggett examines Yeats's shifting relationship with the warring discourses of British cultural imperialism and Irish nationalism during Ireland's transition from colony to partially independent nation. By focusing on key historical events that Yeats witnessed and on the nationalist movements he both embraced and resisted, Doggett identifies the core features of Yeats's aesthetic program through new readings of central poems and plays in the Yeats canon. Deep-Rooted Things is organized around two historical periods-the first decade of the twentieth century, when Yeats was involved in the creation and promotion of the Irish National Theatre Society; and the period from 1919 to 1928, when Yeats the artist and senator struggled to reinvent himself as a cultural nationalist against the backdrop of the Anglo-Irish War, the Irish Civil War, and the consolidation of the Irish Free State. A rich and rewarding reading of Yeats that places the poetry and plays in a new context, Deep-Rooted Things will interest students of literary criticism and Irish studies.

The Rebirth of Tragedy: Yeats, Nietzsche, the Irish National Theatre, and the Anti-Modern Cult of Cuchulain

The Rebirth of Tragedy:Yeats, Nietzsche, the Irish National Theatre, and the Anti-Modern Cult of Cuchulain Michael Valdez Moses (bio) I am no Nationalist, except in Ireland for passing reasons; State and Nation are the work of intellect, and when you consider what comes before and after them they are, as Victor Hugo said of something or other, not worth the blade of grass God gives for the nest of the linnet. —W. B. Yeats, 1937 I Nearly all theorists of drama from G. W. F. Hegel to the present assume that the advent of modernity increasingly renders classical forms of tragedy aesthetically moribund and politically irrelevant. According to this historicist view, the dramas of Aeschylus and Sophocles survive, but only as historical artifacts within the culture museum of modernity. They may inspire modern thinkers and artists, but their forms, themes, and contexts cannot be revived except as an exercise in antiquarianism. Friedrich Nietzsche and W. B. Yeats provide striking, if rare instances of the critic and dramatist who refused to accept the historicist premises underlying the modern view of Attic tragedy. Nietzsche, no less than Hegel, regards the tragedies of Aeschylus and Sophocles as antithetical to many of the values and institutions of European modernity, but for that very reason, [End Page 561] in his The Birth of Tragedy, he looks to the modern operas of Richard Wagner as both marking a genuine rebirth of the spirit of classical tragedy and heralding a revolutionary antimodern turn in the cultural history of modern Europe. Yeats, whose dramatic and critical works were influenced by Nietzsche, attempted, in no less hubristic a manner, to effect a rebirth of premodern, ritualized, and aristocratic tragedy within the apparently uncongenial confines of contemportary Irish politics. What Yeats found so attractive in Nietzsche was a shared hostility, even repugnance, to what both men considered the defining features of European modernity, and a common conviction that the forces of modernization might be resisted by bringing about a cultural rebirth of the spirit of ancient tragic drama. Yeats's drama and theatre criticism thus represent a sustained effort, a lá Nietzsche, to resist the notion that aristocratic tragedy and ritual theater are historically irrecoverable. Yeats saw his efforts to assist in the rebirth of ancient tragedy as an essential part of a militant cultural and political program to free modern Ireland from imperial British rule. Yeats's literary midwifery aimed to establish a free and independent Irish nation that would offer a counterweight to the forces of (English or British imperial) modernity. Though nationalism itself might be said to be a distinctively modern ideology, Yeats hoped to cultivate an independent Irish nation on nominally premodern or non-modern grounds. As the twentieth century wore on, however, Yeats grew increasingly disenchanted with the actual Irish Free State that emerged after 1921 and with the forms of Irish nationalism that predominated in the 1920s and 1930s. Oddly, his disappointment did not lead him to abandon, but rather to intensify his efforts to promote an "anachronistic" form of dramatic tragedy, which he imagined would serve as a kind of cultural counterweight to the increasingly modernizing Irish nation-state that came into existence after formal independence. Yeats's continuing efforts to create a ritualistic, heroic, cultic, and antidemocratic form of dramatic tragedy from 1916 onwards represented his vigorous attempt to cultivate an "alternative" form of Irish modernity that was as much at odds with the British imperialism (and English culture) as it was with the predominant and increasingly official strains of modern Irish nationalism of the 1920s and 1930s. As a founding member of the Irish Literary Theatre in 1899, and later a leading dramatist, co-director, manager, and polemicist for the Irish National Theatre Society (founded in 1902 and better known after 1904 as the Abbey Theatre), Yeats looked to an "ancient" form of tragic verse drama to play a leading, even decisive role in revivifying and remaking Irish national culture at a time when prospects for Irish Home Rule, to say nothing of Irish national independence, were bleak. But despite his dominant position in the Abbey Theatre in its early years, Yeats ultimately found that his own heroic verse...

