Nation

Abstract

Arguably the nation and its many anti-colonial, postcolonial, Troubles-era, post-conflict and early twenty-first-century permutations remain the defining thematic obsession of contemporary Irish theatre. This chapter contributes elucidating frameworks for navigating how contemporary Irish theatre continues to dramatise and negotiate these complex and contested dimensions of the nation from the perspective of past, present and future. The three frameworks and accompanying case studies that model the application of these critical lenses to key theatre productions are:

• Theatre and the political work of nation-building (Michael West/Corn Exchange’s Dublin By Lamplight),

• Woman and/as nation (Anne Devlin’s Ourselves Alone),

• Interrogating national histories through the Irish history play (Frank McGuinness’s Observe the Sons of Ulster Marching Towards the Somme).

The iconic Shakespearean character MacMorris, an Irish officer in the English Army, intoned of the Irish nation in Henry V in 1599: “Of my nation? What ish my nation? Ish a villain, and a bastard, and a knave. What ish my nation? Who talks of my nation?” (Shakespeare 1982, 169). When it comes to modern and contemporary Irish theatre and performance practices, the answer to who is talking of the Irish nation is still quite bluntly—almost everyone, and it is for this reason that nation is the focus of our first of this book’s theoretically focused chapters. Arguably the “nation” and its many anti-colonial, postcolonial, Troubles-era, post-conflict and early twenty-first-century permutations remain the defining thematic obsession of contemporary Irish theatre—a fixation echoed structurally in the continuing centrality of the Abbey as Ireland’s national (and most highly funded) theatre in the Republic, the broader ongoing role of the arts as tourist draw and cultural export of the island as a whole, and the recent conclusion of the Republic’s Decade of Centenaries specifically which as we’ve dealt with at length in Chapter 6 comprehensively commemorated key events, figures and controversies in the birth of the independent Irish nation-state. Christopher Murray’s pithy summation of twentieth-century Irish drama as a whole as “mirror up to nation” in the title of his seminal 1997 study therefore remains apt in the early twenty-first century but this chapter will seek to unpack the multilayered and multivalent ways that contemporary Irish theatre and performance are used by theatremakers not only as a mirror for nation but also as a laboratory for experimentation, creation and occasionally destruction of the idea of nation itself.

Before continuing, however, we need to parse how we are using nation, nation-state and nationalism in this chapter as these nuances are essential to understanding the complexity of contemporary Irish theatre and performance’s treatment of these themes. The Republic of Ireland’s occupation by England from the sixteenth century to 1922 resulted in a state of extended rupture, crisis and conflict regarding this territory’s status as a nation. These negotiations over time across the island in Ireland’s case and in countless others across the world means that a nation is not only a fixed inert point on a map which marks an internationally recognised political territory with defined legal and geographical borders. Instead, we must reckon with how ideas of nation impact on individuals’ and collectives’ feelings of belonging, stability, and identity in the present, over time and through collectively held real or imagined memories and/or myths. And yet, the nation as a modern bureaucratic innovation is still quite recent with historian Benedict Anderson tracing its emergence and exporting only to the end of the eighteenth century when the nation became a “modular” concept capable of “being transplanted” to a “great variety of social terrains, to merge and be merged with a correspondingly wide variety of political and ideological constellations” (2006, 4), a franchising with a difference that of course has played out in complicated ways on the island of Ireland. Nevertheless, the nation-state (once internationally recognised) is also an administrative entity which holds enormous power over people’s lives. National authorities wield the legal jurisdiction to grant or withhold political and/or human rights including access to basic rights and services (such as housing, medical care, employment) and/or security (such as legal protection) to individuals or groups living within the borders of a nation-state (or occupied territory). In the twenty-first century, individual access to these kinds of rights, services and security within a nation-state are typically tied to citizenship as an individual legal status that grants one access to these administrative structures and protections. National belonging then is not only about feeling but about gaining vital material access to resources to live and move freely through the world as a whole.

Within the context of the island of Ireland at the time of writing, two nation-states hold jurisdiction over portions of the population living on these shores: the Republic of Ireland in the South and the United Kingdom (UK) in the North (Northern Ireland). As our book demonstrates across its chapters, basic understanding of the island of Ireland’s division is integral to grasping how contemporary Irish theatre tackles not only ideas of “the nation” but also reveals nuances of the different permutations of this broad baseline concept as it becomes translated into lived and theatricalised experience. Anderson famously conceptualised the nation as an “imagined community” where “communion” among some stands in for “indefinitely stretchable nets of kinship and clientship” (2006, 6–7) which theoretically bind all living within a geographically defined territory. But as Jen Harvie observes, “national identities are neither biologically or territorially given; rather they are creatively produced or staged” (2005, 2)—an ongoing process of negotiation that makes theatre and performance key sites for investigating this dynamic, particularly in the Republic of Ireland and Northern Ireland where the relationship(s) between (and within) these nation-states remains contested.

For what does it mean for theatre and performance’s treatment of nation if a country’s history paradigmatically includes being part of another country’s empire for hundreds of years, long pre-dating the actually quite modern political and administrative concept of the nation-state as defined above? What if, due to this postcolonial history, the borders of this island country remain contested following the 1921 partition of Northern Ireland, the decades long Troubles, the Belfast Peace Agreement and persistent flashes of sectarian conflict up through the present? And what if some of those living behind either border, the Republic’s or Northern Ireland, hold multiple citizenships (as per the Belfast Agreement) or are stateless or formerly stateless (as in the case of an increased number of individuals seeking asylum or who hold refugee status who have arrived in both states since the 2000s)? How do these kinds of contested (and often multiple) national belongings translate into lived experiences and theatrical/performance content? And not only that, what if claims to an Irish national belonging are regularly tied not just to residence, citizenship or rights to citizenship, but distant feeling whether as traced through or projected onto a family line back through recent or distant generations or through fainter moments of imagined connection shared in an “Irish” bar abroad or during a St. Patrick’s Day parade (or pub crawl in a foreign city)?

All this baggage means that we will be careful to avoid use of “the Irish nation” as a catch-all in this chapter, but instead track carefully which nation-state we are referring to any given time and/or how the distinction of the Republic/Northern Irish border is being challenged in the theatrical works we examine. We will also draw attention to how contemporary Irish theatre and performance reveal viscerally how nationalism manifests as an affective and imaginary set of practices, feelings and beliefs that almost never respects the administrative limits of the Irish nation-state(s) as (a) more rigid designation(s). In the context of contemporary Irish theatre studies, we ultimately view nationalism as the performative practice of ideas of the Irish nation as an imagined community that may bear some, little or no resemblance to the actual contours of nation-states set up administratively on the island of Ireland.

Ultimately, this chapter contributes three elucidating frameworks for navigating how contemporary Irish theatre continues to dramatise and negotiate these complex and contested dimensions of the Irish nation as an idea and aspiration from the perspective of past, present and future:

• Theatre and the political work of nation-building: One of the most unique features of modern and contemporary Irish theatre history is the persistently close relationship between the work of theatre (and theatre practitioners) and the political work (and interrogation) of nation-building from the late nineteenth century onwards. While the founding of the Irish Literary Theatre and its subsequent relaunching as the Abbey, the Republic’s national theatre and the world’s first English-language state-subsidised theatre in 1904 (still in operation today) are the most recognizable touchstone in this genealogy, the work and interrogation of Irish nation-building in fact continue to be done across the registers of theatremaking practice from professional to amateur, institutionally located to community-based, in the period covered by this book. This manifests through the direct participation of theatremakers in political struggles/activism and their linking of this action to their theatrical work’s form, content or themes, but also through more subtle means, such as how projects are funded and/or conceptualised, for example, in terms of community reconciliation processes (as in the North) or local/state commemorative occasions or how Irish theatre productions are funded to travel abroad (and then marketed) or programmed to serve strategic points in the tourism calendar at home.

• Woman and/as nation: As identified in the introduction to this chapter, national belonging—whether administrative or affective—is experienced by individuals and groups, singly and collectively. But national belonging is also gendered in terms of the different expectations placed on men, women, transgender, genderqueer and/or non-binary people in terms of expected service and participation to the Irish nation(s) including but not limited to biological reproductive capacity or the ability to participate in military service and/or campaigns. In modern and contemporary Irish theatre history, these expectations are highly gendered along a male/female axis. This section will focus on theatrical figures of Irish women and/as nation, distinguishing between how the valences of “woman” can play out differently on Republic versus Northern Irish stages but we acknowledge that there is far more work to be done in the nuancing of this area in relationship to diverse gender identities and expressions over time that have likely been obscured by modern and contemporary Irish theatre’s persistent gender binary as tied up with ideas of and contestation over “the nation.”

• Interrogating national histories through the Irish history play: Across the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, Irish playwrights and theatremakers have continuously created works that consciously and deliberately reflect on national histories, often in very close proximity to the historically significant events then being depicted or reflected on theatrically. While contemporary Irish theatre’s repetitive topical and thematic focus on national histories tangibly contributes to the work of nation-building as explored in our first case study in this chapter, we also need to consider the ways in which contemporary Irish theatre practitioners’ obsession with national histories/histories of the nation expands our ability to think about the relationship between history and theatricality in the Irish context and beyond. For as Rebecca Schneider offers, “…theatre, like history, is an art of time. Even, we could say, the art of time” (2014, 7). The contemporary Irish theatre’s particular use of theatricality as an art of time to return again and again to history, and histories of the nation specifically, creates a powerful feedback loop that is essential to not only understanding Irish theatre as a discrete field of practice, but histories of the Irish nation more generally. We argue that the work of Irish theatre practitioners offers a unique embodied counter archive of the history of the nation state that defies chronology through its manipulation of the theatrical art of time, and in doing so, makes available a syncopated series of counter-narratives of the nation.

These three foundational frameworks are accompanied by brief case studies that model the application of these critical lenses to these key theatre productions:

• Theatre and the political work of nation-building (Michael West/Corn Exchange’s Dublin By Lamplight).

• Woman and/as nation (Anne Devlin’s Ourselves Alone).

• Interrogating national histories through the Irish history play (Frank McGuinness’ Observe the Sons of Ulster Marching Towards the Somme).

The chapter concludes with a consideration of how the Decade of Centenaries’ conclusion in 2023 alongside the ongoing waning of the Covid-19 pandemic and its rippling seismic effects across the fabric of international society might provide an opening for new narratives of the Irish nation to emerge in their wake and speculates about the role of contemporary Irish theatre in doing this foundational work.

