There’s Nothing Queer Here: The Abbey Theatre and the Problem of Practice

David Cregan

The Irish theatre has historically been described as a literary theatre. As a result, until recent times the art of theatrical technique for performance has rarely been the main point of focus in either drama studies or in production. The consequence of this literary focus has produced a type of theatrical criticism and praxis which has focused more on authorship, narrative-based historical analysis, and naturalism within the Irish tradition, and less on the development of a distinctly Irish method of representation or theatrical aesthetic of practice. By describing itself as a literary theatre the mainstream Irish dramatic tradition has avoided any prolonged attempt to experiment with performance genres, but has alternatively settled largely for the devices of dramatic realism in both acting and production design, and has favoured a decidedly erudite engagement with drama as text.

Although many domestic theatre companies have emerged in recent years in response to the rather conservative theatrical practices of much of the twentieth century in Ireland, the National Theatre, or the Abbey, remains the most internationally visible example of Irish theatrical practice. However, the Abbey has entered a period of serious reconfiguration due to substantial fiscal failures. Although the crisis at the Abbey has been detailed in the media and amongst theatre critics as a financial downfall of mismanagement and poor audience support of Abbey productions, in this paper I suggest that it is, additionally, a crisis of practice; a creative decline rather than simply financial.

The Abbey theatre is an important cultural commodity in the representation of Irish identity both at home and abroad, and remains a foundational identifier in the marketing of the prominence of Irish writers. As a result of its iconic institutional stature and rich historical legacy the work done at the Abbey is, arguably, the highest profile theatrical work being done in modern Ireland. Theatrical experimentation and avant-garde performance practices have rarely been the defining aesthetic at the Abbey. Instead, authenticity and historical accuracy in the reproduction of dramatic artefacts or dramatic historical memories have dominated the artistic values of the Irish National Theatre.

With a principal emphasis on authorship, Irish theatre is quite naturally text-based and cognitively – as opposed to visually – or linguistically driven. The accessibility of theatrical naturalism and the certainty of dramatic realism were the perfect means of expression for a theatre whose original aim was to define and stabilize Irish identity through the nation’s postcolonial period and into its modern future. It is the early political roots of the Abbey that have created its venerable reputation and simultaneously limited its aesthetic vision to the protection of a dramatic legacy over theatrical aesthetic innovation and artistic growth. Commitment to the play as text is partial to an approach to theatre which views theorization as secondary, favouring, instead, authorial intention. At the Abbey this is a precarious artistic choice at a period in its history when the public is weighing its place in the culture of contemporary Ireland.

Drama Studies in the Irish Academy is a rather recent intellectual phenomenon. Instead, the study of theatre has been largely under the auspices of English departments. As a result the essential component of theatre called ‘performance’ has been undertheorized in favour of materialist, historical, or political readings. It is this gap in the analysis of Irish theatre that I am interested in. If performance is the missing link in the progress of Irish theatrical practice at the Abbey, as I would suggest it often is, then it is essential to try and frame the meaning of the word. The concept of performance is interdisciplinary by nature as it addresses a spec-trum of human activity ranging from the overtly theatrical to the everyday banality of social transactions. For the purpose of a theatrical discourse I will define performance as the execution of demonstrable and organized skills that include the interdisciplinary interaction of text or play, actor, design and audience: a democratic relationship of value rather than hierarchical. Performance, therefore, embraces the conflation of human artistic theatrical activity in a more complete fashion than happens with an understanding of theatre primarily as text.

How does the notion of performance put pressure on the literary emphasis of traditional Irish theatre? In dramatic writing characterization is a defining characteristic of the genre. Although character development is based on human characteristics they are two dimensional in text until they are animated through the body of the actor, the ultimate aspiration of a dramatic writer as opposed to an author of fiction. It is the phenomenology of all aspects of theatre that performance most clearly and accurately articulates.

