The Dublin Theatre Festival: Social and Cultural Contexts

Fintan O’Toole

[This is an edited transcript of a talk given by Fintan O’Toole during the Irish Theatrical Diaspora Conference at the 2007 Dublin Theatre Festival.]

I want to talk about how we can relate the Dublin Theatre Festival both to Irish society over the last fifty years, and to Irish theatre generally. It’s important to start with the way in which the Festival outgrew and to some extent contradicted its own origins. It’s worth putting that into the context of what the grand narrative of the late 1950s was in Ireland, and to consider how the Festival was originally intended to reflect that grand narrative.

That narrative involved facing up to the inadequacies of Irish nationalism as a political and economic construct. Lemass and Whitaker, with their 1958 Programme for Economic Expansion, implicitly admitted that the foundation of the state as an autarchic entity had failed. They did not accept that the foundation of the state itself had failed, but that Ireland could no longer exist as an entity that was self-sufficient, as it had been imagined in the 1930s.

Part of that project necessitated a degree of cultural self-reflection. This involved trying to make the case that the core of the nationalist project was not economic but cultural – that, essentially, what nationalism involved was the maintenance and sustaining of an independent Irish identity. It didn’t really matter what the economics of the situation were; it was no longer important to express our sense of a monolithic and independent Irish cultural identity through an economics of self-sufficiency. The logic of breaking this link between self-sufficiency and national identity was that, in Marxist terms, there was no impact of the base on the superstructure – that economics could change many things, but that it would not change Irish culture. Ireland could move from an economic model that involved high tariff-barriers and was relatively isolated, to a new model that we would now call globalization (though the phrase wasn’t used in that sense at the time) but this change could be made without fundamental cultural consequences. Or, if there were cultural consequences, they would be essentially conservative. The intention was to reanimate the economy in a way that was aimed primarily at ending emigration, and which would (paradoxically) open Ireland up to the world economically, in order to allow it to become a more enclosed space – politically, socially, and culturally.

It’s important to remember that in the 1950s the Catholic Church (for example) was one of the great forces arguing for change, because it saw how the economic consequences of an autarchic philosophy were playing themselves out: we were seeing the deconstruction of the Irish family, of Irish rural society, of the very conservative values that the Church supported itself. This was a cultural moment when it was felt that Ireland could change everything about itself, and the result would be conservative; it could fundamentally alter the way in which its society and economic system were organized, and those changes would only make us culturally more like ourselves.

This idea was I think expressed most vividly by the author of the entire policy, T.K. Whitaker, the great Secretary of the Department of Finance whose Programme for Economic Expansion is one of the most important cultural texts of the 1950s, as well as being one of the most important economic and political texts of the period. Whitaker once wrote about what the new Ireland was going to be like, and what was going to happen in this modernizing process. He described having visited German monasteries that were founded by Irish monks in the early Middle Ages, and seeing in them images of Irish saints and German saints side by side. He thought that this is what the Irish future was going to be like: instead of having some kind of anarchic change in the social structure, we would just add a couple of international Catholic saints to our collection of Irish Catholic saints. The metaphor he applied was that we would have a bit of German efficiency and productivity co-existing with Irish virtues, within the same imagined cultural structures that had been there from the beginning.

The foundation of the Dublin Theatre Festival was a direct response to that impulse; it came out of that mode of imagining how a stable culture could go hand-in-hand with the big economic changes that were taking place at the time. It imagined the Festival as a cultural version of the economic modernization project: you would take a resource (in this case culture) and export it or sell it. Culture would become part of the tourist industry and acquire a productive capacity in economic terms; and it would therefore help to underpin and to some extent demonstrate to the rest of the world the process of economic modernization going on in Ireland at the time. It’s a perfectly comprehensible and, in some ways, quite logical way of thinking about the purpose of the Festival in its early years.

As you know, however, the contradictions of that project were immediately evident. There was The Rose Tattoo case in the first Festival in 1957, and then the cancellation of the 1958 Festival after the clash with Archbishop John Charles McQuaid over the proposed productions of Joyce and O’Casey. Those conflicts had the enormous benefit of demonstrating from the very beginning that the founding ideas of the Festival weren’t feasible: they demonstrated that the Festival was actually promoting a form of Irish culture that did not have the stabilizing conservative capacity that Irish culture was imagined as having.

