Abbey Theatre: Abbey Tours to London after 1990

Richard Cave

In the early 1900s, the Abbey Theatre was the only Irish company touring regularly to England.⁷ That position, as sole carrier of the Irish theatrical flame into England, went largely unchallenged until the formation of the Gate Theatre in the late 1920s.⁸ Even then, the amount of Irish drama performed exclusively by Irish actors in productions originating in Ireland accounted for a small fraction of the fare being offered annually in metropolitan theatres. By the 1990s, the situation had changed significantly.

The Abbey is now but one of many Irish companies coming to tour in London. In part, this is because of the great proliferation of alternative or fringe companies throughout Ireland, which matches that in England since the 1970s. This certainly fulfils Yeats’s dream of a vibrant theatrical culture, fuelled by fine playwriting; but it is a situation that has to some extent marginalized in English perceptions the theatre that he helped to found. In the period 1990-2006, a total of 585 productions of plays by Irish dramatists have been performed in London.⁹ Of these only sixty (10.25%) were toured to England by major Irish repertory companies (the Abbey, the Gate, Druid, Field Day, Rough Magic); exactly half of that number were the work of the Gate, where some 19 productions made up the Beckett Festival promoted by BITE at the Barbican Theatre in 1999, seven of which were revived for the Beckett Centenary Season also at the Barbican in 2006. Abbey Theatre productions in London over this period number 13 if one counts only Irish plays (or 15 if one includes stagings of plays by Ibsen and Euripides¹⁰). What impresses is the increasing number of smaller, less established companies coming to fringe venues in London in these years.¹¹ What surprises is the vastly increased number of English productions of Irish plays: The Royal National Theatre (25), the Royal Shakespeare Company (17), Royal Court (25), Tricycle (33), Bush (15), Almeida (10), Orange Tree (16), Hampstead (7), and Young Vic (5) account for a total of 153 productions (26.17% of the total number of productions monitored over the period).¹² Noticeable in this list is the high proportion of theatres in receipt of major state funding.

One can only speculate about what these figures might indicate. One might interpret them as suggesting an appropriation of the Irish theatrical heritage by English practitioners; as implying a concern to cater for a substantial minority but vocal social group within the fabric of cosmopolitan ‘English’ society; as an attempt in the context of the peace process for Northern Ireland, which struggled into existence over this same period, to come to terms with the inherited consequences of the historical process of colonialism and to understand the Irish situation more precisely through an engagement with its cultural expressions; or it may involve a recognition of a vibrancy and urgent energy and a brilliance of linguistic usage in Irish playwriting felt to be lacking in English dramaturgy. These reflections are the product of studying the reception of many of these productions (Irish and English) in the press reviews, where critics find a need to explain the surge in new Irish writing and revivals of so-called ‘classics’. A crucial touchstone in such speculations is the indisputable success of Nicholas Kent as Artistic Director of The Tricycle Theatre in Kilburn which aims its work consistently at the interests of the local community (a mix of spectators with Irish or Caribbean roots and cultural affiliations) but has steadily attracted audiences from a far wider demographic through the sheer quality and challenge of its stagings.¹³

Where the Abbey once sustained a solo position in terms of touring in England, the theatre is now but one voice amongst many and its status as Ireland’s national theatre is scarcely mentioned in reviews unless, ironically, critics are writing adversely about the particular production on offer. The rest of this essay engages with the complex reception of Abbey productions by English reviewers. To facilitate an in-depth analysis, four productions only have been chosen for close examination; the choice has been influenced by the fact that the four can be readily viewed in pairs, a situation occasioned by the productions in each pairing being staged in London only weeks apart. In one pairing (Frank McGuinness’s Observe the Sons of Ulster Marching Towards the Somme and Marina Carr’s Portia Coughlan in 1996 at the Barbican Theatre and the Royal Court respectively) a known, if relatively new play by an established writer is undergoing a major revival, while the other is an instance of an emerging voice. In the other pairing a decade later (O’Casey’s The Plough and the Stars and Dion Boucicault’s The Shaughraun in 2005 at the Barbican and at the Albery in the West End respectively), two revivals from the Irish dramatic heritage were offered as part of the Abbey’s centenary celebrations. What do the productions reveal to English critics about the Abbey’s sense of an identity in this period, particularly when the company’s work and repertoire may be viewed against a far wider spectrum of Irish, English, and international theatrical endeavour than had previously been the case?

