Irish Drama

written and compiled by Jeffrey Dawson

Introduction

This unit looks at the contextualising of Irish Drama from Synge to McDonagh. It encourages students to explore theoretically and experientially the theatrical forms and dramatic techniques that some prominent Irish playwrights have used to represent Ireland on stage.

Ireland
Context
History
Political context
Cultural context
Cultural identity
Social context
Northern Ireland

Dramatic history
Earlier theatre
The Fay Bothers
Edward Martyn
George Moore
Sean O’Casey
John Millington Synge
Brendan Behan

Features of Irish drama

The prescribed texts
The Playboy of the Western World
The Plough and the Stars
Dancing at Lughnasa
The Beauty Queen of Leenane

The playwrights
J.M.Synge
Sean O’Casey
Brian Friel
Martin McDonagh

Theatre companies

Activities
Background study
The language
Script interpretation
Improvisation\playbuilding

Extension activities
Additional activities
Bibliography

Ireland

Context

The historical, political, social and cultural contexts of Ireland are an important part of the process of exploring Irish Theatre. They are an immediate and accessible way to document observations and ideas about Irish Theatre.

History

England’s role in Ireland prior to this had dated back to the 12^th century conquest of Ireland. Henry VIII took the title of “King of Ireland” in 1541. England’s role in Ireland has been contested ever since.

When Charles II assumed the English throne in 1660, any catholics who had lost their property through eviction were not able to reclaim it. James II followed on the throne, but fled to Ireland when William of Orange and his wife, protestant Mary Stuart, were invited by Parliament to assume the throne.

William’s reign initiated a lengthy period of misery for Irish Catholics.

They were:

• evicted from their property
• restricted from accessing education,
• unable to bear arms,
• unable to pass land to their heirs
• unable to vote.

Some of these laws were less rigorously enforced in the late 18^th century, providing the context for political upheaval at that time.

Political context

The Act of Union of 1809 brought Ireland into the United Kingdom. Although this shattered Ireland’s aspirations as an independent nation, many activists kept working towards independence throughout the 19^th century.

In the later 19^thcentury, a greater awareness of nationalism was followed by the movement toward Irish rule led by politicians such as Charles Stewart Parnell.

This led to the aborted Easter revolution of 1916, which was the forerunner of the election of Eamonn De Valera as President of Sinn Fein, which was an Irish Nationalist movement, founded in 1906. It aimed at the revival of the Irish language and independence from England. In The Irish language Sinn Fein means ‘Ourselves Alone’.

De Valera campaigned for an independent Ireland, rather than Ireland being a province of Great Britain. In 1922, Sinn Fein succeeded in gaining independence for most of the Irish nation, but the counties of Northern Ireland remained a province of Great Britain.

There have been many periods of discontent between the Republic of Ireland and Northern Ireland, and between Ireland and the U.K. This tension came to a head in the late 1960s through the sharp contrasts between the rich and the poor, the powerful and the oppressed and the catholics and the protestant Anglo-Irish. These divisions were also reflected in the theatre of the time. Throughout the sixties, catholic and protestant groups rioted in the northern cities of Derry, Belfast and Londonderry, and British soldiers were called in to protect the protestant marchers.

Cultural context

Along with the quest for Nationalism, came the growth of Irish cultural identity, such as the foundation of the Irish Literary Theatre (later the Abbey Theatre) by the poet W.B. Yeats and the playwrights J.M. Synge and Lady Augusta Gregory in Dublin in 1899. The aim of this company was to “build up a Celtic and Irish school of dramatic literature.” Until 1930, the Abbey succeeded in producing a diverse array of plays on national subjects, such as peasant dramas like Synge’s Playboy of the Western World, or naturalistic plays of urban working class life, like O’Casey’s The Plough and the Stars.

The Abbey Theatre fostered an Irish performance style and the context for a national theatre company as well. It remains a leading theatre company in the Republic of Ireland and several leading Irish playwrights have had important productions of their work there, including Tom Murphy, Frank McGuiness and Marina Carr.

Cultural identity

In the last decades of the twentieth century, there was a stronger move to an Irish “identity,”not only in Ireland, but in the countries where Irish emigrants had settled and made their mark. “Visiting Ireland” became an aim of many Americans, Canadians and Australians who had begun to value their Irish roots, and there are few major cities in these countries that don’t have Irish “pubs” with Irish music and entertainment.

Irish musicians, writers and film makers began a proud new cultural tradition of local material which spread across the world. For example, in the 1980s, the Irish band U2’s song, Sunday, Bloody Sunday, represented the riots of 1972 that resulted in thirteen dead. This was a major turning point in the history of modern Irish troubles, escalating the conflict into a civil war, driving many young men into the ranks of the Irish Republican Army (the IRA) and fuelling a 25-year cycle of violence. (The film Bloody Sunday, directed by Paul Greengrass, released in 2002, deals with this event, and is highly recommended). Other movies such as In the Name of the Father and Michael Collins are also excellent representations of these troubled times.

