Rapid Change, Revision and the “Troubles” (1966–1980)

Abstract

The late 1960s and 1970s saw Ireland’s acceptance into the European Economic Community in 1973, educational reform, revisionist histories, increased urbanisation and the outbreak of sectarian violence in Northern Ireland, all of which prompted a break with previous convictions and ideologies. This chapter shows how theatrical activity reflected this change in its themes and practices with a new generation of directors and designers. An emphasis on regionalism led to the establishment of the Irish Touring Company and the founding of Druid in Galway. There were political experimentations in form, dramas critical of Catholic morality and plays that confronted the violence in the North. The Abbey produced seminal Beckett revivals, while productions at the Project Arts Centre brought the underrepresented urban working class to the fore.

Part 1: Historical Context

The late 1960s and 1970s in Ireland was a period of accelerated change. Ireland’s acceptance into the European Economic Community (EEC) in 1973, educational reform, the removal of censorship on publications, revisionist histories, increased urbanisation and the outbreak of sectarian violence in Northern Ireland created new social and economic circumstances prompting a break with previous convictions and ideologies of the past. This rapid change was fuelled by an increase in materialistic desires created by mass media. The goal of making Ireland into a competitive open economy spearheaded by Sean Lemass’s Fianna Fáil government in the early sixties now dominated state policy in the Republic.

As we saw in the previous chapter, the pursuit of economic prosperity by means of an open economy and through membership of the ECC was not conceived as a radical break from the past but a new means to achieve the old goals of Irish independence. It was thought that financial prosperity in the Republic would help to end partition by making unionists see the financial benefit of a united Ireland. While membership of the EEC was sought to secure subsidies and grants that would sustain the primacy of agriculture in Irish economic plans. However, despite its aims at continuity with the past the fervent adoption of free market capitalism soon aided the creation of a “new Irish reality” that “was ambiguous, transitional, increasingly urban or suburban, disturbingly at variance with the cultural aspirations of the revolutionaries who had given birth to the state” (Brown 2004, 299).

The revival of the Irish language was one such aspiration at odds with this new reality. This was reflected most obviously in the lack of Irish-language programmes on Irish television. Dependent on advertising revenue the state broadcaster determined that most of its broadcasting be in English. The requirement for proficiency in the language for entry to the Civil Service was abandoned and the numbers of native Irish speakers continued to decline. Terence Brown tells how the revival of the language on the island was replaced with a new goal: “Bilingualism, not linguistic exchange became the new aspiration” (Brown 2004, 259).

After four decades of independence the dominant nationalist historical narrative was now being openly and frequently questioned as the people began to consider if their circumstances were all that better in the Republic. Historians and public intellectuals like Conor Cruise O’Brien rejected the story of Ireland as one of repeated sacred Fenian rebellions that culminated in the salvation of the Irish people through the sacrifice of the 1916 insurrection and a subsequent heroic war of independence. The motives and actions of revered revolutionaries like Patrick Pearse and the role played by the Catholic Church since independence were scrutinised while those who had sought different futures for Ireland were again remembered. This historiographic revolution referred to as “revisionism” was not confined to public debate but was also incorporated into second-level education, now free to all citizens since 1967. This created a generation that would continue to dismiss old pieties and reassess national values in subsequent decades. A further contributing factor to this was that the school children of the 1970s grew up in an Ireland free of the censorship on literature and intellectual thought experienced by previous generations. The censorship of previous years had been particularly sensitive to anything sexual. Historian Donal O’Drisceoil tells how the “mere suggestion of homosexuality, promiscuity, or prostitution was enough to ban a book” (2017). In 1967 the then Justice Minister Brian Lenihan brought forward a new Censorship of Publications Act. The permanent prohibition on books banned for indecency and obscenity was replaced by a 12-year ban, applied retrospectively. According to O’Drisceoil, “This immediately released over 5,000 titles, and about 400 a year up to 1979” (2017). Irish citizens could now read and study great works of world literature and most of their own modern writers that had been banned until this point.

These gains for freedom of thought did not lead to an immediate destabilising of the power of the Catholic Church as had been once feared. There was a legislative shift towards pluralism of religion with the Irish people voting in a referendum in 1972 to remove article 44 from the constitution that recognised the special position of the Catholic Church. But the majority of the country still showed unwavering devotion to Catholicism with two and half million people turning out to see the Pope when he visited in 1979. It was in the theatre that opposition to the controlling aspects of organised religions, particularly Catholicism, continued to be voiced and enacted. Patrick Lonergan views Irish theatre from 1950 onwards as being “instrumental” (2019, 42) in the liberalisation and secularisation of Irish society. However, he qualifies that “Irish dramatists, actors and theatre-makers have challenged Catholicism not so much as a religion but as an ideology, and not so much as a personal faith but as an institution that wielded power, often unjustly, within Irish society” (2019, 42). Indeed, plays of the late 1960s and 1970s by Tom Murphy, Brian Friel, Thomas Kilroy and Edna O’Brien all rage against the ideology of religion through their characters but interestingly plays such as Murphy’s The Sanctuary Lamp (1975), Friel’s Faith Healer (1979) and O’Brien’s A Pagan Place (1973) all rely on its ritual structures for their dramaturgy. This is most explicit in the title of Kilroy’s breakout play: The Death and Resurrection of Mr. Roche (1968). These plays seek the communion and transformative potential offered by Catholic ritual while also rejecting Church dogma and control.

Women’s groups also voiced dissent against the Church by protesting legislation influenced by Catholic thought, in particular the restrictions on contraceptives. In 1971 members of the Irish Women’s Liberation Movement, many of them high-profile journalists, travelled by train from Dublin to Belfast to purchase contraceptives across the border. This public event drew attention to the absurdity of the legislation on contraceptives in the Republic and marked a significant moment for a second wave of Irish feminist activism. Sustained pressure from women’s groups led to a series of legislative reforms in the 1970s including the introduction of an unmarried mother’s allowance and removal of barriers against employing and promoting married women in the Civil Service. Further to the actions of these grassroots movements “EEC directives were paramount in advancing equality (…) reflected in the Employment Equality Act, which came into operation in 1977, prohibiting discrimination on grounds of sex or marital status” (Ferriter 2012, 623).

Less advances were unfortunately made for gay equality in this period despite the establishment of the Irish Gay Rights Movement in 1974. Men were still being prosecuted and sent to prison for “gross indecency” under 1885 legislation. The Irish Censorship Board banned the English Gay News in April 1976 (Ferriter 2012, 584) and that same year Dublin Corporation pulled its funding of the Project Arts Centre after it produced two plays by the UK-based Gay Sweatshop Theatre Company.

