Theatre Stuff

These essays are not so much about the intellectualising of theatre practice as about encountering theatre in different, passionate ways and about the challenges facing those who make meaning in theatre. As well as this, some of these essays confront the lip service paid to the role of the director, designer, theatre space and performer in the making of meaning within theatre. Long gone are the days when drama and theatre were just a component of English Literature and this is something that the new Leaving Certificate Syllabus is attempting to address. Clearly, today’s audiences are more sophisticated and demanding in their encounter with a performance. In addition, these essays remind the reader of the gender challenges facing theatre practice. The slow emergence of women writers, unlike the advancement of women in theatre administration, production and performance, is part of the ongoing troublesome debate. Not everything could be covered, not every invitation to writers to contribute was accepted and, occasionally, what was promised was not delivered for numerous reasons. Nevertheless, there is no perfect balance and not everybody will be comfortable with certain absences, but the objective with this book was never to be all-inclusive; instead the intention was to be somewhat representative of what is going on now.

Watching some daytime television recently, I saw two programmes that fascinated me. Jenny Jones’ show offers men and women the opportunity through DNA testing to establish the paternity of a child. DNA testing is as accurate as can be. The results were announced “on air” and the viewer could bear witness to the instant responses of the panellists. The other programme was Ricki Lake’s. A mother and daughter were on this particular show. Communication between mother and daughter was fraught. (Guests hardly ever hide their identities behind a screen as you might find on a RTE or BBC programme.) And in order to address the difficulty, the young woman had agreed to take a lie detector test off camera; the findings of which would be related to her mother, who posed the questions to be answered.

The polygraph test would measure heartbeat, pulse, breathing rates and the conductance of the skin in order to distinguish between what is true, what is false and what is inconclusive. What is truth, what is fantasy and what is fabrication? Despite the voyeurism, and taking into account the performative opportunity afforded to guests on the show and the chance to realise some escapist fantasy, there is a belief that television is the court of appeal and that “truth” can be ascertained and verified publicly, by the spectacle of the chat show. Is there some ultimate truth that a heightened pulse or an escalated blood pressure can somehow confirm? And can in effect, physiological feedback or DNA testing be equated with truth. What is the relationship between fact and truth? Is there any need to establish one? Most of all, what has social class got to do with it all? I make some of these comments in light of Prime Cut’s recent production of Problem Child by the Canadian playwright, George F. Walker, which dealt with some of these issues.

What once was the ritualisation of truth in theatre and performance becomes the spectacle of truth, voyeuristically framed by the perverse quest for verification and authenticity within the chat-show format; a quick fix in both meanings of the word. Neither the resolution of issues in private nor the recourse to expertise beyond the frame of television is enough. The transaction is a complicated one, but the guests, though not victims in a narrow sense of the word, still perform some act of self-laceration. Often on such shows, the pain is spectated, made spectacular and numbed by the presence of the camera and made offensive by an intrusion that is invited from the studio audience, which often attempts to determine the value and worth of an individual’s pain and of his/her behaviour. It becomes a show-trial by (the usually female) chat-show host and her studio audience. (It is unknown, in my experience, for the host and audience not to share relatively similar responses, and as such the guests are judged according to some common value system that is without complication and driven by nostalgia and sentiment.)

The bigger deception, however, is the lie of compassion promoted by programme makers in the name of ratings and profit. It seems as if there is no emotion and no feedback accommodated, without the presence of the camera and no substance or validation of identity without the intervention of the public. What does it mean to play to the public gallery?

From here there is a broader question. What is the standing of contemporary writing practice? Why have Irish plays abroad been so successful, especially since 1990 with the acclaim granted to Dancing at Lughnasa? Clearly, we cannot deny the huge success of Irish drama of late. But what is the truth of it? How do we evaluate that success? Is it the number of awards garnered, by playwright, production or performer, is it the length of the run and the scale of the audiences attending, is it measured by the substances of critical responses, or by the translation of texts into other languages and contexts? Is it too immediate to assess or is a play truly of merit, only after it has been through many new productions and many interrogations before a broad spectrum of spectators? The answer to such a series of questions is complex.

It is only in the past decade that Ireland has become truly urbanised in the late-twentieth century meaning of that term, in other words, characterised by great mobility, using highly complex, far-reaching systems of communication, with increased secularisation and the break-down of the old bonds of familial, tribalistic society. We have yet to have a theatre of this Ireland because it is as yet incompletely formed but we are getting plays that reflect the confusion attending those changes.

Change is fundamental to a dramatic practice and the challenge facing all of our present dramatists is to match and map the experiences, confidences and demands of a changing society. Kilroy raises a number of substantial issues in his essay. First are aspects of a tradition that still shape his own writing and the writing practice of his own generation that grew up in a “virtually cashless society”, with a “containable, endurable poverty everywhere”. It was a situation marked by “isolation, repressiveness and dreariness”. How different is Kilroy’s description of his economic reality to the one presently on offer to a substantial part of the population? For Kilroy, out of the dour circumstances of 40s and 50s Ireland emerged a “new writing” and a “new sensibility”, a writing practice which profited from aspects of “distancing”, “self-consciousness” and “artifice”, as were laid down by playwrights mainly from the Anglo-Irish tradition. It was a writing style that was “alive to the dislocating perspectives of the mid-century and the fluidity of expression possible on stage with modern lighting, design and direction”. Yet it still took his generation, according to Kilroy, to bleed dry certain forms; namely, the “Irish peasant play”, the “Irish Religious play”, the “Family Play” and the “Irish History play”. Kilroy delivers a warning, stating that “Within the metropolitan centres there is always a nostalgia for cultures which are untouched, untainted by the ennui, the busyness, the crowdedness of the centre”. Finally Kilroy ends with the statement that “nostalgia may no longer be enough, indeed it may not even be necessary as Irish drama begins to locate itself more in the present”.