An Open National Identity: Rutherford Mayne, Gerald McNamara, and the Plays of the Ulster Literary Theatre

During the early decades of the twentieth century, while Ireland's Abbey Theatre tried hard to create a unified image of nationhood in the figure of a West-of-Ireland peasant, a little theatre company in the North of Ireland addressed issues of national representation by very different means. The Ulster Branch of the Irish Literary Theatre, set up in 1902, brought plays from the Dublin-based dramatic revival on tour to Belfast. However, when William Butler Yeats, one of the leading forces behind the foundation of both the Irish Literary Theatre (1899-1901) and the Irish National Theatre Society (1903), heard about the Ulstermen's artistic project, he would not allow them to use one of his companies' names and forbade them from staging dramas he was in the process of copyrighting. (1) Bulmer Hobson and David Parkhill, the founders of the Ulster theatre, promptly changed the company's name well its creative focus. Damn Yeats, we'll write our own plays, was Hobson's response to Yeats's protective attitude. (2) The break with Dublin marked the start of the Ulster Literary Theatre. Ironically, the Belfast company's inaugural production in December 1904 took place during the same month when the Irish National Theatre Society moved into the Abbey Theatre. Between 1904 and 1915, the Ulster Literary Theatre staged twenty new plays and numerous revivals. (3) A number of these were dramatic failures, some of the dramas stood out, but most significant was this group's capacity to navigate between a range of conflicting identities: Ulster unionism and Irish nationalism, Catholicism and Protestantism, a northern versus southern identity. What I intend to argue in this article is that the Ulster Literary Theatre found its own surprisingly simple solution to negotiate such diverse political and cultural tensions. In particular the work of two playwrights, Rutherford Mayne and Gerald MacNamara, illustrates that the Ulster Literary Theatre explored Irish nationalism and Ulster unionism not political concepts but defining parameters of social and cultural identity. Their conclusion was not a separatist one. Identities are complex and ambiguous, Mayne's and MacNamara's plays suggest. Particular features and interests are never the sole property of one political, cultural, or religious faction, but are shared by a number of identifiable groups. The same applied to sectarian extremism: bigotry was a feature of nationalist militants well of unionist activists. MacNamara satirized such weaknesses in order to promote open-mindedness; Mayne fostered tolerance with his fair-minded portrayals of County Down life. For the formation of the new company in 1904, Parkhill and Hobson were joined by writers such Joseph Campbell and Rutherford Mayne, and by enthusiastic artists from the Belfast School of Art. The school's Sketching Club had already staged dramatic entertainments and showed a specific interest in elaborate stage design. (4) Much of this stemmed from the active involvement of Harry Morrow and his family. Morrow, who ran an interior design business that specialized in decorating, painting, and renovation, also lectured at the Belfast School of Art. His sons, Harry, Fred, Jack, Edwin and Norman Morrow, participated in the school's productions. (5) All had a talent for painting and sketching, but Harry and Fred would become major contributors to the Ulster Literary Theatre's stage design, repertoire and production standard. Delving into conflicting political identities in an objective manner would not be easy for any of them: Hobson, Parkhill and the Morrow family all shared a nationalist bias. The first two belonged to the Protestant National Association in Belfast and were interested in using Irish drama as a vehicle of propaganda. (6) Hobson was also a member of the Dungannon Clubs. The Morrow family produced anti-loyalist sketches at entertainments in their own home, and Jack and George would later draw anti-British cartoons for Hobson's paper The Republic. …