The social and political upheaval in Northern Ireland that would emerge in the late 1960s and lead to a period of sustained violence for the following three decades originated in efforts to address social injustice and poverty. The once prosperous linen and shipbuilding industries of the region were in decline and the suburbanisation of cities such as Belfast saw the placing of “link roads through inner city areas, destroying supportive networks” (Ferriter 2005, 610). This led to the building of large flat complexes, “an expensive and destructive mistake, which carved up local communities” (Ferriter 2005, 610). The Troubles, as these three decades became known, were thus born from a movement to address poor housing conditions and unemployment. Catholics were disproportionately affected by such scarcity of jobs and housing as unionist controlled local government and employers discriminated against them favouring Protestant workers. Inspired by the Civil Rights Movement in the United States, the Northern Irish Civil Rights Association (NICRA) was formed in 1967 to unite both Catholic and Protestant communities, not to strive for a united Ireland, but to force the government at Stormont and the British government to “face up to the facts of discrimination and honor the rights of Nationalists as citizens of the UK” (Ferriter 2005, 616). A series of civil rights marches took place in the summer of 1968, opposing the discrimination in the allocation of housing and other issues and these passed peacefully with little incident. This was not the case with a march in Derry on 5 October 1968 when large-scale rioting broke out and protesters were savagely confronted by the RUC police force. The violence was captured on television and broadcast across the world. This served to further tensions as the two communities became more entrenched in their positions. Regular rioting from both sides brought the British Army to police the streets of Northern Ireland in 1969 and in 1970 the Criminal Justice Act was enacted allowing mandatory sentences of six months for disorderly behaviour. Unjustified internments of Catholic men taken out of their beds in the middle of the night by British soldiers and RUC officers followed in 1971. All these events saw a shift in Catholic’s sympathies and activities from peaceful civil rights protests against discrimination towards support and participation in a violent provisional IRA terrorist campaign against the British government. But it was the events of Bloody Sunday on the 30th of January 1972 when 13 unarmed civilians were killed by British soldiers at a civil rights march against unlawful internment of Catholic citizens that decidedly radicalised a generation towards violent protest. News of this atrocity in the South led to an emotional outbreak of support and violence as the British Embassy in Dublin was burnt down. Bloody terrorist campaigns by Catholic and Protestant sectarians would continue throughout the decade claiming hundreds of victims on both sides. An attempt in 1974 by British and Irish governments to establish a power-sharing executive was met with a general strike by the Ulster Workers Council which escalated into further violence and killings; direct governance of Northern Ireland from Westminster followed with the cities of Belfast and Derry effectively becoming militarised war zones.

Part II: Theatre and Performance Practices

Genres, Methods and Approaches

The emphasis on developing international practice to invigorate Irish theatre that started in the late 1950s became further established and institutionalised in this period. This manifested in a “a rather restless search after innovation” (Brown 2004, 305) in dramatic form by prominent playwrights such as Murphy, Friel, Leonard and Kilroy who would draw on the theatrical styles and dramatic structures of Bertolt Brecht, Tennessee Williams and Anton Chekhov in particular. However, this period also followed international practices in terms of its production process with a movement away from the primacy of the playwright as the creator of the piece towards more collaborative productions that valued the contribution of directors and designers. This in turn led to the development of more community-based and devised theatre practice that would become more fully developed in subsequent decades.

The new spirit of collaboration was spearheaded by Theatre Director Jim Fitzgerald who teamed up with an ambitious recent UCD graduate Colm O Briain in 1966 to organise Project 67, “the first attempt at cross-fertilisation of the arts in Ireland” (Irish Times, 2003). This consisted of a series of events that ran for three weeks at the Gate Theatre including the production of European avant-garde plays, rallies against censorship, music performances and art exhibitions. These events eventually led to the establishment of the Project Arts Centre in Dublin which quickly became the home of interdisciplinary performance, offering an alternative creative space for art practitioners and new companies to explore novel methods and forms.

The Abbey Theatre with its new state-of-the-art building under a succession of artistic directors (Tomás Mac Anna, Lelia Doolan, Hugh Hunt) broke away from the narrow nationalist and revivalist agenda of Ernest Blythe which had been stultifying for artistic growth. Mac Anna and Doolan had both worked with Bertolt Brecht (Dean 2021, Walsh 2016) while Hunt after having been a director at the Abbey in the 1930s had been director of the Bristol Old Vic, London, and directed productions in Australia and on Broadway (Allen 2009). During Mac Anna’s first tenure as Artistic Director from 1966 to 1969, he purposefully produced dramas by playwrights previously rejected by Blythe such as Tom Murphy and Hugh Leonard. He even convinced Samuel Beckett to have his work staged at the Abbey and Beckett would eventually come to direct at the theatre by the end of the 1970s. Mac Anna also brought in teams of designers to work with him including Christopher Baugh, who was teaching stage design at Manchester University, Bronwen Casson, Wendy Shea and Frank Conway. These designers brought a new professionalism and internationalism to design. Casson, Shea and Conway all received formal training at the National College of Art and Design in Dublin, and then went on to complete specialised courses in theatre design in London: Casson and Conway at Sadler’s Wells while Shea attended the stage design course at Regent Street Polytechnic.

Audiences at the Abbey were offered productions of world-renowned plays written by Jean Genet, Günter Grass, Harold Pinter and Albert Camus. These challenging theatrical texts invited ambitious imaginative productions and were mostly staged on the smaller Peacock stage which functioned as a space for creative experimentation. The Abbey also brought its work to new audiences touring productions, particularly in the late 1960s playing at festivals in Florence, London, Edinburgh and Paris. In 1970, the company toured Holland, Germany, Austria, Switzerland and London with a production of Brendan Behan’s The Hostage directed by Hugh Hunt. That same year international recognition for the achievement of the company would come with another Behan production when Frank MacMahon’s adaptation of Borstal Boy directed by Mac Anna on Broadway was awarded a Tony Award for Best Play (Abbey Theatre 1970).