Observe the Sons of Ulster Marching Towards the Somme had been staged by Michael Attenborough at London’s Hampstead Theatre some seventeen months after its initial production at the Peacock in February 1985. Its worth, aesthetic, social, and political, had been immediately apparent, winning McGuinness the Evening Standard Drama Award that season for Most Promising Playwright and seven further prizes. In the ten years between the initial Hampstead production and that visiting from the Abbey in 1996, McGuinness had sustained a regular presence on English stages. Twelve productions of his work included two revivals of Carthaginians; two premieres (Mary and Lizzie in 1989, commissioned by the Royal Shakespeare Company, and Someone to Watch Over Me in 1992, which transferred to the West End at the Vaudeville after a short run at the Hampstead Theatre); three adaptations of established classics, of which two were touring Irish productions (Chekhov’s The Three Sisters for the Gate Theatre came to the Royal Court in 1990; and Uncle Vanya for Field Day which came to the Tricycle in 1995) and one (Ibsen’s Peer Gynt) a commission from the Royal Shakespeare Company for a production in 1994 designed to tour internationally and be staged by the renowned Japanese director, Ninagawa; there were productions of earlier plays (Baglady, Factory Girls and Innocence). Already in the pipeline were commissions for an adaptation of Sophocles’ Electra (1997) and for a new work, Mutabilitie (to be staged at the Royal National Theatre the same year by its then Artistic Director Trevor Nunn). This is a prodigious record of achievement and proof that by 1996 McGuinness had an enviable stature within the English theatrical scene to be rivalled only by Friel amongst living Irish dramatists.¹⁴

This contextualizing is necessary to explain the tone of near-reverence that obtains throughout most of the reviews of the Abbey revival of Observe the Sons of Ulster. Critics saw it as a contemporary play in terms of its composition and performance but one of recognized and proven worth that was the foundation stone of McGuinness’s career in England. Moreover, it was a play with a stage history, allowing critics an approach akin to how they might view a revival of a work by O’Casey or Synge. Many of the reviewers had previously commented on the earlier Hampstead production, so they had a personal history in relation to the play: consequently they had secure grounds for effecting comparisons and for confirming the appropriateness of their original praise (the tenor and subject of the play, however, militated against overt self-satisfaction at formerly witnessing the birth of a masterpiece, though most were quick to claim the play as such).¹⁵ A greater focus than perhaps would usually occur in critiques of new plays was therefore given to Joe Vanĕk’s design (starkly simple to allow for atmospheric lighting), to Patrick Mason’s direction (‘an outstanding revival of an outstanding play’¹⁶), and to the subtle discriminations evident in the acting. If attention was paid to McGuinness’s dramaturgy it was to comment on ‘the beauty of [his] bleak poetry’¹⁷; the ‘series of slightly surreal rituals and ceremonies, in which Ulster soldiers discover the bonds that bind them’¹⁸; the powerful dominant irony of Pyper, ‘a sceptical, self-destructive spirit’, alone surviving ‘to carry the message of no surrender on into the 1980s’¹⁹; the marrying of ‘humour […] with growing fear and despair as the moment of reckoning draws near’²⁰; the ‘sharp dialogue, fierce dramatic rituals and rich cross-currents of feeling’²¹; and above all the ‘heroic feat of empathy’²² involved in a Donegal playwright exploring Orange iconography, inherited myths and political commitment with such a rare degree of insight (‘Inside the patriots are men, and inside the men are feelings that transcend any sectarian divide. What could be more obvious? What could be harder to acknowledge?’²³), compassion (‘McGuinness hates the sins but loves the sinners’²⁴) and ‘a profound understanding of how such appalling circumstances [as life in the trenches of the Somme offensive] bound even the most incompatible of men together’.²⁵

