The Irish Connection

Thomas Kilroy

Connection in theatre is made between actor and audience. Indeed, there are exemplary occasions in the theatre where you have the coming together of text, acting and audience in an experience that seems to transcend any one of the elements involved. It can only happen with great writing and great acting, of course. But my point is that in the degree of its response, the audience is testifying to the depth to which the work has penetrated its communal consciousness. In this way, audience presence or audience involvement is an essential ingredient of the theatrical experience itself. In this way, theatre, in sublime fashion, is seen in the very act of fulfilling its public function.

I will mention a few such occasions which I’ve experienced myself but you will have your own lists. In Ireland, Donal McCann in Faith Healer at the Abbey Theatre, Siobhan McKenna in Bailegangaire at the Taibhdhearc in Galway. I would add three productions from outside Ireland from the fifties and sixties, Laurence Olivier in The Entertainer at the Royal Court in London, Uta Hagen in Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? in New York and Jean-Louis Barrault in La Tentation de Saint Antoine at the Odeon in Paris. All of these performances had a profound connection to the local culture. They tapped into some particular, native, shared experience, opening an unhealed wound, as it were, stirring a brew that had been dormant, bringing to the surface something familiar but unacknowledged in quite this public way before. They spoke not only to the audience but they also spoke for the audience. The audience provided a rippling, potent presence as part of the theatrical event.

What is interesting, and of some relevance to my topic, is that such a theatrical experience on home ground and that abroad, may have slightly different perspectives. At home one is fully part of the audience, surrendering to that tunnelling down into the communal consciousness. Abroad, there may be that too but there is also some degree of remove, of observing the audience as a visitor and saying, yes, this is what it must mean to them.

All of this has to do with the way theatre relies upon the familiar but transforms it, making it new, fresh, even strange and outlandish in that journey up on the stage and through the individual vision of the writer. The familiar in a play is likely to embrace the social, political background of the country, in a way offering a version of history. The familiar, too, is to be found in the language used. But if it is a demonstration of the language of the people, it is a demonstration of that language stretched to some limit of its capability.

To take such exceptional events is one way of starting a discussion about the characteristic theatre of any one country. Why is it that some dramatic actions are more meaningful than others to more people in a given community? What does the characteristic performance tell us about Irish theatre? And how does it translate the local experience for a non-Irish audience?

I thought maybe this is the approach I should take this evening. In the end I decided to go a different way. But I do want to hang this picture of the exemplary theatrical event in front of me as I proceed, as a kind of corrective perhaps to what I have to say.

What I will do instead is return to the hoary old question of tradition and I hope those of you who have heard me rattling on about this in the past will bear with me. I want to use this to reflect upon the way tradition has both released and inhibited the Irish stage. And I want to end by looking at a number of plays by young Irish playwrights today, asking in what way do they reflect that tradition gone before. In doing this I will come back to the actor.

Fourteen years ago in the Irish University Review I wrote about the trifurcated tradition of Irish drama in the English language. When I was invited to give this talk I was asked to go back to that essay and try to expand on it in the light of more recent Irish theatre. The trifurcation that I was talking about there was, firstly, the fracture between the theatre of Anglo-Irish playwrights of the seventeenth, eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and the theatre established by Yeats and his contemporaries. Then there was the fracture between the theatre of Yeats and that of our theatre of the second half of the twentieth century. Three very different bodies of drama, then, by playwrights born on this island.

The question here is what continuity exists between these three areas of dramatic writing by Irish-born playwrights in the English language, from the seventeenth up to the second half of the last century? The answer has to be: very little indeed. Nor, given the history of the island over that period, is this particularly surprising.

I do want to remark, however, on two legacies received by playwrights of my generation from the Anglo-Irish drama of the past, one having to do with value and one with genre.

The first is the transmission of certain values about playwriting, the most important of which is the idea that drama can attain to the quality of literature. Intrinsic to this is the pre-eminence of verbal language in a play, the theatricalizing of vernacular speech, allied to a highly developed consciousness of form in the writing, including an allusiveness, a referential mode in the writing where plays feed upon other plays as well as other kinds of writing.

In genre, there is the legacy of the peasant play from the theatre of Yeats and his contemporaries, one of the most durable forms of drama in modern Irish theatre. The peasant play of Yeats’s theatre was written by Anglo-Irish playwrights who were separated from their peasant material, outsiders writing about a world that was, in ethos, removed from them, politically, socially, and culturally.

Their choice of subject, then, was deliberate, a self-conscious choice based upon a late Romantic idea of the authenticity of the natural man close to the soil. This turning to life on the periphery of the centre is a feature of some modernist art, a kind of neo-primitivism. It is as if an over-ripe, over-sated central culture had this need to strip away the inessential and find in a simpler society some human qualities lost through sophistication.