Commitment to the Irish language was still apparent at the Abbey throughout this period. The annual Gaelic pantomime was abandoned once the company moved back to Abbey Street into its new building in 1966, as it was associated with Ernest Blythe’s tenure as director and the days of exile at the Queen’s theatre. Irish-language work was not neglected in this period at the national theatre. There were new plays produced including An Choinnéal written by Padraig O Giollagáin (1967); Mairead Ní Ghrada’s Breithiúntas produced in 1968 and subsequently revived in 1969 and 1971; Christór Ó Floinn’s  Is é Dúirt Polonius (1968)—a one-man show acted by Michael Campion; Mise Raifiteirí an File (1973) and Aisling Mhic Artain (1977), an Oireachtas Award winning dystopian drama by Eoghan O’Tuairisc. A translation by Liam O’Brian of Micháel mac Liammóir’s play, The Mountains Look Different was staged in 1970 as Tá Cruth nua ar na Sléibhte. In 1972, a new initiative was trialled entitled Scéal Scéalaí. This involved the telling of stories in Irish by fluent actors with the tale then “acted out with the visual aids of mime and dance and Father Patrick Ahearne’s musicians.” (Abbey Theatre 1972). The stories were compiled by Eamonn Kelly, Tomás Mac Anna, Edward Golden and Sean O’Bríaín. This was deemed a success and the formula was repeated the following year with new stories as Scéal Scéalaí Eile and again in 1974 under the title Seo Scéal Eile. More satirical pieces in the Irish language included an adaptation of Flann O’Brien’s comical novel An Béal Bocht in 1975 and Mise Le Meas, a bi-lingual tongue-in-cheek look at the Irish Language Revival was collaboratively written by Eoghan O’Tuairisc, Liam O Cleirigh, Fergus Linehan, Eamonn Kelly and Tomás Mac Anna in 1976. The end of the 1970s saw a short-lived return of the annual pantomime with Eoghan O Tuairisc penning Oisín in 1978 and Táinbócó in 1979.

This was also a time of great activity at An Taibhdhearc, the national Irish-language theatre. From 1973 to 1977 the theatre expanded by operating “a small experimental theatre space, An Taibhsín” (Pilkington 2023, 315), which was located just across the road from the main theatre.

World-class theatre practitioners such as Julian Beck from the Living Theatre as well as Pierre Bylan and Harold Pinter staged work in Ireland as part of the Dublin Theatre Festival during this period. But touring companies such as the Glasgow Citizens Theatre, Tanz Forum Cologne and John McGrath’s 7: 84 Company also brought their work to the Abbey as part of an annual International Season that ran from 1971 to 1973. This initiative ran during Lelia Doolan’s tenure as Artistic Director of the Abbey, which was significant not only in its emphasis on bringing international work to Ireland but also in its ambition to learn new techniques in movement, voice and design which would also lead to new modes of making theatre. It was Doolan who first brought Patrick Mason to the Abbey as a voice coach and in 1973 “a four month season of activities” (Abbey Theatre 1973) was programmed at the Peacock theatre entitled Experiment 73 which proposed not only to present “plays old and new, Irish and Foreign,” but also “to blunt the lines of demarcation between author-designer-actor-technician so that each can make the greatest contribution to the whole for the eventual benefit to the audience” (Abbey Theatre 1973). This was radical change for a theatre that had built its reputation on the promotion of writers and their plays. Indeed, it was in the 1970s that many of the directors that would come to international prominence in the 1980s and 1990s such as Patrick Mason, Joe Dowling and Garry Hynes began to emerge. These directors “brought a renewed emphasis on the psychology of character into theatrically complex productions that radically reinterpreted canonical works while also discovering appropriate approaches to new plays manifest with dramaturgical invention” (Walsh 2016, 452). This turn to the psychology of characters could be considered reflective of an increasingly consumer society that was placing greater emphasis on individualism. But it could also be viewed in the context of the violence in Northern Ireland where the conflict was often made abstract from the realities of the suffering caused by entrenched ideological positions and a saturation of media coverage. The creation of empathetic individual characters could be viewed as a corrective response to such abstraction.

Experiment 73 is also notable for its inclusion of works by Helen Cahill and Maureen Duffy in addition to those by Beckett, Joyce, Genet and Anthony Cronin. This is significant as few plays by women were produced at the national theatre during this period. Despite the civil and legal victories for equality in this period plays written by women were still rarely produced at the larger stages of the Abbey and the Gate. Women did, however, rise to greater prominence in theatre management, along with Doolan’s appointment at the Abbey, Garry Hynes co-founded and directed Druid Theatre Company in Galway and Deirdre O’Connell ran the Focus Theatre in Dublin. Doolan’s time at the Abbey was regrettably short as she met with resistance from a conservative board and a lack of financial support for her innovations (Houlihan 2021, 201–202).

Pecuniary issues would continue long after Doolan’s departure from the national theatre. However, Terence Brown observes that “the 1970s were notable {…} as the period when Irish Theatre attracted a greater degree of public support and financial aid than it had ever done before” (Brown 2004, 304). This increase in financial support came from the new legislation and the establishment of new structures within the government. Firstly, the Currency Act (1969) introduced by the Minister for Finance and later Taoiseach Charles Haughey was passed that exempted writers from income tax. This enticed writers such as Tom Murphy and Hugh Leonard who had established themselves abroad to return to Ireland. In 1973 the Arts Act (1951) was expanded to include funding for the Gate Theatre and others. This showed a new support for theatrical output such as that of the Gate that was not explicitly nationalistic in its aims. Then in 1975 the Minister for Finance transferred responsibility for the Abbey Theatre, the Gate Theatre, the Irish Theatre Company, the Irish Ballet Company and the Dublin Theatre Festival to the Arts Council and made it responsible for administering funds “four times greater than before” (Merriman 2016, 393). This transfer of responsibility for theatre funding to the Arts Council is also significant in its subsequent support of new theatre companies. After only being established the year before Druid Theatre Company would receive council funding in 1976, which was a marked difference from the past where companies other than the Abbey had to struggle independently for decades without any government subsidy. Indeed, Druid would become a new model for independent theatremakers in Ireland. The increases in funding were unfortunately still far less than in other European countries. The Abbey received a subsidy of £518,000 in 1978 which was scarcely enough to cover the wage bill and the Arts Council Report the following year would state how such a low level of funding “seriously endangers the Abbey’s ability to fulfil its proper role as a centre of dramatic excellence” (Brown 2004, 455).

Tracking government financing in this period we can see a de-centralisation of Irish theatre in the support for Druid, with their commitment to base themselves in and premiere all new work in Galway city, but also in the funding of the ITC (Irish Theatre Company) established in 1975 which was a touring company that sought to bring professional productions to every corner of Ireland. Christopher Fitz-Simon notes that the 1970s was “the era of regionalism and Cross-Border Co-operation and both Arts Councils on the island were sensitive to the trend” (1988, 19). The ITC also created a space for young directors like Joe Dowling and later Ben Barnes and designers such as Wendy Shea to develop their craft. Sadly, it had to be disbanded in 1982 as the costs of touring rose and the Arts Council budget tightened further. It ended on a high with a critically acclaimed production of Beckett’s Waiting for Godot directed by Barnes and designed by Wendy Shea. Further commitment to regions outside of Dublin came in 1978 with support of the newly established Galway Arts Festival which would go on to eventually become a major international festival.

