Mapping Irish Theatre : Theories of Space and Place 9781107728530, 9781107039421

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MAPPING IRISH THEATRE

Seamus Heaney once described the ‘sense of place’ generated by the early Abbey Theatre as the ‘imaginative protein’ of later Irish writing. Drawing on theorists of space such as Henri Lefebvre and Yi-Fu Tuan, Mapping Irish Theatre argues that theatre is ‘a machine for making place from space’. Concentrating on Irish theatre, the book investigates how this Irish ‘sense of place’ was both produced by, and produced, the remarkable work of the Irish Revival, before considering what happens when this spatial formation begins to fade. Exploring more recent site-specific and place-specific theatre alongside canonical works of Irish theatre by playwrights including J. M. Synge, Samuel Beckett and Brian Friel, the study proposes an original theory of theatrical space and theatrical identification, whose application extends beyond Irish theatre, and will be useful for all theatre scholars. ch r i s m or as h is Seamus Heaney Professor of Irish Writing at Trinity College, Dublin, having previously worked in the National University of Ireland, Maynooth. He is the author of A History of Irish Theatre, 1601–2000 (Cambridge, 2002), which won the 2002 Theatre Book Prize and which has become the standard history of Irish theatre. He has published widely in the field of Irish theatre studies, and is also known for his pioneering work on Irish famine literature, Writing the Irish Famine (1995), and his more recent work on Irish media history, A History of the Media in Ireland (Cambridge, 2009). sh au n r ich ar d s is Professorial Research Fellow at St Mary’s University College, Twickenham. Co-author of the seminal Writing Ireland: Colonialism, Nationalism and Culture (1988), and editor of The Cambridge Companion to Twentieth-Century Irish Drama (Cambridge, 2004), he has published widely on Irish theatre in major journals and edited collections, and is a member of the editorial boards of Irish Studies Review and Irish University Review.

MAPPING IRISH THEATRE Theories of Space and Place

CHRIS MORASH and SHAUN RICHARDS

University Printing House, Cambridge cb2 8bs, United Kingdom Published in the United States of America by Cambridge University Press, New York Cambridge University Press is part of the University of Cambridge. It furthers the University’s mission by disseminating knowledge in the pursuit of education, learning and research at the highest international levels of excellence. www.cambridge.org Information on this title: www.cambridge.org/9781107039421 © Chris Morash and Shaun Richards 2013 This publication is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception and to the provisions of relevant collective licensing agreements, no reproduction of any part may take place without the written permission of Cambridge University Press. First published 2013 Printed in the United Kingdom by CPI Group Ltd, Croydon CR0 4YY A catalogue record for this publication is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Morash, Chris, 1963– Mapping Irish theatre : theories of space and place / Chris Morash & Shaun Richards. pages cm isbn 978-1-107-03942-1 (Hardback) 1. Theater–Ireland–History. I. Richards, Shaun. II. Title. PN2601.M645 2013 792.094170 0904–dc23 2013021434 isbn 978-1-107-03942-1 Hardback Cambridge University Press has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for external or third-party internet websites referred to in this publication, and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate.

To Ann and Lucette

Contents

List of illustrations Acknowledgements

page viii x

Introduction

1

1 Making space

6

2 Staging place

27

3 Spaces of modernity and modernism

48

4 The calamity of yesterday

75

5 The fluorescence of place

97

Theatre of the world

122

7 Theatre of the street

145

Conclusion: Spectral spaces

175

Notes Bibliography Index

180 195 210

6

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Illustrations

MAPS

Dates on which theatres first opened in Irish towns and cities, 1635–1832. The gradual and irregular spread of theatre culture outwards from Dublin in the eighteenth century can be traced in the pattern of theatre building. This period established the basic patterns of Irish theatre geography that persisted into the nineteenth century. Map by Justin Gleeson, All-Ireland Research Observatory/NIRSA page 12 2 A contemporary geography of Irish theatre: the locations of theatre venues in Ireland as of 2013 by date of opening, showing the shift in theatrical geography since 1980; only 9 venues pre-date 1980; 12 date from 1980–9; 30 from 1990–9; 32 from 2000–7; and 13 have been built since the beginning of the economic crisis in 2008. Map by Justin Gleeson, All-Ireland Research Observatory/NIRSA 15 3 Central Dublin, showing locations of key theatres, and the public buildings in proximity to the Molesworth Hall, where the Irish National Theatre Society performed in 1903. The map also shows early twenty-first-century theatrical sites, including the locations of the LAB arts centre and Bord Gáis Energy Theatre. Map by Justin Gleeson, All-Ireland Research Observatory/NIRSA 148 1

FIGURES

Anne Ubersfeld’s distinction between the zone-A of the onstage, and the zone non-A of the offstage; adapted from L’école du spectateur: Lire le théâtre 2 (1981) 2 A typical Irish peasant realist box set from the late 1920s – almost. In many respects this resembles the stage spaces that 1

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List of illustrations

3

4

5

6

ix

regularly faced Abbey audiences until the early 1960s. This play – T. C. Murray’s The Blind Wolf (1928) – happens to be set in Hungary, a detail that did not make the standard peasant kitchen set any less useful. Photo courtesy of Abbey Theatre Archives (National Theatre Society Ltd) 53 Tanya Moiseiwitsch’s expressionist design for Louis D’Alton’s The Man in the Cloak (1937) was one of more than fifty sets she created for the Abbey in the 1930s, challenging the notion that Abbey stages at the time were an unrelieved succession of realist box sets. Photo courtesy of Abbey Theatre Archives (National Theatre Society Ltd) 58 ‘Steps before the Palace of King Guaire at Gort’. Yeats’s The King’s Threshold (1903) hinges on an opposition between the palace and the steps. However, as this production photograph from the 1903 production in the Molesworth Hall shows, the ability to produce such spatial contrasts was constrained by the available stage space and machinery. Photo courtesy of Abbey Theatre Archives (National Theatre Society Ltd) 65 ‘Shelves of canned goods, mostly peas . . . ’ The set of the 2011 production of Martin McDonagh’s The Cripple of Inishmaan (1996) looks to some extent like a classic realist set; however, the exaggeration of some details – such as the rows and rows of tinned peas – suggests a more parodic relationship to realism. Photo courtesy of Robert Day 119 ‘It’s dangerous ’round here.’ In World’s End Lane (2010) and The Boys of Foley Street (2012), site-specific works by ANU Productions, the audience find themselves not only on the streets of Dublin, but in more than usually close proximity to the actors. This photograph from The Boys of Foley Street, featuring Thomas Reilly. Photo courtesy of ANU Productions 172 TABLE

1 The varieties of temporal theatrical identification

95

Acknowledgements

One evening in Neachtain’s pub, Galway, in 2001 we decided it would be a good idea to write a book together out of our shared interest in Irish theatre and sense that something was missing in the current critical approaches. In 2010 we presented our first joint presentation of papers on space and place in Irish theatre at the International Association for the Study of Irish Literatures (IASIL) conference at the National University of Ireland, Maynooth. In the best part of a decade between having the idea and determining its actual focus, we not only turned a possibility into a never less than stimulating book project, but were progressively and continuously indebted to the unstinting support of a large number of people whose contribution, especially over the final period of its composition, has been inestimable. In particular we wish to acknowledge the academic judgement and encyclopedic knowledge of Irish theatre of Nicholas Grene who refined our thinking in the book’s later stages, and Mary O’Byrne who read the manuscript with both speed and precision and made good what we had lost the power to see. Friends in the global network that makes up Irish theatre studies provided the opportunity to test out our ideas in seminars and symposia and we particularly acknowledge the support of Hiroko Mikami and colleagues at Waseda University, Tokyo; Cathy Leeney and Eamonn Jordan at University College Dublin; Laura Izzara, Beatriz Kopschitz Bastos and Munira Mutran at the University of São Paulo; David Grant and Anna McMullen in Queen’s University, Belfast; Katharina Rennhak at the University of Wuppertal; Michael Brown at the University of Aberdeen; and our colleagues in IASIL. Nicholas Grene and Patrick Lonergan of the Irish Theatre Diaspora provided an important occasion to road-test some of the ideas in the congenial setting of a conference in NUI Galway; and Patrick extended a similar invitation for the Synge Summer School in 2011. Mary Trotter provided an opportunity to present x

Acknowledgements

xi

an aspect of this work at the American Conference for Irish Studies conference in Madison, Wisconsin, in 2010, in the course of which it was possible to meet one of the project’s guiding lights, Yi-Fu Tuan. Many people gave generously of their time in providing us with material, contacts and ideas and we wish to thank specifically Gavin Quinn of Pan Pan Theatre, Louise Lowe and Owen Boss of ANU Productions, Claire Connolly, Nessa Cronin, Mairead Delaney, David Grant, Lionel Pilkington, Sinead McPhillips, Domingos Nunez, Ray Ryan, Brian Singleton, Shelley Troupe, the staff of the National Library of Ireland, and Justin Gleeson of the National Institute for Regional and Spatial Analysis, who provided the maps. Research Fellowships for Shaun Richards at the Moore Institute, NUI Galway and the Long Room Hub, Trinity College Dublin granted time to use archives and libraries, and we are grateful for their support. We would also like to thank our colleagues in our respective institutions for helping to make the time for this book to be written. And, once again, Cambridge University Press has shown praiseworthy commitment to the highest values of academic publishing, for which we would like to thank Victoria Cooper and Rebecca Taylor. Finally, we dedicate this book to Ann and Lucette, who are at the heart of our respective senses of place.

Introduction

In 2005 the geographer David Harvey commented on what he termed ‘the widespread appropriation of spatial metaphors’ as part of ‘an intense debate on the role of space in social, cultural and literary theory’.1 The challenge of this ‘spatial turn’ was experienced with particular force in drama and theatre studies where space was, as Joanne Tompkins noted, ‘the fundamental element of theatre that is perhaps most consistently overlooked’.2 From pioneering work such as Marvin Carlson’s Places of Performance: The Semiotics of Theatre Architecture (1986) and Una Chaudhuri’s Staging Place: The Geography of Modern Drama (1995) to the recent collection Performance and the Politics of Space (2012),3 it has been clear that an engagement with the spatial dynamics of theatre as place, performance and play was under way alongside the full renaissance of the study of space across the social sciences in the English-speaking world. This ‘spatial turn’ is beginning to make possible the appropriation and development of a conceptual vocabulary through which theatrical and dramatic space can be examined, bringing into the framework of analysis translations of foundational work such as Michel Foucault’s ‘Des espaces autres’ (1967) in 19864 and Henri Lefebvre’s La production de l’espace (1974) in 1991.5 These have been invaluable in contributing to an awareness of the social production and cultural meaning of space even if, with the exception of some fleeting comments by Lefebvre, they seldom engaged directly with theatre. At the same time, however, the broadly structuralist Parisian intellectual climate that produced Lefebvre and Foucault also impacted directly on theatre criticism, specifically through the work of Anne Ubersfeld whose Lire le théâtre (1977) was translated in 1999.6 In mapping Irish theatre we draw on such theoreticians as the coordinates by which we explore space as it is inscribed in and produced by plays, places and histories of performance, and the culture in which they exist. At the same time, theatre space has always been the preserve of practitioners, and in the twentieth century it was an area of increasing experimentation from the 1

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Mapping Irish Theatre: Theories of Space and Place

work of Oskar Schlemmer at the Bauhaus in Berlin during the 1920s to Peter Brook’s ‘Theatre of Cruelty’ workshops at the Royal Shakespeare Company in 1964. Brook’s famous declaration ‘I can take any empty space and call it a bare stage’7 was the basis for a three-month journey to Africa in 1972 where he put his theories into rigorous practice. ‘We got out, unrolled our carpet, sat down, and an audience assembled in no time.’ For Brook, the carpet was made meaningful as a place of performance when somebody took off a pair of dusty boots and put them on the carpet: ‘first of all there was the empty carpet – there was nothing – then a concrete object . . . Through the boots a relationship was established with the audience.’8 Brook’s radical experiments had been anticipated half a century earlier by W. B. Yeats who, rejecting the conventions of the theatre of his day as forcefully as Brook, realised that his theatre ‘must be the ancient theatre that can be made by unrolling a carpet or marking out a place with a stick, or setting a screen against a wall’.9 Making a case for Yeats as ‘a major figure in early twentieth-century avant-garde theatre’,10 Michael McAteer suggests that we can begin to consider Yeats in the context of work such as Alfred Jarry’s Ubu Roi (1896), a play that Yeats saw on its legendary opening night in Paris, when the frame of the proscenium arch was effectively shattered by its infamous opening line: ‘Merdre.’ In the proscenium arch theatre, the audience looks at a stage world from the vantage point of a darkened and inviolate auditorium. As Bruce A. McConachie argues, this was ‘a means of transforming the assumptions of Cartesian philosophy into theatre architecture and viewing experience’ with the result that ‘people believed they could gaze objectively at passive objects’.11 Yeats’s famous reaction to Ubu – ‘What more is possible? After us the savage god’ – was a prophetic realisation that this stable world was ending, in society as much as in the theatre. ‘Feeling bound to support the most spirited party,’ he wrote, ‘we shouted for the play, but that night at the Hôtel Corneille I was very sad, for comedy, objectivity, has displayed its growing power once more.’12 His subsequent commitment was to the culturally radical but increasingly theatrically conservative cause of the Abbey, but as is clear from his ‘Open Letter’ of 1919 to Lady Gregory, the success it achieved with its predominantly realist peasant plays had been for him ‘a discouragement and a defeat’.13 Yeats’s presence at the premiere of Ubu locates him at a crossroads in European theatre, when choices were being made between a spatial relationship in which the boundary between the stage and auditorium was becoming ever more fluid, flowing finally into the streets beyond, and one in which the space of society was contained within the representational frame of the stage.

Introduction

3

The road not taken by Yeats led from Jarry to Antonin Artaud, whose Theatre Alfred Jarry anticipated ‘a new notion of space utilised on all possible levels and in all degrees of perspective in depth and height’,14 on to Peter Brook, whose ‘Theatre of Cruelty’ was named in homage to Artaud, and from Brook to attempts to achieve Artaudian intensity in a range of performance practices, not least in site-specific works. This trajectory may seem remote from the mainstream of most twentieth-century Irish drama, which has largely held to the spatial integrity of the proscenium arch framing some version of a realist set. However, it is precisely by reading this tradition against the grain, by concentrating on the spaces of Irish theatre rather than on its words or characters, that we can begin to rethink Irish theatre in the light of the theatre theorists and philosophers who not so much chose to problematise space, but who found that they were no longer able to treat space as something that was simply ‘there’. The development of European theatre after Jarry is well documented, but its relevance to our project lies in its impact on thinkers whose concepts, while not always concerned directly with theatre, were profoundly spatial. For Tompkins, Lefebvre’s The Production of Space is ‘the foundational text’ in the study of space,15 while for Chaudhuri he is one from whom ‘a geography of theater’ has taken ‘its inspiration’.16 Lefebvre may be, as Michal Kobialka claims, ‘generally credited with altering the course of spatial studies’,17 but it is not often remembered that Lefebvre’s own thought and practice had roots in performance art in so far as he was connected with the Situationist International. As he recalled in 1997, ‘I knew them very well. I was close friends with them. The friendship lasted from 1957 to 1961 or ’62, which is to say about five years.’18 Their ‘construction of situations’, which were opposed to the passive society of the spectacle, emerged from the cross-pollination of avant-garde groups in post-World War Two Europe and gained notoriety as an influence on the Parisian événements of May 1968. As Martin Puchner summarises their stance, ‘they wanted actively to destroy the theatre and replace it with something new’. This was something they shared with Artaud, who was one of the ‘major axes along which the Situationists’ struggle with and against the theatre occurred’.19 This line of association and influence linking Jarry, Artaud, the Situationists and Peter Brook locates Lefebvre, one of the foundational thinkers in our analysis, within a trajectory whose ideas were both theatrical and profoundly spatial. In what follows, we will take our bearings from work including Lefebvre’s theory of a ‘spatial triad’ and Foucault’s idea of ‘heterotopias’, but also the historian Pierre Nora’s concept of lieux de mémoire (places of

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Mapping Irish Theatre: Theories of Space and Place

memory), and the geographer Yi-Fu Tuan’s distinction between space and place. All of these bodies of theory contribute to a model for understanding the physical and cultural spaces occupied by theatre in a society, enabling an analysis of the ways in which the theatre is not simply shaped by existing spatial formations, but itself produces space. In this respect, when Anne Ubersfeld writes that ‘the theatre is space’,20 we can understand her assertion in the context of a complex web of relations that flow both ways between stage space and social spaces. Our mapping of Irish theatre examines this relationship between a society and its theatre through an analysis whose development is both thematic and chronological, moving from the national validation of the set of the peasant cottage in the early twentieth century through to site-specific performances in the opening decades of the twenty-first. In the first two chapters, ‘Making space’ and ‘Staging place’, we introduce the spatial theories and cultural concepts on which we draw throughout, a diverse but coherent range of positions embracing elements drawn from the Marxist materialism of Lefebvre to Tuan’s experiential humanism, as well as aspects of phenomenology, Ubersfeld’s theatrical structuralism, and performance theory more generally. We also outline the set of sociocultural beliefs and assumptions underpinning the development of the metonymic representation of the nation through a set which increasingly owed more to conceptions of a national ideal than to its social realities. Against this wide-ranging and historically informed backdrop we set a series of chapters which chart the establishment of an Irish sense of stage space – and its various vicissitudes – taking our bearings from a selection of landmark plays and performances, working towards a perspective in which they, and formally similar works, can be seen in new configurations when subjected to a theorised spatial analysis. Accordingly, Chapter 3, ‘Spaces of modernism and modernity’, examines the stresses to which the ‘certain’ stage space of realism was subjected in the maelstrom of modernity, taking in the spatial experiments at the Gate Theatre, and focusing in particular on Yeats’s rejection of the realist stage space and Samuel Beckett’s dramas set in the ruins of that once confidently inhabited set. Building on this engagement, chapters 4 and 5, ‘The calamity of yesterday’ and ‘The fluorescence of place’, move into a consideration of the specifics of theatrical time and space as they are affected by the impact on the Irish sense of place of the collapse of what Lefebvre calls ‘l’espace de “bons sens”’. The plays covered in these two chapters range from Synge to Beckett, Yeats to Friel, and the chapters include discussion of contemporary playwrights such as Martin

Introduction

5

McDonagh and Sebastian Barry to illuminate understanding of the crucial shifts in Irish theatrical space as both set and theme. Chapter 6, ‘Theatre of the world’, extends our analysis into the global space of international tours, particularly that of Playboy of the Western World, in productions across the twentieth and twenty-first centuries ranging from New York to Beijing. Chapter 7, ‘Theatre of the street’, closes our study by engaging with site-specific productions which return to the theatre of the local and, as in the work of Louise Lowe and ANU, do so within the Dublin streets adjacent to the Abbey – a spatial continuity and theatrical disparity which serves to underline the complex narrative of the Irish sense of place and its multiple realisations and productions in theatrical space. What follows is part of a self-consciously spatial turn in Irish Studies, evidence of which can be found by going no further than the titles of books such as Gerry Smyth’s Space and the Irish Cultural Imagination (2001), the edited collections Ireland in Proximity: History, Gender, Space (1999) and Ireland: Space, Text, Time (2005), and, within Irish theatre studies, implicitly in Patrick Lonergan’s influential Theatre and Globalization (2009) and more recently in Helen Heusner Lojek’s The Spaces of Irish Drama (2011).21 However we have a more ambitious territory to map as we have been working towards a theory of theatre space. From the outset, we were conscious of resisting the temptation widespread among theatre theorists: to produce a unified, universalist theory based on what must necessarily be a selective and culturally limited experience of theatre performance. The theatre event insists upon its own particularity at every level. By situating our speculations in the specificities of Irish theatre, and of Irish theatre culture, we are acknowledging from the outset that our theoretical position is embedded in a theatre practice with its own history and assumptions. At the same time, we harbour the hope that the theoretical approach we have taken will allow others to navigate the space of theatres in different places using a conceptual map on which we have tried to sketch the contours of a newly unfamiliar shoreline.

chapter 1

Making space

I can take any empty space and call it a bare stage. A man walks across this empty space while someone else is watching him, and this is all that is needed for an act of theatre to be engaged.1

To begin with the word: theatre, from the Greek theatron (θέατρον), means ‘the seeing place’ and ‘at the very basis of the phenomenon of theatre as it is found in a wide variety of cultures is the assumption of a particular spatial configuration suggested by the word theatre itself – a place where one sees’.2 David Wiles puts it succinctly when he writes: ‘Theatre is preeminently a spatial medium, for it can dispense with language on occasion but never with space.’3 However, Henri Lefebvre begins The Production of Space with a warning: ‘Not so many years ago the word “space” had a strictly geometrical meaning: the idea it evoked was simply that of an empty area.’4 The commonsense notion that space was simply an ‘empty area’ – the notion that Lefebvre challenged – has begun to have a particular resonance for theorists of theatre, in that it echoes Peter Brook’s influential definition. Since its publication in 1968, Brook’s opening to The Empty Space has often been taken to encapsulate the fundamental essentials of dramatic performance. However, as spatial theory has developed over the subsequent decades in the work of figures such as Lefebvre, Yi-Fu Tuan, Edward Soja, Doreen Massey, and others, the concept of an empty space has become increasingly untenable. ‘Theatre only “in all innocence” can occur in an empty space,’ as Alan Read puts it.5 Between the recognition that theatre is fundamentally a spatial form, and the parallel recognition that space can no longer be treated as an empty receptacle, it is time to begin thinking spatially about Irish theatre. In the early 1990s, Read could still observe that ‘the theatre image’s presence in time and space has, until recent work, been neglected’.6 If that balance has been redressed elsewhere, in an Irish theatre in which the playwright continues to be the dominant artist, analysis – and the theorisation of that 6

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analysis – still finds it difficult to go beyond the word. From the outset, this raises a problem. ‘Any search for space in literary texts will find it everywhere and in every guise,’ cautions Lefebvre, ‘enclosed, described, projected, dreamt of, speculated about’.7 He goes on to argue that in beginning to think spatially, we run the danger of confusing very different forms of space, and hence he insists that we need to disentangle and demystify space by distinguishing among three basic concepts: space as physical, space as mental (including logical and formal abstractions), and space as social.8 For Lefebvre, the distinction among these three categories is not in their form, or in their ontological status, but in their mode of production, a point that he states as a foundational principle: ‘(Social) space is a (social) product.’9 Lefebvre goes on to define three understandings of space – sometimes referred to as his ‘spatial triad’ – that can form the basis for a theory of theatre space. The first element is ‘spatial practice’, which is sometimes glossed as ‘perceived’ space, the commonsensical, ‘everyday’ space in which we live, and in which social life exists. This can be distinguished from ‘representations of space’, ‘which are tied to the relations of production and to the “order” which those relations impose, and hence to knowledge, to signs, to codes’. Also sometimes called ‘conceived’ space, this is the space of planners, of cartographers, and, to some extent, of theorists of space themselves. However, Lefebvre complicates what could be a fairly straightforward binary opposition of spatial relations – the perceived as opposed to the conceived – by differentiating these two categories from what he calls ‘representational space’, which he later refers to as ‘lived’ space, but which is ultimately more complex than either term suggests.10 For Lefebvre, ‘lived space’ ‘embodies complex symbolisms, sometimes coded, sometimes not, linked to the clandestine or underground side of social life, and also to art (which may come eventually to be defined less as a code of space than as a code of representational spaces)’.11 Lefebvre’s influence on a later generation of social and cultural theorists has contributed to a ‘profoundly spatialised historial materialism’,12 alert to the view that space is never simply ‘there’, never truly empty, but is produced through human agency. However, his influence on the theorisation of theatre has had less impact than, for instance, Judith Butler’s work on performativity, or other theorisations of the body. Lefebvre has informed David Wiles’s historical work on performance spaces,13 is cited by Gay McAuley in her Space in Performance (2000),14 and is a key influence on Alan Read’s Theatre and Everyday Life (1993), the title of which signals the impact of Lefebvre’s theorisation of ‘the everyday’. However, Lefebvre’s

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own comments on theatre are fleeting, if suggestive: ‘Theatrical space certainly implies a representation of space – scenic space – corresponding to a particular conception of space (that of the classical drama, say – or the Elizabethan, or the Italian). The representational space, mediated yet directly experienced, which infuses the work and the moment, is established as such through the dramatic action itself.’15 In these few sentences, we get a sense of the potential complexity that Lefebvre’s model brings to the theatrical event, and of its place within other spatial configurations, rippling outwards from the theatre building, to the city, to the national space, and beyond to a wider world. Lefebvre’s is not a structuralism that offers the sterile pleasure of nomenclature, of naming inert objects. Instead, his is a dynamic theoretical model, in which the three modes of producing space – the perceived, the conceived and the lived – interact, moment by moment. This makes it profoundly theatrical. For Lefebvre, space is produced not in the past tense but in the present continuous, just as happens in theatre. What is more, the production of lived space is participative, a process that involves not only performers, but also the audience. An audience, as Herbert Blau puts it, ‘is not so much a mere congregation of people as a body of thought and desire. It does not exist before the play but is initiated or precipitated by it; it is not an entity to begin with but a consciousness constructed.’16 The constitutive presence of an audience in the auditorium makes it possible to see the production of space in the theatre as a subset of the wider social production of space. However, there is at least one major difference between the production of space in the theatre and that which occurs in the wider society: in the theatre, there are strict spatial boundaries, defined according to explicit criteria; within those boundaries, a space is produced, but it only endures for the clearly defined duration of the performance. One consequence of this is that spatial production in the theatre must take place at an accelerated pace, with an intensity and focus that usually exceeds the rhythms of spatial production in the everyday world. As a result, theatrical performances are, as Bruce A. McConachie puts it (borrowing a term from Joseph Roach), ‘condensational events’,17 a concept that recognises the twoway flow from performance to the world outside, while at the same time acknowledging the intensity that is one of the definitional qualities of performance (and, as we will argue in Chapter 4, constitutes one of its attractions). In Ireland, however, this condensational quality is not always confined to the stage, but is shared by key moments in Irish history, particularly the 1798 Rising, Robert Emmet’s 1803 rebellion (of which there were at least ten stage versions between 1853 and 1905) and the Easter

Making space

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Rising of 1916. ‘When the Easter Rising began,’ observes James Moran, ‘some bystanders believed they were witnessing the opening of a play.’18 Hence, the concentrated, intensified production of space in performance is reliant upon spaces produced outside of the theatre; however, in a particular society or historical moment, those socially produced spaces may have already been the subject of intense, non-theatrical condensational spatial production, which alerts us to the difficulties of always tracing spatial boundaries of the theatrical precisely. To put it simply, a space may already appear theatricalised before it appears on stage. The very existence of a designated ‘theatre’ (whether in the sense of a building, an institution, or a temporary site) is the product of a culturally specific set of spatial understandings. At the same time, once a space for theatrical production has been constructed, the real physical limitations of that space will have a formative effect on what takes place there. An extreme example can help to make this case: in 2007, the Performance Corporation, an Irish company specialising in site-specific work, staged a play, Lizzy Lavelle and the Vanishing of Emlyclough, in a sand dune on the Mayo coast. The nature of the performance space – the shifting movement of the sand, the cauldron shape created by the dune, the metaphorical connotations of sand – all played a constitutive role in the resulting performance, physically and conceptually. At the same time, audiences watching the play brought to the venue a set of expectations concerning the nature of theatrical space, which they were able to apply to a sand dune, a space in other respects utterly dissimilar to a conventional theatre building. The kind of interaction between the perceived space (the sand dune), the conceived (theatrical space), and the lived (the experience of taking part in a performance) may not be as obvious or as explicit as in a conventional proscenium arch theatre: but it happens in all theatre nonetheless. Indeed, the complexity and interpenetration of these various productive forces have been the focus of a small, but growing body of work, notably that of Herbert Blau and Marvin Carlson: ‘The way an audience experiences and interprets a play, we now recognise, is by no means governed solely by what happens on the stage. The entire theatre, its audience arrangements, its other public spaces, its physical appearance, even its location within a city, are all important elements of the process by which an audience makes meaning of its experience.’19 For the past century or so, it has generally been assumed that one of the conceptions of space that Irish audiences bring with them into the site of theatre (along with the concept of theatre space itself), has been the space of the nation. ‘The starting point here is the assumption’, argues Christopher Murray in his Twentieth-Century

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Mapping Irish Theatre: Theories of Space and Place

Irish Drama: Mirror Up to Nation, ‘that in the Irish historical experience, drama . . . and theatre . . . were both instrumental in defining and sustaining national consciousness’ – to which it might be added that the reverse was also generally assumed to be true.20 Again, as with the idea that there might be such a thing as an empty space, the idea of the national theatre has been subject to a critical debate, characterised by the idea that such a thing should not, in theory, exist – even if it clearly does. For Loren Kruger, ‘the idea of representing the nation in the theatre, of summoning a representative audience that will in turn recognize itself as a nation on stage, offers a compelling if ambiguous image of national unity, less as an indisputable fact than as an object of speculation’.21 If the idea of a national theatre constitutes a ‘conceived space’ saturating every pore of the national territory, the locations of ‘perceived’ sites of performance are not so evenly distributed. Theatre buildings are generally solid, substantial structures, which require concentrated populations, roads, public transport and legislation – in short, all of the apparatus of a functioning state, which is rarely constant through time, or distributed evenly throughout the national space. Thus, whether considered diachronically or synchronically, the parallel maps of the conceived and perceived spaces of a ‘national’ theatre will always have points at which they do not match. This is particularly true of Irish theatre. Like most theatre histories, the history of Irish performance spaces is discontinuous, marked by shifts and changes over time, which nonetheless leave their traces. Possibly because theatre requires a relatively stable urban society, the first Irish theatre building cannot be dated earlier than 1635,22 relatively late for a Western European country. That first theatre was an indoor Caroline platform stage in a building on Werburgh Street, just beside the colonial administrative centre of Dublin Castle, to which it was closely bound with ties of patronage. The Werburgh Street theatre lasted only a few short years, closing as a result of the political tensions leading up to the War of the Three Kingdoms in 1640. Following the Restoration, the first proscenium arch theatre in Ireland (and one of the first in the British Isles) opened in Smock Alley in 1662. Once again, located in what is now the western end of the Temple Bar district, this theatre was in what was then the nexus of power: Dublin Castle was only a few hundred yards to the south, the shadow of Christchurch Cathedral fell from the west, Trinity College, Dublin was a short distance to the east, and the Courts were visible just across the River Liffey. If maps of Ireland from the time marked the area surrounding Dublin as ‘The Pale’, defined by the reach of a centralised state, Smock Alley Theatre was at its geographical epicentre. By the beginning of the eighteenth century, that

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situation began to change, both as control of the state extended outwards, and as the theatre became less explicitly dependent on the patronage of Dublin Castle. By the 1730s, Smock Alley (along with a rival theatre in Aungier Street) began to tour to other urban centres in the summer season, principally to Belfast, Limerick, Cork, Kilkenny and Waterford. As theatre cultures developed outside of Dublin, this in turn led to theatre building in other Irish cities in the second half of the eighteenth century. By the time visiting touring companies came to dominate Irish theatre in the 1820s, there was thus a network of Irish theatres already in place. At this point, the shape of the Irish theatrical map changed, from an area defined by its centre (Dublin), to a network of points connected to the centre, and to the ports from which companies travelled back and forth to England. As with any map, there were blank spaces. Galway, in spite of being a centre of population for the western seaboard, rarely saw theatre in the eighteenth century; as a result, it had no substantial theatre building, and was thus bypassed by the major touring companies of the nineteenth century. Londonderry joined the Irish theatre world relatively early in 1741, and was included in tours throughout the second half of the eighteenth century. However, as it was increasingly left out of transportation networks over the course of the following century, so fewer and fewer plays were staged there, until it too was effectively off the map of Irish theatre. The establishment of the Irish Literary Theatre by Yeats, Lady Gregory and Edward Martyn in 1897 initially seemed like an attempt, in spatial terms, to re-draw the Irish theatre map (Map 1). From 1903 onwards, after the dissolution of the original organisation and the subsequent creation of the significantly named Irish National Theatre Society, the company began to tour, initially to London, but soon travelling throughout Ireland, to England, Scotland, and, after 1911, the United States. Not long after it assumed the title of ‘National Theatre’, Yeats asked: ‘What is a National Theatre? A man may write a book of lyrics if he have but a friend or two that will care for them, but he cannot write a good play if there are not audiences to listen to it.’23 As Loren Kruger would ask of the imagined national audience: are they ‘spectator or participant? Incoherent crowd or mature nation?’24 In 1903, as the company set out for London, it was not clear whether a national theatre found its audience dispersed throughout the nation (which, in the case of post-Famine Ireland, could be extended to include its diaspora), or whether a national theatre could find a ‘representative’ audience in its capital; or, indeed, whether newspaper reports in Ireland of an Irish company playing in New York were enough to make that company part of the national imaginary. The question may have been conceptual, but it also had a concrete

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Mapping Irish Theatre: Theories of Space and Place

Derry/Londonderry (1774) Belfast (1730)

Galway (1783)

Dublin (*5) (1635)

Ennis (1789) Kilkenny (1795) Limerick (1760) Wexford (1832) Waterford (1737) Cork (1713)

Map 1 Dates on which theatres first opened in Irish towns and cities, 1635–1832. The gradual and irregular spread of theatre culture outwards from Dublin in the eighteenth century can be traced in the pattern of theatre building. This period established the basic patterns of Irish theatre geography that persisted into the nineteenth century. Map by Justin Gleeson, All-Ireland Research Observatory/NIRSA

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spatial dimension: it was another way of asking if in order to be ‘national’, a theatre had to tour nationally, or if it could remain based in the capital, with occasional forays overseas. Nor was the title of ‘national theatre’ uncontested in those years. Apart from various groups who broke away from, or who competed with, what after 1905 became the company directed by Yeats, Lady Gregory and Synge, there was the question of Ulster, and the claim of Dublin to be the centre of Irish space. Tellingly, the Ulster Literary Theatre published a manifesto in the first issue of its journal Uladh in 1904, which contrasted the new venture in Belfast with ‘the stage of the Irish National Theatre in Dublin . . . where a fairly defined local school has been inaugurated’,25 thereby steadfastly refusing to recognise the Dublin theatre as anything other than another ‘local’ theatre. Although the Irish National Theatre Society Limited continued to tour, its spatial identity was effectively settled in 1904 when it moved to the site of its current home, on Dublin’s Middle Abbey Street, and came to be known by the name of the street on which it was situated: the Abbey Theatre. This gave the ‘national theatre’ a physically defined spatial identity. Physical space would be given institutional recognition after August 1925, when the company was given a state subsidy as the ‘national theatre’, giving substance to the assurance given to Lady Gregory, as early as January 1922, that the new Irish Free State government viewed the Abbey as ‘the “National Theatre” of Ireland’.26 Overlaying this centred map of Irish theatre history there is another, shifting map of Irish theatre geography, and a parallel theatre geography can be traced as hundreds of amateur theatres grew up around the island from the late 1920s onwards. Over time, the amateur movement organised itself into regional structures of competitive theatre festivals located in centres such as Tubbercurry and Killarney. In 1953, these regional competitions came together to create the national All-Ireland Theatre Festival. Significantly, this national theatre structure, which arose from the combination of individual regional theatre cultures, chose as its centre not the administrative capital of the state, Dublin, but the geographical centre of the island: Athlone. Hence, for much of the twentieth century, the lived experience of theatre for a great many Irish men and women outside of Dublin was of their local amateur theatre company, supplemented by a number of small touring companies (most notably that of Anew McMaster), who travelled regular circuits, often using the same venues as the amateur companies. This dispersed geography first began to merge with the map of the statesanctioned ‘national theatre’ in 1974, when the Irish Theatre Company was

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Mapping Irish Theatre: Theories of Space and Place

created as one of only three theatre companies to receive significant government funding in the Irish Republic (the other two were the Abbey and the Gate; the Lyric Theatre was the prime recipient of state subsidy in Northern Ireland). The following year, Druid Theatre Company was formed in Galway, and it soon took on touring to smaller towns as part of its remit. Field Day Theatre Company (formed in 1979) was even clearer in its understanding of the relationship between touring and functioning as a national theatre. While from the premiere of their first production, Translations in 1980, Field Day were associated with Derry, their clear intention was not to be tied to any one location. ‘We toured Ireland, North and South, East and West’, co-founder Stephen Rea later told an interviewer, ‘and we started to have an agenda, which was to probe the condition that the country was in and to ask questions about it. We were sometimes attacked for being narrowly nationalist, but we were far from that.’27 In retrospect, the burst of touring activity between 1974 and the mid 1980s now seems like the prelude to a period in which a dispersed Irish national theatre made the transition from the conceived to the perceived. Shortly after the early Druid and Field Day tours, arts funding bodies both in the Republic of Ireland and in Northern Ireland began to support the construction of regional theatre buildings (usually with the cooperation of local amateur or semi-professional theatre groups). There also was new support for professional theatre companies beyond the three main Dublinand Belfast-based theatres (the Abbey, the Gate and the Lyric). In the greater Dublin area, a suburban necklace of theatres eventually circled the city: the Helix in Glasnevin; axis in Ballymun; Draíocht in Blanchardstown; the Civic Theatre in Tallaght; the Mill Theatre, Dundrum; and the Pavilion in Dun Laoghaire. Meanwhile, further outside of Dublin, theatres such as the Solstice Arts Centre in Navan, the Riverbank in Newbridge, the Hawk’s Well in Sligo, the Town Hall in Galway and the Ardowen Theatre in Enniskillen would create a theatre geography that was increasingly dispersed, if not decentred. By the first decade of the twenty-first century, the bulk of state funding would continue to be directed to the Abbey in the Irish Republic, and to the Lyric Theatre in Belfast, but the map of Irish theatre now had dots all over it (Map 2). If the idea of a national theatre constitutes, in Lefebvre’s terms, a conceived space, and the infrastructure of theatre sites constitutes its perceived space, attempts to align them have produced at least two paradoxical effects. First, as regional theatres have come into being around Ireland – from the Ulster Literary Theatre in Belfast in the first decade of the twentieth century, to more recent theatre companies such as Druid in Galway, Red Kettle in

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Irish theatres as of 2013 by date of opening

Before 1980 (9) 1980–9 (12) 1990–9 (30) 2000–7 (32) Since 2008 (13)

Map 2 A contemporary geography of Irish theatre: the locations of theatre venues in Ireland as of 2013 by date of opening, showing the shift in theatrical geography since 1980; only 9 venues pre-date 1980; 12 date from 1980–9; 30 from 1990–9; 32 from 2000–7; and 13 have been built since the beginning of the economic crisis in 2008. Map by Justin Gleeson, All-Ireland Research Observatory/NIRSA

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Mapping Irish Theatre: Theories of Space and Place

Waterford, or the regional arts centres that have multiplied since the 1980s – the effect has often been not to reinforce the sense of a national theatre culture, but to create multiple differentiated regional theatres. For an audience in Navan, for instance, there is a difference between watching a play that has been produced in their home town at the Solstice Theatre by a locally based company, and one that is on tour from a national theatre based in the capital, just as, for an earlier generation, there was a difference between watching a play that had originated in Ireland, and one that was touring from England, or from the United States. In other words, the spread of physical spaces for theatre around the national space did not necessarily reinforce the idea of a national theatre; it could, in fact, have the opposite effect, highlighting regional difference over national solidarity. Second, just as there is little to stop a book, once printed and in circulation, from migrating beyond the imagined space of the nation (or the jurisdictional space of the state), once a theatre production is on the road, there is every reason to continue beyond the bounds of the nation in search of new audiences. In the same interview in which Stephen Rea spoke of touring regionally around Ireland with Field Day, he spoke of being ‘very proud’ of the fact that, in his view, Field Day had made it easier for Irish plays to transfer to London. ‘It’s now considered normal, and the traffic of actors between Dublin and London, and Belfast and London is very simple and very easy, but it wasn’t then . . . Field Day had a lot to do with that.’28 Similarly, in the 1990s, Druid began a practice of premiering their plays in Galway (at the Town Hall Theatre) and, within a few days, opening in London (often at the Royal Court), and have since built up audiences in New York and Australia. Other companies based outside of Dublin have followed similar patterns of opening in their regional base, playing festivals in Perth, New York or Edinburgh, and only then, if at all, staging a Dublin run. ‘The question as to whether there can be such a thing as “national theatre” is a salient one,’ remarks Read: That a theatre exists that operates under the aegis of a national title cannot be questioned. Nor can the very real material and spiritual effort and investment that have been directed to that entity. But there is a contradiction in the idea, and it remains an idea, of a theatre reflecting something which is in itself in good measure ‘imagined’.29

In 1784, on Dublin’s Fishamble Street (less than a hundred yards away from the Smock Alley Theatre), a theatre building opened proclaiming itself to be the National Theatre Music Hall: this would be the first (but not the last) time that an Irish theatre would describe itself as a ‘national theatre’. This first ‘national theatre’ in Ireland appeared less than two years

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after repeal of the Declaratory Act in 1782 created an independent Irish parliament, and the modern formulations of Irish cultural nationalism (and Irish republicanism) were taking shape. Any earlier than 1784 an Irish ‘national’ theatre would have been literally unthinkable, because the conceptual framework for thinking about the nation in terms of symbolic cultural institutions would not have existed. By returning to the moment at which the space of the nation was first produced, we begin to glimpse the source of the contradiction that Read notes, and of the paradoxes inherent in trying to align the perceived and conceived spaces of a national theatre. In Imagined Communities, Benedict Anderson influentially argues that millions of geographically diffuse individuals, most of whom will never meet one another, come to think of themselves as a ‘community’, and ultimately as a ‘nation’, largely through the mediation of print capitalism. Anderson’s argument here is spatial, in that he imagines a geographically diffuse mass of individuals reading the morning newspaper, and thereby participating in ‘a mass ceremony . . . performed in silent privacy, in the lair of the skull. Yet each communicant is well aware that the ceremony he performs is being replicated simultaneously by thousands (or millions) of others of whose existence he is confident, yet of whose identity he has not the slightest notion’.30 This simultaneous ‘silent communion’ is one of the defining features of modern culture, Anderson argues, that allows an individual to share a bond of kinship with thousands or millions of spatially distant and anonymous others, facilitating the formation of ‘a national consciousness’. As familiar as this argument is, aspects of it are worth developing in more detail, including the obvious point that, except in the case of linguistically defined nations such as Finland, there is nothing to stop print flowing promiscuously back and forth across borders, and thereby muddying the very concept of a national (as opposed to a state) boundary. Indeed, if we accept the point made by David Harvey and others, that the spatial orientation of capitalism is expansionist in an ever-extending search for new markets, whether in an earlier phase of colonial expansion or in a late capitalist phase of globalisation, it becomes apparent that a fatal flaw is built into the project of producing the national space through print. The same forces that bring it into being are constantly exceeding it, spilling out over the edges of the national territory and thereby puncturing its claims to authenticity or integrity – and this is equally true of theatre. In Ireland, the role of theatre in producing the space of the imagined nation was both more central and more complex than that of either print or, indeed, broadcast media. Unlike copies of a newspaper, or a radio broadcast,

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Mapping Irish Theatre: Theories of Space and Place

a play in performance takes place in a clearly demarcated space at a clearly defined time. The audience for any given performance is limited to those people who are in the same place at the same time. Members of an audience are not, in Anderson’s phrase, an ‘imagined community’: they are a real, albeit temporary, community whose members’ relationship to one another is bounded by the temporal and spatial parameters of the performance as event. The audience is, as Blau would have it, initiated by the performance, and this in turn makes possible the work of producing the space. Hence, there is an argument to be made that theatre in performance can never be national, at least in Anderson’s sense of creating a simultaneous national field in the case of radio (or, in the case of print, a field with what we might call a ‘simultaneity effect’). Theatre takes place in a particular place, at a particular moment, before a community that is not imagined but is real (and hence is constrained by the size of the space). To put it another way, there will always be a disjunction between the perceived space of performance and the conceived space of the nation. In terms of the perceived space, theatre is not national at all; it is local.31 If theatre in performance creates an event that is by definition local, why is theatre – particularly Irish theatre – so often considered in the context of the national? Theatre in performance may actively resist many of the features of print that make it so conducive to the creation of a national consciousness, but this does not prevent the theatrical experience from being translated into print, radio, and online information sources. The publication of reviews and play scripts, and the accumulation of these sources in theatre histories reconfigures the temporally and spatially specific form of performance into the temporally and spatially diffuse form of print. Reading a review of a play, a dramatic script, or a theatre history involves sharing with those geographically distant and anonymous others that sense of ‘communion’ of which Anderson speaks, producing an imagined community. In this regard, theatre can only really be national at a remove. As Alan Filewood writes of the idea of a Canadian national theatre, where sheer geographical vastness makes the conceived space of a national theatre even less realisable (or, indeed, imaginable), a national theatre ‘in fact exists only in the nostalgic space of its own imagining . . . In many cases, it was not the performance per se but its critical reception as circulated amongst an influential elite of engaged peers that mattered.’32 Thinking about theatre space in this way brings us some way towards the ‘postpositivist theatre history’ for which Bruce A. McConachie called in 1985, one that takes seriously the idea that ‘social-historical roles, actions and perceptions constitute the fundamental stuff out of which theatrical events

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emerge’.33 In particular, McConachie has gone on in his later work to suggest that the spaces produced by a given theatre culture can be understood in relation to a particular historical mindset, or way of seeing the world. Focusing on the idea (and, indeed, the policy) of ‘containment’ in the USA during the Cold War in the 1950s, he writes that ‘“containment” was as ubiquitous in the dominant culture as was the spatial relations schema of “balance” in the culture of Enlightenment France’.34 He points to the work of Thomas Postlewait, who noted, in relation to the plays of Tennessee Williams, that Williams generally creates ‘three spatial realms that operate visibly and thematically in his plays: an enclosed space of retreat, entrapment, and defeat, a mediated or threshold space of confrontation and negotiation, and an exterior or distant space of hope, illusion, escape, or freedom’.35 A comparable spatial analysis of Irish theatre in the late nineteenth century would reveal that, as the post-Famine diaspora was spreading out across the world, Irish theatre had a spatial orientation that was likewise expansive. In this period Irish theatre was being integrated into an international theatre system based around large touring productions. The stages of the theatres these productions used were designed to produce rapid changes of large-scale spaces, which emphasised not only their depth and size, but their capacity for transformation. In effect, these stages produced a theatrical space that codified the expanding international spaces of the theatrical tour, whose parameters were sketched in railroad lines and steamship routes, and which followed the trajectory of capital to penetrate ever larger markets. The spatial orientation of this theatre, in other words, was centrifugal. Because the form was not unique to Ireland, the Irishness of Irish plays written for this globalised theatre had to be recognisable as Irish from Sydney to New York, from Paris to Dublin. As a consequence, the aesthetic of this form of theatre was primarily visual, producing a represented space of the nation that was visual, expansive and transformational. A play such as Dion Boucicault’s The Colleen Bawn (1860) could not simply refer to the lakes of Killarney, and assume that audiences around the world could imagine them; they had to be shown, produced on a stage that foregrounded its own height, depth and speed of transformation. This theatre of visible space stands in marked contrast to the early Abbey Theatre, and Yeats’s stated desire that to ‘restore words to their sovereignty we must make speech more important than gesture upon the stage’.36 The name of the original organisation founded by Yeats – the Irish Literary Theatre – and the resounding opening of its manifesto, make clear the linguistic focus: ‘We propose to have performed in Dublin

