The Transience of the Visual Image in Touring Theatre: Brian Friel’s Dancing at Lughnasa

Enrica Cerquoni

This article evolves as an investigation of the dynamics of theatrical space and scenic art whose mutable boundaries have taken on the role of provocative agent in shaping images and states of a nation. As Czech scenographer Jaroslav Malina has claimed, ‘stage design, just as other areas of national culture, seeks its own national identity’.²⁴⁶

Given the connection between theatrical representation and issues of Irish national identity, it is particularly revealing to explore those issues as embodied in scenic representations. Scenography, with the dimensions of the visual and of the physical, as a critically overlooked yet penetrative and implosive area of theatre practice, can disclose aesthetic and ideological insights in relation to those matters. To look at Irish theatre from an angle other than ‘words’ exposes alternative forms of expression. This undermines the saturated myth of Irish theatre as exclusively ‘verbal’, and insists on the adaptive capacities of touring theatrical production as it shifts its physical, along with its geographical and temporal, space.

The assumed monolithic identity of Irish theatre as a theatre of ‘words’ is ideologically marked. If Una Chaudhuri and Elinor Fuchs can refer to scenographic practice globally as ‘the most obvious site’²⁴⁷ in the new spatial turn which has debunked Aristotelian hierarchy and reshuffled dramatic structures, this view would hardly apply to scenic art in an Irish theatrical context, where scenography has been stripped of its semblance of obviousness. In the critical context of a diasporic Irish theatre, words and images have long incarnated a contesting tension between self and alterity: scenography and the whole dimension of the visual have most often been edited out of the critical discourse, the latter more focussed on perpetuating a construction of Irish theatre as definitively logocentric yet utterly falsifying and unreflective of the plurality of the Irish theatrical experience in the twenty-first century. Because of the invisibility of the visual component, the theatrical memory that is being transmitted is a maimed and elliptical one, inhabiting discontinuity and a theatrical ‘negative space of absolute loss’.²⁴⁸ The inclusion of the visual component in the calcified fabric of critical seeing can present a danger for the exclusionary verbal ontology of theatrical nationhood in Ireland. As Heidi Gilpin argues, paraphrasing Norman Bryson, ‘the visual experience is never fully organized by a centralized ego: there is always an excess in vision over and beyond what the subject can master in sight’.²⁴⁹

In order to highlight the ambiguous and complex relation between scenography and national identity in accounting for alternative experiences, identities and histories, in this article I will focus on Brian Friel’s Dancing at Lughnasa, a pivotal play in the Irish canon and for more than one reason. Firstly, it was written specifically for the Abbey Theatre in Dublin, the National Theatre in Ireland, in 1990, when the images of the nation and of Irish theatre were undergoing complex processes of diversification and formal changes. Secondly, from an aesthetic and thematic viewpoint, in Dancing at Lughnasa Friel tackles the culture-defining conflict at the core of an infected critical practice. The play performs and makes problematic the dialectics of division between the verbal and the visual, between words and images, between what is spoken and what is shown, between the shaking ‘memory framework’ of Michael’s narratorial voice and vision, and the stage events, the visual and corporeal energies, ‘the scenes of real life’, with their mostly female ensemble within a 1930s country home location. Finally, the play has had a diverse and successful stage history from the 1990s onwards, first in-house, then internationally, following its reproduction on the stage of the English National Theatre. As such, Dancing at Lughnasa has visually marked an era of national and theatrical reshaping, providing a wide spectrum of performance images in the void of visual documentation.

For the purposes of this exploration I will therefore focus on and refer to selected aspects of scenic presentation in the original production of the play in 1990: the Abbey Theatre production which went to England before touring elsewhere and was revived at the Abbey, in 1999 and 2000. These scenic aspects from the original production will be counterbalanced by images of stage design from a more recent, non-touring, Irish production, so as to highlight images and concepts where the theatre artists’ inventiveness and the spectators’ visual perceptions interact to evoke transient, provisional and permeable notions of nationhood, identity, and belonging. Transience is a key-factor for this visual journey through Friel’s Dancing at Lughnasa: it becomes scenic image and national metaphor within the play in the touring and non-touring productions under scrutiny in this article. The transience of the travelling visual image raises questions in relation to audiences in Ireland and England and their reception of the performed play.