While theatrical activity through regional and touring companies increased in rural areas in the 1970s the staging of stories of urban life also began to rise. Brothers Jim and Peter Sheridan lead the charge in writing and directing plays about working-class city life at the Project Arts Centre. Jim Sheridan, appointed Chairman of Project Arts Centre in 1976, wrote dramas that explored the plight of urban caravan dwellers (Mobile Homes, 1976), the dreams and desperation of three young women at a Dublin Disco (Where All Your Dreams Come True, 1978) and urban renewal in Dublin's inner city (Inner City/Outer Space, 1979). While Peter Sheridan would write of the frustrations of a young man wishing to escape a violent urban society in No Entry (1976) and in Liberty Suit written with Mannix Flynn he would stage a young man’s struggle to overcome the effects of a system of institutional reformatories. Murray writes how the Sheridan’s “set about creating a politically aware theatre along lines which combined the Irish dramatic tradition with the community-style British theatre made popular by John McGrath and 7:84” (1997, 181). The influence of John Arden’s and Margaretta D’Arcy’s Non-Stop Connolly Show at Liberty Hall, Dublin, in 1975 which had sections directed by Jim Sheridan must have been a significant influence in the formation of this style as this play was staged by a large cast of amateur and professional actors staging scenes over a twenty-four-hour period. The production mixed song, dance, political speeches, music and film to tell the story of patriot and socialist James Connolly. Michael Jaro contends that The Non-stop Connolly show “represented a significant step towards later community-based theatre and devised performance” (2015, 34). Peter Sheridan would continue to create challenging theatre work in subsequent decades while Jim Sheridan would leave theatre to become one of Ireland’s premier filmmakers.

Key Practitioners and Companies

Bronwen Casson

In an article from the Irish Times in 1976 Bronwen Casson is quoted as saying “The set should not distract: Stage design is a self-effacing art and the designer should be almost imperceptible” (Walsh 1976). The issue with the work of great designers is that in this “self-effacing” art too often their contribution is overlooked. Such is the case with Casson  whose  influence on Irish theatre in a career lasting over four decades was significant. She came from a famous theatrical family with her father Christopher Casson an actor in the Gate Theatre, Dublin, and her grandmother the British Actress Dame Sybil Thorndike. But she did not favour acting and instead followed her mother Kay O’Connell’s profession of theatre designer. After four years in NCAD she went on to specialist study in theatre design under Margaret Harris at Sadler’s Wells, London. She returned to Dublin and began working at the Abbey Theatre in 1968 becoming Head Designer from 1975 to 1990. In her early years at the Abbey Casson looked to international companies for inspiration travelling to France and Germany in particular. She was affected by the Berliner Ensemble’s production of Coriolanus in London in 1966 and she greatly admired the work of Ariane Mnouchkine working with her Théâtre du Soleil Company in the mid-1970s (Walsh 1976).

These influences are discernible in her work through an emphasis on creating a playing space for the actors onstage above simply the presentation of a particular place. For Casson, “stage design is not implanting a monstrous art form onto the stage, which doesn’t relate to the actors. It should be instead a definite space in which the actors can best put across the idea of the play” (Walsh 1976) (Fig. 3.1).

Fig. 3.1

(Photo Fergus Bourke. Courtesy of the Abbey Theatre Archive)

Photograph of the stage setting for Ulysses in Nighttown, Peacock Stage, 1974

This preference found particular expression in sets that combined abstraction and realism such as her design for a revival of Yeats plays at the Peacock in the 1970s and again in the 1990s but also in adaptations such as Ulysses in Nighttown (1971, revived 1974) or new plays such as Tom Murphy’s The Sanctuary Lamp (1975). In her design for The Sanctuary Lamp Casson created an “abstract and atmospheric arrangement of church pillars, pulpit, pew and confessional” (O’Toole 2003, 193) that was “shot through with shafts of darkness” (Morash 2002, 150). This set allowed for the Church setting to function as both a place for the outer action of the characters to be played but for that action to also be read in terms of inner psychological states and metaphorical significance. In 1983 she joined playwright Tom Mac Intyre, director Patrick Mason and actor Tom Hickey in their adaptation of Patrick Kavanagh’s The Great Hunger at the Peacock. Hickey, Mason and MacIntyre had been producing experimental productions together at the Peacock since the late 1970s in “a devised imagistic theatre style” (Walsh 2016, 450). The Great Hunger proved to be the most successful of these experiments and was considered innovative in its “foregrounding of scenography as central to the adaptation process” (O’Gorman 2018, 347). Casson worked collaboratively with this team of theatremakers throughout the rehearsal process, something she would repeat with them for The Bearded Lady (1984) and in subsequent productions with director Micheal Scott at the Project Arts Centre. Casson has written how working collaboratively in this manner was her favourite way of working but it was also pioneering. Siobhan O’Gorman observes how Casson’s collaborations allowed for a new model in Irish theatre where “Designers became partners in theatre-making in that their work not only fed back into textual developments but was responsive to the rehearsal process” (O’Gorman 2018, 346).

Joe Dowling

Joe Dowling’s career in theatre began when he joined the Abbey Company as an actor in 1968. In that first year he was cast in a production of Chekhov’s The Cherry Orchard directed by Madame Marie Knebel visiting Ireland from the Moscow Art Theatre. “Knebel’s clear and unambiguous reading of the text, combined with her deep understanding of the characters was a revelation and inspiration to Dowling who never forgot this world-class director’s ‘brilliant ensemble approach’” (Dowling 1983, 33). Over the next few years, he continued to act in Abbey productions but was frustrated that the national theatre was losing younger audiences and so “he went to the then Artistic Director Hugh Hunt and pleaded for something to be done. Hunt sent him to Manchester to see some of the theatre-in-education companies that were running effectively there” (Walsh 2016, 452). When he returned, he co-founded and led the first Irish Theatre-in-Education group where actors, technicians and administrators created a series of programmes for schools throughout Ireland. Through improvisation, scene work and discussion, the students worked with the company to make new and innovative theatre pieces. With the Young Abbey and under the mentorship of Tomás Mac Anna he first began to direct for the stage. He further cut his teeth serving as the artistic director of the Peacock and then of the Irish Theatre Company in 1976–78, touring new productions all around Ireland. In 1978 at twenty-nine years old, he became the youngest-ever Artistic Director of the Abbey. During his tenure he directed the premieres of several important Irish plays including Brian Friel’s Living Quarters (1975) and Aristocrats (1979). He also made a success of Faith Healer in 1980 at the Abbey after its disastrous premiere on Broadway. Dowling has admitted that “practically everything I know about directing a play comes from my work with Brian Friel… Listening to the clarity he brought to every line and every character has served me in working with other writers and with classic texts” (IT OCT. 12 2015). Indeed Dowling’s style of direction is one that is driven by textual analysis and an ambition to “fully realize the intentions of the text” (Dowling 1992, 188).