For Yeats, Synge and Gregory, with their deep interest in ancient Gaelic saga material, there was a further bonus. The Irish peasant, through folklore and story telling, seemed a living embodiment of this great literary tradition of the Irish sagas, otherwise available only in translation and in libraries. In other words there was the exciting discovery that the great mythic tales existed in two forms, the formal, written one and the vernacular one of oral story telling. This latter was a considerable stimulus to the writing of the new drama.

Synge’s highly individualistic vision took all this a stage further. His vision as an artist was based upon a secular spirituality and an almost monkish, personal pursuit of dispossession, a divesting of material things and, obviously, of the comforts of his own, middle-class, Anglo-Irish background. He was drawn to extreme poverty as a testing ground of reality, as, indeed, was Beckett following after him. The idea that truth may be found more readily on the margins of existence, among the deprived and dispossessed should sit uneasily in an age of consumerism, celebrity and technological progress. However, as I’ve been suggesting, modernity has always sought out such a retreat in art, perhaps out of escape, perhaps as a way of flattering its own culture’s tolerance. The Irish peasant play is part of this.

When, after Synge’s death, Irish playwrights of actual rural background emerged, a different kind of peasant play emerged with them. This new drama was based upon intimate knowledge of the material and, in many instances, a realistic portrayal of rural society. With the change from an agricultural economy to one based upon technology, with the rapid disappearance of the family farm, the very material of this kind of play has become extinct. The playwrights, too, have exhausted the genre, in very different ways, in plays like Translations, Bailegangaire and The Field. Such a pervasive form of drama often ends in self-conscious parody, particularly when the material itself has begun to disappear and so, perhaps, its final manifestation is to be found in the parodic comedy of Martin McDonagh.

This point is well made by Michael Cadden in a recent issue of the Princeton University Library Chronicle devoted to Irish drama. He says McDonagh’s work ‘seems wilfully perverse when read in relation to the great tradition it to some degree mimics and to some degree takes the mick out of – a perversity that can be seen as an act of violence aimed at the hegemony enjoyed by the Western play in the canon of Irish literature’. McDonagh, he elaborates, ‘seems to both use and abuse the form of peasant drama’.

At any rate, these legacies of literary drama and of the peasant play have steered our theatre in a particular direction affecting the characteristic style, not only of our writing of plays, but of our acting and productions as well.

I, for one, see this direction as one of enormous richness. But I also see how it has inhibited the development of other kinds of theatricality, the theatre of other languages of the human body other than the verbal. The language of image-making, of movement, and of the dynamic between the human figure in a decorated stage space has only become a prominent one in our theatre in recent years.

The pivotal figure in all this discussion is Yeats. He understood the separation of his theatre from that of his Anglo-Irish predecessors like Sheridan and Goldsmith or even contemporaries, like Wilde and Shaw. He also saw the way in which younger Catholic playwrights, like Padraic Colum and T.C. Murray, were producing a type of play that was markedly different to that of himself and of his Anglo-Irish contemporaries.

Yeats is also the Irish theorist who most effectively described the nature of literary drama. The key here is the dramatist’s use of language. Dramatists who infuse language with a highly developed personal vision may create literature. Dramatists who simply record the language of the street or the market place will not. Yeats here is thinking of the naturalistic drama of someone like Ibsen or Shaw. But it also reflects his distaste for younger Catholic playwrights of peasant plays, like Padraic Colum, who were bringing a new naturalistic drama into his own theatre. Here he is on the subject:

If one has not fine construction, one has not drama, but if one has – not beautiful or powerful and individual speech, one has not literature, or, at any rate, one has not great literature. Rabelais, Villon, Shakespeare, William Blake would have recognized one another by their speech. It is only the writers of our modern dramatic movement, our scientific dramatists, our naturalists of the stage, who have thought it possible to be like the greatest and yet to cast aside the poor persiflage of the comedians, and to write in the impersonal language that has come, not out of individual life, nor out of life itself, but out of the necessities of commerce, Parliament, of Board Schools, of hurried journeys by rail.

When Yeats came to set up his own theatre he had to remove himself and his endeavours from those of his great Anglo-Irish predecessors in the theatre. As a young man striving to create a new Irish literature in the English language he did look to his Anglo-Irish heritage but not to the dramatists. He looked, rather, to other poets like Davis and Ferguson who, like himself, had drawn from native Irish material or to popularizers of such material such as Standish Hayes O’Grady, all precursors, in other words, of himself. To find out what he thought of Anglo-Irish playwrights like Farquahar, Goldsmith and the others I’ll just give two examples.