Irish theatre in the 1950s was itself a conflicted zone. It’s very easy to look back and say that, prior to the 1950s, Irish theatre was very conservative. It certainly was, but the maintenance of that conservatism was a full time job: it was extraordinarily difficult in the 1950s to retain the idea that Irish theatre presented an acceptable version of Ireland to Irish people, never mind to the rest of the world. It’s not accidental that much of the 1950s is characterized, really for the first time, by the importation of the state censorship which applied to written literature into the dramatic sphere. It wasn’t legislative censorship, but self-censorship, and all the sharper, therefore, and more damaging. These are the years when the only badge of merit for an Irish playwright was rejection by the Abbey. When the Abbey was celebrating its centenary in 2004, I half-jokingly urged that they should do a season of plays that they had rejected; it might have been a lot better than the season of plays that they actually did. It is worth reminding ourselves that almost every single interesting play of that period was rejected by the theatre – and the few that somehow did get through, like John Murphy’s The Country Boy (1959), were met with responses which didn’t at all mirror their quality. Brendan Behan was rejected; John B. Keane was rejected; Tom Murphy was rejected. There was an impulse within the Irish theatre that was questioning, critical, and is in some way destructive of the old certainties, but unofficial censorship had been so effective in blocking this impulse that no-one realized that allowing Irish writers to put on their plays would give it release.

A very simple example is Tom Murphy’s great play A Whistle in the Dark (1961). Ernest Blythe’s rejection of that play for the Abbey was quite vicious: instead of the standard letter of rejection from the theatre, he sent one saying ‘there are no such people in Ireland as are represented in your play’. Implicit in the period of the Festival’s beginning was a conflict between an official version of what Ireland was supposed to be, and what you were actually going to see if you put these plays on. In hindsight, therefore, it seems inevitable that the initial project of the Festival – as a nice little earner, a showcase for the rest of the world of how civilized we were – was unlikely to be fulfilled. The influence of the Festival was evident not just in terms of how it presented a wider set of theatrical images to an Irish audience. It also put pressure on the Irish state by the almost accidental validation of a set of energies which were not intended to be validated.

It would have been rather pleasant for official Ireland if the 1958 Festival non-event had become permanent, if the implicit tensions had become so obvious that people said that they should cancel the Festival entirely: all it was going to involve was making a show of ourselves ‘in front of the foreigners’. That, in fact, is what actually happened in 1958: the 1958 Festival was arguably one of the most brilliant Dublin Theatre Festivals ever staged, since it said an enormous amount about Irish culture, Irish society, and Ireland’s relationship to the rest of the world. It was not accidental, for example, that one of the spurs for the state’s action against the Pike’s production of The Rose Tattoo was a review in the London Times which stated in passing that a condom had been dropped on stage. If this had appeared in TheIrish Times, they perhaps wouldn’t have bothered objecting: the fact that this was internationally recorded as happening in Dublin may well have been one of the factors behind the case.

You could say, therefore, that the Festival was by force of circumstance addressing itself both inwards and outwards, and both upwards and downwards. It was addressing theatre audiences (as of course it was supposed to do), but it was also implicitly addressing the state, forcing the state to acknowledge that there was a cultural space in which unpleasant things could happen and could be discussed, and in which unpleasant images could be shown. Understanding that helps you to understand why historically the Festival had an impact that was disproportionate to its economic strength. In international terms it was a relatively small and very poorly resourced Festival, making the importance it acquired all the more remarkable.

One of the major effects of the Festival was gradually to alter the programming of the main Irish theatres. The need to put on a play for the Festival had an impact on what the mainstream Irish theatres would do each year. So it is in the Festival that we first hear the voice of Hugh Leonard, beginning to become very adventurous in what he’s doing theatrically with Stephen D. (1962) – a kind of response in itself to the fact that a previous adaptation of Joyce had brought the 1958 Festival down. You find Friel’s Philadelphia, Here I Come! in 1964, with its fundamental questioning of some of the main co-ordinates of Irish culture: space, exile, family, generational relationships, even the Irish personality. Friel’s play acts out the idea that there is such a severe division between our public image of ourselves and our private realities, that you have to have two people playing one young Irish person. This was itself a profound statement of the tensions in the culture between what people knew to be true and what was acceptable to say, between the face that was shown to the rest of the world and the face that we show to ourselves. The exploration of sexuality and of family tensions was also evident in Eugene McCabe’s The King of the Castle (1964). Then there was Thomas Kilroy’s The Death and Resurrection of Mr Roche in 1968. Frank McGuinness expressed it best when he said that play isn’t about homosexuality but heterosexuality: that by putting a gay man on stage you problematize Irish heterosexuality. That play had a fundamental power, using the idea of difference as the grit for an exploration of the psychological and cultural tensions within that group of Irish men.