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Mapping Irish Theatre: Theories of Space and Place

in the spring of every year certain Celtic and Irish plays, which whatever be their degree of excellence will be written with a high ambition, and so to build up a Celtic and Irish school of dramatic literature.’37 From the outset, the spatial scale of this theatre was small, both in the physical dimensions of the stage and in the audience that Yeats imagined, and this continued to be a feature of its successor organisations for a number of years. ‘It is a necessary part of our plan’, he wrote in 1904, ‘to find out how to perform plays for little money, for it is certain that every increase in expenditure has lowered the quality of dramatic art itself, by robbing the dramatist of freedom in experiment, and by withdrawing attention from his words and from the work of the players.’38 Moving from a theatre of visibly expansive space (which had existed in the nineteenth century) to a theatre of language had the effect of detaching the perceived from the conceived, in which there would always be more on the stage than could be seen. As Richard Allen Cave puts it, in Yeats’s early plays ‘visual austerity links with imaginative richness’. In plays such as Yeats and Lady Gregory’s Cathleen ni Houlihan (1902), he argues, the door in the stage set is not simply ‘the actors’ means of entering and leaving the playing space’ but is also the focal point in the play’s ‘spatial dynamics’ as the ‘imagined offstage world in these plays comes in time to be as important to the resolution of the dramatic action as what is depicted onstage by more traditional means’.39 Likewise, Alice Milligan’s The Last Feast of the Fianna (1900), produced by the Irish Literary Theatre, may have been constrained by technical and economic considerations, but the spaces it evokes extend significantly beyond anything that could be physically produced upon the stage in any literal representation: ‘A banqueting hall in the house of Fionn Mac Cumhal. The warriors of the Fianna are seated on benches round a fire which is in the centre of the floor. Behind the fire through an open door is seen a moonlight space of sea.’ In performance, diegetic references add significantly to this evocation of another spatial dimension as Oisín looks out and points. ‘Look! On the golden, curving strand I see a wave burst in foam. It is not a wave but a white horse, and a graceful woman is the rider.’ The final speech by Niamh only confirms that the spatial conception of this play, even if limited in absolute visual expression, extends into another dimension altogether: Beyond the blue rim of the sea, where the red sun sinks at evening, Beyond the walls of the round world, where the white moon goes wheeling, Amidst ever azure waters, where storm winds never blow, Are the isles of the blessed, my Tir-nan-Oig.40

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Over the next decade, Yeats began working with the designer Edward Gordon Craig to create a series of moving screens that could be pivoted, rotated and folded to create instant transformations of stage space in the quest to find a form for making the invisible visible. ‘We shall have a means of staging everything that is not naturalistic,’ Yeats wrote excitedly to Lady Gregory on 8 January 1910, ‘and out of this invention may grow a completely new method even for our naturalistic plays’.41 As Eugene McNulty points out, this interest in creating non-naturalistic stage spaces was profoundly ideological in that for ‘the Abbey playwrights (Yeats and Gregory most notably) performance of the mythic as a utopian space, in that etymological rendering of utopia as a “no-place”’ was attractive precisely because it took them away from the politically disputed ‘real’ space.42 As defined by the messianic Marxist Ernst Bloch, utopia is ‘that which has never entirely happened anywhere, but which is to come’. And he identified the theatre as the site of its genesis but not, crucially, its realisation for ‘it always has to extend beyond the evening of the theatre’ and into the space of society.43 Yeats’s belief in the power of dramatic poetry to enable utopia in Ireland was compromised by dramas which were often too opaque and esoteric to engage audiences, while the socialist alternative to his aristocratic vision, such as represented in the short-lived theatre career of Fred Ryan, was stillborn in a society whose utopian visions were for national rather than social liberation. Progressively, however, across the opening decades of the twentieth century, all impulses to engender any manifestation of a utopian space subsided in a desire to stage worlds which contained, rather than excited, the suggestion of better alternatives to those dramatised. As seen in Sean O’Casey’s Dublin Trilogy, by the time of the Free State in 1922, the characteristic note was one of mourning for places promised but never entered. However, and as will become apparent in more detail in the next chapter, one of the defining features of Irish theatre space in the first half of the twentieth century would be a tension between this utopian offstage space and the constraints of a visible onstage space. Historically, we can begin to trace the outcome of that tension in the rapid consignment of the Craig screens to the Abbey prop store and the parallel ascendance of the realist box set in the repertoire. The dominant space on the Irish stage thus became the metonymic representation of the nation – the cottage kitchen. Although Rutherford Mayne is associated with the Ulster Literary Theatre rather than the Abbey, his plays demonstrate the all-pervasive presence of this particular stage space as, with variation only in the names of the owners, the set directions for three of his most successful plays read: ‘The action takes place

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Mapping Irish Theatre: Theories of Space and Place

throughout in the Kitchen of William John Granahan’s house in the County of Down’ (The Turn of the Road, 1906); ‘The action takes place throughout in the kitchen of John Murray in the County of Down’ (The Drone, 1908); ‘The action takes place in the kitchen of Ebenezer McKie’ (The Troth, 1908). And when, as in The Turn of the Road, there is a staging of the world beyond that of kitchen, its function is only to confirm the reality of the latter: ‘Door at back, opening to yard.’44 If the nineteenth-century touring theatre against which the early Abbey defined itself was expansive and centrifugal in its spatial orientation, and the space of which Yeats dreamed was utopian, and centrifugal in a different way, the realism that would dominate Irish stages in the middle decades of the twentieth century was, for the most part, centripetal, enclosed and bounded. It was still arguably a politicised space; however, its politics were no longer utopian. As Una Chaudhuri has argued, naturalist theatre can be understood in spatial terms as a ‘theatre of total visibility’, which ‘adumbrates a specific relationship between the performance and the spectator, connecting them to each other with an ambitious new contract of total visibility, total knowledge. The promise of the well-stocked stage of naturalism is the promise of omniscience.’45 Even when the full set of theoretical contentions underpinning naturalism is not in play, the realist stage remains, to use Jean Jullien’s 1890 formulation, ‘a slice of life artistically set upon the stage’.46 McConachie suggests that in creating a world in which all that is can be seen, realism (and, indeed, naturalism) acted out the logic of omniscience that had been inherent in proscenium arch staging since the Renaissance: Historically, the positioning of the audience in proscenium staging developed from the perspectivism of Renaissance painting. As idealized in the Teatro Farnese, for instance, the all-seeing eyes of the Renaissance Prince at the center of the auditorium gazed toward a horizon line behind the proscenium and fixed objects in space according to their distance from his vision. With the proscenium arch as a picture frame organizing stage objects for this type of panoptic vision, the West discovered a means of transforming the assumptions of Cartesian philosophy into theatre architecture and viewing experience.47

Realism thus follows through on the logic of this panoptic vision to produce a ‘theatre of total visibility’, which is the product of a fundamentally empirical attitude to knowledge that implies that all that can be known, can be seen. As well as implying an omniscience of power, however, ‘total visibility’ suggests that all that exists in a culture is coherent and homogenous enough that it can be seen, at least synecdochically, in a single image. A culture in which it is felt that the heterogeneous, the complex, is impinging

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on its sense of unity could respond in a number of ways: one would be to close down all of those elements that could not be contained within a single frame; the other would be to acknowledge the image’s own inadequacy. The dominant trends in Irish culture in the decades immediately after 1922 can be understood within these competing alternatives. Most obviously, as both the Irish Free State and the Northern Ireland state became increasingly aware of their own limitations, not only did enforcing those limitations became a matter of public policy: limitation was adopted as a defining characteristic of national identity. This was evident in aspects of public culture ranging from the Censorship of Publications Act (1929) to trade restrictions, to the adoption of an autarkic economic policy, with the result that, as Tom Garvin argues, ‘the notion of a static and unchanging order that was to be regarded as ideal was quietly accepted, gladly or fatalistically, by much of the population’.48 On the stage, the form of this ‘static and unchanging order’ was a stage space that was likewise bounded, and was readable at a glance: a country kitchen, largely devoid of the markers of either modernity or antiquity, a space that could provide the setting for a play located in any time over the past century or more. Yeats’s experiments with the Craig screens may have been a dead end in the creation of an Irish spatial aesthetic, cut off with the curtailing of a utopian political culture. However, they suggest that a small stage with limited (or no) offstage space nonetheless had the potential to produce a theatrical space that, rather than reinforcing the inherent limits of the space, transcends them. This is one way in which to read the work of Micheál Mac Liammóir and Hilton Edwards in the Gate Theatre in the 1930s and 1940s. Edwards and Mac Liammóir began producing plays together in Dublin in the late 1920s, but found that the only available space for them was the Abbey’s second stage, the Peacock – a stage, as Mac Liammóir later wrote, ‘on which you could hardly swing a cat’: ‘so we decided we might as well throw discretion to the winds and be bold and daring for once, and we opened one night with Peer Gynt’.49 Like the early stages on which the Irish Literary Theatre worked – the Molesworth Hall, St Teresa’s Hall, even the Abbey itself – the Peacock was a stage whose physical limitations were more pronounced than its possibilities, with a performance space only 6.3 metres across and 4.8 metres deep, raised a mere 0.5 metres from the auditorium floor. The Peacock stage was only technically a proscenium arch theatre, for there was no offstage space, the back wall of the theatre was not parallel to the front of the stage, and there was no way of making a backstage cross. The only way to give the stage the functionality of a full proscenium was to build a box set within the already tiny performance area, making it smaller yet again.

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Mapping Irish Theatre: Theories of Space and Place

It was initially on this stage that Edwards and Mac Liammóir began creating scenic spaces that were neither mimetic nor bound by the limits of the stage in which they were produced. Their first production, that of Ibsen’s Peer Gynt in 1928, used two moving stair-shaped trucks, painted a solid black, which could be moved into different shapes – a valley, a pyramid, ocean waves – against an uplit sky-blue cyclorama; the effect, by all accounts, was to create a theatrical space whose expansiveness defied the actual physical limitations under which they were working. In the years that followed, working in the only slightly less restrictive space of the Gate Theatre in the eighteenth-century Rotunda Rooms, Edwards and Mac Liammóir would develop this expansive spatial sense into a distinctive art-deco-influenced style, particularly with productions of plays by Wilde and Sheridan. ‘Realism is not essential to drama,’ declared a contributor (probably Edwards) to the Gate’s short-lived magazine Motley. ‘For the theatre is not life. No realistic trimmings will make it so.’50 In other words, the same physical limitations that produced the confined domestic spaces of the peasant play in the Abbey (which in turn were to be replicated around the country in amateur productions) were equally capable, in the early Gate Theatre, of producing a nonrepresentational, utopian theatre space. Where the theatrical space produced by the peasant drama of the Abbey was a space aware of its own confinement, barely acknowledging the dimension of depth in space, the theatrical space championed by Edwards and his collaborators at the Gate was (like the conceived Yeatsian space of the Craig screens) constantly breaking through limits, creating space that used three full dimensions to create an implicit critique of the determinism of physical space in the production of lived space. A space need not be as given; the theatre can make it otherwise through performance. These two contrasting forms of Irish theatrical space can be mapped on to two contrasting conceived spaces of the nation. If the realism of the Abbey stage in the 1930s and 1940s produced the space of a nation defending its boundaries, the Gate constituted a differently imagined national space. Writing in Motley, in 1932, the playwright Denis Johnston proposed that a national theatre should exist not purely within the walls of theatre buildings, but should take the form of street processions, on occasions such as Easter, staging the spectacle of Irish history. At the same time, in its engagement with plays from outside of Ireland, the Gate was producing a conceptual space that refused to be constrained by geography or politics. In the same years that economic policies were restricting trade, and censorship was restricting the flow of non-Irish books, newspapers and films, the Gate was staging plays by writers such as Eugene O’Neill,

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Nikolai Evreinov, Karel Capek, Tolstoy and Goethe – producing a theatrical world that extended beyond the island of Ireland. ‘The “Gate” has not fettered itself by pseudo-national Shibboleths,’ wrote the playwright Christine Longford in Motley in 1932. ‘It has not tied itself to the letter of Nationality, which is death only too often to the spirit . . . No person or institution can justly claim to be international unless it is also profoundly national, or to be national while repudiating the best that the world has to offer for the nation’s good.’51 Between the restrictive space of the kitchen box set and the expansive space of the sky-blue scrim in the Edwards–Mac Liammóir Peer Gynt, it would be possible to trace a history of Irish theatre in the twentieth century as a dialectic of expansive and restrictive spaces. As we shall see in Chapter 2, the most important Irish plays since the beginning of the twentieth century have been those that have both produced and critiqued their respective spaces in the same gesture. Before moving on to that analysis, however, it is worth noting that arguably the National Theatre itself was responsible for the most extravagant renunciation of an enclosed, restrictive theatrical space when it moved into new premises in 1966. The original Abbey building had been destroyed by fire in 1951. Over the next fifteen years the architect Michael Scott, of the firm Scott Walker Tallon, who aligned themselves with the modernism of Mies van der Rohe, worked to create a brick cube on the original site that was the physical renunciation of tradition. As one member of the design team said at the time, ‘they tried to forget about every theatre built before’.52 The architect’s brief for the stage, as Scott understood it, was ‘to eliminate the feeling of disconnection between audience and players caused by the traditional proscenium arch’.53 If, as McConachie suggests, realism was the working through of the visual logic of the proscenium arch, the new Abbey stage (which nonetheless retained a modified proscenium) was intended to be a renunciation of that logic. As a result, the stage in the new national theatre was the very opposite of the contained spaces in which the Abbey aesthetic had been formulated. With a 22-metre-wide stage, extendable forestage, three large and flexible hydraulic traps, thirty counterweighted flies, hydraulic bridge, acoustic baffles, and a full lighting rig, the 1966 Abbey stage was designed for expansive transformations of space. A second space, the flexible studio of the Peacock, went even further in this direction, at least in terms of design, capable of being used in a variety of configurations (although in practice it was largely used as a small proscenium arch stage). However, rather than proving liberating, the stage of the 1966 Abbey has been challenging in terms of keeping the inherited repertoire alive: if the lived space of the

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Mapping Irish Theatre: Theories of Space and Place

Abbey in its early years was one in which limitations and constraints could be produced and transcended in the same gesture, the 1966 stage, by removing the limitations of the original space, also removed the tension that produced the possibility of their transcendence. From a spatial perspective, therefore, 1966 could be taken as the point at which the defining dynamic of Irish theatre space established in the early decades of the twentieth century gave way to a new version of the expansive spaces that had dominated the nineteenth-century theatre. Indeed, within a year of the new theatre opening, the Abbey staged its first production of a play by Boucicault, The Shaughraun (1874) in January 1967. At the time, it seemed like a return to the past; in retrospect, it may have been a premonitory glimpse of the globalised theatrical spaces that would emerge at the end of the century, as the defining, enclosed centripetal space of Irish theatre would come unravelled.

chapter 2

Staging place

Theatre is space.1

Peter Brook’s famous dictum ‘I can take any empty space and call it a bare stage’ gains its full resonance in the subsequent sentence: ‘A man walks across this empty space while someone else is watching him, and this is all that is needed for an act of theatre to be engaged.’2 This distinction between the space of performance and the space of the spectator is one of the constants in theatre, even in contemporary experimental work where there has been a quest for fluidity of movement in the relationship between actor and audience. In this respect, Brook’s empty space was never really empty at all: it was always produced, in Lefebvre’s sense of that word. ‘However productive it may have been of good work,’ writes David Wiles, ‘Brook’s ideal of “empty space” was always philosophically untenable. In order to take an empty space and call it a bare stage, he (the unseen director) needs to frame that space and separate it from the clutter round about.’3 Before a word is spoken, often before the actor even steps on to the stage, the space of performance is marked out from the world around it, whether in a gesture as simple as an actor unrolling a carpet, in the more usual frame of the proscenium arch, or simply by the audience leaving a clear space for the performers. The other constant, at least in Western theatre, is the idea that the space observed can have a reality – usually, but not always, a geographical reality – other than that of the playing area itself: a conceived space that is to be represented. Oedipus Rex might have played in a bare Greek amphitheatre, but references to Corinth, Thebes, Delphi and, even more specifically, ‘the side of mount Cithaeron’4 locate what is seen within a geographic web extending beyond the space of performance, to spaces that exist offstage. The theatre may indeed be ‘a place where one sees’,5 but it is worth remembering that the space allocated to the audience is known as the auditorium, which has its root in the Latin, auditorius: ‘pertaining to hearing or hearers’.6 27

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Mapping Irish Theatre: Theories of Space and Place

The theatre, then, is not just a place where one sees, it is also (usually) a space in which words are spoken, and these produce both the space that is seen, as well as the spaces that are unseen and evoked through diegetic references. As we suggested in the previous chapter, in the theatre two forms of space coexist: the perceived and the conceived, producing in turn a third, the lived. While the actual distance between performers and spectators might be just metres, the fictional space of the performance will often be distant both in space and in time to that inhabited by the spectators. Language, the actor and the configuration of theatrical space all work towards production of a space ‘elsewhere’, but the nature of that space is not the same from performance to performance, and will change through different historical periods. If that ‘space elsewhere’ is a ‘represented space’ in Lefebvre’s terms, the concept of mimesis becomes unavoidable. In the first book of his Poetics, Aristotle defines theatre (strictly speaking, tragedy), as mimesis, or imitation, and then distinguishes among the means of imitation: language (both the narration of the chorus and dialogue), personification and ‘painted scenery’.7 If we take these elements as the means by which the represented space is produced, we might expect that the relative weighting of these elements will change over time. For instance, if we go back to the first Irish theatre after the Restoration, the Smock Alley Theatre in Dublin, we find that for a period of almost a century, roughly from the Restoration until the 1760s, the ‘elsewhere’ signified by the stage space was a conceptual space rather than a space with a real physical existence. ‘The stage should be furnished with a competent number of painted scenes sufficient to answer the purpose of all the plays in stock,’ claimed The Case for the Stage in Ireland. ‘There is no great variety, being easily reduced to the following classes, 1st, Temples, 2ndly, Tombs, 3rdly, City walls and gates. 4thly, Outsides of palaces, 5thly, Insides of palaces. 6thly, Streets. 7thly, Chambers. 8thly, Prisons, 9thly, Gardens. And 10thly, Rural prospects of groves, forests, deserts, & c.’8 By the same token, a surviving Smock Alley promptbook for a production of Hamlet from the late 1670s has a handwritten annotation at the beginning of Act One simply reading: ‘Castle’; a slightly later Smock Alley promptbook for King Lear has annotations for settings such as ‘Court’, ‘A Chamber’, and so on.9 Such generic scenery was not simply a way for a post-Restoration theatre to save money by reusing sets; it was the theatrical form of a spatial understanding that valued the conceived over the lived, the type over the specific. In such an understanding, a generic ‘castle’ on stage can represent a particular castle (real or imagined) by presenting the idea of a castle.

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29

In this respect, Smock Alley and other early eighteenth-century theatres, with their lumber rooms full of stock sets, might be thought of as an idealist theatre, where the space staged was a conceptual one. The theatrical representation of actual (or even specific) places develops slowly on the Irish stage. Apart from a few mid seventeenth-century plays for which no performance record exists (such as Henry Burkhead’s Cola’s Furie of 1646), probably the first Irish play to foreground place was St Stephen’s Green, or, The Generous Lovers by William Philips. Staged in Smock Alley in 1699, and largely set less than a kilometre away in one of the city’s best-known public parks, St Stephen’s Green maps the urban world of its audience, a fashionable geography of gardens, coffee houses and the playhouse in which the play is performed. ‘As an orderly, pleasant, and artfully designed public space,’ writes Helen Burke, ‘St Stephen’s Green is also a synecdoche for an Irish society that is culturally sophisticated and rational.’10 However, it is more than this; it is also a real, specific location, and St Stephen’s Green, in its commentary on Irish manners, treats the theatre in which the audience are seated as an extension of that specific urban public space that is both the audience’s world and the scenic space of the stage. In one exchange, Lady Volant (described in the dramatis personae as ‘affected and mercenary’) attempts to criticise the behaviour of Irish ladies: For was not my Lady Courtly seen twice in one week at the Play? and was not my Lady Blameless in a Mask in the Gallery? and was not Mrs Wellbred heard most Impiously and Obscenely to wish it were the Custom in this Town, for Women to sit in the Pit? and is not Mrs Winlove seen to walk often in St Stephen’s-Green?

In a society in which nobility was contested, the occupation of particular public spaces was coded in very precise terms. ‘I wou’d no more be Guilty of these things,’ declares Lady Volant, ‘than I wou’d sit at a Play in the second Row, which I think very improper for one of my Quality.’ ‘And Beauty, Madam’, the true Irish gentleman Bellmine quips sarcastically, making it clear to the audience that all Lady Volant condemns is to be endorsed.11 The result is a map of the fashionable city. Not only St Stephen’s Green, but also the pit and the gallery of the Smock Alley Theatre in which the play was staged are thus transformed by the play into places in which social status – the contested status of ‘gentleman’ or ‘lady’ – can be displayed and, indeed, performed. This sense of spatial contiguity, which conceived of the stage as an extension of other public urban spaces for the performance of status, was also evident

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Mapping Irish Theatre: Theories of Space and Place

on the Smock Alley stage in the seating practices of the audience. Not only did ladies and gentlemen of status sit, in a fully illuminated theatre, in boxes level with the stage (in what was, effectively, a 360-degree space of display), but up until the mid 1740s, gentlemen could sit on the stage apron (as was the practice in London and elsewhere). Likewise, in a practice unique to Dublin, ladies could sit in small windowed boxes known as ‘lattices’ built into the proscenium arch itself (this is the ‘gallery’ to which Lady Volant refers), provided the play did not require them as playing spaces (say, for the balcony scene in Romeo and Juliet). Whether seated in the boxes that ringed the theatre at stage level, in the lattices, or on the stage itself, the fashionable audiences in Smock Alley were performing their status in public by occupying particular spaces within the theatre, much as they would do in other public spaces which in turn could be represented scenically – such as St Stephen’s Green. To see one’s own spaces staged appropriately, in accordance with one’s own sense of worth, was thus a profoundly political act. The theatre world of eighteenth-century Dublin struggled to create spatial specificity, not only against the constant gravitational pull of London, but also against a spatial aesthetic that tended to favour the generic or typological settings. So, we still find a century later the anonymous author of All at Home; or, The Irish Nieces (1804) claiming that he had written the play for the Dublin stage because ‘so few have chosen to lay the scene of action in this country’.12 However, to make this claim in 1804 was quite different from having done so a century earlier, for in the intervening years there had been a move from conceptual spaces to mimetic places in theatre practice generally, driven less by political and philosophical concerns than by a combination of audience demand for novelty, changing theatrical aesthetics and new staging technologies. Even by the middle of the eighteenth century, Dublin audiences were aware that the scenographic capabilities of their theatres were lagging behind those of London, which had been growing in size and developing new stage machinery. It added to the irony that one of the pioneers of the new theatrical aesthetic of specificity was an Irishman, Charles Macklin, whose productions of Shakespeare in the 1740s were seen by many as marking a new way of thinking about the function of theatrical space. Writing of his 1773 Covent Garden production of Macbeth, for instance, his biographer recalled that prior to Macklin’s production, Macbeth ‘used to be dressed in a suit of scarlet and gold, a tail wig, etc., in every respect like a modern military officer’, which Macklin replaced ‘for the old Caledonian habit’, showing ‘the same attention to the subordinate characters as well as to the scenes, decorations,

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music, and other incidental parts of the performance’.13 The first moves towards a theatre of landscape in Ireland can be traced to that same period of the 1770s, when new technological possibilities for staging converged with a new interest in Irish landscapes (and a new sense of landscape) to create a visual theatre, what Nicholas Vardac calls ‘theatrical production pictorial, thus cinematic, in conception’.14 In May 1770, for instance, the Dublin-born playwright John O’Keeffe produced The Giant’s Causeway; or, A Trip to the Dargle in the Mill Gate Theatre in Belfast, in which the plot (involving a flying giant surveying Ireland) existed purely to provide a device to justify ‘an elegant View of the Giant’s Causeway, the Dargle, and the Waterfall of Powerscourt’.15 In productions such as these (few scripts for which have survived), the diegetic is far less important than actual physical representations in the creation of stage space. Nonetheless, these late eighteenth-century productions set the agenda for the mainstream of Irish theatre for the next century and more. As the theatre world became more internationalised and theatre buildings increased in size and technical capabilities, this theatre of landscape came to dominate nineteenthcentury stages, so much so that (as elsewhere) playbills for Irish plays often gave more prominent billing to the specific landscapes to be represented than to the names of the actors (much less the playwright). Audiences in Dublin’s Theatre Royal wanted to see ‘the Lakes of Killarney’ in Boucicault’s The Colleen Bawn (1860) as much as they wanted to see Boucicault himself. This nineteenth-century theatre of spectacle is usually seen as antithetical to the naturalistic theatre that emerged later in the 1880s; however, both are located on the visual/mimetic end of the spectrum that we have been tracing. Indeed, Vardac states that ‘modern theatrical realism is said to have begun with the archeologically authentic costume production of King John by J. R. Planché at Covent Garden, January 19, 1824’.16 From archaeologically correct costuming, there is a direct line to André Antoine’s Théâtre Libre in Paris (established 1887), which was central to the realisation of the theories of naturalism. In pursuit of the creation of ‘real’ spatial environments (the key term in naturalist theory), Antoine’s production of Fernand Icre’s The Butchers (1888) saw bloody carcasses of beef hung on stage. As Hana Scolnicov has argued, ‘in modern drama, the theatrical space, instead of remaining implicit in the formal setting of the play, has been brought into the foreground and made into a theoretical and philosophical issue. Space is no longer a mere environment in which the characters move. It has become a theatrical object in its own right, often replacing the traditional subject matter of drama.’17

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Mapping Irish Theatre: Theories of Space and Place

One way to look at this move from conceptual to mimetic, to signifying spaces is to see it as a diachronic evolution, a historical trajectory. Moreover, we can understand these three terms as corresponding, respectively, to the three elements of Lefebvre’s spatial triad: the conceived, the perceived and the lived. Taking our cue from Lefebvre, we can begin to understand these three modes of theatrical space operating synchronically (as happens with the triad), as aspects of the theatrical space that can be activated, to greater or lesser degrees, at any given historical moment. Whether we are talking about the generic set of an early eighteenthcentury production of Hamlet, or the elaborate landscape spectacle of a nineteenth-century harlequinade, or a naturalist production of the latter decades of the nineteenth century, in all cases there are elements present of the conceptual, the mimetic and the signifying; indeed, it may be that the defining feature of a particular style of theatrical space is not even the predominance of one mode or another, but the relationships among them. For instance, in an Irish context, it is worth recalling that Yeats, when he wrote in 1902 ‘If we are to restore words to their sovereignty we must make speech more important than gesture upon the stage,’ saw rethinking stage space by working in more intimate theatres as a means of revitalising the spoken word.18 When read in the context of a diachronic development of theatrical space, this remark is usually seen as a reaction against the theatrical forms of the nineteenth century that had been dominated by spectacular stage machinery, and cavernous auditoria. However, it would be wrong to see Yeats making a choice between a visual theatre and a theatre of the spoken word. Instead, we can see Yeats attempting, in the first instance, to identify the modes of theatrical space (conceptual and signifying as opposed to mimetic), and to create a theatrical form determined by defining the relationship among these elements. When Yeats conjured up earlier very different theatrical moments as his models – of Sophocles, of Shakespeare, and particularly of the Noh theatre – he was not simply validating his own practice; he was proceeding from a recognition that forms of spatial relation among past varieties of theatrical space could be reactivated in the present. Complicating the relations among the conceptual, the mimetic, and the signifying are the multiple means by which they are produced in theatre: through diegesis, through the bodies of the performers, or through physically constructed scenic space. Moreover, all of these means of production are embedded in the culture of which the theatre is a part. As the 1699 production of St Stephen’s Green makes clear, the spaces that exist outside of the theatre intersect with those inside. In this respect, Gérard Genette

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33

has argued that texts are ‘rarely presented in an unadorned state, unreinforced and unaccompanied by a certain number of verbal or other productions’;19 rather they are surrounded by ‘a heterogeneous group of practices and discourse of all kinds’, the work’s ‘paratext’, which ‘is at the service of a better reception of the text and a more pertinent reading of it’.20 This provides a useful analytical tool, especially if, in the case of theatre, one includes advance publicity and the programmes for productions (epitext), in addition to introductions and prefaces internal to the play text itself (peritext). However, when Genette writes of the paratext in relation to literary texts, he is thinking of the text’s relation to other forms of printed words, not space per se. Indeed, it is worth calling to mind here Anne Ubersfeld’s dictum ‘the theatre is space’.21 ‘Theatre is not a literary genre,’ she writes. ‘It is a stage practice.’22 In her two major works on ‘reading’ the theatre, Lire le théâtre (1977; trans. Reading Theatre, 1999) and L’école du spectateur: Lire le théâtre 2 (1981), Ubersfeld provides detailed analytical models of all aspects of theatre and performance. When considering space, she identifies both the location of the theatre within the city or town and the socio-cultural role that it performs from the space of the stage. The location of the theatre building within the urban space maps on to Lefebvre’s interaction of conceived and represented spaces, and can be extended to include the role of theatre as an institution within the culture for a given class, for instance. This is a very different spatial configuration from the space within the theatre, which includes the stage size and the stage/auditorium relationship, both of which impose their own possibilities and restrictions, as we indicated in Chapter 1. On the stage itself, Ubersfeld further distinguishes between the scenic space, the space on stage which is the domain of the director and set designer and which will vary according to the individual play (at least according to the economic circumstances of the theatre), and the historical period and culture, within which it is produced, and the dramatic space, the space mentioned in and symbolised by the text which may, or may not, actually appear on stage. In short, Ubersfeld proposes four categories of theatrical space: (i) theatre location, (ii) space within the theatre, (iii) scenic space, and (iv) dramatic space. The complex issue of ‘location’, especially that of a national theatre in a global market, will be addressed in Chapter 6. However, our immediate concern is with the physical and cultural interdependence of ‘space within the theatre’, ‘scenic space’ and, in turn, ‘dramatic space’, for, as Alessandro Serpieri argues, ‘it can be said that every author, in writing for the theater, has in mind a stage realization which he stamps on the text, drawing on the

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Mapping Irish Theatre: Theories of Space and Place

system of stage conventions operative in his time’.23 Apart from the forays in 1900 and 1901 into the Gaiety Theatre, most of the original spaces occupied by the nascent national theatre shared one characteristic: intimacy. The 1902 productions of Deirdre by George Russell (AE) and Yeats’s Cathleen ni Houlihan, for instance, were rehearsed ‘in a house in High Street’ and opened in St Teresa’s, ‘a little hall in Clarendon Street’, before moving, as Seamus O’Sullivan recalled, to ‘a little hall behind a grocer’s shop in Camden Street’.24 The consequences of limited stage space on the stage sets for those performances is well captured in Máire Nic Shiubhlaigh’s recollections: The boxed-in scene, manufactured by Willie Fay, took up most of the space from wall to wall. Off-stage during the action, we lined up in the wings in order of our appearance, backs to the wall, noses almost touching the sidepieces of the scene, and sidled crab-like into position for our entrances. Awaiting our cues, we held our breath. It was quite likely that a vigorous movement would have brought our chests into contact with the canvas walls and caused them to fall inwards. As it was, the whole scene wobbled dangerously when we moved.25

As Nicholas Grene has observed, the Abbey was a ‘little theatre’ in every sense of the term and this suited its early allegiance to Antoine’s practice for which ‘small venues were needed where minimal movements and sounds could be made to count’.26 This is significant, for there is an argument to be made that the physical dimensions of the theatre that opened in 1904 were to have a shaping effect on the theatre’s continuing repertoire (and hence on its role in producing Irish space). Initially, the Abbey Theatre of 1904 had no scene dock, workshop, paint-room or even wardrobe, although this was rectified with the purchase of more adjacent buildings in 1905 and 1906. However, from 1904 until 1951, the Abbey company played on a proscenium arch stage with a frame 6.3 metres wide by just over 4.2 metres high, but only just under 4.5 metres deep, which meant that squeezing even a compact box set in this space left very little room for a backstage cross. Indeed, for the first few years, actors who exited from one side and had to re-enter from the other were sometimes forced to leave the building, scurry down a dank alleyway and re-enter by another door. All of these limitations meant that ‘the frequent use of a single set, especially the single cottage kitchen set in the peasant play, was a practical solution for a theatre that had little room on stage, and less off stage’.27 ‘We all tried at that time to write for as little scene-shifting as might be,’ recalled Lady Gregory, ‘for economy of scenery and stage-hands.’28 Indeed, Brenna Katz Clarke has claimed that ‘the peasant play, which is partially characterized by interior setting and domestic routine, might never have

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35

developed if the company had performed at the larger Gaiety theatre where the Irish Literary Theatre performed for a short time’,29 and which featured a full fly tower, traps, and the other stage machinery of a fully appointed Victorian touring house. The Abbey sets, on the other hand, Katz Clarke notes, were ‘perfectly scaled to the exact dimensions of an Irish cottage one would find in the west’.30 At the same time, as Grene puts it, ‘the peasant country cottage . . . for the Dublin-centred gaelicising nationalists, was that place of origin which in its pristine simplicity typified their imagined community’.31 So powerful was this confluence of the available theatrical space, and the conceptual space of the West of Ireland and its domestic interiors, that the kitchen or pub set’s presence in any number of Irish plays of the twentieth century, from Yeats’s The Pot of Broth (1904), to J. M. Synge’s Playboy of the Western World (1907) to Conor McPherson’s The Weir (1997) has become a staple of dramatic criticism, albeit moving frequently through phases of exhaustion, if not irritation, at the longevity of this location. As Declan Hughes commented in the late 1990s: ‘I could live a long and happy life without seeing another play set in a Connemara kitchen or country pub.’32 One way to think about this theatre of domestic interiors is to consider it as theatre of place rather than of space. ‘Space’, writes Yi-Fu Tuan in one of the most influential discussions of the topic, ‘is more abstract than place. What begins as undifferentiated space becomes place as soon as we get to know it better and endow it with value . . . When space feels thoroughly familiar to us, it has become place.’33 A small stage, with a static set, reveals itself to the eye more quickly and hence the audience come to know it; it becomes a place. By contrast, a large stage that is constantly being transformed by light or stage machinery never becomes familiar, and so it is a form of space that is constantly in a state of becoming; as such, it is a zone of danger (but also of freedom). Indeed, there is good reason to believe that this was precisely the kind of theatre of space that Yeats was imagining when he complained that owing to ‘the necessities of a builder’ the stage of the Abbey had to be altered so that ‘we must submit to the picture making of the modern stage’.34 Similarly, in Yeats’s limited but suggestive engagement with the scenographic practice of Edward Gordon Craig – most notably seen in the surviving drawings for a 1911 production of The Hour-Glass – he was striving for a theatre that carved performances from space, using light and moveable screens. ‘The new arrangements served to strip away everything that could distract from the emotional and dramatic unfolding,’ noted a critic at the time.35 This move towards abstraction was in turn a refinement of the aims of the 1903 production, of

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Mapping Irish Theatre: Theories of Space and Place

which Máire Nic Shiubhlaigh recalled, ‘in pursuit of a remote poetical effect in keeping with the character of the play, he [Frank Fay] threw away realism altogether. The scenery, such as it was, was calculated to centre the onlookers’ attention principally on the dialogue and action.’36 For the most part, however, the company that was to make its home in the Abbey, both in the original halls in which it staged its plays and later on Abbey Street, found itself working with a stage more conducive to place than to space – and, to be specific, more conducive to the staging of enclosed domestic sets. In other words, the ubiquitous country kitchen of the early Abbey was not simply the product of a valorisation of the West of Ireland and its frequently associated values of family, domesticity and what were effectively bourgeois standards, nor was it purely the product of the very real spatial restrictions of the stage; it was the confluence of the two. In this example of the combination of theatre location and sociocultural function, along with the spatial restrictions of the stage set, and audience expectations, we identify what Ubersfeld, after Julia Kristeva, terms the géno-text antérieur.37 Described by Kristeva as ‘language’s underlying foundation’,38 the concept of a determining ‘social code’39 is adopted by Ubersfeld and applied by her to the culturally determined parameters of the theatre which encourage, if not actually enforce, a style of play, set and production. This idea has obvious currency with regard to the first production of a play, but it becomes more problematic with regard to productions on other stages and in other historical moments, let alone in other cultures. If we concentrate on that initial moment of production, however, we can give the idea substance by turning to Synge’s original notes for Playboy of the Western World. As is clear from the early draft, ‘The Murderer (A Farce)’, Synge originally thought of opening the play in ‘a potato garden’40 but, as Lady Gregory observed, ‘when he thought of the actual stage he could not see any possible side wings for that “wide, windy corner of high distant hills”’41 and changed the setting to the interior of the “Country public house or shebeen”’.42 While the idea of the géno-text antérieur of theatre location and stage size as determinants of the play as written and originally produced is a useful tool of analysis, it must be considered alongside one of Ubersfeld’s crucial insights when we apply it to Irish drama: namely the significance of the spatial opposition between interior and exterior locations. Ubersfeld defines the space of performance in terms of a range of oppositions: horizontal versus vertical; depth versus surface; closure versus openness and emptiness versus fullness, but it is the final opposition – interior versus exterior – that most fully captures both the dramatic tension

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37

of the plays of the early Irish theatre and the theatrical space they created. Interior and exterior spaces, she says, constitute ‘the highest possible expression of all spatial oppositions’.43 As Patrice Pavis has further argued, ‘the opposition between interior and exterior spaces seems sufficiently pertinent for it to be retained in any staging of a text in which these two types of space feature’.44 Ubersfeld’s key terms in this aspect of her spatial analysis are ‘an A zone and a non-A zone, such that at any moment non-A is defined by its relation with A’. These mutually dependent zones are spatial, or can be made spatial, and a distinguishing feature is the opposing values attached to them, with one being ‘privileged both textually and in terms of staging’. When Ubersfeld develops this spatial division in terms of the premise that ‘in a way, the structure of almost all dramatic stories can be read as a conflict between spaces, or as conquest or abandonment of a space’ we can see its value as a tool of analysis in Irish drama where the offstage world (the non-A zone) is often the enticing but frightening alternative to the comfortable, but often stultifying, onstage zone A of the domestic space. This is especially true in the context of the proposition that the drama can be understood ‘in terms of the investment or disinvestment of a given space by the principal character or characters’.45 We can start to understand this ‘internal geometry’46 in more detail by considering the spatial relationships that pertain onstage between the A zone and the non-A zone, and those which operate between the stage and the auditorium. In L’école du spectateur, Ubersfeld provides a diagrammatic representation of the dominant stage/auditorium relationship and accompanying set style of ‘the modern theatre’, a term that can include the work of the Abbey and, indeed, most Irish theatre practice, albeit with some amendments and the occasional rejection (Figure 1). In this model of theatre, the audience looks into a staged world which, bounded by the set, appears as ‘a piece arbitrarily detached from the rest of the world, but which could be extended indefinitely’ as what could be seen of the offstage was not the corridors and equipment of the theatre, but ‘a world homogeneous with the world seen on the stage’.47 The fact that it was interiors – kitchens and pubs – that became the synecdochical representation of the space of the West of Ireland in Irish theatre was by no means culturally inevitable. Indeed, in other visual media – one thinks of painters such as Paul Henry, Nathaniel Hone, and later Derek Hill – the defining image of the West of Ireland became a landscape in which human figures were either absent or almost entirely subsumed into the natural environment. In theatre, however, a play such as Synge’s Well of the Saints (1905), with its exterior

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Mapping Irish Theatre: Theories of Space and Place

Figure 1 Anne Ubersfeld’s distinction between the zone-A of the onstage, and the zone non-A of the offstage; adapted from L’école du spectateur: Lire le théâtre 2 (1981)

Wicklow setting, is almost an unsettling presence in the canon, its characters somehow adrift in a space that is as much conceptual as mimetic. In the case of the more typical cottage kitchen sets, however, the staging was a consequence of the confined stage spaces on which they were realised and the géno-text antérieur pertaining in the culture of the playwrights and audiences. Indeed, one can imagine an alternative past, in which the National Theatre Society Limited had moved to a larger stage in 1904 and developed theatrical forms set among long treeless vistas, dramatic changes in weather, and vast expanses of sky against the sea – in effect, the landscape of the West of Ireland as it appears in the paintings of Paul Henry, or in Robert Flaherty’s 1935 film Man of Aran. However, the Irish theatre of Yeats and Synge developed on a stage whose limitations and small scale were its defining features.48 The very real architectural limitations of the stage did not, however, operate in isolation, and one needs to be wary of falling into a form of architectural determinism. Physical space and conceptual space colluded in the Irish theatre of the early twentieth century in the creation of an active – and often actively conflictual – dynamic between onstage and offstage. ‘What is that sound I hear?’ asks Peter at the beginning of Cathleen ni Houlihan, to which Patrick responds by ‘going to the window and looking out’, prompting Peter to speculate ‘it might be a hurling’. ‘There’s no hurling

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to-day,’ replies Patrick. ‘It must be down in the town the cheering is.’49 Within those few lines, the play establishes (a) that there is an offstage world beyond the view of the stage, which is continuous with the visible world of the stage; (b) that this offstage world is populated; (c) in the mention of ‘hurling’ (implying a pitch, or at least a field) and ‘the town’ the specific details of that space gain initial definition. As Keir Elam notes, ‘it is evident that even in the most detailed of naturalistic sets what is actually presented to the audience’s view stands for only part of the dramatic world in which the action takes place.’50 In order to produce this kind of belief in the credibility of offstage space, that onstage must be mimetic, capable of convincing the audience of its representative verisimilitude. Given this objective, says Ubersfeld, ‘it is pointless to ask (and the spectator does not ask) if the glasses and bottles mean something other than “we are in a café”; they function as the metonymic indicators of a place’.51 In 1902 Yeats and Lady Gregory joined forces with Frank and Willie Fay and their Irish National Dramatic Company who provided the directing and acting skills for the Abbey and its antecedents. Although Willie Fay later complained about ‘attempts to make plays real in the photographic sense’, he nonetheless did so frequently, acknowledging that ‘we got the idea from Antoine’52 whose Théâtre Libre practice of ‘slice of life’ scenography, and use of real-world objects as metonymic indicators of a place, was continued at the Abbey. For instance, during rehearsals for Riders to the Sea, Lady Gregory received a letter from Synge requesting ‘four red petticoats, Aran men’s caps, a spinning-wheel’ which, she said, was ‘the most difficult’, although one was finally located in a cottage near Gort. This impulse for accuracy created a situation in which, said Gregory, ‘all the actors want pampooties (the cowskin shoes worn by the Aran people)’, although, she noted, ‘I warned them the smell is rather overpowering.’53 This almost anthropological insistence on authenticity, especially with regard to the staged space, is well captured by a letter Frank Fay wrote to Yeats while the latter was on holiday in the West of Ireland: ‘Are you able to sketch? Would you send me a few examples of the interiors of cottages?’ Based on such research Willie Fay would then make scale models of the intended sets because ‘this would be much more enlightening than telling the Company “Oh it’s just a kind of cottage, you know, with a fireplace Right and a door Left, and Window up at the back somewhere”’.54 Una Chaudhuri has argued that ‘the most significant intervention that realism made into the developing discourse on space was through its commitment to what we would now call a platiality of the stage, an

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emphasis on the particularity and materiality of each dramatic environment’.55 However, and despite the Abbey’s commitment to authenticity and to place, the crucial comment on the nature and choice of the space which is staged is made by Ubersfeld: ‘What is given in the theatrical space, is never an image of the world, but the image of an image. That which is “imitated” is not the world, but the world recast according to the fiction and in the frame of a culture and a code.’56 This ‘cultural code’ constitutes the géno-text antérieur which informs the set, structure and themes of the drama, ‘as what is imitated in the concrete space of the stage is the “imaginary” space (un espace imaginaire) of a specific group (cadre) in a culture. And one is able to define the truth of a staged image, or if one prefers, its realism, by its conformity not to an ungraspable reality, but to this “imaginary” space.’57 While Ubersfeld does not expand on what appears to be an adoption of Lacanian terminology, and there is a major difference between Lacan’s focus on an individual/sexual level and Ubersfeld’s engagement with the social/political level of the audience, Lacan’s statement that the ‘mirror stage is a drama whose internal thrust is precipitated from insufficiency’ and that this ‘extends from a fragmented bodyimage to a form of its totality’ is clearly analogous to Ubersfeld’s arguments. Indeed, Lacan’s reference to ‘the transformation that takes place in a subject when he assumes an image’58 reflects Ubersfeld’s concerns with the fact that the ‘imaginary’ that is made ‘real’ on the world of the stage ‘always corresponds to an ideological function; the stage doesn’t show the nature of the world, but that of the world it stages’.59 The extent to which the staged space fulfils an ideological function for the audience, or at least that proportion of the audience belonging to the cadre whose ‘imaginary’ is staged, has been frequently remarked on in Irish dramatic criticism. For Brenna Katz Clarke, writing of the peasant comedies of the early Abbey, ‘most of the audiences, only a generation removed from the land, looked to the Irish peasant as a symbol of their lost identity’.60 More recently Paige Reynolds has noted that the setting of dramas in the West of Ireland offered a particular consolation to the inhabitants of an expanding Dublin, drawn to the city in the aftermath of the nineteenthcentury’s trauma of famine and emigration.61 This function was multiplied for the Irish diaspora who were the audience for the touring productions of a globalised theatrical form. As John Harrington argued, Boucicault not simply provided comfort for immigrants, but staged the ‘impasse between reality and romanticism’.62 This turn to the actual social significance – and function – of the staged space is clarified by the comments made by Michel Foucault in ‘Of Other Spaces’. Speaking of the modern moment as ‘the

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epoch of space’, he maintains that space has become the dominant contemporary paradigm, and he focuses specifically on what he terms ‘heterotopias’, ‘a kind of effectively enacted utopia in which the real sites, all the other real sites that can be found in a culture, are simultaneously represented, contested and inverted’. In developing the relationship of the individual with the heterotopia, Foucault uses the image of the mirror in ways analogous to Lacan and which are particularly suggestive with regard to Ubersfeld’s adoption of the concept of the ‘imaginary’ and its manifestation in the space of the stage. In response to his question ‘As for the heterotopias as such, how can they be described, what meaning do they have?’ Foucault presents a number of possibilities, among which is the idea that they have a relationship to the space that remains: ‘their role is to create a space that is other, another real space, as perfect, as meticulous, as well arranged as ours is messy, ill constructed and jumbled. This latter type would be the heterotopia . . . of compensation.’ What is particularly striking in this regard is Foucault’s comment that ‘heterotopias are most often linked to slices in time – which is to say that they open onto what might be termed, for the sake of symmetry, heterochronies. The heterotopia begins to function at full capacity when men arrive at a sort of absolute break with their traditional time.’63 In his influential ‘Preface’ to the published text of Playboy of the Western World, Synge gave paratextual expression to the play’s ‘conceptual or theoretical space’64 in arguing that in modern Ireland ‘the springtime of the local life has been forgotten, and the harvest is a memory only, and the straw has been turned into bricks’, but in remote parts of Wicklow, or in the West of Ireland that idyll of a pre-industrial world existed ‘for a few years more’.65 We will develop this feature of Irish spatial imagining in more detail in Chapter 3. However, for the present consideration of the production of heterochronic space, it is worth putting Foucault’s comments in the context of Bakhtin’s concept of the ‘chronotope’. Although used by Bakhtin to capture the way in which fictional time runs at varying speeds in different parts of the narrative, the idea of the ‘chronotope’ is equally valuable when considering perceptions and presentations of Ireland as ‘a place with an uneven distribution of time-passage, where time is apt to slow down and come to a standstill at the periphery’.66 In her contribution to the collection Timespace, Nuala C. Johnson sums this up in relation to the West of Ireland when she notes that ‘antiquarians, anthropologists, and creative writers all cultivated an image of the western seaboard as a space located back in time’.67 Here then, in the unspoilt spaces of the West, it was largely believed that time halted (or at least slowed), authenticity could

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still be found and the dialectic of tradition and modernity could be seen most clearly. Synge’s observation that on the Aran Islands ‘few of the people . . . are sufficiently used to modern time to understand in more than a vague way the convention of the hours’68 makes clear the extent to which the West was seen as free from the metronomic pressures modernising the rest of Ireland. Foucault makes the point that ‘heterotopias always presuppose a system of opening and closing that both isolates them and makes them penetrable’,69 so that to enter the heterotopia is to re-engage with what has been lost. And if the land itself is not to be accessed, then its mimetic reproduction on stage stands as a double ‘compensation’. In other words, what is staged is deeply invested in visual mimesis; however, in this form of mimetic staging, audiences do not see themselves represented on stage in their social reality, as in conventional Ibsenite realism, but rather in what Joep Leerssen terms ‘auto-exoticism’: ‘a mode of seeing, presenting and representing oneself in one’s otherness (in this case: one’s nonEnglishness)’.70 The key point about the mimetic stage space in this context, along with its imported pampooties and architecturally accurate dimensions, is that it realises the audiences’ ‘imaginary’, providing the fullness it deemed to be lost or, at best, threatened with extinction. In that Foucault describes heterotopias as ‘a kind of effectively enacted utopia’, he brings the idea of ‘mirror’ and ‘compensation’ into a productive relationship when he suggests that ‘in the mirror, I see myself there where I am not, in an unreal, virtual space that opens up behind the surface; I am over there, where I am not, a sort of shadow that gives my own visibility to myself, that enables me to see myself there where I am absent’.71 Here, what has been lost, abandoned or purloined can be imaginatively re-entered, momentarily repossessed. In this reading of the relationship of the staged space of the West to the ‘imaginary’ of the audience we can usefully adopt Pierre Nora’s concept of lieux de mémoire, those sites where ‘memory crystallizes and secretes itself’, and expand it beyond the site-specific location of memorials such as war memorials, or Famine memorials, that Nora takes as his examples to encompass ‘The West’ (while making allowances for the recognition that ‘The West’ was not always geographically so, as in the case of Synge’s Wicklow). For as Nora made clear in a comment highly relevant to our present discussion, ‘there are lieux de mémoire, sites of memory, only because there are no longer milieux de mémoire, real environments of memory’ and he identified ‘the irrevocable break marked by the disappearance of peasant culture’ as a clear example of ‘a fundamental collapse of memory’.72 The relationship between the West as a conceptual space and