In 1895 Yeats was busy defining the canon of Irish literature during the course of which he engaged in debate with Professor Edward Dowden of Trinity College. Dowden had offered his own additions to this ideal library of Irish books and he included the plays of Farquhar, Goldsmith and Sheridan. Yeats would have none of this. He said the professor knew nothing of Irish literature and, worse, had ‘set himself upon the side of academic tradition in that eternal war which it wages on the creative spirit’.

In 1904 Yeats returned to the topic of an Irish canon in a public dispute with the English journalist Clement Shorter who was also a friend. Yeats had praised Lady Gregory’s Cuchulain of Muirthemne ‘as the best book that has come out of Ireland in my time’. In his response Shorter referred to ‘the many great writers’ of the ‘past of whom England and Ireland may be equally proud’. Among these he included Goldsmith and Sheridan. Yeats’s extraordinary reply to this was that the eighteenth century Anglo-Irish playwrights ‘hardly seem to me to have come out of Ireland at all’.

An older Yeats was to re-embrace his Anglo-Irish heritage. But even then he did not turn to the witty writers of the Comedy of Manners. Instead he turned to Swift, Berkeley and Burke more as iconic representatives of a threatened culture than as individual writers or philosophers or political theorists. The Anglo-Irish playwrights could never fulfill this function for Yeats.

With regard to his great Anglo-Irish theatrical contemporaries, Wilde and Shaw, who had turned to the English stage and English audiences, Yeats is on record in 1902 as having said that they were the only playwrights of the nineteenth century ‘worth going to hear’. The emphasis on the aural is telling. It would be impossible in a short space to convey the complexity of Yeats’s relationship to either man. With Wilde it involved great personal loyalty on the part of Yeats as well as the incorporation of Wilde by Yeats, as an important symbolic figure, into his reading of history, but Yeats was never enthusiastic about Wildean theatre.

With Shaw, Yeats had a life-long engagement, never entirely easeful but it did involve sponsorship of Shaw’s work and support of Shaw in his fight against English stage censorship. Nevertheless, at the end of the day, Yeats assigned both Wilde and Shaw to a state of rootlessness, men suspended between two cultures, the English and the Irish, ‘abstract, isolated minds’, as he put it in one of the commentaries in The King of the Great Clock Tower, ‘without a memory or a landscape’. This marks a significant breach, then, in Anglo-Irish culture which had to do with the anchorage, rootedness within native Irish tradition on his part and the absence of it in the theatre of Goldsmith or Wilde.

When he looked at the newly emerging playwrights of the next generation, not from his own Anglo-Irish background but from Catholic Ireland, Yeats was even more disenchanted. After Synge’s death in 1907 he came to realize that the theatre which he had nurtured with Gregory and Synge had been taken over by a new, naturalistic drama. He hated this naturalism in theatre which he associated with an impoverished mind, with writers who had no freedom from their subject matter, who were, so to speak, overwhelmed by sociology. There is little doubt that he considered such work as lacking in literary quality. Here is how he put it in one of his more intemperate moods:

I have noted by the by that writers in this country who come from the mass of the people – or, no, I should say from Catholic Ireland have more reason than fantasy. It is the other way with those who come from the leisured classes. (Yeats means the Anglo-Irish) They stand above their subject and play with it and their writing is, as it were, a victory as well as a creation. The others – Colum and Edward Martyn for instance – are dominated by their subject, with the result that their work as a whole lacks beauty of shape, the organic quality.

In other words, the quality of literature. I should now say that this idea of drama as literary text is not a universally accepted one of what a play should be. If the decade 1899-1909 is the one which established the primacy of text in the Irish theatre it is also the decade when Adolph Appia’s developing ideas about staging and the early work of Gordon Craig were shifting theatre away from the word to design, lighting, music and the dynamic between the human body and the space it occupies, those other mysterious languages of theatre.

Yeats admired Craig’s design from the beginning but it was not until after Synge’s death, from 1909 to 1912, that the two men collaborated, with Craig’s screens at the Abbey and Yeats’s revising of earlier plays to stage them in this highly visual form of theatre. It was only then than Yeats gave himself fully to the eurhythmic, the plastic, the physicality of the stage and in this way re-entered the modern theatre but from a different angle. At a personal level, this is the Yeats, the playwright, that I have most interest in.

I’m now going to shift tack completely and, at the risk of over-generalizing, I’m going to comment upon a number of new plays by young Irish playwrights, in the light of what I’ve been talking about. These plays are to be found in John Fairleigh’s recent anthology The Tiger in Winter: Six Contemporary Irish Plays.