Tom Murphy’s Famine was also significant. It was the first time Murphy had an Irish premiere since the one-act amateur play On the Outside appeared in 1959, and he returned from London to Ireland in 1968 in the context of the Festival. As I have said, his previous great play A Whistle in the Dark had been condemned by Blythe not only because it misrepresented people living in Ireland – the Irish of the play, of course, aren’t living in Ireland but in Coventry – but also because of its treatment of violence. Official culture responded to it as a play that let us down in front of the foreigners: it was being performed in the West End, and was portraying us as a bunch of savages. This is what makes the return of Murphy with Famine in the 1968 Festival so important.

Famine itself is an extraordinary representation of the power of international theatrical modes to explore fundamental historical issues within the Irish psyche and within the Irish culture that emerged from the Famine. Famine is not a play about the Great Famine, although it’s set in that period – it’s a play about what the experience of going through a famine does to the collective psychology of a nation, about why we are we so afraid, why we are so ungenerous as a consequence. What’s striking about Famine when you look at it now is that it embodies in both form and content the idea that Irish theatre is an international entity. Famine is the first Irish play to take up from Eugene O’Neill’s Long Day’s Journey into Night the question of what happens to people when they go through hunger. At the same time, in its form it’s using a Brechtian expressionist mode to explore not just the surface of Irish society, but the very deepest wellsprings of what is wrong with us. Thus Famine embodied a very different version of what the Festival could achieve. Instead of the original impulse to show the world how wonderful we were, it presented a play that in the most intimate way used the international mode to explore the very deepest intimacies of the Irish psyche – putting a very different kind of German saint side by side with our Irish saints. So by the late 1960s, the remit of the Festival had reversed itself completely.

I would suggest that this is a useful way of looking at how the Festival operated, even though it is obviously very crude and leaves out all sorts of distinctions. Rather than the Festival being a showcase for Irish theatre – or just some kind of caesura, a big punctuating event in the theatre going on all the time with some international stuff thrown in to make it even bigger – something much more profound was happening. Irish theatre, Irish audiences, and certainly Irish playwrights, were seeing the Festival itself as a context in which you could do more, in which you could present work raising fundamental questions not just about Irish culture as it had been, but also about an emerging Irish cultural project. It’s striking that within a decade of the foundation of the Festival, the important new Irish plays being produced in it are subverting the idea with which the Festival started – that you could change everything but not affect the underlying culture. What the Festival is increasingly saying is that the culture itself is the problem – who we are, who we think we are, how our official versions of ourselves relate to the everyday lives of real Irish people – these questions not only will be affected by change, but they need to be affected by change.

This represents a tension within the grand narrative of Irish modernization. On the one side, there is that idea that economic change is possible without cultural change, and on the other side there are the playwrights, declaring in effect that all other change is immaterial if cultural changes do not happen. You can change your economic circumstances, they are saying, but unless you undertake a cultural or even a spiritual process of engagement with the secrets of Irish society – its internal tensions, the lies we tell ourselves – then you are missing the point of change. There’s a contest between a political version of modernization and a cultural version of modernization, the legislators and the ‘unacknowledged legislators’ in direct conflict. The political narrative continues to maintain that everything is fine: it’s getting better, we’ve never had it so good, there’s a boom going on. At the same time, there is a cultural narrative heavily concentrated on theatre – not exclusive to theatre but finding its sharpest expression in that medium – claiming the space of modernization for the writers, because the tensions in the system have opened up an empty space to be filled by the dramatization of fundamental personal conflicts.

