Irish Theatre in Transition

From the Late Nineteenth to the Early Twenty-First Century

D. Morse, D. Morse, D. Morse

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781137450692
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Theatre History & Criticism

The Irish Theatre in Transition explores the ever-changing Irish Theatre from its inception to its vibrant modern-day reality. This book shows some of the myriad forms of transition and how Irish theatre reflects the changing conditions of a changing society and nation.

Part I

Foundations and Refoundations in Historical Perspective

1

The Irish Theatre: The First Hundred Years, 1897–1997

Christopher Murray

The best theatre is always in transition. The one you have to watch out for is the theatre that is the same today as it was 20 years ago, following the same conservative principles of a safe, inoffensive repertory and covering up with a casting system that presses the politically correct buttons that market research reveals are likely to please audiences at this time. But the theatre that matters, the theatre likely to produce new voices, is the theatre that breaks with the past, or, at the very least, the theatre that operates with such an awareness of the past that audiences will recognize and react to difference. The key to this willingness to change, this flexibility, is consciousness of how unacceptable in theatre is any kind of ‘comfort zone’. Success along established lines has to be seen as a danger signal; audiences, actors, directors all share the responsibility of keeping theatre alive in the only sense which that word can mean if box office is not to be the primary determinant, and that is the artistic, the public challenging in mimetic form of fixed ideas, be these on politics, history, morality, gender, religion or art itself. The business of theatre is to refresh and maintain energy for life itself. Talent is perverted if representation is deliberately directed towards appeasing anxieties or confirming assurances: theatre is there, like poetry, to alert to nuances, to draw attention to possibilities other than the commonplace, to do what great playwrights have always insisted on doing, awakening us to the real rather than the imaginary fear, in short, to give us a greater, not a lesser, sense of reality.

This handful of commonplaces is by way of prefacing an essay on Irish theatre and drama in modern times. The focus on foundational moments is, in one sense, a mere trick. Clearly, a foundation marks a beginning or at least a restart. History works like that. It is forever proposing a Year One, apocalypse now. But if this is a fiction, even a supreme fiction, it is an enabling one, like Francis Fukuyama’s thesis of finality, The End of History. Nobody nowadays takes such beginnings and endings as more than convenient markers in our attempts to make sense of history. We know we are going to go back behind Year One and open our minds to pre-Enlightenment horrors, disasters and candidates for re-estimation. We know that beyond the securities of the end of the Cold War there lie, and have to lie, contemporary vistas of more of the same. History is an expanding universe. But human kind, as T. S. Eliot said, cannot bear very much reality, and so we need the shapes and symbols of starting and end-points in order to facilitate meaning. And this is all right so long as we also accept, with Eliot, the paradox that ‘To be conscious is not to be in time’ but somehow to be capable of transcending it (173). W. B. Yeats well understood that point when, in 1897, he, Lady Gregory and Edward Martyn met to discuss the foundation of the Irish Literary Theatre, which was new but also age-old. It was, moreover, an attempt to reach into the contemporary European consciousness, where theatre everywhere from Paris (André Antoine’s Théâtre Libre, 1887) to Berlin (Otto Brahm’s Freie Bühne, 1889), London (Jacob Grein’s Independent Theatre, 1891) to Moscow (Ivanovich Danchenko and Konstantin Stanislavski’s Moscow Art Theatre, 1897), was starting afresh. The agenda was the same in most particulars, to establish a Little Art Theatre to counter the commercialism which had robbed the heart out of the old classical and romantic traditions, with the one great addition in the case of the Irish Literary Theatre: part of the purpose was to retrieve identity, to define consciousness as national as well as historical, or national because of a different way of understanding the significance of the individual. In all other respects, Yeats’s theatre, let us call it for convenience, which was to evolve into the Abbey Theatre, shared the aesthetic values of the new European little theatres, with a single major aim: to bring reality back to the stage.

Historical background

There was no native, indigenous Irish theatre. It was a colonialist enterprise. Gaelic culture expressed itself through sagas, epics, satires and lyrics of various kinds, but not through dramatic form. I suspect this is why the young Joyce at first approved so much of the Irish Literary Theatre and then turned sharply against it in The Day of the Rabblement (1902). Joyce was at this time a nineteenth-century evolutionist who saw drama as the historical culmination of the growth of poetry within society. Joyce took no interest in the earlier history of Irish theatre: like most people at the time, he viewed this as colonialist and therefore (a common non sequitur) inauthentic. Yet the fact that it was ‘other’, as postcolonial theorists say, does not mean it is not significant. On the contrary. The modern Irish theatre and the modern Irish drama can be defined only in relation to the colonial theatre stemming from the British occupation. In Mutabilitie (1997) Frank McGuinness imagines a visit to Ireland by Shakespeare and a few other players who blunder into Irish history and in particular into Edmund Spenser’s role in it. Shakespeare is here seen as a crypto-Catholic and is recognized by the native Irish as their Messiah, a role he refuses as he leaves again for England. But in effect Shakespeare stayed to become part of the cultural definition of Anglo-Ireland from the foundation of the first professional theatre in Dublin in 1637.