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the urban location of the lived space of the audiences for the plays of the Literary Revival then corresponds to what Ann Rigney refers to as the ‘“original plenitude and subsequent loss” model’, so while the actual knowledge and experience of the West might still be preserved by its inhabitants, ‘this “lived memory” is constantly on the brink of extinction or erosion with the passage of time as the richness of experience fades and those who did the experiencing die out. At a certain point, the only way for memory to survive is for it to be written down.’73 What audiences then encountered in the staged space of the peasant play was a receding cultural memory of a land and a life, but one which, through the mimetic power of the stage, they could fully, if momentarily, enter and repossess. The recognition that this repossession of an imagined, and lost, plenitude is momentary is crucial. If we consider the means outlined so far in the creation of stage space – diegesis, the actors’ bodies, and physical objects on the stage – we need to recall that the first two (and to varying extents the third) of these elements have a temporal existence. Spoken words have duration; they exist in time. Likewise, a movement of the body has duration, in that it defines a segment of time. ‘In purposeful activity,’ claims Tuan, ‘space and time become oriented with respect to the cogitating and active self ’74 – and there can be few activities more purposeful than the tiniest gesture on the stage. Whether in structuring the activities of our daily lives (and here Tuan approaches Lefebvre’s concept of ‘lived space’), or in describing the length of a journey not in terms of distance but in terms of time span (‘three days’ drive’), the temporal dimension of the act, including the speech act, constitutes part of the manner in which it creates space. In the case of the physical objects on the stage, this situation is somewhat more ambiguous. On a stage in which there are physical transformations of the space, through the use of light or stage machinery, the physical space produces an awareness of time, and of time passing. On the realist stage (the scene space of the early Abbey) with a single fixed set creating a sense of place, time certainly passes, but there is a less acute spatial signalling of temporality, other than that of the duration of the performance as a whole, and the awareness of temporality generated by the narrative among the characters. In this we find one of the paradoxes of what we might call the ‘theatre of place’. The places it creates are knowable, and hence can be aligned with communal and familial values; at the same time, the very thing that makes place knowable, its relatively unchanging nature, is that which makes it potentially a trap. ‘Open space itself’, observes Yi-Fu Tuan, ‘is an image of hopeful time.’75 Among the peasant plays of the early Abbey, as Nicholas Grene has noted,

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there are a remarkable number that use what he calls ‘the stranger-in-thehouse’ trope, examples of which include Douglas Hyde’s Casadh an tSúgáin (1901), Cathleen ni Houlihan, Synge’s The Shadow of the Glen (1903) and Playboy of the Western World, as well as other, less well-known plays, such Lady Gregory’s The Travelling Man (1910) and Padráic Colum’s The Fiddler’s House (1907). In each of these plays (to which more titles could be added), there is ‘a room within a house, a family in the room, who together stand in for normality, for ordinary familiar life; into that room there enters a stranger, and the incursion of that extrinsic, extraordinary figure alters, potentially transforms the scene’.76 In Colum’s play, the stranger who enters is a nomadic fiddler, while in The Shadow of the Glen and in Casadh an tSúgáin, the stranger is a landless traveller; Playboy of the Western World is effectively a parodic version of the trope, in that Christy’s version of himself rests upon his assumption that he is now familyless and homeless. Ultimately, however, Cathleen ni Houlihan is the ur-text for all of these plays, for here the wandering traveller explicitly exists in a different dramatic register, whereas this is less clear-cut in the other plays. Where all of the other characters in Cathleen ni Houlihan exist in realistic register, The Poor Old Woman is meant to be recognised as a symbolic figure; in spatial terms, this means that she enters what is effectively the mimetic onstage place of the stage from an offstage space that is conceptual, not mimetic. In considering these plays, Grene begins by recognising that this dramatic form was dictated by certain practical considerations. These included not only the size and technical specifications of the available performance spaces, along the lines that we have outlined above, but also, for a company that remained at least partly amateur for much of its first decade, the requirement that plays be relatively undemanding in dramaturgical terms, requiring only one major entrance and one central conflict. However, he is also attuned to the ambivalence that the structure could contain; the peasant cottage in these plays functioned both as a heterotopia, the image of the pristine place, while mounting a simultaneous critique of its changelessness. It is this ambivalence of critique and valorisation that allows us to grasp the complex dynamic of place and space on the stage of the early Irish Literary Theatre as the expression of a culturally complex géno-text antérieur in which what was consciously desired was, at some level, also feared. In all of these plays, the freedom that exists offstage is also dangerous; by the same token, the comfort of the knowable onstage world can be stifling. ‘The ideas “space” and “place” require each other for definition,’ writes Tuan. ‘From the security and stability of place we are aware of the

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openness, freedom and threat of space, and vice versa.’77 The cottage kitchen of the Abbey peasant play is, as we have seen, firmly established as the dominant stage set: it is a lieu de mémoire, invested with associations (both those of the characters and those of the audience) that give it the resonance of place. In Cathleen ni Houlihan, the opening lines not only establish the place of the play in terms of an offstage; they also establish the deeply entrenched sense of place within the cottage, emphasising its materiality as Bridget and Peter admire their son Michael’s wedding clothes, and calculate the dowry from his wedding. ‘You seem well pleased to be handling the money,’ Bridget says to Peter. Each object on the stage, like each member of the family unit, is firmly fixed in place. The Poor Old Woman, on the other hand, enters from an offstage that is explicitly distanced from the town of Killala, the hurling pitch, or the nearby harbour. Indeed, any attempt to define her spatial identity is constantly thwarted by her lack of fixity. ‘There was a red man of the O’Donnells from the north,’ she tells Michael, when asked about her ‘neighbours’, ‘and a man of the O’Sullivans from the south, and there was one Brian that lost his life at Clontarf by the sea [on the east coast of Ireland], and there were a great many in the west, some that died hundreds of years ago, and there are some that will die tomorrow.’ Unlike the characters on the stage, or in the offstage that they recognise, The Poor Old Woman inhabits space, not place, taking her bearings from identifiable points of reference but fully inhabiting none of them: all are her ‘neighbours’ in a fluid geography that flows over hundreds of kilometres, jumping from point to point on the compass. There is a similar contrast in relation to time: the onstage family exists in a strict linear temporality, focused on the wedding that will take place ‘tomorrow’, while The Poor Old Woman shifts in the course of a sentence from ‘hundreds of years ago’ to ‘tomorrow’. Again, her own lack of temporal fixity takes its points of reference from identifiable historical moments but is contained by none of them. Her promise – ‘They shall be speaking for ever’ – is the final statement of her ambivalent temporality: ‘for ever’.78 Ultimately, Michael’s decision to follow The Poor Old Woman is both a choice of freedom and a choice of death. In the usual reading of the play, this decision is seen as purely political, and there certainly is an argument that the play is a masterful piece of propaganda. However, from a spatial perspective, in the same gesture the play undermines its own ideology. Cathleen ni Houlihan not only suggests that underlying the idealisation of the western peasantry is an acute awareness of the stifling restrictions of peasant life (something attested to by all of the ‘stranger-in-the-house’

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Mapping Irish Theatre: Theories of Space and Place

plays); it also suggests that the sense of place, which is so often proclaimed as one of the defining features of traditional Irish culture is ultimately stultifying. The real enemy in Cathleen ni Houlihan is not the colonial power but the deeply entrenched sense of place in the rural domestic interior that is the very embodiment of a fantasised Irishness. While the overt reading of the play is that The Poor Old Woman offers liberation from imperial oppression she also invites Michael to shed the inhibitions of domesticity and enter a youthful infinity. ‘Did you see an old woman going down the path?’ the younger son, Patrick, is asked at the curtain, as he enters from a final encounter with her in the pure space of offstage. ‘I did not, but I saw a young girl and she had the walk of a queen.’79 In other words, the offstage (zone non-A) may be the space of death; but it is also the space of freedom and of transformation, produced by its contrast with an onstage place (zone A) that is an unchanging hell of sameness. This same structure also exists in relation to the constantly shifting offstage reality from which Christy Mahon enters in Playboy of the Western World, or the Wicklow hillsides of the Tramp in The Shadow of the Glen; they are not places but spaces, characterised by, as Tuan puts it, ‘openness, freedom’ but also ‘threat’. In Playboy, Christy initially enters from an offstage place; however, as the story of his murder of his father grows, and as his offstage victories become more fairytale-like, the offstage is transformed into a fluid place of triumph, before ultimately being transformed back into the remote hill farm he shares with his father. In this regard, The Shadow of the Glen is structurally closer to Cathleen ni Houlihan, in that the world beyond the cabin door, as described by the Tramp, is one in which time flows promiscuously out of sequence. ‘You’ll be saying one time: “It’s a grand evening, by the grace of God”, and another time, “It’s a wild night, God help us; but it’ll pass, surely. You’ll be saying. . .”’ – at which point he is interrupted by the housebound Dan: ‘Go out of that door, I’m telling you, and do your blathering below in the glen.’80 When The Shadow of the Glen was first staged in October 1903, it produced outrage in the nationalist press for its scandalous representation of rural married life. However, when we recognise the structural parallels between the spatial politics of The Shadow of the Glen and those of Cathleen ni Houlihan, the scandal of Synge’s play is effectively in making evident the hidden critique of the stasis of rural life that was contained in that of Yeats and Gregory. Read spatially, The Shadow of the Glen is effectively a version of Cathleen ni Houlihan, shorn of its political iconography, and with the genders of the main characters reversed. In Synge’s play, the domestic peasant interior can no longer be imagined as a

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heterotopia; it is quite literally figured as a site of living death, as Dan Burke lies covered in a shroud in the centre of the stage. Like Michael in Cathleen ni Houlihan, Nora in The Shadow of the Glen chooses space over place, defined by shifting compass points, shifting sounds, and shifting light: ‘hearing the herons crying over the black lakes’.81 In both plays, the family homes, deeply emplaced in the domestic interior and surrounded by an equally defined immediate offstage place are presented as profoundly materialistic and emotionally restricted, the very things from which open space offers such complete liberation. It is little wonder that ‘Chanel’, the theatre critic of the nationalist Leader newspaper, called The Shadow of the Glen ‘an evil compound of Ibsen and Boucicault’;82 yet the play does no more than make manifest the spatial dynamic of Cathleen ni Houlihan, which audiences at the time characteristically saw as the most orthodox of national plays. As we shall see in later chapters, this spatial dynamic – and its embodied contradictions – continued to be developed and played out in Irish theatre for much of the twentieth century. In short, what is staged has a relationship with the actual spatial and temporal divisions within Ireland and, in the historical moment of the Literary Revival, has a precise ideological/psychological function. This is predicated on an overlapping spatial and temporal division in which the conceptual space of the West of Ireland is conceived as a site of unchanging rural tradition and beneficial social conservatism while the cities are the location of rapid urban transformation and subsequent alienation. At the same time, the process of staging this idealised West is the process of defining its limits, so that those limits are felt as burdensome, and (in a process analogous to the theory of suture in cinema) can only be overcome by an appeal to pure space, an ideal ‘West’ that is by definition unstageable. This is the conflict ultimately performed in so many of the plays of the early Abbey. However, beyond the domain of psychological compensation for a lost plenitude, the point about these spatial divisions, and their dialectic of belonging and freedom, is that, as Henri Lefebvre writes: ‘Space is political and ideological. It is a product literally filled with ideologies.’83

chapter 3

Spaces of modernity and modernism

Turning and turning in the widening gyre The falcon cannot hear the falconer; Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold.1

More than any Irish writer of the first half of the twentieth century, W. B. Yeats registers a crisis of space, resonating through his poetry, (as in the well-known lines from ‘The Second Coming’ quoted above), mapped through the conceptual spaces of A Vision (1925/37), and translated into lived space in his theatre. Yeats’s lines of 1919, written in the aftermath of World War One and the Russian Revolution, are part of a diverse set of aesthetic and cultural responses to the destructive manifestations of a rapidly changing and destabilising world, which Lefebvre dates from around 1910 when, he writes, ‘l’espace de “bons sens”’ was shattered;2 an echo of Virginia Woolf’s famous statement that ‘in or about December, 1910, human character changed’.3 Donald Nicholson-Smith’s translation of ‘bons sens’ (common sense) as ‘certain’ suggests a space which is specific but also one of certitude, and it is this to which Lefebvre clearly points, describing it as the space ‘of knowledge, of social practice, of political power, a space hitherto enshrined in everyday discourse, just as in abstract thought, as the environment of and channel for communication’. These certainties ‘have disappeared’, he argues. ‘This was a truly crucial moment.’4 This is the ‘experience of space and time’ as ‘modernity’ in which humanity is, as Marshall Berman puts it, poured into ‘a maelstrom of perpetual disintegration and renewal, of struggle and contradiction, of ambiguity and anguish’.5 Berman’s ‘maelstrom’, echoing Yeats’s gyres spinning out of control, makes a curious contrast with Lady Gregory’s account of the founding of the Irish Literary Theatre in this period of turmoil. The theatre that was to become the Abbey, she claims, was ‘brought on its triumphant way’ because it was ‘caught into the current’ of ‘the discovery, the disclosure 48

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of the folk-learning, the folk-poetry, the folk-tradition . . . It is chiefly known now as a folk-theatre’.6 The key word here is ‘tradition’, the very antithesis of a whirlwind in which all is changed. What is more, the form that this ‘folk-theatre’ would take on stage usually (with exceptions such as Cathleen ni Houlihan (1902)) owed very little to the ritualised, halfremembered gestures normally associated with folk culture, in something like a mummer’s play, for instance. Douglas Hyde’s Casadh an tSúgáin (1901) may develop the action of the play in a form that is part folktale, part comic farce, but the set is described as ‘teach feilméir i gCúige Múmhan céad bliain ó shin’ 7 [‘A farmer’s house in Munster a hundred years ago’] and the play was staged in a realist box set. What evolved on the Abbey stage, then, was a curious kind of hybrid realism, one of whose defining features was its explicit (and often vehement) renunciation of any connection to the conceptual foundations of realism (much less naturalism) as modern, urban forms. Synge, for instance, condemned symbolism and realism equally in his ‘Preface’ to Playboy of the Western World (1907). ‘In the modern literature of the towns,’ he declared, ‘. . . one has, on one side, Mallarmé and Huysmans producing this [symbolist] literature [‘far away from the profound and common interests of life’]; and on the other, Ibsen and Zola dealing with the reality of life in joyless and pallid words.’8 Realism (and, to a greater extent, its more doctrinaire cousin, naturalism) produces a conceived space that requires a ‘certainty’ with a knowable centre and solidity, in Chaudhuri’s words ‘an ambitious new contract of total visibility, total knowledge’.9 However, this ‘new contract’ emerges in the 1870s and 1880s at precisely the moment that the ‘certain space’ it presupposes is collapsing. The speed with which the best-known proponents of a realist stage space – such as Ibsen or Strindberg – broke with that space in their later work is, as Peter Szondi saw it, one indication of the crisis in a theatrical form unable to accommodate ‘subjective drama’.10 The ambivalent realism of the early Abbey can be understood as another. Spatially, then, the Abbey peasant realist play – such as Casadh an tSúgáin or Playboy of the Western World – was produced within an onstage set designed to achieve the maximum of verisimilitude, and with a diegetically evoked offstage world of equal veracity. However, rather than these plays treating such spaces as determinants of character as in classic realist/ naturalist drama, we frequently find the stage occupied by comic creations who challenge, rather than simply reflect, their social condition, creating a deliberate – and productive – disjunction between actor and space. Writing in 1904, Yeats observed:

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Mapping Irish Theatre: Theories of Space and Place At the first performance of Ghosts I could not escape from an illusion unaccountable to me at the time. All the characters seemed to be less than life-size; the stage, although it was but the little Royalty stage, seemed larger than I had ever seen it. Little whimpering puppets moved here and there in the middle of the great abyss . . . Certainly they were all in a prison, and yet there was no prison.11

In a play such as The Playboy of the Western World, this relationship is reversed; Christy is a character who is too big to be contained by the realist set, so that a play which appears realist is in fact carrying out a critique of realism per se, in that the energy and language of the characters are in excess of the environment that ostensibly produced them, and which now must contain them. In this regard, the so-called ‘realism’ of the early Abbey can be understood to have taken shape within one of the faultlines that existed in realism and naturalism from the outset, and its frequent veerings towards the comic and the grotesque are attempts to break out of the ‘prison’ of realist space and the dramatic form’s inability to accommodate the ‘subjective path’.12 The early Abbey may have thus have defined its aesthetic in opposition to conventional realism, both implicitly and explicitly in the writings of Yeats and Synge; however, at the same time powerful cultural forces made realism a necessity that could not simply be dispensed with on a self-consciously ‘Irish’ stage, even by Yeats. ‘One Sunday, in summer, a few years ago,’ Yeats wrote in the 1906 edition of Samhain, the Abbey’s occasional journal, ‘I went to the little village of Killeenan, that is not many miles from Galway, to do honour to the memory of Raftery, the Gaelic poet who died a little before the famine.’ Killeenan, in Yeats’s account (like so much of his imaginative geography of those years, from Kiltartan to Innisfree), is a place, in Yi-Fu Tuan’s sense of the word, knowable, rich in significance and memory, human in scale, its songs and stories grounded in its fields and crossroads. ‘A few days after I was in the town of Galway,’ Yeats continues, ‘and saw there, as I had seen in other country towns, some young men marching down the middle of a street singing an already outworn London music-hall song, that filled the memory, long after they had gone by, with a rhythm as pronounced and impersonal as the noise of a machine.’13 If Killeenan is place, Galway, by contrast, (not without some irony, given its location in the West of Ireland) is space: it is interchangeable with ‘other country towns’, and the songs sung there are displaced, ‘already outworn’, ‘impersonal’ like ‘the noise of a machine’. Yeats, of course, is far from unique in the Ireland of the time in locating the distinctive values of Irish culture in somewhere like Killeenan, where

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memory and language have turned space into place. P. W. Joyce’s Origin and History of the Irish Names of Places (originally published in 1869, but republished in 1910), was only one of a multitude of influential texts, ranging from scholarly multi-volume tomes to poems and popular articles in the field of Celticism, that consolidated the idea that the identity and buried history of the Irish people could be found in the relations of place to language. ‘Our placenames are purely Celtic,’ wrote Joyce, ‘with the exception of about a thirteenth part, which are English, mostly of recent introduction.’ ‘This great name system, begun thousands of years ago by the first wave of population that reached our island, was continued unceasingly from age to age, till it embraced the minutest features of the country in its intricate net-work; and such as it sprang forth from the minds of our ancestors, it exists almost unchanged to this day.’ ‘The face of the country’, Joyce goes on to state, ‘is a book.’14 Yeats’s application of this argument to theatrical production was particularly influential, putting forward the view that Joyce’s ‘intricate net-work’ linking specific sites in the present to ‘the minds of our ancestors’ provided a unique basis for great theatre. Yeats compared the Ireland of his time to the London of Shakespeare, or to the Athens of Sophocles, where ‘they had not to deal with the world in such great masses that it could only be represented to their minds by figures and by abstract generalisations’.15 The argument here is the same as that Synge makes in his ‘Preface’ to Playboy of the Western World, where he lists very specific places – ‘any little hillside cabin in Geesala, or Carraroe, or Dingle Bay’ – as sites where ‘striking and beautiful phrases were as ready to the story-teller’s or the playwright’s hand, as the rich cloaks and dresses of his time’, just as ‘when the Elizabethan dramatist took his ink-horn and sat down to his work he used many phrases that he had just heard, as he sat at dinner, from his mother or his children’.16 For Synge and Yeats, as for P. W. Joyce, rich language is born of place. ‘I would not be trying to form an Irish National Theatre’, Yeats wrote in 1904, ‘if I did not believe that there existed in Ireland . . . a vivid sensitiveness as to the reality of things, powerful enough to overcome all these phantoms of the night.’17 As his thought was already beginning to move towards the dialectical play of opposites that would take shape in A Vision, theatre offered Yeats a form in which ‘the reality of things’ could come into creative conflict with ‘phantoms of the night’; the theatre, in other words, offered him a form in which the specificity of things (grounded in the particularity of place) could enter into a dialectical engagement with the abstract thought that, for him, characterised modernity. ‘It is no surprise’,

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comments Edward Engelberg, ‘that Yeats’s early writings on the drama suffer from some confusion and sense of uncertainty. While disliking realism, he could not sanction what often masqueraded as its antidote – a shadowy, insubstantial art.’18 So, while Yeats could not fully endorse realism, it nonetheless on occasion provided him with the necessary material ground for thought and desire. However, for many others writing for the Abbey – and for many in the audience – the powerful attraction of the Killeenans of Ireland produced no such confusion: the appropriate dramatic form for staging a linguistically rich sense of place was a realism that mimetically reproduced specific places on the stage. ‘As is natural in a country where the Gaelic League has created a preoccupation with the country-man,’ Yeats noted with a hint of resignation in 1905, ‘the greater number of our plays are founded on the comedy and tragedy of country life, and are written more or less in dialect’.19 Indeed, it was certainly the case that there were a great many plays on Irish stages in the 1920s and 1930s that used the spatial form of realism without activating its critical potential. The cultural investment in the Irish sense of place meant that Irish audiences were comfortable with realism as an indigenous style, so that very similar sets – a peasant kitchen, with a door, table, chair, dresser and window – could serve as the realistic setting for a number of different plays. This repetition had the unintentional effect of undermining the specificity of setting upon which the more theoretically developed versions of stage realism (particularly naturalism) were founded. Indeed, by 1928 it was even possible to transport ‘Irish’ peasant realism elsewhere. For instance, Figure 2 shows the setting from a production of an unpublished play by one of the leading Irish realists, T. C. Murray, The Blind Wolf (1928). All of the elements of the Irish peasant realism scenic space are present, with the sparse furniture of the cottage, and the door opening on to the countryside; however, this particular play is set in Hungary. If one were to look for a definitional image of Irish theatre space in the first half of the twentieth century, it would resemble very closely the realist box set for The Blind Wolf – albeit without the Hungarian setting. And there would be forces greater than simply the economy of reusing sets at work in reproducing, over and over again, this space on Irish stages. Indeed, as the twentieth century went on, the realism of the Abbey’s first decade became increasingly reified as the expression of a period that produced a stable, ‘certain’ Irish space. We could understand this space – bounded within four walls, but always with a door opening to an unseen offstage – by looking at any number of plays of that period, but in few

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Figure 2 A typical Irish peasant realist box set from the late 1920s – almost. In many respects this resembles the stage spaces that regularly faced Abbey audiences until the early 1960s. This play – T. C. Murray’s The Blind Wolf (1928) – happens to be set in Hungary, a detail that did not make the standard peasant kitchen set any less useful. Photo courtesy of Abbey Theatre Archives (National Theatre Society Ltd)

more clearly than Pádraic Colum’s The Land (1905), where the young protagonist Ellen says wistfully, ‘Do you ever think of America? The streets, the shops, the throngs?’20 As Stephen Kern argues in The Culture of Space and Time, 1890–1918, the result of the fluid movement of ideas and individuals associated with modernity was ‘a growing sense of unity among people formerly isolated in distance and lack of communication. This was not, however, unambiguous, because proximity also generated anxiety.’21 America was not proximate to early twentieth-century Ireland in the strict geographical terms of perceived space, but its powerful presence in plays of that period as a desirable and accessible space elsewhere points to the simultaneous attractions of its modernity, and also to the ‘anxiety’ it engendered as somewhere that was proximate in terms of conceived space. This introduces a dominant strain of Irish drama in which, to use David Harvey’s phrase, ‘the identity of place was reaffirmed in the midst of the

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growing abstractions of space’.22 From Ellen’s perspective, America is a developed and above all an urbanised society, where modernity guarantees material wealth: ‘In America there’s money to have and to spend and to send home,’ she asserts. However, even though ‘home’ is referenced as a financial beneficiary of the emigration of the young, the pulse of the play is found in the declaration of Ellen’s father: ‘We were in dread of Ellen going to America’; it is a space of infinite opportunity to which she is attracted, because there, she says, ‘I have a chance of knowing what is in me.’ For Ellen, the ‘home place’ of Ireland is imaged in ways similar to those examined in Chapter 2 where, in Tuan’s terms, ‘From the security and stability of place we are aware of the openness, freedom and threat of space, and vice versa.’ As Ellen says, ‘it’s my freedom I want’.23 In Irish theatrical realism, then, an underlying structure of space and place exists in a dialectic that privileges place over space. We can superimpose Werner Sollors’s categories of ‘consent’ and ‘descent’ over this basic structure, with its opposed sites of the places of Ireland and the spaces of America in The Land. Consent stresses ‘our abilities as mature free agents and “architects of our fates”’, while descent ‘emphasises our positions as heirs, our hereditary qualities, liabilities and entitlements’.24 While Ellen does emigrate, Colum’s play closes on the celebratory triumph of descent: ‘Stay on the land and you’ll be saved body and soul.’25 However, the exercise of consent, the placing of individual choice above communal responsibility, is a clear and pervasive concern in the play, and one which is not defeated. This ‘dread’ of America as an alien space disruptive of the home place of Irish community and cultural values continued to inform Irish drama into the 1930s and 1940s; indeed, as the culture of the new state became more permeable, with radio, cinema and cheap newspapers, there was a heightened awareness of what was seen as a corrosive materialism of a modernity against which there seemed to be no bulwark. A thread of what we might call a countermodernity in the production of Irish theatrical space can be traced from a play like The Land through to the work of a later writer, such as M. J. Molloy. If the increasingly advanced state of American modernity made it an especially threatening spatial ‘other’, England was an equivalent, and more proximate, open space (at least from an Irish perspective). Molloy’s The Wood of the Whispering (1953) suggests both the persistence and the mutation of the spatial orientation of The Land and similar plays from the early part of the century. Molloy’s play captures the sense of modernity’s threat to the old and its attractive promises to the young in Stephen’s statement: ‘My daughter is finding this village too quiet and lonesome on account of all

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the young crowd are long since gone out of it, all enticed away by the plentifulness of the money in England and America and Dublin.’ The implication here is that the salient features which differentiated Dublin from modern cities have now been erased, much as Yeats, half a century earlier, equated Galway with urban modernity when contrasted to the village of Killeenan. Once again, we see spatial distinctions that are usually expressed in national terms internalised within the territory of Ireland. The West of Ireland in which Molloy’s play is set is faced, according to the play’s spatial reading, with the implacable force of the modern city unless the young resist emigration and ‘marry in Ireland and on the land of Ireland’26 – a category which clearly excludes Dublin, which is in the same conceptual zone as ‘England and America’. By the 1960s, this attachment to home and sense of place began to be rendered in increasingly strained and disturbing ways, in plays such as John B. Keane’s The Field (1965) which is set in that decade, although its central concerns are part of a continuous thread stretching back to the 1930s and earlier. The dramatic issue is ownership of a field due to be auctioned, and for which the two contenders are a self-made Irishman returned from England and Bull McCabe, a local farmer, whose dedication to the field in which his own mother died while harvesting has become a violent, psychotic obsession. The place/space opposition and the attendant values of tradition and modernity are captured in McCabe’s virulent denunciation of his opponent: ‘[A] total stranger [who] has come and . . . wants to bury my sweat and blood in concrete.’ The blood is also that of the mother whose death in the field serves to underline the regenerative cycle through which field and mother become one; this is stressed, moreover, by McCabe referring to the field as his child. What the play makes clear is that this is a world-view which, while authentic, is now archaic and destructive. McCabe’s heroic struggle is undermined by the perverse and repressive atavism which leads him to murder his rival. For while he forces the community to deny all knowledge of his crime in a confirmation of ancient allegiances, this is now a modern world in which television provides entertainment and, just as the returned émigré brought English-earned money to buy the field, the global economy is only a flight away. The moment is brief, but when, following ‘Sounds of a jet’, Tadgh explains to Bull ‘That’s only a jet . . . one of them new ones with the high boomin’ sound,’27 Keane concentrates in one brief exchange the changed spatial coordinates of modernising Ireland. For characters whose lived space is mapped out in blood on the ground beneath their feet, the jet introduces a third dimension, in which distance and time exist according to different rules.

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That this stark juxtaposition of spaces – between the archaic world of allegiance to the sacral place and the world of high-speed travel – can still be captured in a realist play raises questions about David Harvey’s assumption that the form is unable to portray the experience of accelerated modernity: ‘How was it possible, using the narrative structures of realism, to write anything other than a parochialist and hence to some degree “unrealistic” novel in the face of all this spatial simultaneity?’28 While this could be questioned with regard to the realist novel, which enjoys an expressive freedom of movement, it applies directly to the realist drama, which is bound within the often densely realised set, which technically (and financially) restricts the ability to encompass other spaces. Indeed, Keane is only able to express his apprehension of this ‘other’ modern space through sound, a zone non-A, distinct from the zone-A space produced on the visible stage. Usually, the realist stage posits a continuity between on- and offstage spaces, eliding their spatial differences. In the moment a jet passes overhead in The Field, however, the zone A of the stage (the world of the field and of the community) and the zone non-A of the aurally produced offstage (the world of continent-crossing jet travel) are both contiguous (within the fiction of the play), and profoundly discontiguous, in terms of spatial formation. At that moment, space and place exist in conflict. While what we can now call the ‘monad of realism’ was reproduced, over and over again, on Irish stages throughout the twentieth century, it was thus far from uncontested. In the same years that the Abbey was increasingly a theatre of ‘country life’, and the critical and dialectical nature of its realism waned, in continental Europe there were much more radical responses to the collapse of ‘l’espace de “bons sens”’ after 1910. ‘Is it that the scenographers believe it absolutely necessary to represent this reality?’ demanded Enrico Prampolini in his ‘Futurist Manifesto (Scenography)’ in 1915. ‘Idiots!’ He called instead for ‘the abolition of the painted stage’ and its replacement by ‘uncoloured mechanical architecture, powerfully vitalized by emanations from a luminous source’. A few years later, in 1924, the Bauhaus designer László Moholy-Nagy called for a stage space that would allow the audience ‘to take hold and participate – actually allow them to fuse with the action on the stage at the peak of cathartic activity’.29 The realist box sets of the Abbey peasant plays, with their steady amber lighting, were tame by comparison with such modernist visions. Con Leventhal, writing as L. K. Emory in the short-lived Klaxon in 1923, would thus long for ‘a whiff of Dadaist Europe to kick Ireland into artistic wakefulness’.30 By contrast, John Dowling, writing in Ireland To-Day in 1937, would take a more widely held stance when he described Surrealism

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as ‘the manifestation of a stealthily spreading philosophy. It is evident in all the arts and is usually referred to as “modernist”, a modest word which does not altogether deny the existence of contemporary work of a different kind.’ In Ireland, Dowling concluded, there was always the ‘comforting thought that the steady stream of tradition still moves on, indifferent to these squalls, and it is heartening to remember that the gates of Hell shall not prevail against it’.31 In the maelstrom of modernity, Dowling spoke for an Ireland grounded in tradition and a sense of place that was to be a rock of stability. ‘Artistic and cultural expression in the Irish Free State in the 1920s and especially in the 1930s’, writes Terence Brown, ‘would certainly give the cultural historian sufficient ground for concluding that modernism and post-colonial nationalism (another capacious and accommodating term) are antithetical in their particular manifestations.’32 Micheál Mac Liammóir notes in his memoirs that the 1920s in Ireland were ‘a curious period for the dramatist who if he set his face against the expressionism movement that was creeping in from Russia and Germany and avoided modernism of style, found nothing in the air but the conventional methods of the classics and the gramophones and cocktails, the witty regretful moons and tunes and libertines that Noel Coward had set free in Shaftesbury avenue’.33 In an article entitled ‘Realism’ published in Motley in 1932, Hilton Edwards announced: ‘Since this theatre was founded we have presented comparatively few realistic plays, and have already avoided realism in production. We consider that realism has been badly overdone, and if the drama has a future that future will not be found to lie in a realistic direction.’34 Curtis Canfield put the matter succinctly in 1936: ‘It has been the consistent custom of the Abbey to subordinate the physical aspects of production, stage setting, and lighting, to the acting . . . On the other hand, an advanced artistic decor, stylized methods of production and acting, and innovations and experiments in the use of stage-lighting and sound effects have been the chief concerns of the Gate.’35 The Abbey was quick to respond to the recognition, as an Abbey board memorandum of 1935 put it, that ‘drama enticing to the intellect and to the eye are now found on another stage’,36 a clear reference to the Gate. Later that year, the National Theatre hired Hugh Hunt to direct plays, and Hunt in turn brought in Tanya Moiseiwitsch, who went on to design more than fifty plays for the Abbey (and who would later design the influential platform stages of the Festival Theatre in Stratford, Ontario, and the Sheffield Theatre in England). Although many of the plays for which she created scenic designs were written within the broad conventions of stage

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Figure 3 Tanya Moiseiwitsch’s expressionist design for Louis D’Alton’s The Man in the Cloak (1937) was one of more than fifty sets she created for the Abbey in the 1930s, challenging the notion that Abbey stages at the time were an unrelieved succession of realist box sets. Photo courtesy of Abbey Theatre Archives (National Theatre Society Ltd)

realism, her designs frequently made use of the height of the Abbey proscenium, with arching painted shadows near the top of the set creating open-ended vertical space rising up out of an otherwise realist set. In other cases, Moiseiwitsch emphasised abstract patterns in an apparently realist setting, moving the scenic space away from the specificity of place. When a play gave her greater scope to move beyond realism, as with Louis D’Alton’s play about the poet James Clarence Mangan, The Man in the Cloak (1937), she created forcefully expressionist scenic designs, foregrounding their own theatricality with broadly painted, distorted backdrops against which the human figures stood out starkly (Figure 3). This parallel scenic tradition in the Abbey in the middle decades of the twentieth century is not often remembered, and, indeed, was not always appreciated at the time. The Irish Times, for instance, wrote disparagingly of The Man in the Cloak that ‘the use of pseudo-expressionist technique for

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the presentation of the second act does nothing to alter the realism of the play’.37 As Micheál Mac Liammóir later noted, theatrical Expressionism in Ireland was generally ‘regarded with suspicion and dismissed with the neat label “highbrow”’.38 In spite of this, Moiseiwitsch was only one of a group of designers who developed a spatial critique of stage realism in the Abbey in the 1930s and after. In his history of the Abbey, Hugh Hunt also mentions ‘James Bould . . . Anne Yeats and their successors Michael Walsh, Alicia Sweetman, Carl Bonn and Vere Dudgeon’ as ‘at least a partial answer to those who had long pointed to the superior staging of Hilton Edwards and Micheál Mac Liammóir at the Gate Theatre’.39 Moreover, one of the institutional features of the Abbey that otherwise contributed to a certain scenographic inertia – its repertoire system and practice of reusing sets – paradoxically meant that Moiseiwitsch’s scenic designs had a stage life after her departure in 1939. In spite of Moiseiwitsch’s work, the perception in the 1930s that the Abbey was the home of a conservative scenic practice, while the Gate was the home of an experimental modernism, had as much to do with the latter’s ability to articulate, within a wider European framework, a modernist agenda, in contrast to the Abbey’s growing sense of itself as the steward of a peasant realist tradition, the ‘folk theatre’ whose parameters had been laid down in the early years of the century. In this respect, what can be read as the counterblast to the Irish Literary Theatre’s manifesto of 1897 appeared in the April 1933 edition of Motley, where (writing under the Teutonic pseudonym of E. W. Tocher), the playwright Denis Johnston published ‘Towards a Dynamic Theatre’. The problem with Irish theatre’s attachment to realism, Johnston asserted, was that it had failed to define its own specifically theatrical qualities: it lacked, in other words, formal selfawareness. This may not have been universally true (and was far from true in the case of Yeats), but it allowed Johnston to enter into open combat with realism understood as a theatrical form that masked its own conventions. In creating a theatre of realism, he argued, Irish theatre practitioners had failed to recognise that they were fighting a battle that had already been lost. By 1933 – six years after The Jazz Singer brought sound to the cinema – it was possible for film to be realistic in ways that would never be possible with theatre. For Johnston, the solution was for theatre to become, once again, theatrical. His understanding of the specificity of theatre as a medium in ‘Towards a Dynamic Theatre’ was, to a significant extent, spatial. At the core of his manifesto are a series of six axioms, the first two of which are spatial, and out of these arise the third, and most critical axiom:

60 (1) (2)

(3)

Mapping Irish Theatre: Theories of Space and Place The play does not take place upon the stage, but in the reflexes of the audience. The Proscenium Arch, in so far as it frames a two-dimensional picture, has no advantage over the Cinematograph screen, save that of colour, which is only of very doubtful value. At the same time, it has innumerable disadvantages. The theatre is at its best when it is most theatrical.40

A ‘theatrical’ theatre was one that would be aware of and exploit its own spatial nature, operating in three dimensions (the simulation of which the cinema still struggles to achieve). If Johnston’s analysis of the ‘theatrical’ was fundamentally spatial, so too was his prescription for the form of a modern theatre. The most challenging aspect of his argument is the idea that a play takes place not in the absolute space of the stage ‘but in the reflexes of the audience’ – or in the ‘lived space’ of performance, to put the idea in Lefebvrean terms. Johnston’s theory was firmly rooted in practice, for most of what he advocates in 1933 he had already attempted with his first play, The Old Lady Says ‘No!’, staged by Micheál Mac Liammóir and Hilton Edwards at the Gate, initially in 1929, but remounted throughout the 1930s (including each of the two years after he published ‘Towards a Dynamic Theatre’, 1934 and 1935) and into the early 1940s. Set on a stage on which a patriotic melodrama is being performed, the dialogue from the opening section of the play is a montage of popular poems and ballads, designed to trigger memories and responses in the audience. When this pastiche melodrama is interrupted by a falling curtain (literalising the collapse of a knowable stage space), the play breaks free from the constraints of plot and becomes open to a succession of images, words and scenes that orchestrate responses in the audience, in the manner (as Johnston suggests) of a piece of music. In order for this to happen, however, Johnston insists that the space of the stage must become fluid, freed both from the demands of omniscience of the realist stage, in which spatial relations are fixed, and from the temporal sequence of narrative. ‘The action must be kept flowing without interruption,’ he writes, ‘either by means of the revolving stage or by way of a permanent set, coupled with proper use of modern lighting.’ When the space of the theatre becomes fluid, the work of producing the space (in Lefebvre’s sense of ‘production’) is transferred from the director and scenic designer to the audience. The theatre, argued Johnston, ‘can beat the screen by a firm exploitation of its two advantages: (a) its stereoscopic values and (b) the knowledge in the back of the listener’s mind that something is actually happening now’.41 For Johnston, a ‘dynamic’ modern

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theatre will be one not so much in which space is freed from any fixed centre in the name of freedom, but one in which constantly shifting forms force the audience to confront space, to experience it as crisis, and thus to be aware of the work of constantly producing it. ‘Towards a Dynamic Theatre’ was published when the Gate seemed to have the same sense of openness and possibility that Johnston imagined on a stage freed from the demands of narrative realism, thrown from the constraints of place into the freedom and threat of space. For instance, Mac Liammóir’s record of the Gate’s 1928 staging of Oscar Wilde’s Salome (produced alongside Nikolai Evreinov’s Theatre of the Soul ) gives a sense of a re-imagined stage space. ‘It was a strange combination, and called forth a few howls, for in the Evreinov play we acted in a black set with two spotlights and a line-drawing in white and scarlet of an enormous heart rather in the manner of Joan Miró; and in Salome we had a lovely set in silver and viperish green with the entire cast stripped almost naked.’42 This production clearly subscribes as much to the decadence of the fin-de-siècle and art deco as to the more radical experimental styles of Futurism, Dada/surrealism and expressionism which, by 1928, had revolutionised many aspects of on- and offstage space elsewhere in European theatre, including the stage/auditorium relationship. At the same time, in its darkened space, highlighted with ‘viperish green’, we get a sense not only of the freedom of this form of theatrical space, but also its hint of danger. So, as Nicholas Allen noted, the small stage of the Gate was ‘the site of alternative worlds in miniature’,43 a condensational space that made manifest the latent critique of realism in the Abbey’s cottage kitchens, which in turn had become metonymic of an equally constrained society. In 1936, Curtis Canfield had observed that ‘radios and moving pictures [are] helping to smooth away those salient features which once made Dublin different from London or New York’. These comments informed the plays included in his collection Plays of Changing Ireland, which were chosen to reflect ‘the extent to which each [play] was an expression of new forces and conditions in the modern State’. Ireland, for Canfield, is ‘striding along with the modern world’, and he lists the construction of a hydroelectric plant on the River Shannon as ‘the most significant presage of all’. ‘Now cheap power and light can be sent across the Island, paving the way for an expansion of industry unthinkable before.’ He clearly assumed that there was a direct relationship between modern industrialisation and modernist theatrical innovation and, determined by the evolving economic and social base, believed that the dramatic superstructure ‘is in

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an interesting state of transition from Realism to Experimentation and Expressionism’,44 modern forms to express the modern moment. However logical Canfield’s argument may have been, this shift in dramatic form did not occur, or at least not in the wholesale way anticipated, and the issue of Ireland’s engagement with modernity largely remained the preserve of realist dramas, from which critique had been evacuated, in rural locations, as if any concession to post-nineteenth-century forms would be acquiescence to the very developments to which an increasingly conservative society was diametrically opposed. Despite Canfield’s enthusiasm for the modern, there was a strong tendency in Irish culture in the middle decades of the twentieth century to exclude foreign ideas as much as foreign imports and, from the early years of the Literary Revival, we see an apprehension that the dissolution of spatial distinctions between Dublin, London and New York was to be resisted, almost at all costs. So, as figures associated with the Gate, such as Johnston, moved on to other pursuits, and Edwards and Mac Liammóir’s dramaturgy became less adventurous (with more productions such as Mac Liammóir’s 1944 stage adaptation of Jane Eyre), Terence Brown has good reason to argue that not ‘even the Gate was in any real sense dedicated to modernist experimentalism’ and, ‘for all its brilliance, its bravura cosmopolitanism, one detects in the Gate Theatre of the 1930s the subversive energies of both the decadence and of the modern becoming somehow unthreatening in the provincial Irish air.45 Indeed, by 1950, Mac Liammóir himself had all but despaired of the Gate’s potential to become a truly modernist theatre. Writing in Theatre in Ireland, he laments the dissipation of those energies: And so the Gate turns from Denis Johnston, too occupied with other work to be a great playwright, and from myself, too torn by conflicting desires to become a frankly popular one, and peers into darkness . . . So the search goes on for those authors who will deliver it from the cumbersome drawingroom and library set . . . from the limitations of those literal and representative surroundings which the film, for obvious reasons, can achieve so much better.46

In Irish theatrical realism, then, space and place exist in a dialectic that may ultimately seem to have privileged place. However, as Johnston’s modernist manifesto and the work of Moiseiwitsch at the Abbey should remind us, it can be misleading to read this as an inevitable outcome, and there existed in Ireland in the first half of the twentieth century a parallel modernist theatre of space. Alongside Synge’s visit to the Aran Islands, there is Yeats’s time in Paris, and Katharine Worth identifies ‘the Symbolist movement’ of French and other European theatres as ‘the nourishing source of the

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Yeatsian revolution’. It was this, she argues, that ‘led in the end to a modernist drama’ of which Beckett is the best-known exponent.47 At the heart of Symbolist drama stands the concept of ‘static theatre’ proposed by Maurice Maeterlinck: not a drama in which nothing happens, but one in which the perceived excesses of late nineteenth-century drama such as violent onstage action, melodramatic declamation, and an extended plot are sloughed off in favour of a concentrated moment of emotional intensity evoked by the stage image. Accordingly, subjects such as ‘the lover who strangles his mistress, the commander who is victorious in battle’, or ‘the husband who avenges his honour’ were abandoned in favour of the static drama of ‘an old man sitting in his armchair, waiting simply beneath his lamp’ as this life was ‘more human, more profound’.48 The concept of the condensational image that compresses space–time is widespread throughout a range of Modernist writings and manifestos, and constitutes a counterpoint to the narrative-driven theatre of realism. For instance, in The Widening Gyre Joseph Frank extends Ezra Pound’s definition of an image as that ‘which presents an intellectual and emotional complex in an instant of time’ to suggest that it is actually the ‘unification of disparate ideas and emotions into a complex presented spatially in an instant of time’.49 While drama is not addressed by Frank, it too is largely a ‘time-art’ in which full meaning is dependent on the forward flow of plot and the movement of bodies rather than an art of tableau-like stillness. However, Martin Esslin’s concept of ‘a theatre of situation as against a theatre of events in sequence’50 captures the essence of this ‘static’ theatre, especially as it found expression in the one-act play that gained serious artistic credibility within the late nineteenth century. As Peter Szondi has argued, in order to create any tension within its attenuated form, the oneact play must stage ‘a situation bordering on catastrophe – catastrophe which is imminent when the curtain goes up and that later becomes ineluctable’. This applies to Yeatsian drama, particularly the Cuchulain plays such as On Baile’s Strand (1904), but it is in Yeats’s anticipation of Szondi’s point that in the one-act play ‘time is spatialized’51 that his drama becomes most experimental and, paradoxically, while most apparently opposed to modernity, yet most fully engaged with its crisis of space. If we go back to the early years of the twentieth century, then, the theatrical spaces of Irish realism in a play like Colum’s The Land in 1905 thus need to be set alongside those produced by plays such as Yeats’s On Baile’s Strand or The King’s Threshold (1903), which are removed in both style and theme from rural realism. As Yeats explained in his notes to The King’s Threshold: ‘It was written when our Society [the Irish Literary

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Society] was having a hard fight for the recognition of pure art in a community of which one half was buried in the practical affairs of life, and the other half in politics and propagandist patriotism.’52 Michael McAteer has suggested this might be refined to an opposition between the individual and a repressive state authority.53 In both authorial explanation and critical interpretation, the drama is based on an opposition that accords with the stance of modernism, which Michael Levenson maintains was concerned ‘to challenge an unfreedom’.54 However, where a narrative of historical progress would put individual freedoms on the side of the modern, and inherited authority on the side of ‘unfreedom’, Yeats reverses the terms of the equation, opposing the rights of tradition to the rationalised conformity of the modern state. What is more, the opening stage directions make it clear that this is conceived in spatial terms: ‘Steps before the Palace of King Guaire at Gort . . . Seanachan lying on steps . . . King on the upper step before a curtained door.’55 The threshold of the title is one which Seanachan, the poet, has recently been banned from crossing, his place on the ‘great council of the State’ denied by ‘Bishops, Soldiers, and Makers of the Law’ whose clearly modernising concept of government has no place for tradition. In protest against his exclusion, Seanachan has undertaken a hunger strike on the steps, his position opposed to that of the King ‘on the upper step’, strikingly and spatially conveying the dramatic heart of the play. For all that Yeats ‘twisted’ and ‘revised’ a ‘Middle Irish story’, the idea that ‘it was the men who ruled the world, / And not the men who sang to it, who should sit / Where there was the most honour’56 captures what he saw to be at stake in the modernising Ireland he critiqued in 1892: ‘Every man here is grinding at the mill wherein he grinds all things into pounds and shillings, and but few of them will he get when all is done.’57 That state formation and materialism were twin deniers of individual freedom is clear, as is the William Morris-inspired sense of the wage slavery that such developments brought in their wake. So, while in The King’s Threshold there are diegetic references to the towns of Kinvara and Duras, the offstage world does not function as the zone non-A location of opposition; the conflict is expressed totally through the steps and relative positions of the King and Seanachan. Although there is movement in ways reminiscent of Milton’s Samson Agonistes as various characters enter and entreat Seanachan to break his fast, the play is essentially static, an audience’s attention focused entirely on the spatially defined battle of wills on the steps. As an experiment in the use of space, The King’s Threshold is limited. A production photograph from 1903 shows that the stage restrictions of the Molesworth Hall did not allow any realisation of a spatial divide between

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Figure 4 ‘Steps before the Palace of King Guaire at Gort’. Yeats’s The King’s Threshold (1903) hinges on an opposition between the palace and the steps. However, as this production photograph from the 1903 production in the Molesworth Hall shows, the ability to produce such spatial contrasts was constrained by the available stage space and machinery. Photo courtesy of Abbey Theatre Archives (National Theatre Society Ltd)

Seanachan and the King; the narrow band of steps is simply a shallow line across the stage rather being a dynamic element of the drama as imagined in the play text (Figure 4). What dominates are the verbal exchanges between Seanachan and other characters rather than an expression of their differences in spatial form. While On Baile’s Strand is less adventurous than The King’s Threshold turned out to be in practice, in terms of its creation of an informing onstage spatial image it does exemplify Yeats’s engagement with onstage space in terms of his attempt to evoke a world which is other than the quotidian one occupied by the audience. This offstage is not simply the historic past but a past with the suggestion of ‘faeryland’ – a concept that in Yeats’s critical vocabulary is more complex, and more attuned to modernist anxieties, than the word might suggest. As he observed in his notes on The Green Helmet (1910), ‘Our stage is too small’ for experiment, but with a set that had ‘a very pronounced colour scheme’ – and so clearly

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not aiming for verisimilitude – ‘the more it [the play’s world] is lifted out of time and place, and the nearer to fairyland do we carry it’.58 What then distinguishes Yeats’s drama is its constant experimentation with the space staged and the space evoked as he sought to transcend realism and engage audiences in a world other than that which lay beyond the theatre, albeit that it was that social world he wished, ultimately, to transform. However, while the language of the heroic plays might evoke a world of mythic grandeur, this evocation worked better on the page than on the stage where the combination of the restrictions of the Abbey’s performance space and the company’s budget meant that what was produced fell far short of ‘faeryland’. While these constraints had limited impact on the peasant plays, their effect on the heroic plays was considerable. As James Flannery notes, pictures of productions ‘tell an unrelieved tale of tasteless shoddiness’59 in terms of costumes, while the limitations of the stage space meant that characters were ‘strung along the edge of the stage in straight unbroken lines, like paste-board figures stuck on to the scenic backdrop’.60 Even years later, those involved would recall the ‘awful costumes’ made for The King’s Threshold by Yeats’s patron, Annie Horniman, which, Yeats noted acidly (but not inaccurately) made the actors look ‘like Father Christmas and fire extinguishers’.61 Yeats gave public expression to his discontent in ‘A People’s Theatre’, his open letter to Lady Gregory in 1919, where he made clear his view that the Abbey’s ability to produce a stage space of social verisimilitude was a failure rather than a triumph: ‘its success has been for me a discouragement and a defeat’. His remedy was to relocate his theatre to ‘a room worthy of it (some great dining-room or drawing-room)’. This would have the advantage of excluding the ‘artisan and small shopkeeper’ and ensuring an audience of ‘leisured and lettered people’ who, Yeats felt, would be more receptive to his ‘mysterious art’.62 He had expressed his disquiet with the pragmatic necessities of theatre management in 1917, making an explicit link to the need to raise money to pay wages by catering to audiences who actually ‘prefer light entertainment’. I have begun, he wrote, ‘to shrink from sending my muses where they are but half-welcomed’. In what is almost a repudiation of all that he had achieved at the Abbey, Yeats speaks of the ‘blunder’ in his youth of not realising that his theatre ‘must be the ancient theatre that can be made by unrolling a carpet or marking out a place with a stick, or setting a screen against a wall’.63 The clear paradox is that while Yeats’s ideal anticipates Peter Brook’s nomadic theatre experiments in Africa over half a century later,64 his sense that ‘Ireland has suffered . . . from democracy’ meant that a performance of

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such open access could not be contemplated as it might attract audiences such as those in the gallery of the Lyceum Theatre who ‘receive the love speeches of Juliet with an ironical chirruping’.65 Rather, Yeats attempts to fuse two antithetical theatrical spaces: the performing space that has a democratic simplicity produced by ‘marking out a place with a stick’, and the oligarchic exclusivity of a drawing room in which actors could perform for a select audience ‘by the light of a large chandelier’.66 By 1917, he was already beginning to explore such spaces with the Noh-influenced At the Hawk’s Well ‘performed for the first time in April 1916, in a friend’s drawing room’. Staged in Lady Cunard’s London home, At the Hawk’s Well ‘was played upon the floor, and the players came in by the same door as the audience’.67 In this shared space, as Richard Taylor notes, ‘instead of spectators being drawn into the fictional world of the stage, the fictional characters and action are thrust into the real world of the audience’,68 in a manner not dissimilar to the way in which aristocratic eighteenth-century audiences in Smock Alley sat on the stage itself during comedies such as St Stephen’s Green. The scenic space in At the Hawk’s Well is produced when Three Musicians enter, their faces made up to resemble masks, and slowly unfold a black cloth decorated with a gold pattern suggesting a hawk. This unfolding coincides with their singing the opening line of the play, ‘I call to the eye of the mind’ and the evocation of ‘A well long choked up and dry / And boughs long stripped by the wind.’ The drama concerns the Old Man and the Young Man (Cuchulain) who are entranced by the dance of The Guardian of the Well and so miss the opportunity to drink the water of immortality. But the specific space in which the action occurs is totally dependent on language for its creation in ‘the eye of the mind’; namely that of the audience who, numbering no more than fifty in Yeats’s ideal, would be directly affected by the words, the dance and the music in ways which would not be feasible in a larger auditorium. The only object on stage is ‘a square blue cloth to represent a well’, otherwise everything is evoked through language and almost exclusively focused on the well and its immediate environs. The First Musician sets the scene in terms of both lighting and location: Night falls; The mountain-side grows dark; The withered leaves of the hazel Half choke the dry bed of the well.