Performance is what makes a play more than a publication and transforms it into a living piece of temporal art. Victor Shklovsky defines art as the following:

Art exists that one may recover the sensation of life; it exists to feel things, to make the stone stoney. The purpose of art is to impart the sensation of things as they are perceived and not as they are known. The technique of art is to make objects ‘unfamiliar,’ to make forms difficult, to increase the difficulty and length of perception because the process of perception is an aesthetic end in itself and must be prolonged. Art is a way of experiencing the artfulness of an object; the object is not important.⁸⁴⁴

The emphasis of art as experience is the defining characteristic of theatre, and the quality of analysis that includes the object of art as created by practitioner and the reception of that work by audiences. For ‘performance is always performance for someone, some audience that recognizes and validates it as performance’.⁸⁴⁵

The academic discourse on theatre as performance embraces the multifaceted, interdisciplinary character of theatre as text, design, and action, and codifies the semantics that unify these diverse practices; this is the work of theatre theorists. ‘Some theorists speculate about the role of theatre in relation to audience, society and state. Others consider how the stage can best represent humankind’s existence on earth, battle with demons, and afterlife in heaven or hell.’⁸⁴⁶ Theory is indeed technique, and in theatre it is a discourse of practice. For example, while deconstruction is a literary theory, which complicates meaning in textual analysis, it is a design aesthetic which alters semiotics in theatre practice to stimulate visual associations otherwise unexplored. This theatrical theoretical discourse is phenomenological in its desire to find a language of action and experience, and does so by acknowledging the social sciences from psychology to political science in order to articulate beyond text and into the fullness of live encounter.

For the purpose of how the queer functions as performance at the Abbey Theatre, I will focus on a revival of Oscar Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest, and will trace what I would describe as a denial of practice and theory in this production. Additionally, I will highlight a crisis of aesthetic and theory in the production, and estimate what that means for the performance of queer identity on the stage of the National Theatre of Ireland.

As the year 2005 drew to an end the Irish Times theatre critic Fintan O’Toole described the Abbey’s year-long misfortunes as ‘annus horribilis’.⁸⁴⁷ Half way through 2005, on 20 July The Irish Times reported that the Abbey was expected to release the results of a commissioned examination of the theatre’s financial records. The Abbey had engaged the accounting firm KPMG in May of 2005 after assessing its projected losses from 2004. KPMG examined the theatre’s accounting records as well as its financial control systems on both the management and the internal governance levels. The Irish Times predicted that KPMG’s report was ‘likely to show that widespread systemic failure, lack of monitoring of expenditure and a reluctance to address the issues are at the root of the financial crisis’.⁸⁴⁸ In the days that followed these revelations the Abbey took centre stage in a national scandal revealing an irresponsibility of management at the highest levels of the country’s National Theatre.

Attempting to contradict the financial accounting jargon of reviewers and critics alike, the then Artistic Director Ben Barnes asserted an artistic prognosis much more in line with the perhaps less obvious fundamentals which underlie the transparent economic crisis at the Abbey:

The truth of the matter is that theatre has become a minority art form unless you devise the most popular programme and shamelessly play to the lowest common denominator. To do this brings down the odium of the media art police but not to do it risks the wrath of boards and finance committees with their focus on the bottom line.⁸⁴⁹

Barnes struggles throughout this article to assert what he calls a ‘new paradigm’⁸⁵⁰ to deal with the crisis of vision between artistry and economics at the Abbey. As artistic director, he published his prospectus in a forty-page document titled Act 2. In Act 2 he made the following suggestions in an effort to revitalize interest in the Abbey as its artistic director:

I argued for the establishment of a research and development studio to interrogate ways of making theatre which do not rely exclusively on the text and the spoken word. I believe that the over-reliance of the Irish theatre on drama of the spoken word will seriously hamper its future development as it seeks to attract young audiences who are multi-media literate but not literate in the sense that people of my generation understand that term. This is not to say that I wanted to throw the baby out with the bath water, as the media hysteria of last September would have it dismantle the Abbey as a writer’s theatre.⁸⁵¹

Barnes describes how his artistic vision and general influence at the Abbey began to diminish more and more as financiers positioned themselves in leadership, ushering in the old tension of art for the sake of art versus commercial theatre based on profit and popularity.

With the dissident voice of Barnes’s struggle added to the dialogue on the past and future of the National Theatre, the idea of art is foregrounded in an otherwise predominantly corporate rather than aesthetic debate. What may appear to be insightful and creative artistic vision does not always translate well into an economic stability based on popular support of audiences and critics alike. And yet, the space between this divide is not one which can be simply dismissed as either an artistic intellectual superiority over the more base understanding of popular entertainment. At the root of the Irish National Theatre is a commitment to producing art which speaks to its constituency, whether positively or negatively, about the condition of Irish life.

Ben Barnes was attempting to move the Abbey Theatre into the new millennium based on an internationalization of theatre practice. This internationalization would focus on the interpretation of text by the director, or production concept, diminishing the Irish esteem for dramatic language in favour of imagery and visuals. Critics of his administration interpreted this move as a threat to the literary focus of the theatre for most of the twentieth century. Consequently, the failure of the theatre in the past year may be overtly associated with financial misgivings, but there is a larger menace to the perceived identity of the National Theatre inherent in an artistic policy which threatens established aesthetics and traditional modes of dramatic representation.