In relation to transience and scenography, the scenographer Jaroslav Malina offers an interesting point of reflection:

Every stage design is transient, it perishes with the end of the production for which it was intended. Its short life is very often played out in the field of popular culture. Its memory, photographs of it, designs, exhibits, can penetrate the field of elite culture: museums, galleries, posters and so forth. Its transient life is then lengthened and experiences a new interpretation which each person projects into it. Its transience becomes its strength.²⁵⁰

This statement has strong implications in reference to the unresting power of the set design created by Joe Vanĕk for the Irish premiere of Friel’s Dancing at Lughnasa in the Abbey Theatre, directed by Patrick Mason in 1990. As the production went touring to London, New York, Melbourne, and Sydney and was revived several times in Dublin (last time in 2000), the setting had to be rebuilt and recreated, sometimes with variations in accordance with the physical reality of the different hosting sites. Because of its vast popular and critical acclaim, this set design has become iconic of the theatrical imagery of the play, thus pointing to the scenographer’s role as ‘visual director’²⁵¹ in unlocking the visual impact of the play. Because of its ‘transient’ and nomadic visual history, Vanĕk’s scenic image has turned into an emblematic mirror of the mutating state of the nation. A further evidence of the role of Vanĕk’s set image is that in 2004, Vanĕk’s setting was one of the central pieces of the Abbey scenic art exhibition held at the Irish Museum of Modern Art as part of the events celebrating the Abbey Centenary. In the catalogue accompanying the Abbey exhibition, the photographic reproduction of Mason’s and Vanĕk’s mise-en-scène as cover image visualized its centrality within the artistic scenario of the exhibit.

Joe Vanĕk’s set for the Abbey production in 1990 presented a thrusted-out stage image which was realistic just on the surface: details present, but distilled. The overall feeling is more that of a fragmentary quotation from reality than reality itself. Vanĕk’s angular and edgy open box, with the single diagonal wall containing all the necessary props and objects, such as turf stack, the radio, the range, the iron, the buckets and so on, has its line of power in an unruly field of golden wheat rising potently in a dramatic wedge behind the house and extending towards a visually discordant focal point. Extending the spectator’s visual field beyond the physical confines of the stage, the dotted expanse of corn, like an open-ended and fleeting image from an Impressionist painting, conjures up the irresolvable ambiguity and complexity of the play’s inward landscape. Mason’s and Vanĕk’s premiered stage image has known multiple incarnations in its touring history throughout its subsequent decade. The symbolic power of this obtrusive and commanding visual presence shifts and renews through the diverse spatial adaptations and scenic modalities: intimate and atmospheric in Dublin, framed and sharp in London (National, Lyttleton Theatre, 1990-1991), popular and cinematic in New York (Broadway, 1992), abstract and stylized in Melbourne and Sydney (1992-1993).

In all the diverse spatial transformations the challenge is to preserve the thrusted-out image, which translates on the Abbey’s ‘very wide and unfocussed stage and auditorium’²⁵² the immediacy of the characters and their intimacy with the audience. For the transfer to the National in London, which was the seminal site for the travelling visual image, crucial in establishing its iconic status, the physical reality of Lyttleton’s stage and auditorium – the repertory system and the fixed position of seats – required some changes. Joe Vanĕk writes how:

by stopping the walls six feet short of the stage edge and extending the floor only between black, textured slabs that connected with similarly textured side flats[…] I endeavoured […] to keep a sense of that thrust.²⁵³

However, the final effect is of a sharper frame than had been the case in Dublin. Michael Coveney caught the achievement in the Observer:

[the] shimmering wheatfield, flecked with poppies’ [and holding] the history of a nation in a burning glow of reminiscence, in the aftermath of Catholic imperialism before the loss of joy and identity in the urban diaspora.²⁵⁴

