Abstract
Joep Leerssen discusses how theatre contributed to the formation of an independent Irish public sphere in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, by examining William Butler Yeats’s Kathleen Ní Houlihan (1892/1912), J. M. Synge’s The Playboy of the Western World (1907) and Seán O’Casey’s The Plough and the Stars (1926). He concludes his contribution by presenting two late-twentieth-century plays, Brian Friel’s Translations (1980) and Frank McGuinness’s Observe the Sons of Ulster Marching Towards the Somme (1985), that both thematize the national tensions in Northern Ireland. Leerssen demonstrates that independence and the relationships between the Republic of Ireland and Northern Ireland, and Great Britain has been a recurrent theme not only in politics but in the theatre too, and in fact functions rather like a connective tissue between the plays examined. A similar focus can be seen in plays written during the struggle for independence in the early twentieth century as well as in plays written in the wake of ‘The Troubles’. The last play Leerssen discusses, McGuinness’s Observe the Sons of Ulster Marching Towards the Somme (1985) underlines once more the function of theatre as a moral institution. What is more, it shows that by openly discussing issues of identity and belonging a national play can contribute to the creation of a feeling of mutual understanding, and by doing so can present an inclusive notion of national identity.
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Notes
- 1.
Wilde , odd man out, ironically embraced middle-brow Labiche-style farces in his social satires (The Importance of Being Earnest and An Ideal Husband), and adopted a ‘decadent’ aestheticism in Salomé.
- 2.
On what follows, generally my “Knotenpunkte. Wie Ibsen und Maeterlinck sich in Dublin in die Quere kamen”, In Literarische Transnationalität. Kulturelle Dreiecksbeziehungen zwischen Skandinavien, Deutschland und Frankreich im 19. Jahrhundert, ed. Karin Hoff, Anna Sandberg & Udo Schöningh (Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann, 2015), 127–145 and “The Theatre of William Butler Yeats”, in The Cambridge Companion to Twentieth-Century Irish Drama, ed. Shaun Richards (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 47–61.
- 3.
There is a very substantial body of research on this remarkable synchronicity between the literary and cultural revival on the one hand and the radicalization of separatist nationalism on the other; starting with William Irwin Thompson , The Imagination of an Insurrection: Dublin, Easter 1916: A Study of an Ideological Movement (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1967), and burgeoning in the run-up to the centenary commemorations of 2016 (e.g. Roy Foster , Vivid Faces: The Revolutionary Generation in Ireland, 1890–1923 (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2015)).
- 4.
The documentation is gathered in Robert Hogan & James Kilroy, eds. The Modern Irish Drama: A Documentary History, vols. 1–3 (Dublin: Dolmen, 1978–80). Also, Roy Foster, W.B. Yeats: A Life (2 vols.; Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997–98). Yeats’s lines are from his 1938 poem ‘The man and the echo’.
- 5.
I here combine insights by Gérard Genette, “Vraisemblance et Motivation”, in Id., Figures II. Essais (Paris: Seuil, 1969), 71–100, and Hans-Robert Jauss, Probleme des Verstehens: Ausgewählte Aufsätze (Stuttgart: Philipp Reclam, 1999).
- 6.
Quoted and discussed in my National Thought in Europe: A Cultural. 2nd ed. (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2010), 96–97.
- 7.
The moribund Gaelic language was rescued from extinction by the manifold activities of the Gaelic League. On the outlook of the Gaelic League, the best source is Philip O’Leary , The Prose Literature of the Gaelic Revival, 1881–1921. Ideology and Innovation (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1994).
- 8.
W.B. Yeats , “The Celtic Element in Literature” (1897), in W.B. Yeats , Essays and Introductions (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1961), 187.
- 9.
In London, the innovation of the ‘literary’ theatre was driven to a large extent by Ibsenites: for example, J.T. Grein, whose production of Ibsen’s Ghosts Yeats had seen in 1891. Yeats appreciated Ibsen for his uncompromising literary high-mindedness and refusal of commercial opportunism; but Yeats’s literary sensibility was miles removed from Ibsen’s naturalism (though possibly more appreciative of early plays such as Brand and Peer Gynt); hence also his rivalry with the other Irishman on the London drama scene: the Ibsenite Shaw . Yeats leant more in the direction of the symbolism of Maeterlinck and Villiers de l’Isle-Adam, whose plays had mesmerized him during a visit to Paris, where these schools, naturalism and symbolism, were at daggers drawn. The art theatres of André Antoine and A.F. Lugné-Poe, the Théâtre Libre and the Théâtre de l’Œuvre, had split along more or less this aesthetic divide; but that antagonism was less obvious for the dramatic progressives in London, including their Dublin-rooted outrider Yeats . When J.T. Grein invited the Théâtre de l’Œuvre over to London in 1895, it offered a programme that consisted in equal parts of Maeterlinck (L’intruse, Pelléas et Mélisande) and Ibsen (Rosmersholm, Solnes le constructeur).
- 10.
