Irish Theatre Research Articles

Irish Theatrical Celebrity and the Critical Subjugation of Difference in the Work of Frank McGuinness

Frank McGuinness is one of the most successful Irish playwrights of his generation, yet little critical attention had been paid to what seems to be the unique and most challenging aspect of his writing: his di verse representations of gender and sexuality. McGuinness' plays fit neatly into the Irish theatrical tradition in their comparable narrative choices and their traditional literary techniques; however, his work most radically diverges from the drama of his predecessors in the distinctive and diverse ways he approaches character development through thematic narrative. Where other Irish playwrights have engaged topics ranging from politics to psychology, none have dealt with issues of gender diversity and sexual "deviance" as consistently as McGuinness. In a unique way, McGuinness communicates theatrical narratives employing the traditional conventions of the Irish stage, representing stories set in the much-cherished location of the Irish country kitchen, as in Dolly West's Kitchen (1999), or traditional family-based drama of The Bird Sanctuary (1994). But in an interesting twist, he includes and often conveys these narratives from the perspective of individual types never so fully or continually represented on the Irish stage: homosexuals.

Wordmadeflesh: Writing the Body in Irish Theatre

Wordmadeflesh: Writing the Body in Irish Theatre

Irish Theatre: Conditions of Criticism

It is apposite that this collection of essays about (and of) Irish theatre criticism is appearing in the pages of a theatre journal published in Canada, for it was a work of Canadian theatre scholarship that inspired the conference at which these papers were first presented. In the titular essay of Producing Marginality: Theatre and Criticism in Canada, Toronto critic Robert Wallace places the practice of contemporary, mainstream theatre criticism in Canada in the larger context of Canadian society and cultural politics, exposing the implicit ideologies behind a critical practice that he judges to be far too determined by individual taste and a "common sense" approach. An honest and functional critical practice must start with an acknowledgement that ''judgment is relative and evaluation is political", argues Wallace, quoting John Leonard's call for a "Canadian theatre criticism that is partisan, subjective and interested - as it is now - but explicitly so," a criticism, Wallace continues, that "recognizes its symbiotic connection to Canadian theatre".

Wordmadeflesh: Writing the Body in Irish Theatre

In performance practice, when the word is made flesh it is made to matter, it is made material in the performance moment. As Peggy Phelan argues in Unmarked: The Politics of Performance, "In moving from the grammar of words to the grammar of the body, one moves from the realm of metaphor to the realm of metonymy. [...] In performance, the body is metonymic of self, of character, of voice, of 'presence". In critical practice, when the flesh is made word, it is recorded by a language outside of itself. W. B. Worthen, in Theorizing Practice, writes, "[A]ll writing about performance must face its own impossibility: the event is gone, the records are always partial and suspect, and the only thing we know is that nothing we say happened actually took place in precisely that way". This anxiety about capturing the live, doing it justice, recording it accurately, illustrates the troubled relationship between the flesh and the word in performance that extends beyond the "faithful" rendering of a play text to a "faithful" response to that performed rendering.

Vivian Mercier's Irish Comic Tradition : The Man and the Book

Usually, a discussion of a work of literary criticism is academic in the strict sense, confining itself to the contents of the book and evaluating its materials from a scholarly standpoint. My looking back at Vivian Mercier's The Irish Comic Tradition, while it will seek to engage with those elements of the book that have had most influence and effect upon my study of Irish literature in English, will necessarily have a strong (auto)biographical vein, as my encounter with the book is so tied up with my memory of the man himself, both as mentor and friend. It was as an undergraduate at Trinity College, Dublin, in 1972 that I first came into contact with and developed an interest in Anglo-Irish Literature, as it was then referred to. All of my teachers in the subject were Irish—but when I went to the library stacks to look up secondary works of literary criticism on Irish writers, the authors were inevitably American. In the booklist for the Third Year course, we had been given a dauntingly long, and hence rather unhelpful, bibliography of more general works on Anglo-Irish literature, among which I had noted The Irish Comic Tradition by Vivian Mercier—a French woman, I surmised. But it was to the more detailed studies of individual authors I had gone when the tutorial or term essay came due. Later in that same undergraduate year, I chaired a session of the English Literature Society apocalyptically titled, "The Irish Theatre: Has It A Future?" (Plus ça change.) After the panel discussion, a silver-haired gent in green tweed jacket and orange tweed tie at the back of the lecture hall rose to his feet and, in a soft American accent, asked the then artistic director of the Abbey Theatre why the Peacock had been let go dark. Obviously a knowledgeable type. Who was he, I wondered, since (such being the nature of local literary gatherings) I recognized everybody else in the hall? Afterward, this visiting American scholar introduced himself as Vivian Mercier; and he further corrected my false impressions by telling me that, though long resident in the United States, he was from Clara, County Offaly, and had studied for both his undergraduate and graduate degrees at Trinity. As he spoke, the lineaments of an Irish accent were discernible within the American. He was in Dublin for a year on a fellowship, researching his book on Beckett. He also indicated that he would be willing to give a talk on Joyce's Finnegans Wake to the society. We were so impressed at meeting anybody who had read all of the Wake, let alone was prepared to talk about it, that we immediately [End Page 148] said "yes." In the Dublin academic world, the earliest Joyce works were always preferred over the later. Vivian gave a witty and engrossing talk on Finnegans Wake which, as with the sections about it in The Irish Comic Tradition, not only insisted on seeing Joyce's lifelong project whole, but also made the case for the Wake as the most connected of Joyce's works to the Gaelic tradition. I had looked for a copy of Vivian's book in the Dublin bookshops, but without success. Instead, I dipped into the library copy. It was only several years later, when I studied for both my M.A. and Ph.D. with Vivian as my professor at the University of California at Santa Barbara, that I bought The IrishComic Tradition and read it through in tandem with relevant texts from the Gaelic and Anglo-Irish literary traditions. I distinctly recall that the title of The Táin so baffled UCSB's English Department that it was typed up in the course booklet as "The Train." I found the scope of Vivian's book dazzling and impressive, covering as it did the two literatures of Ireland from the earliest...