Musicians such as Christy Moore, Luka Bloom, Enya, U2, The Corrs, The Furies, Sinead O'Connor, Van Morrison, The Chieftains, U2 and Clannad have taken Irish music – and her culture and history all over the world. Images of Irish society have also been presented by popular writers such as Maeve Binchy, Sheila O’Flannigan and Frank McCourt in his books Angela’s Ashes and ‘Tis. Films about Ireland have also presented aspects of Irish society and people, and their sense of humour – for example Ryan’s Daughter, Circle of Friends, Waking Ned Devine, Angela’s Ashes and, more recently Sisters of Magdalene. Television programs such as Ballykissangel have shown aspects of Irish rural life, and become so popular overseas in countries such as Australia and America that it has brought a whole new tourist attraction to The Vale of Avon (in County Wicklow, south of Dublin) where the series was filmed.

Social context

Influences

1. It is important to remember that the Catholic church has played a very important role in shaping Ireland and the Irish people. It has impacted on family life, local affairs and government policies on such things as divorce and abortion. In the past many families had sons who were priests or missionaries, such as Father Jack in Dancing at Lughnasa.
2. Many Irish people migrated to England and America during the Potato Famine, 1845–1849. The potato blight hit Irish farms and destroyed crops right across the country, leaving starving families unable to pay rent and evicted from their homes. Many died of starvation and disease, while others crowded on to ships to try and find a life in America or Canada. Many died at sea of fevers contracted in the crowded unhygienic conditions.
   Try a search of Potato Famine to find articles that explain this tragic time.
   Most Irish families have relatives in England, America and Australia. Reference to the need to leave Ireland to find work is made in the plays set for study.
3. The Irish are a nation of talkers and story tellers. Legends, poetry, stories, jokes, stand up comedy are part of the way of life, and this is evident in some of the characters in the plays set for study.
4. The influence of the family is important in Ireland. Family ties and family occasions are remembered and celebrated. People look after their own, especially in rural areas.
5. National identity: One of the most difficult aspects of the situation in Ireland is the challenge to ideas of national identity. For example, although Northern Ireland is physically part of Ireland, many of its citizens, (even those who do not wish to be part of the United Kingdom), feel distinct from the Republic of Ireland. Also the long traditions of British rule have instilled a sense of identification with England, which is strengthened for some by the pro-Irish violence of the IRA.

Northern Ireland (Ulster)

The history of Northern Ireland, since the division of the two countries, and continuing to this very day, is the history of this conflict. There have been hunger strikes by catholic prisoners who wanted the rights in the Maze prison as political prisoners, rather than being treated as criminals; the increasing power of Ian Paisley and the Protestant paramilitary forces and Gerry Adam’s and Sinn Fein’s attempts to bargain for peace. Violent outbreaks have continued to erupt since 1994 at times.

Hence the theatre of Northern Ireland has had to work around a mixed sense of nationalism. A troupe called The Field Day Theatre Company was formed in 1980 by playwright Brian Friel, poets Seamus Heaney and Tom Paulin and actor Stephen Rea, to develop a new theatre with the express intention to foster new drama from the North and to identify the uniqueness of the region. Plays like Friel’s Translations set out to communicate a distinctive Northern Irish culture to the world. Field Day continues to publish Irish literature and essays, but no longer produces plays.

Dramatic history

Earlier theatre

Although Ulster and Dublin had had theatres of their own before this time, they had been programmed with an English repertoire and often the only Irish characters featured were stereotypes, such as comic and drunken fools or ‘Stage Irishmen.’

1630-1897

Although there was apparently some liturgical drama in Ireland during the Middle Ages, there are few records of any dramatic performances before the 17^th century.

The first public theatre in Dublin was built in 1637 by John Ogilby, a Scottish dancing master. He brought over from London productions such as the historical Irish play, St Patrick for Ireland by James Shirley. The theatre was closed, however, when Oliver Cromwell was in power in Britain.

In 1661, after the Restoration, Ogilby obtained a Royal grant to build the Smock Alley (or Orange Street) Theatre. This became the third most popular theatre in Britain, after Drury Lane and Covent Garden. Other theatres in Dublin were the Crow Street Theatre (1758), the Theatre Royal (1821), the Queen’s Theatre (1844) and the Gaiety (1871). The Theatre Royal burnt down, but was rebuilt in 1897. ‘Sister’ theatres of some of these were built in Cork.

Plays performed at these theatres came mostly from the English stages of the time. Irish playwrights, went to England, made their names there, and English productions of their works were brought to Ireland. Playwrights over this period included George Farquhar (The Recruiting Officer), Richard Sheridan (The Rivals, The School for Scandal), Oliver Goldsmith (She Stoops to Conquer), Oscar Wilde (The Importance of Being Ernest, The Ideal Husband) and George Bernard Shaw (Pygmalion, Saint Joan, Man and Superman).

1897–1950

Indigenous Irish theatre began with the Irish Dramatic Movement initiated by Lady Isabella Augusta Gregory and the poet and playwright, W.B.Yeats.

Lady Gregory was a wealthy landowner and playwright, who put much of her time and energy behind the establishment of the Irish theatre movement and the Abbey Theatre, which was opened in 1904.

Funds to open the theatre were supplied by Miss Horniman, who managed the theatre from 1904 and also gave the theatre an annual subsidy until 1910. (She withdrew the subsidy in 1910 because Yeats refused to close the theatre during the funeral of Edward VII!)

