Contemporary Irish Theatre and Performance Studies Reader

Who The Hell Do We Think We Still Are? Reflections on Irish Theatre and Identity

Declan Hughes

You don’t live in Ireland; you know nothing of the country but the last thirty years or so of its literature. And then, one cold morning, you arrive in Dublin in 1999. You’re going to be very confused, aren’t you? Why didn’t anyone warn you about all this? The cranes, the plate glass, the extremes of wealth and poverty, the corruption, the vulgarity, the new slapped gaudily on the old like bright paint on a crumbling facade. What were those writers doing, obsessing about the Nineteen Fifties, stuck down the country being Irish with themselves? Who the hell do we think we still are?

Why does contemporary Irish literature ignore contemporary Ireland? Yes, there are exceptions, but that’s what they are: cranks, objectors, loons with the preposterous notion that literature should, in Mr. Trollope’s words, reflect The Way We Live Now. For the most part, Irish writing is still based on an Ireland that hasn’t existed for years.

In an introduction to a collection of plays a couple of years ago, I wrote the following:

The experience of growing up in Dublin in the sixties and seventies was not unlike the experience of growing up in Manchester or Glasgow, or in Seattle for that matter. The cultural influences were the same: British and American TV, films and music. You read Irish literature, but mostly for the past; to discover the present, you looked to America. Irish writers flicked through the family album; American writers looked out the window. You knew you would go to America one day, to work, or for a holiday, or just to get the hell away from home, or maybe you lived in California or New York already, in your mind. You were People Like That, and if you felt your cultural identity dwindling into a nebulous blur, well, you believed that what you had in common with others was more important than what set you apart, and you knew there were millions like you all over the world, similarly anxious to be relieved of the burdens of nationality and of history. You were tired of hearing about those who didn’t learn from history being condemned to repeat it; you sometimes felt the opposite was true, that those who were obsessed by the past were doomed never to escape it, to replicate it endlessly, safe and numb within its deadly familiarity.

I use America in that passage as an idea; America as New Found Land, that which we all seek: the opportunity to put the past in its place, to stop answering the question “Who Are We?” with “This is who we used to be – this is how we got here”. To reinvent ourselves for the future, to stop defining ourselves in terms of the past. Identity is inchoate: it’s up for grabs, it must be constantly reinvented: like theatre, made new every day.

In the late seventies, I was a regular reader of the New Musical Express, which at the time dealt with an extraordinarily rich mixture of music, film, literature and politics: a kind of learned journal of popular culture. It was fantastically pretentious: a review of a Rip Rig and Panic gig invariably contained references to Derrida and Lacan. It was also the first publication I had come across which suggested that there was no contradiction in listening one minute to the Ramones, the next to Steve Reich, or in reading Don DeLillo and the X-Men; indeed, it suggested that if you didn’t investigate the range of culture, high to low, then you were seriously out of touch. The policy was: Not only but also, as opposed to Either/or.

It was relentlessly secular, hedonistic, politically correct, foul-mouthed, internationalist. It understood that the 20^th century had been, and would continue to be, for better or worse, the American century, and that culturally, again for good or ill, we had all been colonised irrevocably by the first beam of light Hollywood had shone on us, by the first notes of music we’d heard the descendent of an African slave play.

The NME at the time came as cultural manna from heaven to a gloomy suburban teenager who could find absolutely nothing in Irish culture, official or unofficial, that resonated in any way. Irish culture then was obsessed in every respect with the past; that has changed to some extent, but unfortunately, nowhere near comprehensively enough.

RORY: I thought you were busy embracing the chaos in the biggest burgh in burgerdom, Danny, what’s wrong, does it scare you when you see it in your cherished little homeland?

DANNY: No, what I’m saying is: the chaos is here – wannabees and weirdoes on the airwaves, brains fried from T.V. and video and information overload – so acknowledge it, don’t pretend there’s some unique sense of community, that Ireland’s some special little enclave – things are breaking down as fast here as anywhere else.