Indeed, there is a risk in overdetermining all Irish plays (and/or performances broadly construed) and theatremakers as invested in exploring the question of the Irish nation in all its plurality, North and South. Some like playwright Declan Hughes have openly challenged assumptions that Irish theatre artists are inevitably reflecting on Irish national identity in its singular or pluralistic forms. In his landmark polemical 2000 essay, “Who The Hell Do We Think We Still Are? Reflections on Irish Theatre and Identity,” Hughes wrote that he’d:

like to see Irish theatre embrace the profound change that has occurred: that we are barely a country any more, never have been and never will be that nineteenth century of drama, a nation once again; that our identity is floating, not fixed. (13)

Yet, despite Hughes’ passionate pronouncement and the recent international success of Irish(-affiliated) playwrights including Marina Carr, Martin McDonagh, Conor McPherson and Enda Walsh with works not set in Ireland or exploring specifically “Irish” themes (as in Walsh and McPherson’s musical adaptations of work by David Bowie, Roald Dahl and Bob Dylan), this close association between Irish theatre and the nation persists. For example, ANU Productions does not articulate an ambition to comment on the Irish nation as core to how they see themselves but their intimate, site-specific and immersive theatre has been referred to by Fintan O’Toole as “a kind of alternative national theatre, exploring the legacy of coercive institutionalisation, sexual exploitation, poverty, social collapse and the heroin epidemic” (2013). Their work has central to the Decade of Centenaries through a high rate of commission by various state and non-state agencies including Dublin City Council, Dublin Bus, the Irish Congress of Trade Unions and Irish Heritage Trust, Fáilte Ireland and the National Museum of Ireland to create bespoke commemorative performances on key events in Irish national history in addition to the company’s own independent theatre work on this topic. As arguably the most written-about and discussed contemporary Irish Theatre Company of the 2010s (Haughton 2018a; McIvor 2018; Morash and Richards 2013; Singleton 2016; Till 2018 among others), ANU’s obsessive retelling of Irish national histories from the minority perspectives of those marginalised within Irish society by class, gender and/or sexuality communicates that reflecting on the nation is still a very dominant concern of contemporary Irish theatre practice (see Chapter 6 for a full discussion of their work and participation in the Decade of Centenaries and Chapter 10 for a discussion of Boys of Foley Street from their Monto Cycle).

Theatre and the Political Work of Nation-Building

Twentieth- and twenty-first-century histories of theatre in Ireland North and South reveal a close relationship between this art form and not only commentary on, but direct participation by theatremakers in political matters of building, maintaining or imagining the Irish nation-state—whether singularly or plurally conceived or claimed. As Nicholas Grene summarises, “As long as there has been a distinct Irish drama it has been so closely bound up with national politics that the one has often been considered more or less a reflection of the other” (1999, 1). However, Christopher Murray counters that Irish theatre may “be a mirror up to nation” but “the mirror does not give back the real; it gives back images of a perceived reality” (1997, 9). To extend Murray’s observation of the inevitable gap between intention and execution, this section examines how contemporary Irish theatre practitioners both aspire to and contest the ongoing work of Irish nation-building vis-à-vis politics and political participation in their practice, whether through strategies of dramatic representation and/or the setting up of production conditions intended to contribute to or contest these efforts when performed on the island or abroad.

Indeed, the Abbey was not the only twentieth-century Irish theatrical institution to explicitly claim a national mandate as part of its core mission. Parallel projects included the Theatre of Ireland (1906–1912), the Ulster Literary Theatre (1902–1940) and Taibhdhearc na Gaillimhe, the national Irish-language theatre of Ireland (1928–present). Lionel Pilkington argues that attaining national theatre status as these projects attempted to do, each on very different terms, holds such attracting power because “a national theatre…serves both as a prominent public site associated with the prestige of national self-representation, and as a means of instituting, or attempting to institute, norms of political agency” (2004, 232). However, Ireland’s competing national theatrical institutions, past and present, enact the island’s postcolonial fracturing as it is still being played out in real-time and theatrical space over matters including but not limited to jurisdiction and language.

For example, when Protestant National Association Members Bulmer Hobson and David Parkhill formed the Ulster Literary Theatre to “spread the ideals of the United Irishmen” (Quoted in Byrne 1997, 37) as a Northern franchise of the Irish Literary Theatre (the precursor to the Abbey), they informed William Butler Yeats expecting to be supported, however, he instead demanded royalties for their performance of Cathleen Ni Houlihan (1902), his landmark play co-authored with Lady Gregory. Through the Dublin secretary for the Irish National Literary Theatre at the time, George Roberts, Yeats wrote to Parkhill also stipulating that “the Belfast actors had no authority to state that they were a branch of the Irish National Literary Theatre” (Quoted in Byrne 1997, 37). This row exposes another key tension characteristic of the relationship between (all-island) contemporary Irish theatre and the concept of nation: anxiety over whether “national” theatre refers to the creation of theatrical work that is unique to the people of that nation in that time and place or whether “national” theatre is an endeavour undertaken to agitate for or to shore up the very existence of or continued flourishing of a political nation-state, or indeed to imagine it into being as in the case of the pre-independence Republic or the ongoing political cause of nationalists in Northern Ireland. Initially, Hobson and Parkhill viewed their franchising of the Irish Literary Theatre as an endeavour promoting a shared political cause (the United Irishmen) but when knocked back, they pivoted to focus on the creation of their own plays, unique to their region and experiences. As a contrast, when Brian Friel, Seamus Deane and Stephen Rea founded Field Day in 1980, they did so with the intention of creating a “cultural Fifth Province, complementing Ulster, Munster, Leinster and Connaght” with Friel referring to the idea as a “transcendent location” (Regan 1992, 27). Reflecting on their intentions more than 25 years later, Rea contended that Field Day’s work

…was directed at a very broad kind of audience, not just a theatre audience or the theatre ghetto, but into the veins of public opinion. What was unique about it was that it was a theatre of debate or discussion; [we were] looking for a way out when the ceasefire wasn't even a remote possibility. (Keating 2006)

Yet, Field Day has also been critiqued for, on the one hand, latent Republicanism and, on the other, political naivete with Colm Toibin famously musing that “There were times in the 1980s…when it was hard not to feel that Field Day had become the literary wing of the IRA” (Shovlin 2009). In looking at Field Day’s contributions to postcolonial theory discourse vis-à-vis theatre, Shaun Richard judges that overall “[t]here is some fairly unsophisticated material and perhaps, some less than well-judged analogies and activities” that “also has to be acknowledged” (2004, 611). Richards concludes that Field Day’s use of postcolonial theory as the “frame in which theatre could be set” was often “applied unreflectingly as a prevailing orthodoxy that often serves to limit rather than advance analysis of both Irish drama and Irish society (2004, 612).”

In contemporary Northern Irish theatre, ongoing contested questions of belonging and identity for Catholic/Nationalist and Protestant/Loyalist communities whether or not they participated in or endorsed armed conflict during the Troubles remains a central concern as in the recent plays of Stacey Gregg, David Ireland, Owen McCafferty and Abbie Spallen or the seminal 1990s–early 2000s work of Christina Reid, Anne Devlin or Stewart Parker among others. Across all these plays, the personal and communal costs of particularly violent struggles for Irish national freedom are debated and contested as the theatrical stage provides a forum through which to rehearse the tension between individual and collective experiences of “nation” as a lived experience.

Furthermore, national politics are not only a subject of Irish drama but have also been played out live within and adjacent to Irish theatre spaces (a cross-over satirised and celebrated by Michael West and Corn Exchange’s 2004 Dublin By Lamplight, see below). Theatre practitioners repeatedly contributed and continue to contribute to key political events and movements particularly during the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. Indeed, the first rebel casualty during Easter Rising was Abbey actor and Irish Citizen Army member Seán Connolly (Keena 2013), serving under rebellion leader, barrister, educator, poet and playwright Padraig Pearse whose plays with overtly militaristic and revolutionary themes including An Rí, Iosagan and The Singer had also been performed at the Abbey. This blurring of lines between performance and politics in the Irish theatre is also captured in the iconic anecdote of feminist nationalist activist and campaigner Maud Gonne arriving for one of her landmark performances of W.B. Yeats and Lady Gregory’s Cathleen Ni Houlihan and approaching the stage through the audience (presumably coming straight from a nationalist organising meeting or protest). But there are numerous other examples from modern and contemporary Irish theatre history where state of the nation plays and those producing them are not holding up a mirror to real-life politics as much as directly participating in the shaping of them: from the direct involvement of Easter Rising leaders and participants such as Pádraig Pearse, Seán Connolly and Maud Gonne with the Abbey (leading to Yeats’ later crisis of conscience captured in his iconic poem) to Field Day’s role as intellectual and theatrical thought leaders regarding not only the Northern Irish conflict but also postcolonial theory internationally in the 1980s and 1990s. More recently, we can cite Panti/Rory O’Neill’s elevation to a leading national campaigner for the 2015 Marriage Equality Referendum after a speech he gave onstage at the Abbey regarding homophobia went viral (see Chapter 9 for more discussion of Panti/Rory O’Neill’s “Noble Call” onstage at the Abbey, plays and broader activism) and the widening use of documentary/verbatim and other theatrical and performance approaches to interrogate state-level traumas including abuse of women and children in Magdalene laundries, Mother and Baby Homes, industrial and reformatory schools and the ongoing peace and reconciliation processes in Northern Ireland (see Chapter 6). As Mark Phelan observes of the role of theatre in conflict transformation in Northern Ireland:

One of the most distinctive, if debilitating, features of the otherwise successful peace process in the North is the fact that there is no state mechanism or apparatus in place to undertake any form of truth recovery, with the resulting vacuum unsatisfactorily filled by a welter of charitable, statutory, and community organizations. This political failure to deal with the past means that artists- particularly theatre artists- have had an enormously important role to play in the ongoing processes of conflict transformation. (2016, 373)

The role of the theatremaker and theatre institutions in amplifying processes of social reckoning and redress has been particularly pronounced in the early twenty-first century with key companies like Brokentalkers and ANU Productions in the Republic collaboratively creating works that deal with histories of abuse and trauma within Irish institutions including industrial and reformatory schools and Magdalene laundries and the Abbey theatre recently creating a theatrical response titled Home: Part One to the publication of the 2021 report of the Commission of Investigation into Mother and Baby Homes featuring actors and other public figures including authors and politicians reading testimonies from survivors and other materials (see also Chapter 6 for more detail on the Abbey Theatre’s programming under then artistic directors Neil Murray and Graham McLaren). Home: Part I was made available to watch first on St. Patrick’s Day 2021 and for four months afterwards, with the Abbey stating that this “day where we celebrate our identity should also be a day for us to reflect on Ireland’s history and on the experiences of its citizens” (Abbey Theatre 2021). The necessity of creating this material for an online audience due to the pandemic also meant that the content was available globally and throughout the Irish diaspora. This extension of access was particularly appropriate in this case as many adult survivors of these institutions might have been sent out of the country to be adopted (with the United States a frequent destination) and as a case in point which demonstrates how participating in acts of belonging to the Irish nation and its histories can transcend presence in the actual Irish nation-state at the time of spectatorship.