Hugh Hunt (who was also a director of the Elizabethan Theatre Trust in Sydney from 1955 to 1960), was a director of the Abbey Theatre from 1935 o0 1938, and 1969 to 1971.

William Butler Yeats (1865-1939), Irish poet and playwright, was awarded the Noble Prize for Literature in 1923. He was a director of the Abbey Theatre from 1904 until his death, and as such did much to ensure the integrity of the emerging national drama, despite political and financial pressures. He encouraged new playwrights (see below) as well as writing works of his own on historical and national themes, such as the legends of Celtic Ireland. His works include The Land of Heart’s Desire, Cathleen ni Houlihan, The Pot of Broth, The King’s Threshold, The Dreaming of the Bones, Calvary, The Player Queen, Purgatory and his last play, The Death of Cuchlain (one of the legends of Celtic Ireland).

The ideals of the Movement were fervently national. It aimed for Irish Theatre to be independent of European theatre ‘fashions’ and box office and popular control and its material to be native and poetic.

Playwrights drew upon Irish legends and history and contemporary Irish life.

Direction, sets and acting in the Abbey Theatre were also regarded as revolutionary and this established a new and continuing tradition. Although designers had to be economical, they were ‘highly intelligent artists and craftsmen, whose designs resulted in a beauty and simplicity little known elsewhere at the time’. (page 419)

Other important people in this movement included:

The Fay Brothers

Frank Fay (1870–1931) and William George Fay (1872–1947) were Irish actors who formed the Ormonde Dramatic Society in 1892, playing in Dublin and touring the surrounding countryside in a repertory of sketches, short plays and farces. Fellow actors included Sara Allgood, and Dudley Digges who were also associated with them in The Irish National Dramatic Society in 1898 and went with them to the Abbey Theatre in 1904.

Frank was interested in verse speaking and was responsible for the company’s speech training, while W.G. acted as stage manager. Both brothers appeared in most of the plays produced at the Abbey at this time, W.G. playing Christy Mahon in Synge’s The Playboy of the Western World, and Frank his rival Shawn Keogh,in its premiere in 1907.

In 1908, after a disagreement with Yeats and Lady Gregory over artistic control, both brothers left the Abbey and went to America, where they directed a repertory of Irish plays, W.G. making his first appearance on Broadway in Yeat’s The Pot of Broth.

Back in London in 1914, W.G. was seen in several new plays and directed at the Nottingham and Birmingham Rep Theatres. Among his later parts were The Tramp in the revival of Synge’s In the Shadow of the Glen in 1928, and Mr Cassidy in Bridie’s Storm in a Teacup, which he also directed.

Frank returned to Dublin in 1918 and became a teacher of elocution, returning briefly to the Abbey in 1925 to play in a revival of Yeat’s The Hour Glass.

Edward Martyn (1859–1923)

Martyn was a dramatist who was part of the Irish Literary Theatre, which, as its second production in 1899, staged his play The Heather in the Field. Maeve, a psychological drama on the clash between England and Ireland, was staged in 1900, as was The Bearing of the Bough, an adaptation by George Moore and W.B. Yeats of his play The Tale of the Town.

All of his other plays were published, but none were produced.

He was president of the Theatre of Ireland, formed by a splinter group of the Abbey Theatre company in 1905, and his last active participation in theatre was in 1914, when he founded the Irish Theatre in Hardwicke, Street, Dublin.

George Moore (1852-1933)

Moore was a novelist and dramatist who spent many years in London and Paris. His play, The Strike at Arlingford, was produced in London in 1893. When plans were started in 1899 for the production of the first two plays by the Irish Literary Theatre, Yeat’s and Lady Gregory’s The Countess Cathleen and Martyn’s The Heather Field, Moore returned to Ireland to help to recruit the players and direct the rehearsals.

He collaborated with Yeats to write the adaptation of The Bending Bough (see above) and Diarmuid and Grania,(the first play to be taken directly from a Celtic legend), which was produced in 1901, but despite an excellent cast and music by Elgar, was not a success.

Sean O’Casey (1880–1964)

O’Casey was a playwright whose best plays were set in the slums of the Dublin of his time. They, and their characters, also show how intimately he knew the people of whom he wrote and the political events of 1912–1922, from which he drew his material–rebellion against English rule, fighting on the streets between Irish rebels and English soldiers and harsh treatment of political prisoners.

His treatment of his themes closely related to that of the Irish realists – grim, clear-cut, satirical, but the comedy of the satire points directly to tragic implications.

His first play, produced at the Abbey Theatre in 1923 (London 1927, New York 1932) was The Shadow of the Gunman, a melodramatic story of the war in 1920 and its effects on the lives of a group of people in a Dublin tenement house.

Juno and the Paycock,1924 (London 1926, New York 1927) was a moving, realistic tragedy set in 1922.

The Plough and the Stars (Dublin and London 1926, New York 1927), a play on the Easter Rising in 1916, caused a riot at the Abbey Theatre when it was first performed there. The consequent refusal of the Abbey to produce his next play The Silver Tassie (London and NY 1929) led O’Casey to leave Ireland and settle in England.