BREDA: You just don’t understand, talk radio here – even if people feel isolated, lost in the suburbs or something, they can tune in and feel a part of what’s going on – it’s like they’re living in a village, and they want to keep up with the gossip.

DANNY: And what about the people who don’t want to live in a village? The people who left before their village suffocated them? Is village life supposed to be the most authentic, the most Irish?

BREDA: It’s also about having a sense of place –

DANNY: And what happens when you don’t have a sense of place? When I arrived in New York for the first time, and as the cab swung past that graveyard and around the corner and I got my first glimpse of the Manhattan skyline, I felt like I was coming home. The landscape was alive in my dreams, the streets were memories from a thousand movies, the city was mine.

RORY: Well you have a sense of place, Danny. It just happens to be somebody else’s place.

DANNY: No it doesn’t, it’s as much Ireland as Dublin is; millions of Irish went out and invented it, invented it as much, probably more than any ever invented this poxy post-colonial backwater.

BREDA: So what’s the problem? You don’t like it here, fine, you don’t live here; you feel at home there, great, you live there. What’s the big deal?

DANNY: The big deal, the big deal is, that there is as much here as here is… and I don’t believe the here you’re describing exists here. To me, here is more like… there.(Pause)

EMILY: Danny, are you on drugs? (From Digging For Fire (1991), in Declan Hughes: Plays: 1 (London: Methuen, 1998))

I work in a profession whose practitioners are famed for their loquaciousness. The joke about actors of a certain age entering their anecdotage is well known, but like so many jokes, it makes us laugh because it’s true, and it’s true for profound reasons. If you’ve ever seen a film of a theatrical performance, you’ll have remarked on its oddness: the timing, the rhythms, even the acting seem out of kilter, somehow skewed, at once too obvious and curiously opaque. Photographs can’t capture it, sound recordings won’t do it justice. Theatre is written on the wind. As we tell our friends, speaking of some great night they missed: You had to be there. The only memory is an anecdote, a rambling story that can’t quite capture the magic. We trust that it was magical, but we can’t quite figure out how. And as some old actor rambles on, we begin to wonder if it was as ever as good in the past as we know it to be now. There was a legendary Olivier “Othello”, (legendary because everyone said so) which was filmed. I watched the film in incredulity, as a blacked up ham gives the most preposterous display of vainglorious preening and bombastic declaiming. They said it was a legend, but it looked like a load of old nonsense to me. Maybe Olivier wasn’t all they said he was. Maybe all those old guys were overrated, maybe what counts, all that counts, is what we’re doing right now. Making it new. But if I’d been there, at the Old Vic all those years ago, I’m sure I would have been enthralled.

Written on the wind. This is the essential purity of theatre as an art form. It’s created out of air, and vanishes into it. All the accretions of the past, all the tradition counts for nothing. Howard Brenton has said, of working for one of the large English institutions – you know the ones, they have Royal or National in their names – sometimes, rather greedily, both – that as soon as anyone starts talking about “the traditions of this theatre”, you know you are in trouble. What used to be creativity, inspiration, energy has congealed into tradition. What is tradition anyway? Habit in fancy dress. An excuse for thought. A mindless worship of the past.

There are two ways of reacting to the perceived collapse of cultural identities in the modern world. One is, literally, to react: to insist on national and regional identity, authenticity, to stress more and more the need to be Irish against the swirling and chaotic global forces, to employ a national culture as a kind of nostalgic bulwark that stresses, and eventually fetishises, the differences between Ireland and everywhere else. The irony is that, by and large, those things that make us different are those which tell us least about ourselves today, but hark back to the past. The country kitchen, the rural pub, the farm, the nineteen fifties; this is a form of perverse nostalgia: nostalgia for the time when we think we were Irish, when we had an identity.