Finally, across the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, Irish theatre (defined here as made in the Republic or the North originally) has also functioned as a national cultural export utilised for soft diplomacy as well as supporting the livelihood of the Irish theatre artists bringing their work around the world. From the early twentieth century Abbey theatre tours to Druid Theatre’s international touring circuit forged from 1980 onwards to the 2005 formation of Culture Ireland to explicitly promote the circulation of Irish arts (including theatre abroad) (Culture Ireland 2022), modern and contemporary Irish theatre’s ongoing association with the political and economic work of nation-building to some extent remains inescapable when work from these companies or under the auspices of state agencies has circulated abroad. Patrick Lonergan’s work on the relationship between globalisation and contemporary Irish theatre is particularly instructive here as he identifies and works through at length post-Celtic Tiger shifts in the branding of theatre for national and international audiences, noting that particularly post-1990s that the Abbey (as well as other Irish theatres) “operates within a global theatre network where it must compete against other national and international theatres, its success in doing so determined by the dominance and success of branded versions of Irish identity” (2009, 75). While a full consideration of contemporary Irish theatre’s movement around the world through globalised networks in the time period covered by this book is outside the scope of this current chapter, it is nonetheless essential to bear in mind that even when Irish theatre moves outside of our national border(s), its circulation nonetheless contributes to the political work of Irish nation-building in layered and complex ways with affective and economic implications that we must remain attuned to as spectators, artists and/or critics.

Case Study One: Michael West in collaboration with Corn Exchange, Dublin by Lamplight

Premiered: 2004, Project Arts Centre, Dublin, produced by The Corn Exchange, directed by Annie Ryan.

Notable Revivals: 2017, Abbey Theatre and The Corn Exchange, directed by Annie Ryan.

Dublin by Lamplight is a purposeful conflation and distortion of two of early twentieth-century Ireland’s most powerful founding moments/myths which both took place in 1904: the opening of the Abbey and the action of James Joyce’s novel Ulysses, his epic account of Dublin over the course of one day through the eyes of Stephen Bloom and his associates. Equal parts satire and homage, comedy and tragedy, Dublin by Lamplight follows the ill-fated premiere of would-be theatre impresario Willy Hayes’ The Wooing of Emer as an attempt by his amateur drama troupe to lay claim to establishing the first “Irish National Theatre of Ireland” (West 2005, 12) as performance and politics collide directly in their attempt to stage this play. Historical figures like Maud Gonne, Lady Gregory, Annie Horniman, Oscar Wilde, William Butler Yeats and the Fay brothers are cleverly collapsed into single characters or refracted across multiple characters with their most identifiable character traits and/or aspects of their legacy savagely lampooned. The characters address the audience in both first and third person, experiencing the play’s action but also commenting on themselves and the play from an outside perspective (Fig. 7.1).

Fig. 7.1

(Photo Ros Kavanagh)

Corn Exchange’s 2017 revival of Dublin by Lamplight by Michael West in collaboration with the company, directed by Annie Ryan. Featuring (from left) Willie Hayes (Louis Lovett), Martyn Wallace (Paul Reid), Maggie (Catríona Ennis), and Jimmy Finnegan (Colin Campbell)

Set over one day during the visit of the King, the leading actress (and the troupe’s benefactress), Eva St. John, is detained for political protest en route to the theatre while the leading actor, Frank Hayes (Willy’s brother), is plotting a bomb blast outside the theatre to protest the King’s visit which he plans to detonate during the play’s final rousing nationalist speech. Meanwhile, Maggie, the costume mistress turned leading lady understudy, is forced to take to the stage. She is also trying to tell Frank that she is carrying his child while another suitor Jimmy tries to convince her of his own love for her. The business of putting on a play and agitating for political independence on the occasion of the King’s visit become bound up in one another repeatedly, much to the chagrin of many of the characters such as Willy and the actor Martyn Wallace who hold out hope for the non-political and primarily self-enriching glory and economic rewards of a theatrical career and the status that might come with laying claim to the national theatre.

Dublin by Lamplight’s riotous slapstick driven by personal and political intrigue builds up not to a comic climax but a tragic one after the explosion of Frank’s bomb kills a young man outside the theatre. This climax viscerally depicts the very real differences between staging a call to armed struggle and dying when one answers this call to participation. When pressed by suspicious police on the political content of The Wooing of Emer as connected to the blast, Willy protests “it’s just a play” (West 2005, 57)—but this defensive claim is precisely what West and Corn Exchange encourage audiences to reflect on more deeply at a century’s remove. It is of course a claim that William Butler Yeats himself would reflect on at length as in his well-known poem, “The Man and the Echo” (1939) where he asked of his and Lady Gregory’s play Cathleen Ni Houlihan, “Did that play of mine send out/Certain men the English shot?”

West’s irreverent deconstruction of early twentieth-century Irish political and cultural nationalism as interrelated movements comes into sharpest focus through the character of Maggie and her ultimate alienation from cultural or political agency within 1904 Ireland. Her alienated status as a pregnant woman out-of-wedlock promoted from wardrobe mistress to temporary star is far from an incidental plot line. West and Corn Exchange’s ensemble instead gives Maggie the final scene in the play as she sails away on a boat to England, meditating on the question of “What future had she, had any of them, in this dark place?” (2005, 73). By ending the play on Maggie’s unfinished story, Dublin by Lamplight ultimately demands reflection on who got erased or became collateral damage within early twentieth-century Irish cultural and political nationalist movements rather than reassuring audiences with a triumphalist celebration of Ireland’s national/ist theatre legacy.

Originally staged in 2004, Peter Crawley describes Dublin by Lamplight’s premiere as “staged in parallel with the national theatre’s own blighted centenary, by a company on the outside looking in” (2017) with the play revived in 2017 finally on the stage of the national theatre itself. The Corn Exchange, founded by Annie Ryan in 1995, combines “strong physical theatre practice” (particularly Commedia dell’Arte) “with dynamic text” in order to create work ranging from “contemporary site-specific work, adaptations of classics and original theatre made in collaboration with the ensemble and writer Michael West” (2018). They have more recently clarified their focus as a company to be committed also to “strong embodied ensemble practice” and “cutting edge design and technology” (The Corn Exchange 2023). When Dublin by Lamplight was revived by the Abbey Theatre in 2017, the Abbey’s publicity described the production as “Corn Exchange’s much loved alternative version of the founding of a national theatre” (Abbey Theatre, 2017).

Dublin by Lamplight emerged from Corn Exchange’s signature ensemble-based working method which at the time Ryan described as “marrying this renegade version of Commedia dell’Arte from Chicago with other performance disciplines” (West 2005, n.p.) The company assembled “a cast, a creative team and a devising period before committing anything to paper other than the premise,” working through the principles of “‘pure’ commedia (with mask and fixed location) and ‘pure’ Story Theatre (whatever you could find or invent)” (West 2005, 6). In performance, an ensemble of six performers played over thirty characters in Dublin by Lamplight while wearing “fixed painted masks” (inspired by Commedia dell’Arte) but taking on “complete costume changes for each character” (West 2005, 7). Props apart from Frank’s leather bag (which contains the bomb) were all mimed by the actors in line with the company’s highly physical performance style and the conventions of Commedia particularly as the performers deftly manoeuvred through the riotous world imagined by West and the ensemble under Ryan’s direction. In both the 2004 and 2017 productions, the sparse scenography (Kris Stone) and stark lighting (Matt Frey) amplified the actors’ performing bodies at the centre of this work as the virtuosic performances of the ensemble met the demands of the densely layered and intertextually rich dramatic text with expert lightness.

Dublin by Lamplight ultimately engages many of the key tensions inherent in the relationship between theatre and nation in Ireland, especially at the beginning of the twentieth century: Do cultural and political nationalism have anything to do with one another really? Can one theatre troupe alone profess to represent the “nation”? Is a “national theatre” a building or an idea? What is the relationship between women as an ideal within the nationalist struggle and the lived experiences of women in the streets? What does the drama backstage reveal about the meaning of the drama onstage? How does dramatising the contrast between backstage and onstage help us make sense of the larger tensions within nationalism as a discourse of ideas and repertoire of political practices (including the realities of armed struggle)? Dublin by Lamplight does not resolve any of the tensions around nation and theatre that it mobilises, but instead asks audiences to consider what stories remain unfinished when we focus too much on nation as the primary value through which to measure theatre’s function in society.

Woman and/as Nation

The previous section detailed the myriad ways in which contemporary (and modern) Irish theatre as a network of institutions and individual artists remains engaged in the political work of nation-building materially and metaphorically up through the present day. However, this section explores the ways in which staging the Irish nation has been heavily gendered along a male-female binary in landmark plays and productions over time. This tendency has had implications for women as symbolic figures performing characters and/or personas and female playwrights and theatremakers as bearers or critics of national themes and tropes in the works they create.