These specifics are then echoed in the Old Man’s question: ‘And are there not before your eyes at the instant / Grey boulders and a solitary girl / And

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three stripped hazels?’ The Young Man replies: ‘I but see / A hollow among stones half-full of leaves.’69 As the audience can see only the square blue cloth, the success of the play depends on the power of the language to evoke a specific place while the audience faces a stage lacking all such detail. Martin Puchner has suggested that Yeats derived from Noh theatre ‘the use of diegesis as a weapon against the mimetic theatre’, particularly against the latter’s inadequacy in staging the space of ‘faeryland’. Accordingly, while there is still some minimal mimesis in At the Hawk’s Well (the square of blue cloth makes the well present on stage in symbolic if not realistic form), the weight of spatial evocation is carried by a diegesis that functions very differently to diegesis in the realist theatre. In realist theatre, diegesis produces the zone non-A of the offstage; in Yeats’s theatre, it produces the zone A of the onstage. Here, as Puchner puts it, diegetic space is ‘projected right on top of the mimetic scene’.70 Diegetic space is evoked in terms of that which is both proximate to and distant from the well. The First Musician observes ‘That old man climbs up hither’, adding that ‘the old thorn trees are doubled up / Among the rocks where he is climbing’, and the Young Man refers to his ‘ancient house beyond the sea’.71 These do not come into conflict in terms of Ubersfeld’s zone-A and zone non-A, as would happen on a realist stage; rather, Yeats attempts to transcend realist space on stage and contemporary social space within and beyond the auditorium, aiming for the linguistic evocation of a mythic space in which zones A and non-A merge. This is created by what Puchner terms ‘ekphrastic diegesis’,72 a diegesis of such vivid detail that it creates a stage space ‘in the eye of the mind’ within which the actions of the onstage characters can be believed to be occurring. Despite the slightness of its plot, At the Hawk’s Well is a conceptually complex play in terms of its use and evocation of space. The simplicity of the staging on ‘any bare space before a wall’ is countered by the opulence of the ‘light of a large chandelier’; the minimalism of the square blue cloth is set against the richness of the ‘ekphrastic diegesis’ and the location of the Three Musicians who are set ‘against the wall’, an intermediate space from which they comment on the action and, through the unfolding and finally folding of the cloth, demarcate the space in which the performance is to occur. Moreover, to situate the play fully in relation to what Ubersfeld calls the ‘location’ of performance, At the Hawk’s Well was staged in London. Roy Foster has observed that Yeats ended his ‘Note’ on the play with ‘a rallying call reminiscent of the manifestoes he had issued in Samhain when shaping the Irish National Dramatic Society’, declaring that, as with painters who found they were no longer called on to decorate palaces and churches

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determined to make ‘framed pictures to hang upon a wall’, it was now time to find an appropriate form and place for the drama.73 Lady Cunard’s drawing room might be considered, therefore, as the frame that marks off the aesthetic from the spaces of commerce that usually define theatre districts, or, indeed, from the conceptual space of the national theatre. After the Easter Rising took place in April 1916, the month following the London performances of At the Hawk’s Well, Yeats was forced to reevaluate his understanding of the relationship between theatrical space and public space; he wrote in May to the playwright St John Ervine that ‘I have been a great deal shaken by Dublin events – a world one has worked with or against for years suddenly overwhelmed.’74 Such a sense of spatial disorientation informed the lines of ‘The Second Coming’ and, in the years that followed, Yeats’s sense of a crisis of space – and the parallel sense that it was possible at least to find a form for that crisis in the theatre – grew more acute. The crisis itself is given its most detailed articulation in A Vision, on which he started work in October 1917, shortly after his marriage, and not long after the performance of At the Hawk’s Well. In the edition of A Vision he published in 1925, he describes the philosophy that gives the work its form in explicitly spatial terms: As man’s intellect, say, expands, the emotional nature contracts in equal degree and vice versa; when, however, a narrowing and widening gyre reach their limit, the one the utmost contraction the other the utmost expansion, they change places, point to circle, circle to point, for this system conceives the world as catastrophic, and continue as before, one always narrowing, one always expanding, and yet bound for ever to one another.75

While the gyres and lunar cycles of A Vision are usually read in relation to Yeats’s understanding of history and poetic language, they also arise out of, and inform, his theories of theatrical space. Yeats’s writings on stage space go back to the early years of the Irish Literary Theatre. In the same 1904 issue of Samhain in which he announced Annie Horniman’s gift of the theatre on Abbey Street, with its proscenium arch, Yeats was already bemoaning its effects on stage space. Writing of the theatres of Shakespeare and Sophocles, he points out that ‘the stage itself was differently shaped, being more a platform than a stage, for they did not desire to picture the surface of life, but to escape from it. But realism came in, and every change towards realism coincided with a decline in dramatic energy.’ For Yeats, the key issue was spatial, in that the proscenium arch created a stage in which all elements of the scenic space existed on the same plane. ‘Ever since the last remnant of the old platform disappeared’, he wrote, ‘and the proscenium grew into the frame of a picture, the actors have been turned

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into a picturesque group in the foreground of a meretricious landscapepainting.’ For Yeats, who understood ‘energy’ to be the product of the dialectical play of opposites, whether in the form of ‘intellect and emotion’, ‘man and mask’, or ‘angel and demon’, a stage in which there was no spatial conflict was a dead stage. Instead, he advocated ‘a scene upon canvas, whose vertical flatness we accept and use’, and thereby ‘keep one’s composition from competing with the illusion created by the actor, who belongs to a world with depth, as well as height and breadth’.76 The conflict of two spatial planes was, for Yeats, the source of theatrical energy. This was more than simply the conflict of the two-dimensional scenic space and the threedimensional body of the actor; both scenic space and body are for him signifying spaces in their own right, corresponding, respectively, to what he calls ‘abstraction’ and ‘classical man’. For Yeats, the simple act of the performer stepping out into the empty space stages the play of opposites, ‘each living the other’s death, dying the other’s life’.77 Yeats’s understanding of this spiralling conflict of opposites is by no means static, however; his gyres spin, ultimately reaching a point of implosion, so that eventually abstraction and the body, set and actor, collapse into one another. Yeats would seem to have been approaching something like this point in his own dramatic development in the final year of his life, immediately after the publication of the 1937 edition of A Vision, as his own body slowly broke down and he prepared Purgatory for the stage. Yeats’s sketches (on the verso of his manuscript of the poem, ‘The Long-Legged Fly’), and early drafts of the play indicate clearly that he conceived of the play spatially from the outset. Like the earlier Nohinfluenced plays, the space is both simple, and signifying in its own right. In the first production, on 10 August 1938, there was only the outline of a house up left, a tree on stage right, and, realising a suggestion he made in his 1911 Harvard lecture ‘A Theatre of Beauty’, a moving shaft of moonlight. ‘You have a great, bare wall that seems to you monotonous. Instead of painting a commonplace window upon it, you cast a shaft of light across it and so have something living and changing.’78 The Boy’s first lines (‘Half door, hall door’) are architectural, drawing our focus towards the house, to which the Old Man replies: Study that house. I think about its jokes and stories; I try to remember what the butler Said to a drunken gamekeeper In mid-October, but I cannot. If I cannot, none living can.79

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For the Old Man, the ruined house is a lieu de mémoire, a place (in Tuan’s sense) that has been invested with significance because memories of the lives that had inhabited the house lingered there. The Boy, on the other hand, can see only the vacant freedom of space: ‘The floor is gone, the window’s gone, / And where there should be roof there’s sky.’80 ‘The moonlight falls upon the path,’ the Old Man tells the Boy. ‘The shadow of a cloud upon the house, / And that’s symbolical.’ In the system that Yeats worked out in A Vision, the full moon is identified with objectivity, and with space; the dark of the moon (the shadow) is identified with subjectivity (and hence memory), and time. The tragedy of the play is thus, to a significant extent, spatial: the slow collapse (at least from the Old Man’s perspective) of place (space imbued with time) into pure space. Understood spatially, the same is true of Purgatory as Peter Szondi has written of Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman: ‘there is no real change in setting, and, at the same time, it is perpetually transformed’.81 It may seem as if the Old Man is lamenting (in the manner of Yeats himself) the decline of place into vacant space, as memory drains from the house; however, the Old Man killed the Boy in the hope that he might ‘release’ his ‘mother’s soul from that dream’, so that the Old Man’s actions are equally a plunge into the freedom, and the threat, of space. Killing the Boy not only annihilates the next generation; it is intended to ‘release’ the dead from the house, leaving it truly vacant. ‘To kill a house / Where great men grew up, married, died, / I here declare a capital offence,’ says the Old Man; but this is precisely his crime. As such, the Old Man’s actions may be said to constitute the play’s ‘tragic joy’, the renunciation of all individuation (personal and spatial) and the plunge into the abyss of space. And yet, with Yeats, any such movement from one state towards another is always accompanied by an antithetical motion. So, as the Old Man claims his memories are fading, and the Boy sees only a shell of masonry, within the ruin the spectres of the Old Man’s mother and father are alive, the latter seen by the Boy as ‘a dead, living, murdered man’ as memory itself is given spatial form. The dialectical tension of place and space persists until the end: as the play concludes, the Old Man, thinking he has erased the memory of place, turns to the tree, now bathed in moonlight, in the full objective splendour of its Being-in-itself, ‘like a purified soul, / All cold, sweet, glistening light’.82 However, while he contemplates the tree, the sound of hoofbeats returns, as the spectral memory of place resurfaces. Read in this way, Purgatory is a final play in more than simply biographical terms. It can also be read as the death of a certain kind of naturalist stage, replete with signifying objects, which, in spite of the collapse of the

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understanding of space that gave rise to it, continues to live a spectral existence. The stage of Purgatory, stripped to a tree and a house, reminds us that in realist theatre the signifying function of stage objects is not in their individual specificity; rather they signify in their plenitude the solidity and verisimilitude of the stage space. The more that the stage space is emptied of objects the more signifying weight is carried by those that remain. In this regard, Purgatory can be read as a kind of beginning of the end, with its explicit instructions (addressed both to the Boy and to the audience) to ‘study that house’ and ‘study that tree’. By the time the audience are enjoined to study the tree for a second time at the play’s conclusion, it has achieved the state of pure object. As such, Purgatory can be seen to resemble Beckett’s theatre in more than simply its image of two figures alone on a stage with starkly defined objects. Indeed, Michael McAteer notes that Beckett was in Dublin in August 1938, when Purgatory premiered, and argues that ‘the impact of that night’s performance on the thirty-two year old is evident in several of Beckett’s greatest theatrical achievements after the war’, pointing not just to the visual similarity between Yeats’s play and Waiting for Godot, but also to the idea that Endgame might be seen as the interior view of the same ruined house, occupied by Hamm and his ‘accursed progenitor’.83 In Yeats’s theatre there is thus an actively antagonistic relationship between character and space; in Beckett’s theatre, this sense of a sundering of body and space goes even further. In an essay published in The Irish Bookman in 1934 entitled ‘Recent Irish Poetry’, Beckett proposed, ‘as rough principle of individuation’ between younger Irish poets, an ‘awareness of the new thing that has happened or the old thing that has happened again, namely the breakdown of the object, whether current, historical, mythical or spook’. While this may be misrecognised as the ‘breakdown of the subject’, he writes, ‘it comes to the same thing – rupture of the lines of communication’. Accordingly, ‘the artist who is aware of this may state the space that intervenes between him and the world of objects’.84 In such a world, in which there has been a breakdown between subject and object, place – which may be defined as a symbiotic relationship between subject and object – becomes problematic: all that remains is, to use Beckett’s phrase, ‘the space that intervenes’. ‘The space that intervenes’ in Beckett’s theatre is initially staged in the ruin of the spaces of certainty that had imploded several decades earlier. Endgame (Fin de partie, 1957; 1958), for instance, has some resemblance to realism in its configuration of zone A and zone non-A. Its scenic space is described as a ‘bare interior’, with two small windows and a door leading to

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the kitchen in which Clov has ‘things to do’. This suggests a realist stage space, whose immediate offstage is an extension of the interior world. Further afield, diegetic references to ‘the Ardennes’, ‘the road to Sedan’, and ‘Lake Como’ contribute to the reading of the play as taking place within a broadly European location, with the idea of tandem rides and rowing trips implying a modern world of holidays and leisure. However, the view from the windows (seen only by Clov, never by the audience) produces a completely different kind of space. ‘Have you looked?’ asks Hamm early in the play: ‘Yes . . . Zero.’ ‘Zero’ is not the same as saying ‘I can’t see anything.’ It is the spatial equivalent of nothing expressed as a mathematical abstraction. A succession of similar negatives follows each reference to the offstage world: ‘Outside of here it’s death’; ‘There’s no more nature . . . In the vicinity.’ This diegetic space of negation is further contradicted, however, when Clov reports seeing ‘a small boy’, and, at the play’s end, appears ‘dressed for the road. Panama hat, tweed coat, raincoat over his arm, umbrella, bag.’ What use is an umbrella, one wonders, if there is ‘no more nature’. In short, while things happen offstage in Endgame, the play lacks one crucial element of realist drama: an assurance that the spatial coordinates through which on- and offstage space relate to one another are connected. While an offstage space (albeit in the past) might be the Ardennes or Sedan, there is no way in which that knowledge helps locate the onstage space with any precision. The possibility that a knowable space might be produced is further eroded when Clov takes the telescope and ‘turns it on the auditorium’, reporting that he sees ‘a multitude . . . in transports of . . . joy’, – adding drily: ‘That’s what I call a magnifier.’85 Beckett, Dean Wilcox has argued, moved from ‘the “expansive” space of Waiting for Godot [1953 as En attendant Godot; 1955] discrete in its creation of a neutral yet illusionistic place (“A country road. A tree.”) to an everincreasing minimalism in which the putatively “empty stage” resonated with dramatic possibilities’. Wilcox draws both on Yi-Fu Tuan’s Space and Place, and on Edward S. Casey’s The Fate of Place to conclude that: Place, within such a description [as that of Tuan and Casey], needs to be occupied, and when occupied, it ceases to be space. Space, on the other hand, offers the potential for occupation without the limiting quality of that definition. In this terminology, place, then, is viewed as defined, specific, occupied, whereas space offers the potential for occupation, which endows it with the apparent quality of infinite emptiness.86

Whether in the collapse of subject–object relations in the spaces of Beckett’s work, or in the antithetical implosion of remembered place and

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abstract space in Yeats’s, there is a strand of Irish modernist theatre that registers, in its radical reconceptualisation of the stage space, the shattering of a world of certainty. For Yeats and Beckett (and, indeed, for Johnston), the space of a transnational modernism crossed international boundaries, aspiring to a condition of pure aesthetic object, while remaining (to varying degrees) in dialogue with the imaginary space of Ireland. To the extent that their plays engaged with Irish space, however, they entered the territory of that ‘intricate net-work’ of place names connecting the present to ‘the minds of our ancestors’ through language: for Johnston, the engagement was ironic and playful; for Beckett, it was reluctant, spectral, and eventually almost nonexistent; but for Yeats, it would persist, actively, as a central dynamic in his work. An Irish site was not just anywhere; it was saturated with a historically validated sense of place. Hence, to put an Irish place on the stage was to activate chains of resonance and meaning that simply did not exist in the same way for a play set elsewhere. Realism provided the form for activating this sense of place in which Irish identity was so deeply invested. Writing in 1963, the long-serving director of the Abbey, Ernest Blythe, was clear that plays ‘set in farmhouse kitchens, city tenements or middle-class sitting-rooms’ (and, from his point of view, preferably in the Irish language) could be part of ‘a policy which will preserve permanently Ireland’s historic identity . . . in a world which is, as it were, shrinking geographically and coalescing politically’.87 Considered in this light, modernist Irish theatre repeats a pattern that will be familiar from other theatre cultures, particularly from the early part of the twentieth century, of a dialectic between realist spaces and the critique – sometimes immanent, sometimes explicit – of the adequacy of realism to stage the condition of modernity. However, because in Ireland those alternatives were identified as being extraterritorial, and realism was so closely tied to a defining and indigenous sense of place, the immanent critique would remain the stronger of the two responses to the collapse of a knowable space in Ireland until the end of the twentieth century. It would not be until the final decades of that century that the crisis that gave rise to the theatrical spaces of modernism in the first place, masked but existing as a trace, would erupt again in a second shattering of ‘l’espace de “bons sens”’.

chapter 4

The calamity of yesterday

The essence of theatre is within a mystery called ‘the present moment’.1

The theatre is a machine for making place from space. When the actor enters the space of the stage, that space may not be empty, in any meaningful sense; nonetheless, in the process of inhabiting the stage, the actor turns space into place. To take a very basic example: the first line in Riders to the Sea (1904) – ‘Where is she?’ – references space (‘where’), as Nora asks Cathleen about the location of Maurya. ‘Lying down, God help her,’2 Cathleen replies, at which point the audience is made aware that the two characters have a mental map of the scenic space of the stage (including its unseen, zone non-A spaces) since both understand, without explanation, where the missing third person will be ‘lying down’. Initially this opens up a difference in spatial knowledge between the actors and the audience, for until they are told, the audience can only surmise what might be offstage. In this example, in the fiction of the play the characters appear to inhabit the space of the stage (thereby transforming it into place) from the outset; in reality, of course, this is a theatrical illusion, and the performers are producing place from space as the performance proceeds. From this follows the recognition that the production of place from space on stage occurs in time. The degree to which the audience is conscious of place being produced in time is by no means consistent from play to play; indeed, it is one of the elements that any performance calibrates to produce meaning. Even within the confines of realism, which generally strives to produce a quality of givenness in its scenic space, subtle variations in the relationship between time and place will produce very different effects. In Riders to the Sea, for instance, the characters appear to be at home on the stage and the audience must work to learn their way around the space, finding out what is offstage, or why characters respond emotionally to otherwise innocuous 75

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objects, such as the white boards, which, in fact, have been laid out to make a coffin. The audience’s sense that the scenic space is rich in significance is further intensified by the referent of the mimetic space, for peasant characters inhabit a world that is tightly circumscribed, where travel is limited and new objects seldom appear, so those that do exist stand out in sharp particularity. Indeed, this was something of which Synge was acutely conscious, writing in The Aran Islands that ‘every article on these islands has an almost personal character, which gives this simple life, where all art is unknown, something of the artistic beauty of medieval life’.3 ‘All places’, as Yi-Fu Tuan notes, ‘are small worlds.’4 Aran is one such ‘small world’, but so too is the stage. When there is a homology between scenic space and reference, the stage’s place-producing powers are further intensified in a condensation of an already condensational space. By contrast, Tom Murphy’s Sanctuary Lamp (1975) opens with characters arriving as exiles in an abandoned church, so that unlike the characters in Riders to the Sea, they are not already at home. Consequently, they must learn the space along with the audience, and imbue it with their own meanings as the play progresses. ‘Y’know’ are Harry’s cryptic first words as he struggles to make himself understood in unfamiliar territory.5 In Riders to the Sea, the audience follows a step behind characters who are clearly at home; in The Sanctuary Lamp, the audience creates a conditional sense of place with the characters, place-making along with them. However, while the experiential distance between the audience and the characters varies between the two plays, it varies along a continuum of temporality. In both cases, the process of learning to dwell in the place created on the stage is shared by audience and characters. In spatial terms, it is one of the definitional theatrical experiences. The making place from space in the theatre is, therefore, a shared experience; shared among members of the audience, among the actors-ascharacters, and between the audience and the actors-as-characters. In all of its permutations, however, this is a process that necessarily occurs over time as actors-as-characters and audience share the laying down of memories (another temporal process) and the naming and investing of space with language, even if they do so at differing rates. This means that the members of the audience, at a very basic structural level, identify with the characters in their place-making. From this we can postulate the existence of a first-order theatrical identification: we will call this ‘spatial identification’. The concept can be clarified by comparing theatrical spatial identification to the influential neo-Lacanian understanding of cinematic identification that emerged in the 1970s in the work of film theorists such as Christian Metz and

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Laura Mulvey. As Dudley Andrew summarised the situation, ‘for [Stephen] Heath, [ Jean-Louis] Baudry and Metz, identification with characters and stories is based on an identification with the process of viewing itself and ultimately with the camera which views’.6 Metz writes: As he [the spectator] identifies with himself as look, the spectator can do no other than identify with the camera too which has looked before him at what he is now looking at and whose stationing (¼framing) determines the vanishing point. During the projection this camera is absent, but it has a representative consisting of another apparatus called precisely a ‘projector.’ An apparatus the spectator has behind him, at the back of his head, that is, precisely where fantasy located the ‘focus’ of all vision.7

For more than thirty years, this concept of cinematic identification, while not undisputed, has exerted a powerful pull on our understanding of cinematic spectatorship. However, because the theory has been so closely bound up with the cinematic apparatus (the projector and the camera), theorists of theatre spectatorship, such as Susan Bennett, have struggled to find a way to use it in relation to the theatre. ‘For the theatre spectator,’ she writes at one point, ‘the signifiers are, of course, present as part of the onstage fictional world [as opposed to “moving visual and sonic impressions”], but otherwise the relationship Metz suggests holds.’8 This is a significant ‘otherwise’. In spatial terms, it is precisely the fact that the audience and the performance occupy the same space that defines the theatrical event. In the theatre, there is no apparatus with which to identify, so the audience must find an alternative point of identification. Chapter 2 explored some of the configurations of theatrical space, from the fully lit auditorium of the eighteenth-century theatre, in which spectators sometimes sat on the stage, through to the bifurcated space of the realist stage, to the more fluid audience–actor space of the site-specific work that we will consider in Chapter 7. Common to all of these historical configurations, however, is the sharing of a real space. Hence, this sharing of a real space is one of the defining characteristics of theatre, and as such is a crucial element that distinguishes theatre from the cinema. Audience members, regardless of any sense of identification with the performer or character on the grounds of kinship, empathy, ethnic or gender identity (all those things that Metz calls ‘secondary identification’), share the space, and thus share in the experience of place-making: in so doing, the audience must identify with the characters who are making place from space. ‘You have to make acquaintance with it,’ as Gertrude Stein once declared of the world created on stage, ‘but it does not with you.’9

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For instance, in Tom Murphy’s Conversations on a Homecoming (1985), the White House pub in which the play is set is so rich in associations, ideals and memories that it has an almost symbolic quality for the characters. ‘This was our roots, Liam,’ says Michael, the immigrant who has returned from the United States, gesturing around the room. ‘This was to be our continuing cultural cradle: “Let the word go forth from this time and place” – What?’10 The other characters, however, have seen the ideals associated with the pub evaporate in the years that Michael has been away, and so their sense of the place is very different from his. As such, he must learn what has changed their sense of place; but he is not alone. The audience learns along with him, and thus identifies with him in a shared experience of space, regardless of how the audience might feel about his character in terms of what is commonly understood as empathy or identification. This first-order spatial identification is intensified in Irish theatre because what Ubersfeld calls its géno-text antérieur, the set of socio-cultural beliefs and assumptions that make the play possible, is, as we saw in the previous chapter, already heavily invested in a sense of place. ‘Soil’, as Seamus Deane has influentially argued, has been ‘ideologically constructed as a natal source, that element out of which the Irish originate and to which their past generations have returned’.11 This ‘strategy of sacralisation’, as Deane calls it, has been particularly powerful in relation to the West of Ireland. According to Paddy Duffy, ‘The image and – ultimately – myth of the West [of Ireland] was a central motif in the Irish cultural nationalism which evolved towards the end of the nineteenth century,’12 whether in Synge writing about the Aran Islands, or in Yeats visiting the poet Raftery’s village of Killeenan. In plays as otherwise different in their mode of spatial production as Riders to the Sea and Conversations on a Homecoming, a common location in the West of Ireland compounds firstorder theatrical identification (spatial identification) by tying it to a culturally encoded second-order identification (identification with the fictional character or situation). So, when Owen in Translations (1980) explains the meaning of ‘Bun na hAbhann’, or when Maurya in Riders to the Sea speaks of ‘the sea by the white rocks’, or when a character in Marina Carr’s By the Bog of Cats (1998) claims she is the ‘Keeper of the Bog of Cats’, something complex is taking place.13 An audience that associates Irishness with a deeply held sense of place will have its participation in first-order spatial identification in an Irish play reinforced by second-order identification with what is understood to be the character’s specifically Irish cultural attachment to place. Consequently, while first-order spatial identification

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takes place in all theatre, in Irish theatre it is given a particular intensity – different at different historical moments – by being embedded in a particular géno-text antérieur in a double helix of identification. The production of place in Irish theatre thus involves a particular set of relations to memory, loss and nostalgia, for a sense of place is produced through memory and language. For example, Conversations on a Homecoming is saturated with references to memory, beginning in the early scenes, when Tom and Junior, who have stayed in the town while Michael emigrated, resituate him in the world of the White House by conjuring up memory after memory: junior: D’yeh remember? michael: I do. junior: But do yeh? – Jasus, Jasus!

Junior then suggests that what brought Michael back was ‘Nos-talgia!’ – ‘Something like that,’ Michael responds. Throughout the play, the space, made up of individual objects – pictures on the wall, a relocated door, the bar itself – becomes a trigger for memory as the characters recall the pub’s inauguration as a ‘cultural centre’: ‘Friends, all this, our cultural centre, has been a co-sponsorial job from design to decor. Mark its line, its adornment . . . Its atmosphere derives from no attribute of wisdom, vestige of native cunning, or selfish motive.’14 As Michael and the others evoke the idealistic dreams that they had for the pub, the space of the stage becomes analogous to Pierre Nora’s lieux de mémoire. Of course, this same process of producing the memories associated with particular sites on the stage takes place in almost every theatrical production, although not always with the same degree of self-consciousness. By speaking or moving in a particular location on the stage, the actor invests that site with the memory of his or her action. In The Haunted Stage, Marvin Carlson writes of the function of memory in the theatre largely in terms of the recycling of elements (including the actors’ bodies) from production to production. ‘Because every physical element of the production can be and often is used over and over again in subsequent productions’, he writes, ‘the opportunities for an audience to bring memories of previous uses to new productions are enormous.’15 However, without even going beyond a given performance (much less to extratheatrical memories), within a particular production, directors will use the associative memory of character with a particular location on the stage to give resonance to the same stage location at a later moment. To take a simple example, in Riders to the Sea, when Bartley’s body is carried through the doorway, the audience will remember that he delivered his last lines as he was

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exiting from that same location only a few minutes earlier. A stage prop or location such as a doorway, then, accumulates meaning over the course of an individual performance in precisely the same way that a house or a field accumulates memories over the years, but with an intensity (and often an accelerated temporality) that makes the performance a ‘condensational event’. ‘To remember’, Edward S. Casey writes in Remembering: A Phenomenological Approach, is ‘to have not just a point of view but a place in which we are situated. It is to occupy a portion of space from out of which we both undergo given experiences and remember them . . . Our memory of what we experience in place is place specific.’16 For Casey, place ‘holds in’ memories, acting as what he calls ‘their place-holder’, and the agency that makes this possible is, he claims, ‘the lived body’.17 In an argument that draws both on Merleau-Ponty’s concept of ‘gearing’ the body to the world, and on Heidegger’s ‘dwelling’, Casey goes on to insist that we only really experience space as place when we physically inhabit it, and Tuan is equally clear on this point: ‘We can say little more than that original space possesses structure and orientation by virtue of the presence of the human body.’18 We can thus more closely define the two key elements that allow the production of place from space to occur in the theatre: the physical presence of the body (both the actor’s body and physical presence of the audience); and memory. Onstage, space becomes place when a specific site is defined by events that occurred there in the past. In Riders to the Sea, to continue our example, the play evokes past moments from the same space, layering them on the present, to create the rich web of associations and meanings that constitutes a sense of place. This happens with special intensity near the end of the play, as Bartley’s body is about to be carried in, when Maurya, resting on a particular stool, recalls hearing of earlier drownings while sitting in that same spot. I was sitting here with Bartley, and he a baby lying on my two knees, and I seen two women, and three women, and four women coming in, and they crossing themselves and not saying a word. I looked out then, and there were men coming after them, and they holding a thing in the half of a red sail, and water dripping out of it – it was a dry day, Nora – and leaving a track to the door.19

At the basic level of theatrical practice, Maurya pointing to the door is performing what Julian Hilton calls an ‘act of designation’,20 where the naming of an object on the stage gives it meaning. Such ‘acts of designation’ are usually understood, as Cormac Power puts it, ‘to key in the time and place of the action’.21 However, as this example makes clear, the time

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that is being ‘keyed in’ here is not singular. As Maurya, bodily present before us on the stage, remembers the drowning of her husband and two other sons in the past, their deaths merge with the birth of Bartley (also in the past), and the drowning of Bartley that has yet to be confirmed (and thus exists in the future). This sense of temporal overlapping becomes particularly powerful when, a few moments after Maurya conjures up this spatially specific memory, the body of Bartley is carried in covered ‘in the half of a red sail’, just as his father and brothers had been carried in similarly covered, years before. In other words, the character of Maurya, speaking in the present, is able to invest the empty space of the doorway with meaning by conjuring up both past and future in that particular location. At that moment, when a space has been invested with a past and a future, and both appear to exist at the same moment, in the present of performance, space becomes place. What is more, the site of this temporal convergence is not purely a space (or even place); its site is Maurya’s body located in a particular location, just as Bartley’s dead body, when it is brought in, becomes the site of convergence for the memories of those who drowned in the past. ‘My only connection with the set’, as Sartre reminds us, ‘is the character’s gestures: the only way I can be connected with the tree is to see a character sit down in its shade.’22 The production of place from space on stage thus not only happens within time (the time of the performance); place is produced from space on stage through the calibration of our experience of time. Just as space on stage is produced, and is plastic, so too is time. ‘Time can be shortened, stretched, intensified, arrested, repeated,’ wrote Friedrich Dürrenmatt of the theatre in a 1955 lecture, ‘Problems of the Theatre’.23 Indeed, a recognition of the distinctive nature of theatrical time is one of the key theoretical contributions of modernist dramatic theory. The theatre, wrote Denis Johnston in 1933, has an advantage over the cinema in ‘the knowledge in the back of the listener’s mind that something is actually happening now’.24 ‘A dramatist’, Thornton Wilder told the Paris Review in 1956: is one who believes that the pure event, an action involving human beings, is more arresting than any comment that can be made upon it. On the stage it is always now: the personages are standing on that razor-edge, between the past and the future, which is the essential character of conscious being; the words are rising to their lips in immediate spontaneity.25

Wilder’s dictum that ‘on the stage it is always now’ captures one of the ontological definitional features of performance. Performance takes place in the present where ‘something is actually happening’. Whereas with the

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written word it is possible to create a past tense – ‘the woman walked across a room’ – there is no analogous way of performing something that has already taken place. Peter Szondi makes the same point in his Theory of the Modern Drama, when he writes that the drama’s ‘internal time is always the present . . . As the present passes away, it produces change, a new present springs from its antithesis.’26 This is not to suggest that there have not been attempts to create a past tense of performance, particularly once this feature of theatrical performance became apparent to modernist playwrights of the first half of the twentieth century, and thus came to be felt as a constraint. In his ‘Short Description of a New Technique of Acting’, Brecht suggests that ‘transposition into the past’ might ‘help to alienate the actions and remarks of the character being portrayed’. Precisely how this is to be accomplished, however, has puzzled commentators ever since. Brecht hints that the actor might speak a line ‘not as if he were improvising it himself but like a quotation’,27 possibly transposing it into the third person. However, this is to move speech towards narration, where, of course, it is possible for a character to speak in the past tense. From the chorus and the messengers in classical Greek tragedy through to the monologists of the contemporary stage, narration has always had a role in dramatic action: however, the speech act itself – as act – must always occur in the present. In the Irish theatre, Rosana Herrero Martín maintains, ‘The tradition of story-telling and oral remembrance of the past as the central doing on stage is deeply rooted all throughout the history of 20th-century Irish theatre.’28 Herrero Martín points to the speech act theory of John Searle to remind us that a character in a play may narrate an event that happened in the past; but the act of speaking necessarily takes place in the present of performance. The present-tense nature of performance is not, in other words, a function of narrative, and it has nothing to do with matters such as the relationship between what the Russian Formalists termed the fabula (content) and the szujet (structure); it is an ontological question for phenomenology, not a structural problem for narratology. The distinction here is akin to that made by Paul Ricoeur where he differentiates between ‘the configuration of time in narrative’ and time’s ‘refiguration by narrative’.29 In considering theatre, we are taking a further step, moving beyond narrative to the event of performance in which time is refigured. To this end, Cormac Power cites the American expressionist scenographer Robert Edmond Jones: ‘This is drama; this is theatre – to be aware of the Now.’ ‘Theatre’s distinctiveness’, Power suggests, ‘is less about making fictions present than it is about making our experience of the present a subject of contemplation.’30

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If the theatre is to create place from space, it thus must make space for the past in the present. If a performance were nothing more than a continuous stream of present moments, unconnected to past or future, the space of the stage would remain precisely that: an empty space (as, indeed, sometimes happens in forms of postdramatic theatre). This tension – between the ontological presentness of performance and the contradictory need to allow the past to inform the present – is one of the definitional structural qualities of the theatrical. One of the most sustained attempts to explore the temporal tension at the heart of the theatrical has been the work of Brian Friel whose major plays constitute an extended (and necessarily doomed) attempt to forge a theatrical past tense. Not coincidentally, this project is tied to one of the most sustained and extended productions of place in the Irish theatre, in Friel’s creation of the fictional town of Ballybeg, whose history can be traced through Translations (1980; set in the 1830s) to Dancing at Lughnasa (1990; set in the 1930s), to Philadelphia, Here I Come! (set in the time of its first production, in 1964) to Aristocrats (again, set at the time of performance, in 1979). As such, Friel’s work brings together, and moves beyond, the two strands of modern Irish theatre space that we identified in the previous chapter: the visible space of the realist stage, and the fractured spaces that result from the shattering of ‘l’espace de “bons sens”’. For instance, Friel’s first major successful play, Philadelphia, Here I Come!, took scenic space produced by the realist form in modern Irish theatre, and placed within it a character who is a split subject: Gar O’Donnell. Set on the night before his emigration from Donegal to Philadelphia, Gar is played by two actors in the parts of Public Gar and Private Gar. While Public Gar inhabits the present tense of the realist performance, Private Gar, on the other hand, not only comments on the realist world of the play, he also slips in and out of extended memories. At one point, Private Gar pleads (unheeded) with his father (who he calls ‘Screwballs’): ‘God – maybe – Screwballs – behind those dead eyes and flat face there are memories of precious moments in the past?’ The play’s most powerful – but necessarily most ephemeral – moments occur as Gar tries, and fails, to make present those past moments by asking his father to confirm a memory of a blue rowboat. His father puzzles uncomprehendingly over the memory: ‘A blue one, eh?’ he ponders. ‘I mind a brown one.’ As memory is shown to be both the ground of a sense of place, and to be unreliable, constantly disintegrating, so too is Gar’s sense of place constantly eroding as he prepares to leave for the United States. The extent to which the forms of Irish realism maintain strands of continuity, even as their foundations erode, can be

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measured in the extent to which America is produced as an offstage space in terms that echo Colum’s The Land (1905) more than fifty years earlier. ‘I gather it’s a vast restless place that doesn’t give a curse about the past,’ says Gar’s old schoolmaster, Boyle, defining America in terms of pure space. ‘And that’s the way things should be. Impermanence and anonymity – it offers great attractions.’31 As Friel’s work developed through the 1960s, he began to use what in his ‘Author’s Note’ to The Loves of Cass McGuire (1966) he called ‘rhapsodies’, moments in which characters step out of the present tense of realism and speak reflectively in the past tense about their lives.32 In The Freedom of the City (1973), three characters, disoriented after being gassed during a Civil Rights march, find themselves trapped in the Lord Mayor’s office in Derry. The play opens, however, at a much later point in the narrative, in a courtroom during a judicial inquiry into their deaths, and there are moments in the play – the ‘rhapsodies’ – in which each character steps out of the linear flow of the narrative to comment on the past. As a result of this refiguration of time by narration, the audience is aware throughout the play that they have present before them three characters who are ‘the deceased’ (as the judge refers to them in the opening scene). In Faith Healer (1979) six years later, Friel refines his problematic even further, in a play that is made up of the interlocking (and sometimes contradictory) monologues of three characters, one of whom (Frank Hardy, the faith healer of the title) is narrating the events that led up to his own death; indeed, viewed this way, Faith Healer becomes effectively a rewriting of Freedom of the City, stripped of its overt politics. More subtly again, but nonetheless similarly, Friel’s most successful later play, Dancing at Lughnasa, opens with a narrator, Michael, who tells us at the start that what we will see takes place in the past (in which he, Michael, has a role as a child): ‘When I cast my mind back to that summer of 1936, different kinds of memories offer themselves to me.’33 In each case, the action taking place on the stage is framed in such as way as to indicate that it is past; and yet, at the same time, events as they occur take place, as they must, in the now of performance. In the case of Faith Healer, as Frank Hardy narrates the events leading up to his death, the temporality of the play is even more complex. The play ends with Frank’s narration of going to meet his death, attempting to cure a man who he knows will not be cured: And although I knew that nothing was going to happen, nothing at all, I walked across the yard towards them. And as I walked I became possessed of a strange and trembling intimation: that the whole corporeal world – the

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cobbles, the trees, the sky, those four malign implements – somehow they had shed their physical reality and had become mere imaginings, and that in all existence there was only myself and the wedding guests.34

Spoken in the present of performance, Frank ‘knew’ (past) that nothing ‘was going to happen’ (future); past, present and future thus all exist, fully and intensely, in the present tense of performance, where all that is physically present in the now of the stage is a man speaking. Friel’s complex meditation here on the problem of time foregrounds a structural element of theatre per se (although not always so explicitly evident): theatre allows us to experience time in ways that our ordinary linear experience of clocks and sequential time masks. In order to function in our everyday lives, we must conceive of the future in terms of those events that may, possibly, take place, but not now; when an event is occurring, it is present, and when it is completed, after a certain (variable) period, it belongs to the past. There are, of course, difficulties with this simple formulation (not least in determining the duration of ‘the present’); however, as a basic schema, it can stand for our ‘everyday’ experience of time. Theatre, however, allows us to experience time otherwise. A useful way to understand just how everyday time differs from theatrical time is to draw an analogy with Henri Bergson’s distinction between time as a causal sequence (temps), and time as what he refers to as ‘duration’ (durée). Indeed, Bergson’s writings on time are both a symptom of the same crisis of time and space that shattered ‘l’espace de “bons sens”’on the modern stage, and a means by which we can understand stage time per se. We tend to think of time as linear, Bergson argues, because we assume that time is empty and homogeneous, as if it were space. ‘We project time into space, we express duration in terms of extensity, and succession thus takes the form of a continuous line or a chain, the parts of which touch without penetrating one another.’ For Bergson, this masks the way in which time presents itself to consciousness: as duration. ‘Pure duration might well be nothing but a succession of qualitative changes, which melt into and permeate one another.’35 When we experience time as duration, as multiplicity, Bergson claims, memory is not confined to the category of the past; memories exist in the present. In the context of our current argument, if empty, homogenous and linear time is analogous to space (according to Bergson), then we can say that time as duration is analogous to place, in which each present moment is permeated by past memory and future potential. Place presupposes an understanding of time in which past, present and future can melt into one

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another, in which the space occupied in the present is also the active site of memories of the past, and anticipations of the future. In the theatre, which is continuously producing place from space, we are acutely aware of this experience of durational time. A given present moment only has significance because it is ‘penetrated’, as Bergson would have it, by memory and anticipation. This is fundamental to making even the most rudimentary sense of a play. We only recognise a character standing before us on the stage because we remember seeing them before; we only recognise the setting in Act 2 because we remember it from Act 1 (along with the actions that took place then). By the same token, what we call ‘dramatic interest’ or ‘dramatic tension’ can be thought of as the future penetrating the present. In some forms of popular theatre, our orientation to the future (‘What will happen next?’) is so intense that we evade the present, which could lead us to conclude that our experience of the theatrical in such plays is less pure. Both the intensity and the balance of the experience of a present saturated by past and future is thus at the heart of theatre as a condensational event. In this regard, Heidegger (whose thought converges with Bergson’s on this point) is of use. ‘The future is not later than having been, and having been is not earlier than the Present,’ he writes in Being and Time. ‘Temporality temporalizes itself as a future which makes present the process of having been.’ This ‘unity of temporality’ makes possible what Heidegger calls ‘Being-there’;36 a form of authentic Being, distinct from ‘everydayness’. In the everyday, we live ‘alongside of’ the world, in what he calls ‘falling’, or ‘leaping away’ from our Being, distracting ourselves with ‘idle chatter’, and ‘curiosity’, Heidegger’s phrase for the ‘What will happen next?’ orientation of certain forms of narration. For the most part, we must live this way, for to be truly aware of our Being, Heidegger argues, is to experience Being-towards-death. To put matters with a simplicity that would be alien to Heidegger’s own practice, to be aware of our Being is to be aware of our own ‘thrownness’ towards death – and hence to ‘temporalise’ temporality. The theatre, as a condensational event, involves us in an experience of temporality that is other than linear clock time; as such, the theatrical experience of durational time (and hence of place) could thus be said to constitute an intense experience of Beingthere, in which we are fully aware of temporality, of place, but also therefore of death. The links that bind place-making, durational time, and being-towarddeath in the theatre are made explicit in Friel’s work. From Freedom of the City through to Faith Healer, to the more nostalgic Dancing at Lughnasa, his attempts to create a theatrical past-in-the-present are shaped by an

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awareness of characters as Beings-towards-death. In each of these three plays, some or all of the characters are simultaneously dead and present before the audience. Unable to settle into what Heidegger calls an ‘everyday’ attitude towards these characters, which we fill with ‘idle talk’ or curiosity about the future, the awareness of Death gives to each moment of these characters’ existence, even the most inconsequential, a weight of significance. Moreover, in each case their Being as Beings-toward-death is grounded in place. In Faith Healer this is most explicit in that every time one of the characters veers towards the one thing they must not (indeed, cannot) say – the fact of Frank’s death – they launch into a litany of place names, the only common point of convergence in the three conflicting accounts: ‘Aberarder, Kinlochbervie, Aberayon, Kinlochbervie . . .’37 The link may not be as starkly structural in Freedom of the City or Dancing at Lughnasa, but both of those plays have a deeply engrained sense of place. In Freedom of the City the onstage world of zone-A may be fluid, but it is nonetheless very specific, being, variously, the Lord Mayor’s parlour, the walls of Derry, or the tribunal chamber. Dancing at Lughnasa is more apparently conventional, creating onstage both the interior world of the cottage and its immediate exterior, both detailed in specifics and in memories. Both plays, moreover, have a rich sense of the world beyond these staged specifics, whether the zones non-A of Derry or the townland of Ballybeg, and the hills beyond, with their Lughnasa fires. In each case, place is the ‘ground’ (in Heidegger’s sense of that word) of being-in-time, and hence of Being-towards-death. Friel’s prolonged and concerted attempt to ground ‘a unity of temporality’ in place is in some respects the exemplary instance of what we might call ‘late Irish modernist theatre’. Embedded in the géno-text antérieur of a culturally endorsed sense of place, this theatre was able to prolong the life of the realist stage, in what we have called ‘the monad of realism’, long after the effective collapse of the spatial and temporal order that had made it possible. If in Friel’s theatre, grounded by the Irish sense of place, a continuous self was still possible, in Beckett’s theatre, increasingly disconnected from the referents of place (particularly Irish place), the fissures are not only laid bare: they become the object itself. We might think here of Vladimir and Estragon in Waiting for Godot (1953) who, when they meet Pozzo and Lucky entering from offstage again in Act Two, are not recognised by them. Likewise Krapp, in Krapp’s Last Tape (1958), set in ‘a late evening in the future’, listens to recordings he made in the past and finds only the most tenuous links to his younger self, in some cases being unable even to remember the meanings of words he had used in a past that exists .