An unexpected political irony, not lost on these critics, coloured English spectators’ reactions to the production. Patrick Mason had conceived his revival in 1995 as a celebration of the IRA ceasefire that seemed to offer a large step forwards for the Peace Process and power-sharing initiatives in Northern Ireland and it was in such a spirit that the production was taken in the summer of that year to the Edinburgh Festival and an international tour planned. The opening in London coincided with a resumption of IRA bombing with the inevitable reprisals. If one traces the reviews collected into Theatre Record back to their originating newspapers, one finds them situated amidst pages of analysis of the political situation: the enduring timeliness of the play (‘its resonance … amplified by external events’²⁶) could not have been more finely demonstrated. Ian Shuttleworth, for one, confessed to finding the performance ‘ineffably moving’ as a ‘Northern Irish protestant reviewer’. Six of the twelve reviewers whose columns are collected into Theatre Record took occasion to comment how circumstance had brought a poignant and disturbing immediacy to their engagement with the action and McGuinness’s representation of the complexities of the Orange psyche and the fears and loyalties that bring individuals from widely diverse backgrounds into a fierce union quite other than their quotidian selves. Benedict Nightingale in The Times went so far as to ask whether McGuinness’s artistry in this play achieves a cathartic potential of considerable social significance, though he hedges his claim with careful reservations, which indicates a deep unease at where his instincts are urging his thinking to progress: ‘… though I would be mad to make any claims for the power of drama to touch the intransigent, I must still ask what more constructive and humane example could be set to either Prod or Pape’.²⁷ The syntactical construction here (that strange balancing of ‘though I would …’ with ‘I must still …’) is revealing of an intricate motivation, but the performance moved him to write one of the longest and most detailed of the twelve reviews, setting the play in clearly defined social, historical and theatrical contexts while subtly commenting on the director’s sensitivity to the dramaturgy and the uniformly fine characterization of the actors.

There were two dissenting voices amidst the general praise for the production: an anonymous review in the Daily Express (dated 24 March 1996)²⁸ and Robert Butler writing for the Independent on Sunday. Perhaps this is an unfair comment on the reviewer for the Daily Express, who recognized the social timeliness of play and production (‘As relevant as ever, alas’) and the poignancy and pathos of many of the sequences in the action, but like Butler he or she found fault with the playwright’s dramaturgy: ‘McGuinness deals here in types rather than characters’. Given that the writer goes on to praise Peter Gowen’s ‘ferociously impassioned performance as the young Pyper’, the strong casting and Mason’s ‘sombrely beautiful production’, the adverse comment is the more remarkable. It is as if the reviewer were discomfited by the power of the piece to impress emotionally and psychologically, and needed to find some means of establishing a distance from the experience by asserting that the subject and its representation were somehow predictable but redeemed by excellent staging (the assertion is not substantiated by any attempt at analysis, however brief). One might argue (as the other critics discussed consistently do) that the disconcerting power of the play as written is that McGuinness establishes the eight men as recognisable types only to reveal depths of individualising emotion behind the public selves they project onto their world. Perhaps the reviewer needed to resist that recognition?