Unfortunately, like Lelia Doolan and other artistic directors before him, Dowling grew increasingly frustrated with the interference of the Abbey Board in the management of the theatre. He resigned his post in 1985 and went on a year later to found the Gaiety School of Acting, which again testifies to his lifelong dedication to training and theatre education. That year, he would also go on to exact revenge on the Abbey by staging O’Casey’s Juno and the Paycock, a staple of the Abbey repertoire, at the rival Gate Theatre. This production would tour to Broadway and prove a worldwide success and helped Dowling build an international profile which led to him becoming the director of the prestigious Guthrie Theatre in Minneapolis from 1995 until 2015. During his time in Minneapolis, he directed over 50 productions and oversaw the building of a new Guthrie Theatre building with a 700-seat proscenium stage and a smaller studio space designed by Jean Nouvel costing 125 million dollars.

Patrick Mason

The impact that Patrick Mason has had on Irish theatre is immense. Spanning a career of over four decades he has directed many of the most significant productions of the contemporary period including dramas by Brian Friel, Tom Murphy, Tom Kilroy and Sebastian Barry, and some of the landmark examples covered in this book: Edna O’Brien’s A Pagan Place (1977), Marina Carr’s By the Bog of Cats (1998) and Frank McGuinness’s Observe the Sons of Ulster Marching Towards the Somme (1985). He has also shaped the character of Irish theatre through his leadership as Artistic Director of the Abbey in 1994–99, his long-term collaborations with designers Bronwen Casson, Joe Vanek, Monica Frawley, Wendy Shea, Frank Hallinan Flood, and Francis O’Connor and his direction of some key revivals of the work of Anglo-Irish writers including Shaw, Wilde and Sheridan at the Gate Theatre as well as directing Opera, writing radio dramas and adapting work for the stage. Mason’s deep knowledge of the history and practice of theatre comes from his training at the Central School of Speech and Drama where he subsequently taught in 1972. That same year saw him arrive in Dublin to take up a position as voice coach in the Abbey while Lelia Doolan was Artistic Director. He then left Ireland to become a lecturer in Performance Studies at Manchester University in 1975 but returned to the Abbey as a resident director in 1978. This began his long association with the Abbey where he developed his craft crediting his collaborations with the playwright Tom Mac Intyre and actor Tom Hickey on a range of productions at the Peacock between 1982 and 1989 as influencing his development. He wrote that it was “the intensity and energy of that contact that really jolted me out of a more literal, realist kind of reading of text into a far more emblematic, symbolic reading of text and action” (Mason 2001, 320). With Friel’s Dancing at Lughnasa (1990), a play that relies heavily on music and tableaux for its effects, Mason found the perfect piece in which to display the maturation of his style. This was most clear in the scene in which all the sisters temporarily forget themselves in a wild liberating dance. Under Mason’s direction the five personalities of the women began to sound and signal individually, only to then harmonise and dissolve into each other becoming ecstatic in a transcendent coup de theatre. The production became a theatrical phenomenon with long runs in the West End and Broadway with Mason winning the Tony Award for Best Director in 1992.

For Cathy Leeney “Mason has […] worked to broaden the context of Irish theatre, its connections across cultures and histories in Europe and internationally, its collaborative sophistication and professionalism” (2008, 106). He has directed many influential productions of world drama in Ireland including notable productions of Luigi Pirandello, Henrik Ibsen and Arthur Miller, and he staged a production of Tony Kushner’s Angels in America, at the Abbey in 1992. This was a brave and important moment as homosexuality was still classified as criminal in Ireland at the time and Kushner’s play concerns the 1980s AIDS epidemic and includes the staging of a gay sex scene. In more recent years Mason has won critical acclaim for his direction of Hugo Hamilton’s The Speckled People (2011) and The Mariner (2014) at the Gate Theatre, Dublin.

Druid and Garry Hynes

As a student in the early 1970s Director Garry Hynes spent her summers working in New York where she managed to see avant-garde productions by the Performance Garage and the work of Joe Chaikin and Meredith Monk. She writes:

I saw theatre that was being made by young people, or people reasonably young and it was being made in small rooms, and it was immediate and it was accessible and it was available and it was tremendously exciting to me. (Hynes 2012, 81)

Inspired by this experience Hynes along with the actor Marie Mullen whom she met in the university and actor Mick Lally formed Druid Theatre Company in Galway. The intent of the company in the early years was to replicate in the west of Ireland what she had seen in New York. The company began staging plays in “small rooms” in Galway city until they eventually secured rental of an old warehouse and converted it into a small theatre there, which has become their permanent home and is now named the Mick Lally Theatre, in honour of the actor and founding member of the company who died in 2010. Gavin Kostick has stated that it was the ‘foundation and success of the Druid theatre in Galway in 1975 that sets the scene and template for the development of the independent sector” (Kostick 2018, 235).

For their first season they staged a production of J.M Synge’s The Playboy of the Western World in a bid to attract tourists. This opportunistic decision was to have a long-term effect on Hynes practice and the direction Druid would take as a company: “In my own development as a director, the discovery of Synge as a writer was an epiphany, one of the shock things. It completely influenced everything I’ve done since and continues to do so (Chambers et al. 2002, 201).” From Synge, Hynes and Druid developed a “harsh, physical and direct style of performance” (Morash 1994, 257) rooted in social reality that challenged romantic pastoral visions of Ireland. The company would produce fresh interpretations of The Playboy in 1977, 1982 and 2004, and in 2005 they staged and toured all of Synge’s plays as a theatrical event entitled DruidSynge. Although Druid have produced renowned productions of canonical Irish writers like Synge, O’Casey, Boucicault and others they are also celebrated for producing new Irish writing. From 1983 to 1986 Tom Murphy was writer-in-association at Druid and wrote Conversations on a Homecoming and Bailegangaire for the company. The success of these productions helped to solidify Druid’s reputation as an “Alternative National Theatre” or the “Abbey Theatre of the West.” Indeed, from 1991 to 1994 Hynes left the company to take up the position of Artistic Director of the Abbey Theatre. When she returned Druid would go on to produce and tour three enormously commercially successful plays by Martin McDonagh which became known as the Leenane Trilogy. This led Hynes to become the first woman to win the best director Tony Award for her production of McDonagh’s The Beauty Queen of Leenane in 1998. Druid has also premiered new work by Vincent Woods, Marina Carr, Enda Walsh, Lucy Caldwell and Stuart Carolan. Following on from DruidSynge (2005) the company has produced further theatrical events that have toured nationally and internationally such as DruidMurphy (2012) where three of Murphy’s plays Conversations on a Homecoming, Whistle in the Dark and Famine were produced with an ensemble cast and in 2015 Shakespeare’s Richard II, Henry IV (Parts 1 & 2) and Henry V were condensed into one thrilling drama played out over six hours entitled DruidShakespeare. In 2021 the company embarked on reviving the neglected work of Lady Augusta Gregory in site-specific works in Galway entitled DruidGregory.