In order to analyse this tension between finance and art, tradition and progress, at the root of the Abbey’s bankruptcy problems, it is illuminating to examine one of the theatre’s major production endeavours during this troubled fiscal year. In its cultural objectives, the Abbey explicitly articulates its imperative to re-imagine its own foundational texts: ‘The guardianship of the Irish repertoire through the reanimation of the wide canon of Irish writing already in existence.’ ‘Reanimation’ at the Abbey has more often been preoccupied with questions of authenticity in the resurrection of dramatic artefacts than it has been in the illumination of latent themes within well known plays which speak to contemporary realities and thus elicit interest from modern audiences.

Interestingly, the production of Oscar Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest stretched the Abbey’s traditional production values through non-traditional, if not entirely original, casting choices. The Importance of Being Earnest opened at the Abbey on 23 July 2005 and ran through September. It was directed by the renowned young Irish director and playwright Conall Morrison. In pre-production the play was widely publicized as an all-male version of what many regard as Oscar Wilde’s most famous play. This production was chosen for the theatre with the hope that its extensive popularity would draw larger audiences and increase revenue for the theatre during this sensitive period in which the public were weighing the viability of such a large national debit.

Ben Barnes had proposed to Morrison the possibility of directing the play, but also encouraged him to take the play beyond its sophisticated comedy and into the issues below the surface of the text that might make it more thought provoking. Being both an author and a director Morrison chose to write a new prologue for the play, one which placed Oscar Wilde himself as a character into the action of the piece. Morrison describes his concept for the piece:

The idea of viewing it through Oscar’s glasses really came to me through years of watching Wilde’s plays … And just feeling that all the plays were, much more so than a lot of dramatic writing, completely perfumed with his personality. Lady Windermere’s Fan and An Ideal Husband are sort of circumscribed by Wilde’s biography, the fact that ultimately society got him, it beat him, and so the great play of his life ended tragically and was, in its own way, a morality tale.⁸⁵²

In exploring the play, Morrison saw the action of Earnest as portentous in its representation of the future fate that Oscar Wilde would experience due to the public revelation of his homosexuality. He continued: ‘It is shot through with ironic foretellings of his own downfall. A play of double lives, about untruths, about unsympathetic fathers. About revelations.’⁸⁵³ Ultimately, Morrison was interested in exploring the sexual politics which he felt were a subtext for the entire play. In order to do so he decided to cast the show entirely with male actors, with the intention of exploring the homosexuality which he believes exists throughout the text and the dramatic relationships it portrays.

With its new prologue in place, the Abbey’s production of The Importance of Being Earnest begins with the entrance of the character of Oscar Wilde into a fashionable Parisian café whose patrons are exclusively male. Morrison’s prologue is written largely in French which gives way eventually to English. The setting is flamboyant and the flirtatious interaction of the male actors onstage was unmistakably the atmosphere of a gay bar. As the character of Wilde sits at a table to enjoy a glass of champagne the various patrons of this exclusive establishment take on the characters of Wilde’s original play. The actor playing Wilde on stage, Alan Stanford, transforms himself into the character of Lady Bracknell by skirting himself with a tablecloth and creating a stylish hat out of a lampshade which initiates a standard of cross-dressing which enables the all male cast to become the female characters which populate the play.

For Morrison, the casting was a technique which would allow the culturally dangerous question of homosexuality written beneath the play to emerge. He asserted, ‘It allows us to examine the performative nature of gender, of gender construction’.⁸⁵⁴ The male actors who played the female parts in this production were fully corseted, wigged, and given heavy make-up in order to transform them respectively into Lady Bracknell, Cecily Cardew, Gwendolen Fairfax, and Miss Prism. Morrison’s desired intention was that this type of untraditional casting would provide additional support for the sophisticated wit and humour which have traditionally defined this play, as well as spark a debate about gender, identity, and cultural issues of the position of the homosexual in society both at the time of Oscar Wilde’s death and now. He describes his artistic interpretation:

I suppose that like Oscar, with this play, I’m hoping to have my cake and eat it. In that I want it to be accessible, funny, popular, and in its own way moving. And I also want, for those who want to decode it a bit further, to think about all the different layers and levels, to have some extra resonances. Because for the gay community, the battle is not won. It’s over a hundred years on from when I’m setting this, and the battle is still not won. Think of the rise in homophobia and homophobic attacks lately, particularly in the North. And if you think of Oscar casting men in these roles, look at Hollywood and how many stars still cannot come out of the closet. It’s far from won. Far from won.⁸⁵⁵

The broad aspirations of comedy and cultural challenge placed a heavy weight on a play so well established in the minds of Irish theatre goers.