The Festival work of Murphy, Kilroy, Friel, and many others at this time significantly explores the idea of sexuality as basic to Irish society. Running through many of these plays is a very direct attack on the tenet of the Constitution by which the fundamental unit of Irish society is the nuclear family. This idea is challenged from many angles and from different voices in Irish theatre in the 1960s by a desire to look closely at what the Irish family is and how it operates. In fact, you almost never find a conventional Irish family in any of these plays. What you get instead are extraordinary presentations of the domestic space being invaded by images of death, hatred, and violence, with all sorts of other undercurrents. Philadelphia, Here I Come! is one example in which the Irish mother – the core of the entire Irish system – just disappears. Running all through that work is a sense that the family space is at once an intimate personal space and a political space.

Such a perception relates to a new international understanding, signalled in the events of 1968 and the emergence of feminism, that the personal is political. In the Irish case that slogan is literally true, because the official version of the society is founded specifically on notions about personal behaviour, about gender roles, about the way in which the family operates as a building block for Irish society. Consequently playwrights are in a position to argue that the family comprehends everything. If you are dealing with economics, you have to deal with the family: emigration means that you cannot have your nuclear family because its nucleus is splitting, and its electrons buzzing off around the world. Sexuality itself is something that we have (ironically) attempted to keep away from the family, as though the family could be a non-sexual unit. The whole area of sexual tension and sexual ignorance underlying Irish life, which has never been properly acknowledged can only express itself in violence and conflict. This too is an underlying theme running through so much of the Festival work of the 1960s.

In the 1970s and 1980s, the international dimension of the Festival becomes more important as a direct result of the questions raised by 1960s Irish theatre. The focus on sexuality, the family, and gender means that formal questions in the theatre are no longer just formal questions. If personal issues are not just personal but are also about politics and society, so as the Festival develops, the questions about sexuality are no longer just national questions, and it’s no longer possible to confine them within the terms of the well-made naturalistic Irish play. Hence an awareness of the body raises formal questions about theatre and theatricality, about how people move and express themselves on stage.

By the early 1980s, the single dominant image in Irish public and political life has become the body. Two major psychodramas are being played out in Ireland at this time. The first is the H-Block hunger strikes, where excrement is a weapon, where starvation of the body itself is a political weapon and a political battleground, where the whole idea of the use of the body to alter political reality has gone far beyond deconstructionist texts and has become the site for terrible political tensions in both parts of Ireland, in Britain, and echoing throughout the world. Simultaneously running is the other great psychodrama about abortion. In the run-up to the ‘pro-life’ referendum designed to introduce a clause proscribing abortion into the Irish Constitution, we have the emergence of a political discourse which is not dominated by economics and trade unions and government decisions, but by fallopian tubes, ectopic pregnancies, embryos, and zygotes. Specific aspects of reproduction, the body, and the control of the body, have become part of the mainstream political discourse.

It could therefore be argued that, as art so often does, the Irish theatre of the 1960s prefigured the way physicality itself became a major battleground for a whole set of tensions in Irish history concerned with the control of Irish women and the idea of what it was to be Irish. Even though they might have seemed to be about very different things, the hunger strikes and the abortion referendum were linked very closely in being attempts to assert an Irish identity. The hunger strikes were of course part of a larger narrative about Irish nationalism and Irish separatism, but it’s important to remember that a key part of the abortion argument was also about our being different, distinguishing ourselves from other people, maintaining that we did not have to follow the lead of the rest of the world. The Pope’s visit in 1979 provided the impetus for an attempted return to the 1950s, an effort to pretend that the forces unleashed by the globalizing project of Whitaker and Lemass were still containable, and that we could still, as in the 1950s, assert a distinctive, separate, and autarchic Irish identity.

You could say, then, that in the late 1970s and early 1980s Festival, we were almost back to where we had started. We were back with questions about whether there was a culturally distinctive Irish identity that could support a culturally distinctive Ireland, standing out against cosmopolitanism, internationalism, and globalization, the forces seen to be extraneous to Ireland. In that context, one of the reasons for the power of international theatre in Ireland was its language of the body, a language that had not been fully explored by the Irish literary theatre of the 1960s.

The production style in Irish theatre by the time that I was starting to go to the theatre in the 1970s was still highly conservative. The actor and the theatrical space were still essentially there to allow us to hear the words of the playwright; the production was acted out in the service of the content of the play. International styles brought in the sense that theatre actually does two things, often at the same time. It could give a unified sense of what’s happening on stage, but it could give complex and contradictory senses of the one event, simultaneously verbal and visual. One might be to do with language and the other with the body, but the way the two interacted was very potent.

