Review
An excellent, engaging account of Ulster’s contribution to the Revivalists, says Patricia Byrne.
- The Ulster Literary Theatre and the Northern Revival
- Cork University Press
The Ulster Literary Theatre and the Northern Revival
In 1902, two key figures in Ulster drama, Bulmer Hobson and David Parkhill, decided to establish an Ulster branch of Dublin’s Irish Literary Theatre. This was the first step in a journey that would lead to the formation, in 1904, of the Ulster Literary Theatre as an organ of northern cultural nationalism.
Having made their decision, the pair turned to Dublin for help and travelled south to meet with key figures involved in the Irish Literary Theatre – a meeting where they found W.B.Yeats to be haughty and unhelpful. Drawing on material from Hanna Bell’s interviews with Bulmer Hobson as an elderly man, Eugene McNulty recounts a conversation between the pair on their return journey to Belfast. It is not recorded at what point on that historic journey Hobson struck the arm of his seat and exclaimed: “Damn Yeats, we’ll write our own plays!” What can be said is that the blow laid the foundations of the Ulster Literary Theatre.
This episode illustrates a major theme in McNulty’s study of the Ulster Literary Theatre; the dual processes of imitation and independence, inclusion and exclusion, insider and outsider, which marked its relationship with the revivalist movement in Dublin. In this first, book-length study of the Ulster Literary Theatre – established in 1904, the same year as the Abbey Theatre – McNulty traces the origin of the movement in the cultural nationalist expression in Belfast in the closing years of the 19th century; pointing to the constant exchange between culture and politics in that period. McNulty repositions key figures of the time, such as Alice Milligan, and her attempts to place Ulster at the centre of the revivalist movement.
At the heart of McNulty’s study is his examination of the ‘fantastical burlesques’ of Gerald MacNamara, the most significant playwright of the Ulster Literary Theatre period. Uniquely, MacNamara was the person within that movement who, in McNulty’s view, ‘unpacked many of the assumptions found at the heart of the Irish cultural-nationalist vision’. Almost an exact contemporary of Yeats, MacNamara’s comments on a Belfast performance of Cathleen Ni Houlihan (‘...someone in the audience said the play was going “rightly” till she came on...’) reveal his scepticism about the techniques of the Dublin revivalists. On 26 November, 1909, the year of Synge’s death, MacNamara’s parody of Synge’s peasant drama, The Mist That Does Be on the Bog, was premiered at the Abbey. In McNulty’s words: ‘In the guise of an outrageous comedy, MacNamara managed to deconstruct the early Abbey using some of its most treasured tools.’ The so-called authenticity of the Irish revivalist movement was powerfully called into question by this subversive revivalist.
McNulty states that one of his main objectives in this book was ‘to reclaim and recuperate playwrights like MacNamara from their position of critical marginalisation’.
He has done much more. He has demonstrated that the story of Irish drama can be immeasurably enriched by a critical reinstatement of the contribution of the Ulster Literary Theatre and the revivalist movement in the North.