In fact, staging the modern and contemporary theatrical Irish nation is inconceivable without women as key players onstage, but their centrality often translates into the tokenistic and comes at a cost. As Melissa Sihra details:

Women have held centre stage since the inception of the Irish Literary Theatre in 1899 and foundation of the Abbey Theatre in 1904, in iconic roles which variously symbolize ‘Woman’ as ‘Mother’ and/or ‘Ireland,’ embodying the anticolonial imaginary as Eire or aisling, which goes back to at least the time of the Penal Laws. (2016, 547)

But as Shonagh Hill trenchantly observes: “The enduring trope of Mother Ireland has defined women’s bodies as the terrain over which power has been contested, while concurrently erasing the reality of their corporeal experiences” (2019, 4) particularly in terms of access to birth control, pregnancy, motherhood and free expression of sexualities (See Chapters 2–6 for historical context). Maria Elena Doyle’s assessment of early twentieth-century Irish drama concluded that:

nationalists preferred to put forward the figure of the woman-nation who could return to Irish men a sense of their own masculinity by standing as a passive ideal in need of their rescue. Writers including W.B. Yeats, Alice Milligan, Edward Martyn, AE and John Millington Synge thus generally opted to depict active male heroes who either protected passive heroines (like the popular Deirdre) or overshadowed more harshly drawn villainesses (like Milligan’s Grania). (1999, 33–34)

Writing in 1999, Doyle assessed that these patterns of representation were still persistent at that time:

Present day Irish drama tends to depict figures who recall the woman-nation as powerless (Sarah in Brian Friel’s Translations), self-deluded (Mamie in Jennifer Johnston’s The Nightingale and not the Lark), overtly destructive (Marie in Stewart Parker’s Catchpenny Twist) or disturbingly unknowable (Greta’s ghost in Anne Devlin’s After Easter); in these and many other plays written since the onset of the troubles, the ideal of the woman-nation as conceived by the Revival ultimately hinders the production of an Irish identity taking its place in a modern world. (1999, 46)

Post-1999, contemporary Irish theatre and society have re-examined the binarism of gender identity and its relationship to sexuality as well as race and ethnicity in more complex ways as this book reveals throughout but nonetheless, Doyle’s diagnosis ghosts the representational limits of female embodiment even at the time of writing. To this end, Chapter 9 examines in more detail the relationship between the body, intersectionality and identity (including gender) in contemporary Irish performance, but this section will focus narrowly on how the interplay between “woman” and “nation” has been and continues to be (albeit in ever more complex and critical ways) a major foil for contemporary Irish theatre practices due to the legacy of this entanglement over time, and its different manifestations as a trope in the Republic versus Northern Ireland.

When it comes to interrogating the Irish nation (or aspirations towards its achievement theatrically), Irish women have been simultaneously symbolically overloaded and constrained as characters and professional workers in the industry (as actors, playwrights, directors, designers, etc.). Their work particularly as playwrights has also been systematically marginalised and misunderstood in terms of the productions and dominant critical reception of their plays which take on national (and other) themes despite watershed moments of agitation, change and impact by individual artists and movements over time as demonstrated repeatedly by leading scholars in this field with the point only amplified again most recently with the two-volume publication of The Golden Thread: Irish Women Playwrights, 1716–2016, edited by David Clare, Fiona McDonagh and Justine Nakase which gathers case studies from 400 years of this pattern in action (2021a). For this reason, this section’s case study, the 1985 premiere of Anne Devlin’s Ourselves Alone, focuses to a great extent on the play’s critical reception and critics’ pronouncements on Devlin’s ability to take on the themes that she does and the relative accomplishment of her playwriting craft in order to illustrate this dynamic in action and within historical context.

As a representative moment capturing the persistence of the entanglement of modern and contemporary in imagining “woman” and “nation” together in Irish theatre, Outlandish Theatre (OT) Platform’s 2016 production of Megalomaniac, which was based on “fifteen qualitative” interviews with an anonymous collaborator of Syrian-Palestinian descent living in Dublin 8 and her family” and “written by Maud Hendricks in collaboration with Bernie O’Reilly (co-artistic directors of OT Platform), the interviewee, and Aoun, addressing “themes of migration, war, displacement, citizenship, racism, social integration, and family” (McIvor 2020, 67). This key moment features the character of Noor, the Syrian-Palestinian woman whose story was adapted for the play as played by Iman Aoun, the artistic director of Palestine’s ASHTAR Theatre who collaborated with OT on the project. In this moment, Noor interacts with one of the child assistants who brought onstage props including baby dolls throughout the performance. Notably, this child is dressed as Cathleen Ni Houlihan, the titular character from W.B. Yeats and Lady Gregory’s iconic play, a detail that combined with the location of the play’s staging and themes becomes highly meaningful. Originally staged in the Rita Kelly Theatre located in Coombe’s Women’s and Infant’s University Hospital as part of a three-year partnership with this institution, Megalomaniac was originally envisioned as the first instalment in a Trilogy of plays inspired by the title Mother Ireland, an honorific the play suggests Noor has a full right to as a migrant woman and now Irish citizen. However, although Cathleen Ni Houlihan/Mother Ireland is played here by an seemingly innocent and guileless child, that symbolic figure in fact stalks both the child performer and Noor (Aoun) in layered ways, particularly in a 2016 moment staged in Ireland’s largest “provider of women’s and infant healthcare” (Health Service Executive 2023) prior to the legalisation of abortion in 2018 in the Republic, and where migrant women’s childbearing remains suspect and their layered status as (non-Irish born) women within Irish society remains highly contested (See McIvor 2016, 153–178). Neither female figure here (the eternal Cathleen ni Houlihan as child or Noor, the more recently arrived Irish resident) can claim full autonomy over their body or rights even in the immediate setting of a maternity hospital and even after the character of Noor begins the play sharing that she has received refugee status and citizenship in Ireland. The revisiting and recycling of the Mother Ireland figure remains highly potent, relevant and perhaps unescapable even for women more recently arrived in Ireland as a symbol of what continues to hold women back from full bodily and other autonomies in the country today.

Contemporary Irish female characters, playwrights, actresses, theatre artists and/or theatremakers might therefore be excused for feeling burdened by the myth of Mother Ireland but it has remained constitutive up through the present due in no small part to this repetitive theatrical fixation being legislatively mirrored in the setup of the Irish nation-state. As Miriam Haughton contends emphatically, “Ireland as a state is birthed from, and has become reliant upon, gender inequality in its machinery of nationhood, of which the national theatre [the Abbey] acts as a significant public tool in shaping and influencing images of Ireland deemed ‘national’” (2018b, 346). For example, one of the most persistently controversial articles in the Republic of Ireland’s Constitution, for example, is Article 41.1 which has still not been replaced at the time of writing and stipulates that by “her life within the home, woman gives to the State a support without which the common good cannot be achieved,” which means that “mothers shall not be obliged by economic necessity to engage in labour to the neglect of their duties in the home” (Bunreacht na hÉireann, 40.1) (See also Chapter 2).

The Republic’s immediate constitutionally enshrined linkage between the home, maternity and nation on its formation from the previous Free State in 1937 has drawn (female) playwrights who have experimented with the “state of the nation” play, if only to explode and contest the format to exploring and contesting the domestic and/or motherhood as a site of nation-building and/or regulation. Nadine Holdsworth describes the state of the nation play in an international context as characterised by:

representations of personal events, family structures and social or political organisations as a microcosm of the nation-state to comment directly on the ills befalling society, on key narratives of nation or on the state of the nation as it wrestles with changing circumstances. (2010, 39)

We could indeed group many of the best-known works of modern and contemporary female playwrights into this genre including of course the iconic Cathleen Ni Houlihan by Yeats and Gregory but also Teresa Deevy domestically trapped disenchanted heroines in the 1930s, Maura Laverty’s own Dublin Trilogy addressing housing, class and motherhood as a female-perspective led updating of Seán O’Casey’s 1920s post-independence Dublin Trilogy (Leeney and McFeely 2021), the domestic dystopias of Marina Carr’s early 2000s Midlands Trilogy (see Chapter 6), Máiréad Ní Ghrada’s 1960s An Trial/On Trial in its indictment of the relationship between the Irish home, Church and state regarding out of wedlock pregnancy (see Chapter 2), Charabanc Theatre Company’s work (written by Marie Jones, Martin Lynch, Sue Ashby) and that of Christina Reid and Anne Devlin who together explore the relationship between Northern Irishness and femininity in the home in the 1970s–1990s (see Chapter 4), or finally, Nancy Harris, Deirdre Kinahan and Stacey Gregg’s more recent urban realism excavations of Irish and new Irish female identities in the Republic and the North as negotiated in domestic spaces across networks of kinds of relationships that often exceed the strictly familial and/or biological. Lisa Fitzpatrick posits that Anne Devlin, Christina Reid and Marina Carr’s approach to the state of the nation play in particular works through key problems of the nation and nationalism to pose a set of “key problems” that simply cannot be disentangled from the gendered perspectives of their characters. Due to the “concentration of the dramatic conflict around female characters” in those playwrights’ works, Fitzpatrick argues that straightforward “readings of the text as metaphorical engagements with the national question” (2005, 321–322) are continually interrupted particularly by Devlin and Reid as Northern Irish playwrights. Fiona Coffey observes that in Northern Ireland, “an emphasis on essentialist forms of identity has required that individuals subvert all other parts of their selfhood (such as gender, class or profession) to the dominant identifying markers of the larger group” (2016, 25). For women in particular, they “have had to subvert their needs as females to those of their ethno-nationalist group in order to avoid marginalization” (2016, 25) in addition to negotiating the religious gendered norms that affect those in the Catholic and Protestant communities in various different ways. Fitzpatrick argues that Devlin and Reid’s work in particular troubles “the conflation of woman and nation in the originary myths of Irish republicanism” by disrupting “narratives of communal identity” and opening up “other potential allegiances, such as those based on class or gender, which trouble sectarian identities” (2005, 321), an approach also shared in common by the production history of Charabanc Theatre Company working in roughly the same era.

It therefore might therefore be said that cisgender female Irish playwrights, in the Republic and Northern Ireland, have largely interpreted and continue to interpret the Irish state of the nation play as a key dramatic genre through which to interrogate the relationship between symbolic and material relationship between women and/as nation in Irish contexts. Whether or not this automatically makes their work feminist in a political sense is a point that Irish theatre and performance scholars continue to debate with Melissa Sihra recently making the distinction between “theatre (and art in general) that is polemically feminist or ‘issue-based,’ where the work serves as a political means to an end” and “theatre that instinctively challenges heteropatriarchy through the nature of its form and content” (2016, 546), while also tracing the way in which earlier generations of female Irish playwrights and theatremakers such as Carr and the women of Charabanc being more hesitant to name their work as such despite touching on a large range of political issues in their work beyond gender whereas she argues that “the younger generation of women in theatre now largely self-identify as feminists” (2016, 557).

