Review
A readable and representative roll-call of some of the great Irish dramatists, Sean McMahon approves wholeheartedly.
- The Radicalization of Irish Drama 1600-1900: The Rise and Fall of Ascendancy Theatre
- Irish Academic Press
The Radicalization of Irish Drama 1600-1900: The Rise and Fall of Ascendancy Theatre
Desmond Slowey has produced a brilliant survey of the slow growth of Irish drama over three troubled centuries.
His research has been wide and deep, and clearly sprang from his 2006 PhD thesis, but shows no sign in its crisp readability of the dire hand of academe. A lively history such as this has long been needed and if the excuse for its existence is the hook of a hypothesis, so be it. The truth is that Irish drama was part of the remaking of the Irish nation and the growth of its self-awareness, and it is hardly surprising that the original interest in drama was Ascendancy-led since all the arts, apart from the purely folk ones, were patronised by them.
The account of 17th and 18th century Irish drama is fascinating even when cited ‘a thèse’. Farquhar’s works, as theatregoers this spring in Derry discovered, play as newly minted - though it is odd that Slowey does not mention The Twin-Rivals (1707) because one of the characters, called Teague (from Carrickfergus!) is very significant in the denouement and subversive enough to fit his subtitle. Another important Irish dramatist, John O’Keeffe (1747–1833) is given exemplary treatment and revivals of Wild Oats (1791) in 1977 by the RSC and in 1992 by the RNT have shown how playable his dramas are. Charles Shadwell (1675–1726) was not the first – nor the last – Englishman to find greater scope for his talents in Dublin than in Drury Lane. He is given a chapter to himself and indeed deserves it. Like Farquhar and O’Keefe, many of his plays are worth revival and indeed The Sham Prince (1718), with the action transferred to Belfast, was chosen by Tyrone Guthrie to celebrate the Festival of Britain in 1951.
Macklin, Sheridan, Boucicault, better known and safely in the repertoire, are fitted to the thesis with only minimal squeezing, the last successfully breaking the class barrier. The Shaughraun (1875), was approved by peasant and gentry alike and became a staple of late 19th century drama for both amateur and strolling companies. By then the movement for independence had taken its first faltering steps, and drama as the greatest medium for popular entertainment inevitably reflected the Zeitgeist.
The Queen’s Theatre, airily dismissed as the home of melodrama, was where O’Casey learnt his dramaturgy and where actors with sufficient professional ability were found to act in the Abbey productions of his plays and those of Yeats, Gregory and Synge. They no longer featured sympathetic Ascendancy characters, as they would have done earlier, simply because plays hold the mirror up to nature. A few trifling errors: Farquhar was not a member of a prominent family from County Derry but the son of a poor clergyman from Liscooley in the Finn valley of County Donegal, and rapidly changing as the English language is, there is still no word ‘playwrighting’.
Sean McMahon