Clearly it wasn’t only the Festival that created this in Irish theatre. If you look at the great Garry Hynes Druid productions of The Playboy of the Western World from the late 1970s and early 1980s, their shocking physicality was organic. It didn’t come directly from the experience of the Festival or of international productions; it picked up on influences already present in the culture. I think that when influence happens, it occurs because it relates to something that’s emergent anyway. You never really have an influence if what you’re doing is completely unconnected to the thing that you’re trying to influence: you have an influence when you help to articulate or catalyze forces that are already present. That’s what the Festival did in the early 1980s.

1981 was the year that I became aware of this. With the visit of companies like the Wroclaw Contemporary Theatre from Poland (who came to the Festival in 1981 and 1982) you could see Irish audiences being profoundly disturbed by what they were seeing, but profoundly engaged too. They realized that theatre could function in a largely non-verbal and physical way, using image, movement, and light. This has a profound effect on audiences. I remember strongly at the time that practitioners were also talking about these developments: you could actually overhear conversations between actors and director about how interesting these productions were. There was a real sense of a connection being made.

That connection we can now see was influential in terms of theatre form, but it also had deeper resonances for the culture itself. In terms of the development of theatrical form in Ireland, it’s significant that quite a number of our actors started going off to study with Marcel Marceau and Jacques Lecoq: that was a very conscious and deliberate response to seeing their techniques at the Festival. There was also a trickledown effect, with Irish productions showing greater attention to movement, greater awareness of space. Over the 1980s, Irish audiences became less tolerant of productions that didn’t show that attention; so the visual awareness of Irish audiences was changing too. This appeared very directly with Tom Mac Intyre’s experiments with Patrick Mason and Tom Hickey at the Peacock throughout those years, showed the possibility of a very different kind of theatre. Making those shows was a collaboration between Mason and Mac Intyre that used Tom Hickey’s body as the text for what they were doing. Some of those productions were successful; some weren’t; but more important than whether they worked individually was the fact that they were making a statement about how the body could be used.

One of the interesting things about this was that, paradoxically, shows coming out of the Festival began to relate themselves back to some of the misconceptions from the 1950s – and began to make some of those misconceptions seem oddly true. For instance, the idea that you could change everything about Ireland but preserve its culture had been blown away successfully throughout the 1960s and 1970s. What came back in the 1980s was a sense that, although you couldn’t preserve the culture, you can attempt to ask what it was, to understand it, and to start to engage with the body of inherited Irish culture in theatrical terms. So over this period we started to see re-engagement with classic Irish texts. There was the re-evaluation of Synge: people said we can actually start ‘doing Synge’ now. There were also James Flannery’s Yeats Festivals at the Peacock. They had mixed levels of success, but they at least tried to use techniques and ideas from an international context for plays from our own national canon that nobody had succeeded in staging in Ireland. This was also true for the Mac Intyre projects, most of which used traditional texts by writers like Patrick Kavanagh and Jonathan Swift. So there was a re-engagement with the literary tradition of Irish identity. To some extent, one paradoxical echo of the 1950s could be heard, because there was a sense in which the more internationalized Irish theatre was becoming, the better it was able to be an Irish theatre.

There is a further paradox in this view of the way the Festival has functioned: it has in fact been so successful that some of its success is now invisible. In the first place, the notion that economic change can happen without cultural change is one that we no longer would even consider to be serious. Secondly, physicality and non-verbal communication have become so much part of the mainstream in theatre, that we no longer see the development of these techniques as a function of international influence. Finally, we might say that these forces have been so profoundly influential and successful that we’re faced with a reversal of the question from the 1950s. The question then was whether we could have massive economic change and massive engagement with globalization without that having any cultural effect. The question now is this: can we have any cultural identity at all, in what is now the most globalized society in the world?

Extract From: Interactions: Dublin Theatre Festival 1957-2007, edited by Nicholas Grene and Patrick Lonergan with Lilian Chambers (2008)

Cross Reference: Fintan O’Toole’s afterword from Critical Moments

See Also: Dublin Theatre Festival and references to Festivalisation