This shift towards not only explicit identification but also multi-sited action becomes evident in the work of more contemporary theatremakers like Republic-based Maeve Stone, who has worked across the genres of theatre, film and interdisciplinary art practices, particularly performance art, and overtly describes her work as “responding” directly “to issues of climate breakdown” and “revisiting the canon with a feminist lens” (Stone 2023a). Stone’s body of practice includes extended stints with mainstream companies like the Abbey (resident assistant director in 2012) and established independent companies like Pan Pan Theatre (working their first associate director ever) but increasingly she has moved towards interdisciplinary arts practice with an explicitly activist and/or community-led and embedded orientation. She has addressed the relationship between woman, body and nation head on in Unwoman Part III, a collaboration between herself, iconic performer and feminist theatremaker Olwen Fouréré and Australian feminist theatrical company The Rabble performed at the 2018 Dublin Fringe Festival in September, four months after the repeal of the Eighth Amendment which legalised abortion in Ireland (see Chapter 7). Unwoman Part III was: “…an invocation of the pregnant body as a plurality of experiences,” an “uncompromised piece of feminist theatre horrified by the history and laws attempting to curb bodily autonomy and reproductive rights” (Stone 2022). In the performance, Fouréré gives “birth to stones,” as “[t]ethered by a thick umbilical rope,” she is “condemned to labour over and over, a perpetual parturition” (Keating 2018), a spectacle supported by set designer Kate Davis’s “space with caul-like tombs” (Keating 2018), Emma Valente’s haunting and atmospheric lights and Stone’s sound design and composition which intensified the overall affect of the piece. Stone’s politically inflected theatre work has addressed the global refugee crisis in The Mouth of A Shark (2018), a verbatim song cycle featuring stories of migration to and from Ireland, composed by Maeve Stone, directed by Oonagh Murphy and “created with Michelle o’Rourke, Osaro Azams, Daryl McCormack and Ashley Xiu for ‘Where We Live’ Festival at the Complex in Dublin including a community choir from immigrant and asylum communities” and most recently and prolifically, the climate emergency across multiple projects and artistic works which she classifies under “Activism” on her personal webpage and which has included her serving in roles such as lead artist for the Green Arts Department at Axis Ballymun and artist in residence at the Project Arts Centre, as well as working with “Codema (Dublin’s energy agency)” and Axis as the “embedded Irish artist” on the 2019–2021 Creative Europe project, Cultural Adaptations, led by Creative Carbon Scotland (Stone, 2023a, 2023b “Activism”). Like the work of Charabanc Theatre’s founders, Stone’s work demonstrates how an explicit political orientation towards looking at the relationship between women, gender and nation in Ireland today not only can translate into direct action on a variety of issues but ongoing formal artistic innovation that pushes forward the field of contemporary Irish theatre and performance more broadly.

Case Study Two: Anne Devlin, Ourselves Alone

Premiered: 1985, Royal Court Theatre, London in a co-production with Liverpool Playhouse, directed by Simon Curtis.

Anne Devlin’s first play Ourselves Alone premiered at London’s Royal Court Theatre at the height of the Troubles and immediately following several landmark referendums and events on reproductive rights in the Republic. These included the 1983 passage of the Eighth Amendment to the Constitution of Ireland which guaranteed an equal right to life of the unborn child and the mother (Irish Statute Book 1983), County Longford teenager Ann Lovett’s 1984 death in childbirth in a Virgin Mary grotto and the Kerry Babies case which was an investigation into the discovery of a murdered infant and subsequent wrongful targeting of another local woman, Joanne Hayes, who had given birth out of wedlock to and buried a stillborn child in the same vicinity. The Irish state recently apologised to Hayes and her family in December 2020 with “deep and sincere regret” for “‘the hurt and stress’ caused to the entire Hayes family,” many of whom had been intimidated and charged with aspects of the crime at the time (O’Faolain 2020). These intense contexts would have directly influenced the reception of the play as Devlin’s play deals at length with women, sexuality, motherhood and the relationship of these themes to political agency, freedom and contested ideas of nation albeit in the North.

Ourselves Alone was initially developed at the Liverpool Playhouse Theatre and its world premiere for the Royal Court was directed by Simon Curtis with design by Paul Brown (Irish Theatre Playography 2023a, 2023b, 2023c). Despite the play being set in Anderstown, a West Belfast suburb, Devlin was unable to get it produced in Belfast and she speculated at the time that “Belfast theatre management might have thought the play would prove too provocative for their audience” (Nowlan 1986a, 8). Nevertheless, Ourselves Alone toured Derry, Enniskillen and Dublin, and also received productions closely following the premiere in Hamburg at the Schaus Spiel Haus in 1986, directed by Peter Palach and the United States at Washington D.C.’s Arena Theatre, directed by Les Waters (Troubles Archive, n.d.). The play’s international acclaim also extended to Devlin receiving the 1985 Susan Smith Blackburn Prize for Ourselves Alone which is given annually since 1978 to “women who have written works of outstanding quality for the English-speaking theatre” (The Susan Smith Blackburn Prize 2022). Other awards or nominations for Ourselves Alone included the George Devine Award (given by the Royal Court Theatre), an Irish Post award and nominations for best new play by the Laurence Oliver Awards (which recognises the best professional theatre in London) and at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival.

In terms of Ourselves Alone’s immediate categorisation vis-á-vis Irish theatre upon its acclaimed premiere, Andrew Hamilton’s pre-coverage of the play in The Irish Times opens stating:

The conflict in Northern Ireland is featured day and night now on British television screens and on the radio news bulletins but the greater British public at whom the coverage is directed are already war weary in their armchairs and kitchens. They are switching off metaphorically. If not literally. Oddly the same thing isn’t happening in the British theatre. (1986, 8)

Devlin’s unequivocal association with the “British theatre” in the Irish Times is telling, Northern Ireland’s status as part of the UK and the premiere of the play in Britain notwithstanding. Ourselves Alone’s international productions and acclaim further complicate how we might think of this play’s impact within the unstable category of contemporary “Irish theatre,” particularly in terms of how anxieties (or uncertainty) about its initial classification in 1985 also powerfully capture the caginess with which Irish association with the Northern Irish conflict was being dealt with in the Republic of Ireland’s press at the time.

Ourselves Alone dramatises the interrelationship between armed conflict in Northern Irish society and violence in the home, following the women of one republican family—sisters Josie (Bríd Brennan) and Frieda (Hilary Reynolds) and their brother’s partner/common-law wife Donna (Lise-Ann McLaughlin). All performers referenced here appeared in the original production at the Royal Court and for the tour in the Republic of Ireland (Irish Theatre Playography 2023a, 2023b, 2023c). Women’s bodily autonomy is under threat throughout from within their own community and kinship network, as well as in the wider context of the Troubles. Frieda comes home noisily telling her sister, Josie, and Donna, “I was nearly gang-raped at the club,” to which Josie responds, “Is that all?” (Devlin 1986, 18)—highlighting the pervasiveness of sexual aggression in their daily lives.

Ourselves Alone dramatises the struggle between women’s bodies being a central obsession within Irish politics, culture and society and the daily struggle of women to have any meaningful control over their own bodies, personal or political. While women are sexualised constantly as in Frieda’s encounter at the club, expression of desire outside of the boundaries of heteronormativity is unacceptable as Josie’s inability to talk about her deep and long-term extramarital love affair with Cathal O’Donnell (Adrian Dunbar) epitomises. And while maternity is idealised, it risks being an overdetermining trap which Donna’s confinement to the home with a small baby as the partner of an interred man reveals. The extremity of these distorted values is represented by the offstage figure of Josie and Frieda’s maiden aunt, Cora, who is cared for by Frieda. She is “blind and deaf and dumb and she has no hands” because the “usual” happened to her—she was storing ammunition for her brother which exploded in her face. Frieda wryly observes: “They stick her out at the front of the parades every so often to show the women of Ireland what their patriotic duty should be” (Devlin 1986, 29). This grotesque parody of a Marian procession in honour of the Blessed Virgin Mary, mother Jesus Christ, vividly communicates the distorted symbolic value put on women’s total self-sacrifice for their men—an imperative that all three women resist in different ways throughout the play however imperfectly.

As such, the play knowingly plays on the second-wave feminist slogan that the personal is political throughout but keeps feminist politics (as defined by active involvement in political agitation for gender equality) in the background rather than in the foreground. As Cathy Leeney observes of Anne Devlin’s later work After Easter (1994), Devlin’s dramaturgical vision “lets the private flow into the public, making visible in spatial terms a feminist refusal to uphold the categorisation of experience into the political, the personal, the cultural” (2021, 317). Frieda refuses to express cross-border objection to the pending anti-abortion Amendment to the Irish Constitution (see Chapter 4). Meanwhile Josie emphatically insists that “there are no political differences between one person and another that are not political” (Devlin 1986, 23)—a conviction that is not only a matter of personally held belief but reinforced by their family’s treatment as active republicans within their immediate community. The women represent a spectrum of political commitment—Josie is a volunteer for the IRA who works as courier, interrogator and active combatant (having planted an unsuccessful bomb), Frieda rejects political commitment and only joins the Worker’s Party out of defiance after being hit by her father, and Donna’s commitment to republicanism seems sustained only through her child’s father’s activities and ongoing internment.

In Ourselves Alone, sexuality and motherhood operate as continual (but unreliable) barometers that confirm or limit each woman’s degree of personal and/or social freedom. After learning that Liam has another woman, Donna immediately takes a younger lover herself, telling Josie, “he’s young, he makes me feel innocent” (Devlin 1986, 83). Josie’s pregnancy radically alters her plans for political involvement: “I’d like to stop for awhile, look around me, plant a garden, listen for other sounds; the breathing of a child somewhere outside Anderstown” (Devlin 1986, 77). Mel Gussow’s New York Times’ review for the later 1987 Arena Stage production of Ourselves Alone observed that “[w]hat keeps the play from being solipsistic or self-pitying is that Ms. Devlin’s three women are not viewed heroically. They are self-victimizing, allowing themselves to be trapped in traditional roles, unable or reluctant to assert their own identity” (1987, 61). However, Gussow’s individuation of the women as portrayed by Devlin misses the structural argument that she consciously makes through imbricating her protagonists’ personal struggles so closely to the gendered constraints of Northern Irish republican nationalism which confines the characters (and by extension the other women in their immediate and wider communities) so absolutely to their homes and within rigid limitations of femininity and motherhood. In doing so, Reid does not concede to her character's lack of heroism, but rather calls into question the conditions under which women can become heroes to themselves or others in the North at that time, and in doing so begins to chip away at the notion of the tragic hero as both gendered and potentially meaningless in these circumstances.

