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Cultural Materialism and a Class Consciousness?

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The Palgrave Handbook of Contemporary Irish Theatre and Performance

Abstract

In his 1991 article, “The Dublin Renaissance: An Essay on Modern Dublin and Dublin Writers”, Ferdia Mac Anna argued that a literary revival was emerging, whereby working-class writers were using innovative techniques to explore the impact of social inequality on the Republic of Ireland, primarily throughout the 1970s and 1980s. While Mac Anna used examples from poetry, novels and plays to support his central thesis, this chapter will adopt a Marxist approach (broadly conceived) to focus exclusively on the effect of social inequality on theatre in Dublin. In doing so, this it will investigate contributing factors to the development of this writing such as location and accessibility in order to examine the role of the working class in their own representation.

This chapter will comprise of three sections: a snapshot of the cultural development of the “Dublin Renaissance” and a background of Ireland in the 1980s; an analysis of theatre companies that emerged in the 1980s such as Passion Machine and Wet Paint; and a study of Dermot Bolger’s The Holy Ground and Paul Mercier’s Home, which will be used as a case study to support/dispute Mac Anna’s claims.

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Notes

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    Charles Haughey served from 1979 to 1981; 1982; and 1987 to 1992 and Garret Fitzgerald served from 1981 to 1982 and 1982 to 1987.

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    Nicholas Rees, “The Irish Economy and Europe”, in Europeanisation and New Patterns of Governance in Ireland, eds. Nicholas Rees, Bríd Quinn, Bernadette Connaughton (Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 2009), 92, accessed February 15, 2016, doi: https://books.google.co.uk/books.

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    Nicholas Rees, “The Irish Economy and Europe”, 92.

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    Several investigations, including the Tribunal of Inquiry into the Beef Processing Industry, the McCracken Tribunal and the Moriarty Tribunal investigated possible acts of corruption by Haughey. The Moriarty Tribunal, which took fourteen years, was eventually successful in identifying “a money trail leading to Haughey” (Murphy 2006, 101) who “received (about) £8.5 million in donations over a sixteen-year period” (Murphy 2006, 101).

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    Paul Mercier, “Home” (Dublin: Passion Machine Ltd., 1989), 78.

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    Mercier , “Home”, 64.

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    Mercier , “Home”, 64.

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    “The Lament for Arthur Cleary”, Dermotbolger.com, accessed May 17, 2017, http://dermotbolger.com/plays_lamentforarthurcleary.htm.

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    Wet Paint Arts, a company devoted to promoting and increasing the accessibility of theatre to underprivileged young people, also functioned in conjunction with Wet Paint Theatre.

  30. 30.

    “The Lament for Arthur Cleary”, Dermotbolger.com, n.d., http://dermotbolger.com/plays_lamentforarthurcleary.htm.

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    Victor Merriman, “Staging Contemporary Ireland: Heartsickness and Hopes Deferred”, in The Cambridge Companion to Twentieth-Century Irish Drama, ed. Shaun Richards (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 249, https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=7LMZBAAAQBAJ&pg=PA245&lpg=PA245&dq=David+Byrne+wet+paint&source=bl&ots=-bbGSVO81F&sig=b-zbbyL1c1s14V6jPeSt6SI1Az4&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwiX0Yn5vuXKAhVEmg4KHU6IDg0Q6AEIIjAB$v=onepage&q=wet%20paint&f=false.

  32. 32.

    A Second Life was originally published in 1994 and rewritten and republished in 2010.

  33. 33.

    Dermot Bolger, “The Holy Ground”, in Plays: 1: “Lament for Arthur Cleary”, “In High Germany”, “The Holy Ground”, “Blinded by the Light” (London: Bloomsbury Methuen Drama, 2000), 103.

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  38. 38.

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  39. 39.

    Damien Shortt, “‘Who put the ball in the English net?’: The Privatisation of Irish Postnationalism in Dermot Bolger’s In High Germany”, in Redefinitions of Irish Identity: A Postnationalist Approach, eds. Irene Gilsenan Nordin and Carmen Zamorano Llena (Oxford: Peter Lang, 2010), 116–17, accessed March 24, 2016, https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=Hj71Va_qefQC&pg=PA115&lpg=PA115&dq=the+holy+ground+play+bolger&source=bl&ots=eN-WjEmLnf&sig=egdLBIajRvV3aMO8ADAjszumWzQ&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwienoya1qbLAhXHtxoKHTzXAn4Q6AEINDAE$v=onepage&q=the%20holy%20ground%20play%20bolger&f=false.

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    Keating “Church, State, and Sexual Crime against Children in Ireland after 1922”, 159.

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    Donal Ó Drisceoil, “‘The best banned in the land’: Censorship and Irish Writing since 1950”, Modern Humanities Research Association 35, (2005): 148. Accessed March 1, 2016, http://www.jstor.org/stable/3509330?seq=1&uid=3738032&uid=2&uid=4&sid=21103509944251.

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  49. 49.

    Peacock, “Drama and the Moral Connexion”, xxxi.

  50. 50.

    Michael Riffaterre, Fictional Truth, (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1990), xiii–xiv.

  51. 51.

    Bolger, “The Holy Ground”, 122.

  52. 52.

    Bolger, “The Holy Ground”, 124.

  53. 53.

    Bolger, “The Holy Ground”, 124

  54. 54.

    Bolger, “The Holy Ground”, 125.

  55. 55.

    Bolger, “The Holy Ground”, 125.

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    Mireia Aragay, “Reading Dermot Bolger’s The Holy Ground: National Identity, Gender and Sexuality in Post-Colonial Ireland”, Links & Letters 4, (1997): 63, accessed March 1, 2016, http://www.raco.cat/index.php/linksletters/article/viewFile/49870/87845.

  57. 57.

    Bolger, “The Holy Ground”, 106.

  58. 58.

    Bolger founded Raven Arts Press, which ran from 1977 to 1992.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. The University of Edinburgh, Edinburgh, Scotland

    Erika Meyers

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  1. Erika Meyers
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Editors and Affiliations

  1. School of English, Drama and Film, University College Dublin, Dublin, Ireland

    Eamonn Jordan

  2. School of Creative Arts, Trinity College Dublin, Dublin, Ireland

    Eric Weitz

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Meyers, E. (2018). Cultural Materialism and a Class Consciousness?. In: Jordan, E., Weitz, E. (eds) The Palgrave Handbook of Contemporary Irish Theatre and Performance. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-58588-2_49

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