Modernisation and national representation in late 19th century Dublin theatres

Traditional theatre historiography regards the Abbey Theatre as the embodiment of the modern phase of Irish drama. This article argues that modernising forces already dominated the artistic policies and repertoires of Dublin's patent theatres and music halls. Moreover, these theatres fulfilled many of the demands of an Irish 'national' theatre. Investigating the concept of 'national representation', this piece argues that issues of prestige, Irishness and representing the majority of Irish people were already major preoccupations in Dublin's houses of entertainment. This forces us to re-assess the innovative status of the Irish Literary Theatre and of the Abbey Theatre. They did not invent an Irish national theatre, but rather redefined its role. They continued the move towards national representation in the theatre by staging prestigious Irish drama, but initiated a major change in the way people thought of a national culture when their select sense of taste came to 'represent' that of the entire nation.

A Century of Irish Drama: Widening the Stage

Preliminary Table of Contents: A Century of Irish Drama Widening the Stage Edited by Stephen Watt, Eileen Morgan, and Shakir Mustafa Foreword by Shivaun O'Casey Acknowledgments Introduction: Re-thinking the Abbey and the Concept of a National Theatre /Eileen Morgan Part One: Challenging the Received View of Early Twentieth-Century Irish Theatre 1. The Founding Years and the Irish National Theatre That Was Not /John P. Harrington 2. The Alternative Aesthetic: The Theatre of Ireland's Urban Plays /Nelson O Ceallaigh Ritschel 3. Of Orangemen and Green Theatres: The Ulster Literary Theatre's Regional Nationalism /Laura E. Lyons Part Two: Theorizing and Historicizing Theatre Controversies 4. The Abbey and the Theatrics of Controversy, 1909-1915 /Lucy McDiarmid 5. More Than a Morbid, Unhealthy Mind: Public Health and the Playboy Riots /Susan Cannon Harris 6. Saying No to Politics: Sean O'Casey's Dublin Trilogy /Shakir Mustafa Part Three: Reconstructing Drama During the Fatal Fifties 7. O'Casey's The Drums of Father Ned in Context /Christopher Murray 8. Love and Death: A Reconsideration of Behan and Genet /Stephen Watt 9. Playing Outside with Samuel Beckett /Judith Roof Part Four: Contemporary Theatre Projects and Revivals 10. Translating Women into Irish Theatre History /Mary Trotter 11. I've Never Been Just Me: Re-Thinking Women's Positions in Christina Reid's Plays /Carla J. McDonough 12. Neither Here Nor There: The Liminal Position of Teresa Deevy and Her Female Characters /Christie Fox 13. Playwrights of the Western World: Synge, Murphy, McDonagh /Jose Lanters 14. The Passion Theatre Company's Everyday Life /Lauren Onkey Part Five: Irish History on the Contemporary Stage 15. The Book at the Center of the Stage: Friel's Making History and The Field Day Anthology of Irish Writing /Kathleen Hohenleitner 16. Ireland, the Continuous Past: Stewart Parker's Belfast History Plays /Marilynn Richtarik 17. Frank McGuinness and the Ruins of History /James Hurt 18. The End of History: The Millennial Urge in the Plays of Sebastian Barry /Scott T. Cummings Bibliography Contributors Index

Which Fiddler Calls the Tune? ThePlayboyRiots and the Politics of Nationalist Theatre Spectatorship