Landmark Plays and Productions

The Flats by John Boyd (1971)

John Boyd’s The Flats was an early dramatic response to the Troubles that follows Seán O’Casey’s’ model in Juno and the Paycock of condemning the political conflict through examining its disastrous effects on family and community. Christopher Murray points out the location of the play in “a block of flats in which Protestants and Catholics live together but which is now under attack by Protestants seeking to drive out the Catholics also proved to be “both metaphor and prophecy” (Murray 1997, 189–190) for the situation in Northern Ireland in the 1970s. With the popularity of the play its plot and situation provided a “precedent for a separate genre of ‘Troubles plays’ which rapidly degenerated into hackneyed representations” (Maguire 2006, 22).

At the centre of the drama is the Donnellan family whose actions when confronted with angry Protestant mobs intent on driving them from their home reveal a range of attitudes to the conflict. Father and son, Joe and Gerard Donnellan resort to a violent defence of their home; the Junoesque Kathleen Donnellan condemns violence on both sides; her daughter Brid Donnellan and Brid’s boyfriend Sean Cullen wish to flee and let others resolve the matter. Monica Moore, a young Protestant girl, is a neighbour to the Donnellans who have helped her in looking after her sickly mother. Monica begins a flirtation with Phil, a young British soldier stationed at the flats to protect the occupants from the Loyalist mob. She is shot in the final act trying to get to her mother who is distressed by all the noise of the attack. Her body is brought on stage in the final moments and presented to the audience as the awful tragic result of sectarian violence. The stage directions read:

When Monica’s body is brought in the light is beginning to fade; and when Phil kneels beside her darkness has almost fallen; and when Kathleen is saying her prayer only a few wisps of light are left. This wan light finally falls on Monica and on Kathleen, and fades. (Boyd 1981, 85)

These final moments are powerful in eliciting an emotional response from the audience but also point to some of the problems of the play in the choice of the young innocent girl as sacrificial victim and the emphasis on the selfless Mother figure that mourns her passing. Throughout the drama the men come to represent violence and women peace. Maguire writes that such an idealisation of women “both occludes the realities of women’s experiences of the conflict and suggests that they have little part to play in its political resolution. Individual agency is detached from structural change” (2006, 104). This characteristic of the “Troubles play” was something that Northern female playwrights have been keen to address. The appeal of the play is that it humanises the conflict making it easier to comprehend and condemn in its familiar Aristotelian tragic form. However, this too is problematic as Christopher Morash writes in deciding to have all the violence in the play happen offstage “it makes political violence appear mindless and unmotivated because it is unrepresentable” (2002, 246).

Non-Stop Connolly Show by Margaretta D’Arcy and John Arden (1975)

Like the subject of their play James Connolly Margaretta D’Arcy and John Arden were rebels and in the creation of The Non-Stop Connolly Show they showed how theatre could be produced in a radically different way. Staged on Easter Weekend fifty-nine years after the 1916 Rising in Liberty Hall the headquarters of the Irish Transport and General Workers Union The Non-Stop Connolly Show told the story of the life of James Connolly, the insurrectionist and socialist leader of the Irish Citizen’s Army, who was cruelly shot dead after the rebellion by British forces. The performance consisted of a six-part series of plays staged over twelve hours that told of Connolly from his boyhood to his death. The piece was directed by Jim Sheridan, Robert Walker and D’Arcy and Arden and involved a mix of community and professional actors. The length of the show was a deliberate device to tell all of Connolly’s story so that he could be judged and understood for more than his contribution to the 1916 Rising. For Arden, the duration of the performance and its attention to Connolly’s many struggles with politicians and Union leaders over the decades of his life was crucial to the politics of the piece. He wrote,

…the very tediousness and seeming hopelessness of the eternal wrangling was in itself so essential a part of the life-pattern of any Revolutionist, that we could neither omit it nor slide over it too briefly. If we did, we would be in danger of distorting our work into spectacular 'high theatre' at the expense of the long-drawn 'continuous struggle’ which inevitably precedes the actual outbreak of Revolution. (quoted in Cohen 1990, 79)

In its style of production, The Non-Stop Connolly Show also ran counter to “high theatre” and any Aristotelian conception of drama. It was closer to the medieval theatre in its form with a spatial configuration that involved several platforms and banners, redolent of the pageant wagons of the mystery plays. For Michael Jaros it also “had the sweeping scope of a religious passion play, with an ongoing allegorical battle between Socialism and Capitalism” (40). The plays were made non-naturalistic using masks, women playing male roles and use of physical slapstick comedy. Characterisation drew on archetypes—a capitalist villain in the piece called Grabitall comes straight from Victorian melodrama—and actors would step in and out their roles as they sometimes would narrate action in Brechtian fashion. Further to this, events were represented emblematically in the production. Robert Leach writes:

…the First World War was depicted by giant, puppet-like monstrosities including the War Demon, “a tall figure all covered with spikes, flags, bits of armour and weapons”, the ‘Controlling Nations’ personified by “an androgynous creature, very tall and gross, laden down with innumerable furs and rich robes [and] hung about with boxes and bags on chains and jewelled belts” and the ‘Neutral Nations’ like a cartoon figure of Uncle Sam, but with “a great, broad, featureless moon of a head that laughs all the time. (2019, 8)

In its non-naturalistic style of production, its duration and its performance in a non-theatre space The Non-Stop Connolly Show anticipated much of what would come in Irish theatre in subsequent decades. However, its radical politics would not be as easily adopted in the following years as Ireland became increasingly conservative and avidly embraced the individualism of global consumer culture.

A Pagan Place by Edna O’Brien (1972, 1977)

Edna O’Brien’s A Pagan Place, adapted from her novel of the same name, was a scathing attack on Irish society and its shameful mistreatment of women under the guise of Catholic moral correction and piety. First staged by the Royal Court in 1972 directed by Ronald Eyre and designed by Sean Kenny, it was subsequently produced at the Abbey Theatre in 1977 directed by Patrick Mason (his first time directing on the main stage) and designed by Wendy Shea. Tomás Mac Anna first approached O’Brien about adapting her novel The Country Girls for the Irish national theatre but after the stage rights could not be acquired for this it was decided instead to produce A Pagan Place.

The play received mixed reviews both in London and in Dublin; those that dismissed it did so because they found the subject matter unpalatable and even implausible. James Downey in his review of the London production for the Irish Times found the very idea of a priest raping a young girl “silly” and “ludicrous” (1972). Barry Houlihan writes that “For this play to reach the Abbey stage at all was a subversive act” (Houlihan 2021, 54) and in retrospect the play can be viewed as landmark, not only in its bold subject choice for the time, but also in its adroit dramaturgy that draws on ritual as a means to critique a Christian Ireland devoid of spirituality, compassion or love.