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offstage. ‘Just been listening to that stupid bastard I took myself for thirty years ago, hard to believe I was ever as bad as that.’ When Beckett refuses at key moments to let the past permeate the present, theatre audiences experience this as a rupture, a jolt to the experience of theatrical time, where an ever-present ‘now’ (which the stage directions erase as a moment in the ‘future’) is permeated by the past. We expect Pozzo to recognise Vladimir and Estragon because we do – we must – as we make sense of the ‘now’ of performance. We expect Krapp to recognise his former self. At points, he does not. When, at the play’s end, we hear the 39-year-old’s recorded voice claiming that there was a chance of happiness in ‘my best years’ – he is adamant that ‘I wouldn’t want them back. Not with the fire in me now. No, I wouldn’t want them back’ – it stands in stark contrast to the silently listening and solitary Krapp, ‘motionless staring before him’, the aural evocation of an earlier spatio-temporal moment of self-assertion shattered by the sight of the onstage space which the aged Krapp now occupies.38 In Beckett’s Happy Days (1961), the zone non-A is effectively eliminated, and the effects of time are fully spatialised. Act One opens on Winnie: ‘Embedded up to above her waist in exact centre of [low] mound’ located in an ‘Expanse of scorched grass’. Act Two has: ‘Scene as before’ but with Winnie now ‘embedded up to neck’, no longer able to ‘turn, nor bow, nor raise’ her head. The mound, like grains of sand accumulating at the bottom of an hourglass (which, in fact, it resembles), is first and foremost in Happy Days a spatial representation of time. Unlike Endgame, which we discussed in Chapter 3, there is no suggestion as to the reality of the onstage space which is described as having a ‘very pompier trompe l’oeil backcloth to represent unbroken plain and sky receding to meet in far distance’. This emphatic (pompier) insistence on the artificiality of the scene makes clear the signifying rather than mimetic use of the stage space. The play has no concrete offstage zone non-A (Winnie is described as ‘gazing at zenith’), and the few brief diegetic references to other places are all subsequently brought into doubt as fallible memories. There is ‘Borough Green’ where Winnie sat on the knee of Charlie Hunter ‘under the horse beech’, a memory hesitantly recapitulated in Act Two as ‘beechen green . . . this . . . Charlie . . . kisses’; and the ‘toolshed’ where she was possibly kissed by Mr Johnson/Johnston/Johnstone, even though she subsequently notes that this must be wrong, ‘for we had no toolshed and he most certainly had no toolshed’.39 While these may seem like places, invested with significance, their record in memory is fragile, and hence their status as place is constantly being eroded.

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In Waiting for Godot, there is a metatheatrical reference to the immediate offstage world of the theatre to which Vladimir exits to urinate – ‘End of the corridor, on the left’ –, and a more conventional zone non-A which contains the ditch in which Estragon slept and, further afield, Pozzo’s manor. However, there is no sense in which these spaces have a dramatic role or ‘reality’ in the ways defined by Ubersfeld, any more than do the diegetic references to times past at the Eiffel Tower, in the Macon country, or by the Rhône. While the stage directions state that the Act One set of ‘A country road. A tree’ is the ‘Same place’ in Act Two, the play is marked by the characters’ uncertainty as to both place and time.40 What the audience experiences in the zone A of the visible stage, then, are variations on the degeneration of the body which can provide only a relative measure of space. By contrast, the offstage spaces evoked in these plays are memories without sites, the signified of place without the stability of the spatial signifier. Beckett’s drama, then, far from being concerned with ‘a conflict between spaces, or as conquest or abandonment of a space’41 produces on and offstage worlds that operate in contrasting signifying registers, each defined by their characteristic relationship to time, but united in their consciousness of death. The reduction of Winnie’s space down to, and progressively into, the mound, paralleled by the few, and uncertain, diegetic references to once-occupied places elsewhere, perfectly captures the fundamental Beckett conception of his stage space as an image of Being existing ‘astride of a grave and a difficult birth’, as Vladimir puts it in Waiting for Godot.42 In the later works, particularly Not I (1972), That Time (1974) and Rockaby (1981) this rupture of the self in time still exists, refined to the formal division of the body of the performer in the present and the recorded voice speaking from the past in that present. The stage images in these plays have all been refined to icons of Being-towards-death, figures on the very precipice of their mortality. In That Time, for instance, the audience sees only the Listener’s Face, suspended ‘10 feet above stage level’, and we are told that the three voices – A, B, and C – that we hear are ‘his own coming to him from both sides and above’.43 The voices belong, as the play’s title suggests, to ‘that time’; they speak of and from the past, but can only do so in the present, the ‘now’ of performance, in the presence of the body of the Listener (and, by extension, the audience). Hence, in That Time, voice (past) and body (present) occupy the same space, thereby producing a particularly intense experience of Bergsonian durée. Indeed, this helps explain the theatrical power of these plays, whose contents (memories of childhood, for instance), have sometimes been

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criticised as veering towards nostalgia, or even sentimentality. The plays’ real force lies not in their content but in their refiguration of time and memory, their disclosure of durational time as a fundamental element of theatrical experience. In That Time (as in Not I, and several of Beckett’s later works), the site of this memory is not a place on the visible stage; in That Time the illuminated face of the Listener is suspended on an otherwise darkened stage, and in Not I only the mouth of the speaker (identified only as Mouth) is visible. Indeed, Hanna Scolnicov even suggests that Not I is ‘a radical experiment in abolishing the theatrical space’,44 although this may be to underestimate the significance of the onstage Auditor, who is downstage left throughout the play. In spite of this, all of these later pieces are saturated with awareness of place: ‘that time you went back that last time to look was the ruin still there where you hid as a child when was that’. The opening lines of That Time establish the particular density of the temporal (‘that time’, ‘that last time’), the spatial (‘the ruin’, ‘where was that’), and, perhaps most important, the two combined: ‘you went back’ (in both time and space); ‘where you hid as a child’.45 Even on an empty stage, place is the place-holder of memory, as Edward S. Casey puts it, in spite of having almost all of its apparent physical markers stripped away. The bare, or almost bare, stages of Beckett’s late work thus become a kind of testimony to the difficulty in escaping memory – and place – even on a stage that has been all but wiped clean of the physical markers of place that we associate with the realist theatre. When place and memory no longer have a concrete spatial dimension, there is no escape from what Beckett named in his 1931 essay on Proust as ‘that double-headed monster of damnation and salvation – Time’: There is no escape from the hours and the days. Neither from tomorrow nor from yesterday. There is no escape from yesterday because yesterday has deformed us, or been deformed by us. The mood is of no importance. Deformation has taken place. Yesterday is not a milestone that has been passed, but a daystone on the beaten track of the years, and irremediably part of us, within us, heavy and dangerous. We are not merely more weary because of yesterday, we are other, no longer what we were before the calamity of yesterday.46

If place is that which roots us in memory and allows us to experience durational time, then, at any given moment, we are not only what we are but also what we were, the past ‘irremediably part of us, within us, heavy and dangerous’. The saturation of the present, durational moment of performance with memory is part of all dramatic theatre in performance.

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Beckett’s late theatre merely attempts to strip place of its spatiality, leaving its raw temporality. By contrast, for Friel (as for his key contemporaries such as Tom Murphy and Tom Kilroy) the Irish sense of place whose terms were laid down during the Literary Revival was still a powerful enough cultural formation to allow the crisis of temporality to cloak itself in the forms of realism. The result has been a particularly acute awareness of the ‘calamity of yesterday’ that maps on to perceptions of Irish history as ‘the nightmare from which I am attempting to awaken’, as Joyce’s Stephen Dedalus would have it. In Irish theatre after Beckett, this awareness weighs with a heaviness that becomes a signature of many of the key Irish plays of the final part of the twentieth century. Appropriately enough, in the years immediately before and after Beckett’s death in 1989, it is a signature that increasingly manifests itself in spectral form. ‘Again,’ exclaims the tormented, elderly World War One veteran Pyper, waking at the beginning of Frank McGuinness’s Observe the Sons of Ulster Marching Towards the Somme (1985): ‘As always, again. Why does this persist? What more have we to tell each other? I remember nothing today. Absolutely nothing. (Silence.) I do not understand your insistence on my remembrance.’ In a scene entitled ‘Remembrance’, the old man watches as yet again the ghosts of his comrades from the Ulster Division rise up around him. ‘Leave me,’ he begs them. ‘Do not possess me. I do not wish to be your chosen.’47 However, in the continuous ‘now’ that is stage time, the dead rise, memories become present, and the anonymous space of a hospital bed (identical to others) becomes the army camps and battlefields that are the lieux de mémoire, not just for these characters, but for many in the Ulster Loyalist tradition. At the time of Observe the Sons of Ulster’s first production in 1985, and again when the play was restaged just as the first IRA ceasefire was announced in August 1994, the hold of the past on the present was particularly powerful in Irish politics. Indeed, Anne Devlin’s After Easter, from that same year, 1994, has a remarkably similar scene, in which the main character, Greta, describes the apparition that visits her room. ‘Did it speak to you?’ her sister Aoife asks, to which Greta replies: ‘Just the thought . . . (Greta demonstrates the thought: beseeching).’ ‘It felt’, she says, ‘as if the whole of Ireland was crying out to me.’48 At that moment in the early 1990s, ‘the calamity of yesterday’ had an identifiable referent in Irish experience, whether in the violence of a colonial history, in what was long felt to be the inordinately strong influence of religion as a conservative force in Irish culture, or in an emerging crisis of institutional abuse. Writing of Devlin’s play, Geraldine Cousin connects it with other works by women writers of the mid 1990s (from the UK and elsewhere), in

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that it focuses on a character who ‘is her past . . . who carries with her also a means of coming to terms with that past’.49 It may be, however, that this kind of political optimism that the past can be successfully exorcised is precisely what the theatre must refuse. In disclosing Bergsonian durée as ‘salvation and damnation’, Observe the Sons of Ulster, like Beckett’s late work, stages one of the elements of theatricality itself, the mutability of time; as such, the play persists not because it is political (as seemed to be its importance when it was first performed), but because it is theatrical. Observe the Sons of Ulster can then be seen as part of an Irish theatre of ‘the calamity of yesterday’. This is a theatre brought into being by a particular political and cultural crisis in which legacies of the past seemed to have an inordinate hold on the present, investing the sense of place with a particular intensity. At the same time, many of these plays have outlived the crisis of their origin, because in their engagement with the production of place, and the experience of temporality onstage, they also expose something that is fundamentally theatrical, and not tied to particular historical conditions. So, alongside McGuinness’s Observe the Sons of Ulster we can place Tom Murphy’s Bailegangaire (also 1985), Brian Friel’s Faith Healer (1979), Stewart Parker’s Pentecost (1987), Sebastian Barry’s The Steward of Christendom (1995), and Conor McPherson’s The Weir (1997). Indeed, the similarities between Observe the Sons of Ulster and Bailegangaire are striking. Having opened within ten months of one another, both focus on an elderly character (Pyper in Observe the Sons of Ulster; Mommo in Bailegangaire) who is acutely aware of the body and its decrepitude, present in a now of performance that is saturated – indeed, haunted – by memory. A decade later, Barry’s Steward of Christendom forms what could be thought of as the third of this trilogy, as the 75-year-old Thomas Dunne conjures up the ghosts of his own past. ‘Please do not talk back to Black Jim, Thomas, there’s the manny,’ he tells himself. ‘Because he is not there.’50 While historical conditions in Ireland at the time gave these elderly, transfixed remembrancers a particular valence on the Irish stage, they can also be seen as part of a wider tendency that Carol Rosen notes in plays such as The Elephant Man (1977), Whose Life Is It Anyway? (1978) and Peter Brook’s production of Peter Weiss’s Marat/Sade (1964). Writing in 1983, Rosen referred to this moment as producing a ‘theatre of impasse’. Taking as her point of reference an earlier Irish play, Brendan Behan’s The Quare Fellow (1954), Rosen sees a commonality in a group of American and British plays from the late 1970s and early 1980s, in which ‘an actual environment is rendered, explored, turned into a mental construct’,51 producing the spatialisation of an ‘issueless situation’. Bailegangaire is,

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among other things, part of this wider ‘theatre of impasse’ in Western theatre culture. Bailegangaire opens as the character of Mommo ‘settles herself in the bed for her story’, which begins with a kind of ritual opening: ‘Now . . . It was a bad year for the crops, a good one for the mushrooms, and the contrary and adverse connection between these two is always the case,’ the word ‘always’ producing a zone of narration in which past and present ‘permeate’ one another, a now of telling. Initially, the audience has no idea whether her story takes place in the distant past (the subsequent mention of horses, dark country lanes, and market fairs suggests it might be), the recent past, or, indeed, the very recent past: we only know that it dominates the present. A small detail: before settling into her story, Mommo fixes her eyes on the bare electric light bulb hanging above her bed, and spits out: ‘The cursèd paraffin.’ It later emerges that her tale involves her grandson, who died from burns suffered when he threw paraffin on an open fire. The lamp of memory and the physically present light bulb merge into a single object for Mommo. The degree to which past and present penetrate one another is highlighted by those moments that punctuate her tale when she shifts momentarily into the clock time of the present. ‘What time is it? . . . Miss!’, she demands of her granddaughter. ‘Seven. Eight,’ replies Mary wearily, her own grasp on linear temporality worn thin by the relentless waves of her grandmother’s memories: some number, any number, will do in an effort to give time some kind of sequentiality. Mommo’s story, weaving its way through the quotidian conversation of her granddaughters, is memory made tangible, initially appearing to be disconnected from the now of performance in anything other than its moment of narration. However, the audience progresssively realises that the story is of Mommo and her granddaughters, and that of the recent history of the West of Ireland which forms the play’s scenic space. It is, then, in the context of the time of the play’s first production in December 1985 that the apparently ancient tale of horse-drawn carts and paraffin lamps loops around to its conclusion, spoken not by Mommo but by her granddaughter, Mary: ‘To conclude. It’s a strange old place alright, in whatever wisdom He has to have made it this way. But whatever wisdom there is, in the year 1984, it was decided to give that – fambly . . . of strangers another chance, and a brand new baby to gladden their home.’52 Bailegangaire, then, makes Edward S. Casey’s case as convincingly as any philosophical argument: place-making and memory work together, bound by bodily presence in a mutually generative spiral that spins outward to produce an unseen world offstage, existing in a different fictive time.

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The double helix of temporality in Bailegangaire (and, indeed, in Observe the Sons of Ulster, The Steward of Christendom, The Weir, and other plays of this period), in which the past loops into the present, can lead us to take our reflections on the nature of theatrical time a step further, by connecting theatrical time to the concept of first-order theatrical identification with which the chapter opened. There we argued that whereas a neo-Lacanian theory of cinematic identification maintained that the cinema audience identified with the gaze of the camera, in the theatre this recourse to the apparatus as a site of identification is not available. Instead, in the theatre, audience and performer share a space; within that shared space, over the course of the performance, space is transformed into place. In a single-set realist play, it may happen only once, but with a particular intensity. In a play that moves over the space of the stage more fluidly, place is created and disassembled many times over the course of the performance, but each time the audience must nonetheless identify with the characters’ act of making place from space. Indeed, even on the Brechtian Epic stage, Mother Courage’s cart gathers memories and associations in each successive scene, which invest it with a sense of place; in this regard even a fully realised Brechtian production can never dispense with identification per se, in spite of its aspirations to alienation. Regardless of whether or not the audience identifies (in the Aristotelian sense of empathising with) the character, it must share in, and identify with, the character’s place-making. The theatrical production of place not only takes place in time, it also involves the structuring of a shared time of performance. In some respects, there is an analogy here with Ricoeur’s concept of ‘refiguration’ in relation to the experience of temporality in the novel, where ‘the phenomenon of reading became the mediator of refiguration’ in ‘the confrontation between two worlds, the fictive world of the text and the real world of the reader’.53 Likewise, whether on the realist stage or in Beckett’s late theatre from which realism has been evacuated, every moment of performance is saturated with memory and anticipation, quite different from the ‘everyday’ linear experience of ‘clock time’ that the audience members carry with them from the world outside the theatre. With this in mind, we can differentiate among the audience, the actors and the characters as the three categories of subjects conscious of differing modes of temporality during a performance. We can understand the relationships among varieties of temporal theatrical identification in terms of Table 1, where particular types of performance make particular equations possible. Realism, for instance, in attempting to present the stage as a ‘slice of life’ strives for an identity among the time of the actors, the time of

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Table 1 The varieties of temporal theatrical identification Audience Clock time A

Actors Durational B

Clock time C

Characters Durational D

Clock time E

Durational F

the audience, and the time of the characters. This could be expressed as: A¼C¼E. (where A, the clock time of the audience, always equals C, the clock time of the actors). In non-realistic forms of theatre, time is foregrounded or problematised by disclosing that A¼C is not equal to E. However, the important equation for the purposes of understanding temporal identification is B¼F (D, the performers’ experience of durational time, is irrelevant, except in forms of dramatherapy where the focus is on the experience of the performer rather than on the performance). When the audience shares with the characters the sense that the present moment is both vividly experienced and saturated by memory and anticipation (produced through the performance), they identify with what they take to be the characters’ durational experience of time (although this is, of course, an illusion). Neither the memories nor the hopes we experience in the theatre are our own; they are produced by the performance. By the same token, characters do not really have memories or emotions, because characters are fictive; their subjective states (including the experience of temporality) are thus projections. The process by which the audience come to experience this illusion of a shared temporality, projected on to the fictional yet living beings before them, we can now name as temporal theatrical identification. Temporal theatrical identification is neither separable from nor distinct from spatial theatrical identification. ‘The notion of “distance” involves not only “near” and “far”,’ writes Tuan, ‘but also the time notions of past, present and future. Distance is a spatial–temporal intuition. “Here” is “now”, “there” is “then”.’54 When theatre audiences and performers share a space in the theatre (which is not the case in the cinema), they also share the now of performance. The performance occurs in a particular space at a particular time. That space is invested with memory and possibility in the now of performance, moment by moment; as such, the production of place is both facilitated by, and a necessary facilitator of, durational time. To put the matter succinctly, what place is to space, memory and anticipation (experienced as duration) are to time; and the two are interwoven. The characters on the stage produce place from space, by means of memory and

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anticipation in a durational now. Hence, when the audience shares in this process, it takes part not only in a form of spatial identification that is fundamental to what we mean by ‘theatricality’; they also experience time as duration as they imagine the characters must. Both spatial and temporal identification thus constitute what we might call ‘first-level identifications’, which together constitute an identification with the theatrical event itself. Such first-level identification is anterior to any second-level identification based on empathy, shared cultural, historical or gender identity – those aspects of theatre that have long been the targets of critical analysis. For Irish audiences, however, as we will see in the next chapter, history and culture, which have been deeply invested in a sense of place, have given this fundamentally theatrical form of identification powerful second-level reinforcement. When we are tempted to think about this as a uniquely Irish characteristic, however, we do well to remember that in the theatre we do not have to like (or be like) the characters on the stage to experience theatrical identification; we just have to be there.

chapter 5

The fluorescence of place

In theatrical space, music, choruses, masks, tiering – all such elements converge with language and actors. A spatial action overcomes conflicts, at least momentarily, even though it does not resolve them; it opens a way from everyday concerns to collective joy.1

Writing about Irish theatre is always conducted with an awareness that, for much of the twentieth century, theatre held a place of unusual centrality in the culture. Without denigrating the accomplishments of Irish painters, sculptors, designers or architects, it is clear that theatre has been the preeminent spatial form of Irish culture, and as such has produced the spaces in which the culture has most fully defined itself – and its conflicts. This is, at least to some extent, the product of Ireland’s economic, social, and cultural situation, particularly in the early years of the twentieth century. A culture in which it is possible to concentrate large amounts of capital will produce great cathedrals, ceremonial thoroughfares or piazzas, or the soaring monuments of financial zones – St Peter’s, the Champs-Élysées, or the Pearl Tower of Shanghai’s Pudong District. ‘For millennia,’ writes Henri Lefebvre referring to such spaces, ‘monumentality took in all the aspects of spatiality we have identified above: the perceived, the conceived, and the lived’. Monumentality, he continues, ‘offered each member of a society an image of that membership, an image of his or her social visage’, and, most importantly, it offered a point at which the spatial conflicts in a culture could achieve at least a spatial resolution, a ‘collective mirror’ with a ‘recognition effect . . . of far greater import than the “mirror effect” of Lacanian psychoanalysis’.2 In Ireland, the kind of capital accumulation necessary for the creation of this spatial monumentality was possible for a period in the eighteenth century, and the result was the work of the Wide Streets Commission in Dublin (which anticipated the work of Haussmann in Paris in the nineteenth century), and the buildings and demesnes of the Irish big houses, such as Castletown House in County Kildare. In the period after 1800, 97

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however, as the rural economy went through a series of crises, and industrialisation was concentrated largely in the north-east, the monuments of industry that developed elsewhere in Europe and in North America were, for the most part, missing from Ireland. In the period since Irish Independence, there have been attempts, including the 1966 Abbey Theatre building, to create this kind of architectural monumentality. However, it was really not until the final decade of the twentieth century and the early years of the twenty-first, in the period leading up to the economic crash of 2008, that it was once again possible for the monumental to be created in Ireland. From the north bank of the River Liffey in Dublin, in an area that in the mid 1990s was semi-derelict warehouses, it is now possible to see a single vista that takes in the spectacularly tilted glass cylinder of the National Convention Centre, and the swan-neck lines of the Samuel Beckett Bridge, with the curves of the Aviva sports stadium rippling in the distance. Consequently, with a few notable exceptions, such as the Opera House in Belfast or the Theatre Royal in Dublin, in the period between the first half of the eighteenth century and the first decade of the twenty-first, Irish space lacked obvious monuments. This is potentially problematic. Monumental space, claims Lefebvre, provides an important function in culture. It is the zone that ‘permits a continual back-and-forth between the private speech of ordinary conversations and the public speech of discourses, lectures, sermons, rallying-cries, and all theatrical forms of utterance’.3 However, given that the period in which the monumental was most notably absent from Irish space coincides with the ‘classic’ period of the Literary Revival it could be said that the theatre itself fulfilled at least some of the monumentality function in the production of Irish space. If Irish culture largely lacked what Yi-Fu Tuan calls ‘places that yield their meaning to the eye’ which he refers to as ‘public symbols’, the theatre provided a powerful instance of the alternative, ‘fields of care’, which are ‘places that are known only after prolonged experience’.4 Lacking monuments or the resources to construct them, the theatre had to become the site of spatial reconciliation, uniting the perceived, the conceived and the lived. ‘Here’, Pascale Casanova writes of Ireland in The World Republic of Letters (2004), ‘within Europe itself, immobilized under colonial control for more than eight centuries, was a land that disposed of few literary resources of its own at the moment when the first calls for a national culture were issued; and yet it was there that some of the greatest literary revolutionaries of the twentieth century were to appear – reason enough, surely, for talking of an Irish “miracle”.’5 The fact that this ‘miracle’, with

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theatrical production at its core, occurred at precisely the moment that monumental space was not being produced gives us an indication of the importance of ‘fields of care’ (including theatre) within Irish culture. ‘In Ireland to-day,’ Yeats claimed in 1905, ‘the old world that sang and listened is, it may be for the last time in Europe, face to face with the world that reads and writes, and their antagonism is always present under some name or other in the Irish imagination and intellect.’6 In the absence of monumental ‘public symbols’, the clearly articulated sense of place that emerged in Ireland at the end of the nineteenth century, almost always in opposition to the space of the modern, became a necessary part of the conception of Irish space. This in turn meant that there was a very good reason for this spatial formation to linger throughout much of the twentieth century. In the theatre, the persistence of a distinctive Irish sense of space was thus able to provide powerful reinforcement for the place-making that produces first-order theatrical spatial and temporal identification, and which is at the heart of theatricality per se. This aspect of the ‘miracle’, then, was a miracle born of necessity. The processes that produced place as a ‘fields of care’ in Irish culture, compensating for a relative lack of monumental ‘public symbols’, were thus historically determined; as such, they were subject to change over time. We can register that change in the final decades of the twentieth century by considering the ways in which Irish space came into sharp focus in Irish critical discourse from the 1970s onwards. In 2001, Gerry Smyth noted that ‘the coalescing of a number of critical discourses in the closing decades of the twentieth century made the study of Irish cultural history amenable to spatial analysis’.7 When Smyth writes of critical discourses coalescing, he is referring primarily to the dominance of postcolonial theory as a critical paradigm in Irish Studies from the early 1990s until relatively recently. From the outset, postcolonial theory was attuned to conflicts of space. Edward Said’s Orientalism (1978) is, at a basic level, an account of the production of a spatial zone, the ‘Orient’, in conflict with another spatial zone, the ‘West’. ‘None of us is outside or beyond geography,’ Said states at the beginning of Culture and Imperialism (1993). ‘None of us is completely free from the struggle over geography . . . [It is a struggle that] is not only about soldiers and cannons but also about ideas, about forms, about images and imaginings.’8 In 1988, Said’s influence in Irish Studies was confirmed with the publication of his Field Day pamphlet (No. 15), Nationalism, Colonialism and Literature: Yeats and Decolonization. ‘If there is anything that radically distinguishes the imagination of anti-imperialism,’ Said wrote there, ‘it is the primacy of

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the geographical in it.’9 The spatial orientation of postcolonial theory can be traced in the work of many of those associated with the Field Day project. This would be true, for instance, in the work of Kevin Whelan as a geographer; equally, it is present in Seamus Deane’s arguments about the sacralisation of soil, in Luke Gibbons’s juxtaposition of the West of Ireland and the Wild West, and in Joe Cleary’s work on partition and culture. In each case, the ‘primacy of geography’ is evident. It is worth remembering that Field Day, of which Deane was a director, began not simply as a theatre company but as one that defined itself in terms of a very specific geography: a company based in Derry, but committed to touring, tracing a new map of Ireland through its tours. Moreover, the wider Field Day project came to be associated with a spatial, geographical metaphor: the idea that in addition to the four historical provinces of Ireland (Leinster, Munster, Connaught and Ulster), it would be possible to imagine a fifth province. ‘From such a place,’ wrote Richard Kearney and Mark Patrick Hederman in their inaugural editorial in The Crane Bag in Spring 1977, ‘a new understanding and unity might emerge.’10 As Marilynn Richtarik notes, ‘the notion of a fifth province above the fray of national politics and the conviction that art could shape as well as reflect society would become central to the Field Day enterprise’.11 As we look back at the emergence of postcolonial theory in Irish Studies in the late 1980s and early 1990s, certain lines of continuity can be traced to a crisis of space that was registered earlier, in some cases by commentators who would not necessarily have recognised an affinity with the work of the later postcolonial critics. In this respect, 1977 stands as a pivotal moment. This was not only the year in which Tuan’s Space and Place was published; it was also the year in which Kearney and Hederman introduced the concept of the ‘Fifth Province’ into Irish cultural debate; and it was the year in which Seamus Heaney, lecturing in the Ulster Museum in Belfast, gave the phrase ‘sense of place’ its currency in Irish culture.12 Heaney opened his talk by echoing Yeats’s earlier distinction between ‘two ways in which place is known and cherished . . . One is lived, illiterate and unconscious, the other learned, literate and conscious.’ In the course of a talk that is partly a self-portrait, he focuses on the legacy of the poets Patrick Kavanagh and John Montague. Their work, he argues, is dependent upon a sense of belonging to a locality that knows its stories, its history, its associations, and is able to read the landscape as a manuscript; at the same time, these poets maintain a scholarly, cosmopolitan distance from that lived experience, capable of reflecting upon the kind of total

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immersion in place that characterises pre-literate cultures. For Montague, says Heaney, the pre-Christian feminine religion of Northern Europe ‘is the lens through which he looks and the landscape becomes a memory, a piety, a loved mother. The present is suffused with the past.’ Heaney sees this tension between the local and the cosmopolitan (and its attendant sense of loss) as lying at the heart of much modern Irish writing, achieving its persistent form at the end of the nineteenth century, principally in the work of the Irish Literary Theatre. In particular, he cites Synge’s introduction to The Tinker’s Wedding (1909) where Synge ‘used a phrase which is very apposite to my concerns in this discussion’: ‘The drama is made serious,’ he [Synge] wrote, ‘not by the degree in which it is taken up with problems that are serious in themselves, but by the degree in which it gives the nourishment, not very easy to define, on which our imaginations live.’ That nourishment, it seems to me, became available more abundantly to us as a result of the achievements of the Irish Literary Revival, and much of its imaginative protein was extracted from the sense of place.13

Heaney’s lecture not only explicitly named the attachment to the local as a sense of place, he tied its modern historical root to the Irish Literary Revival (and hence to the theatre); this combination is, he claims, the ‘imaginative protein’ of contemporary Irish writing. Part of the potency of this argument over the next few decades was due in no small part to Heaney’s complex sense that this particular piece of ‘imaginative protein’ was not always a cosy legacy, particularly in relation to Northern Ireland. Speaking in 1984 of contemporary poets from Northern Ireland, Heaney made the influential argument that these writers ‘belong to a place that is patently riven by notions of belonging to other places’.14 However, whether it is something from which the poet is alienated, or something that may be one of the irrational roots of conflict (as the poems in North had intimated), the Irish sense of place for Heaney (and in this he exemplified much Irish cultural debate) was real. It is only in stray moments, such as the end of his ‘The Sense of Place’ talk, that it is possible to detect the anxious note that can now be seen as the seed of the crisis that would be experienced in Irish theatre in the first decade of the twenty-first century. ‘We are no longer innocent,’ he notes, ‘we are no longer just parishioners of the local. We go to Paris at Easter instead of rolling eggs on the hill at the gable.’15 Both the explicitness with which Irish culture was identified with a sense of place and the nascent anxiety that it was fading would continue to grow in Irish cultural discourse throughout the 1980s. For instance, in 1985, the

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Irish national broadcaster, RTÉ, offered radio listeners a series of lectures coordinated by the historian Joe Lee entitled Ireland: Towards a Sense of Place. Many of the lectures strike a characteristic tone that is at once celebratory and valedictory, sounding like a pre-emptive epitaph for something that may already be gone. The broadcasts open with a piece by the geographer W. J. Smyth, in an argument that he would continue to develop and refine over the next twenty years, culminating in his 2006 volume Map-Making, Landscapes and Memory. ‘Have we lost our sense of place?’ he asks. ‘For a sense of place is bound up with memory, identity, caring; with articulating the true nature of our past experiences so as to enable us, more creatively, to engage the present, and through that the future.’16 Similarly, in 1988 (the same year that Said’s Field Day pamphlet appeared), Patrick Sheeran published an influential article entitled ‘Genius Fabulae: The Irish Sense of Place’, in which he put the matter even more directly, stating: ‘It is well nigh a truism that Irishness and sense of place go together.’17 ‘Irish culture is defined’, continues a later commentator, ‘by a sense of placehood that is not predicated upon the construction of enclosures, monuments, or structures but by a placehood that exists primarily through representation – “by being known and talked about”.’18 This gets to the nub of an argument that has been made in differing ways by Eamonn Slater, Kevin Whelan and others: Ireland’s colonial history of underdevelopment has contributed to a distinctive spatiality that is not based on the kind of structural monumentality about which Lefebvre writes, but on words and stories, on place names and their histories; in short, on the activities of place-making that exist through narration and memory, beyond the boundaries of the conceived space of planner, cartographers and administrators. This in turn has meant that while the Irish sense of place has been understood largely as the residual product of an older, archaic cultural formation, it has equally been seen as a site of resistance. Moreover, because Irish place has been associated primarily with language (particularly the Irish language) – ‘by being known and talked about’ – place is doubly connected to writing. This was true of Irish poetry, but is even more pertinent in relation to writing for the theatre, where the link between language and physical space is itself spatialised. The anxiety that this language-based Irish sense of place was under threat was articulated in the 1980s in the binary form that we will recognise from Yi-Fu Tuan’s work, in which the other of place is space. However, in Ireland, the familiar place/space binarism took a particular historical colouring, such as when W. J. Smyth argues that Irish spatiality has been defined by a conflictual relationship between

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two ways of knowing and seeing: the dominance of visual perspectives, views, descriptions, images and maps geared to militarize the conquest and planning of future anglicized landscapes and societies, as opposed to the perspective of the song/poem, the story, local place-knowledge and the defence and elaboration of a distinctive Irish way of loving, knowing and doing.19

In creating an opposition between the space of maps (produced in order to facilitate colonisation and capitalist development) and the places of memory and narration (inhabited by the colonised), Smyth indigenises Tuan’s terms. The key move here repeats what happened in the period of the Literary Revival, linking place-making to the Irish language, and hence to earlier Gaelic culture, with a view not so much to reviving the language as to finding a synecdochical substitution for it available to non-Irish speakers. Smyth’s argument, in some respects, could be that of Yeats in 1906, when he writes that ‘wherever the old imaginative life lingers it must be stirred into life, and kept alive, and in Ireland this is the world, it may be, of the Gaelic movement’.20 Smyth makes this argument by highlighting an evocative term that Heaney had given currency in his ‘The Sense of Place’ lecture: dinnseanchas – ‘the traditional, legendary lore of notable places’.21 This word echoes through the Irish discourse of place into the twenty-first century from a range of critical perspectives. For instance, John Wilson Foster, although a stern critic of the postcolonial analysis of Irish culture, adopts a position not dissimilar to that of Heaney and others involved with Field Day in his 1997 book Nature and Ireland when he writes approvingly: ‘Places, place lore, place-names; the landscape of Ireland was seen and read through powerful cultural lenses.’22 Likewise, a 1993 study of John B. Keane entitled Kerry Playwright: Sense of Place in the Plays of John B. Keane opens with the observation that, ‘although difficult to define, spirit of place colours and orders one’s way of seeing . . . This sense of place is the clue to much of Irish writing.’23 Indeed, by the mid 1990s, feminist critics such as Catherine Nash were objecting to the pervasive idea that ‘there is only one true Irishness and this depends on a stable and secure relationship to place’,24 an idea excluding not only gender identity perspectives, but also diasporic culture, whose relationship to place is neither stable nor secure. At the same time, to the extent that Irish exceptionalism was challenged by postcolonial criticism, the equation of place with the indigenous and space with the imperial could be restated less as an exceptional feature of Irish culture than as a pattern of spatial understanding common to other colonies and former colonies. As Tuan noted in a 1997 review of Senses of Place, a collection of essays that explored

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the connection between folklore and place across a range of cultures: ‘Space is somehow bad: it evokes the abstract and the impersonal, and is even tainted by the odour of imperialism. Place, by contrast, is embodied virtue – modest, in touch with one’s roots, deeply personal, communal, and human . . . Space is history – the old political history of change and movement; place is folklore.’25 As Heaney’s invocation of Synge in ‘The Sense of Place’ suggests, it is thus possible to trace a genealogy of Irish space and its close identification with a sense of place from Yeats to Smyth, from Riders to the Sea in 1904 through to Brian Friel’s Translations in 1980, both of which are effectively realist plays informed by a mimetic use of space. In such a theatre the audience looks into a staged world that appears as ‘a world homogenous with the world seen on the stage’.26 What is then seen on stage, the ‘interior’ world of the cottage and hedge school respectively, constitutes the zone A to which the zone non-A exists in an oppositional and conflictual relationship. As we argued earlier in relation to the Irish theatre of the early part of the twentieth century, it is possible, at least in these plays, to equate the zone A of realism with place – known, defined, lived – and the zone non-A of the offstage with space – open, undefined, free, but also threatening. Zone A is primarily produced by bodies, and by physical objects in space, interacting through language; zone non-A, by contrast, need not be visible at all, and can be produced purely through diegetic references; these may be confined to the creation of an unseen offstage world, but not necessarily so, as we saw in relation to the use of ‘ekphrastic diegesis’ in Yeats’s Noh plays. However, given the centrality in Irish theatre culture of a spatial division between the zone A and the zone non-A, between that which is visible and that which is produced diegetically, and the importance of the latter, we can now begin to understand that spatial arrangement as one of the constituents of a theatre of language. This theatre of language inhabits a very particular landscape: Riders to the Sea is set on ‘an Island off the West of Ireland’,27 Translations in Ballybeg, Friel’s fictitious Donegal location for many of his dramas. As we saw in Chapter 2, the rural West of Ireland – particularly when represented as a domestic interior – is the valorised space whose staging so dominated the drama of the Literary Revival, and this continued to be the case into the middle decades of the last century. As Kevin Whelan puts it, the West was ‘the bearer of the authentic, quintessential Irish identity, encoded in a landscape different to the industrialised, modernised landscapes of contemporary Britain’.28 However, for the predominantly urban audiences who watched Riders to the Sea such peasant characters were increasingly

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becoming a spectral presence in Irish life. In Translations, written more than seventy-five years after Synge’s play, the sense of loss has moved on even further; what is being mourned is arguably loss itself. In both cases, however, the plays close on an ending which is absolute – the death of the last of Maurya’s six sons and her stoical lament in Riders, or in Translations the final descent into black following Hugh’s evocation of an empire’s erasure of an earlier civilisation. A particular kind of theatrical space is opened up by the evocation of loss, for when a play creates a sense of loss, a new kind of conceptual space is produced on the stage: a contradictory space, the space of that which is not present. These non-present spaces are produced more vividly when the visible world of the stage is meticulously realised, if only so that the present and non-present space – the space of what-is, and the space of mourning – appear in sharper contrast. When this dialectic of the present and nonpresent is produced on the stage, it brings into being something analogous to Pierre Nora’s lieux de mémoire. Nora is talking about memorials; however, when we consider the nature of Irish monumentality as ‘fields of care’, Irish theatre can also be seen as functioning as a place- and timespecific crystallisation of that which is no longer. As such, the play in performance becomes a monument, in Lefebvre’s sense. If the onstage zone A is the site of lieux de mémoire, then the offstage, zone non-A is the site of absence, the pure loss that is being memorialised onstage. Irish theatre of the 1980s and 1990s inherited from the earlier theatre of place a scenic spatial structure that was already attuned to loss, the theatrical form of the elegiac note already present in the work of Yeats, when he writes of ‘wherever the old imaginative life lingers’, or in Synge, or in the intimation of disappearance that drove the folklore collecting of Lady Gregory. Only one stage direction in Riders refers to conditions in the external, i.e. offstage world: ‘The door which Nora half closed is blown open by a gust of wind’. Diegetic references make it clear that this is no spring breeze. Cathleen’s question, ‘Is the sea bad by the white rocks, Nora?’ elicits the reply: ‘Middling bad, God help us. There’s a great roaring in the west, and it’s worse it’ll be getting when the tide’s turned to the wind.’29 In other words, the offstage world, the zone non-A, is in conflict with the life of the cottage and its inhabitants in that its turbulence poses a constant threat to their safety and security. Translations, though replete with diegetic references to spaces and places has only one moment as specific as that from Riders, when the conditions immediately external to the staged world are brought to the fore. It occurs in Act Three, when, in a sequence of four directions, ‘Doalty moves over to the window’, then ‘looks

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resolutely out of the window’, ‘Begins whistling through his teeth’ and then ‘With sudden excessive interest in the scene outside’ exclaims ‘Cripes, they’re crawling all over the place! Cripes, there’s millions of them! Cripes, they’re levelling the whole land!’30 While the structure of the onstage/offstage opposition is analogous in the two plays, the agency of offstage extinction is quite different. The sea in Riders to the Sea is a timeless, inhuman force, existing outside of human history or agency; by contrast, the British army in Translations is human, historical and political, mapping on to the current political situation at the time of the play’s original production. Indeed, when the play was reviewed in An Phoblacht, the newspaper associated with the Provisional IRA and Sinn Féin, the political parallels to the current situation were made clear: ‘They [the ‘Brits’] effectively destroy the fiercely nationalist hedge schools, and Irish language and culture in their aim to transform the people into docile Brit subjects.’31 If the British Army in Translations functions as the agent of empire, the spatial expanse evoked by that term is captured in the diegetic references that serve to locate the onstage world. These range globally from the India where Yolland failed to arrive, signalled in the title of his putative employer, the East India Company, to the Boston to which Maire aspires: all nodes in the dawning network of ‘empire’ which Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri describe as ‘a new form of sovereignty . . . the political subject that effectively regulates those global exchanges [economic and cultural], the sovereign power that governs the world’.32 The web that binds these places together is the English language which, as Hugh notes, is spoken by some of the Irish characters, ‘on occasion – outside the parish of course – and then usually for the purposes of commerce’. The play dramatises the process by which this offstage space encroaches on the onstage, erasing its differences and literally mapping it, locating it, within the commercial coordinates of empire. A key moment in this regard occurs late in the play when Maire talks of ‘Winfarthing [which is] near a big town called Norwich. And Norwich is in a county called Norfolk. And Norfolk is in the East of England.’ As she speaks these ‘odd names’ and establishes their spatial relationship, she traces an outline map on the ground with her finger. Crucially, as the stage directions indicate, this is ‘where Owen had his map a few minutes before’.33 While the names on these two maps are different, they now belong in the same extended network; at that point, despite the resistance of the Donnelly twins, the real conflict between onstage and offstage space is effectively over. Or, to put it in a different frame, what is staged in this moment in Translations is a conflict between a represented space (in Lefebvre’s sense) – the

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map – and a lived space, made up of traditional names informed by dinnseanchas, individual histories, territories claimed at night by the Donnelly twins, and markings visible only to the initiated. In the representational space of the stage, however it is the conflict itself between these two spatial configurations that signifies. By contrast, the spatial range of Translations, which includes Nova Scotia as well as India and Boston, not to mention Dublin and England, is lacking in Riders to the Sea, which holds resolutely to its West of Ireland domain. While Maurya speaks of what she terms ‘the big world’, she contrasts its practices to ‘this place’ and, in fact, only the physically immediate locations of Galway, Connemara and Donegal are referenced in the play.34 As John Barrell noted in The Idea of Landscape and the Sense of Place, ‘for those of its inhabitants who rarely went beyond the parish boundary, the parish was so to speak at the centre of the landscape . . . For those inhabitants accustomed to moving outside, however, and for those travellers who passed through it, the parish was . . . defined not by some circular system of geography but by a linear one.’35 It might appear that Riders to the Sea is contained within a narrow spatial field, like that described here by Barrell, while Translations is defined by movements that have a global reach out from and back into ‘the parish’. However, the sense in Riders of an enclosed, unmapped authenticity is at odds with the actuality of the Aran Islands that Synge recorded in his journal, where there are fifteen references to America concerning letters and actual or intended voyages. In spite of this, Synge’s preferred image of the islands is captured in his view of what he termed the people’s ‘isolation in the face of a universe that wars on them with winds and seas’.36 While we do not deny the harshness of island life, the reality was that the islands were no longer an isolated outpost of primitive survival. They were part of a geographical continuum enabled by transport and to which commerce was central. As W. J. McCormack notes, ‘Synge’s Aran Islands, for example, had a fishing industry using large trawlers from the east coast and linked directly to the London markets.’37 Synge was certainly aware of this. In The Aran Islands journal he refers to stopping at ‘a hulk that is anchored in the bay, to make some arrangements for the fish-curing of the middle island’ but the moment is subordinate to his dominant emotion at ‘moving away from civilisation’.38 Indeed, as David Fitzpatrick has shown, not only were the islands well connected by commerce, even their ‘fabled inaccessibility’ was something of a myth; when Synge visited there in 1898, it was already ‘a significant tourist destination’ which had had its own ‘pleasure-boat service’ from Galway from as early as 1863.39

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The erasure of modernity from the Irish theatre of place in the first decade of the twentieth century is a gesture that is repeated at the century’s end. Commenting on Conor McPherson’s The Weir from 1997, Eamonn Jordan notes: ‘Simplicity as a sign of authenticity is false, principally because of the absence of complexity.’ McPherson’s play works a ‘sleight of hand’, he suggests, because the characters are ‘relatively unsullied by the compromises of first-world capitalism’.40 The implication is that no late twentieth-century life, even in Sligo or Leitrim, could so completely constitute such a ‘small world’. Likewise, despite the time differences between Riders to the Sea and Translations in terms of setting and composition, both demonstrate what Derek Gregory, commenting on Lefebvre, referred to as ‘the specificity of the capitalist mode of production of space [showing] how the production of space came to be saturated with the tonalities of capitalism’.41 In fact, while the dominant sense of the immediate offstage world is that of timeless wind and waves, almost a metaphysic, outside of history or culture, Riders to the Sea is replete with references to articles purchased on or beyond the island. For instance, Michael’s shirt is identified as an unreliable means of identifying his body as there are ‘great rolls of it in the shops of Galway’ and so many other men ‘may have a shirt of it as well’.42 This is a world clearly located in that of mass production and distribution yet still, as the fact that he is identified by his hand-knitted socks suggests, on the cusp of a final translation into that wider world. The fact that identity is only certain through the product of specific individual effort, while the mass-produced manufacture of the mainland ensures only anonymity, makes clear Synge’s value system. So, while the set is that of a cottage kitchen, and the play closes on keening of the death of Bartley, this is no prelapsarian Ireland. Instead, we can read it as a peripheral location permeated and encroached upon by an expanding world of commerce. In writing about mimetic/realist drama, Ubersfeld claims that it puts on stage ‘a certain picture of socioeconomic conditions and relationships between people, a picture that is constructed in conformity with the way a given social stratum sees itself’.43 In that Synge stages a cottage and eschews references to locations other than those most immediate to the islands, he conforms to what ‘the given social stratum’ wished to believe of their idealised West of Ireland: the desire for an untouched Eden he largely shared. However, in his references to commerce Synge is far more acutely, and honestly, aware of the spatial interconnectedness of Ireland. This point can be developed by reference to Edward Soja’s observation that as space is a social product, it cannot be ‘a separate structure with rules of

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construction and transformation that are independent from the wider social framework’.44 In this context, the West of Ireland (and its staging) is fully imbricated in the overall spatial relations pertaining in the Ireland of the time of production, whether in the late or early twentieth century. Or, to return to Lefebvre: ‘Theatrical space . . . implies a representation of space – scenic space – corresponding to a particular conception of space.’45 There is thus a continuity in the production of space in Riders to the Sea and in Translations, one that cuts across their production of a distinctively Irish sense of place, and, indeed, constitutes its Other. The space that is produced in both plays is that of a world that is in the process of becoming mapped in its entirety, but which stages sites of resistance to that process. While Synge’s play, unlike Friel’s (and unlike Synge’s own account in the Aran Islands journal), does not acknowledge this through diegetic references to a linear geography, the reference to mass production and distribution necessarily, if reluctantly, does so. Translations can offer a more complete overview of the emergence of this linear and commercial space than is possible with Synge’s play, if only because it was written at a time when the process was far more advanced, and the sites of resistance had all but vanished. What was only nascent in 1904 was fully formed and dominant by 1980, and in the Ordnance Survey, Friel has an effective metaphor for the process of a culture’s transformation into what he termed an ‘alien future’.46 The space has become literally alien as, through translation, ‘place-names’ become ‘spacenames’, since what Friel dramatises is the reversal of the process identified by Yi-Fu Tuan in which undifferentiated space ‘becomes place as soon as we get to know it better and endow it with value’.47 By the end of the play, the characters have, to quote Tuan again, left ‘the security and stability of place’ and entered ‘the openness, freedom and threat of space’48 as what had been the place that they had inhabited has become unfamiliar, its map overwritten with unfamiliar names. The difference between the two plays, finally and most decisively, is captured in those two words ‘freedom’ and ‘threat’. As Synge saw it, the Aran Islands would ‘gradually yield to the ruthlessness of “progress”’49 and, although not overtly dramatised as such, the offstage space of Riders to the Sea embodies that implacable process. Friel, as he made clear, has ‘no nostalgia for that time [Celtic Ireland’]’ and claimed the only merit in looking back was ‘to understand how you are and where you are at this moment’.50 We must imagine the characters exiled from Ballybeg at the end of Translations as, at least in part, free. The moment in which Translations was produced was thus one that was far more anxious about the relationship between place and space than that

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in which Synge wrote Riders to the Sea. Richard Kearney was one of many who were to pick up on this, in his response to the play in his 1983 essay ‘Brian Friel and Ireland’s Verbal Theatre’. Kearney observes that Friel, in his programme note for the original Field Day production of the play, quotes from a lecture Heidegger gave in 1951: ‘. . .Poetically Man Dwells. . .’ [‘. . .dichterisch wohnet der Mensch. . .’ ]: ‘Man acts as if he were the master of language, while it is language which remains the master of man.’51 Reading that programme note in conjunction with the play, Kearney is able to identify Heidegger as one of the sources for understanding the concept of a sense of place as it has functioned in Irish cultural debate since the end of the nineteenth century. For Heidegger, the recognition of language as a ground of Being was foundational to his philosophical position, particularly in his late works. In the very act of moving the ground of the discussion of the Irish sense of place from terms like dinnseanchas, drawn from medieval Irish-language poetry, to Heidegger’s phenomenology, Kearney makes an important contribution to our understanding of what is at stake: he removes the veil of antiquity surrounding the idea and forces us to think about the constant re-stating of the sense of place as a feature of modernity, rather than as a timeless legacy or simply another manifestation of Irish exceptionalism. In his reading of Translations, Kearney uses Heidegger to distinguish between the two understandings of language and space in Friel’s play: what he calls the ‘ontological’, in which Being is understood to exist within language as a ground of consciousness; and the ‘positivist’ position, in which language must always, to some extent, be alienated from Being and from consciousness. For the positivist, Kearney claims, language is a system of naming objects that exist independently of consciousness (and hence of language). This was the position of Husserl from which Heidegger broke, although Kearney traces it to the tradition of British empiricism (Locke in particular). For Kearney, this understanding of language can be equated with what W. J. Smyth sees historically in an Irish context as the cartographic perspective, or with what Lefebvre would see as the ‘conceived’ space of cartographers and planners. By contrast, Kearney argues, there is an ontological understanding of language that Heidegger developed from Being and Time onwards, for which language is what he later calls ‘the house of Being’: ‘It is because language is the house of Being, that we reach what is by constantly going through this house. When we go to the well, when we go through the woods, we are already going through the word “well”, through the word “woods”, even if we do not speak the words.’52

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Heidegger came to this position early, in the 1925 lectures that became his History of the Concept of Time: Prolegomena (which preceded Being and Time): ‘It is not so much that we see the objects and things but rather that we first talk about them. To put it more precisely: we do not say what we see, but rather the reverse, we see what one says about the matter.’53 In the same way, space for Heidegger is grounded in language. ‘When we speak of man and space,’ he writes in the late essay ‘Building Dwelling Thinking’, ‘it sounds as though man stood on one side, space on the other. Yet space is not something that faces man. It is not an external object nor an inner experience’54 – a comment that suggests both the continuities and the differences between Heidegger’s phenomenology and Tuan’s ‘perspective of experience’. ‘“Place”’, in Heidegger’s view, ‘places man in the ground of self-consciousness, it confirms him in this world in a unique way. “Place” reveals our being here, our human reality.’55 Heidegger is thus the inescapable figure in an ontological understanding of place grounded in language, and thus, although largely unacknowledged (Kearney excepted), Heidegger could be said to underwrite the key concepts underpinning the discourse of the Irish sense of place. That Field Day should have made this explicit in the company’s first production in 1980 is also a testimony to the parallel (and, in some respects, antithetical) anxieties of place in Irish culture at the time: on one hand, Heaney’s anxiety that the price of a culture too deeply rooted in place was tribal violence and, on the other, the gnawing worry that the sense of place that made Ireland distinctive was being eroded. Indeed, the latter anxiety was already present in the late Heidegger, who writes in relation to humanity’s relationship to technology: ‘Homelessness is coming to be the destiny of the world.’56 Overriding the whole discussion was the recognition that once a thing could be picked apart with this clarity, it was already on the dissecting table. Kearney’s reading of Translations begins to unravel these parallel anxieties by contrasting Friel’s theatre with the work of Operating Theatre, a collaboration between new music composer Roger Doyle and actor Olwen Fouéré, which Kearney heralds as creating a new form of Irish theatre ‘freeing itself from the bondage of the word’.57 Once the ground of place in language is recognised, he argues, the only way in which to critique or develop the Irish relationship to space is to move outside of language, which in the theatre involves non-verbal theatrical forms, whose focus is movement, the body and the architectural production of space. At the very least, in setting up an opposition between Friel’s ‘theatre of language’ and Operating Theatre’s theatre of space and the body, Kearney defined the key conflict of space in contemporary Irish theatre at a critical moment.