Given the intense political and social contexts noted above and the international success of this play by a Northern Irish female playwright, attention to its immediate reception is illuminating as it reveals a gendered slant to the criticism and also notably does not put the play in direct dialogue with any of the production’s loaded contexts—the Troubles or debates over reproductive freedom—instead it is about assessing the play as a discrete stand-alone artistic work of estimable measurable quality. David Nowlan’s review of Ourselves Alone when it premiered in the Republic as part of the 1986 Dublin Theatre opens by proclaiming that with Ourselves Alone, Devlin “consolidates her reputation as a significant writer, even if she does not establish herself as an accomplished playwright.” He goes on condescendingly to claim: “She writes her words well and conveys her ideas with empathy and subtlety. Her text resounds with authenticity. But her plot creaks with implausibility” (1986b, 12). Feminist Irish theatre scholars including but not limited to Cathy Leeney, Melissa Sihra (2018) and Lisa Fitzpatrick (2005) have demonstrated over and over that as a female Irish playwright Devlin has been far from alone in these kinds of backhanded gendered critical commentaries, particularly the repeated focus on her inability to satisfy genre conventions and tendency to verbal excess but as Leeney charges, “If women playwrights are sometimes accused of not knowing what they are doing theatrically, it is often because they are doing something new, familiar, or transgressive of convention. Originality, strangeness, and resistant awkwardnesses are likely to result” (2021, 318). In addition, Nowlan’s review visibly chafes against the emphasis on women’s lives and women’s words, noting first that “the characters of the women are persuasive and engaging, but the men in their lives come across as either bullies or wimps,” ultimately grudgingly concluding that “…in contrast to many other plays, the women have all the best lines here” (1986b, 12). The same gendered undertones (or overtones) are evident in Michael Billington’s review of the London premiere for The Guardian. He does open by conceding the play’s significance from a canonical perspective weighted down by gendered tropes of the nation as he observes that in “[m]ost Irish plays tell us it is the women who suffer: this one shows it” as “the first work I have seen to present the Northern Irish tragedy from the women’s viewpoint” (1985, 12). However, he goes on to fault the work for excesses claiming that “she takes on more material than she can handle” although “her writing is not without hidden subtleties” (1985, 12). This reception example for Devlin’s work in the Republic is important to highlight both in terms of what it brings up about Northern Irish theatre’s relationship to Irish theatre and the double-bind of Northern Irish female playwrights who are marginalised through both lenses.

Interrogating National Histories Through the Irish History Play

From the nineteenth century to the present, the island of Ireland’s search for national self-definition has not only relied on the stage but the stage as a lens for historical contemplation of ideas of the Irish nation in formation through the evolution and practice of the modern and contemporary Irish history play. This is true both in terms of the craft of playwriting but also production strategies applied to canonical Irish history plays as in Director Garry Hynes’ infamous 1991 production of Séan O’Casey’s Plough and the Stars as her inaugural production as artistic director of the Abbey which “placed strong emphasis on the poverty of its characters” with “visual” images that “worked against the tendency to see O’Casey’s characters as ‘colourful’ expressions of working class life in Dublin” (Lonergan 2009, 65) Patrick Lonergan identifies this series of artistic choices as inciting “unusual levels of media hostility” but also making space in the media and private debates that followed for discussions of the 1926 play’s “relevance to contemporary events, including the changing role of women in Irish life, the ongoing conflict in Northern Ireland, and fears about the erosion of Irish sovereignty caused by the impending transformation of the European Community into the European Union” (2009, 65) at the time (see Chapter 4 for more background on this period).

Many of modern and contemporary Irish theatre’s most famous and paradigm-defining plays could be classified within the genre of the Irish history play from W.B. Yeats and Lady Gregory’s Cathleen ni Houlihan to Seán O’Casey’s Dublin Trilogy (The Shadow of a Gunman, Juno and the Paycock, The Plough and the Stars) to Brian Friel’s Translations and Making History to Stewart Parker’s Northern Star, Pentecost and Heavenly Bodies to Frank McGuinness’s Observe the Sons of Ulster Marching Towards the Somme (profiled below) to ANU Production’s extensive body of site-specific work largely concerned with local, minoritarian and grassroots histories of individuals and/or communities that challenge monolithic (and patriarchal) histories of the Irish nation and/or nationalist movements (see Chapter 6). In this section, we define the Irish history play as a theatrical work that uses past events of canonical or counter-canonical significance to reflect explicitly on those events by using theatrical form as a prism to make new meaning for the present. Theatre’s liveness lends an immediacy to this particular dramatic genre, particularly as the Republic and North’s self-memorialisation of their intertwined histories has so often looked to theatre through grassroots (Field Day Theatre) and top-down state funded initiatives (such as the heavy theatrical programming and commissioning of ANU Productions particularly for the Decade of Centenaries observed between 2016–2023, see Chapter 6). We also identify how performance histories and particularly the history of the actor and/or revivals of landmark Irish history plays are key to understanding the operation of this genre in its constitutive role in establishing and testing the limits of Irish national belonging onstage.

The Irish history play and the Irish state of the nation play (addressed in the previous section in primarily gendered and gynocentric terms) share similarities in terms of their preoccupation with interrogating and defining belonging to and through Irishness in private and public spaces. However, the Irish history play, as arguably a subgenre of the state of the nation play, explicitly focuses on watershed historical events as a lens for theatrical and/or performative action. The events which form the background to the theatrical experience concern representative groups and figures with the events’ impact ranging in scale from the nation or contested territory as a whole (plays which deal with Easter Rising, the War for Independence, Civil War), regions (such as plays about the Troubles which may impact the whole island to greater or lesser degrees depending on the particular event or context being addressed) or distinct subgroups or communities who uniquely experience the historical event in ways that might not extend to the whole nation (such as in McGuinness’s Observe the Sons of Ulster profiled below which focuses on the experience of Ulster Protestants who served in World War I or various adaptations of James Plunkett’s radio play The Risen People (Irish Theatre Playography [2023b] which depicts working-class tram workers striking in Dublin during the 1913 Lockout). Regardless of whether the historical event in question’s scale of impact extends to the whole nation or only to smaller subgroups or communities, however, the Irish history play as a formal genre makes an argument that an audience’s focus on the particular experiences of characters amplified through the play and/or performance at that historical watershed moment can result in their own greater understanding of the (Irish) nation as a broader shared collective, their own place in it and that historical moment.

In understanding how the Irish history plays operate in relationship to the nation, nationalism and the nation-state, it is important however to acknowledge that modern and contemporary Irish theatre’s lineage of the Irish history play pre-dates the early productions of the Irish Literary Theatre and then the Abbey Theatre which most prominently define the genre such as Yeats and Gregory’s Cathleen ni Houlihan. Rather, we might more usefully locate the origins of the Irish history play as we are using it here with the work of nineteenth-century melodramatic playwright extraordinaire Irish emigrant playwright Dion Boucicault, popular on English, Irish and North American stages. While his work (and in particular his triptych of Irish plays The Colleen Bawn, Arrah-na-Pogue and The Shaughruan) was in earlier periods often minimised only as a side effect of an “improved portrayal of the stage Irishman,” Deirdre McFeely has more recently demonstrated that “the complex politics of reception of” Boucicault’s “plays, spanning the twenty-year period from the start of the 1860s right through to the early 1880s, cannot be separated from the social and political implications of colonialism at that time” (2012, 2). Boucicault’s triptych’s emphasis on using historical events as a touchstone of plot (whether the 1798 rebellion in Arrah-na-Pogue or the re-telling of the nineteenth-century murder of Ellen Scanlan (neé Hanley) in County Clare in The Colleen Bawn) and reappropriating them in the service of (nationalist) melodramatic spectacle would not have been unique to him in the time period in which he worked. However, as Boucicault’s pivotal role in the lineage of modern and contemporary Irish theatre practice has been more clearly excavated in the past decade due to the work of McFeely and others, we must begin with him if we are to understand most rigorously how the contemporary Irish stage makes use of theatricality not only as a re-treading of but also a rectification of the past for the present through the genre of the Irish history play as a comment on the nation, nationalism and the nation-state. Crucially, beginning our genealogy of the Irish history play as we’re using it in this chapter with Boucicault also foregrounds the inter- and transnational influences and political crosscurrents of this particular dramatic genre as practised by contemporary Irish playwrights and/or theatremakers who are an unprecedentedly diverse generation in terms of race, ethnicity and/or other nationalities than Irish.

The Abbey Theatre’s 2022 production of African-American playwright Brandon Jacobs-Jenkins’ An Octoroon, which is a direct adaptation of Boucicault’s The Octoroon, makes the theatrical potential of this longer and multi-nodal genealogy of the Irish history play particularly evident in terms of how the specific genre of the Irish history play might be used theatrically to not only reflect on the past but demand active confrontation with the present and the future of the Irish nation, in particular, the relationship between race, ethnicity and national identities in Ireland today. Boucicault’s original play The Octoroon and Jacobs-Jenkin’s An Octoroon admittedly do not focus on historical events per se but rather historical institutions (U.S. slavery), tropes (the “Octoroon”) and in the case of Jacobs-Jenkins’ adaptation, historical figures (Boucicault himself). However, the Abbey’s programming of this play written by an African-American playwright, directed by a Black British director (Anthony Simpson-Pike) and featuring the largest cast of Black and/or African-Irish descent ever to appear on the Abbey’s stages (either the mainstage or the Peacock) was a deliberate performative confrontation that worked actively to destabilise how we might classify the Irish history play moving forward in light of the Republic of Ireland’s drastically diversified population over the last 25–30 years (see Chapters 6 and 12).

Directed by Black British Director Anthony Simpson-Pike, the Abbey’s production of An Octoroon starred renowned white Irish actor Rory Nolan as Boucicault and other roles (recognisable to many from his extensive production history as a Druid ensemble member including acting in other Boucicault plays with Druid including their 2013 production of The Colleen Bawn) (Druid Theatre 2022) and a cast of Black, Black-Irish and/or mixed-race Irish actors including Loré Adewusi, Umi Myers, Jeanne Nicole Ní Ainle and Patrick Martins, many of whom were making their debut on the Abbey stage (Abbey Theatre 2023a). This example is relevant to this section because of the way in which Jacobs-Jenkins as contemporary African-American playwright uses history as his material consciously in An Octoroon—not only the history of slavery but also the history of melodrama as a theatrical genre tied up with both slavery and capitalism which Boucicault’s original play The Octoroon casts in bold relief through its staging of a slave auction as one of the central sensation scenes characteristic of the melodrama genre that the play restages.