In Mark Doherty’s impressive play Trad you have a father and son wandering about on a journey towards death. One of the recurring motifs in the bleakly comic exchanges between the father, Da, and his son, is precisely the subject of tradition. But it is tradition bled of all its weight, all its substance, a post-traditional treatment of tradition, where tradition has now become an item of comic indignation, an item of stand-up comedy.

Son: (exploding) Ahhhhhhhhh! What is it that you want…? Da …? What is this tradition thing that gives you all your energy? Hah….? Your great-great-grandchildren telling the same stories that you’re telling me now? Is that it? Is that what you want? Is that what tradition is? Everyone standing still and facing backwards?

In this play, father and son scramble across a stage littered with the props of the Irish peasant play, a cottage interior, a field, a graveyard, stone walls. There is even Synge’s ravenous sea at the end. But that’s all they are, props. There is no grounding in a reality beyond the stage. We’ve gone past that requirement. The journey of the two is on a stage, the location is stage space. References to landscape invite one even further into artifice, rather than to reflection on the real thing. An allusion to Vladimir and Estragon is inescapable, (there are even two encounters with others on this journey). This is sophisticated, parodic writing of a contemporary kind.

Two young Irishmen working for the summer in the Canadian tobacco fields is the unusual setting of Malachy McKenna’s Tillsonburg. A young couple pour out their hearts to the audience in Eugene O’Brien’s Eden, a shocking, poignant play about small town life in the Midlands. Christian O’Reilly’s The Good Father has a young woman and a young man meeting and remeeting and meeting again in a wryly comic sexual twosome. In Gerald Murphy’s Take Me Away a father and three sons engage in a savage, emotional strip session, as they plan a visit to an absent mother, a visit that never takes place. The turbulent life of the snooker-player Alex Higgins is portrayed in Richard Dormer’s Hurricane. These plays are by male playwrights. But if you were to include Stella Feehily’s vivid play Duck, for instance, about two young drifting Dublin women, the generalizations that I’m going to make would still apply.

There is no question about the quality of the writing in these plays, some of it is of very high order indeed. What is remarkable, however, is the extraordinary resilience of social naturalism in these works, the naturalism that Yeats railed against. But these plays do not suffer from the playwrights being dominated by their subject matter, as Yeats put it. Quite the contrary, here you have a very self-confident control over the material.

The world conjured up in these plays, one shared across virtually all of them, is a world in which the old-fashioned codes of behaviour, the rituals which once made social encounters bearable, have withered away. There is no reserve here, any more, the action seems unmediated, offered just as it is. Every contact is intense, immediate and frontal, sometimes violently so. Encounters become collisions.

Nor are these large-scale works, using all the resources of the modern stage. All have small casts. Even when the action roams the pervasive sense is of confinement. Everything is directed inwards towards closely observed detail. The rhythm is often driven through duologues, in exchanges that are wound-up to extreme limits and then cut loose. This extreme effect is found also in Eugene O’Brien’s play Eden, even though the man and woman are separated through monologue. All of this fits the common theme across all the plays, human need, need of sex, of course, although love is in short supply, but sometimes just an unappeasable, almost inexpressible need for an inexpressible goal.

It may be significant that at least five of the seven playwrights mentioned here come to playwrighting out of acting. Certainly, these plays are very much actor-vehicles. Returning to the point with which I began, contemporary Irish drama is dominated by the figure of the actor. There is little room here for directorial flourishes. Instead you have some brilliantly constructed moments for Irish acting, depending upon the old staples of the school, closely observed characterization, a wicked ear for the vernacular and a sense of timing in that comedy of desperation which has been such a feature of Irish drama over the decades.

If I see any one figure behind these plays, a presiding presence, as it were, it would be Tom Murphy. The Tom Murphy of A Whistle in the Dark or Conversations on a Homecoming, for example, who excavated Irish family life with such ferocity, particularly through the rituals of Irish male lives. Having seen Stuart Carolan’s The Empress of India, I feel the other Murphy, the visionary, mystical Murphy of plays like The Sanctuary Lamp and Too Late for Logic, may also be influencing young Irish playwrights. Connection, then. It may not be quite one of the connections with which I started this talk but it is still a connection.

Extract From: ‘Mirror Up To Nature’: FOURTH Seamus Heaney Lectures, edited by Patrick Burke (2010)

Cross Reference: Two earlier essays on Kilroy

See Also: Theatre Talk: Voices of Irish Theatre Practitioners, edited by Lilian Chambers, Ger Fitzgibbon and Eamonn Jordan