This popular cultural impact has been significant of late. A blatant model of contrast would compare the wild dancing in Friel’s Dancing at Lughnasa to the beat of the traditional Mason’s Apron to the dancing inspired by the sound of Bullet with Butterfly Wings by the Smashing Pumpkins used in Hughes’ own Halloween Night (1997) (both dances were partially performed on top of tables), would oppose the operatic influence on the structure of Murphy’s The Gigli Concert (1983) with the effect of the television soap opera format on McDonagh’s work and would differentiate between the significances of the King James’ Bible, Shakespeare or Mikhail Bakhtin’s underworld of the carnival to McGuinness’ writings and the influences of Quentin Tarantino, Irvine Welsh and The Simpsons on the work of Alex Johnston.

Hughes perceives very clearly the fetishisation of authentication and views that to be a dangerous cul-de-sac of sorts. For Hughes, “What used to be creativity, inspiration, energy has congealed into tradition. What is tradition anyway? Habit in fancy dress. An excuse for thought. A mindless worship of the past”. He ends his essay with a question, if the Celts never really existed, and if the versions of Irishness we feed ourselves are an illusion, a fabrication, how liberating might that be? How much easier it might be to resolve certain tensions, but perhaps it is this confidence trick that has prompted the freshness and vision of what has emerged in so much of the writing of late.

Hughes sees a need to fend off tradition and elsewhere he has written of placing an embargo on the writings of an older generation, in order to allow a new generation space to prosper. To me, there is more boldness, recklessness and provocation in that statement than real desire. Essentially, as an emerging post-colonial society, we are still locked between village and city. Hughes states that: “The village is no longer the objective correlative for Ireland: the city is, or to be precise, between cities is. That space between. That’s not to say that people don’t live in the country any more, or that rural life isn’t ‘valuable’; it’s that culturally, it’s played out. It no longer signifies. Mythologically, it doesn’t resonate any more”.

There are three traditions of translation/adaptation in operation in Irish drama, the translation of modern European classics (McGuinness, Friel and Kilroy), the adaptations of Irish poetry best seen in the work of Bolger and MacIntyre and the re-working of Greek classics. The consistent modification of Greek classic drama is a re-invigoration of tradition, a cross-cultural absorption and adaptation of form, content and context, and an attempt to interrogate the present by appropriation. Marianne McDonald’s essay maps that vigorous approach towards the classics at a particularly sensitive time both socially and politically. McDonald notes that:

Each of these Irish playwrights has a particular approach towards Ireland’s history and political situation, some more overtly than others. Field Day Theatre first performed Tom Paulin’s The Riot Act. A Version of Antigone by Sophocles at the Guildhall, Derry, on September 19, 1984. It uses the language of the Irish North to place us in its modern locale, and the ideas expressed translate well into the issues which divide Derry.

80s Ireland was in part a world of suspicion and little compromise. Antigone was the obvious attraction here. Through this text, distance, insight, repudiation and the processing of fears and anxieties are available to the writer. Moreover, it is not just a recent Irish passion for the classics. Yeats’ attempts to appropriate the classics are duly noted by McDonald. Moreover McDonald escorts the reader from the world of politics into a specific post-colonial context, something that most definitely needs articulation.

McDonald argues that literary classics not only provide a “heightened mode of communication”, but that they can also be used to “filter personal terror, such as fear of death”. The fact that the playwrights opted for Antigone more than any other text gives an indication that the concerns are “on human rights more than on fate and identity”. A version of Oedipus Tyrannus is striking by its absence. So, in re-writing or re-working, adapting, translating, and transposing the classics, McDonald argues, the main function is to create a “literature of protest”. Justice is the quest and justice is the obligation. Overall for McDonald, “The result is not simply a political tract protesting abuse, but a passionate expression of hopes and fears”.

Towards the end of her essay McDonald quotes Seamus Heaney’s lines about the need to believe in “miracles” and in “healing wells and cures”. Such is his optimism and such is the role of the writer to step outside of the brutality of fact and into mystery and parable. The Greek connection fulfilled that in part, where curses, revenge and the bond of blood were commonplace and resolution problematic on many fronts. Irish versions of Chekhov and Ibsen in particular fulfil a not too dissimilar function.

Obsession, the process of change and the intense and lacerating bonds of family seem to be the attraction, apart from the need to resist the demands and imperatives of British versions of the same plays.

If tradition is problematic on a number of fronts, then Lionel Pilkington complicates it further by determinedly tracing what is perceived as being tradition and more importantly what is excluded from that. Such exclusion then impacts in a number of ways, not least of which is the relationship between tradition and institutionally formal theatre and more importantly, what is marginalized, repressed and excluded from our contemporary definitions, something which ties in with later essays by Caoimhe McAvinchey and Victor Merriman. Pilkington draws on John Harrington’s work in which he claims that even the Irish melodramas of the 19th century “functioned as an important counterweight to the misrepresentation of Irish character on the English stage and thus helped to prepare the way for the possibility of a somewhat more independent Irish theatre”.