Butler’s opening paragraph in the Independent on Sunday (dated 10 March 1996) immediately states his doubts about the play’s ‘classic status’ and much of the ensuing review is taken up with substantiating this view. Again the issue is with McGuinness’s dramaturgy, which Butler implies is overly contrived (he writes of what he terms the dramatist’s ‘essay-plan’, a too conscious thesis he wishes to promote, which ‘in Patrick Mason’s fraught production … feels stiff and inert’, while the structuring of the section entitled ‘pairing’ he dismisses as ‘emblematic writing [which] has a stark predictable quality’). The play is at its best in Butler’s view when McGuinness relaxes his tense intellectual hold on events and characters and allows a seeming spontaneity to take over, and he gives as a ‘superb’ instance of this the mock re-enactment of the Battle of Scarva: ‘In these unbuttoned moments McGuinness achieves a real lightness and depth’. What Butler and to a less reasoned extent the critic of the Daily Express seem to be asking for here is a different mode of realism, a monochromatic style, one more closely following the patterns of English dramatic usage in this period, which observes chronology, eschews devices of heightening, avoids imagistic intensity, intrusions of verse and song, and the technique of mixing styles and genres which is to some degree McGuinness’s forte.²⁹ One could defend McGuinness as writing firmly within the Abbey tradition of poetic realism (one that clearly, from his enduring popularity on the English stage, continues to find favour with a high percentage of English theatregoers). The creative links with O’Casey and Synge are palpable in such techniques as those listed above and in the sudden intrusions of verbal flamboyance. The textural richness would appear to be anathema to Butler, showing McGuinness’s want of stylistic decorum. It demands of spectators a flexibility of engagement with the play in performance, an ability to make imaginative leaps and connections by lateral thinking. Butler would appear to be resisting such a requirement.

Portia Coughlan, which toured to the Royal Court’s main stage, opening in May 1996, was a new play by an unknown writer; there was no suggestion that reviewers were seeing an established classic, so cultural reverence was on none of their agendas. Theatre Record carries fifteen reviews from a range of newspapers and journals, showing critics trying to write in a balanced way with varying degrees of success.³⁰ Some were outright hostile, pouring scorn on the perceived links with Shakespeare’s Merchant of Venice (‘the relationship … is nominally clear but otherwise impenetrable’³¹); seeing parallels with Cold Comfort Farm, Stella Gibbons’ satire on the preposterous aspects of the popular rural novel (Sheridan Morley recalled Aunt Ada Doom’s constant expectation of finding ‘something nasty in the woodshed’; and Sarah Hemming opined that everyone on stage as in the novel needed ‘a good slap’³²); while some five critics expressed exasperation with the authentic dialect as rendering the characters unintelligible and the dialogue obscure (‘deserving as [Portia’s] case is, it is easy to lose sympathy and become tired of the highly wrought poetic language with which she expresses herself’³³). Others, seeking to give their readers a way into the unchartered territory of Carr’s vision and dramaturgy, in a more kindly spirit invoked Albee and his portraits of ‘marriages inexorably heading for nasty rocks’ (Nicholas de Jongh), O’Neill ‘at his most relentless’ (Benedict Nightingale), Pinter’s Moonlight where too ‘the dead are present in the living’ (Michael Billington) and Henry James’s ‘secretive, conspiratorial siblings in The Turn of the Screw’ (Michael Coveney).³⁴ What impresses is that none of these comparisons seems forced or detrimental to Carr’s achievement but emerges as genuinely illuminating.

Seven of the critics chose to comment on the play’s structure and particularly Carr’s decision to place the conclusion to the action (Portia’s suicide, the winching of her body out of the River Belmont and the ensuing wake) in the second act rather than the third. Sheridan Morley in a generally negative review sees this as ‘a twist typical of Marina Carr’s obscurantist writing’ in wanton defiance of traditional dramatic logic, but de Jongh considered this a brilliant strategy ‘so dramatic irony works its painful effect’ as one observes the implacable drive in Portia’s psyche towards her demise and he admired in this ‘how artfully Carr plays with time’.³⁵ Jane Edwardes took issue with the pacing of incidents, by which she presumably means the discovery that Portia’s parents were unknowingly committing incest, that Portia’s incestuous activity with her twin brother dates from their childhood, and that his suicide was motivated by seeing his sister sexually involved with another man. Edwardes argues that ‘the revelations flow rather too fast for comfort (too fast for credibility too)’, implying that there is more than a touch of the novice about Carr’s dramaturgy; but she is alone in voicing such a critique.³⁶