Nostalgia is in many ways the Irish disease, and it corrodes at every level: at its most extreme, it becomes the savagery of war: as Don DeLillo says in White Noise:

Nostalgia is a product of dissatisfaction and rage. It’s a settling of grievances between the present and the past. The more powerful the nostalgia, the closer you come to violence. War is the form nostalgia takes when men are hard-pressed to say something good about their country.

The village is no longer the objective correlative for Ireland: the city is, or to be precise, between cities is. That space between. That’s not to say that people don’t live in the country any more, or that rural life isn’t “valuable”; it’s that culturally, it’s played out. It no longer signifies. Mythologically, it doesn’t resonate any more. Despite the fact that the overwhelming movements and changes in Irish society in the last thirty years have been urban, global, technological; that in every other area, we divest ourselves of the past like the good little I.T. loving global capitalists we’re becoming; culturally we persist in defining ourselves by the ethnic, the pastoral (and that qualified form, the tragic pastoral). Even if we do it in an iconoclastic way, the iconography remains powerfully the same: half door, pint bottle, sacred heart.

We make a show of ourselves as we think we were in the past, because we don’t, or won’t confront ourselves in the present. Because, correctly, we fear the set of identities we have for ourselves won’t add up any more. And foolishly, we think that fear is better avoided than embraced. And the rest of the world colludes in this because they want us to be Irish too; hell, they’d like to be Irish themselves.

I read a piece in The Guardian recently decrying the film Waking Ned for its paddywhackery, and attributing its box office success in the UK to racism against the Irish. I thought that it was quaint these days to see racism and the Irish being used that way round, and I thought it was a bit over the top devoting an entire column to what is a bog-standard piece of shamroguery. But then I noticed that the author, Lawrence Donegan, was flogging a book. Mr. Donegan, a Scotsman, had spent a year in an Irish village, and the book, published by an English publisher, would be a hugely charming, meaningful testament to how bloody marvellous we “Irish” are. I resisted the temptation to write in, because I’m saving for a later and madder chapter in my life the role of The Man Who Writes Letters To The Newspapers.

But I thought: almost as bad as being discriminated against because you’re thought inferior is discrimination in your favour because you’re thought marvellous. And I thought, spending a year in an Irish village in 1999 is about as useful as living on a Scottish croft would be as a way of assessing the contemporary character of the two countries. And I thought, the more people agree on who you are and are not, the more your identity is fixed by others, the less easy it becomes to investigate who you really are – investigate whether an identity defined by nationality, or geography, has a meaning any more. And I thought of David Mamet’s line from Speed-the-Plow, a line that sometimes seems as if it was written with Ireland in mind: “I wouldn’t believe this shit if it was true”.

I’d like to see Irish theatre embrace the profound change that has occurred: that we are barely a country any more, never have been and never will be that most nineteenth century of dreams, a nation once again; that our identity is floating, not fixed. I could live a long and happy life without seeing another play set in a Connemara kitchen, or a country pub. I think it’s significant that in contemporary theatre and cinema, so much attention gets paid to the nineteen fifties, the decade before Ireland opened for business, the time when we were a “special little enclave”. And of course, as a form of pastoral idyll, that’s attractive to audiences from countries who were by that time heavily industrialised and urbanised. But I don’t see any mythological resonance in it: all I see is a marketing strategy: this is our special, uniquely Irish past: isn’t it funky? Isn’t it perversely exotic and thrillingly other? Well, no actually, it’s just a miserablist equivalence of Merchant Ivory costume drama: the bourgeois fallacy that art is always set in the past.