A Pagan Place follows a rites of passage narrative where a young twelve-year-old girl Creena moves from childhood to adulthood over a series of successive scenes set in 1940s rural Ireland. Creena’s spirited nature with her inclination towards creativity and material pleasure, illustrated in her invention of her own pagan rituals, is continually hampered and threatened by a patriarchal society that wishes to control her behaviour. Her limited options are made clear by the examples of how other women behave and are treated in the community. Her teacher Miss Davitt, an intelligent, educated, and outspoken woman, has a nervous breakdown in front of her students leaping around the classroom and stripping her clothes while teaching a lesson on the history of male conquests of the land of Ireland. Subsequently it is reported that she drowned herself after the incident. Later in the play Creena’s unmarried sister Emma returns from Dublin and her pregnancy is revealed to the whole village by the drunken doctor, much to the shame of her mother and father. Her family threaten to put Emma in a Magdalene Laundry, and she escapes back to Dublin. In these two figures Creena sees that she will have no future in the community and after she is sexually assaulted by the priest, she ends the play leaving to become a nun who will teach in Belgium. It would appear that the community has managed to break Creena but in joining the nuns she is offered a chance of escape and it is made clear that her vocation is one she views as offering her freedom. She tells the recruiting nun that she feels her vocation is “like a summer’s day inside my head” (O’Brien 1973, 61). In the middle of the play the family have a day by the beach where they are happy, connected and free. Thus, for her to see her vocation as a summer’s day is to associate the future with freedom. Creena is also the only character that acts as a Christian in the play by showing compassion to a man who tried to attack her. She offers a hopeful future that blends the pagan and the Christian, but that future is only to be realised away from Ireland, a place that is represented in O’Brien’s play as irredeemable in its containment and cruelty towards women.

Seminal Revivals

Beckett Revival

Samuel Beckett lifted the ban on his plays being performed in Ireland in 1960 but it was not until 1967 that he saw his work produced on the national stage at the Abbey. Although from then on his works would be produced regularly until 1990 and Patrick Lonergan notes, “No other living Irish writer was produced so frequently at the Abbey during that period” (2019, 35). Beckett’s work spoke to the concerns of the late sixties and seventies in several ways. Plays like Krapp’s Last Tape in its interrogation of the complexities of remembering address the era’s revision of Irish history and identity as it “challenged any complacent narrativizing of the past” (McMullan 2016, 114). While the conceptual nature of his work invited key creative contributions from directors and designers and unlike previous internationally recognised Irish playwrights such as Yeats, Synge or O’Casey his art did not explicitly make Ireland its subject matter or its location. As such Beckett as a figure and his work represented the aspirations of the period towards a re-imagining of Irish identity that was modern in its refusal of tradition, international in its displacement and sophisticated in its intellectualism.

The production of Krapp’s Last Tape at the Abbey in 1970 shared a bill with Gregory’s The Rising of the Moon, W.B Yeats’s Purgatory, Synge’s The Well of the Saints and Frank O’Connor’s On the Train. Roche comments that this programming “can be seen as a strategic move by the Abbey to align Beckett with the Irish rather than International drama” (Roche 2016, 13). But this programming in its choice of these most Beckettian Irish plays could instead be considered as re-reading the history of Irish drama through Beckett’s work and as such re-situating the Irish dramatic tradition in relation to an international practice of theatrical experimentation. Beckett would himself go on to bring German and American productions to the Abbey staging his own directed productions of the Schiller Theatre’s Warten auf Godot in 1977 and the San Quentin Theatre Workshop’s productions of Krapp’s Last Tape and Endgame in 1980.

Productions of Beckett’s plays were not confined to the Abbey at this time and there are notable productions of his work at smaller venues such as the Focus theatre (see O’Gorman 2016, 67–85), Dublin, and at the Lyric theatre, Belfast (Grant 2016, 51–65). However, it was the revival of Waiting for Godot at the Abbey in 1969 that has been regarded as “a watershed in the history of Beckett production in Ireland” (Murray 1984, 114). It is a fascinating case that stages many of the concerns of this era in its complex interplay between the Irish and the International and its crafted revision of the past. The play was produced only months after Beckett had garnered significant prestige and world-renown in being awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. It starred Peter O'Toole, the famous stage and screen actor at the top of his powers having been nominated for an Academy Award for his role in The Lion in Winter the previous year. O’Toole appearing on stage at the Abbey marked how the theatre under the directorship of Tomás Mac Anna, and subsequently Hugh Hunt, had broken with previous long held values. Such a celebrity-driven production was a rarity at the theatre where up until 1966 under the directorship of Ernest Blythe there had been a policy whereby all performers at the national theatre had to be fluent in the Irish language. Indeed, O’Toole (who had been raised in Leeds) claimed to have been rejected from joining the Abbey Players for this very reason (Murray 1984, 115).

The theatre programme for the show includes an expected write-up on O’Toole (foregrounding his Irish origins and his residence in Connemara) but it also features Norah McGuinness as the designer of the show. McGuinness linked the production to the triumphs of the early Abbey in the 1920s and 1930s as the programme tells of how she designed sets for the plays of Yeats, Lennox Robinson and Denis Johnston (Abbey Theatre, 1969). The production thus announced itself as a break from an insular nationalism, characterised by Blythe’s Irish-language policy, in its casting of O’Toole but also connected itself to the glory days of the early Abbey and the cosmopolitan figures of Yeats and Johnston with McGuinness as designer. The choices in performance would also reflect a mixed representation of the Irish and the international (Fig. 3.2).

Fig. 3.2

(Photo Fergus Bourke. Courtesy of the Abbey Theatre Archive)

Waiting for Godot by Samuel Beckett, Abbey Stage, 1969

The production stressed the music hall and vaudeville aspects of the play. The double act of Vladimir and Estragon in tattered costumes and large shoes evoked Charlie Chaplin’s tramp figure. Further to this, the director of the play, Sean Cotter remarked how “before each performance, […] O’Toole and McCann listened to old records of Flanagan and Allen in O’Toole’s dressing room, in order to get the music hall “feel” and timing right before curtain up” (Murray 1984, 116). However, McMullan comments how the ragged costumes also brought forth “an Irish iconography of stage itinerants” (McMullan 2016, 115). Here, then Beckett’s clowns are redolent of the displaced wanderers of Synge’s and Yeats’s dramas. McGuinness’s set of an “Island of Boulders, topped with a withered tree” (Murray 1984, 116) would also have evoked for many of the audience a Neolithic tomb, or fairy fort as they are often known, a common feature scattered across the Irish landscape. These aspects would have hibernicised the production, as did the accents of the actors, although the trend in Irish productions of Beckett of depicting Pozzo as an Anglo-Irishman was not followed. Instead, Eamonn Kelly played the demonstrative Pozzo in his native Kerry accent and his performance was suggestive of an old school master or parish priest. This saw the production reflecting on more recent history identifying oppression as no longer coming from outside colonial forces but from the internal authoritarians of post-independence Ireland.