The multi-dimensional image transmitted by Vanĕk’s scenic creation captured the spirit of the Irish nation in the early 1990s, when Mary Robinson had just been elected president and ‘there was a very real sense of the take-off of the Irish internationally, culturally, and politically’.²⁵⁵ It was a nation in a germinal state of flux, where boundaries were becoming permeable and provisional, and notions of identity and nationhood re-invented and renegotiated. The production at the Lyttleton therefore marked a crucial repositing of the Irish nation (and National Theatre) in an English national (and National Theatre) context, a moment of changed reception and of cultural re-perception. The London performance indicates how, transposed from culture to culture, Vanĕk’s scenic environment has continued to contaminate and be contaminated, each time in an attempt to disclose ‘differentness’ to the onlooker’s world of experience. Yet, when it was revived in its original cultural context years later (1999 and 2000), that very conceptual image did not speak to its audiences with the same strength as before: the concept behind the mutable scenic constructions had stayed the same, whereas the nation and its identity values had continued to morph. As a consequence, Vanĕk’s epoch-making image appeared more as a nostalgic attempt to look backwards and to recapture a past state of the nation. Audiences were confronted with an image which had become the memory of a memory, thus reiterating the narrator’s tragic distance from the events and experiences of the play.

In 2004 the Gate Theatre in Dublin became the hosting site for a production of Dancing at Lughnasa under the direction of Joe Dowling, with the set design of Robert Jones and lighting design of Rupert Murray. Jones’s visual response presented the audience with a conceptual image which contracts the expansiveness of the Mason-Vaněk image and excavated the dark and subterranean forces of the play. Here spectators were faced with a darkened and austere miniature-space which engulfed the pitch-brown exterior of a tiny farmhouse, with the narrow field as its decentered backdrop. A key image in this recreated, gloomy theatrical locale was the presence of a frame which had been superimposed on the more external frame of the proscenium stage of the Gate. The rectangular greyish frame, marble-like and abstract in its style, as the visualization of the play’s memory framework, created a perceptual and emotional bridge between the performance space and the audience space. Within that visual filter of the frame, the austerity of the space intensified this opening tableau of gloom, isolation, and uncertainty. As soon as the play began, the revolving platform, on which the dark exterior of the house rested, revealed as its interior a contrastingly brightly-lit kitchen; then, as the tableau animates, the action started unfolding under the warm light. Yet, the visual impact of that sombre opening image of the farmhouse, like a shadowy Nativity, banished any nostalgia from the spectator’s experience and functioned as a constantly surfacing visual reminder of the disturbing recesses of the play’s fictional world.

The shift of the visual focus from the animated field, as it is in Vanĕk’s conception, to the abstract inner frame, as in Jones’s vision, went along, in the Gate production, with a reinterpretation of the narrator’s role. The actor performing Michael, Peter Gowen, moved anxiously across the whole onstage and offstage, thus traversing memory, ‘reality’ and the ‘elsewhere’. In and out of his role, as if existentially denied a full possession of it, his own painful and problematic interpretation reopens the relationship between the flux of memory and the scenes of ‘real’ life, between the verbal and the visual, favouring a possibility of a rebalance between the two dimensions. The visual elements become so alive as to nearly spill out of the framing power of words and take on an ontological existence of their own. Nicolas Pussin’s dictum that ‘nothing is visible without boundaries’ is here given visual stage expression.²⁵⁶ It is as if spectators are invited to access the play’s complex world through a series of multiplying frames which, one within the other, undermine the effect of one, unitary perspective and paradoxically lead to what Bleeker defines as ‘an absence of frames, an absence that would allow for a direct access to the plenitude of being’.²⁵⁷

This battlefield of representational boundaries creates liminal zones of indeterminacy where performers and audiences can participate in the process of making meanings. These borderline moments suspended between change as created within Jones’s bleak stage imagery revisualize a disquieting image of the Irish nation today: they hint at the downturn that has followed the prosperity and success of the 1990s decade, thus pointing towards the social and cultural limbo that post-millennium Ireland seems now to inhabit. In this layered and fluctuating condition, the experience of home and identity as a ‘transient’ set of relationships outside nationality and territoriality can be at once challenging and unsettling. The nation has been exposed to the opening of borders and has encountered ‘otherness’: it may now have to face the impossibility of embracing that otherness.