In October of 1903,The United Irishman, a leading newspaper of the Irish nationalist movement, published an essay by William Butler Yeats entitled “The Irish National Theatre and Three Sorts of Ignorance.” Yeats wrote this essay after an infuriated nationalist community protested the Irish National Theatre Society's production of John Millington Synge's play,In the Shadow of the Glen. In response to Yeats's admonishment of the nationalist movement for putting politics over aesthetics in their creation and judgment of Irish drama, Arthur Griffith, the editor of the newspaper, added some remarks of his own:Mr. Yeats does not give any reason why if the Irish National Theatre has no propaganda save that of good art it should continue to call itself either Irish or National. If the Theatre be solely an Art Theatre, then its plays can be fairly criticized from the standpoint of art. But whilst it calls itself Irish National its productions must be considered and criticised as Irish National productions.

Staging Ethnography: John M. Synge's Playboy of the Western World and the Problem of Cultural Translation

Much has been said about the role of folklore and legend in the various incarnations of the Irish National Theatre, but there is little discussion of how these indigenous materials come to be conscripted into dramatic productions and what this conscription tells us about Irish Revivalism generally. The Revival is usually understood to mean the group of writers surrounding W. B. Yeats, John M. Synge, and Lady Augusta Gregory who worked assiduously to restore and preserve the folk-cultural texts of the Gaelic-Irish peasantry. Revivalism as a cultural phenomenon (which encompasses historical, anthropological, and sociological discourses as well as literary ones) is so often characterized as a dramatic movement mainly because the early years of the National Theatre (1894-1916) are so strongly associated with the chief Revivalist writers, whose version of a national theatre was often rerouted through ostensibly non-political works.

Imperialism and the Natural World edited by John M. MacKenzie, and: Macropolitics of Nineteenth-Century Literature: Nationalism, Exoticism, Imperialism edited by Jonathan Arac (review)