Spotlight on Institutions and Festivals

Project Arts Centre

In 2016 in a speech that celebrated 50 years of the Project Arts Centre Orlaith McBride proclaimed: “This is not a home for art as monument. It is not a place of retrospection. It is a laboratory to find the antidote to what afflicts us now. Censorship may be gone off the statute books, but the requirement to challenge consensus, is more pressing than ever” (2016). McBride’s description of the Project Arts Centre as a laboratory space captures what this institution has offered Irish Arts—a place to creatively imagine, develop and show alternative modes of thinking and behaving. She also draws attention to how it has always been more interested in the future than the past with its origins in an initiative from 1966 entitled Project 67 which looked forward to what was to come, in a year where the Irish state was busy organising events that looked back, commemorating 50 years since the 1916 insurrection, the foundational event for the establishment of an Irish Republic. When he failed to secure the rights for a run of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf Colm O’Briain (later director of the Arts Council) decided to use the three weeks he had booked at the Gate to organise, with the help of Theatre Director Jim Fitzgerald, a series of artistic activities including exhibitions, short plays, music and poetry readings. This became Project 67. One of the most memorable events during the three weeks was a meeting to protest the censorship laws where writer Edna O’Brien brought copies of her own banned books and actors including Fionnuala Flanagan and T.P. McKenna read extracts from O’Brien’s work to “a packed gathering, highlighting the absurd situation whereby words that could be freely spoken in public could not be read in private” (McBride 2016).

The Project Arts Centre would have peripatetic beginnings, located first in Lower Abbey Street, then in South King Street until it finally settled in a former printing works at East Essex Street in 1974 that was converted into a performance space, gallery and cinema. With financial support from the Arts Council this building was bought in 1977 and the arts centre would continue here until 1998. It was temporarily closed for refurbishment but continued as Project @the mint in Henry Place until once again taking residence in its newly designed space in East Essex Street in 2000.

Over the years the centre has proved a nurturing creative space for new companies and artists to develop their work. The 1970s would see future film directors Neil Jordan and Jim Sheridan write and direct at the centre, while U2 and the Boomtown Rats would also perform on the project stage. In the 1980s Rough Magic theatre company would use the project space to stage productions that would establish them as a new force in Irish theatre. Other companies such as Operating Theatre, Loose Canon, Pan Pan, and Fishamble and countless others would all be supported by Project Arts Centre to develop exciting new work in the subsequent decades attracting a much more socially and age diverse audience than the other established theatres.

Galway International Arts Festival

The 1970s was a time of great theatrical activity in the city of Galway. John Arden and Margaretta D’Arcy had established the Galway Theatre Workshop “primarily for the purpose of developing the treatment of social questions in theatrical form—street theatre, cartoon plays, agit prop” (Pilkington 2023, 325); Druid Theatre Company had been founded in 1975 and An Taibhdhearc, the national theatre for plays in the Irish language, had expanded to run a smaller experimental space, An Taibhsín, from 1973 to 1977. In this atmosphere a group of artists, university students and community activists came together in 1977 to propose the establishment of a new arts centre and festival for Galway. The following year the first Galway Arts Festival took place offering a fortnight of a variety of artistic endeavours. The festival was funded by local and national businesses and semi-state bodies. With few artistic venues in Galway the Festival became known for its innovative use of urban sites and buildings to house and stage work. One of the most famous examples of this was when “Robert Lepage’s Dragon’s Trilogy—one of the key international productions of the latter half of the twentieth century—was performed in a tiny school hall in Galway in 1987” (Lonergan 2019, 94). The lack of theatres and arts centres also led to the festival attracting international large-scale street and outdoor theatre with Cornish-based Footsbarn, Catalonian theatre group Els Comediants and French circus group Archaos regular participants. Lionel Pilkington writes “It was the electrifying effect of Footsbarn and Els Comediants’ extraordinary, larger-than-life processions that inspired Ollie Jennings and Páraic Breathnach to establish Macnas (an Irish word meaning ‘joyful abandon’) in 1986” (2023, 330). Macnas would go on to perform an annual parade in the Galway Arts Festival for many years and became itself a renowned company, touring to festivals around the world. Galway would see the development of more artistic venues in the subsequent decades after the establishment of the festival including the refurbished 400-seat Town Hall theatre, Druid’s Mick Lally Theatre, the Galway Arts Centre and O’Donoghue Centre for Drama, Theatre and Performance. These venues have helped the festival to attract some of the biggest names in theatre worldwide and to present a major discussion platform entitled, First Thought Talks, but it has always maintained its commitment to street spectacle and temporary venues. There is still no permanent art gallery in the city and the visual art programme in the festival still adapts old buildings for exhibitions. The festival more recently invested in a large, big top blue tent which hosts large music concerts and circus events. The erection of this tent in mid-July has now come to signal to all in Galway that it is festival time. Thousands of tourists flock to Galway for the festival each year and in 2014 the name of the festival was changed to Galway International Arts Festival to acknowledge its global reach and its role as a major producer of new Irish work, premiering plays by Enda Walsh, Olwen Fouéré, Conall Morrison and many others, to then tour this work to London and New York.

Conclusion

The rapid historical and social changes of this era, sped on by membership of the EU, free second-level education and the outbreak of sectarian violence in Northern Ireland troubled the conception of an Irish national identity like no other period since independence. There was debate over and revision of key historical events and figures, while mass youth movements protested for equal rights for women, and gay liberation in the Republic and civil rights for Catholics in Northern Ireland. This inevitably led to fierce conflict and in the case of Northern Ireland a decade of terrible grave violence. The theatrical activity on the island reflected this time of revision and began to expand, reaching new audiences with a new emphasis on regionalism. This led to the Irish Touring Company (ITC) bringing quality productions all over the country and the founding of Druid Theatre Company in Galway, that would become a major production house outside of Dublin. The Project Arts Centre through the energies of the Sheridan brothers, Mannix Flynn and others brought the underrepresented urban working class to the fore. There were political experimentations in form such as Arden and D’Arcy’s The Non-Stop Connolly Show (1975), controversial dramas that criticised the morality of the Catholic Church such as Edna O’Brien’s A Pagan Place (1977) and a theatrical reaction to the violence in Northern Ireland in John Boyd’s The Flats (1971), which began a subgenre of the “Troubles play.” Many new young directors and designers would begin working this decade who would become hugely influential in subsequent years. The period ended with a visit from the Pope to Ireland in 1979 with millions from both North and South coming out to see him. This visit effected a mass renewal of faith in Catholicism which would bring a deep conservatism of thought and action in the early years of the following decade.