Views were divided too about Garry Hynes’s direction. Where most considered her control over the play unrelenting, exact and exacting (‘stark’, ‘simple’, ‘lucid’, ‘unfussy’, ‘intense’ ‘burning but precise’ are recurring epithets with the more evocative description, ‘moody, sepulchral’, coming from Sarah Hemming), Nicholas de Jongh demurred, considering the staging ‘second-rate, without any sense of place or atmosphere – despite the poetic vividness of Carr’s language’³⁷. He partly lays the blame for this with the designer, Kandis Cook: de Jongh comments on the remarkable specificity of the setting intimated through Carr’s stage directions with its three precise venues (Portia’s home, the local bar, and the riverbank), whereas Cook in his view ‘uselessly sets the play in a void with only table and chairs, and a shimmering backcloth to suggest the river’.³⁸ Billington also uses the adjective ‘shimmering’ and couples it with ‘translucent’ to evoke the set, while Sarah Hemming carries the visual intimations of these terms into the psychological in referring to the ‘surreal, glittering background’ as ‘represent[ing] the water that lures Portia on’; the continual, seen presence of the curtains seemingly defined for her both the limits of the stage and, in the poetic domain, the limits of Portia’s life, a mesmeric image of the fate that lures her to drown herself. The curtains made the same impression on Jane Edwardes: ‘Cook’s watery drapes are a permanent reminder of the pull of the Belmont river’, whereas Benedict Nightingale found them more disturbing, since he saw a ‘backcloth which, Rorschach-style, teems with trees, spectral faces or both’.³⁹ But this image did not resonate with all reviewers who commented on Cook’s design: to Charles Spencer, the ‘set, with a backdrop of what looks like black bin-liners, is a shoddy, unevocative disgrace’⁴⁰. That only a third of the critics chose to comment on the design elements suggests that for the rest the setting adequately fulfilled its requirements, creating an acceptable playing space.

Where the fifteen reviewers were unanimous, was in praise of the acting (the production boasted in Coveney’s view ‘some of Ireland’s finest actors’).⁴¹ Donald Hutera perhaps offers the most sensitively judged account:

Each performance is such a model of nuance and energy that they all deserve mention … Sliding and soaring through Carr’s heart-quickening text and Hynes’ unfussy staging, these actors do the kind of work that sticks in the memory.⁴²

Irving Wardle considered ‘there were amazing moments when, without taking a breath, the characters switch into broad comedy’.⁴³ Hutera too admired how the actors negotiated the ‘troubling, often blisteringly comic poetry’ that Carr creates out of despair, and Coveney praised how they handled the complexities of Carr’s writing, which he described as ‘a poetic repository of natural speech aerated with swingeing idiom, vigorous scatology and heavily aspirated consonantal patterns’.⁴⁴ The play was generally viewed as a superb demonstration of ensemble playing, necessary to offset the excellence of Derbhle Crotty’s performance as Portia. Here the superlatives abound: ‘spellbinding’, ‘riveting’, ‘ethereal and savage’, ‘a triumph’, ‘fierce’, ‘striking’, ‘remarkable’ ‘a tempestuous yet utterly controlled performance’, ‘great, rhapsodic’, ‘the performance of a lifetime’. Surprisingly, however, a recurring stress is on the meticulously judged physicality of Crotty’s interpretation. Sarah Hemming commented on how ‘with her pliant body language’ she ‘looked like a rag doll that has been carelessly hurled away’; for Nicholas de Jongh, ‘everything about her droops, from listless voice to slumping body’; for Michael Billington, ‘Crotty captures all of Portia’s death-wish and unease in her own body’; and for Nightingale, ‘Crotty, her pale, bony face gleaming, cuts a huddled, quaking figure most of the time – and a fierce, feral one when Portia’s internal demons run amok’.⁴⁵