When Yeats, as the prime mover, undertook to establish the modern Irish theatre in 1897 he had at first as paradigm the foundation by Ibsen and Bjornson of the Norwegian theatre. In his lectures and interviews early in 1899, just before the opening of the Irish Literary Theatre in Dublin, Yeats spoke frequently of the Norwegian model. In a piece written for Beltaine, the organ of the Irish Literary Theatre, Yeats made clear that the Norwegian model as he adopted it was directly opposed to the English commercial theatre:

Norway has a great and successful school of contemporary drama, which grew out of a national literary movement very similar to that now going on in Ireland. Everywhere critics and writers, who wish for something better than the ordinary play of commerce, turn to Norway for an example and an inspiration. (Prose 159)

Proof of Yeats’s claim could readily be found in Edward Martyn’s play The Heather Field, which accompanied Yeats’s The Countess Cathleen in the programme for the first productions of the Irish Literary Theatre in May 1899. Martyn was a convinced Ibsenite, as indeed was his friend and (tor)mentor George Moore, who soon made his presence felt as contributor to the new Irish drama. In short, Ibsen was to be a major influence on the growth of Irish drama in the twentieth century, and it should have been no major surprise that the version of A Doll’s House which won a number of Tony awards on Broadway in 1997 was by Irish playwright Frank McGuinness.

Yet this enduring influence tends to be occluded in the histories of Irish theatre. One reason lies in the fact that from 1901 on Yeats himself, having quarrelled with both Martyn and Moore, moved sharply away from the Norwegian model and replaced it with a Shakespearean model for his theatre. Indeed, he had probably always held a dislike for Ibsen’s plays in prose, while admiring the verse plays and Ibsen’s role as fighter. In the Autobiographies Yeats says he hated A Doll’s House when he saw it staged in London, ‘and yet neither I nor my generation could escape him [Ibsen] because, though we and he had not the same friends, we had the same enemies’ (Autobiographies 279). After 1901, Yeats began to see Ibsen’s drama as too limited to realism, too confined to the simulacra of daily life, too lacking in opportunities for the expression of deeply felt passion. This is where Yeats’s own influence on modern Irish drama diminishes, pace Katharine Worth (1978), since it was to be the Joycean mode, the Ibsenist strain, which was to predominate in Ireland and not the symbolist or poetic.

What may be called the first refounding of the Irish theatre came in 1902 with two plays which combined history and myth, and these were to supply new if not easily reconcilable forces in the development of Irish drama. The two plays in question were Yeats’s Cathleen ni Houlihan and George Russell’s Deirdre. The transition to this combination, strangely enough, came via Shakespeare. The Shakespeare Memorial Theatre opened on 23 April 1879, but it was founded, according to its latest historian, in 1875 (Pringle 8–10). As with the Irish national theatre, foundation is a movable feast. Foundation is always traceable to some point beyond the ostensibly originary moment. It is when one looks back beyond that moment that one sees more and more tributaries contributing to the mainstream. Thus, in the theatre, foundation is often followed by refoundation.

Yeats’s visit to Stratford in April 1901 was such a tributary to the foundation of the Irish dramatic movement. There he saw six history plays, played, as he said, ‘in their right order, with all the links that bind play to play unbroken; and partly because of a spirit in the place, and partly because of the way play supports play, the theatre has moved me as it has never done before’ (Essays 96–7). He persuaded himself that it was all somehow rather Irish:

I have felt as I have sometimes felt on grey days on the Galway shore, when a faint mist has hung over the grey sea and the grey stones, as if the world might suddenly vanish and leave nothing behind, not even a little dust under one’s feet. The people my mind’s eye has seen have too much of the extravagance of dreams. (97)

We are on the verge here of Yeats’s transforming Shakespeare into ‘an honorary Celt’, as Philip Edwards has put it. ‘Beginning a new literary movement and inspiring a new theatre in the burgeoning new life of an old nation, Yeats was replacing the Shakespeare who initiated the cultural greatness of England’ (207).

To Yeats, the six history plays he saw had in them what he termed ‘something almost mythological’, like the gods and heroes of Greek drama (Essays 109). He had found the model he wanted, where history disappeared into the mists of myth. (In the Countess Cathleen in 1899 Yeats had introduced images of the Great Famine of 1845–47 but studiously set the action in earlier times and repressed the politics arising from the famine theme.) Moreover, the actors he saw at Stratford were Frank Benson, Mrs Benson and the Benson company, already engaged to travel to Dublin in a few months’ time to stage, as the final production of the Irish Literary Theatre, Yeats’s first mythic play, Diarmuid and Grania, written in collaboration with George Moore. It is not important for the present discussion that this production was a flop, nor even that it was upstaged by the simplicities of Douglas Hyde’s folk play in Irish, Casadh an tSúgáin. What is important is that the next play Yeats wrote, with Lady Gregory’s help, was a history play which sheered off into myth, namely Cathleen ni Houlihan, with Maud Gonne cast in the mythic role of the Old Woman who is Ireland.