Irish Theatre: Conditions of Criticism

Irish Theatre: Conditions of Criticism

Historicising Is Not Enough: Recent Developments and Trends in Irish Theatre History

Arguing in favour of Ulster regionalism - an advocacy movement that sought to use the idea of a distinct "Ulster" culture so as to naturalise the recently established and highly contested six-county unit of Northern Ireland - David Kennedy advances the idea that Irish Catholics "take naturally to the theatre." That "Gaelic stock" are those for whom "the heightened traffic of the stage is hardly to be distinguished from the vivid emotional experiences of everyday life" is not a new assertion. Whether to act the mick, to indulge the blarney, or to engage in periodic acts of spectacular insurgency, Irish culture regularly conveys an impression that it is peculiarly theatrical, and yet lacking the discipline of the theatre as an institution. As with the Compact Oxford English Dictionary's fourth definition of the word Irish — "Irish in character or nature; having what are considered Irish characteristics; specifically, used of seemingly contradictory statements" — Irishness sometimes denotes a kind of refractory logic that seems to have all the gratuitousness and the intransitivity of the theatrical.

Irish Theatre Criticism: De-territorialisation and Integration

Irish Theatre Criticism: De-territorialisation and Integration

Irish Theatrical Celebrity and the Critical Subjugation of Difference in the Work of Frank McGuinness

Irish Theatrical Celebrity and the Critical Subjugation of Difference in the Work of Frank McGuinness

Historicising Is Not Enough: Recent Developments and Trends in Irish Theatre History

Historicising Is Not Enough: Recent Developments and Trends in Irish Theatre History

"Besides the Obvious": Postcolonial Criticism, Drama, and Civil Society

This paper is a reflection on the proposition that, in Irish theatre criticism, some important aspects of civil society in Independent Ireland are written to the margins of public consciousness, if not written out altogether. I begin with some remarks on Independent Ireland (1922-present), on colonialism and its aftermath, nationalism, subjectivity, human agency, and the state. I consider the condition of contemporary theatre criticism — both journalistic and academic — and offer a view as to its implications for the art form, drama, and society in Ireland, as the cultural mutations of globalisation elaborate in the early years of the twenty-first century.

"The Laughter Will Come of Itself. The Tears Are Inevitable": Martin McDonagh, Globalization, and Irish Theatre Criticism

"The Laughter Will Come of Itself. The Tears Are Inevitable": Martin McDonagh, Globalization, and Irish Theatre Criticism

"The Laughter Will Come of Itself. The Tears Are Inevitable": Martin McDonagh, Globalization, and Irish Theatre Criticism

At the 2003 annual conference of the International Association for the Study of Irish Literatures, a special panel discussed the works of Martin McDonagh. The event was-well attended, and the papers presented in it were of the highest quality, yet there was an umnistakable sense of frustration and weariness in the debate that ensued — one participant even proposed that, owing to the impossibility of gaining agreement on the quality, authenticity, or importance of McDonagh's work, no further discussion of it should take place until his oeuvre had developed sufficiently to allow for greater critical consensus.