Critical response to the play was confused at best, perhaps a reflection of its wide-ranging aspirations in interpretation. There appeared to be little difficulty in grasping and enjoying the comedy of the homocentric pairings of men in drag, and yet, little seemed to be gained in the attempt to draw out the serious nature of homophobia and its deadly consequences for men like Oscar Wilde. Belinda McKeon of The Irish Times wrote of Morrison’s strategy, ‘He tries to make a virtue out of blatancy, and while the lens he holds up to Wilde’s layers often proves a thought-provoking one, its battle with the sheer comedy of Earnest is never quite won.’⁸⁵⁶ This critical remark indicates the success of the comedy but the disappointment of the political message intended.

What was it about the production which made it more frivolous than contentious? After all, it was obvious to audiences that the men on stage were, in fact, men; a reality which had the potential at least to cause discomfort in the expression of romantic love and desire which dominate the narrative of the play. In fact, the very device which promised to make this play thought provoking, the all male cast, was undermined by the director and the designers by the misuse of drag. The culturally contentious effects of male/male relationships which Morrison asserted were latent in the play and crucial to its political stance were, in reality, neutralized by an uncritical use of the performance strategy of cross-dressing. The desired political effect was truncated by an audience base accustomed to drag as a performance practice used in pantomime rather than as a tool to assert injustice towards the gay community. The literal attempts to costume the men playing women, combined with the directorial choice for the men to alter the octave of their voices up to mimic that of a woman, made this potentially challenging concept in theatrical practice merely funny.

The Importance of Being Earnest is written in an extravagant style which foregrounds homocentric thinking in its liberal application of camp to its narrative and action. Characters fall in love instantly only to turn in the next moment into wronged lovers or jealous suitors. Style, social convention, and class are prodded at and blatantly mocked for comic effect. This is certainly at the root of Wilde’s authorial strategy. The gender theoretician David Halperin defines camp and its intent within social or political systems of meaning:

Camp, after all, is a form of cultural resistance that is entirely predicated on a shared consciousness of being inescapably situated within a powerful system of social and sexual meanings. Camp resists the power of that system from within by means of parody, exaggeration, amplification, theatricalization, and literalization of tacit codes of conduct – codes whose very authority derives from their privilege of never having to be explicitly articulated, and thus from their customary immunity to critique.⁸⁵⁷

Susan Sontag describes camp as ‘sensibility – unmistakably modern, a variant of sophistication … esoteric – something of a private code, a badge of identity’ and as a ‘taste [that] tends to develop very unevenly.’⁸⁵⁸ The sophistication of Wilde’s satiric comedy fits into this description of camp nicely, and Morrison’s intention of marking this particular production in order to speak to the politics of homosexuality would, ideally, find a source of artistic inspiration in the performance potential of the politics of camp’s coded sensibility.

Camp is perhaps what Morrison detected as essential to Wilde’s play, for comedy is a favoured genre for camp. And yet, comedy in writing such as Wilde’s is rarely simply implemented to be funny. Esther Newton describes the double meaning of laughter for the camp style of performance: ‘Camp is for fun; the aim of camp is to make an audience laugh. In fact, it is a system of humour … a system of laughing at one’s incongruous position instead of crying.’⁸⁵⁹ When understood in this fashion, Wilde’s writing reveals fear, danger, and injustice. For modern audiences sodomy laws have changed since the time of Oscar Wilde, and so the fate of the honest revelations of sexual identity detected below the surface of this play may be expressed more overtly with only the fear of cultural disapproval, not civic retribution.

Perhaps doing an all male version of the play in which the masculinity of the characters is emphasized, rather than negated as it can be by panto-like drag, would have brought the danger and the anxiety of Wilde’s dramatic vision to the foreground more effectively. And yet, this type of interpretation may have drained the comedy away, an effect which would damage the popular appeal of a piece which held the promise of renewing interest in a bankrupt theatre. Ultimately, it was the lack of ability to focus on a theorized intention for practice that neutralized the potential of such an innovative reanimation. A theoretical engagement with the simple ideas which help critically illuminate Wilde’s writing would have proved a wonderful bridge between the desired political effects of the director and its opposite effects in performance or practice.