His next play, Within the Gates, (London and New York 1934) was set in England and showed further influence in his work of the Expressionistic style evident in The Silver Tassie.

In 1943, O’Casey had his first Irish premiere for seventeen years with Purple Dust (New York 1955, London 1962) and Red Roses for Me (London 1946, New York 1955). In these plays, and in Oak Leaves and Lavender (1947), he again used symbolist and expressionist devices to reinforce ideals expressed by their Marxist heroes. Cock-a-Doodle Dandy (London 1949, New York 1958) sparked new interest in his plays.

In his later plays:The Bishop’s Bonfire (1955), The Drums of Father Ned (1958), Behind the Green Curtains (1961) and Figaro in the Night (1961), O’Casey contrasts the repressive forces of the clergy and the moneyed classes in modern Ireland with the yearnings of Irish youth for artistic, sexual and political freedom.

O’Casey also wrote one-act plays, which are included in his collected plays.

Many incidents in his plays are drawn from personal experiences which are recorded in the six volumes of his autobiography, Mirror in my house.

John Millington Synge (1871–1909)

Synge was also a leading figure in the Irish theatre. His six completed plays led some to describe him as the greatest modern Irish dramatist. His control of structure, whether in tragedy or comedy, his revelation of the characters and thought processes of a subtle and imaginative Irish peasantry, his language and his imagery, are rich, alive and essentially poetic.

An early play, When the Moon has Set (1901) was rejected by Yeats and Lady Gregory, but was found among his papers after his death and published with his other works in the 1960s.

The first of his plays to be performed by the Irish National Dramatic Society was In the Shadow of the Glen (1903), the first of a series of grave, original studies of Irish thought and characters which were not appreciated by some of his early audiences.

Riders to the Sea, produced by the Abbey Theatre in 1904, was a one-act tragedy whose brevity, intensity and structure make it one of the best known modern short plays. It was used as the libretto of an opera by Vaughn Williams in 1937.

A third play, The Tinker’s Wedding, was begun in 1902 but revised many times before its publication in 1908 and first production in London in 1909, because it was considered too dangerous for an Abbey audience. Its comedy, drawn from the life of the Irish roads, is more jovial than any other of his plays.

Synge is probably best known for his play The Playboy of the Western World (1907), a comedy of “bitter, ironic, yet imaginative realism”. The unsparing, though sympathetic portraiture in this play, caused riots at the Abbey Theatre on its first production, and disturbances led by Irish patriots when it was first produced in New York in 1911.

Other works include The Well of the Saints (1905) and the unfinished Deidre of the Sorrows, in which Synge turned back to the ancient legends of Ireland.

Brendan Behan (1923–1964)

Plays: The Quare Fellow (1956) and The Hostage (1958)

Autobiography: Borstal Boy

Activity: Do a web searchto read about the difficult life and work of this cult figure in Irish literature, some of whose famous sayings include:

It’s a queer world, God knows, but the best we have to be going on with.
If it was raining soup, the Irish would go out with forks.
I saw a sign that said ‘Drink Canada Dry’ and I’ve just started.
I am a daylight atheist.

Features of Irish Drama

Australian playwright Louis Nowra recently declared in an analysis of contemporary drama that, “Despite their shared history, Irish drama is radically different from British drama. Samuel Beckett’s plays are quintessentially Irish. There is a grim, mutual acknowledgement from the playwrights and Irish audiences of their shared innate pessimism, the dispiriting prospects for improving relationships between men and women, and an even bleaker attitude towards the future.”

Nowra went on to say that (his) “idea of hell in theatre is a season of Irish plays”.

(Reference: "Just act normal" in Spectrum in The Sydney Morning Herald Weekend edition, 8-9 February 2003, page4)

This “bleak” opinion of Irish Drama, does not take into account the many other features of that country’s theatrical output, such as:

• families and honest banter between family members
• a bleak, often sorrowful and nihilistic landscape
• idiosyncratic rhythms of speech, different dialects and unusual sentence construction
• honest, good, entertaining humour
• naturalistic settings, such as a kitchen, often in an impoverished household or a bar
• a general fondness for alcohol
• real action e.g. baking soda bread, making tea, putting away shopping, pulling a beer …
• dysfunctional families
• a strong tradition of storytelling
• a ghost scene
• lively music, poetry and/or dance, even the music of Irish speech patterns
• an element of magic
• literary merit
• intertextuality with other Irish texts, e.g. McDonagh revisits Synge
• elements of the potboiler, employing simple, linear plotting
• representations of family breakdowns
• Unionism and other divisions in political and religious beliefs
• memory
• love
• the courage of one’s convictions
• wit and pain
• the dream to break away from the bitter tedium of daily life, a chance for a new beginning.

Oral reflection activity

Using the above list of features debate Nowra’s view of Irish theatre.