From its earliest years under Frank Fay’s direction, the acting style of the Abbey company had been focused on delivery of the text with movement kept to a stylized minimum (except in the performance of Yeats’s dance plays). This had been greeted in the 1900s by English critics as captivating because different from the grandly mannered business that characterized the English style. Little in the intervening decades, when that English style had changed beyond recognition, had come from Ireland to challenge the prevailing opinion of Irish style.⁴⁶ Playwrights such as Tom Mac Intyre or Thomas Kilroy are not generally known to English audiences, not having been widely toured⁴⁷; and physicality was not, significantly, an aspect of Mason’s production of McGuinness’s play that excited comment.⁴⁸ Hynes’s staging, like most of her work with Druid and with the Abbey, attended markedly to embodying the text; but this, her characteristic style of directing, has only recently gained international, as distinct from Irish recognition, chiefly through her work with the Synge canon.⁴⁹ In that sense, Portia Coughlan with its focus on the heroine’s body (graphically displayed when winched aloft from the riverbed at the start of Act Two) was a revelation, inviting a wholesale revision of conventional English attitudes to the Abbey Theatre.

Though the Abbey celebrated its centenary in 2004, it was not until the following year that productions from that celebratory season reached London. O’Casey’s The Plough and the Stars came to a Barbican much changed from its previous visits: the Royal Shakespeare Company had departed and the theatre season now comprised visiting companies, chiefly from abroad. Language was in most cases less the medium of communication now than the visual dimension.⁵⁰ Interestingly reviews of Plough (once they had commented on the signature status of the play in the Abbey’s repertoire, given its history) focused on the actors’ physicalization of their characters and on Francis O’Connor’s setting. This severely limited the playing space by surrounding the stage on all sides with mounds of domestic rubbish (broken furniture, sandbags, doors, prams and the like) so the action was played out within this frame. Paul Taylor in the Independent thought this created ‘a literal gulf’ between stage and audience that it was difficult for the actors to bridge, while Susannah Clapp in the Observer felt this distancing effect caused the performers to over-act and ‘caper like comic cut-outs’; Charles Spencer considered it ‘dwarfed the actors’; others just found the set ‘excessively untidy’ or ‘clumsy’.⁵¹

The general response was more positive, seeing it as a powerful expressionist evocation of both the effects of the Rising and, within the larger international scene, of the trenches of the Great War. The sense of humanity caught inexorably in a universal decline into mud was disturbing, locating the play (as Michael Billington observed) closer to The Silver Tassie in O’Casey’s canon than to Juno and the Paycock.⁵² This symbolism defined precisely the social context of the play’s action and reviewers felt there were gains and losses in this. Billington thought Ben Barnes as director deliberately chose with this setting to play down the drama’s ‘comic gusto’, but he continued like others to praise the ‘persuasive’ stress placed on the inhabitants of the tenement as ‘the victims of war’, on O’Casey’s ‘artful interweaving of domestic and political themes’, as ‘public events shadow private lives’.⁵³ The recurring concern of reviewers is with O’Casey’s continual redefinitions of heroism, finding it in unconventional places and revealing it ‘in all its contradictions’.⁵⁴ An over-riding preoccupation was whether the production sustained most critics’ opinion that Plough rates ‘as maybe the 20th-century’s greatest play’.⁵⁵ Barnes’ choice to bring his production to London as the representative work in the Abbey’s hundred-year endeavour was judged generally to be exemplary on these grounds.⁵⁶

