Review
A wide ranging and comprehensive study of Irish theatre in England, says Sean McMahon
- The Irish Theatre in England
- Carysfort Press
The Irish Theatre in England
Ireland and the Irish have long had their place on the English stage, right from the days of Captain MacMorris in Shakespeare’s Henry V and James Shirley’s St Patrick for Ireland (1639).
Irish born dramatists like Congreve, Farquhar, Goldsmith, Sheridan and John O’Keefe demonstrated what the sister island could do, and Boucicault with his brilliant trio, The Colleen Bawn (1860), Arrah na Pogue (1864) and The Shraughaun (1875) showed that Irish characters could be funny and not clownish, and succeeded in amusing Queen Victoria – no mean feat. With the increase of the Irish population in Britain begorrahry and shamrougery again lowered the tone of representation and it was this facile greenery that Gregory and Yeats tried to smother. This heavily academic book shows how well they succeeded. Yet it fails to mention the case of Martin McDonagh who - though not first generation Irish - has created a new Stage-Irishism, much more deleterious to the national image than any amount of paddywhackery and unfortunately accepted at home.
The book contains twelve essays, papers from a conference about the expatriate theatre and an eighty-six page appendix by Peter James Harris; listing a chronological table of Irish plays produced in London (1920–2006), alone worth the cost of the book. Boucicault appears again as the remote originator of Julius Benedict’s opera, The Lily of Killarney (1862) that combined with Balfe’s The Bohemian Girl (1842) and Wallace’s Maritana (1845) formed an immensely popular trio of frequently performed Irish operas that Jerry Nolan calls the Irish/English Ring, becoming a kind of band-Wagner. Two accounts of Field Day plays are given the full litcrit fervour with ‘Doubling’ by Carmen Szabo about Tom Kilroy’s two plays Double Cross (1986) and The Madam MacAdam Travelling Theatre (1991) and ‘The Transience of the Visual Image’ by Enrica Cerquoni largely about different sets used during the tour of Brian Friel’s Dancing at Lughnasa (1990), probably his most successful play.
More interesting for that semi-mythical person, the general reader, are the accounts of the self-greening of the Irish-born Ninette deValois by Elizabeth Schafer, the theatrical representation of the Ulster Protestant by Wallace McDowell and Michael Colgan’s reconquest of Beckett for Ireland. The book’s first three pieces are closer to ‘straight’ theatre history, describing the effect of Shaw’s John Bull’s Other Island (1904) and Yeats’s The Land of Heart’s Desire (1894) on metropolitan audiences and the remarkable success of Lennox Robinson’s The Whiteheaded Boy (1916) in Annie Horniman’s Gaiety Theatre in Manchester and the Ambassadors in the capital when the Irish Players (a splinter group from the more famous Abbey) made a lasting impression abroad.
Yeats’s dedication to the ‘painted stage’ though more effective in principles than product gave the newer Irish dramatists a new gravitas and effectively banned British critics from dipping their quills in condescending green ink when dealing with the perplexing neighbours who spoke a form of their own language but with somehow a more buoyant elegance.