The prescribed texts

The Playboy of the Western World, J.M. Synge(1907)

J.M. Synge was a truthful, earnest man with a romantic view of peasant life. He set The Playboy of the Western World near a village on a wild coast of Mayo. He says in his Preface, “I have used one or two words only that I have not heard among the country people of Ireland and a certain number of the phrases I employ I have heard also from herds and fishermen along the coast from Kerry to Mayo or from beggar-women and ballad-singers nearer Dublin; and I am glad to acknowledge how much I owe to the folk imagination of these fine people.” He made poetic form from the lively nature of their speech. He wanted to tell the national history of Ireland from their perspective. The Playboy of the Western World caused massive riots on its opening night with its less than complimentary picture of Irish life and a main character who wasn’t a roguish stereotype.

Accordingly, Synge had a great disrespect for authority such as clerics. He was more interested in pagan society in rural Ireland. The Playboy of the Western World is a ‘coming of age play’ not a love story, where Christy is taking on the mantle of his father and attempts the possibility of romantic love. Christy says in Act 1 that “Up to the day I killed my father, there wasn’t a person in Ireland knew the kind I was, and I there drinking, waking, eating, sleeping, a quiet, simple poor fellow with no man giving me heed.”

Synopsis

An excellent web site for The Playboy of the Western World resources is:
John Millington Synge, Ernest A. Boyd, in his Contemporary Drama of Ireland, pick The Playboy of the Western World as Synge's ... Riders to the Sea - A synopsis of the play by J.M. Synge .

The Plough and the Stars, Sean O’Casey(1926)

Sean O’Casey lived through a bitterly hard boyhood in a Dublin tenement house but received most of his education in the streets. He learnt his dramatic technique by reading Shakespeare and watching the plays of Dion Boucicault, an Irish playwright, actor, director and theatre manager, whose work bridged the gap between earlier Irish playwrights and the new writers of the Irish Literary Theatre. O’Casey was determined to give a voice to “the little people”. Like the other playwrights in this unit, O’Casey holds a mirror up to society; in his case from a Socialist perspective. His work was revolutionary for its time from this point of view. He writes honestly of characters in pubs with noble aspirations who were interested in putting food in the mouths of others. He also writes with a profound sense of humour.

The Plough and the Stars is revolutionary from a theatrical viewpoint as many of the characters are seen in profile or with their backs to the audience. The play is set in the Clitheroe’s living room in a Dublin slum in Act I and in successive acts, in a public house, “The Plough and the Stars” (outside of which a meeting is being held), the street outside the Clitheroe’s tenement flat, and finally in Bessie Burgess’s room in the period 1915-1916. However, O’Casey’s work is often revised, reinterpreted and aligned with pressing social concerns of the day, such as inner city development. For, as Mrs Gogan, the charwoman, says in Act 1, “there’s always th’ makin’s of a row in th’ mention of religion.”

Synopsis

An excellent web site for The Plough and the Stars resources is:
The Plough and the Stars, Sean O'Casey

Dancing at Lughnasa, Brian Friel (1990)

Dancing at Lughnasa is a bittersweet social commentary focusing on a particular family in a rural setting, but with a universal message. Friel’s play is innocent and simple, using a pastiche of memory, music and dance. In fact the complexity of the characters’ lives is communicated best in the final scene without verbal language, whereby narrator Michael evokes a memory when “atmosphere is more real than incident and everything is simultaneously actual and illusory. In that memory, too, the air is nostalgic with the music of the thirties.” (Act 2) The wireless plays an important role in the lives of Michael’s family,:“It obsessed us…I remember my first delight, indeed my awe, at the sheer magic of that radio. And when I remember the kitchen throbbing with the beat of Irish dance, music beamed to us all the way from Dublin, and my mother and her sisters suddenly catching hands and dancing a spontaneous step-dance, laughing-screaming like excited schoolgirls.” (Act 1) It is also important for the Folans in The Beauty Queen of Leenane, as is their television set.

Friel’s play has also been produced as a film, directed by Pat O'Connor in a co-production of the USA, UK and Ireland in 1998. Like the play, the film is set in 1936 at harvest time in County Donegal. In a house just outside the village of Ballybeg live the five unmarried Mundy sisters, barely making ends meet, their ages ranging from 26 up to 40. The two male members of the household are brother Jack, a missionary priest, repatriated from Africa by his superiors after 25 years, and the seven year old child of the youngest sister. The film depicts two days in the life of this close-knit household. The film, like the play, has a rich feel for time, place, atmosphere and character, with fine performances from Meryl Streep et al.

Dancing at Lughnasa shows there is a ritual for everything in Ireland, especially death. The characters here don’t lose their inner spirit; they explode into dance.

The Beauty Queen of Leenane, Martin McDonagh(1996)

Set in a claustrophobic living room and kitchen of a rural cottage in the mountains of Connemara, County Galway (in the west of Ireland), The Beauty Queen of Leenane has moments of black humour but the humour does not come from two-dimensional Irish stereotypes or caricatures. McDonagh’s lines of dialogue are not intentionally funny, unless of course they are rooted in violence and cruelty. This is the very nature of black humour employed by the young playwright.

These elements of black humour in The Beauty Queen of Leenane are seen when plain and lonely Maureen Folan and her insufferable, petty and embittered mother Mag, live in a world of tragic farce, playing out their roles, where events are simultaneously comic, brutal, horrifying and absurd. McDonagh has been criticised for living in London and writing characters notable for their “Irishness” and for avoiding writing a subtext to his plays. His images of Ireland have also been criticised for exploiting Irish identity.