Pavis’s typology of mise-en-scène as a confrontation between directors, ‘visual directors’²⁵⁸ and textual practice is relevant here to help to assess briefly the ideological weight and repercussions of the two scenic images.²⁵⁹ From the analyst’s taxonomy two dimensions of mise-en-scène seem to serve our critical purpose: one is what he calls the ‘autotextual’ mise-en-scène, when productions tend to approach the playtext as a world of its own, with its own internal cohesion and logic, hermetically closed upon itself; the other is the ‘ideotextual’ one, when the interpretive strategy seeks relevance in the outside world and the new circumstances of reception, thus creating a relation of continuity between the play’s world and the audience’s world. While it could be argued that both productions’ conceptual images tend towards the ‘ideotextual’, it seems to me that the status of the Mason-Vanĕk transient stage composition has journeyed from ‘ideotextual’ to ‘autotextual’. Beyond and apart from its physical adaptations and reinventions, its unchanged, surviving core image in the revived productions in 1999 and 2000 has broken the continuity between the play’s perceptual world and the audience’s perceptual world and engendered an unexplored fracture between the two worlds. The premiere production’s diasporic trajectory, beginning in London, charted a process of reinvention and adaptation to new stages, which, however open-ended, masked a lack of change in its sense of Irishness, rather like a emigrant space relying on memory. The scenic image, sealed in a chamber of its own, was revealed upon its return as the entrapping and falsifying visual consciousness of the nation, now become a tragic witness to the space/time-specificity of production values. By contrast, Dowling’s and Jones’s compressed scenographic choice engendered an edgier feel of phenomenal strangeness, which unleashed again the spirit of the play and its current, disturbing topicality from the oppressive halo of past familiarity and knowability. Recalling Roland Barthes, it could be contended that the Mason-Vanĕk scenic image, had evolved into his notion of ‘studium’, having initially released and then submerged the play’s ‘punctum’, or as Barthes would have it, the ‘element which rises from the scene, shoots out of it like an arrow and pierces [us]’.²⁶⁰

Given the multiple visual possibilities conjured up by each production’s unique theatrical vision, it seems to me that there is more to Irish theatre than just ‘words’. This visual quest has also proved how the aesthetic and ideological impacts inscribed in the mutable identity of scenographic art in touring and non-touring productions can have a foundational role in making and breaking images of theatrical nationhood.

The vast diversity of each production’s image and scenographic realization asks spectators to ponder on the shifting and vulnerable nature of concepts such as nationhood, identity, and belonging. With each production, the scenic transposition seeks to reinvent Irish theatrical locations which, less burdened by national traditions and inherited visual formats, are characterized by inclusiveness, open-endedness, non-linearity, and multi-dimensionality. Such a representation foregrounds a move away from a bordered, stable and coherent notion of Ireland and ‘Irishness’ and opens up uncomfortable and unfamiliar zones of fragmentation, complexity and contradiction.

In view of the problematic and transient revisualizations of self and place which emerge in the spatial poetry of each production under scrutiny, this visual journey has revealed the fallible and precarious cartography of received notions of Irishness and identity in the hybridity of our current world. While this ontological vacuum interrogates the truth-value of identity as a point of origin in the cultural imagery of third-millennium European Ireland, it also asserts how theatre works. ‘Plays’, in Howard’s words, ‘do not belong to nations but to audiences’.²⁶¹

Extract From: Irish Theatre in England, Second in the series: Irish Theatrical Diaspora, edited by Richard Cave and Ben Levitas (2007)

Cross Reference: Cerquoni on Vanĕk’s work, Vanĕk on designing for Mac Intyre, and other considerations of scenography

See Also: Brian Friel’s Dramatic Artistry, ‘The Work has Value’, edited by Donald E. Morse, Csilla Bertha, and Mária Kurdi