Irish Drama

Acknowledgements

This book arises from a conference that was held as part of a project funded by the Irish Research Council for the Humanities and Social Sciences. The project was entitled ‘The Internationalization of Irish Drama, 1975-2005’ and the conference took place at National University of Ireland, Galway in April 2009. We gratefully acknowledge the support of the Council. We also wish to thank Lisa Coen and Shelley Troupe, who co-organized the event.

Thanks to Rough Magic theatre company and Colm Hogan for permission to reproduce images from A Solemn Mass for a Full Moon in Summer. Thanks to Blue Raincoat, Quay Street, Sligo for kind permission to reproduce an image from The Third Policeman, taken by Joe Hunt. We also wish to thank Bisi Adigun and Roddy Doyle for permission to quote from their script of their 2007 adaptation of The Playboy of the Western World.

We are grateful to the members of the Irish Theatrical Diaspora organising committee and advisory board. We also wish to thank the peer reviewer who commented in detail about all of the papers in the book.

Finally we wish to record our thanks to the editors of Carysfort Press for their continued support for the Irish Theatrical Diaspora series of books.

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List of Illustrations

Introduction

Since the late 1970s there has been a marked internationalization of Irish drama, with individual plays, playwrights, and theatrical companies establishing newly global reputations. Opportunities to travel internationally have led to a continuing re-invention of Ireland as it is represented on the world stage and, as a result, a growing number of theatre companies and writers are seeking to exploit and re-evaluate international constructions of Irishness. Simultaneously, the increased globalization of Irish society has led to a new awareness within the Irish theatre of international dramatists and practices – which have in turn have helped to shape and reshape Irish awareness of its place in the world. These new forms of cultural mobility, to and from Ireland, have also affected Irish dramatists’ and practitioners’ considerations of social and cultural identities within Ireland. Such developments have been widely celebrated and, following the collapse of the Irish ‘Celtic Tiger’ economy in late 2008 have (perhaps surprisingly) intensified, with the Irish government investing significant resources in promoting Irish culture abroad in the hope of restoring the country’s reputation.

The conference was an attempt to consider these issues in detail. We invited contributors to explore specific case studies, most of them from the period 1975-2005. Those papers have subsequently been rewritten and reviewed, and are gathered in this book.

Immediately evident at the conference was the fluidity of terms that were used to speak about the movement of Irish theatre around the world. Some contributors spoke of Irish theatre as functioning in ways that might be termed international: that is, they considered theatre that involves a movement from one specific national space to another. For others, Irish theatre has become globalized: it is based on a conception of the world as a single place with one broadly shared culture – so that an Irish play can mean much the same thing in Ballina as it does in Bochum, Broadway, or Birmingham. We heard from some scholars who explored the increased multiculturalism of Irish drama, and from others who saw Irish theatre as having benefited from entering into intercultural dialogue with non-Irish practitioners and performance practices. Some speakers also sought to historicize Irish drama, and thus to consider it in its colonial and postcolonial contexts. In each case those terms were used precisely, but what was fascinating was the extent to which they converged, overlapped, and sometimes contradicted each other.

We do not promise to resolve those contradictions in this volume, but our hope is that by placing case studies in dialogue with each other we may reveal surprising affinities and new areas for investigation. For instance, we were aware when organizing the conference that there was already enormous academic interest in the 2007 Abbey Theatre adaptation of The Playboy of the Western World, which had been co-authored by the Irish writer Roddy Doyle and the Nigerian director Bisi Adigun. Christopher Murray’s paper in this book provides a detailed reading of the adaptation, but also situates it in terms of the work of the Dublin-based theatre collective The Passion Machine. He thus allows us to view the Doyle/Adigun production through several prisms: the local (that is, Passion Machine’s relationship with its Dublin audience), the national (the staging of the play at the Abbey Theatre), and the intercultural (the interrelationships between the Irish and Nigerian elements of the script). He also shows us how the treatment of race in 2007 can be mapped back on to the Passion Machine’s approach to social class in the 1980s and 1990s.

Blue Raincoat was one of a wave of Irish companies formed in the late 1980s and early 1990s, partly inspired by the success of Druid Theatre, the Galway-based company founded in 1975. In her essay, José Lanters shows how Druid used their west of Ireland location to allow the Irish theatre to re-connect with the works of John Millington Synge. DruidSynge, the company’s day-long staging of all of Synge’s plays, premiered in Galway in 2005 and subsequently toured internationally, and here Lanters provides an investigation of its time in the United States. What emerges is a theme that runs through this book: that theatre tends to provoke a variety of responses, even as its mediators – marketing people, academics, journalists – seek to impose a single meaning upon what is being performed. As Lanters shows, DruidSynge provoked markedly different reactions as it toured. The critical response as recorded in newspapers can only give us a partial insight into the reactions of audience members; we are therefore faced with the difficulty of retrieving accurately and comprehensively the conditions in which a play was produced and received.