The Beauty Queen of Leenane, Sydney Theatre Company Production (grateful acknowledgment to STC Archives).

His characters are usually summed up by the audience from their first appearance. They rarely have a sense of a future, especially economically.

We, the audience, laugh at the twist of the knife, the mocking, and the warped perspective of these characters, yet in the moment that follows we cringe at the consequences and the injustice of events. Hence McDonagh's play is deeply serious and tragic yet still terribly and darkly funny. McDonagh has the ability to find humour in the strangest places in the immediacy of his dialogue. He takes his audience on a journey, cleverly manipulating our perspective with simple revelations along the way, such as a local priest who had previously punched a local lad in the head. Pato, a former local, tells us in Scene 3, “That’s Ireland, anyways. There’s always someone leaving…I do ask myself, if there was good work in Leenane, would I stay in Leenane? I mean, there never will be good work, but hypothetically, I’m saying. Or even bad work. Any work…Of course it’s beautiful here, a fool can see. The mountains and the green, and people speak. But when everybody knows everybody else’s business…You can’t kick a cow in Leenane without some bastard holding a grudge twenty year.”

The Beauty Queen of Leenane, Sydney Theatre Company Production. (Click picture to view full-size)

The characters are whingers. The grass is always greener in another country and their lives are always harder than the lives of others. They long for an alternative life, like that seen in Australian soap operas, like Sons and Daughters, even from an old episode of The Sullivans, a drama series set in Australia in WWII. Young Ray says near the end of the play in Scene 9, “Who wants to see Ireland on telly?” Or Maureen sends out for a radio request for a song by Irish band The Chieftains at the end of the play, said in “the announcer’s quiet, soothing voice.”

There is little plot development over the course of the play, but tension does develop.The degree of anxiety for the daughter rises until till there is no way out in her tragic world but to kill her meddlesome mother. Maureen never hears of Pato’s hopes for the future as his letter to her is intercepted by the meddlesome Mag.

The Beauty Queen of Leenane, Sydney Theatre Company Production. (Click picture to view full-size)

The Beauty Queen of Leenane also has elements of Realism, which was a modernist movement, initiated by Emile Zola with his novel, Therese Raquin. The aim of the realists was to reproduce events in the style of an historical/scientific document. The Realists were influenced by scientific scholarship at the time. Norwegian playwright Ibsen's realism was strongly influenced by the behavioural theory of Naturalism. This paradigm, popularised by Zola in France, suggested that your heredity and environment determined everything in life. In this sense, it was a discourse based on Darwin's theories of evolution-"the survival of the fittest," which is clearly demonstrated in McDonagh’s play.

The Beauty Queen of Leenane, Sydney Theatre Company Production. (Click picture to view full-size)

The Playwrights

J.M. Synge

John Millington Synge (1871-1909) was one of the brilliant discoveries of the Irish Literary Renaissance, which was largely the product of Lady Gregory and William Butler Yeats, the co-directors of the Abbey Theatre in Dublin. The Abbey ranks as one of the most influential and successful national theatres in European history. From 1904 to the present, it has been devoted to producing plays by Irish writers, some of whom have gone on to be ranked among the greatest of their age. Besides Synge, Bernard Shaw, Lady Gregory, Yeats, Sean O'Casey and Brian Friel are among the many whose names still loom impressively as having contributed to the reputation of the Abbey.

Synge wrote a number of important plays within less than ten years. Most of them remain in the repertory of modern drama; they are all still regularly produced there, and internationally for that matter.

Synge was not always a popular playwright in Ireland. He felt that he faithfully represented peasant ways, but his Dublin audiences often protested that he insulted the Irish. Synge's kind of realism, while not especially harsh or critical, was an untainted view of the west of Ireland. The Abbey audiences wanted an idealised portrait of their countrymen and countrywomen, not straightforward and sometimes embarrassing portraits such as the one Synge offered them in The Playboy of the Western World. This play caused riots in the Abbey Theatre when first performed.

An excellent web site for helping you understand the context of J.M. Synge’s plays is Sally Greene’s site at the University of Virginia:
Created by Sally Greene at the University of Virginia , this site includes passages by various critics and writers, including W. B. Yeats, which should help you understand the context of the play.

Sean O'Casey

Sean O'Casey lived through a bitterly hard boyhood in a Dublin tenement house and received most of his education in the streets. The anger seething below the surface of The Plough and the Stars, exemplified between Peter Flynn and the Young Covey, was drawn from his early experiences in t6he slums. O’Casey tells us in his stage directions that Flynn’s face “invariably wears a look of animated anguish, mixed with irritated defiance, as if everybody was at war with him, and he at war with everybody”. O’Casey learnt his dramatic technique by reading Shakespeare and watching the plays of Dion Boucicault, the latter’s plays were produced in Sydney with their Irish archetypes of the likable and charming stage Irishman, the argumentative soldier and the quick-witted female servant.

An excellent web site that provides resources for Sean O’Casey is the Hedgemaster Archives at: Sean O'Casey, his life and work .

Brian Friel

Friel was an active force in changing Irish Theatre, as the following link emphasizes.