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The recognition that the Irish theatre has been shaped by a deeply politicised, conflictual opposition between place and space enables us to trace the outlines of that conflict through the history of modern Irish theatre, particularly through its apparently contradictory relationship with stage realism. Lady Gregory’s claim in 1913 that the Abbey was ‘chiefly known now as a folk-theatre’58 can be understood in the context of the political necessity of creating a Heideggerian ontological sense of place. Peasant realism was the theatrical form of a particular relation between place and language in a cultural-historical context in which ontological place, grounded in language, was understood to be indigenous, and it was this theatre that Heaney would later claim codified the ‘imaginative protein’ of modern Irish writing more generally. The culturally encoded privileging of place over space in Irish culture helps us to understand why Irish theatre after 1900 was, for so long, a culture in which the writer was the dominant artist, and the script was privileged over the performance. ‘Our plays must be literature’, declared W. B. Yeats in 1904, ‘or written in the spirit of literature.’59 More than eighty years later, David McKenna would write in The Crane Bag, ‘Irish theatre began with the word, the word, unfortunately, of a Great Poet, and it has been dominated by the word ever since.’60 In the 1980s, reactions to this domination by the word, coinciding with changes in arts funding both in the Republic and in Northern Ireland, helped spark the formation of companies such as Blue Raincoat and the Corn Exchange, whose work was rooted in performance, not in written texts (although both companies have worked closely with writers on occasion). One of the elements uniting the performers in Blue Raincoat, for instance, is a shared training at the École de Mime Corporel Dramatique¸ which is based on the principles of dramatic corporeal mime of Étienne Decroux, an experience of physical theatre that links them to Mikel Murfi of Barabbas theatre company who trained at L’ École Jacques Lecoq. It is from companies such as these that lines of descent can be traced to the site-specific work that will be considered in Chapter 7. Nonetheless, the major figure in Irish theatre has remained the playwright. Well into the twenty-first century, the Irish theatre calendar continued to be punctuated by premieres of new work by the generation which had dominated since the 1960s (Brian Friel, Tom Murphy and Tom Kilroy), joined in the 1980s by Frank McGuinness, and followed in the 1990s by Conor McPherson, Marina Carr, Martin McDonagh, and Enda Walsh, to name only some of the major figures. Site-specific and devised work runs against this trend, existing largely outside of what might be considered the Irish theatrical mainstream.

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It is in the theatre of language, then, that we must trace the first disruptions of Irish space. If Translations was a play about language, power and mapping, it was equally a play about conflicting forms of theatrical space. To this extent, Translations is unlike Riders to the Sea, in that while the earlier play works within the constraints of a mimetic realism (albeit with a metaphysical tinge), Friel’s play manages to be both realist and to carry out a kind of reflection on the nature of space itself, including stage space. By the same token, Dancing at Lughnasa (1990), which appeared a decade later, takes that self-conscious reflection on theatrical space a step further, and can be read as a commentary on the spatial formations that characterised Irish theatre for the first half of the twentieth century. The first production of the play at the Abbey Theatre in 1990 was visually striking in that Joe Vanek’s set used the full width of the Abbey stage to create what was effectively a trisected onstage space. On stage left, there was a country kitchen set that could have come from any number of Abbey plays from the first half of the last century; however, sweeping upstage and to stage right were rows of ripe wheat, lit to an almost supernatural brightness and arranged in rigidly straight rows that signalled a change in representational register from the naturalistic detail of the kitchen. Finally, on the extreme fringes of stage right was the space occupied by Michael in his role as narrator in the play’s framing monologues, much like the space occupied by Tom in his narrative passages in Tennessee Williams’s The Glass Menagerie (1944). If we compare the scenic space of Dancing at Lughnasa to earlier plays in which the domestic interior was all that was visible, what appears onstage in Friel’s play is effectively both the onstage and the offstage of the earlier theatrical formation. The stage space outside the kitchen connects to the village of Ballybeg (and, in this sense, it is a representational space produced by Friel’s work as a whole). It also leads ultimately to the wider world of London, Spain and Africa, which are spaces of ‘freedom’ but also of ‘threat’. Ultimately, these offstage spaces are sites of liberation for Father Jack, but of death for Agnes and Rose. By contrast, the stage-left kitchen is not only a place that is safe and knowable; it also acts as a metatheatrical signifier for a scenic space that had contributed to the Irish sense of place for many decades: the single-set Irish country kitchen. In this regard, at least part of the nostalgic, popular appeal of Dancing at Lughnasa is the way in which it modulates the balance between place and space. The stage contains both the traditional peasant kitchen of earlier Irish theatre and the spatial zone of freedom that forms its implicit critique. Hence, just as Friel makes self-consciously contradictory uses of foundational elements of

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performance elsewhere, such as language (Translations) or presence (Freedom of the City, Faith Healer), in Dancing at Lughnasa he creates an elaborate offstage space that is, in fact, onstage, a detail faithfully produced in Joe Vanek’s set. In order to do this, Dancing at Lughnasa needs to create a second-level offstage, a kind of deferred offstage which it does through its engagement with technology. The first character to whom the audience is introduced is the radio: Marconi. Writing in the Irish Radio Review on November 1925, shortly before the Irish national broadcaster 2RN (later Radio Éireann) began broadcasting from Dublin, the poet George Russell (AE) observed: By the close of this year broadcasting stations will be in operation in the Free State, and within a few years I doubt if there will be any village in Ireland, any valley, however remote amid the hills, where it will not be possible for the country folk to be not only within hearing distance of Dublin, but it may also hear London, Paris, Berlin, and even the United States. Imagination fails in trying to realise the complexities, the myriad changes in the mentality of the country folk which may come within a generation.61

Russell’s article was only one contribution to a wide-ranging debate in the 1920s as radio was being introduced in Ireland. Running through this debate, however, was the note struck by Russell; that where so much of Irish culture up to this point had been focused around a spatial sense in which rural Ireland was, by definition, remote from modernity, radio would fundamentally transform those coordinates. More than any other medium before (including cinema), radio created a simultaneous field, a lived space that transcended the perceived space of physical geography. A theatre audience is bound by the strictures of the perceived space; its members must all be present in the same room at the same time, with both the limitations and the sense of community that follows. A radio audience, on the other hand, is bound only by the transmission area of the broadcast; there is nothing determining the listeners’ actual spatial location. For the radio audience, the proximal relationship between the physical presence of the speaker and the listener is almost irrelevant; in theatre, it is definitional. Reading Dancing at Lughnasa in terms of the way in which it produces space thus involves considering how the music on the radio produces a lived space both of freedom and of threat within the confines of the Mundy family home. On one hand, technology creates this space, making the radio an icon of the modernity that will eventually crush the world we see onstage; on the other hand, when the open spaces of modernity created

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by the radio erupt on to the stage in the form of music, they create a utopian moment of freedom which exposes the limitations of tradition. Further complicating matters, the music that is heard through the spatially diffuse technology of the radio is what would be called ‘traditional’ music, folk music arising from the shared life of a tightly knit community, the music of place, but now recorded and broadcast beyond the bounds of the culture that created it, thereby freeing it from place. This is the complex balancing act performed by Dancing at Lughnasa, to which audiences responded so powerfully; the play neither endorses nostalgia as a critique of modernity, nor does it endorse technological modernity as utopia. Instead, it creates the spaces of both simultaneously, in tension with one another, each constituting an immanent critique of the other. When it did so on its opening night in the Abbey on 24 April 1990, it brought together a series of contradictory spaces: the represented spaces of the rural domestic interior as the manifestation of the Irish sense of place, and its critique; tradition (alluded to in the Lughnasa fires, physically represented in the wheatfields, and aurally evoked through ‘traditional’ music), and modernity (in the form of the radio), all circumscribed by the space of the National Theatre, and its associated memories and histories. As such, the play produced dialogically the representational spaces of tradition and modernity, achieving that effect of monumentality of which Lefebvre writes. The monument, he suggests, ‘transmutes the fear of the passage of time, and anxiety about death, into splendour’62 – which is precisely the effect of those final moments of Dancing at Lughnasa, in which the audience is made acutely aware of the passage of time, and of death (and retrospectively of the characters as beings-toward-death), but experience it as ‘splendour’. Dancing at Lughnasa is able to accomplish this delicate weave of opposites because it begins with a representational space already imbued with a sense of place. ‘Places’, writes Tuan, ‘can acquire deep meaning . . . through the steady accretion of sentiment over the years.’63 The West of Ireland about which Synge wrote in Riders to the Sea, the pre-Famine countryside of Translations, and its 1930s aftermath in Dancing at Lughnasa participate in the long, well-established discourse of the Irish sense of place that reaches beyond the bounds of a particular performance or play. Indeed, Friel’s sustained creation of the fictional Ballybeg, beginning with Philadelphia, Here I Come! in 1964, has precisely this effect of the ‘steady accretion of sentiment’. In this respect, Translations forms part of the text of Dancing at Lughnasa, in that it is part of the later play’s memory of place. By the same token, for audiences today, Synge’s Riders to the Sea

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draws upon his autobiographical prose work, The Aran Islands, but also references later works, such as Robert Flaherty’s Man of Aran, as well as the whole complex of texts and discourses that have built up around the islands in anthropology, tourism, poetry and music. In short, we have been arguing that much of the satisfying sense of density and tradition that audiences have attributed to Irish theatre since the beginning of the twentieth century can be attributed to this ready-made sense of place, and this in turn feeds a self-perpetuating and expanding intertextual web of reference, a network of paratexts that seems like memory. From this ‘imaginative protein’, Irish playwrights for more than a century have been able to create stage spaces that are already invested with meaning; such spaces already form part of a representational space, even before the action of the play has begun. ‘Landscape’, as Tuan reminds us, ‘is personal and tribal history made visible.’ That visibility, he argues, only takes place when the history and the memory of the place is readable; indeed, ‘Identity of place is achieved by dramatising the aspirations, needs and functional rhythms of personal and group life.’64 In other words, Irish playwrights have not only started out with spaces imbued with a sense of place by dramatising the narratives that create that sense; with each play, they reinforce it, making it usable for future productions. However, for as long as it has been possible to write of an Irish sense of place, it has been possible to imagine its extinction. This possibility took on a more potent reality in the 1980s, precipitating a crisis of space very different from that which occurred at the beginning of the twentieth century. This becomes evident when we recognise that Nora’s concept of lieux de mémoire can be applied not only to the representational space created by the theatrical performance, but to the theatre itself as a space within Irish culture. From this perspective, Dancing at Lughnasa is a site of memory not only for a particular cultural formation at the moment of its dispersal by a new form of media; it is also a site of memory for a particular formation of theatrical space that dominated the first half of the twentieth century, whose symbol is the realist box-set kitchen. To say that it is a site of memory, then, is to identify it as a site of absence, and thus to recognise that it is losing the ability to carry out the work of the immanent critique of realism. Indeed, the distinguishing mark of Friel’s work is its proleptic recognition of absence, and throughout his career he has struggled to stage that which is not present, often at the moment of its disappearance, whether it be a certain relationship to the landscape in Translations, to an idea of home in Philadelphia, Here I Come!, or to belief in Faith Healer.

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‘Though it remains part of Irish cultural memory, the Ballybeg of Translations no longer exists,’ writes Helen Lojek in The Spaces of Irish Drama. ‘It is home to no one. And no one belongs there, however much we wish it were otherwise.’65 In Dancing at Lughnasa, the key to this reading is not only the recognition that the play makes explicit the bifurcated space of earlier Irish theatre; it goes further, framing that space within a third space, the space of narration, which marks the entire play as, technically, a non-play; a narration, not a dramatisation. It thus becomes a play whose real subject is a certain spatial formation of the stage, now only available as the object of reflection. In gestures such as these, the Irish theatre of place begins to mourn itself in the 1980s and 1990s. In these acts of mourning, we can begin to see a theatre of place being supplanted by a theatre of the fluorescence of place, if ‘fluorescence’ is understood to be the light emitted by a dying particle. Tom Kilroy, writing in 1992, was particularly alert to the impact that social change was having on the platially specific forms of Irish drama, especially on ‘the most durable of all Irish theatrical genres, the Irish peasant play’.66 Despite Curtis Canfield’s comments as early as 1936 on the smoothing away of ‘those salient features which once made Dublin different from London or New York’,67 which we noted in Chapter 3, ‘it is only in the last decade’, said Kilroy, ‘that Ireland has become truly urbanised in the late-twentieth-century meaning of that term, in other words characterised by great mobility, using highly complex, far-reaching systems of communication’. The consequence, he argued, was that Translations and Bailegangaire marked the culmination of the genre; indeed they began ‘to finally exhaust the form’.68 Given the cogency of this analysis it might appear surprising that one of the most critically and commercially successful theatrical events of the 1990s, one which appeared only three years after Kilroy’s comments, was Martin McDonagh’s Leenane Trilogy which began with The Beauty Queen of Leenane in 1995. Staged in the single set of ‘the living-room/kitchen of a rural cottage in the west of Ireland ’69 which was maintained with only minor variations in the decor across the other two plays, A Skull in Connemara (1997) and The Lonesome West (1997), at first glance Beauty Queen of Leenane appeared to prove that the Irish sense of place still had both theatrical power and cultural relevance. Indeed, not only did the onstage zone A of the stage look familiar, the plays established the same immanent critique of place that goes back to Colum’s The Land (1905), in their juxtaposition of an overly familiar domestic onstage place with the freedom of offstage space. ‘Of course it’s beautiful here, a fool can see,’ Pato tells

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Maureen in Beauty Queen of Leenane. ‘The mountains and the green, and people speak. But when everyone knows everybody else’s business . . . In England they don’t care if you live or die, and it’s funny but that isn’t altogether a bad thing. Ah, sometimes it is.’70 From this perspective, the plays do indeed have a continuity, not only with the mise en scène of earlier peasant realist plays, but also with the characteristic spatial structure of these plays and their dialectic of space and place. However, as Fintan O’Toole observed, ‘it is easy to be fooled by the apparently traditional, naturalistic form of the plays’. Indeed, the Leenane Trilogy’s ‘apparent realism’71 was only of its overly meticulous rendition of place, as its language and action effected a demolition of the peasant play from Playboy of the Western World to Bailegangaire, appropriating the intergenerational conflict of Playboy of the Western World to savage rather than save Mag, Beauty Queen of Leenane’s recreation of Mommo as a vindictive ‘poor old woman’. As if to correct those critics who took the trilogy as a contemporary take on Synge’s 1905 reports on the deprivation of the Congested Districts in the West of Ireland, McDonagh pushed the rendition of place to the comic extreme in The Cripple of Inishmaan (1996) using the set of a village shop with ‘shelves of canned goods, mostly peas’ (Figure 5).72 For Anne Ubersfeld, as we noted in Chapter 2, the use of glasses and bottles on stage might simply function as metonymic indicators of a place and ‘it is pointless to ask (and the spectator does not ask) if [they] mean something other than “we are in a café”’.73 However, McDonagh’s tins of peas exaggerate the minute detail of realist theatre to reinforce the fact that it is a stage representation of a stage representation of a shop; his sense of place is now the site of parody rather than piety, a rendition of a theatrical form which has become untethered from its cultural roots. While the zone non-A of McDonagh’s plays includes traditional sites of Irish emigration, England and America, they are imbricated with a montage of mediatised spaces, from the world of Starsky and Hutch to Australian soap operas. Nor is this mediatised world confined to the offstage; the lore of place, dinnseanchas, has been replaced by garbled memories of films and television. ‘What was it that oul fella used to say, now?’ ponders Pato. ‘What oul fella, now?’ asks Maureen. ‘The oul fella who used to chase oul whatyoucall. Oul Bugs Bunny.’ The situation could be summed up by the snatch of a Pogues song that Pato sings at one point: ‘“And the Yanks they were within.”’74 If the Leenane Trilogy could be mistaken as the revival of a dramatically viable Irish sense of place, the recognition of its cultural and theatrical demise is overtly and comically rendered in Enda Walsh’s The Walworth Farce (2006). This endless dramatisation of a narrative, the fantasy of how

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Figure 5 ‘Shelves of canned goods, mostly peas . . . ’ The set of the 2011 production of Martin McDonagh’s The Cripple of Inishmaan (1996) looks to some extent like a classic realist set; however, the exaggeration of some details – such as the rows and rows of tinned peas – suggests a more parodic relationship to realism. Photo courtesy of Robert Day

the father, Dinny, and his sons Sean and Blake left Cork for London, masks the bleak acknowledgement of the fatal fracturing of the Irish family and, finally, the closing down of all possibilities of the infinite freedom of space for the repetitious restrictions of place, but now devoid of its comforts. In both The Walworth Farce and Walsh’s stylistically and thematically similar The New Electric Ballroom (2008), the set is the zone A to which the offstage zone non-A is a credible and enterable reality. The stage world in The Walworth Farce is ‘three square spaces. Essentially a living room at its centre, a kitchen to stage left and a bedroom to stage right.’ Although it is occupied throughout by a ‘Farce’ in a ‘performance style [that] resembles The Three Stooges’ as Dinny and his sons perform the story as they have done every day for twenty years, involving rapid cross-dressing and frantic physicality, the psychological and social reality of their lives is at the heart of the play. For, as Sean acknowledges to his father, the truth of the reason for their exile is a crime and a loss: ‘I see Uncle Paddy and Auntie Vera on the ground and I see you standing in the corner with blood all over your hands. There’s blood on your hands and a kitchen knife, I’m sure of it. (A pause.) Mam’s terrible screaming.’ The double murder was fuelled by

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Dinny’s dispute with his brother over their dead mother’s money and, rather than face this fact, he has recast the events of that day in a performance which displaces responsibility and imprisons his sons in the endless ritual replay. The fact that this fantasy is performed in a socially grounded world is brought sharply home by the entry of Haley, the checkout girl at the local Tesco, who comes to deliver the shopping, which Sean accidentally left behind. Through her talk of playing football on Burgess Park, trips to Brighton Beach, and the fact that Sean goes shopping ‘every morning at ten o’clock’ we see that, despite the onstage attempt to deny the changes wrought by time, beyond the walls is the reality of its flux and flow in London, a viable zone non-A. While Dinny attempts to continue the performance of the fantasy by casting Haley in one of the roles, it judders to a halt as she attempts to escape, and both Dinny and Blake are stabbed to death in a rapid sequence of filial revolt and mistaken motives. Haley’s exit, as her entrance, makes clear the continuum of the enclosed world of the flat into the offstage space of the Walworth Road but, rather than following her, Sean closes and locks the door and ‘calmly lose[s] himself in a new story’ 75 in which he plays Haley. Likewise, in The New Electric Ballroom, Breda refers to ‘those distant voices and bad words that locked the door. And inside, inside then. And the stories take over and our pattern returns.’76 This articulates the overall sense of both plays, in which the social formations that once grounded Irish drama in a cultural network extending beyond the world realised on stage are now only retained in ‘stories’. If Dancing at Lughnasa functions as a lieu de mémoire for a tradition founded on place, and whose ruins are seen in The Walworth Farce, that which comes after can be glimpsed in Mark O’Rowe’s Terminus (2007). O’Rowe’s play is made up of the interlocking monologues spoken by three characters identified only as A, B, and C who speak directly to the audience from a stage with no markers of place. While the stories they tell are full of references to specific locations around contemporary Dublin, none of these sites have associations of memory; indeed, as the narratives become increasingly nightmarish and detached from reality (featuring flying demons and extreme cartoonlike violence) even real Dublin place names – Inchicore, Ormonde Quay – take on the aura of film sets or videogame scenarios, rather than actual locations with referents in the offstage world. Clare Wallace has argued in relation to Conor McPherson that the increasing dominance of the monologue form is not simply ‘an extension of an apparently ubiquitous Irish storytelling tradition’; rather, it is about the destabilisation of narrative itself and a postmodern

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‘obsolescence of the metanarrative apparatus of legitimation’.77 Equally, the increasing use of the monologue on Irish stages, and particularly in Terminus, also marks the obsolescence of a particular spatial formation. In Terminus, all social space is offstage and alluded to only in language; the onstage space, made up only of three broken shards of mirror on which the three performers stand, is self-erasing. The scenic space is thus a site only of that against which theatre defines itself – narration. If, in the spatial formation that had dominated the Irish stage over the twentieth century, the tension between onstage and offstage, zone A and zone non-A, was between place and space, between the oppressively familiar and terrifying freedom, then O’Rowe creates a space in which nothing is familiar, all is free and all is terrifying. Unlike the offstage sites produced through language in earlier Irish theatre, now language itself has become detached from shared cultural memory, from place, and from the body of the speaker. Hence, in Terminus, a sense of place is no longer present even as a memory (as it is in some of Conor McPherson’s work, for instance); as such, it is no longer even an absence. Given the premise that theatrical space is produced, and that the act of production is as much social as aesthetic, then the end of the bifurcated space of the Irish stage in Terminus may also mark the end of a certain social formation. While the space of Dancing at Lughnasa was balanced between a form of social space produced by a particular historical community, poised on the cusp of moving into a very different kind of mediated space produced by broadcast media, the space of Terminus is that of the hyperlink. It is a space in which the distinctive spatial form of Irish theatre, with its tension between interior and exterior, has disappeared, and in which all things – demons, serial killers, school teachers, frozen dinners – exist in contiguity to one another. It is a world from which place and home have disappeared. In this regard, Terminus also marks a terminus in Irish writing. It suggests an end to the much-discussed Irish sense of place, the ‘imaginative protein’ of Irish writing, which had been such a powerful idea that it could be evoked on stage as something so familiar as to be experienced as a constraint; and it was in that tension between familiarity and limit, and their opposites, freedom and anxiety, that Irish theatre defined itself. If Terminus imagines a spatial configuration in which these oppositions have ceased to function, Irish theatre of the twenty-first century will bear less and less relation to that which came before. It will also become less and less possible for Irish theatre to become a ‘field of care’, or to fulfil the monumentality function, producing a reconciliation of the competing forms of Irish space.

chapter 6

Theatre of the world

Can’t we re-think our sense of place? Is it not possible for a sense of place to be progressive; not self-enclosing and defensive, but outward-looking? A sense of place which is adequate to this era of time-space-compression?1

The ‘certain space’ that Lefebvre claimed was shattered by the modern, and to which Doreen Massey’s epigraph demands a response, was not least a space produced on the stages of the Irish realist theatre, its locations rich in memory and associations stretching out beyond the confines of the visible stage into the discursive fabric of the wider culture, the informing géno-text antérieur. But if this ‘certain space’ imploded for the first time in the early years of the twentieth century, the question of its continuing persistence on Irish stages arises. The world of the Aran Islands validated by Synge existed on the periphery of modernity at the time of his visits there during 1898–1902; however, as we saw in the previous chapter, even place as a ‘field of care’ on Ireland’s western periphery was showing the first flickers of its slow fade in those years. The decades of underdevelopment in the middle of the twentieth century may have masked the transformation of Irish space, but it continued nonetheless, as the combination of outward immigration, expansion of the rational state, electrification, and media saturation left the Irish sense of place as an increasingly spectral presence by the time it appeared on Irish stages during the 1980s and 1990s. In the first decade of the twenty-first century, that ‘certain space’ had gone beyond a state of collapse; it had been subsumed in a second, more complete implosion, facilitated not least by a global revolution in communications technologies. In the year 2002, and for the next three years, Ireland would be ranked by the journal Foreign Policy as the most globalised country in the world, based on a series of indicators that included not only economic integration but also technological connectivity, political engagement, and personal factors such as international travel, telephone and email contact.2 It was no longer simply the case that what had been 122

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understood as a distinctively Irish sense of place was under threat from globalisation as an external force; Ireland itself now was at the forefront of the reconfiguration of space worldwide; the extraterritorial now occupied Irish soil. Irish theatre in the first three-quarters of the twentieth century had been founded on the spatial formation of a realist stage that validated the culture’s belief in a sense of dwelling in the world – a sense of place. For most of the century, this sense existed in constant tension with the critical spaces of the modernist stage that imagined its erasure. However, where stage spaces produced by the work of Denis Johnston, Yeats or Beckett constituted a critique of, or utopian alternative to, those of realism, in a globalised world the role of utopian critique shifted to realism itself. It was no longer the bounded, tangible world of the realist stage that needed to be subjected to an immanent critique, as had been the case in 1910; in 2010, in the world of the hyperreal, realism constituted a critique of a culture that was increasingly intangible and unbounded. Consequently, the continued stage presence of a spatial formation that has disappeared can be understood less as the unaccountable survival of a residual genre than as the activation of a monad that continues to be nurtured by the wider culture, and thus remains available for use in the theatre as a resource in a present in which the ‘real’ is an increasingly slippery concept. To this extent, then, the monad of realism participates in the production of what Lefebvre calls the ‘conceived space’, ‘tied to the relations of production and to the “order” which those relations impose, and hence to knowledge, to signs, to codes’; to this we have added the spatial productions of the realist stage. Hence, the persistence of Irish stage realism in the spaces of globalisation increasingly puts the conceived space of the stage at odds with the lived spaces of the culture within which the performance takes place. To put it simply, the audience member who sits down to a realist play, in which characters are framed within a proscenium arch that defines their total visibility, is looking into a space at odds with the decentred spaces of globalisation. If it is the case that, as Marc Augé writes, ‘the individual can . . . live rather oddly in an intellectual, musical or visual environment that is wholly independent of his immediate physical surroundings’,3 the theatre is one of a diminishing number of places where this is not possible. In most public and private spaces, there is no longer a taken-forgrantedness as to what is near and what is far; the side-by-side of geographical space rubs up against side-by-side on the mobile screen. The injunction to ‘turn off your mobile phone’ in the theatre makes it one of the few places where spatial elements such as contiguity, volume and depth

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exist in a real physical space, rather than being multiplied by technology, supplemented by or superimposed upon the virtual spaces of the screen. Where Gaston Bachelard wrote in The Poetics of Space, ‘our house is our corner of the world . . . our first universe, a real cosmos in every sense of the word’,4 Augé claims that this is now true today in a completely different sense. ‘The television and computer now stand in for the hearth of antiquity,’ writes Augé. ‘The Hellenists taught us that the household in classical Greece was watched over by two deities: Hestia, the goddess of the hearth . . .; and the outward-looking Hermes, god of the threshold, protector of exchanges; . . . Today the television and computer have replaced the hearth. Hermes has taken Hestia’s place.’5 In this, we can identify one of the core spatial tensions in theatre today. The realist set, nestled around the hearth of Hermia, may thus be a site of resistance to the global; however, to the extent that the lived space of the audience is increasingly mediated and globalised, the theatre that ignores the screen of Hermes becomes, ironically, less real in its relation to the offstage referent of the hyperreal. In the context of Irish theatre, any attempt to negotiate the dialectic of the local and the global must also take account of the inherited space that intervenes between the local and the global: the national. In Chapter 1, we argued that the concept of a national theatre – the guiding narrative trope in Irish theatre history for a century – is actually a misnomer, at least in spatial terms. Unlike the newspaper or the radio broadcast, which can produce a simultaneous field throughout the national territory, as Benedict Anderson’s argument in relation to print would have it, the theatrical performance can only ever take place in a single site, at a single moment. So, while a play’s content may reference the national (making Cathleen ni Houlihan such a foundational text in an Irish national tradition), its production will be resolutely local. It can only be national, as is the case for Cathleen ni Houlihan and other peasant cottage plays, in that the set is metonymic of the nation as a whole. Likewise, the performance per se can only be national at a remove, when translated into print, for instance, through the publication of scripts or reviews, which can be distributed nationally. The lived space of performance, however – not only the conceived space of the stage, but the space of the theatre, occupied by the audience – is immoveably local. By the same token, if there is spatially no such thing as a national theatre, there is equally no such thing as global theatre. A theatre production may take globalisation as its subject matter (as did Declan Hughes’s Shiver in 2003); it may stage the global as a conceived space, as Patrick Lonergan argues in relation to Marie Jones’s

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Stones in His Pockets (1996), where a Hollywood film production company arrives in a small Irish town, creating a conflict between global and local forms of cultural production.6 However, in terms of its form, a play in performance cannot be global in the way that a satellite broadcast or a webpage can be. In spatial terms, the performance remains a physically embodied event that takes place in a single location at a precise time in the full presence of a specific group of people. Indeed it could be argued that spatial specificity – which is related to the specificity of place – is fundamental to the definition of the event as theatre. This spatial specificity of performance is in turn an aspect of the compelling power of first-order spatial identification, which we argued in Chapter 4 is a foundational and necessary element of what is meant by the theatrical. This does not mean, however, that there is no meaningful way of talking about theatre space in the context of globalisation. In Theatre and Globalization, Patrick Lonergan outlines a number of key ways in which globalisation has changed Irish theatre. In the first place, he maintains, global networks of theatre production have created opportunities for Irish theatre producers to tour internationally, in events as diverse as the Beckett Festival (Gate Theatre, 1991) and Riverdance (1995; originally staged at the Point Theatre, Dublin), both of which have toured extensively, while Riverdance has been distributed even more widely through extensive DVD sales. Conversely, drawing on arguments not dissimilar to those made by Richard Kearney in the early 1980s, Lonergan argues that globalisation has introduced Irish audiences (and theatre-makers) to new forms of performance, particularly visual theatre, which has given the Irish stage a new vocabulary. Indeed, in ‘Ireland’s Verbal Theatre’, Kearney had already suggested that ‘the Dublin Theatre Festival of 1982 provided a telling sample of the widening rift between the theatre of the Word and the theatre of the Senses’, in that a significant number of new Irish works had been influenced by the international touring productions from previous Festivals. In that same year, two of the major events in the Dublin Theatre Festival were Kazimierz Braun’s ‘Polish production of Anna Livia and the Brazilian production of Macunaima’,7 both of which used space and the body in ways not common in Irish theatre at the time. In the years since, it has been further argued (not least in the book Lonergan co-edited with Nicholas Grene, Interactions: Dublin Theatre Festival 1957–2007) that the Dublin Theatre Festival has been instrumental in moving Irish theatre away from its grounding in language. In the work that has followed from Lonergan’s study, there has been increasing acknowledgement that globalisation challenges many of the

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foundational features of Irish theatre in the twentieth century, including the relevance of ‘Irish’ theatre as a category. However, it is not simply the case that a global theatre has supplanted the national in some kind of linear historical progression. Instead, we need to understand the national, in relation to theatre, as a persistent monad of conceived space which, in Ireland, has typically been staged by a theatre of place. The national has long been imbricated in the lived space of the local, which is the theatre’s definitional space. However, both the national as a conceived space and the local as a lived space likewise now need to be understood in the context of George Ritzer’s claim that ‘it is increasingly difficult to find anything in the world untouched by globalization’.8 In this respect, Ritzer’s work has been part of a rethinking of globalisation theory that has taken place since 2000, not least in relation to concepts such as hybridity and transculturalism. Attempting to move beyond a simple local/global binary, Ritzer differentiates between cultural products that are what he calls ‘something’, usually associated with the local, and its opposite, ‘nothing’, which he associates with an everexpanding globalisation, or what he calls ‘grobalization’ in recognition of capitalism’s voracious growth in search of new markets. ‘Nothing’, he writes, ‘is defined here as a social form that is generally centrally conceived, controlled, and comparatively devoid of distinctive substantive content.’ He contrasts this with ‘something’, ‘a social form that is generally indigenously conceived, controlled, and comparatively rich in distinctive substantive content’.9 Given that theatre is, as we have argued, spatially local at a fundamental level, this suggests that locally staged theatre is apparently on the side of ‘something’. However, this is more than a simple binary, for Ritzer takes seriously the recognition that the local is almost invariably tinged with the global; so, instead of speaking of the ‘local’, he substitutes the term ‘glocal’. In the 2005 issue of Theatre Journal concentrating on ‘Theorizing Globalization Through Theatre’, the editor, Jean Graham-Jones, introduced the term ‘glocalization’ to theatre studies,10 drawing on Ritzer’s definition of the ‘glocal’ as ‘the interpenetration of the global and the local, resulting in unique outcomes in different geographic areas’. ‘If the local alone is no longer the source that it once was of uniqueness,’ Ritzer argues, ‘at least some of the slack has been picked up by the glocal.’11 In the case of Irish theatre, then, we can surmise that the monad of realism and its attendant production of place are not banished from the Irish stage, but reshaped by a géno-text antérieur radically different from that which produced the classic plays of the Irish theatre, one in which the local is

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now permeated by globalised cultural forms. In order to explore this idea, we will focus on the continuing performance life of J. M. Synge’s Playboy of the Western World, among the most canonical of Irish plays and also the one most associated with ‘something’. As Nicholas Grene has argued, ‘Synge’s realisation of the setting for The Playboy as convincingly local locality goes beyond the mere introduction of a few plausible Mayo placenames.’ The use of patronymics and toponymics, allied to the spatial specificity in the dialogue, ‘renders what it is like to live in a place, to know it as an actual inhabited location, short-cuts and all, not as the space mapped by roads and licensing laws’.12 However, this ‘spatial specificity’ was a stage reproduction of a rural ‘something’ by and for an urban audience, not unlike the example of a glocalised ‘something’ that Ritzer puts forward, in respect of ‘indigenous crafts’ produced for a global tourist market.13 Such considerations extend any analysis of the ‘space’ of Playboy of the Western World beyond the specifics of the text, and include the play’s first production in 1907 by a self-proclaimed ‘National Theatre’, based in the urban capital, run largely by members of the Anglo-Irish upper middle class, discussed in the mediated space of newspapers of all political hues, and protested against by groups that were neither Anglo-Irish nor peasants. The subsequent movements of the play from the status of national treachery to national treasure, from museum piece to revelatory rediscovery, and its ‘translation’ from Ireland to a multiplicity of elsewheres, brings into sharp focus the extent to which the expanding concentric circles of theatrical space – text>stage>theatre>city>country>globe – and their intersections across time with the variables introduced by other theatres, cities and countries with their own cultural values and traditions, produces a Playboy which is perpetually transmuted according to the location and period of its performances. And it is in this dynamic space of the glocal that we can begin to locate Synge’s play. In Reading Theatre, Ubersfeld suggests that one of the main dangers in dealing with an established play is the temptation to grant privileged status ‘to one particular historical or codified reading of the text, a reading which, as a result of textual fetishism, will be granted eternal legitimacy’. However, it is a moot point how far attempts to stage a production faithful to some original interpretation can be realised. Indeed, as Ubersfeld argues, the totality of a production in terms of the relationship between stage and auditorium, and of both with the society beyond the theatre, can never be reproduced. Writing on ‘The Problem of the Referent’, Ubersfeld points out that textual referents in the play text refer both to the persons or objects on stage and also to their equivalents in the real world:

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Mapping Irish Theatre: Theories of Space and Place Each moment in history, each new performance reconstructs P [the composite of signs that constitute Performance] as a new referent for T [Text], as a new referential reality (necessarily a little unfaithful to exact historical time), with a second and different referent r, to the extent that this referent r is of the moment (and as a function of the precise hic et nunc of performance).

Therefore, she argues, taking the theatre of seventeenth-century France as her example, one cannot reconstitute a performance from that period but ‘neither can we obliterate that historical referent in order, for example, to make a text from the 17th century brutally contemporary: Le Misanthrope in modern dress does not work because it lacks its twofold reference’. The lack of a ‘real world’ equivalent for specific textual referents that can be identified in a seventeenth-century play can equally be the case for a realist play of a more recent period, such as Playboy, for in the concern to achieve the maximum of verisimilitude the formula would be ‘R ¼ r – that is to say, the hope that the world presented on stage will coincide with the external world’.14 A century on from Playboy’s first production then, as Garry Hynes has argued: The Ireland of that time seems only to exist in stage terms, in the sense of the báinin, and the rough clothes, the fire and the bar, and the drinking and all that. It doesn’t have a connection to anything any longer, other than a connection to itself. If you go in for any kind of realism, which is what I want to go to, you have to go in for this stage realism.15

In this context, the space evoked by a Druid production of Playboy is less Mayo than the dramatic image of that space as inherited from the earliest Abbey productions. Taking Ubersfeld’s argument that even realist theatre does not present a true picture of the world but rather ‘a model for a certain attitude to the world’,16 we can see that even in 1907 the issue was less the extent to which the onstage referents coincided with a social actuality than the degree to which they conformed to an audience’s ideologically determined preconceptions as to appropriate behaviour in the stage world of the West. Reactions to the first production have been examined in detail to the point that we can confidently state the nature of the clash between the values felt to be advanced by the play and those advocated by the spectators. In specifics, the lowering of seat prices at the Abbey which was brought in shortly before the Playboy production, along with the popular success of William Boyle’s The Building Fund (1905), which only closed the preceding month, meant that the Abbey audience of January 1907 had changed significantly from that of its founding years; working-class and

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lower-middle-class Dubliners, who were often members of or sympathetic to the nationalist policies of the Gaelic League or supporters of Sinn Féin, were now much more likely to attend (even if only with the intention of protesting). As we have argued in earlier chapters, during the Literary Revival, the West of Ireland was less an actual than an idealised place, which contained an authentic quality of Irishness and acted as a bulwark against the depredations of Anglicisation. Indeed, Synge’s Wicklow plays show that the ‘West’ did not need even to be in the geographical West. For the West to be staged as the home of people who would lionise a parricide was then tantamount to blasphemy, an offence ‘against an imaginary geography’.17 ‘“This is not Irish life” said one of the voices from the pit,’ according to Joseph Holloway, the theatre diarist who was present, and who agreed with the view. ‘The Playboy is not a truthful or just picture of Irish peasants.’18 However, while both audience and author saw the West as a known and valued place, the repository of the most significant of authentic Irish values, they differed precisely in what these were. Accordingly, Synge’s ‘crime’ was to turn the audience’s sense of place into one of space – a stage realisation of a West in which they no longer felt at home. It was precisely among the vestiges of the archaic, sometimes anarchic, pre-modern world in which the audience felt culturally disoriented that Synge claims to have felt most at home. In many ways, Synge compounded the affront by the precision with which he located the play. The plethora of Mayo place names, along with references to California, Liverpool and Norway, gave the stage world of the shebeen specific geographical coordinates. For nationalist audiences the only possible response was expressed in the letter of protest written by a ‘Western Girl’ who claimed that as she was ‘well acquainted with the conditions of life in the West’, she could authoritatively assert that ‘this play does not truly represent these conditions’. Her rhetorical question, ‘could any Irish person accept this as a true picture of Irish life?’19 implied that to accept its accuracy was to abandon claims to nationality. If the question of the inauthenticity of the staged place was central to responses of Dublin audiences, those of American audiences to the Abbey tour of 1911 illustrate how different locations, albeit within roughly the same temporal moment, can produce similar audience reactions but for different reasons. Certainly the hostility towards the Playboy expressed by some Irish Americans echoed that of the ‘Western Girl’. The ‘Resolution’ of the United Irish American Societies of New York published in the Gaelic American in October 1911 stated that they

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Mapping Irish Theatre: Theories of Space and Place would make every effort, through a committee, to induce those responsible for the presentation of The Playboy to withdraw it, and failing this we pledge ourselves to drive this vile thing from the stage . . . and we ask the aid in this work of every decent Irish man and woman and the Catholic Church whose doctrines and devotional practices are held up to scorn and ridicule in Synge’s monstrosity.20

The issue of misrepresentation is still strongly present, but the spatial specific of ‘life in the West’ is missing. For the American audience, the West of Ireland has gone beyond synecdoche; the West of Ireland is Ireland. As Deirdre McFeely argues in her examination of audiences for the world premiere in New York of The Shaughraun in 1874, negative responses to Boucicault’s play were articulated by a small but educated body of Irish Americans who felt excluded from the power and prestige of the dominant Anglo-Saxon Protestant culture. Accordingly, any felt denigration of the Irish as feckless drunks only seemed to justify their social marginalisation. Consequently, ‘their expression of a dogged nationalism appears to be more acutely the result of the alienation they suffer in America rather than their desire for self-determination in Ireland’. When decrying stage images of Irish vice and demanding plays extolling Irish virtue, they were ‘attempting to promote their own social acceptance within the Anglo American community’.21 Almost forty years later, when the 1911 Abbey touring production of Playboy came to New York, the issue of the status of the Irish as one ethnic group among many, jockeying for position at a time of massive immigration, was still very much to the fore. Hence what had been perceived in Dublin as a negative representation of a specific area in the West of Ireland (which in turn was a synecdochical representation of the country as a whole) equated even more directly in the United States to Ireland as a whole, where distance blurred the more subtle distinctions of Irish place. The protests in New York and elsewhere that met the Abbey’s 1911 tour, then, were premeditated, part of a much longer campaign, not spontaneous responses to the theatrical event. It was an audience prepared to protest who brought to the theatre not only the symbolic potato that struck the actress playing Pegeen, but also the ‘barrage of a prepared arsenal of vegetables and stink bombs’. However, unlike the 1907 Dublin ‘riots’ which commenced in the third act, the New York reaction occurred early in the first when Shawn Keogh admits to being ‘afeard of Father Reilly’ (a line that was considered inoffensive in Dublin). John Harrington suggests that this was because Irish Americans who wished to occupy significant social status in the secular republic of the United States did not welcome the suggestion that they were in thrall to

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‘the Holy Father and the Cardinals of Rome’. As with the Boucicault protests in the 1870s, ‘the offense was not about origins but about futures’, and while Irish Americans had now reached ‘a point somewhere between threatened and accepted status’,22 they were still alert to anything that cast a blight over that social progress. The New York reactions to Playboy were thus similar in effect to those in Dublin but the causes had their roots in decisively local conditions. Indeed, even when the distances involved were a hundred, rather than several thousand kilometres from the site of the first production, reactions were markedly different. In Belfast, for instance, Ophelia Byrne noted that newspaper reports of the 1907 premiere echoed Dublin condemnations, irrespective of sectarian affiliations, but when the Abbey performed Playboy in the city in August 1909, it was desultorily attended, was applauded as well as booed, ‘but was in the main ignored. Belfast did not engage’.23 For one faction among the Dublin audiences, Playboy was a challenge to their demands for national dignity and self-determination, whereas in Belfast, while sectarian divisions meant that riotous reactions to any event were always a possibility, the fact that Unionists formed the vast majority of the city’s population meant they were far more likely to see Playboy’s villagers as a confirmation of Irish unsuitability for independence or Home Rule, rather than as an insulting impediment to its achievement. In each case, the wider spatial context of production – whether Dublin, New York or Belfast – is part of the lived space produced by the production, and of its possibilities for signification. Moreover, each of these spaces of production has its own temporal dimension; with the achievement of objectives or the removal of particular contentious circumstances, the meaning of the play will alter accordingly. This ‘first phase’ of Playboy productions has tended to dominate critical discussion owing to the ways in which scenic space interacted so intensely with what Ubersfeld calls the ‘location’ of the performance. However, subsequent productions, which took on an increasingly globalised dimension, are equally revealing of the complex intersection of time and place in producing readings of a play text. As Ubersfeld has it, ‘each moment in history’ with its ‘here and now’ of performance, will always result in a ‘new referent’ for the text both on and off the space of the stage. By 1960, the ‘here and now’ was that of an independent Irish republic entering the fourth decade of statehood. Representation was still an issue but now the country, not least through the use of state sponsorship, had the ability to project its preferred images rather than simply react against those felt to be imposed by a colonial elite. The Dublin Theatre Festival