A type of dramatic language and practice, which instigates a new hermeneutic for contemporary theatre audiences, has not been produced by the National Theatre. Instead, a random experimentation with under-theorized devices of both practice and writing has caused confusion and limited critical analysis of the practice of the theatre.

The German theorist Wolfgang Iser describes the type of mutual connection between artist and spectator required for basic interpretation or analysis of performance. ‘As we cannot perceive without preconception, each precept, in turn, makes sense to us only if it is processed. For pure perception is quite impossible.’⁸⁶⁰ If theatre is art and performance, with its complex conflation of practices and receptions, then successful theatre cannot be merely perceivable for the artist, but must create the conditions for audience processing. This mutual obligation of artist and spectator suggests an ethic of practice for theatre that cannot simply ignore audience reception.

The missing link in the evolution of theatrical practice at the Abbey is the absence of a clearly articulated discourse surrounding theatre and theory. Although Ireland remains to this day a cultural environment where academics are public figures, academic influence in theatre practice virtually does not exist. Certainly, there are public figures who review theatre and academics who discuss it as literature, but performance analysis is extremely limited and theory is continually held in opposition to the practice of theatre. This was not a problem during an inward-looking era in which the text and authorship were the greatest values of the National Theatre. However, in a period in which the Abbey is articulating its vision as ‘reanimating’ the canon of Irish drama, in conjunction with the aspiration to increase dialogue between Irish and international practitioners, the demand for a thoughtful language of renewed theatrical semiotics is a glaring hole in the centre of the vision of a theatre in trouble. Theory stimulates a theatrical conversation which impacts the pre-production design of a play as well as structuring the language by which the live performance can be analysed and understood by audiences.

In analysing what is self-described as being a literary theatre, Irish scholars have failed to adequately engage the dynamics of theatre as practice in favour of a literary criticism of drama as text. While this intellectual endeavour has created excellent and necessary volumes of historical and materialist analysis, it has done little to promote and encourage the practice of reinterpretation or deconstruction demanded by the engagement of theory with theatre. Theory is often misunderstood as overly complex and exclusively intellectual, but, in fact, theory provides a type of language for theatrical analysis which codifies and organizes new and innovative forms of practice. It would seem an error for the Abbey to have assumed its contemporary audiences and critics would have the interpretive language to enter into an understanding of such a radical reinterpretation of traditional material without a previous and sustained engagement with the principles of deconstruction and theory, as related to drama and performance.

Patrice Pavis elaborates on the significance of the intersection of theory and theatrical practice:

I would not go so far as to claim that the desire to create comes from theory, since every desire is defined by its object, not by its origin; creative desire, like theoretical desire (yes, it does exist), emerges from the wish to situate oneself in the world by assuming a point of view, by taking part in the debate of ideas, but also and above all in the debate of forms. Even if theory does not change institutional structures or artistic forms – which develop slowly as a result of long-range ideological and political changes – it is one of the structuring and destructuring factors, especially in regard to the always suspended sense of what makes sense [sic] in theatre.⁸⁶¹

Clearly, Morrison as a director wanted to participate in the theoretical and ideological debates within culture suggested by Pavis. Theory was already present in the seminal ideas of production and writing, but absent from the larger cultural dialogue which surrounds reception and interpretation of intention. As a result theorized performance is performed for unsuspecting audiences unskilled in ‘making sense’ of postmodern theatrical practice.

Plans for the Abbey theatre include a new location along the docks in Dublin. Cultural observers are speculating that what the theatre needs is less government and more philanthropy. What seems to be essential for the health and development of both the artistry and the finance of the Abbey is the creation of a dialogue which brings together these disparate concerns in such a way as to stimulate a form of theatrical practice which is provocative and interesting enough for theatre-goers who, more and more, have eclectic experiences of both domestic and international entertainment. This type of union would reflect the desire for cultural preservation so important to the Irish theatrical tradition’s search for authenticity and the emerging global sensibilities of contemporary Ireland. The Abbey and theatre in general, offers a space to renegotiate the past and re-envision the future. A dialogue of history, international and interdisciplinary ideas of theatrical theory, indigenous practice, and innovative form could, at the very least, diminish the Abbey’s problem of practice and give hope to a promise of future financial and artistic viability.

Extract From: Deviant Acts: Essays on Queer Performance, edited by David Cregan (2009)

Cross Reference: Abbey Theatre, Ben Barnes, Oscar Wilde, Conal Morrision

See Also: Essays on work of Donoghue, Stembridge and Panti Bliss