When performed on the stage of the Abbey, Ireland’s national theatre in 2022, Jacob-Jenkins’ An Octoroon came directly into close proximity with theatrical genealogies of the Abbey’s “haunted stage” following Marvin Carlson (2003) which raised the stakes of what this particular production could activate in Jacob-Jenkins’ play relative to previous American and UK productions of the play. An Octoroon’s symbiotic relationship with Boucicault’s original melodrama was uniquely intensified when performed on the Abbey stage due to the contested historical and national status of Boucicault himself as a figure, prior histories of blackness and indeed blackface being performed on the Abbey’s stages, and the fact that this play was deliberately chosen by current Abbey artistic Director Caitríona McLaughlin to reflect on and dialogue with Ireland’s growing Black and African-Irish community by confronting dead-on (white) Irish involvement with the violent and coercive histories of slavery and empire the play invokes. As Patrick Lonergan notes in a wider review of production histories of Bouicault’s The Octoroon, we “need too to consider how Irish theatre has contributed to the oppression of others, and to chart the extent to which racist performance practices have informed the composition and reception of Irish plays for several centuries” (forthcoming, n.p.). There is no play more ideal than Boucicault’s The Octoroon as delivered via Jacob-Jenkins’ An Octoroon to activate this quest of inquiry.

Despite the continuing popularity of Boucicault in general and The Octoroon in particular with community and other professional theatres, Boucicault was exiled from the Abbey’s programming until 1967 apart from a single performance by an amateur group in 1905 when the Garrick Amateur Club performed Boucicault’s drama Grimaldi for one night only, 19 December 1905, as a charitable event in aid of “Miss Swifte’s Home” (Abbey Theatre 1905). Boucicault’s exclusion from the “national” canon of modern and contemporary Irish theatre due to being perceived as problematic in his representation of Irishness introduced a chasm in understanding his influence on the evolution of the modern and contemporary Irish history play as a touchstone dramatic genealogy/genre—a gap that became more urgent when the Republic of Ireland’s population diversified drastically post-1990s. This is because Bouicault’s particular sidelining obscured the constitutive relationship of his legacy to race, ethnicity and Irish identity as relevant to the practice of the Irish history play today. Cross-racial performance and blackface specifically in the nineteenth-century theatre history is inextricably linked to Irishness via Boucicault’s transnational prominence as a figure and the popularity of The Octoroon particularly in Ireland and internationally since the nineteenth century.

When Jacobs-Jenkins’ An Octoroon was staged at the Abbey, Ireland’s national theatre, in 2022, all these historical resonances were activated, but the performance was also ghosted by previously acclaimed blackface performances on the Abbey stage such as Northern Irish actor and playwright Rutherford Mayne’s often-revived title role performance in Eugene O’Neill’s Emperor Jones. Billed as the first white actor to play the role, Mayne originally played the role in an amateur context through the Dublin Drama League before performing it for the Abbey Theatre (1927 and 1931), the Belfast Grand Opera House (1929) and 1942 at the Gaiety Theatre, this time in a production produced by Hilton Edwards and Micheál MacLiammoir and the Gate Theatre. Mayne’s 1967 obituary declared that many had “preferred him to” African-American actor “Paul Robeson in the part” (Irish Times 1967), a pronouncement contemporaneous with the in-progress US Civil Rights movement and indicative of the still high level of tolerance for blackface in the Republic at this time. It is difficult to date the actual accepted end of blackface at the Abbey or in Ireland generally as Lonergan details, but John Brannigan has been able to establish that this practice had ceased at the Abbey by the early 1970s based on a noticeable shift to the importing of Black actors from the UK and the United States in productions with Black characters (2009, 202). It is worth noting that Boucicault’s attainment of status as a “national” playwright for the Republic’s national theatre in the late 1960s coincides with other shifts in theatrical social consciousness such as the receding of blackface as an accepted practice at the Abbey.

Simpson-Pike’s 2022 Abbey production of An Octoroon ended with actor Loré Adewusi who played Br’er Rabbit and Captain Ratts settling on the edge of the stage downstage centre and locking eyes in stillness with the audience for several minutes. This stillness (a tactic used at other key moments in the play) deliberately contrasted with the play’s energetic explosion of melodrama as a theatrical repertoire and worked against the spectacularisation of the Black body that melodrama as well as the institution of slavery itself are characterised by. However, the additional layer worth noting here is how this ponderously anti-spectacular and interrogative moment called Irish theatre histories and history in general to account—whether contemporary Irish theatre’s own spectacularisation of the Black (male) body as asylum seeker repeatedly on the Abbey’s stage in more recent times, the Abbey’s previous histories of blackface as well as other racist representations, or the way in which An Octoroon makes it impossible to separate Bouicault’s global celebrity which paved the way for modern and contemporary Irish theatre’s global successes even if indirectly from the institution of slavery it dramatises, an association only intensified by the Republic’s significantly increased Black population in the last 30 years. In this final extended gaze between Adewusi and the audience, the question of what the Irish national theatre is now, who it is for, and what histories must impact its future modes of expression are all left open, but in being left open, they are left activated hopefully for what is to come next on the Abbey and other stages as the Irish history play must reimagine itself for a new generation or at the very least, restage itself in productive and illuminating ways that refuse a chasm between the past and the present. And yet, a February 2023 controversy following the announcement of the Irish Times Theatre Awards nominations for 2022 underscored how potent moments of performative confrontation do not automatically result in structural change. Two actors from the ensemble of An Octoroon were singled out for an acting award nomination—the only two white actors in the ensemble Rory Nolan and Maeve O’Mahony. While the production was nominated for best production overall, Anthony Simpson-Pike and the ensemble (which is a category for award) were not nominated (Keating 2023). Selected members of An Octoroon’s team including Director Simpson-Pike, Annie-Lunnette Deakin-Foster (Movement Director), Choy-Ping Clarke-Ng (Assistant Designer), Esosa Ighodharo (Assistant Director), Giles Thomas (Sound Designer and Composer) and Molly O’Cathain (Costume Designer) released a statement in objection to the nominations noting that the production:

demanded a lot of the people of colour making and performing it, asking them to stage moments of great violence and reenact offensive and damaging stereotypes, in order to emphasise the enduring toxicity of those caricatures to the (majority white) audience. (Black and Irish 2023)

They observe that despite this representative burden “a decision was made to only recognise the two white actors for nominations among all the individuals in the cast and creative team” and in response, called for “a more expansive and diverse judging panel, and transparency around their selection process” (Black and Irish 2023). At the time of writing, the judging for the Irish Times Theatre Awards for 2023 is paused to work through these issues (Carolan 2023), reflective of hopefully a turn towards wider accountability that extends beyond limited flagship productions that still struggle to be legible within mainstream structures of recognition in the Irish theatre industries like the Irish Times Theatre Awards.

Case Study Three: Frank McGuinness, Observe the Sons of Ulster Marching Towards the Somme

Premiered: 1985, Abbey Theatre, Peacock Stage, Dublin, directed by Patrick Mason.

Notable Revivals: Abbey Theatre, Dublin: 1994, directed by Patrick Mason (to mark the Northern Irish ceasefire), 2004 (for the Abbey Centenary), directed by Robin Lefevre and 2016, directed by Jeremy Herrin (as the final play in the Abbey’s Centenary “Waking the Nation” Programme).

McGuinness’s treatment of the mass carnage of the Battle of the Somme through the eyes of eight Ulster Protestant volunteers from diverse class backgrounds is a landmark of contemporary Irish theatre in the context of both the Republic and Northern Ireland. McGuinness’s Observe the Sons of Ulster, directed by Patrick Mason, premiered in the same year as Devlin’s Ourselves Alone, and like the above, took on gender, sexuality, the body and the nation as central themes in relation to Northern Irish identities. However, McGuinness’s play centres masculinity, queerness and Protestantism in an almost complete inversion of Devlin’s work. Interestingly, of the two, McGuinness’s has demonstrated the most canonical staying power despite the heavy international support and accolades for Devlin’s work upon its initial premiere as explored earlier in the chapter.

Upon its premiere, McGuinness’s choice to take on this perspective as a playwright of Catholic background originally from Donegal was considered extraordinary, as was the play’s debut on the Abbey’s Peacock stage given its subject matter. After all, as the Sunday Tribune observed at the time, this was “a Republican play being staged in the national theatre of the Republic of Ireland” (Abbey Theatre 1985a) at a time of active conflict in Northern Ireland. McGuinness described his motivation thus:

When I examined what happened on that day, I realised that it was the Battle of the Somme and the psychic blow that it delivered to a part of the population of the island which has as effectively shaped our destinies as anything that happened on Easter Sunday…This knowledge could have caused not a political unity but certainly an imaginative unity, an imaginative understanding of why people were behaving the way they did. (Abbey Theatre 1985b)

Directed by Patrick Mason, then artistic director of the Abbey Theatre, this landmark production was also a progression of the developing and still ongoing creative partnership between Mason and McGuinness. Mason has directed the premieres of many of McGuinness’s plays also including The Factory Girls, Dolly West’s Kitchen, Gates of Gold, The Hanging Gardens and his adaptation of The Threepenny Opera. McGuinness says of their sustained collaboration that he’s “benefited enormously from Patrick’s very exact visual sense; I benefited from his extremely acute ear; and I try to carry those lessons learnt from him into my work and with other directors. I judge every other director I work with by the standards of Patrick” (Roche 2010, 19).