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had been founded in 1957 as part of Ireland’s commitment to modernisation, and, as Fintan O’Toole has argued, ‘culture would become part of the tourist industry and acquire productive capacity in economic terms’.24 The fact that a production of Playboy of the Western World, directed by Shelah Richards and playing at the Gaiety Theatre, was included in the 1960 Festival indicates how much had changed in terms of Synge’s acceptability. According to the festival’s founder, Brendan Smith, it was ‘regarded by most people as the definitive production of this Irish classic’.25 Playboy’s acceptability as an image of Ireland was such that the play was taken on a tour of Europe followed by a four-month run in London’s West End. While traces of the production have faded, something of its intent is captured in a film version, directed by Brian Desmond Hurst, which was filmed in the following year and again starred Siobhan McKenna as Pegeen Mike.26 Advance publicity for the play indicates how far ‘authenticity’ was used as the selling point with claims made for the Connacht Irish accents of the cast, while McKenna, according to the critic of The Times, was ‘the ideal of Celtic woman-hood’. But this is authenticity rendered according to a sensibility in tune with a vision of Ireland which would have been anathema to Synge who had denounced ‘a purely fantastic unmodern ideal breezy springdayish Cuchulanoid National Theatre’.27 Filmed on the photogenic Inch Strand in County Kerry, the film dazzles the eye with villagers dressed in clothes of blinding whiteness while McKenna’s Pegeen, dressed in a top of radiant red, is elegantly coiffed and with feet which, while bare, are as spotless as the floor of the tastefully realised shebeen. Twenty-first-century criticism has been scathing in regard to this rendition of place, with Adrian Frazier arguing that it was Synge restyled for de Valera’s Ireland, ‘a tourism poster for Shannon airport and development on the western seaboard’.28 Frazier’s comments with regard to Hurst’s 1961 film version were made in the context of a number of influential productions of Playboy by the Galway-based Druid theatre company. ‘We do not for a moment imagine’, he wrote in connection with their 2004 staging of the play, ‘that we are getting a true account of life on the Erris peninsula in 1900; we witness a literary carnival of cartoons.’ This raises fundamental questions about the extent to which the staged space is always and inevitably read by audiences as a representation of a geographical actuality. He goes on to argue that there was no point in repeating ‘the manky, angry style of the 1980s Druid Playboy’, pointing out that while this vision of the play had been attractive to ‘young audiences tired of romantic illusions about an Ireland that had been left behind economically by modern Europe’,29 the place and time of

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production in 2004 was markedly different and so too should be the image of the places and spaces staged. Druid’s sense of place was marked from the moment of its founding in 1975 with a determination to provide ‘theatrical experiences of the highest quality . . . and the provision of education in and through theatre for the children of Galway’,30 and even while there was no attempt to elide historical change in its productions of Playboy, the poverty of its origins resulted in a use of on- and offstage space evocative of the early years of the Irish Literary Theatre. A 1977 production took place in a room in the Coachman Hotel in Galway which, as it could seat fewer than fifty people, had the audience within a few feet of the actors: ‘sitting against the back wall of the pub and the real turf fire ensured a suitably authentic smoky haze by the end of the third act’. These spatial restrictions were such that ‘when the village girls did the sounds off stage during Christie Mahon’s triumph in the races on the strand, they had to stand outside in the alley’.31 This intimacy continued to distinguish productions, so much so that when Druid produced the play at the Donmar Warehouse, London, in 1985, Frank Delaney commented, ‘I am convinced that the company should never play – and certainly not the Playboy – on a large proscenium stage.’32 There is a very clear sense here of a desire to ensure proximity to the audience, allied to a stripping away from Synge’s work of the accretions of success and sentimentality, in order to retain a rooted loyalty to the site of his inspiration, a sense of place expressed spatially in the location of performance. This dedication to origins saw Druid productions of Playboy on the Aran island of Inishmaan (the location of Synge’s cottage) in 1982 and again, as part of DruidSynge (the production of all of his plays) in 2005. The size of the available playing space on the island in 1982 meant that, as director Garry Hynes recalled, ‘we would play in the body of the hall with the audience seated in the remaining area and on the stage’; this proximity of audience and action meant that ‘when it came to the fight between Old Mahon and Christie it was difficult not to believe that a scuffle of some sort had broken out in the audience’. It is somewhat ironic that such a sense of authenticity of environment and action should be experienced not in a location where the work is set (the play is set in Mayo), nor, indeed, where it was originally played, but where the author briefly (if influentially) lived. Instead, what is being evoked is clearly an experience that borders on that of communion with another place and time only now to be apprehended, if at all, through the play. ‘By 9.00 pm the hall was overflowing. Old women dressed in black petticoats and the brightly coloured shawls peculiar to Inishmaan mingled with the younger

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women and girls. A few of the men wore breidin [the clothing of rough worsted wool].’ The clothing, whether or not donned simply for the evening, evokes another era, and Hynes even suggests that at one point, performance and place almost merged. ‘When Shawn Keogh came through the door, I noticed that spray from the journey across Galway Bay still clung to the door’s outside. It looked right.’33 Hence, as Michael Hays suggests, ‘although the audience determines the limits of performance and meaning, it always does so in terms of its socio-historically grounded spatial and temporal context’.34 In such a context, the validation of ‘original coloured shawls’ and the spray of Galway Bay on a stage door could be seen to give the Druid productions an aura of authenticity lacking in productions conceived outside of Ireland. However, Druid’s engagement with place in their work on Playboy is more complex than this. The significance of the place of production for Druid’s stagings of Playboy reached its apogee in DruidSynge when a field trip to Inishmaan was deemed crucial to the rehearsal process. This engagement with the site of Synge’s inspiration translated into a set which, according to the designer Francis O’Connor, would be the same one-room box set for all plays in the cycle but one ‘that somehow was Synge’s house’.35 This reading of the plays saw them as Synge’s response to the particularities of place, with the set becoming almost an expressionist emanation of his emotional state. This is clearly taking the specificity of place as a factor in understanding his work to the ultimate level, transmuting the Aran Islands from inspiration into the inevitable destination of all analysis. Despite this cleaving to place as the bedrock of any understanding of the plays, Fintan O’Toole suggests that Druid has transcended the restrictions of regionality: ‘If Druid has clearly drawn great sustenance from its relationship to the city of Galway and to the West of Ireland, it has clearly long passed the stage where it can be thought of as a regional theatre . . . Druid is truly a national theatre.’36 There is a spatial sense in which this is entirely so, for, like Field Day, from the outset the company has defined itself as a national theatre in terms of its commitment to performing in venues throughout Ireland, describing itself as ‘a theatre for Ireland . . . Touring the length and breadth of Ireland is an essential part of the company’s mission.’ In spite of this, however, in spatial terms it would be more accurate to describe Druid as an international company. They began touring internationally shortly after they were founded, when they brought four productions to the Edinburgh Festival in 1980; in 2009 they would play twenty-six different venues in eight different countries: Australia,

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New Zealand, Japan, the United States, Canada, England, Scotland and Wales. The challenge that thus faces Druid, who now describe themselves both as ‘a theatre for Ireland’ and as ‘one of the best known theatre companies in the English speaking world’,37 is to function as a globalised touring theatre associated with ‘something’ rather than with ‘nothing’. However, as Dan Rebellato reminds us, touring or international success need not rob a production or a company of its spatial specificity, as this would be to suggest that a given production is ‘bound within the space for which it was made and closed to further meanings that might multiply its possibilities’. ‘Plays are not exhausted by a single performance or single production; they are always capable of being done somewhere else . . . The play can always exist in different spaces’; or, as he puts it succinctly, ‘the play in performance is spatially non-identical’.38 One key to understanding the spatial non-identity of performance in an age of globalised theatre is to focus on the audience. On its website, Druid states: ‘At the heart of everything we do is our audience. Our goal is to create electrifying theatre experiences for every person, in every place and every time we perform.’39 Each of those audiences are, however, distinct, just as Adrian Frazier argued that the Irish audience for the 2004 Playboy was so distinct from an Irish audience in 1982 that a very different production was required. When Druid play Melbourne, or Edinburgh, or New York, the audience in each instance is, by definition, glocal: local in the sense of belonging to a particular location, with the recognition that their local culture will have been shaped and shot through with the productions of global media culture. At the same time, the production itself, although creating a scenic representational space rooted in the local, is also glocal, in that the company organises itself globally, but at the same time go to extraordinary efforts – such as researching productions and touring on the Aran Islands – to remain attached to the local. Finally, what might be thought of as their home audiences are likewise glocal; they may be living in Galway, but as we have seen they live in the most globalised country in the world, with among the planet’s highest per capita rates of satellite television saturation, mobile phone ownership, and internet usage. Back in 1897, in the ‘Manifesto of the Irish Literary Theatre’, Yeats, Lady Gregory and Edward Martyn wrote that they ‘hoped to find in Ireland an uncorrupted and imaginative audience trained to listen by its passion for oratory’.40 While it would be wrong to say that audiences everywhere are alike, no one would think of claiming that a Galway audience today is any more ‘uncorrupted’ than a New York or Melbourne audience, in the sense of being untouched by globalisation. So, in fact, it could be argued that

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Druid’s history maps precisely on to the period, beginning in the early 1980s, at which a distinctive or anomalous Irish sense of place begins to implode in the telecommunications revolution of the late twentieth century. As such, the company’s history can be seen as part of the wider narrative of the fate of place in late twentieth and early twenty-first century Irish culture, played out before an audience who are dispersed around the globe. Thinking about the Druid audience as forming a conglomeration of glocal groups across the planet allows us to recognise that the major spatial shift in Irish theatre since the mid 1980s can be identified in Irish audiences, and their sense of lived space moving from a national to a glocal frame. We have already identified the technological transformation of the local into the glocal. However, it also takes a very different form. During the years of economic prosperity, the trend of outward migration reversed, and, accelerated by the accession of eastern European countries such as Poland and Lithuania to the European Union in 2004, for the first time in its history Ireland became a significant destination for migrants. In other words, the experience of globalisation in Ireland has not simply been one of Irish people travelling to, communicating with, or doing business with, the rest of the world; it has also been the experience of people from other parts of the world coming to live in Ireland, producing that uneasy mix of the putatively multicultural and the transcultural that characterises most of Europe in the twenty-first century. With the economic collapse of 2008, the numbers of those coming to live in Ireland slowed, but the demographic shift that occurred during the Celtic Tiger years appears permanent. The impact of this on the conceived space of the culture, however, is only beginning to be understood. To take but one example, if we consider the importance of the Irish language in producing the conceived space of Ireland over the past century, the 2011 Census figures showed that while there were only 77,185 people who spoke Irish daily (other than at school), there were more than half a million people who spoke a language other than English or Irish at home (with Polish leading the way). Similarly, Irish Travellers have long had a strong presence on the Irish realist stage, from Synge’s The Tinker’s Wedding (1909) to Marina Carr’s By the Bog of Cats (1998). And yet the 2011 census figures showed only 29,495 Travellers in the entire state (and that was an increase on the previous census), which is only half of the number of Irish residents categorised as ‘Africans’ (58,697). In the wider perspective, Irish-speakers and Travellers are thus only a small fraction of the population as a whole, when compared to the registered 544,400 ‘non-Irish nationals’ from 196

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countries.41 While no one would want to insist that mimesis on stage must conform to any kind of statistical representationality, the kind of spatial imagination that located an authentic Irishness in a rural, Irish-speaking world (of which the Traveller population often served as a kind of romantic apotheosis) is unable to accommodate this kind of historic demographic change. In terms of theatre, if the conceived space of performance on the realist stage extends into the scenic space beyond the theatre walls, and that world differs abruptly from the world of the stage, the realist stage is unable to produce a total space that is representational, signifying, or lived. It ceases, in a fundamental way, to be realist. In some respects, this recognition constitutes the subject and rationale of the version of Playboy by Bisi Adigun and Roddy Doyle that was staged at the Abbey in 2007. Their relocation of the play from 1907 to the contemporary moment raises questions as to the possibility of urban spaces with little or no cultural memory resonating culturally as powerfully as Synge’s Mayo; moreover, if such spaces lack such resonance, the play asks how they can function dramatically. On one hand, although the scenic space of the play changed, the Dublin location of the production itself remained constant – even though this was no longer Synge’s Abbey, which had been destroyed by fire in 1951. On stage, however, the world had shifted: the shebeen became ‘a modern, suburban pub on the west side of Dublin’ which, according to the stage directions, displayed ‘an invented form of Irishness. Guinness signs; photos of Michael Flatley, Roy Keane and Mary Robinson’.42 Michael Farrell and his associates were gangsters, Pegeen and the girls were streetwise and tracksuited, while Christy Mahon became Christopher Malomo, a Nigerian emigrant on the run from the consequences of ‘killing’ his father with a pestle. His journey, which took in ‘Sokoto, near the border with Niger’, ‘Niamey’, ‘a flight to London’, then ‘Belfast’ and to ‘Dublin on the train’,43 sets the play within the context of a global communications and transport system, in which news of the ‘murder’ can be googled, mobile phones record Christy’s offstage exploits, and the pub’s CCTV screen is a constant presence. This is apparently a world away from Synge’s but, as Nicholas Allen observed, ‘Edwardian Ireland is an already globalized place’ and in Synge’s Playboy the concerns with newspaper reports demonstrate how ‘the printed word formed a web that networked Ireland into a fluctuating global system of news exchange’.44 In the 2007 production, however, these lines, once the apparatus of empire, are now the flows of global information and capital bringing migrants as well as messages. Consequently, some critics saw the production as a necessary attempt to engage with Irish attitudes to a racism

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that had become ever more strident as Celtic Tiger Ireland struggled to accommodate the compromises of a newly multicultural society. Adigun himself read Christy as ‘the archetypal “asylum seeker”’ and ‘the epitome of the majority of immigrants’.45 This potentially brings spatial relations between northern and southern hemispheres powerfully into play, but the movement between them is only recounted by Christy. It does not inform the play, which in dialogue and diegesis focuses on its Dublin specificity. Fidelity to this clearly realised urban place also translated into a modernisation of the language; Pegeen’s final ‘Quit my sight’ became the unadorned ‘Fuck off.’ Christy’s flat ‘I’ll be on my way now’ is equally lacking in passion and poetry, and the fact that as he delivers the lines ‘he retrieves his hat and puts the passport into its inside pocket’ 46 underlines the extent to which this is clearly a world of policed boundaries rather than infinite possibilities. While faithful to the language of its location, the words of the play’s closing moments only served to remind audiences of place-bound realities rather than evoking spaces to be explored. This nomadic quality of a play transcends specifics of language and culture, resulting in productions which test the extent to which one national place, or even an audience’s trans-generational culturally specific memories of that place, is the only determining factor in making meaning. Indeed, as Patrick Lonergan argues, while Irish audiences will always respond to Irish plays ‘in terms of cultural and social factors that will not necessarily exist in other times and places’, these should not be taken as somehow more authentic; rather it is ‘vital that critics bring an awareness of how local preoccupations’ shape responses to ‘globally diffused plays’.47 In the case of the US tours of Playboy early in the twentieth century, even though the causes of audience response could be located within local cultural and political conditions, these were nonetheless informed by a general framework of Irish cultural experience, and could even be said to take place within a national diasporic space. At the same time, Playboy has had a vibrant stage life in non-anglophone European countries untouched by the Irish diaspora. ‘I was able to trace twenty-four different productions of The Playboy,’ noted Ondřej Pilný, writing in 2010, ‘in three alternative Czech translations alone.’ It has been argued, however, that one of the reasons for this popularity is associated with political conditions on a national rather than on a local level, with the relative position of the Irish and the Czechs in early twentieth-century Europe being comparable ‘as nations striving for cultural emancipation and political autonomy from a dominant powerful neighbour’.48 Identification with Ireland as an early exemplar of decolonisation and of its national theatre as a model

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contributor to that process is clearly a historically and culturally specific reason for the production of Irish plays that can also explain their popularity long after the time of the original impetus to their production has passed. However, if this is the case, it means that the national part of the signifying space produced by the play can be transposed; in a situation not without irony, it could be said that the national quality of the play contributes to its globalisation. If a residual cultural commitment among the Irish diaspora, and a sense of a shared past political agenda in some European countries, accounts for much of the global reach of Irish theatre, it is a far more complex phenomenon either when Irish plays are performed by Irish companies in countries with no Irish connection, or when companies in those countries produce their own interpretations of classic Irish plays. For Patrick Lonergan, Irish plays are successful internationally ‘precisely because they are successfully branded as Irish . . . because of their association with a geographical space they have little or no relationship with’.49 He develops this argument to suggest that Irish drama has become deterritorialised to the point that ‘“Irish” doesn’t signify a relationship with a physical space, but a relationship with a concept.’50 However, if this concept becomes almost completely detached both from the conceived space of the nation and from the ability to recognise an Irish sense of place (no matter how attenuated), this raises the question of exactly what concept of Ireland is presented by travelling companies and, perhaps more significantly, to what extent audiences in diverse cultures relate to this Irish ‘place’. ‘From the beginning of the century to the present,’ argues John Harrington, ‘the “Irish play” has come to imply a specific kind of Irish subject matter, invariably rural and Catholic.’51 Nicholas Grene picks up the point: ‘Ireland, in the cinema as in the theatre, has always provided a possible setting and subject for pastoral, a scene distinguished by its otherness and simplicity for the metropolitan audiences who watch it.’52 The international success of the hyperreal urbanism of plays by Enda Walsh or Mark O’Rowe clearly tests the validity of arguments based solely on the rural and pastoral qualities of Irish drama, so it may be that Terry Eagleton comes closer to the mark when he notes that Ireland has ‘become a terrain on which some of the most typical, world-historical issues of our day can be seen to congregate’, capable of signifying both ‘roots, belonging, tradition’ and ‘exile, diffusion, globality, diaspora’.53 The clash of these two concepts of the particular and the universal, which as tradition or modernity were at the heart of the place-specific plays of the Literary Revival, directly informs Pan Pan Theatre’s 2006

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production of Playboy, produced in both Beijing and Dublin. Synge’s script was adapted by director Gavin Quinn to a pacey eighty-minute performance and was transformed in terms of language, place and time, for not only was it performed in Mandarin but the setting was moved from an early twentieth-century Mayo shebeen to a twenty-first-century ‘whoredressers’: ‘A modern hairdressers in Beijing. The semi-legal kind. The normal business of hairdressing takes place but there may be other less mundane activities that occur on the premises.’54 The play was performed on a stage whose full width was occupied by a salon mirror, and Sara Tansey, Susan Brady and Honor Blake became miniskirted party girls who strip Christy of his T-shirt and roll on the floor with him while pouring beer over his body. In an echo of what had happened in Dublin a century earlier, this outraged many in the Beijing audiences, and the director, Gavin Quinn, was told in no uncertain terms that this was a misrepresentation of Chinese actuality. The shock was captured in The Sun’s headline ‘Peking at Your Knickers, Chinese Cracker in Stage Storm’. ‘An Irish play has sparked a sex storm in China’, readers were told ‘– because one of the cast shows her knickers.’55 However the most provocative aspect of the adaptation, and one that was only staged in Dublin, not Beijing, derived directly from the suggestive political power of place, drawn from Synge’s script. In Gavin Quinn’s adaptation Christy (Ma Shang) has come to Beijing from Xinjiang, the remote Muslim region bordering on Afghanistan and Pakistan, which is China’s own western world. For residents of Beijing, the multiple ethnicities that make up the Chinese population are a visible presence, both in daily life and in government propaganda, with the Ethnic Culture Park on the city’s northern ring road displaying, in the manner of Disney’s ‘it’s a small world’, villages representing sixteen of China’s fifty-six officially recognised ethnic minorities. Consequently, the stage direction that Ma Shang ‘comes from Xinjiang, in the North West of China and is a Moslem’ would be signalled to Chinese audiences as soon as he begins to speak, in what is described as ‘a strange rural dialect’.56 However, the status of these ethnic minorities within China is not necessarily as harmonious and uncontested as the happy coexistence of mosques and temples in the Ethnic Culture Park might suggest. Where in Synge’s script Christy is asked if he has been ‘off east . . . fighting bloody wars for Kruger and the freedom of the Boers’,57 in Quinn’s version Ma Shang is asked an equally provocative question in its historical and cultural context: ‘Maybe he went fighting for Al Queda [sic], the like of the man beyond was judged to be hanged and beheaded. Were you off in the middle east, young fellow, fighting bloody

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wars for Osma [sic] Bin Laden and the freedom of the arabs?’58 While Ma, the name Christy is given, would signal Muslim origins, the relocation of his home to Dongbei in the version as staged meant that while the production was provocative in Beijing for its representation of Beijing itself, it did not foreground the more politically sensitive question of ethnic tensions in China. It was only in Dublin, where the significance of Christy/Ma wearing the taquiah (the Muslim cap) was unlikely to be fully appreciated, that this detail was included in the production. While this excision is an interesting aspect of the signifying power of place, albeit included in the script rather than the staged version, the production did resonate within contemporary Chinese culture. Christy/ Ma is a migrant worker in a country which, while there is very little inward migration, has seen vast movements of people from the countryside to the cities, many lacking the necessary permits to work legally outside their home district. This ‘floating population’ or liudong renkou, while estimated to be three times the recognised ‘permanent migrant’ population, lacks many of the entitlements of full citizenship. For instance, certain categories of work are reserved for permanent residents of a given area, and children of liudong renkou are not permitted to attend state schools.59 Like the ‘whoredressers’ salons, the liudong renkou are visible to anyone living in Beijing, but the problems they face are seldom acknowledged or even discussed in China’s tightly controlled media. As Antony Tatlow has noted, the gap between urban wealth and peasant poverty is so great that ‘China almost appears to be coming apart along the divide between city and country with their different standards and ways of living.’60 Consequently, the substitution of ‘migrant workers’ for the ‘harvest boys with their tongues red for drink’, and lines such as Pegeen’s admonishment of Christy/Ma with ‘what call have you to be that lonesome when there’s poor girls walking Beijing in their thousands now?’61 bring into the conceived space elements of the perceived space that must usually be overlooked. In this world, the desire for economic advancement is captured by changing America to Shenzhen, the Special Economic Zone neighbouring Hong Kong. Synge’s plot fits powerfully into this world-in-transition as the ‘killing’ of the father transgresses the second of the five basic human relationships of Confucian philosophy, tested by the fracturing of families as millions migrate to the cities in search of work, bringing with them other languages, cultures and expectations. The power of Synge’s original, and of Quinn’s adaptation, is that both recognise the issue of repression and wish-fulfilment as the inhabitants of both the shebeen and the whoredresser temporarily realise, through Christy/Ma, satisfactions which

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their prescribed worlds fail to accommodate. Accordingly, while relocated in both time and place, the Pan Pan Playboy energised Synge’s original, making it again a provocative engagement with ‘something’, the kind of rich, local meaning that we would not readily associate with the products of globalisation. In some respects, the challenges entailed in relocating a play spatially in a globalised world, while retaining its status as ‘something’ rather than ‘nothing’, are analogous to relocating a play from the past into the present. As Ubersfeld recognised, we cannot make a text from an earlier historical moment ‘brutally contemporary’ as the textual referent (R) will not necessarily find a meaningful ‘real world’ r as the latter is necessarily ‘of the moment (and as a function of the precise hic et nunc of performance)’.62 The alternative, as in the case of the Adigun/Doyle adaptation, is to uproot the play completely from its original setting and relocate it in another location which potentially carries a contemporary analogous cultural resonance. However, the extent to which this can be successfully achieved inevitably raises questions as to what relationship these Playboys have to their Syngean predecessor beyond the title and the bare elements of the plot. While a Beijing ‘whoredressers’ captures the liminal location and illegality of the original setting, neither it nor a west Dublin suburban pub have the sense of place grounded in the geno-text anterieur comparable to the West of Ireland in the period of the Literary Revival. And even though that setting may now be regarded as a cultural stereotype more parodied than praised, it still opens up the possibility of reflections on the ‘movement of history’63 between values ‘then’ and audiences ‘now’: the gap between what was promised and what has been realised. What both the Adigun/Doyle and Pan Pan productions retain, however, is a recognisable stage world. Through these relocations, the distance in terms of time and culture between the original and its various afterlives is still opened up for reflection. This, however, is still linked to forms and expectations of staged places derived from realism, with Synge’s West of Ireland where ‘the springtime of the local life’ has not yet been forgotten in sharp contrast to Pan Pan’s and Adigun/Doyle’s bleak urban backdrops. However, the production of Play-boy by Desperate Optimists in 1998 pushes Synge’s work beyond representation; it is not so much a production of the play as a meditation on its meaning in a world where the old anchorages of solid spatial relations are finally dissolved. Here Irish drama fully engages with the implications of the second shattering of Lefebvre’s ‘certain space’ in which neither the plot nor the playwright of Playboy can any longer inhabit a place of stability.64

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There is no set, and in that sense no referent for the scenic space other than the theatre itself. Writing in New Theatre Quarterly, Neal Swettenham describes the performance space as ‘austerely simple: a low, green catwalk running from left to right across the front of the stage, two stools, a microphone stand from which hang three mikes, and the two large video monitors form the only stage furniture, behind all of which hangs a pale green backcloth’.65 Against this spartan background, the two members of Desperate Optimists, Joe Lawlor and Christine Molloy, recount an everwidening narrative which, starting with the time- and place-specific account of the Playboy riots of 26 January 1907, expands across time and space, fact and fantasy, to embrace the fictitious Johnny Fagan who defended the Abbey stage against the rioters with an axe, and the real-life characters Bernardo O’Higgins (the liberator of Chile), Elia Kazan (whose 1909 birth in Istanbul coincided with the death of Synge), Leon Trotsky and his Mexican exile, along with Marlon Brando and Anthony Quinn in Mexico for the filming of Via Zapata! directed by Kazan. Mexico, evoked throughout by the music of the Mexican boot dance, finally becomes the location for the culmination of the narrative in which this motley group gather in the Casa Amore nightclub established by O’Higgins in Guadalajara, along with twenty-five surrealist painters, to see Synge and his lover Olga (a possible evocation of Molly Allgood) perform extracts from Playboy at the culmination of which Olga (as Pegeen) draws a gun and shoots Synge. And as these, and other, threads of fact and fantasy are spun together, the narrative is interspersed with screened contributions from a range of Irish people talking about Synge’s original with increasing divergence from Playboy itself, as discussion moves into subjects of loneliness and violence suggested by Synge’s work. Clearly, there is no attempt to produce an Irish sense of place on stage in this production, and only fleetingly so in the narrative, as the story of the actualities of the 1907 riots soon spins off into fantasies of the play being performed in silence and the auditorium being floored with felt so as to muffle the stamping disapproval of the audience. The videoed commentators on the play and its meanings vary significantly in terms of their knowledge of the play. Indeed, taking account of the motif of Mexico which runs through Play-boy, the play becomes progressively untethered from any Irish origins and, moreover, makes no attempt to modernise Synge’s script into a production of contemporary Irish significance. Desperate Optimists are Irish but based in the UK, and Play-boy premiered in the Prema Arts Centre, Uley, Gloucestershire, with its 1998–9 tour taking in London, Dublin, Rotterdam, Utrecht, Amsterdam, Helsinki and

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Stockholm. The fact that it was funded by the London Arts Board and the Arts Council of England further emphasises the international reach of a play whose origins were so specifically based in a ‘something’ that, for an audience of Play-boy in, for instance, Helsinki, Synge’s script (not to mention its first production in 1907) could only have been a vague recollection in terms of dramatic style as much as of dramatic space. We could, of course, add to this history of adaptation Mustapha Matura’s Trinidadian version, Playboy of the West Indies (1984), or Brad Turner’s 1994 Canadian film, Paris or Somewhere, which transposes the play’s characters and plot to smalltown Saskatchewan. Across the twentieth century and beyond, then, The Playboy of the Western World has undergone many translations, adaptations and relocations, which demonstrate the power of an intensely place-specific Irish play to resonate within nonIrish and non-anglophone worlds. Synge’s play also has had a history of productions and critical appreciations that enable it to play globally as an iconic work of one of the world’s most high-profile theatre traditions, its popularity supported by the global reach of English as the currency of international cultural exchange: it is, in short, a ‘classic’. And yet, while this play, nurtured on the ‘imaginative protein’ that produced an Irish theatre of place, can continue to be staged globally, the work of companies such as Desperate Optimists leaves open the question as to such a play’s meaningful future in Irish society, other than as vehicle for a stage realism divorced from a reality which is increasingly the fractured, spatially disconnected world of Terminus.

chapter 7

Theatre of the street

A man should find his Holy Land where he first crept upon the floor . . . familiar woods and rivers should fade into symbol with so gradual a change that he may never discover, no, not even in ecstasy itself, that he is beyond space . . .’1

In the summer of 2012 the main auditorium at the Abbey Theatre was closed for nine weeks in order for asbestos to be cleared, with the result that the planned production of O’Casey’s The Plough and the Stars had to be relocated to the O’Reilly Theatre in Belvedere College on Great Denmark Street. According to a spokeswoman for the Abbey, although some minor modifications to the production would be required, as the O’Reilly did not allow for the use of ropes and pulleys to move props and scenery, the play would be produced to the same standard as it would have been in the main theatre.2 As many tickets for the production had already been sold, it is understandable why the effect of the forced transfer was minimised and the specific geographical relocation was not raised as an issue. However, Kelly Campbell, who played Nora Clitheroe, gave a far more positive interpretation of the move, suggesting that the changed location would reinvigorate the play. She told the Irish Independent that ‘people walking around North Great George’s Street to get to the theatre will be walking back into the world in which The Plough and the Stars was set’.3 While the two theatres are only a kilometre apart, North Great George’s Street is one of the best-preserved Georgian terraces in the city and although O’Casey’s characters occupied tenements struggling ‘against the assaults of time, and the more savage assaults of the tenants’, the frontage of the buildings on the street does evoke O’Casey’s idea of ‘Hilljoy Square’4 far more than the surroundings of the Abbey. The suggestion that a more atmospheric experience of the play would be engendered by a move which was not only spatial but somehow also temporal introduces a key issue in terms of the production and reception of performance. As Marvin Carlson notes: 145

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Mapping Irish Theatre: Theories of Space and Place The physical surroundings of performance never act as a totally neutral filter or frame. They are themselves always culturally encoded, and have always, sometimes blatantly, sometimes subtly, contributed to the reception of the performance. The student of theatre who seeks to understand the public presentation of a play without some knowledge of this performance matrix will inevitably be dealing with a partial perspective and in some cases with a seriously flawed one.5

Accordingly, the focus in this chapter is on the varying physical locations of theatre in Ireland, which include that of the Abbey with its dual national and international agenda, locally based and focused theatre work in Ballymun and Derry, and the innovative site-specific work of Louise Lowe in Dublin’s old Monto district. Throughout, the focus is on how various sites of performance and their audiences make plays meaningful. Brenna Katz Clarke’s The Emergence of the Irish Peasant Play at the Abbey Theatre notes not only the spatial dimensions of the stages and audience capacities of the halls occupied by the initially nomadic group who were to become the Irish National Theatre Society, but also their specific urban locations. The Camden Street Hall, where the company (as W. G. Fay’s Irish National Dramatic Company) performed briefly in 1902, was ‘a dilapidated room at the rear of a warehouse . . . bordered by a provisions dealer on one side and butcher on the other, and the audience entered the theatre between large boxes of eggs and sides of beef ’.6 Attending a theatre which involves navigating access difficulties of all levels clearly has a selfselecting effect on the audience. A contemporary example is Adriane Mnouchkine’s Cartoucherie in Paris’s Bois de Vincennes which is accessed by travelling to the end station on a metro line, catching a shuttle bus, and taking a short walk through the wood. The distance from the fashionable centre of Paris makes a clear cultural-political point with regard to the rejection of bourgeois theatre to which the theatre’s audiences subscribe by the fact of their attendance. As Brian Singleton observed, ‘the performative site, building-based or other, subscribes inherently to the politics of culture’.7 While the location of the performance spaces used by the precursor companies to the Abbey in their formative years was determined more by questions of finance than of politics, the differences in this regard between the Camden Street location, with its adjoining billiard hall, and some of its subsequent ones are striking. St Teresa’s Hall had been used after two stints at the much more established Gaiety Theatre (in 1900 and 1901), and was followed by a 1902 production in the Antient Concert Rooms. However, in 1903 (and again in 1904), the Irish National Theatre Society moved to the neo-Gothic

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Molesworth Hall. The Molesworth Hall was located on a short street halfway between Trinity College to the north and St Stephen’s Green to the south, bounded at the eastern end by the impressive lecture hall of the Royal Dublin Society in Leinster House, flanked by the National Library, the National Museum, and the Masonic Hall (which had its own concert venue) on Kildare Street, and at the western end by St Anne’s Church, the Royal Irish Academy and the Lord Mayor’s Mansion House on Dawson Street, all of which hosted public lectures and meetings, within a few hundred metres of one another. The Molesworth Hall, built in 1857, was thus at the heart of fashionable civic culture, and was a regular venue for charity fetes, light opera recitals, and concerts, regularly frequented by members of the aristocracy. The Property Defence Association (a body of landlords opposed to land reform) had convened there in 1890, and the Lord Lieutenant, Lord Cadogan, and his wife had opened several events in the hall in 1898 and 1899. When the Irish National Theatre Society performed there in March 1903, they had been preceded in the venue a few days earlier by the Church of Ireland Molyneux Church Choir, supported by musicians from the elite 21st Lancers regiment, stationed in Dublin Castle. In other words, the Irish National Theatre Society first staged Synge’s The Shadow of the Glen and Yeats’s The King’s Threshold in an atmosphere redolent of aristocratic titles, uniforms and Anglican respectability. That the location was culturally contested can be measured in the recognition that it was within two hundred metres of where the First Dáil convened in the Mansion House in 1919, and even closer to Leinster House, where the Irish government took up permanent residence after 1922 (and where it remains today; the European Commission Offices are now also located on Molesworth Street). So, in taking up even temporary residence in the Molesworth Hall, the Irish National Theatre Society was making a statement, aspiring to the status of ‘public monument’ in the terms defined by Marvin Carlson, or the ‘monumentality’ of which Lefebvre writes. Relocating to Molesworth Street from less fashionable venues meant that the company received, ‘according to [Willie] Fay, more respectful reviews from the press, which now took their work more seriously than when the company was located in Camden Street . . . However, the hall was out of the way for people living on the north side of the city.’8 The significance of location is clearly signalled in Fay’s appreciation of the acquisition of reputation, balanced by his awareness of the possible narrowing of the audience, which, if not necessarily translated into a reduction of revenue, was still a limitation for a company which wished to claim the ‘national’ appellation. It was not so much that the north side

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Belevedere College

Gate Theatre

The LAB

GPO Abbey Theatre

Theatre Royal Bord Gáis Energy Theatre

Olympia Theatre Dublin Castle

St. Teresa’s Hall Molesworth Hall Gaiety Theatre

National Library

Leinster House Mansion House

Map 3 Central Dublin, showing locations of key theatres, and the public buildings in proximity to the Molesworth Hall, where the Irish National Theatre Society performed in 1903. The map also shows early twenty-first-century theatrical sites, including the locations of the LAB arts centre and Bord Gáis Energy Theatre. Map by Justin Gleeson, All-Ireland Research Observatory/NIRSA

of the city was geographically distant from the Molesworth Hall (it was just over a kilometre and a half from where the O’Reilly Theatre now stands, for instance); the distance was one that could be measured in cultural capital (Map 3). The work done by Carlson and Michael Hays on theatres as ‘public monuments’ in the major European capitals demonstrates how both these theatres’ architecture and their location emphasised their importance as focal point and civic symbol, with opera houses being the paramount expression of the aesthetic of the haute bourgeoisie and ‘an obligatory monument for any city anywhere in the world wishing to establish its European-oriented cultural credentials’.9 Their nodal position in a network of symbolically central buildings has been demonstrated by Hays’s examination of the way in which the Paris Opéra at the Palais Garnier is linked by a series of boulevards to other monuments marking the growth of French civilisation.10 The accumulated visual weight of a gathering of national buildings into a complex of artistic achievement and demonstrable

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commitment to culture fulfils the same symbolic function today and, as Carlson argues, national theatres ‘continue to be located in major squares or urban parks near the centre of large cities, but outside the main commercial area and often near to luxury urban housing or to specialised shopping areas suitable for so elegant a neighbour’.11 Even when, as in the case of England’s National Theatre on the south bank of the Thames, the location does not meet such general criteria, it was chosen as ‘a conscious attempt to alter London’s social life by altering its geography’.12 In such cases, the symbolic associations of national theatres allow urban planners to use them as leverage in the regeneration of an area. This is clear in terms of the recent decade-long debate over the location of the new Abbey, particularly in relation to the regeneration of Dublin’s main thoroughfare, O’Connell Street. For, as Senator Joe Costello told the Irish Senate, ‘How we see the development of our national theatre as a central cultural resource is important’: a more imaginative, but centrally located development of the Abbey could, he claimed, ‘turn O’Connell Street into the Broadway of Ireland’.13 Likewise, although not officially designated as a national theatre, Belfast’s new Lyric Theatre is clearly presented as fulfilling an analogous role in staging ‘truly indigenous products of Northern Ireland’ while simultaneously projecting an image of the city as part of a global economy. The new theatre, opened in 2011 not far from the site of its predecessor, was hailed as signalling ‘the continued regeneration of the city and a catalyst for real progress in arts infrastructure for artists and audiences alike’.14 Although located in a comfortable red-brick middle-class residential area not far from Queen’s University, the original 1951 building had been threatened with closure because of health and safety issues and was deemed clearly unable to contribute to what the Integrated Cultural Strategy for Belfast of 2007 saw as the importance of a ‘vibrant urban cultural and arts sector in building and sustaining a unique and competitive 21st Century Belfast’. The importance of this project, it said, ‘cannot be over-stated’.15 This clarity in relation to the economic function of the arts is forthrightly expressed in the subsequent Cultural Framework for Belfast 2012–15 which, finding that in terms of its arts, entertainment and sports provision, Belfast ranked sixth out of eight competitor cities such as Cardiff, Glasgow and Newcastle, concluded that this is ‘a ranking we must strive to improve during the lifespan of this framework’. Indeed, in an overt acknowledgement of what was at stake, the document asserted that ‘our culture and arts offer will be more competitive than other UK and ROI cities’.16 Both the Lyric and the Abbey are thus part of their respective cities’ engagement in the global competition

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for visitors and investors. Considered in this frame, the history of the Abbey, and specifically its association with a particular site, makes its position especially revealing. When the possibility of relocating the Abbey was debated in the Dáil in 2001, Síle de Valera TD, granddaughter of Eamon de Valera and then Minister for Arts, Heritage, Gaeltacht and the Islands, admitted the initial preference of the Board of the National Theatre Society was for the redevelopment of the theatre at its existing location. ‘This option’, she said, ‘was in keeping with my preference of retaining the theatre at its present historic location at Lower Abbey Street. This continues to be my preference.’17 However plans for relocation took on a particular force during the height of the Celtic Tiger property boom when developers turned towards the abandoned warehouses along the dockside, and it was proposed to relocate the Abbey to George’s Dock, in the heart of a new financial services district. When draft plans were made public, it was clear that the proposed theatre was to be as much an architectural statement of an ambitious new kind of Irish modernity as had been the modernist cube of the 1966 Abbey. As Eamon Ryan TD proclaimed to the Dáil on 4 June 2008: ‘the new quayside theatre will be a dynamic structure reflecting Dublin’s growing reputation as a global capital of culture and creativity . . . that makes a bold and visionary statement about modern Ireland, while at the same time acknowledging the historic significance of the Abbey Theatre to Irish life over more than a century’.18 In short, the new Abbey would have been, in the view of one arts commentator, ‘an opportunity for the Abbey to shed the weight of its history and reimagine the theatre as a 21st-century contemporary arts centre’.19 However, while the economic crisis of 2008 meant that plans for a new Abbey in George’s Dock gathered dust, the debate over the location of the theatre remained very much alive. These two strands of the story re-emerged in autumn 2009, when it became clear to the Irish Office of Public Works that the George’s Dock plan had presented insurmountable architectural problems, and a new plan emerged to relocate the Abbey to the General Post Office, an iconic site of the 1916 Rising. Senator David Norris, a longtime campaigner for improving the quality of Dublin’s public spaces, writing in the Irish Times, immediately grasped the way in which locating the theatre on the city’s central thoroughfare would have implications for the reconfiguration of the urban space and the rejuvenation of the city centre. However, he couched his main argument for moving the Abbey to the GPO in terms of historical resonance: ‘Picture it! 2016 O’Connell Street. Easter Week – the Abbey Theatre reopening in the

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GPO with a revival of Sean O’Casey’s great Dublin trilogy including The Plough and the Stars.’20 For some, the proposed location of the National Theatre in one of Irish republicanism’s most iconic sites was too much like instituting an official (and exclusionary) history; for others, such resonances had a powerful appeal. From both perspectives, however, there was recognition that the building occupied by a theatre company had the potential to transform the meaning of the performances it staged, for better or for worse. At the time of writing, the debate appears to have been settled with the purchase of a building on Eden Quay adjoining the existing Abbey. The director of the Abbey Theatre, Fiach Mac Conghail, signalled that the development would house three theatres, of 600, 300 and 100 seats, as well as a restaurant and other facilities. This would be, he said, ‘a downpayment on the future. We’re creating a legacy.’ It would be, however, a future founded on the past for, as the Minister for the Arts, Jimmy Deenihan TD declared, ‘after years of speculation, I consider that the long term location of the Abbey Theatre is now absolutely settled. The Abbey Street location is now, and will be for the future, the home of the National Theatre.’21 As if to underline the necessity for giving the future of a national theatre the sanction of history, it was also announced that, finances permitting, the first sod would be cut on Easter Monday 2016. In these debates, the idea of the Abbey Theatre as the embodiment of the nation with a history in which fealty to the place of origin was paramount, and the extent to which that very same authenticity was a means of engaging with the global economy, were brought into sharp focus. As cities strive to identify a unique selling point in the global market, the historically validated specificity of place is both an opportunity for marketing and an endangered cultural value as its uniqueness is packaged for an international consumption. The problem, as Kevin Dowler has defined it, is that as culture is seen increasingly as a driver in economic regeneration schemes, then cultural resources are no longer ‘simply symbolic goods, but economic goods at the same time’.22 It is precisely the extent of that symbolic power that determines its market value and in this the Abbey and the associated plays of the Literary Revival are giltedged stock. The language of marketing and an awareness of the importance of branding inform the Dublin City Council Development Plan for 2011– 2017, which argued for ‘cultural hubs’ and ‘quarters’ as central to the development of the city. One of the council’s key policies is ‘to maintain and support the presence and development of the National Cultural

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Institutions and other significant cultural institutions in the city centre in recognition of their key role in the cultural and economic success of the capital city’.23 Such thinking is deeply informed by the theories of the urban development guru Richard Florida, whose Cities and the Creative Class advanced the ‘Creative Class’ as the crucial element in urban regeneration. According to Florida: ‘It makes sense to invest in the quality of place that attracts the creative worker, and also enables the private sector to meet the amenity needs of this group by providing cafes and similar establishments.’24 The global ambitions of Dublin Corporation for the O’Connell Street area, which includes the location of the Abbey, were already clear by 2006 when it claimed that just as New York’s SoHo district had been renewed, so too could this part of Dublin be. SoHo, it said, ‘was now one of the most fashionable and exciting parts of New York (overtaking Greenwich Village as this area could complement Temple Bar)’.25 It is a moot point how far the pre-existence of a cosmopolitan ambience determines the influx of the Creative Class, or whether it is an after-effect of the arrival of this group, but what is clear is the centrality of theatre and theatricality to such developments. As Michael McKinnie suggested in his study of how in Toronto theatre has been developed as ‘a way to achieve [the] ideal of urban affluence’,26 those attracted to theatre districts come not only for the production itself but for associated aspects of consumption: ‘The attraction of such people was key, since their activities were consumption-driven and theatrically analogous: flâneurs represent a highly desirable type of affluent social activity in the maintenance of vibrant city districts, since they both consume and spectate, something akin to what a theatre-goer does.’27 A cursory glance around the environs of the Abbey confirms that the day of the flâneur is yet to arrive, but the debates around the theatre’s relocation demonstrate only too vividly the potency of place as a function of memory in considerations of its physical location and in the culture and economy of the state. In particular, the Abbey contributes its symbolic capital to Dublin’s income generation from tourism. As Susan Bennett argues, ‘local cultural practices have come to be valued as distinctive mobile “baits” to lure tourists to a particular place’.28 In this context the Abbey performs a dual role in providing a heritage site to visit and an experience of a related cultural event: ‘It provides in one location not only a distinctive engagement with cultural tourism in Dublin itself, but, by purchase of the received national (theatre) history, an encapsulated experience of Ireland’.29 Indeed, there is evidence to suggest that even in planning visits to Ireland, potential visitors are already making theatre part of their experience, if only in

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virtual terms. Research carried out by the Theatre Forum indicates that, on average, 23 per cent of the internet traffic on the websites of all Irish theatre organisations in 2010 was from overseas, with the figure as high as 94 per cent for one organisation.30 Before visitors even leave the United States, the UK or Germany (the three countries which generate the most web traffic), theatre is part of the attraction in one of the country’s biggest industries, tourism. The paradox in this, and one which the Abbey attempts to negotiate, is that its continuing cultural capital is dependent upon being able to act as a national stage, which reflects and contributes to the contemporary culture, while also realising the value of that cultural capital with national and international audiences by not staging work that runs counter to their expectations about Ireland, or, indeed, about the Abbey itself. Consequently, although the location of the theatre needs to be cosmopolitan, the places produced on stage are frequently required to evoke an Ireland which is anything but, as ‘the nostalgia of Romantic Ireland, the myth of the West as conjured up by the Literary Revival [is] commodified for popular consumption in tourism and the Hollywood dream-world of John Ford’s The Quiet Man’.31 The delicate balance required in this enterprise, demanding the simultaneity of both place-bound authenticity and transnational cosmopolitanism, is captured in the Abbey’s description of its production of Synge’s Playboy of the Western World for the centenary celebrations of the theatre in 2004. For this historically significant event potential audiences were told that Synge was ‘a major figure in European theatre [while] his classic play’s exploration of identity and nationality continues to be provocative and urgent’.32 Paralleling this reading of Playboy as simultaneously canonical and contemporary is the place of the Abbey as both the historically validated site of national memory and the potential centre of a dynamic cultural quarter. The difficulty is in achieving these dual objectives of relevance and reverence in the one place, especially when the audience comprises both international visitors and those whose expectations of the Abbey carry vestiges of the period when it was concerned with ‘summoning a representative audience that will in turn recognize itself as a nation on stage’.33 It was just this sense of the local rather than the global that was captured in Peter Crowley’s Irish Times review of the 2012 production of The Plough and the Stars, which praised it as one that ‘honours O’Casey’s fundamental belief in community’,34 a testimony to the play and production, but a somewhat ironic one given the fate of the North Side communities whose communal resilience and resistance to deprivation was staged by O’Casey. These communities, the subject of the Dublin Trilogy, were deracinated

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by Irish government policies, with Mountjoy Square, the ‘Hilljoy Square’ of the trilogy, subject to particularly ruthless and botched development since the 1960s, resulting in continuing urban dereliction, even at the height of the property boom in the early 2000s. As communities were moved out of the north inner city from the 1960s onwards, there is thus a sense that O’Casey’s play can be read as performing the function of a lieu de mémoire, in that the production replaces the reality of a community whose home is now on the stage rather than in the neighbouring streets. The accurate stage reproduction of a specific site that once reflected that extra-theatrical world is now only an image of a time and place that are past. The deliberate production of a sense of place for economic reasons has been called ‘place patriotism’, a term Michael McKinnie develops from work done by the sociologists John Logan and Harvey Moloch, who claim that ‘place patriotism occurs when property value inflation is linked with cultural institution-building to create sentiments of local well-being’.35 As McKinnie develops the argument, theatre is key to a sense of pride and belonging to place: Theatres help define and entrench capitalist land use areas that are called downtowns and their presence becomes evidence for an ‘ontological’ downtown-ness that pleases the local urban subject. This practice is not confined to theatre spaces – it is relevant to the function of cultural institutions in downtown redevelopment in general – but civic theatres are particularly useful from an urban planning and security perspective, since, unlike art galleries or museums, they tend to attract affluent citizens to an area at night.36