Irish Theatre Criticism: De-territorialisation and Integration

During the 1990S Ireland underwent a much-publicised transformation and highly dramatic transformation in status. Whether conceived as a Cinderella story or a tale of tiger economy, this devout, under-privileged, and perhaps rather peripheral European state, apparently overnight, "definitively joined the rich world [becoming] the icon of the globalisation process”. The speed of transformation has opened much debate as to what is being gained and lost, and - apart from its much-debated impetus and effects — this process of social and economic change in Ireland inevitably bears far-reaching implications for cultural discourse. Specifically, in terms of theatre, the 1990S was a decade of significant activity for both playwrights and practitioners, critics and commentators.

Riotous Performances: The Struggle for Hegemony in the Irish Theatre, 1712–1784. By Helen M. Burke. Notre Dame: Notre Dame University Press, 2002; pp. 356. $70 cloth, $35 paper.

While Irish theatre history and criticism has closely linked performance, nationalism, and identity politics throughout the twentieth century, far less attention has been paid to the Irish theatre's profound role in nation building in previous centuries. Cheryl Herr, John Harrington, and others have reminded us of the nineteenth-century popular theatre's role in subverting British opinions of Irish history and identity. But the eighteenth century, the century of Thomas Sheridan, John O'Keeffe, and Smock Alley, as well as Jonathan Swift, the United Irishmen, and Grattan's Parliament, has received surprisingly little attention from the point of view of theatre history.

Seeking "The Mercy of Fathers": Sebastian Barry's The Steward of Christendom and the Tragedy of Irish Patriarchy

As a poet, novelist, and playwright, Sebastian Barry has established his reputation, in recent years, as one of Ireland's young literary stars. Particularly through his efforts for the stage and through his 1995 breakout play, The Steward of Christendom, Barry finds himself today compared to and associated with that host of Irish playwrights — including Brian Friel, Fr;nk McGUinness, Tom Murphy, Marina Carr, and Martin McDonagh — who have revitalized Irish theatre in the last few decades. Barry also shares a common goal with these playwrights: restaging Ireland.

Half-Hearted: Irish Theatre, 2003

Irish theater experienced an unusually quiet period in 2003. Although the year was free of the controversies that have overshadowed recent years, it was also too frequently free of excitement, creativity, and originality. Whether this was a sign of artistic inertia or overcautious restraint was often difficult to judge. This, after all, was the year before the Abbey Centenary, and there were strong indications that many theater companies were holding back their best work for the 2004 celebrations. But it was also the year in which—after more than a decade of investment—the Arts Council implemented major funding cuts to its theater program. Many companies learned in December, 2002, that their grants for the following year would be significantly reduced—in some cases by as much as 40 percent—leading many into a hasty reorganization of their 2003 schedules: tours were cancelled, productions scaled back or postponed indefinitely, and company administrators were made redundant. This created a sense of gloom that translated, in many instances, into conservative programming and half-hearted productions. However, financial difficulties can only partially explain the generally negative reactions that new work provoked during the year, with plays by many of Ireland's leading writers—Friel, Kilroy, Murphy, and Marie Jones—leaving audiences disappointed. Similarly, although many companies presented themselves as championing the development of new Irish writing, plays by young authors were too often staged prematurely during 2003. The year was not without some notable developments, however, particularly the growing popularity of international work in Ireland, the use of new media in theatrical productions, the development of dance and choreography, and the increasing sophistication of Irish theater criticism and publishing.1 [End Page 142] * * * Brian Friel's Performances was probably the most severely criticized new play by a major Irish writer. This criticism was due at least partially to the play's marketing campaign, which seemed to generate the expectation among audiences that they would be seeing a major new work from Ireland's leading dramatist. What they got instead was a sixty-minute chamber piece with no plot or dramatic action, and an ending that some found inconclusive. The attendant disappointment was understandable, if regrettable: while Performances is by no means equal in substance to Friel's longer works, it is a significant work in many ways. The play is balanced between two performances: the performance of a dialogue between the Czech composer Janaçek and a student of his work, and the performance at the conclusion of the play of a piece of Janaçek's music, which powerfully recontextualizes the debate that precedes it. This contrast between inconclusive dialogue and expressive musical performance allows Friel to dramatize his longstanding preoccupations about creativity and responsibility, and the public and private duties of the artist. More important, that contrast invites us to reconsider much of what we know about Friel himself: in the course of his dialogue, Janaçek makes a number of assertive statements about the role of the artist—statements which in many cases closely resemble Friel's own public ruminations on that subject—yet the conclusion of the piece implies that Janaçek does not fully believe his own arguments. The gradual unmasking of Janeçek the artist to reveal the private man can thus be seen as a reassessment by Friel of his own status as an artist, particularly in relation to the place posterity will award his writing. With echoes of Faith Healer (1979) and Dancing at Lughnasa (1990), Performances offers many interesting new ways to think about Friel's work. Notwithstanding the value of Performances to scholars of Friel, the play's brevity meant that it was regarded by many audiences as a rather poor return on the cost of a full-price ticket to the Gate Theatre; it might have been better received if produced with a longer piece, such as Aristocrats (1979), or with some of Friel's recent short works—The Yalta Game (2001), for example, might have...