Too often when I go to the theatre, I feel like I’ve stepped into a time capsule: even plays supposedly set in the present seem burdened by the compulsion to… well, in the narrowest sense, be Irish. It sometimes feels like Stephen’s Night, listening to a bunch of aged relatives reminisce: it’s comforting, sad, gently amusing and not a little dull. That’s not even enough for Stephen’s Night, let alone a night at the theatre. I’m not suggesting that drama should be “relevant’: I’m never quite sure what that means. Or that it somehow act as the artistic wing of journalism, getting yesterday’s headlines onto tomorrow’s stages (although there can be a certain exhilaration when that occurs). But Irish drama needs to show more guts: the guts to stop flaunting its ancestry, to understand that the relentless dependence on tradition collapses inevitably into cannibalism. The village will eat itself.

I never again want to see an Irish play set in a community where everyone talks and thinks the same and holds values in common. Because that is not truth: that’s nostalgia: the illusion that there is something that still binds us together. Increasingly, there isn’t. This has formal implications, of course: on a simple technical level, plays are easier to construct if everyone on stage follows the same rules; if we all know who we are. But we don’t know who we are any more. There’s a fair possibility that we never will again. That’s an exhilarating notion to take into a new century.

The novelist Hugo Hamilton has spoken about his generation being the last of the Irish, that under the twin influences of Europe and America, the Irish identity will soon disappear. He seemed to think this was a good idea, and I agree with him. I was reminded of it when I saw Warren Beatty’s film Bulworth, wherein the splendid theory is expounded that the solution to the problem of race is mass miscegenation, until there’s only one race left: the human race.

This brings me to the second way of reacting to the collapse of cultural identity in the world: to reflect it, to embrace it, to see it as liberating. It’s the condition. Simple as that. Not only but also. The future, not the past. Bring it all on.

Depressingly, the only other people at present who seem to relish the idea of abandoning the past, ignoring history and welcoming the future are businessmen, modern incarnations of the fumble-in-a-greasy-till-merchants who have always been, revoltingly, with us. (No prizes for guessing why they might relish a valueless, ahistorical, individualistic work force.)

And since the values of the culture are now almost overwhelmingly business values, what we need more than ever are clear-eyed writers who will take the trouble to view the world as it is, in all its complexity, and will then speak the truth: nostalgia is cold comfort; the truth is what we need.

We have had an explosive thirty years in Ireland. Fortunes have been made, crimes have been committed, democracy has been abused, politics has been debased, greed has been glorified, character has been derided. And in the main, we look in vain to the theatre, or indeed anywhere, to see these events transformed imaginatively into art.

Journalism has done part of the job we should have been doing. But journalism will not last. And journalism cannot mythologise. While the nation still exists, it is there to be imagined. And after that… there is a world elsewhere.

My favourite modern parable was outlined by Neal Gabler in his great book An Empire Of Their Own: How the Jews Invented Hollywood. Gabler describes how these men, Cohn and Fox, Warner and Mayer, Zukor and Laemmle, the sons of Eastern European Jews forced from their countries by anti-semitism, came to Hollywood and created the great dream factories of our age. They were discriminated against by the WASP establishment, who wouldn’t let them into their American country clubs and dining clubs. In response, they founded their own. Meanwhile, they were producing the stories that, round the world and in their own land, would depict, define and eventually stand for, America.

They came to America and thrived, but were not considered a part of America. So they invented their own America, one in which they could be kings. AND that’s the America everyone recognises. It’s the America that in many respects exists. I thought of this recently when the theory emerged that the Celts had never actually existed, that they were a fabrication. All that Celtic art, and literature, and ethos… all made up in order that besieged and insecure peoples of these islands might feel they had some identity, some roots, some tradition.

I got very excited. I hope it’s true. Because, if the Celts never really existed, then we must have made them up. And if all we did was make the Celts up, then we don’t have to be them any more. We don’t, in the sense we have understood it, have to be ourselves any more.

Weightless and free.

Who will we be then?

Whoever we like.

Extract From: Theatre Stuff: Critical Essays on Contemporary Irish Theatre, edited by Eamonn Jordan (2000)

Cross Reference: Rough Magic, Lynne Parker, Celtic Tiger

See Also: Kilroy’s Essay and others in part two of this publication