I have explored this cross-purpose further in my Remembrance and Imagination: Patterns in the Historical and Literary Representation of Ireland in the Nineteenth Century (Cork University Press, 1996), 207–223.
- 11.
Mary Trotter, Ireland’s National Theaters: Political Performance and the Origins of the Irish Dramatic Movement (New York: Syracuse, 2001), 73–99. On the pre-history of the tableau vivant: Kristen Gram Holström, Monodrama, Attitudes, Tableaux vivants. Studies on Some Trends of Theatrical Fashion 1770–1815, Uppsala 1967.
- 12.
Catherine Morris , “Becoming Irish? Alice Milligan and the Revival”, Irish University Review 31 no. 1 (2003), 79–98; Mark Phelan, “Beyond the Pale: Neglected Northern Irish Women Playwrights. Alice Milligan, Helen Waddell and Patricia O’Connor”, in M. Sihra, ed. Women in Irish Drama: A Century of Authorship and Representation (Basingstoke, 2007), 109–129.
- 13.
Ann Rigney , “Do Apologies end Events? Bloody Sunday, 1972–2010”, in Afterlife of Events: Perspectives in Mnemohistory, ed. Marek Tamm (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015), 242–261.
- 14.
Seamus Deane , ed. Ireland’s Field Day (London: Hutchinson, 1985); Richard Pine , Brian Friel and Ireland’s Drama (London: Routledge, 1990); Marilynn J. Richtarik, Acting Between the Lines: The Field Day Theatre Company and Irish Cultural Politics 1980–1984 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994).
- 15.
Cf. John Andrews , A Paper Landscape. The Ordnance Survey in Nineteenth-Century Ireland (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975); Gillian M. Doherty, The Irish Ordnance Survey: History, Culture and Memory (Dublin: Four Courts, 2004). The allegorical aptitude of control over place-names applied, of course, first and foremost to the city where Field Day was based and where Translations was first performed. Traditionally called Derry (and still called so by Ulster Catholics and in the Republic of Ireland), the city was officially named Londonderry when given its Royal Charter in 1613, underlining its colonial adhesion to the British state (and still called so by Ulster protestants and in official British nomenclature); the city’s name is now a shibboleth of sectarian division.
- 16.
Eventually collected as Ireland’s Great War (Dublin: Lilliput, 2014). On memory culture and the Memorial Garden, see Ann Rigney , “Divided pasts: A premature memorial and the dynamics of collective remembrance”, Memory Studies 1 (2008): 89–97.
Bibliography
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Foster, Roy. Vivid Faces: The Revolutionary Generation in Ireland, 1890–1923. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2015.
———. W.B. Yeats: A Life. 2 vols. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997–98.
Hogan, Robert, and James Kilroy, eds. The Modern Irish Drama: A Documentary History. Vol. 1–3. Dublin: Dolmen, 1978–80.
Jauss, Hans-Robert: Probleme des Verstehens: Ausgewählte Aufsätze. Stuttgart: Philipp Reclam, 1999.
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———. National Thought in Europe: A Cultural History. 3rd ed. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2010.
———. Remembrance and Imagination: Patterns in the Historical and Literary Representation of Ireland in the Nineteenth Century. Cork University Press, 1996.
———. “The Theatre of William Butler Yeats.” In The Cambridge Companion to Twentieth-Century Irish Drama, ed. Shaun Richards, 47–61. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004.
Morris, Catherine: “Becoming Irish? Alice Milligan and the Revival.” Irish University Review 31, no. 1 (2003): 79–98.
O’Leary, Philip. The Prose Literature of the Gaelic Revival, 1881–1921. Ideology and Innovation. University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1994.
Phelan, Mark. “Beyond the Pale: Neglected Northern Irish Women Playwrights. Alice Milligan, Helen Waddell and Patricia O’Connor.” In Women in Irish Drama, ed. M. Sihra, 109–129. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007.
Pine, Richard. Brian Friel and Ireland’s Drama. London: Routledge, 1990.
Richtarik, Marilynn J. Acting Between the Lines: The Field Day Theatre Company and Irish Cultural Politics 1980–1984. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994.
Rigney, Ann. “Divided pasts: A premature memorial and the dynamics of collective remembrance.” Memory Studies 1 (2008): 89–97.
———: “Do Apologies End Events? Bloody Sunday, 1972–2010.” In Afterlife of Events: Perspectives in Mnemohistory, ed. Marek Tamm, 242–261. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015.
Thompson, William Irwin. The Imagination of an Insurrection: Dublin, Easter 1916: A Study of an Ideological Movement. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1967.
Trotter, Mary. Ireland’s National Theaters: Political Performance and the Origins of the Irish Dramatic Movement, 73–99. New York: Syracuse, 2001.
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Leerssen, J. (2018). Theatre as a Moral Institution: Twentieth-Century Ireland. In: van der Poll, S., van der Zalm, R. (eds) Reconsidering National Plays in Europe. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-75334-8_9
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