No review of the plays so far discussed mentioned the Abbey as Ireland’s National Theatre in terms of what might be considered a suitable repertory for such an institution. This was not the case with the other centenary production: Boucicault’s The Shaughraun which came to the Albery in the West End in June 2005. Of seventeen reviews, three invoked Yeats and Lady Gregory with reference to their known distaste for Boucicault’s plays and one the Abbey’s national status.⁵⁷ The Abbey had previously toured Boucicault’s melodrama to London in 1968 (Hugh Hunt’s production starred Cyril Cusack); and on that occasion there was general praise for the vigour of the acting and the developed sense of an ensemble.⁵⁸ More recently in 1988 the English National Theatre had staged an acclaimed revival of the play as a vehicle for Stephen Rea. Comparisons were inevitable and to the detriment of John McColgan as director. There were three admirers of the venture and three lukewarm appraisals, but the general response was scathing. Direction, design (Francis O’Connor again), and acting style were relentlessly dissected; worse, the production posed for critics serious questions about the taste of Abbey audiences in lauding it and of London audiences prepared ‘to pay £40 for flapdoodle’. Attendance was extremely low.⁵⁹

Reviewers found themselves in an unusual cultural time-warp: if Yeats dismissed Boucicault’s plays as caricaturing Irish peasantry to pander to the patronizing taste of English audiences, this production by an Irish company a century on shocked English critics for playing what they (the English) deemed a superior play as over-the-top caricature.⁶⁰ Was this Irish company deliberately sending up themselves and their theatrical heritage? Postcolonial-inspired cultural cringing on the part of most critics was paramount. The sets looked tacky and fake (or worse, Disneyfied); the direction owed more to Riverdance than any other tradition, historical or contemporary; and the acting inspired many critics to comparisons with the Carry On films for ‘playing cutesy Oirish clichés to the hilt without any visible irony’.⁶¹ Theoretically disposed critics clearly hoped they would find grounds for interpreting the experience as consciously postmodernist kitsch, but were frustrated in the attempt. Admired actors such as Stephen Brennan (Kinchela) or Anita Reeves (Conn’s mother) fell from favour and the overall want of taste of the enterprise was viewed contemptuously in comparison with the subtleties of production, design, and acting in Friel’s The Home Place, which had as recently as May that year transferred into the West End from the Gate in Dublin.

These four productions demonstrate a marked shift in English responses to the Abbey. A century past, critics in London delighted in playwrights’ verbal artistry and (by comparison with the current English style) the restrained style of acting; design was generally serviceable, functional, but not notable.⁶² Played in the final years of the twentieth century to audiences now well-versed in the dynamic variety of international modes of staging and design, Abbey stagings continued to excite comment on playwrights’ dramaturgy, but there is a developing close observation of the organic relation of stage setting and chosen acting style with dramatic artistry in all four productions discussed here. It is the integration, the coherence of the presentations (whether revivals of known plays or mountings of new drama) that is the locus of critical attention. Anglo-Irish political relations hovered to varying degrees over critical responses to Mason’s production of Observe the Sons of Ulster in calculating its timeliness and relevance; but the responses to Plough did not engage with specific politics (despite the subject matter of the play) so much as with the horrors of poverty amongst the working class and the repercussions on private life of the Rising and the Great War (this more generalized reaction was prompted particularly by the setting and by the situating of the production in a season specializing in the work of major European directors). Cultural politics came (almost comically) into play with McColgan’s staging of The Shaughraun in a manner that illuminated the changing ways in which Irish and English audiences were prepared to respond to issues of representation. Portia Coughlan provoked some stereotypical anti-Irish biases in a few befuddled critics, but Carr was generally praised as a welcome new dramaturgical voice of notable power. Can one generalize from this selection of toured productions? Not with any confidence, perhaps. Most noticeable, however, is how Irish drama is increasingly viewed as no longer ‘special’ or ‘other’, but is situated, whether for praise or blame, within critics’ and audiences’ extended, global awareness of the possibilities of theatre. For that we have to thank the upsurge of Irish plays in performance on English stages since 1990 and the touring to England by so many more companies than the Abbey.

Extract From: Irish Drama: Local and Global Perspectives, edited by Nicholas Grene and Patrick Lonergan (2012)

Cross Reference: Irish Theatre on Tour: Irish Theatrical Diaspora Series 1, edited by Nicholas Grene and Chris Morash

See Also: Plays and Controversies: Abbey Theatre Diaries 2000-2005, by Ben Barnes