An excellent web site for Brian Friel resources is at eng.umu.se:
Brian Friel Translations, one of Brian Friel's most admired plays, has a title that could aptly be applied to his oeuvre as a whole: http://www.eng.umu.se/lughnasa/brian.htm

Martin McDonagh

McDonagh emigrated from Ireland at a young age and grew up in the ghettoes of South London. He is often criticized for a certain sense of dislocation from Ireland, socially and geographically, for this reason, yet he is a major dramatic craftsman. He humbly says he is influenced by the structure of Australian soaps. Yet he is a writer genuinely searching for interesting subject matter. He uses pastiche to construct interesting narratives, and hence has been compared to Synge for dealing with characters who exhibit stage Irishness, or stereotypes. This type of characterisation has caused McDonagh’s plays to be taken as damaging to Ireland’s self-image and damaging to its national image overseas.

The earthiness of love is also represented by widow Quin in Playboy and by Maureen in Beauty Queen.

Audiences in Australia will be further able to judge McDonagh’s positioning of Ireland when Company B produces his latest play The Lieutenant of Inishmore, directed by acclaimed Australian director Neil Armfield at Belvoir Street Theatre in Sydney this year. This play is set in 1993 on the Island of Inishmore, also in County Galway.

Irish Theatre Companies

The Abbey Theatre was founded in Dublin in 1894 and played a large part in the development of Irish Theatre and achieved a high standard of acting whose influence was widespread and was ultimately responsible for the plays of George Bernard Shaw, J.M. Synge and Sean O'Casey. It was a famous playhouse built to house the company of the Irish National Dramatic Society which aimed to provide English-speaking Irish actors with texts to interpret the new Irish literary movement. The playhouseopened with a production of a play by W.B. Yeats. An important production of Synge's Playboy of the Western World caused a riot on its first night in 1907. Although the Abbey Theatre did not develop in the way its founders had hoped, being in later years more inclined to realistic than to poetic drama, it maintained its reputation for good acting, and gradually widened its repertory to include plays from all countries. In 1924, the Abbey became the first subsidised theatre in the English-speaking world.

The Irish National Dramatic Society aimed "to present Irish plays on Irish subjects, performed by Irish actors”. The Abbey Theatre Company functions as a specialised repertory group, partly amateur but mainly professional. From the beginning many of the plays drew on Irish traditions, though the accent came increasingly to be on modern subjects and poetic realism in the language. On the production side, the Abbey has always stood for bareness and simplicity, partly to economise, and partly on principle: as a reaction to the elaborate use of language in vogue when it was founded. Though in time theinitiative in Irish drama passed elsewhere (from 1925 to the Gate Theatre and later to the Druid Theatre), leaving the Abbey as a respected national theatre, it has continued to exert considerable influence on Irish drama in general, and especially to act as a nursery for most of the best Irish acting talent.

It is interesting to note that McDonagh’s plays were rejected by the Abbey, only to be taken up by the Druid.

The Gate Theatre, Dublin

The Gate Theatre was established by Irish actor, Micheal MacLiammoir, the greatest of his generation, in 1928. The Gate gave Dublin audiences an alternative theatre to the Abbey, which, by the 1930s, had fallen into a rustic, nationalist style. MacLiammoir broadened and internationalised the repertory, producing 350 plays at the Gate, nine of them written by himself.

The Lyric Theatre, Belfast

Artistic Director - David Grant

The only theatre in Northern Ireland producing its own work all year round. The Company programs its theatre with a wide variety of Irish and international classics. The Lyric was founded by Mary O'Malley in her own home in the 1950s; the success of the enterprise soon necessitated a move to the purpose-built theatre the Company currently occupies on the banks of the River Lagan. Throughout the difficult years of the 1970s, when most other cultural activities ground to a halt, the Lyric continued to provide Belfast with the highest quality drama, with actors of the calibre of Liam Neeson, who is now the Company's patron. The Lyric continues to enjoy a central place in the region's cultural life. The Lyric Theatre premiered Stones in his Pockets in Belfast and then toured the production throughout Britain and Ireland.

The Druid Theatre Company, Galway

A look at the work of the Druid Theatre Company (based in Galway, a growing city on the west coast of Ireland) which has successfully toured to the Sydney Festival with Tom Murphy's Conversations of a Homecoming and Synge's The Playboy of the Western World in the late eighties and Vincent Woods' At the Black Pig's Dyke in 1995, is essential. The Company was founded in 1975 and worked from a theatre that seated 47 people; within a few years the company had evolved an ambitious repertoire and a dynamic style. The fact that Druid worked outside the theatrical mainstream - for many years it was the only professional theatre company in Ireland outside Dublin - forced the Druid Company into a highly distinctive approach to all aspects of theatre, led by its irrepressible (female) director, Garry Hynes. This approach embodied performance, acting and design styles. One of its leading actors and later Artistic Director, was Maeliosa Stafford, director and cast member of STC'S production of The Cripple of Inishmaan in 1998, which is part of young playwright Martin McDonagh's Aran trilogy, all set on different Aran islands at different times. (Stafford is now resident in Sydney and has recently directed Marina Carr’s acclaimed play, Portia Coughlan for Octopus Productions at the Darlinghurst Theatre.)

