«Mirror up to Nature»

Introduction: ‘The Mirror up to Nature’

Between October, 2006, and June, 2007, St Patrick’s College, Drumcondra, a college of Dublin City University, sponsored a programme of seven lectures on drama and theatre, under the less than totally imaginative title, The Mirror up to Nature. This is the fourth in the highly successful Seamus Heaney Lecture Series, inaugurated by the College and supported generously by its President, Dr Pauric Travers. They have been held biennially since 2000, each addressing themes of educational, cultural, political or artistic importance in the broad context deriving from the educational and humanities mission of the College. St Patrick’s is most appreciative of the support and interest consistently shown the series by its patron, Seamus Heaney, a dedicated educator, an outstanding poet, and, be it remembered in the context of The Mirror up to Nature, a significant dramatist – The Cure at Troy (1990) and The Burial at Thebes (2004), versions, respectively, of Sophocles’ Philoctetes and Antigone.

The content of the seven lectures is summarized below, while readers’ versions of six of them are reprinted in the present volume. (Professor Ania Loomba, who spoke on drama and politics, had already pledged her contribution to another publisher.) Sadly, one of the planned lectures, to be given by that outstanding teacher, John Devitt, formerly Head of English at Mater Dei College, was overtaken by an illness which was to take him from us in June of 2007.

The occasion of the second lecture, ‘The Irish Contribution’ by Thomas Kilroy, was graced by the attendance of Brian Friel, whose father was an alumnus of the College. In characteristically penetrating style, Kilroy grounded his argument on the philosophy of the stage articulated by Yeats, his equal unease with the showiness of post-Restoration English comedy and with the visionary restrictiveness of the work of the emerging catholic nationalists such as Padraic Colum and T.C. Murray. He provocatively related that argument to the more recent work of Eugene O’Brien and Marina Carr.

Professor Ania Loomba, University of Pennsylvania, in the third lecture, spoke on the politics of drama and the drama of politics. From an initial discussion on concepts of race, nation and outsiders in some of Shakepeare’s plays – Othello, Shylock – she moved on to related issues of personal and social identity both in his and later work. An impressive feature of this occasion was the lecturer’s exceptional adeptness in the question-and-answer session.

At the heart of the series, reflecting the centrality of St Patrick’s as a College of Education, was a pair of lectures given by two recognized world authorities in the area of drama in education. In ‘The Mythic and the Mundane: the Transforming Power of Theatre and Process Drama’, Professor Cecily O’Neill, stressing the primacy of imagination in education and the related importance of story and myth, argued clearly as to how they could be illuminatingly addressed through ‘Process Drama’, a form of drama.