86Victorian Review Devoting Part I to English perceptions of such social phenomenon as Merchant Planter, Western Man, American Woman, and the Slave, and Part ? to American perceptions of the English Gentleman, the Aristocracy, the Poor, and so on, Mulvey provides much rich analysis. He is especially good, for instance, on English writing about slavery, making even fuller use of Fanny Kemble's writings than does Foster, limited as she is by her concern with the woman traveller's quest for emotional release: for Mulvey, Kemble becomes a figure filled with "complex (and sometimes contradictory) patterns of reactions and sympathies" (92). Mulvey also nicely gathers together Victorian fears of social disruption, yoking MatthewArnold's wistful appeal for sweetness and light with Henry James's evocation of an "Anglo-Saxon light" that might provide an aristocratic ordering of the unfortunate (for him) political conditions of America (146). If Childs provides a kind of stately-homes and artifacts approach and Foster a sensible and sensitive map for the terrain, then Mulvey is an informed, ironic guide. Of the three tours of travel-writing under review here, Murve/s is most obviously the one whose critical speculations make one wish for a further theoretical spin, a detour, so to speak, into the discursive byways of European self/alien "other." Deirdre David Temple University John M. MacKenzie, ed. Imperialism and the Natural World. Manchester: U of Manchester P, 1990. viii + 216. Jonathan Arac and Harriet Ritvo, eds. Macropolitics ofNineteenth-Century Literature: Nationalism, Exoticism, Imperialism. Philadelphia: U of Pennsylvania P, 1991. vi + 309. $39.50 US (cloth) Despite a shared focus on nineteenth-century, mainly British imperialism, these two volumes seem superficially very different. Macropolitics contains twelve essays (plus introduction) by literary scholar-critics, all ofwhom are responding to the new historicism and recent debates about cultural history, cultural studies, and forms ofideological critique. Imperialism and the Natural World, in the "Studies of Imperialism" series edited by John MacKenzie, consists of eight essays (plus introduction) by historians of science and of empire, all of whom pursue themes of ecology in relation Reviews87 to the imperialist exploitation of nature. The contributors to Macropolitics reinterpret a variety of mainly literary texts in relation to empire; the contributors to Imperialism and the Natural World seek to study the ways the natural environment and nonwestern peoples economically dependent on that environment, were affected by imperialist encroachments. One set of authors rereads various western texts; the other set attempts to read "the book of nature," after it has been partly erased, translated, destroyed by imperialism—and to do so at least some of their evidence has to come from nonwestern sources (but mostly their sources are also western texts, mainly official or governmental). Half of the contributions to Macropolitics reinterpret canonical works of literature in relation to the three "isms" of the subtitle (nationalism, exoticism, imperialism); these include Shelley's Hellas (Mark Kipperman), Dombey and Son (Jeff Nunokawa), Jane Eyre (Susan Meyer), Moby Dick (Wai-chi Dimock), Salammbô and L'Education sentimentale (lisa Lowe) and Heart of Darkness (Chris Bongie). Marlon Ross adds an excellent analysis of "romantic nationalism" in Burke, Wordsworth, Hazlitt and Scott, while Nancy Vogeley contributes an interesting but less successful essay on The Discourse of Colonial Loyalty: Mexico 1808" (52). While Vogeley demonstrates the ambiguities in "Mexico's discourse of loyalty in the last years ofcolonial rule," her relatively short essay depends too much on lengthy quotations and translations. James Knapp's excellent study, "Irish Primitivism and Imperial Discourse: Lady Gregory's Peasantry," demonstrates how Lady Gregory's writings, and her project of an Irish national theatre, express the ambiguities of being both colonizer and colonized. And Loren Kruger contributes an essay related to Knapp's, because it deals with "instituting national (popular) theater in England and France" (243), though it has less to say than most of the others about imperialism. The two least literary—or most historical—contributions to Macropolitics I also think excellent, even though they are quite different from each other. Bruce Greenfield's essay on the History ofthe Lewis and Clark Expedition (1814) demonstrates clearly and persuasively how the "westering ideology" of the intrepid explorers employs several rhetorical registers to express "the...

‘To Define Your Dissent’: The Plays and Polemics of the Field Day Theatre Company

The Field Day Theatre Company was founded in 1980 by Stephen Rea, the actor, and Brian Friel, the playwright, at the former's suggestion. The combination of a playwright and an actor in the founding of a theatre in response to a crisis which is both cultural and political recalls the Irish National Theatre Society and the founders of Field Day were conscious that such parallels would be drawn. For both Friel and Rea, the only available models were the Irish Literary Theatre and the Ulster Literary Theatre. The differences between Field Day and other such ventures are however as instructive as the parallels. The Irish National Theatre Society and the Abbey were always Yeats's project; his plays, his theories on drama and speech, and his cultural politics were the informing elements in the development of the theatre. Field Day's founders, however, quickly took on four other fellow-directors – Seamus Deane, Seamus Heaney, David Hammond and Tom Paulin – for just as the Abbey had had Beltaine, Samhain, and The Arrow so Field Day has had its pamphlets and other non-theatrical projects, although in the case of Field Day, these are once again open to contributors from outside the company. The purpose of the pamphlets has been to re-examine the various pieties of Irish cultural life in this past century. In its short history Field Day has already attracted widespread attention, but the time seems right for a stock-taking since by the end of 1988 the company will have reached a plateau of sorts in its development. Since 1980 it has produced eight plays, twelve pamphlets, and one volume of poetry, not to mention the work its directors have produced outside the confines of the company; this work places Field Day at the centre of Irish cultural debate. 1988 saw the production of a new play by Friel, Making History – his first for Field Day since The Communication Cord (1982) – the publication of another set of pamphlets, which for the first time were by non-Irish critics – Terry Eagleton, Frederic Jameson, and Edward Said – and preparations for its anthology of Irish writing. The completion of these three projects should consolidate the company's position.