McDonagh's The Beauty Queen of Leenane, part of his highly successful Leenane Trilogy which has toured the world and enjoyed an award winning Broadway season, also had a successful touring production for STC. The full Leenane Trilogy, performed by the Druid Theatre Company, was part of the Sydney Festival in 1998.

Check the web sites of these Theatres for current productions.

The Abbey Theatre
Druid Theatre Company

Activities

Background study

1. Use the Internet or the library to make a brief study of one of the aspects of Irish culture (e.g. a protest singer), society (e.g. a member of Sinn Fein) or history (e.g. The Potato Famine or the crowded immigrant boats) mentioned in the notes above.
2. Imagine you are an Irish TV reporter presenting a short introduction or background to a movie on the topic.
3. Put yourself in the “hot seat” as an Irish character involved in that activity or at that time.
4. Work with four or five others in the class who have researched the same topic to improvise an aspect of your research. Show the class a successful moment from the improvisation.

The Irish language

1. After reading the plays, and watching some Irish movies, or extracts from the movies, make a list of any similar stylistic features, themes and characters.
2. Select some speeches from the two plays you are studying and look carefully at the sentence construction. Is it the same? In what ways does it differ? How does it differ from the way we construct sentences? How does the sentence construction make it easier for you to develop an Irish accent?
3. Write some lines of your own about something you have done recently using the same sentence construction. Say the lines to see if you have been able to get the same rhythm as the playwright’s characters.

Script interpretation

1. In pairs, or in threes if necessary, choose one or two pages of one of the scripts to study and perform. It would be good if each pair chose extracts from different scenes and different characters to give a real overview of each play.
   Use the discussion you have had in class to inform and develop the characters as you block and rehearse the scenes.
   Present the scenes in order, like a movie preview, then evaluate and discuss the interpretations, the blocking, the insights that have been made into characters and the new things that have become apparent in performance.
2. Make a quick bullet point summary on a large piece of paper or card of the things that can be learnt about the characters you portrayed from what they said, their actions and from what others say about them. Pin or stick this to a wall or window in the classroom under the title of the play. Use it for discussion and revision purposes.
3. In groups of 3-5 students, choose a scene you would like to perform. With one student as director, prepare the scene for a book-in-hand performance to the class.

Improvisation/Playbuilding

Groups	four to six
Scenario	A scene that occurs outside or off stage in one of the plays studied (or one that might occur sometime later). For example Michael talking to the person who nursed Rose as she was dying in England.
Characters	Will depend on the scenario decided upon by each group. Discuss probabilities, improvise ideas, select and structure material, evaluate, edit and re-rehearse your presentation. You may be interested in using some of the music mentioned above to introduce or enhance your performance.

Extension activities

1. Read or watch other Irish plays. Can you see stylistic and thematic connections between these plays and the prescribed texts?
2. Also go online to further research the Abbey and Druid Theatre Company and their work in Ireland and also their productions which have toured to Australia.

Photo of set of the Sydney Theatre Company 2000 Tour production of The Beauty Queen of Leenane, Designer: Francis 0'Connor Photo: Barry Searle. (Click picture to view full-size)



3. Elements of production: The Beauty Queen of Leenane

The Beauty Queen of Leenane is set in this claustrophobic living room and kitchen of a rural cottage in the mountains of Connemara, County Galway in the west of Ireland. The scene doesn’t change; it only becomes progressively more dilapidated.

1. How does this set represent many of the settings of plays in this unit?
2. What dramatic features and forms of this unit could be played out on such a setting?
3. How would you adapt the set and lighting designs to reinforce the play's shift in time frames?
4. How would the actors use the space to convey the shifts in character and narrative?
5. Design your own set for a production of any of the texts. What mood should the set evoke from the out-set of the play? How does this alter at different times in the production?

Additional activities

Collect some examples of Irish art forms such as tartans, covers of novels and videos, CD covers, poems, paintings, photographs of scenes or dancers, Celtic signs or tattoos. Make a collage of them on the notice board or a display board in the class room.

Design a mock-up for a program, using an appropriate motif, for a production of any of the four texts. Design and make a flyer, poster, postcard and ticket for the production.

Compilea list of Irish references from the texts you studied and a brief explanation of what they are or mean. Are these references easy for Australian audiences to understand? Could productions of these works be re-located to Sydney?

Discussion points

• Why is the use of accents important in these, or any other Irish play?
• How does lighting contribute to the mood of each play? What effect do these lighting states achieve?
• How would music contribute to the theatricality of productions of these texts? Make a list of some of the music you could use for each play.

Bibliography

Brockett, Oscar G. & Hildy, Franklin J. 1999 History of the Theatre, Allyn & Bacon, London
Hartnoll, Phylllis. The Oxford Companion to the Theatre, Oxford University Press
HAodha, Micheal.The Abbey – Then and Now, Sackville Press Dublin
Jordan, Eamonn Theatre Stuff, Carysfort Press Dublin
Chambers, Lilian Theatre Talk, Carysfort Press Dublin
Eyre, Richard & Wright, Nicholas. 2000, Changing Stages: View of British Theatre in the 20th Century, Bloomsbury, London

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