With Sons of Ulster, McGuinness powerfully multiplies the “national” myths accommodated on the stage of the Republic of Ireland’s national theatre. He reintegrates not only participation in World War I but queer Protestant Loyalist participation in World War I into the collective memory of the Republic’s national theatre repertoire, an intervention amplified by the Abbey’s repeated re-inclusion of the play at pivotal moments of reflecting on the Irish past in the present over the late twentieth and early twenty-first century. Observe the Sons of Ulsters is a densely textual play with layered classical, religious and historical allusions throughout but it is also extremely visceral in the play’s opportunities for physical expression, particularly in terms of the spectrum of intimacies possible between men, from the platonic to the erotic. The play was received on its premiere in Ireland as not only a comment on the legacy of World War I and the Battle of the Somme, but an allegory for the continuing Troubles as well as the broader global threat of nuclear holocaust felt keenly during the Cold War period in which it premiered. Terence Brown observed in 1985 that the play is not only about Ulster Protestantism or World War I but “about the chronic insecurity that has us all marching towards Armageddon, those fears that mean we arm with weapons of self-destruction so that we might not have to fear” (Abbey Theatre 1985c).

Of Observe the Son’s status as an Irish history play, Helen Lojek argues that: “the importance of McGuinness’s play lies in its very avoidance of (and sometimes outright challenge to [a] standard notion of what events are worth recording and constitute ‘history.’ This play has no directly presented official side, no officers, no marches, no battles” (1985, 45). The play’s opening lines by Pyper, the central character and only survivor of the battle, establish this from the outset as he laments: “Again. As always, again. Why does this persist? What more have we to tell each other? I remember nothing today. Absolutely nothing” (McGuinness 1996, 97). Yet, Observe the Sons’ obsession with the performance of memory and memory as a performative tool (as in Pyper’s constant lies about and/or embellishment of his own past to the other men as a tool to expose their own insecurities, fears and/or prejudices throughout the play) draws attention to way in which individual and idiosyncratic perspectives on moments of historical importance such as the Battle of the Somme expose the true complexity and contradictions of the event in question, as well as playing out how individuals themselves feel history acting on and through them. McIlwaine and Anderson debate the connection between the sinking of the Titanic and the impact of World War I on Belfast in particular:

Anderson::

The bloody Titanic went down because it hit an iceberg.

McIlwaine::

The pride of Belfast went with it.

Anderson::

You’re not going to meet many icebergs on the front, are you? So what are you talking about?

McIlwaine::

The war is our punishment.

Anderson::

There’s more than Belfast in the war.

McIlwaine::

But Belfast will be lost in this war. The whole of Ulster will be lost. We’re not making a sacrifice. Jesus, you’ve seen this war. We are the sacrifice (McGuinness 1996, 156).

Throughout, Observe the Sons riffs on the unionist convictions of the assembled men which vary in intensity and scope. While some were politically active in terms of unionism prior to the war including Millen and Moore who describe publicly shaming a young Catholic who painted a tricolour on their lodge, others such as Pyper engage more primarily with the pressures of this identity as related to their family’s background and expectations and for others still, their primary attachment is to religiosity rather than tribalism. Therefore, while the characters are aware of and meditate on their precise intersection with historical events as above, they also constantly question their true connection to these events even as they experience the consequences of their aftermath as above. Although all the men voluntarily enlist albeit for very different reasons, McGuinness’s take on the Irish history play presents these characters as conscripted to unionist history itself without their consent, an entanglement each negotiates and plays out over the course of the play before mostly meeting their deaths confirming McIlwaine’s prescient intuition in Part 3. McGuinness stages membership to a nationalist/communal identity as part of an imagined community as highly individual and negotiated rather than monolithic in addition to memorialising the nuance of Ulster Protestant experiences in World War I.

David Cregan further argues that McGuinness’s dramaturgical renovation of the Irish history play in Observe the Sons and other works depends on queerness for its critical power as “[r]epresentations of homosexuality and gay characters are often the sexual dynamite McGuinness ignites to blow up the organisation of history that dominates and dictates solidified or essentialized Irish identities” (2004, 672). Fintan Walsh concurs observing that McGuinness’s plays stand out overall for “deploying queer characters and aesthetics in order to revise dominant historical narratives and imagine them differently” (2016, 6), an observation which succinctly encapsulates how McGuinness makes use of the Irish history genre in Observe the Sons. Across his body of work, McGuinness’s signature queer remix of the Irish history play repeatedly uses intimate relationships between men including but not limited to fully sexual “as a dramaturgical device to puncture pressure points in Irish history and disseminate ideologies that have become congested and stagnant in the politics of both gender and national identities” (Cregan 2004, 672) which favour heteronormative figures and roles such as that of Mother Ireland explored in the previous section. Cregan in fact identifies Observe the Sons of Ulster as “the first overt representation of gay physical action on the stage at the National Theatre in Dublin” (2004, 673). Premiering almost a decade prior to the legalisation of homosexuality in Ireland in 1993, the male-male intimacies staged in this production by Mason and McGuinness on the stage of Ireland’s national theatre were highly significant and also cleverly evasive of the archival record when the play was originally published alongside the production. As Cregan exposes, “They kiss” does not appear in the stage directions “of the published text,” meaning that “the only real evidence that proves the use of homosexuality as a dramaturgical tool in this play comes from the performance” (2004, 672–673) itself. The play’s repeated production over the years at the Abbey and internationally however has meant that this watershed moment had sticking power and McGuinness’s groundbreaking and taboo-breaking work as a playwright paved the way for the current generation of queer Irish theatremakers on the stage of the national theatre and beyond.

Observe the Sons of Ulster’s extended meditation on the futility of memory and myth as amelioratives for national(ist) trauma as negotiated by powerless individuals has remained dramatically central in contemporary Irish theatre as a lens through which to negotiate twentieth and twenty-first-century Irish commemorative occasions. It has received several key revivals for the Abbey in line with marking key historical events or anniversaries connected to the play or the institution itself including the announcement of the 1994 Provisional IRA ceasefire, the Abbey’s centenary (2004) and recent centenary of the Battle of the Somme itself as well as Easter Rising (2016). Despite the play’s refusal of grand historical narratives or positions as observed by Lojek earlier, the play’s 1994 staging was particularly charged within and of itself doing political work by commentators at the time with Robert F. O’Byrne observing in the Irish Times that “[n]ow that peace between the parties has been negotiated, the Government chose to watch drama rather than create it by turning out in force for the opening night of the revival” (Abbey Theatre 1994a). However, there were also remarks in the same batch of coverage that security was “tight at the Abbey theatre tonight when representatives of the Loyalist community in the Shankhill road, Belfast” (Abbey Theatre 1994b) were attending the 1994 revival. When the play was revived in 2016, it was tellingly done so as a co-production between “the Abbey, London’s Headlong, Glasgow’s Citizens Theatre and Liverpool Everyman and Playhouse Theatres,” which reviewer Peter Crawley concluded meant this production had covered “more ground between Ireland, the UK and even a brief detour to the Somme battleground, than the characters in Frank McGuiness’s 1985 play” (Crawley 2016). This broad group of co-producers speaks to increasingly coalitional attempts to share and reflect on contested histories between Ireland and the UK. Ireland’s ambassador to London Daniel Mulhall reflected in 2016 on attending commemorative events for Easter Rising and the Battle of the Somme in quick succession and witnessing talks with competing and critical perspectives on both events without controversy. He mused:

I doubt if such inclusive commemoration would have been possible in 1966 or even in 1996. In the past, there would have been some reticence on the Irish side about World War 1 commemoration and a good deal of sensitivity in Britain about the events of Easter 1916. Happily, we have now reached the point where we can view each other’s historical narratives with curiosity and respect. (Embassy of Ireland, Great Britain)

McGuinness’s remarkable success with The Sons of Ulster in the Republic’s national theatre over four consecutive decades suggests that contemporary Irish theatre led the way in making this kind of shared contemplative space possible far in advance of the nation-state apparatuses that programme wider commemorative events for both the Republic and the UK.

Conclusion

Ultimately, this chapter demonstrates that the close association between contemporary Irish theatre and the nation in terms of thematic focus, production aesthetics and/or use of theatre productions or theatremakers as commemorative or diplomatic emissaries has continued to mutate and increase in complexity up through the present rather than fade away as a defining Irish theatrical fixation. Our national(ist) fixation continues however as the meaning of Irish national belonging and/or jurisdiction continues to undergo unprecedented shifts in scope and definition on the grounds of inward-migration, emigration, diasporic belonging and/or race/ethnicity/multiple citizenships.

This book on contemporary Irish theatre comes out just as the Republic of Ireland officially concludes our Decade of Centenaries in 2023 at the end of a commemorative decade that has seen the departure of the UK (and with it, Northern Ireland) and one of the worst ten pandemics or epidemics recorded in human history as well as against the global backdrop of a desperately mounting climate emergency and intense wide-scale conflicts in Syria, the Ukraine, and Palestine among others with this global instability contributing to an unprecedented refugee crisis in which the UN Refugee Agency estimating approximately 100 million people displaced worldwide at the start of 2022, the most recent figures available at time of writing but likely higher (UNCHR 2023). All these interlinked global events and pressures throw the question of “what ish” the Irish nation into further crisis. Impacts include fresh reengagement with questions over the status of Northern Ireland (as well as limited outbreaks of violence related to this ongoing negotiation), serious questions for the Republic and the North regarding their participation in and ethical duty to global and/or European Union led climate recovery initiatives and how to accommodate populations arriving in or displaced from within and/or outside Europe, as well as the ongoing attempt to rebuild economically and socially across the island following the (so far) most acute phase of the Covid-19 pandemic.

The contemporary Irish theatre’s ongoing response to these newest and in most cases dire and even apocalyptic dynamics is of course at nascent stages although some theatrical works such as Brokentalkers’ This Beach (2016) have explicitly explored the link between climate emergency, the global refugee crisis and Irish (and world) national belonging (McIvor, 2023). In addition, as detailed in Chapters 6 and 12, the demographic changes to the population in the Republic of Ireland and Northern Ireland since the mid-1990s mean that whiteness and/or Europeanness is no longer synonymous with Irish national belonging for those living in either national jurisdiction on the island. And indeed, as theatre and performance organisations continue to interrogate the cost and environmental impact of touring productions and/or works post-pandemic as the sector revives internationally, there may be changes ahead for contemporary Irish theatre’s currency and movement as national(ist) export. For example, the Republic’s Arts Council is now currently drafting a new Climate Action Policy and Implementation Plan which will likely have implications for the touring of theatre created in Ireland/Irish theatre both nationally and internationally (Arts Council 2023). These dramatic recent events and rapidly shifting global dynamics mean that precision as well as expanse of imagination in the definition of nation, nationalism and nation-state when it comes to analysing contemporary Irish theatre and stagecraft will be more important than ever.