The House Image in Three Contemporary Irish Plays

The famous cottage kitchen setting of many Revival plays and of their less orig inal imitations, embodies?and, later, endlessly reiterates?the well-known Irish attachment to place. This setting has been so much overused in Irish drama since the beginning of the twentieth century that today, a playwright shows either laziness or great courage to set a play in a naturalistic house. When imaginatively deployed, however, this traditional setting may still serve the dou ble force of the special Irish sense of place, and may also serve to determine the dramatic tension through the interaction of topophilia?which, in John Wilson Foster's definition, is in fact love of self?and topophobia, hatred of place that ensnares the self.1 Some contemporary plays?for instance, in Brian Friel's Philadelphia, Here I Come! (1964)?are steeped in the simultaneous double force of the home. In others, like Tom Murphy's Bailegangaire (1985), the process of the transformation of one force into the other keeps ambivalences vibrant. The house as image of has long been problematized. Anna McMullen is undoubtedly right in maintaining that home in Irish theatre never seems to he a place, but a or a possibility.2 Nevertheless, the house on the stage often becomes an emotional, psychological shell of the self, carrying both past memory and future possibility?or, if the house emphatically remains incarcerating, that very phenomenon enhances the theme of rootless ness and homelessness. Three recent plays?Stewart Parkers Pentecost (1987), Marina Carr's On Raftery's Hill (2000), and Tom Murphy's The House (2000)? each offers exam ples of how the house image can be deployed constructively to enhance the drama, as in Pentecost and The House, or how its enclosed space, if it remains

An American in Ireland: The Representation of the American in Brian Friel's Plays

An American in Ireland: The Representation of the American in Brian Friel's Plays Maria Germanou Twentieth-century Irish theater has been traversed by recurrent binarisms pertinent to the country's specific political and historical condition such as those between Catholic and Protestant, Irish and English, North and South, Nationalist and Loyalist. Such conflicting contrasts, crucial to the understanding ofIrish identity during the colonial and early postcolonial period,fade gradually as Ireland moves out of its seclusion, in an effort to embrace a more intercultural perspective from which to perceive its own identity. Aware ofthe need to transcend absolute boundaries without losing a sense oforigin, identification, and belonging, Brian Friel seems to be moving in this direction, albeit cautiously.1 Deeply concerned with the impact that globalization enacted under the auspices of the United States can have,2 Friel uses the Irish/American relationship to investigate the intricacies ofidentity and culturejust at die time that Ireland has to become engaged with a global economy and the power relations that define it. This article will focus on the representation oftheAmerican in three plays by Friel, The Freedom ofthe City (1973), Aristocrats (1979), and GiveMe YourAnswer, Do!(1997).AU three plays dramatize the conflicts and exchanges between the American, always an intellectual, who tries to understand Ireland by constructing her as an object of investigation, and the Irish who define tiiemselves against the national other and its image ofthem. The analysis ofthisjuxtaposition has a twofold function: first, it reveals the relationship between power and knowledge as the American attempts to define and thus immobilize Ireland; second, the 259 260Comparative Drama principle ofpermanent and absolute cultural difference is dismantled as the American occasionally desires and ultimately finds in Irish culture what is missing from his own; in the process a split selfemerges. But the Irish, too, are occasionally involved in this gesture of the divided self; they too discover secret affinities with the other, and challenge the coherence of fixed identities against any sense of essentialism or cultural homogeneity. The action in TheFreedom ofthe Cityis set in Derry City,Northern Ireland, in 1970, and derives from the Bloody Sunday events in 1972. It was dien that thirteen unarmedcivilians,participating in a banned march for civil rights, were shot dead by the British army, which was subsequently relieved ofany responsibility for the shooting; the investigations that followed the events determined that the victims had been armed. Friel appropriates the events to demystifythe objectivity ofscientific discourses associated with those in power, primarily the English judge and an American sociologist, Dr. Dodds, who delivers three speeches about poverty as an economic, social, and psychological problem. To achieve this demystifying effect, Friel reverses the traditional function of documentary form—its promise of factual truth as a discourse that verifies reality. This reversal occurs when two levels of dramatic action—the realistic and the documentary—arejuxtaposed.The first level deals with the fictional action dramatized in die mayor's parlorin the city's guildhall, where three marchers from the poor Irish Catholic community, Skinner, Michael, and Lily, have taken refuge from the assault of rubber bullets. The second level enacts the investigation that follows the events and the responses of public voices representing larger social groups: the Priest, the Constable, the Judge, Dr. Dodds, the Balladeer,' an Army Press Officer, and the others. It is here that the playwright makes use ofdocumentarydevices such as reports,eyewitnesses, statistics, speeches, direct address to the audience, and scientific information. By blending the fictional with documentary rhetoric, the writer transgresses the conventional boundaries that separate these two categories. In doing so he challenges both the fictional nature ofdrama, which is no longer exclusively associated with the imaginative, and the factual nature of documentary information,which can nolongerbeunderstoodas avalue-free category.3 Permeated by conflicting positions, the documentary discourse and its construction of truth is found wanting, and the American's scientific Maria Germanou261 impartiality is exposed as a means by which existing power structures may be legitimated. InitiallyFriel builds forDodds a position ofneutralitythat he graduallydeconstructs . Hisprofession as a scientist,hisAmerican identity,and the absence in his speech ofany reference to the Troubles distance him from the Irish/English political conflict, and lend...