It is important also to note that Yeats actually misread Shakespeare’s history plays. It may be recalled how I Henry VI was received by its first audiences, according to Thomas Nashe in Pierce Penniless (1592):

How it would have joyed brave Talbot (the terror of the French) to thinke that after he had lyne two hundred yeares in his Tombe, hee should triumphe againe on the Stage, and have his bones newe embalmed with the teares of ten thousand spectators at least (at severall times), who, in the Tragedian that represents his person, imagine that they behold him fresh bleeding. (McKerrow 212)

These plays were what we would call representational. Peter Saccio comments that the series of eight plays on the later Plantagenets

has high coherence as a history of fifteenth-century England. Indeed, far more than any professional historian, and despite the fact that the professionals have improved upon him in historical accuracy, Shakespeare is responsible for whatever notions most of us possess about the period and its political leaders. (4)

The force of this point was emphasized in a production of Henry VIII at the Swan in Stratford. Had Yeats returned to Stratford in 1902 he would have seen that play also and would doubtless have included it in his idea of the history play. Nowadays it is again entitled, as it was at first, All is True. In the 1997 production (directed by Gregory Doran) this title was emblazoned in gold lettering across two large doors dividing the stage in two. Even if it contains a certain amount of irony the old/new title All is True is highly instructive. One is constantly being persuaded of the truth of Shakespeare’s history, its non-mythic content. Yeats could never have taken over this representationalism. ‘All is true’ in the Irish historical context could only have been a narrative of offence, of accusation, suffering and injustice, and hence, given a society divided between nationalists and unionists, have ensured a violent reception. So, from the first, Yeats’s drama and the founding drama of the Irish Literary Theatre either repressed history or disguised it in an effort to evade engagement with controversial issues, such as the Great Famine.

Indeed, instead of ‘all is true’ one would be inclined to say of Irish drama ‘all is vague’ or ‘all is Celtic’ or ‘all is mythic’. There is usually a retreat into a world or state of mind elevated as superior to the actual. Martyn’s plays, for all that they are Ibsenist in form, are like this also. Maeve (1900) is a case in point. It is a tale of two Maeves. The modern Maeve is rescued from marriage to an English nobleman by the mythical goddess and her death is celebrated as the entering upon a far more significant life among Celtic kings. ‘The empire of the Gael’, Queen Maeve tells young Maeve, ‘is in Tir-nan-ogue’; that is, in the Celtic otherworld (Moore and Martyn 293). Which is just as well, since Maeve’s awakening consciousness of the wrongs done to Ireland by England – ‘the old, old story!’ as she calls it (288) – might otherwise have led to her joining some Republican association, probably headed by Maud Gonne, who was present in the Antient Concert Rooms on opening night.

Yeats, too, had to be oblique, and was horrified at the inflamed reception accorded Cathleen ni Houlihan, ostensibly a history play set in 1798 around the arrival of the French at Killala. Here Yeats denied he had written propaganda, a denial which cuts no ice nowadays: Conor Cruise O’Brien has described Cathleen ni Houlihan as ‘probably the most powerful piece of nationalist propaganda that has ever been composed’ (61). At least, O’Brien’s exaggeration draws attention to what Yeats was doing with history. Yeats got away from this line of business as fast as his poetic legs could carry him, and dived with relief back into Celtic myth with The King’s Threshold in 1903. In a well-known passage in A Portrait of the Artist Stephen refers to ‘the broken lights of Irish myth’ (180). Richard Ellmann relates this phrase to Joyce’s seeing Yeats and Moore’s Diarmuid and Grania in 1901, and argues that Joyce’s dissatisfaction at this display of ‘parochialism’ fuelled The Day of the Rabblement (88). Joyce, it would appear, preferred ‘all is true’ for motto. But it may be he misjudged the difficulty. It might be said that in turn J. M. Synge shared Joyce’s view regarding the ‘all is true’ imperative but lived to see how Abbey audiences responded to the truth embodied in The Playboy of the Western World (1907). But Synge retreated into myth for his last, unfinished play, Deirdre of the Sorrows. Joyce himself, of course, went the same way and embraced myth, albeit not Celtic myth, when he moved on to write Ulysses. It will be recalled that Eliot, in that famous review of Ulysses published in The Dial in November 1923, gave Yeats the...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• List of Tables
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• Notes on Contributors
• Introduction: The Irish Theatre in Transition
• Part I Foundations and Refoundations in Historical Perspective
• Part II Engaging with a Changing Reality
• Part III Enhanced Theatricality
• Part IV Reframing Transition
• Part V Inventiveness and Expanding the Stage
• Part VI On the ‘Re-Foundation’ of the Irish Theatre
• Further Reading
• Index