Dead Men Talking: Frank McGuinness's Observe the Sons of Ulster Marching Towards the Somme

In a tiny stone church On the desolate headland A lost tribe is singing Abide With Me. (1) PYPER: Again. As always, again. Why does this persist? What more have we to tell each other? I remember nothing today. Absolutely nothing. (Silence.) (2) ********** PROVOKED INTO SPEECH AGAIN, impelled to remember again, an old man begins again. Darkness gives way to a spot-lit bed in which Pyper wakes, in which an actor playing Pyper acts out awakening. He has been here before. He is, and always will be, here at the opening of the play. What becomes of him between performances? What becomes of him, for that matter, during performances? The opening scene of the play marks only a new circuit of repetition for Pyper who once again returns to some nightmare ground and the moment of annihilation of his companions: Those I belonged to, those I have not forgotten, the irreplaceable ones (9). He dwells in, to borrow from Walter Benjamin, homogeneous, empty time, returning at the beginning of the play to the site of catastrophe itself and also to countless repetitions enacted ever since. And this condition of past-present, in equal parts monotonous and urgent, is projected onto a future that has as much to do with time past as with time to come: There would be, and there will be no surrender. The sons of Ulster will rise and lay their enemy low, as they did at the Boyne, as they did at the (10). This could be a scene out of Samuel Beckett: an old man disjointedly in, outside, across time--soliloquizing into the dark--unwillingly but ineluctably in speech--bound to repeat the same old story--up against it--amongst the ruins--alone. Not entirely alone as we shall see. He is being watched, observed, and not only by us, the audience. too are being watched, and not only by him. But where exactly is he? When is or was he? Who is he? He is one who returns: a revenant! discover soon enough that the nightmare ground is the Battle of the Somme; that his lost comrades are the men of the 36th (Ulster) Division; that his time and his place are, to keep things straightforward for the moment, present-day Ulster: We discourage visitors. Security. Men my age have been burned in their beds. Fenian cowards (11). And to be sure, McGuinness's play is about the condition of present-day Ulster, about the unloved and unwanted community called loyalist or unionist, and about the sense of betrayal voiced most eloquently by Ian Paisley and Frank McCusker. (3) It is about all these, and more. But this about--if we take the word as a sign of semantic plenitude--should not for a moment distract us from the play's devastating staging of insubstantiality, of meagerness. Observe the Sons of Ulster Marching Towards the Somme is--as much as anything produced by Beckett, almost--a theater of attenuation: it is about what happens when (you think) everything is taken away from you, when (you think) everything is destroyed. The parentheses indicate caution, because in fact the sky hasn't fallen in yet. Pyper, the last of the sons of Ulster, doesn't realize that. He sees no further than the ruins. And because of this inability to imagine a future anything other than incarcerated by the past, his predicament and that of the community he stands (in) for are in fact much closer to minor farce than the tragic conditions he imagines both himself and that community to be enduring. And just to complicate matters, Observe the Sons of Ulster is a theater of ghosts. From the opening to the closing moments we are in the company of ghosts, and it is with the implications of this that my essay is chiefly concerned. In various ways I ask the question: what happens when a community is figured as spectral, when even the most substantial elements of a culture are rendered phantasmagoric? It is an obvious question, but yet it has not been asked before--at least not by the many critics of a play that has come to assume a central place in Irish theater. …