Debates over the possible relocation of the Abbey were frequently framed in precisely these terms. For instance, in 2007 the Minister for Arts, Sport and Tourism, Séamus Brennan, informed the Dáil that the new Abbey would be ‘a dynamic structure reflecting Dublin’s growing reputation as a global capital of culture and creativity’.37 The thinking here is clearly in keeping with a global framework where ‘Post-Fordism has placed cities and cultural institutions in the shadow of transnational capitalism.’38 While this creates mobility for both finance and theatre, the focus on ‘global’ flows of ‘culture and creativity’ also points to the danger that ‘local audiences’ are, as Patrick Lonergan has argued, ‘losing opportunities to generate meanings about their own localities’.39 At its extreme this produces what Dan Rebellato calls ‘McTheatre’ with its ‘near total disregard for geographical or cultural specificity’.40 Indeed, while the Abbey did not move to George’s Dock, a theatre did open on a

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very similar post-industrial waterfront site just across the River Liffey: the Grand Canal Theatre. Renamed the Bord Gáis Energy Theatre in March 2012, this is an architecturally spectacular 2,100-seat venue, designed by Daniel Libeskin (who in 2002 had won the competition to redevelop the World Trade Center site in New York), which largely plays host to touring, big-budget musicals, such as Cameron Macintosh’s production of The Phantom of the Opera (staged there in summer 2012). Much of what is presented at this venue is precisely the theatrical form that John McGrath refers to as embodying a ‘bourgeois internationality’, a form of ersatz cosmopolitanism that encourages an ‘interchangeability’ of plays and productions. For McGrath, this is far from a meaningful ‘internationalism’ born of a ‘localism’ in which there is a ‘sense of identity’ with the performers who, even if from outside the community, each give ‘a sense that he or she cares enough about being in that place with that audience and actually knows something about them’.41 Similar arguments about the disconnection between audience and performance could be extended to Irish productions, including those of the Abbey and Druid that tour internationally; or to the work of an Irish company such as Pan Pan, whose work has more in common with postdramatic work being done in Berlin or New York than with an Irish theatre rooted in place-making. In an age of globalisation, it is possible to see the global everywhere. Hence, regardless of whether or not Irish theatre has actually become less rooted in the local in the first decade of the twentieth century, the experience of theatregoing in Ireland is now framed by an awareness that Irish society as a whole has become more globalised; indeed, as we saw in the previous chapter, by the beginning of the twentyfirst century Ireland had become, according to one influential set of criteria, the most globalised country in the world. It is against this background that we can begin to explain, at least in part, why in the same years that Ireland was at the forefront of globalisation some Irish theatre-makers were choosing, in a variety of different ways, to produce work that could not be uprooted from its site of performance. From the outset, it will be recognised that there are multiple ways in which a performance can make the site of performance signify, so in order to better understand plays that are formally tied to a particular location, we are proposing a taxonomy of site-specific work. Given that the term ‘site-specific’ is wide-ranging and often contentious,42 it is best to begin with one of the earliest and clearest definitions, that of Richard Schechner who coined the term ‘environmental theatre’. Schechner argued that ‘to stage a performance “environmentally” means more than simply to

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move it off of the proscenium or out of the arena . . . [It] is one in which all the elements or parts making up the performance are recognised as alive.’43 Using Schechner’s ‘environmental theatre’ as the umbrella term for plays in which the location of performance constitutes part of its spatial significance, we will differentiate between ‘place-specific work’, where the site of performance draws on a resonance of the place, but the form of the play does not depend upon being staged there, and the truly ‘site-specific’, in which the form and meaning of the production are inextricably bound to the site of performance, usually (but not always) such that it could not be staged elsewhere. In both site-specific and place-specific theatre, the site is an active element in the meaning of the performance, rather than simply its location. As Nick Kaye puts it, ‘site specificity [and in this we would also include our use of ‘place specificity’] should be associated with an underlying concept of “site”, rather than with any given or particular kind of place or formal approach to site’. While Kaye agrees with the artist Richard Serra in asserting that ‘to move the site-specific work is to re-place it, to make it something else’,44 introducing the term ‘place specific’ allows us to consider under the broad umbrella of ‘environmental theatre’ plays written for conventional proscenium arch theatres which are staged in historically resonant sites (including historically resonant theatre buildings). Notwithstanding the distinction we have made, however, both siteand place-specific work typically share an attention to developing the audiences’ appreciation of their relationship to what Doreen Massey terms the ‘specific envelopes of space-time’ which project the audience ‘into the (re)telling of the historical constitution of the present’.45 As Jen Harvie develops this argument, site-specific (and, again, to this we would add ‘place-specific’) performances can work as ‘a potent mnemonic trigger’ so that audiences are engaged in ‘negotiating, formulating, and changing their relationships to their pasts – and also to their presents and futures’.46 We can begin to understand the value of these distinctions by considering some recent Irish productions in which ‘all the elements or parts making up the performance are recognised as alive’, including the location of performance. For instance, Dermot Bolger at one point claimed that his Ballymun Trilogy (2004–8) was ‘a piece of work that is so site specific that it can’t be played on or be played anywhere else’.47 The trilogy was commissioned by axis, a company which is part of the theatre and community resource centre located in the heart of Ballymun, an area in north Dublin whose tower blocks, with their associated poverty, crime, and drug addiction, became a symbol of deprivation and alienation in 1970s Ireland. The development originated in the utopian urban modernism of the 1960s,

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in a desire to create a better life for inner-city Dublin tenement dwellers, whose homes were frequently dangerously decrepit and sometimes lacked basic amenities (such as running water). However, the new housing was built without a sustaining social infrastructure, the tower blocks degenerated rapidly without adequate maintenance, and by concentrating social problems without the traditional supports of community, the development in fact magnified those problems. By the 1980s the Ballymun towers had become emblems of failed social engineering, sites of despair. Eventually, between 2005 and 2008, all but one of the buildings were demolished. The fact that the towers were named after the leaders of the Easter Rising of 1916 (Pearse, Ceannt, MacDermott, MacDonagh, Connolly, Clarke and Plunkett) only underscored the savage sense of failure, not only of the Ballymun project, but of the buildings as symbolic sites of a national modernisation agenda. At the time of writing, only the Plunkett tower remains, with plans in progress to preserve it as a historic building. The area, meanwhile, is being regenerated under a multi-million-euro scheme which Ciaran Murray, managing director of Ballymun Regeneration Ltd., claims has the potential to turn a place of deprivation to one of development: ‘It is right beside the airport, with direct access to the M50 and just four miles from O’Connell Street. Since it has land for development, it has the potential to become Dublin’s most sought-after location for investment.’48 Not least interesting in the current context, the plan for the redevelopment of Ballymun identifies ‘place-making’ as one of its top priorities. ‘Where Ballymun is concerned, place-making represents the transformation of a shunned area into a place where people wish to live, work, visit and do business.’49 Between the amnesiac ‘place-making’ of a development plan in which ‘the production of space . . . [is] saturated with the tonalities of capitalism’,50 and the place-making of memory that we find in Bolger’s trilogy, we can begin to map two opposed poles of the contemporary understanding of place, which may nonetheless corroborate (or appear to corroborate) the concept of ‘place patriotism’. The first play in the trilogy, From These Green Heights (2004), opens with a family moving into the flats, the second, The Townlands of Brazil (2006), includes their preparation for demolition, while the final play, The Consequence of Lightning (2008), focuses on the death of one of the first residents. While the plays cover the period 1963–2007 they do not do so in an order determined strictly by the historical events or by their order of composition; the first two plays have a dual time-scale, moving back and forth between the 1960s and the 2000s, and only The Consequence of Lightning is set solely in a time contemporary with its first production.

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While the plays are naturalistic in character and conversation, the sets dispense with any attempt at verisimilitude and deploy ramps and raised sections to create a flexible playing space. For instance, The Townlands of Brazil is performed on an ‘empty stage furnished with a succession of boxes, which the cast may use to build certain shapes to create spaces’.51 This paredback style has clear budgetary advantages, but it also allows characters and conversations of the 1960s to morph swiftly into those of decades later without any cumbersome changes to sets or lighting. As location is designated only in dialogue and in the audience’s recognition of characters, the village of Ballymun in the 1960s swiftly becomes the flats of the 1970s. This complex interplay of the past and present across the changing space called Ballymun, whose most recent residents include Eastern European migrants and a Turkish construction worker, is designed to dramatise what Bolger terms ‘the experience of how a place [or more properly, a space] becomes home [or a place]’.52 ‘Home’ is the key term in the Ballymun Trilogy. From These Green Heights closes as a young girl, on the point of moving into her new bedroom in regenerated Ballymun, speaks of looking forward to being ‘able to call it home’. Moreover, just as the first two plays spatially produce the theatrical equivalent of Bergsonian durational time, in which the past colours the present, so too characters from Ballymun’s past have their lines spoken by characters from its present. For instance, a more recent arrival in Ballymun will, in some scenes, speak the lines of another character from a past moment. The Townlands of Brazil ends with such an exchange in which Eileen, from the past of Ballymun, has her lines spoken by Anna, a Molodovan migrant, in a conversation with Monika, a recently arrived Polish migrant worker, and Matthew, Eileen’s illegitimate son who was born in England but has returned to Ballymun in pursuit of his past: monika: (looks at Matthew) And I’ll tell you all about your new life . . . anna:(as eileen) . . . in my old home. monika: In your new home . . . matthew: . . . In this place called Ballymun.

The focus on ‘home’ recurs at the end of The Consequences of Lightning, but in this case as something that is internalised and no longer placedependent in terms of residency, as Katie assures her mother: ‘I’ll always be a part of here, Ma, no matter where I am, and you’ll always be a part of wherever I am.’ In From These Green Heights Ballymun was referred to as ‘a New World’ only for it to become ‘the place for disaffection, with junkies and dealers playing hide and seek in a warren of boarded-up flats’53

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and a source of shame for many of its inhabitants who, like their real-life counterparts, tried to change its name to that of the more fashionable neighbouring Glasnevin. What Bolger’s trilogy charts is the progressive adoption of Ballymun as a home that can be meaningfully lived in, and lived away from, with a confidence coming from belonging. This theme, however, as Bolger noted in his comment about the work being ‘so site specific that it can’t be played on or be played anywhere else’, can only fully resonate in the theatre in Ballymun where its ‘localism’ speaks directly to local audiences. The trilogy operates emotionally rather than analytically and there is no attempt or intention to trace causal networks in society with a view to corrective social action; there are no political figures and decision takers, only those who live with the consequences of their policies. Bolger’s dramas of social redemption are predicated on a belief in the human capacity for good rather than on calls for structural change. But while they are far from radical in theme, they can be seen to be radical in their relationship with the audience members and their location. In his ‘Short Organum for the Theatre’, Bertolt Brecht declared that ‘an art fit for our times must drive the theatre of the scientific age straight out into the suburbs, where it can stand as it were wide open, at the disposal of those who live hard and produce much, so that they can be fruitfully entertained there with their great problems’.54 In working outside the main theatres of Dublin, within the community whose story he dramatises, Bolger is making a clear statement about what he believes to be the real place and function of theatre. And while the idea of being entertained by one’s great problems is somewhat paradoxical, Bolger, like Brecht, does not believe in a sombre theatre and seeks to entertain as a prelude to emancipation – although he envisages a release into the confident celebration of community rather than the opening salvo in a class war. To stage plays about Ballymun before a Ballymun audience who lived, and are living, the events depicted on stage is, then, crucial to Bolger’s dramas. Accordingly, and to strengthen further the emotional bond between action and audience, he used local amateurs alongside professional actors ‘because not only should the community see themselves reflected, but they should be doing the reflecting too’.55 This immediacy is increased by the extensive use of direct address to the audience and, as noted by Niamh Malone (who operated as a participant observer across the Ballymun Trilogy), ‘the audience in each of the three plays readily spoke back to the actors and commented on the action as it unfolded. Comments such as “Yeah, you can say that again”, “ah, God love her”, “would you look at that, that’s the way it was” and

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“don’t talk to me about those bleedin’ lifts.”’56 This is not only site-specific but audience-specific theatre, and while Bolger argued that ‘the more local you get, the more universal something becomes’,57 such fully participative responses are only possible when the audience belongs as much to the location as does the subject matter. This kind of place-specific/audience-specific theatre links first-order spatial identification with second-order cultural identification in a context that extends the process beyond the walls of the theatre, and beyond the duration of the performance. This extension of the process of creating place from space by binding spatial identification to cultural identification is a defining characteristic of much site-specific theatre in Ireland that is concerned with a dramatic revelation of specific places. Through becoming the physical location and thematic focus of the drama, places were imaginatively returned to the possession of local audiences as part of the social agenda of the site-specific work. This empowerment is key to Bolger’s intentions in the Ballymun Trilogy which, he says, ‘grows into a hidden history of modern Dublin life, exploring the relationship between a place which outsiders used to stigmatise its people and those people themselves who gradually begin to take possession of their own destinies, to fight to reshape that place, to see children born and die there, and to call it home’.58 Niamh Malone is of the view that when ‘The Ballymun Trilogy was staged in the axis, it occupied a space that aspired to being both a practical resource and a symbol of the will and the pride of the people of Ballymun.’59 As such, while the content of the trilogy may have been a world away from the clean-slate ‘place-making’ proposed by the development plan, its contribution to establishing the axis theatre as a distinctive site of cultural production could nonetheless be seen to contribute to a strategy for making Ballymun into ‘a place where people wish to live, work, visit and do business’. This reassertion of pride in place through theatre was a feature also of Derry Frontline, ‘a community-based cultural education organisation which work[ed] primarily with the young unemployed from Derry’s inner city communities’60 within a context informed by liberation theology and a world away from the ‘place patriotism’ informed by property price inflation. Dan Baron Cohen, the writer and director of Threshold, which was based on workshops and discussions in the company and produced in 1992, was explicit as to the place-specific aspect of their work and the relationship between actors and audience: ‘the primary reason for their community coming to see that play is to see and hear their own people in control of their own lives and talking about their future’. The play was

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developed with the community over a thirty-month period with the overall objective, in Baron Cohen’s words, of enabling ‘critical reflection of the cultures of resistance – towards a national culture of liberation’. However, he did not see that achieving this primary objective involved ‘questioning traditional forms of theatre’,61 and so although the work is radical in intent it is conventional in set and form. For instance, the set for the first act was in a conventional realist set, identified as, ‘Bernie Doherty’s home’, and featuring ‘an upholstered Balmoral suite surrounding an oval Queen Anne coffee table which stands on a Chinese rug decorating a polished floor’.62 While the Ballymun trilogy signalled a distance from theatrical realism in its use of scenic space, both it and Threshold hold to conventional aspects of characterisation and narrative, a necessary decision given that their primary focus is a social rather than aesthetic radicalism. However, while both Bolger and Baron Cohen saw their responsibility as being to the local audiences whose stories were the basis of their dramas, Baron Cohen broke with the community as the location for the play’s production, staging Threshold in the Playhouse Theatre in Derry’s city centre because ‘the workshop saw the need to challenge and cut through the very effective marginalisation of its community; and on the other, the decision reflected a new and more confident desire to enter into dialog with working-class and middle-class nationalists and with the Protestant community, and to progress beyond the “ourselves alone” barricade mentality of the earlier decades’. So paradoxically, while arguing that ‘every community should have a radical theatre exploring and modelling its own social organization’, he saw retrospectively that some place-specific productions had inbuilt limitations: ‘we can see that our work unconsciously colluded with the marginalisation of our community. It had been developed and performed inside a community center which was itself built strategically where all the rioting took place as part of the ’70s’ normalisation process [that] enabled the state to contain and isolate one of the most alienated, militant and radical communities in Derry’. The choice of the final location for the production was, then, based on a decision ‘not to collude with our own marginalisation’, which meant ‘abandoning the security of the Bogside for the more “neutral” venue of the Playhouse’.63 While Baron Cohen felt there was a shared desire to work within ‘a progressive mainstream’,64 it is arguable that once the production was removed from the Bogside the associative power of place was lost and its conventional theatre qualities became more apparent. Indeed, these are the terms in which Peter Handke criticised Brecht, arguing that, despite Brecht’s radical intentions, so long as he worked in formal theatre

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structures such as the Theater am Schiffbauerdamm he ‘was in the wrong sociological locale with the sociologically wrong means’.65 However, conventional forms of theatre are not necessarily excluded from having place- and site-specific resonances, especially in the context of Northern Ireland where, as Gerri Moriarty observed, ‘we know that there are few neutral spaces and even fewer neutral individuals’.66 Eva Urban’s assertion that ‘the first site-specific performance events in Northern Ireland were Brian Friel’s Translations performed in 1980 and The Communication Cord performed in 1982, both at the Guildhall in Derry’67 is slightly misleading in that neither was dependent on the Guildhall for its staging, and Translations in particular has been successfully produced across a range of international theatres. The audience of Translations understands that the confines of the hedge school do not extend beyond the edge of stage and intrude into the auditorium in which they remain seated as observers rather than as participants. In other words, the play established a scenic space that operates irrespective of the location of any production. However, as one of Field Day’s co-founders, the actor Stephen Rea, noted, there was a particular significance in where Translations was premiered, irrespective of its transferability beyond that site: ‘The Guildhall building is a huge symbol of Empire, of the Union, of some kind of adherence to English principles, [so] of course there’s an irony in doing plays there that undermine that position and certainly come from a different point of view.’68 Indeed, at points throughout his career, Rea has shown himself to be alert to the power of particular places to enhance audience appreciation of plays. In 1998 he directed a place-specific production of Stewart Parker’s Northern Star – which focuses on the role of Henry Joy McCracken in the United Irishmen’s uprising of 1798 – in the First Presbyterian Church in Rosemary Street, Belfast. This was more than simply the church in which McCracken had worshipped. Staging the play during the bicentennial of the rising gave spatial form to the shared history of Dissenting Presbyterianism and the Republicanism of the United Irishmen, since occluded by sectarian conflict, so that every aspect of the performance, beginning with the epitextual publicity explaining the significance of the site, to the moment the audience entered the church, contributed to its meaning. For Rea: Staging the play there released it from a narrowly theatrical into a wider cultural and political space. That is especially important if you are staging an older play – you have to make it live for an audience today, to make it touch real lives rather than just be a museum piece. Like our earlier staging of plays in the Guild Hall in Derry, the setting blew the play wide open.69

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Stepping into the Rosemary Street Church in 1998 was then like stepping back to a moment at which Presbyterianism and Republicanism recognised their common conceptual roots. Likewise, the 1988 Field Day tour of Brian Friel’s Making History, and the tour of the same play by Ouroboros Theatre Company in 2007, illustrates a proscenium-arch play’s potential as a ‘mnemonic trigger’ to an audience’s relationship to the past, given a historically ‘saturated’ location for the production. Following the by-then traditional premiere in Derry’s Guildhall, Making History toured Ireland, taking in fifty-nine performances in twenty-one towns over a ten-week period in 1988. The play dealt with the story of Hugh O’Neill, the sixteenth-century Earl of Tyrone who led a nine-year war of resistance against the Tudor occupation of Ireland, in which a series of battles and negotiations took place in locations around Ireland, primarily in Ulster. Accordingly, it was the performances in Dungannon, close to the fort at Tullyhogue where the O’Neills were inaugurated as leaders, that Rea felt gave the play a particular place-specific significance. In the 1988 BBC2 Arena programme ‘History Boys on the Rampage’, Rea is filmed walking in Tullyhogue, commenting that it was ‘extraordinary to be somewhere you know O’Neill definitely was’. It was this power of the play’s connection with place that he felt caused the schoolchildren in the audience to be particularly quiet and attentive as they understood that as the past became present in the now of performance, so once again ‘their place was the centre of history’.70 The historical association of Making History with specific places was later evoked by Ouroboros Theatre Company’s 2007 tour of the play, which was performed in locations across Ireland that resonated with the story of the historic O’Neill. This tour visited twenty-two places in Ireland and three in Europe, all but two having a specific connection with the events of the play. The Cistercian Kilmallock Abbey, for instance, was (as the epitextual programme notes informed audiences) ‘on O’Donnell’s route to Kinsale’; Bagenal’s Castle, Newry, was ‘Mabel and Mary Bagenal’s homeplace’; the Louvain Institute for Ireland in Europe, Belgium, was based in a converted monastery where ‘O’Neill found refuge until Feb 1608.’ In a related, but different way, the Strule Arts Centre, Omagh, was in ‘Brian Friel’s birthplace’, thereby drawing audience attention to their personal relationship to the play in a manner that had more to do with current culture than historical memory. Clearly, Making History could not have a relationship to place that produced a ‘mnemonic trigger’ effect beyond particular places in Ireland (other than Louvain), and in this respect the productions of both Field

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Day and Ouroboros were place-specific. The play itself, however, is not site-specific, in the sense that it can be (and, indeed, has been) staged elsewhere without being rendered meaningless. This is because its formal properties are not produced exclusively by a specific performance location. In contrast to place-specific work, then, site-specific work is dependent on unique sites and locations, not simply for its subject matter, or even for its dynamic of audience identification (in terms of the interaction of first- and second-order spatial identification), but, more fundamentally, for elements of its basic theatrical means. In site-specific work, the location of the production not only intensifies but effectively constructs the audience’s condensational experience of place. As such, site-specific work removes, or at least blurs, to a greater degree than is the case with the place-specific theatre, the division of the site of performance between a location for dayto-day social being and as a defined place for the intense awareness of time and space (and, indeed, of Being) that is produced by the theatre event. The series of short plays that made up convictions, which was developed in Belfast’s Crumlin Road Courthouse for the Belfast Festival in 2000, is one of the clearest examples of the site-specific in contemporary Irish theatre. The performance used a real space saturated with history and politics for a production that was also time-specific in terms of intention and impact.71 Although the courthouse had been closed for some two years prior to the production, its role in the legislative history of Northern Ireland, most notoriously through the Diplock Courts, which operated without the benefit of a jury, ensured that audiences entered a space in which ‘convictions’ carried multiple and immediate associations. As Mary Holland commented in the Irish Times, ‘what happened in this building is part of the shared history of the past 30 years’.72 Accordingly, audiences moved around the locations within the building which served as the subject of the seven 12minute playlets that made up the production: Court No. 2 (by Marie Jones); Male Toilets (by Daragh Carville); Judge’s Room (by Damian Gorman); Court No. 1 (by Owen McCafferty); Jury Room (by Nicola McCartney); Holding Cell (by Gary Mitchell) and Main Hall (by Martin Lynch). However, because of the size of some of the spaces, audiences that numbered around eighty at a time had to be split into four groups of twenty for all but three of the playlets and hence saw them in different sequences. The exceptions were the opening and closing pieces, which were always Court No. 2 and Main Hall. As Jen Harvie argues, the varying dramatic styles of the playlets, accompanied by art installations by Amanda Montgomery located throughout the courthouse, ‘offered [the site-specific performance’s] audiences no single, comfortable position from which to relate to either the building itself

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or the events that happened there’.73 By allowing audiences into previously restricted areas, the performance simultaneously fractured the Courthouse’s spatial monumentality and effected a form of liberation for audiences that had existed within its area of influence over their space and movement. Their movements controlled by ‘prison guards’, audiences for convictions may have been allowed to promenade, but only within a confined and relatively controllable area. However, The Wedding Play (1999), a community project produced as part of the Belfast Festival, was intended to ‘push the concept of promenade theatre to the extremes’.74 Both pieces were highly conscious of the extent to which theatre can develop from places saturated with history and politics although, as in the case of Derry Frontline’s work, they were also very much time-specific in terms of both intention and impact. Both convictions and The Wedding Play were developed in conjunction with the peace process centring around the Good Friday Agreement of April 1998, and shared a parallel concern with reconciliation. According to the playwright Martin Lynch, who collaborated with Marie Jones as writer on The Wedding Play, ‘our play has been a peace process on its own’.75 Indeed the organisers wanted to believe that, through participation in the play, ‘groups from “frontline” Protestant and Catholic communities could work together to succeed in a common task because they wanted that to be a symbol of new and changing times’.76 Paula McFetridge, the artistic director of convictions, shared this sentiment, maintaining that the production presented ‘possibilities to let past, present and future sit alongside each other and thereby provoke debate within each audience member’ with a view to understanding the past and forming the future.77 In both cases, it was the historical resonances and contemporary contexts of the sites of production that served to advance this agenda, since meaning is generated, not just by the past associations of the sites of performance, but also by their emplacement within the often fraught discourses of the present. The programme for The Wedding Play informed the audience they were invited to the real homes of Geordie and Jean Marshall (Templemore Avenue) and Margaret and Sammy Todd (Short Strand). You will board a bus in downtown Belfast and travel to both homes to eavesdrop on the happenings, tensions and joys on the day of a mixed marriage. The audience will then travel on to The Edge [nightclub] for the climax of the story at the wedding reception.78

In moving across the peace line between nationalist and unionist communities the audiences retraced the steps of the couple whose ‘mixed marriage’ formed the centre of the play.79 The use of real houses, one donated by the

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Housing Executive and the other given up by the owners for four hours a day, gave what Jo Egan, the project coordinator, described as ‘an authenticity’ because audiences, which were around seventy for each performance, were ‘actually in the houses in the areas that the people come from’. But it also produced what she acknowledged was a ‘logistical nightmare’, as audiences had to negotiate narrow domestic spaces and be ushered from one performance place to another, with some even being lost between the wedding and the reception as they went in search of hot dogs.80 Central to both these productions was their site- and time-specificity, which means that they were both, in Eva Urban’s description of convictions, ‘unique and irreproducible’,81 in terms that underline our recognition that ‘place’ has a temporal as well as a spatial dimension. As Gerri Moriarty observed when the possibility of a reprise of The Wedding Play was mooted: I was among those counselling against all these kinds of revival, in part because of my belief that the reception the play had received was connected to its unique geographical setting in the terraced streets and city centre of Belfast and to the specific socio-political context of 1999, that these factors could not be replicated elsewhere, and that the weaknesses of the project would be easily exposed in other circumstances.82

Paula McFetridge reiterated this view with regard to convictions: ‘This project was of its time – the social context in which it was produced informed all of the contributors – a different time would have produced a different project’.83 Both The Wedding Play and convictions, like the Field Day productions, had a socio-political agenda which drew on specific sites for intensifying their effect on the audience. However, unlike Field Day’s proscenium arch plays, which were enhanced by becoming place-specific rather than being dependent on their performance locations, the two Belfast-based works were ‘irreproducible’ in that the form of the plays, as well as their significance, was directly connected to a particular geography, itself the product of a specific history at the particular moment of post-Good Friday Agreement Belfast. While ‘agit-prop’ is too crude a description for these conceptually sophisticated works, they have in common agit-prop’s concern with the dissemination of ideas and attitudes as a prerequisite to change in a specific historical moment, in dialogue with past moments and legacies. From this argument, it might follow that site-specific work is necessarily so rooted in place, and hence in memory, that it can only be produced in locations that are already laden with a sense of place. However, the work of

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the playwright Tom Swift with the Performance Corporation suggests that this is not necessarily the case, particularly when the theatre turns to what Marc Augé calls the ‘non-places’ of late modernity. For instance, Power Point, a satire on corporate culture, which takes the form of a business conference (in which the audience are attendees), was originally staged in the conference room of a Dublin hotel in 2009. Although the play was site-specific in the sense that it was written for a hotel conference room, it was not written for a specific conference room, and hence could subsequently, in 2010, be staged without difficulty in a hotel in Tampere, Finland. While an individual hotel might advertise its ‘unique’ selling points, the spaces of global capital are, by design, devoid of markers of place, so that a corporate conference room in Dublin is interchangeable with an almost identical room in Finland (or, indeed, anywhere else in the developed world): a space of fluorescent lighting, nondescript abstract art, and birch-topped meeting tables. In Power Point, the recognition that a site-specific play could be restaged elsewhere (potentially, all over the world) became the key point of its spatial significance. Likewise, Swift’s Drive-By (2006) is described as ‘an outdoor site-specific work written for the R and H silo yard in the Cork docks’.84 The play deals with ‘boy racer’ culture, features three real cars (sometimes driven at speed), and is watched by an audience seated in their own cars in the empty shipping yard, the actors’ voices transmitted through FM car radios. Yet in spite of the specificity of place in the first performance, workingclass youths who are willing to risk death in pursuit of speed are not a phenomenon unique to suburban Cork, and so the play was able to transfer to the Canterbury Festival in England the following year, where it played with equal success in a similar abandoned industrial site. Whether in Making History, convictions, the Ballymun Trilogy or even Tom Swift’s Power Point, much Irish environmental theatre remains within the ambit of the theatre of language that has been the dominant mode within Irish theatre culture for more than a century. Indeed, the boundaries between writer-based theatre work and environmental work have become increasingly blurred in the first decades of the twenty-first century, and even a company such as Performance Corporation has published a collection of scripts. One of the few Irish companies to move environmental theatre beyond language has been the Galway-based Macnas, whose public pageants use outsize puppets, music and movement, but few spoken words. Dave Donovan, their Community Arts Coordinator, notes that Macnas has ‘always ventured into areas for which there are no maps’. This, he said, ‘is the exciting part of the journey: the voyaging into

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these spaces not alone but in the company of others equally committed to the process of mapping new territories . . . The end point is always the same, a parade.’85 As the parades take place on the streets of the city (often Galway) then, as Holly Maples phrases it, ‘Macnas claims the space and causes a transformation in the use of that space.’86 By the same token, one of the performers in Performance Corporation’s most self-reflexive play, Swampoodle (2011), tells the audience that ‘Swampoodle is about the evolution of the space. It’s about taking inspiration from the people who have passed in and out of it. So, it’s not that the building itself has done something or that it is a monument but rather we are here to imagine the lives of the people who performed here, who came here, who lived their lives in this neighbourhood’.87 Indeed, whether in a production with a script by an established writer or in a Macnas pageant; whether in sitespecific or in place-specific staging, environmental theatre has a direct transformative effect on space, evoking or producing memories that attach themselves directly to the lived world. If, as we have argued earlier, theatre is a machine for making place from space, in environmental theatre that machine is let loose on the streets. In environmental theatre, place is produced from space through the activation of mnemonic triggers, produced by the interaction of the location of performance with the actors’ bodies, and with language. As the work of Macnas indicates, it is possible to dispense with language, but not with the actors’ bodies (or, in the case of Macnas puppets, their surrogates). In this, we are reminded of Edward S. Casey’s arguments relating to the ‘importance of place for memory that has been lost sight of in philosophical and common sense concerns with the temporal dimensions of memory’; furthermore, his argument for what he terms ‘the memorial potency of place’ resonates with site-specific and place-specific work, above all in the idea that the apprehension of memory in place occurs ‘through the lived body’.88 In Irish theatre since the 1980s, few companies have engaged with this aspect of making place from space with the intensity of Operating Theatre, the collaborative project of composer Roger Doyle and actor Olwen Fouéré. Operating Theatre, Fintan O’Toole once observed, has sought ‘to bring theatre into the same space as music and visual arts’ because, like these forms, ‘it has refused to be instrumental, to have an agenda, to be about anything except itself ’.89 From plays such as The Diamond Body (written in conjunction with playwright Aidan Matthews, 1984), through to Angel/Babel (which involved Fouéré’s body being covered in electronic sensors, linked to computer-generated sounds), it is possible to sense underlying their work an engagement with the work of

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Antonin Artaud, and what Artaud meant when he wrote in The Theatre and Its Double that theatre required ‘expression in space (the only real expression in fact)’. Indeed it was only, Artaud claimed, when the theatre was ‘aware of this language in space’ that it would achieve what Artaud evocatively termed ‘the encounter of one epidermis with another’.90 Operating Theatre’s unspoken engagement with Artaud became explicit in 2005, with Ci Git/Here Lies, which hinged on the historical fact that in the summer of 1937, just before he published The Theatre and Its Double, Artaud travelled to Ireland, intending to return to its homeland a staff which he believed had belonged to Saint Patrick. Destitute and unable to speak English, he was ultimately sent back to France, and subsequently confined to the Departmental Asylum in Rouen. Ci Git/Here Lies captures the intense focus on physical performance and audience experience beyond verbal meaning that Artaud advocated. Although also produced in galleries in Dublin and Paris, the performance was most expressive as an installation in the Imperial Hotel, Galway, where Artaud stayed during his fraught visit to Ireland, accumulating an impressive (unpaid) bill. What Roger Doyle termed ‘a performance installation’91 took place in a glass box containing sparse white furniture in which Artaud, played by Fouéré, declaimed a letter he had written to Art O’Briain, Minister Plenipotentiary at the Irish Legation in Paris, railing against his enforced expulsion from Ireland.92 While this performance was place-specific rather than sitespecific, the sheer intensity of the focus on Fouéré’s body, which was made up to suggest Artaud’s syphilitic skin, coupled with the associative power of the hotel, produced a work in which sensory experience rather than intellectual meaning had primacy. Moreover, given the restrictions of the space in which the box was located, the audiences, who numbered no more than eight at any one time, were forced throughout the fifteen minutes of the production into close proximity with the prowling, declaiming body of Artaud from which they were only separated by the fragility of a sheet of glass. While that barrier ensured that ‘the encounter of one epidermis with another’ which Artaud felt lay at the heart of theatre could not occur, it does point towards his idea of ‘attack[ing] the spectator’s sensibility on all sides’ by ‘producing a spectacle where these means of direct action are used in their totality; a spectacle unafraid of going as far as necessary in the exploration of our nervous sensibility’.93 The spatial relationship of audiences with the actors in site-specific and environmental work generally is frequently at variance with the static-passive relationship which pertains in the proscenium arch theatre. However, and despite the adoption of promenade styles which traverse individual

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or separated sites (e.g. convictions and The Wedding Play), the audience is still largely moving around, or through, an action it observes; its own space is inviolate in a manner analogous to that in proscenium arch theatres. Again, Tom Swift’s work with Performance Corporation provides a usefully selfreflexive instance of this aspect of performance in Doctor Ledbetter’s Experiment (2006), in which the audiences were led around various sites in the city of Kilkenny, ultimately ending up in the basement of the abandoned city gaol, where they learn that the main character’s ‘experiment’ involves attempting to reverse the ageing process through prolonged sensory deprivation. In the final scene, Ledbetter refers to the audience members as his ‘volunteers’, and then apparently locks them in the cell, peering in at them through the cell door, before ‘the audience is left in complete darkness’94 and silence, at which point they involuntarily (and more than momentarily) become not necessarily willing performers. The collapse of the spectator–performer spatial compact in some forms of environmental theatre can be understood in terms of private space, particularly as it was theorised in his work on ‘Proxemics’ by the ethnographer Edward T. Hall. In this 1968 article Hall concluded that ‘virtually everything that man is and does is associated with space’, central to which was ‘distance-setting’: the sense of a personal space which should be maintained.95 While he observed that there were significant cultural variables in this regard, a broadly ‘western’ expectation of the ‘intimate’ space to be observed was within 50 centimetres and a ‘personal’ one from 50 to 150 centimetres. As Patrice Pavis noted, ‘as mimesis of social interaction, theatre reproduces these spatial laws’,96 and this is true of the audience–actor spatial relationship as much as it is of the onstage proxemics. When the site-specific work intrudes into the space of the audience, breaking down a passivity that can be maintained in even the most radically conceived productions, then the drama of the site potentially transgresses the ‘distance-setting’ of the audience. This can have a profound and disturbing effect on the mnemonic triggers typically produced by site-specific performances. The work of Louise Lowe and ANU Productions has been directly engaged with a progressive exploration of the spatial relationships in sitespecific performances, testing assumptions about an audience’s private and intimate space in a trilogy of plays: World’s End Lane (2010); Laundry (2011) and The Boys of Foley Street (2012). These works make up three-quarters of a projected ‘quadrology’ set in Monto, Dublin’s old red-light district whose name was derived from Montgomery Street, the present-day Foley Street. Although just a five-minute walk from the Abbey Theatre with which this chapter began, Foley Street has been a place of social deprivation and drug

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addiction for decades, a situation that pre-dates the Celtic Tiger and that continues into its aftermath. The project covers four periods in the history of the area from the 1920s to the contemporary moment, with World’s End Lane set in the 1920s when the area’s brothels were closed down in a moral crusade spearheaded by the Legion of Mary.97 World’s End Lane was performed before audiences of four people, who begin by listening to a history of the area on headphones while inside LAB (a gallery and arts centre); then one of them is attracted by an unknown woman knocking on the window and summoning them out on to the street. As one critic described the experience, ‘I follow [her] around a corner into the Liberty Corner Flats and she immediately gets in my face: “What’d yah follow me for, yah fuckin’ stupid? It’s dangerous ’round here.”’98 The verbal assault is delivered by an actor playing both a prostitute and a commentator on the social history of the area, so audiences are simultaneously apprehending two moments of time captured in the actor’s ‘I/She’ mingling of conversation and commentary. Likewise, in all three plays, the streets and buildings also function as present-day locations, but with their past lives and histories visibly inscribed on their surfaces. This produces a disconcerting doubling as the past of the area is unpeeled, often directly confronting audience members (and the confrontations are usually one-on-one) with the hidden underbelly of the area’s history. Peter Crowley’s Irish Times review of The Boys from Foley Street opened with ‘“Are you afraid?” a young woman asks me directly with angry, accusing eyes.’ And his comment, ‘There’s no point denying it,’99 captures the disturbing quality of these productions in which the frequent intrusions into the ‘intimate’ space of individual audience members makes the Foley Street site a place physically and emotionally experienced rather than simply observed and reflected upon (Figure 6). The Monto project is clearly part of an avant-garde tradition of breaking through the invisible fourth wall which encompasses the disregard for the sanctity of the auditorium that could be traced back to Italian Futurism, Artaud, or the hectoring of audience members in the Living Theatre’s Paradise Now in 1968, but nevertheless ANU’s work is far from a simple desire to épater les bourgeois. Lowe, the project’s director, has acknowledged that she is ‘not interested in audiences sitting back in comfort for two hours’; rather she holds that ‘we need to take advantage of the live nature of theatre, the energies that exist in any space, what that can lead towards, and the visceral effect that that can create’. For Lowe, this effect is born of a fidelity to the historical truth of the site and a desire to make it meaningful for the audience. In her words:

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Figure 6 ‘It’s dangerous ’round here.’ In World’s End Lane (2010) and The Boys of Foley Street (2012), site-specific works by ANU Productions, the audience find themselves not only on the streets of Dublin, but in more than usually close proximity to the actors. This photograph from The Boys of Foley Street, featuring Thomas Reilly. Photo courtesy of ANU Productions

I actually dread when people say they are making a site-specific show and then it turns out that they are just bringing a text into the space, or something they already have into a space. I call that performing off-site, performing outside the theatre, and it might be beautifully done. But for me, real site-specific work is about a forensic examination of space. Translating all the many levels of experience into performance, so that the performance speaks to the space and reflects the space and encapsulates the truth of that space; the lives of people who have inhabited it, its history.100

As the term ‘forensic’ implies, the company’s productions are based on indepth analyses of the site’s history, sensitive to the lived reality of the community. In The Boys of Foley Street, for instance, the community effectively becomes a partner in the production, as residents of the area gave interviews which formed the basis of the script. In some cases, particular individuals allowed their stories to be told under their real names. In these productions, the history of the area across decades is distilled into highly personal encounters with its actor-inhabitants into whose intimate moments audiences are drawn through physical proximity. For instance,

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Laundry is set in the disused building that had housed the area’s Magdalene Laundry, a religious-run institution in which women had been incarcerated for what were seen as a range of sexual ‘offences’, from being unwed mothers, to being prostitutes, or simply being perceived as promiscuous. The audience entered this historically resonant site in groups of three, which were further broken down into solitary individuals, who encounter the inmates in cell-like spaces. The unsettling effect of this intimacy is captured in critic Sara Keating’s record of concern and uncertainty: Should you reach out to comfort the young woman who genuflects in front of you so closely that her head almost touches your knees? Should you help the fragile young woman out of the bath, bind her breasts for her again when she invites you to? Should you stay to protect her when the supervising nun forces you out? Do you agree to help the ghostly girl who hides behind the mirror, a palimpsest upon your disturbed reflection, begging for intervention?101

While the past of the site’s inmates appears almost unmediated, Laundry is in fact a highly wrought piece that blends performance with sophisticated lighting and a complex sound design so as to impact more powerfully on the audience’s sensibilities. The site is crucial, but place still has to be produced through performance for its history to be revealed. Lowe acknowledges that she ‘hates exposition’102 with the result that audiences are projected into situations which are as unexplained and potentially as unpredictable as in reality. The Boys of Foley Street is an hour-long sequence of vignettes that provide a synchronic history of the area, central to which is drug addiction and the violent vigilante action that responded to it in the 1970s and 1980s. At the outset, a four-strong audience is split into pairs and driven separately to a run-down, but still partly inhabited, block of flats just off Foley Street. In the flat, the pair of audience members are further separated and taken individually either into a squalid living room decorated in the florid style of the period, or into a small bathroom with only a sink and a toilet, on which the door is then closed. In the living room, the audience member is thrown into a world of addiction, violence and abuse, directly accused of looking lustfully at one of the women, or offered tea and toast by an adolescent girl. In the bathroom, this fracturing of intimate space is taken still further, where the lone audience member is only inches away from a woman who appears to have been the recent victim of rape. When the performer slowly hands the audience member a safety pin to repair her torn dress, the breakdown of performer–audience proximic space is complete. The Boys of Foley Street thus forces upon an audience an awareness of what Artaud knew: that

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aesthetic effect is grounded upon spatial proximity. Only when the performance will ‘physically envelop the spectator’ and there ‘will be no unoccupied point in space’ will there be ‘neither respite nor vacancy in the spectator’s mind or sensibility’.103 The Boys of Foley Street ran at hourly intervals through the day and into the night, but rather than simply rerun the same events, the performance changed according to the time of day, further intensifying the immersive quality of the experience within the surrounding streets. Accordingly, passers-by could take on an edge of potential menace, for the separation between performance and the everyday was not always entirely clear. This was unsettling for some audiences, but it also invited reflection on responsibility for the society outside the moment of the performance, and in this, The Boys of Foley Street may have unintentionally conjured up an earlier moment in Irish theatre. In 1925 Sean O’Casey critiqued the government of the new Free State for ignoring the plight of the poor, pointing specifically at an area not five minutes’ walk from present-day Foley Street: ‘Grenville Street is here to-day, a little older, but as ugly and horrible as ever.’104 Site-specific work in Ireland may in some respects have broken with the forms of Irish theatre; however, in its commitment to activating the memory of place as a resource for creating theatre, it could equally be seen as an attempt to find new means to draw upon the intensely local sense of place that has fuelled Irish theatrical production, in a variety of different ways, for more than a century.

Conclusion: Spectral spaces

‘The days of the drama are brief and come but seldom,’1 wrote Yeats at the dawn of the twentieth century, and whether in Synge’s elegiac account of a ‘beautiful poetry that is filled with the oldest passions in the world’2 or in Lady Gregory’s excitement over ‘the discovery, the disclosure, of the folk learning, the folk poetry, the folk tradition’,3 the major figures in the creation of the Irish national theatre shared a sense that they had been placed in a unique historical situation, at the cusp of a fading traditional culture and a modern theatre world capable of giving the energies of that culture form and substance. ‘The drama’, said Yeats, ‘has need of cities that it may find men in sufficient numbers’ but it also needs to be fed by ‘the emotions of sailors and husbandmen and users of the spear and the bow’.4 This understanding of the defining dialectic of Irish culture was not simply historical or linguistic; it was spatial, whether in Yeats’s juxtaposition of ‘the cities’ with the fields and seascapes of ‘sailors and husbandmen’ or in Synge’s precise distinction between an urban world where ‘the springtime of the local life has been forgotten, and the harvest is a memory only’ and an older Ireland whose imagination was still ‘fiery, and magnificent, and tender’.5 It thus makes sense that a culture whose energies were produced by the friction of spaces would find one of its definitive aesthetic forms in an art that is fundamentally concerned with the production of colliding spaces: the theatre. Although the city was, as Yeats realised, the necessary location for the theatre, the company who took up residence in the Abbey in 1904 remained haunted by what had been lost: the world of the past, that still lingered in the chronotopic zone of the West of Ireland. For the most part, it was this spatial – and also, therefore, temporal – disjunction that the Irish theatre of the early part of the twentieth century sought to stage. However, in this regard the Irish theatre simply activated with greater than usual intensity a feature of theatre in general for, as Iain Mackintosh observed, ‘an old theatre may be a sacred place, and the ghosts of past 175

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productions are a reality and, if friendly, a benign presence’.6 Marvin Carlson, in The Haunted Stage, goes further, suggesting that ‘one of the universals of performance, both East and West, is its ghostliness, its sense of return, the uncanny but inescapable impression imposed upon its spectators that “we are seeing what we saw before”’.7 Irish theatre was doubly haunted: in the first instance by the spectre of a culture, land and language that had been lost, but which could still populate the stage. And then, once gain, these ghosts were doubled as the Irish National Theatre Society settled into the Abbey Street theatre, and its performances became haunted by memories of the successive conjurations of that lost place in a place of performance. Together, these mingled spaces constituted a deepstructure of memory and expectation in the audience, grounded in a complex set of relationships between space and place. Theatre, in other words, does much more than simply occupy space. Following Lefebvre, we can say that the space of performance does not simply exist; it is produced. Indeed, we have argued that at a fundamental level the theatre can be understood as a machine for making space into place. When an actor walks out upon an acting space, that actor lays down a memory for the audience that is associated with that area of the stage; the simple presence of the actor’s body, or of an object, in a particular location on the stage, transforms that location from Brook’s ‘empty space’ to a place, with memories and associations that will accumulate over the course of a scene, or of an entire play. This process is a condensational version of the process described by Yi-Fu Tuan, or by Edward S. Casey, when they write of the production of place in the wider society. We have also argued that the audience’s identification with the character’s role in producing place from space in the ‘now’ of performance constitutes a primary form of theatrical identification. Place on stage is not something that has been produced; it is produced, moment by moment, layering past memory and future anticipation in the active present (and presence) of the audience. The audience’s participation in that process, alongside that of the performers-as-characters within the fiction of the play, constitutes one of the definitional attractions of the theatre as an aesthetic experience. At the same time, this process is not purely confined to the site of performance. The spatial sense that constituted the géno-text antérieur of the early Abbey audiences was deeply invested in a culturally produced, but theatrically reinforced sense of place. Even Yeats, whose work was perhaps the most engaged of any among his contemporaries with the threat and freedom of modernist theatre space, was ‘certain’, as he wrote in the essay ‘The Holy Places’ in Discoveries (1906), ‘that a man should find

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his Holy Land where he first crept upon the floor, and that familiar woods and rivers should fade into symbol with so gradual a change that he may never discover, no, not even in ecstasy itself, that he is beyond space’.8 There was a period in the first decade or so of the twentieth century when this insistence on the irreducibility of place as a ground of Being generated a productive tension on the Irish stage. The known, familiar, ground of place, usually figured as a country kitchen in the visible zone A of the onstage, called into being its Other: space, existing offstage in the zone non-A, promising both freedom from the confines of the visible onstage world, but simultaneously threatening its destruction, thus putting the figures on the stage under the sign of Being-towards-death. This offstage is the space of history as the clamour of coexisting historical traumas in Cathleen ni Houlihan (1902), as the sea in Riders to the Sea (1904), or, more prosaically (but equally powerfully), as emigration, as the United States, or even as the city, in plays such as The Land (1905). The Irish realist stage could ground its scenic productions on a culturally sanctioned sense of place that was strong enough to call into being an opposing space, thus producing the characteristic spatial double helix of an Irish theatre that disguised its radical modernity in the trappings of realism. Its obverse, or mirror image, in this regard is Beckett’s theatre, which creates a zone-A of space, not place, in which any security of place is a distant memory somewhere offstage in the zone non-A, whether in Krapp’s memories of his youth, in the non-present Godot, or in the remembered world conjured up by the disembodied voice in That Time. When the opposing space of freedom and threat was not produced by the realist stage, Irish theatre withered into the much-derided ‘peasant realism’; at such moments, the stage was at its least interesting. However, throughout the twentieth century the basic structure of Irish stage realism remained intact, so that when the sense of place that had become effectively an official doctrine by mid-century began to fade, slowly at first, the Irish theatre was able to grasp that second fading as it had grasped the first, original fading of traditional peasant culture in 1900. This second fading was only haltingly visible at first, and, as is so often the case, the theatre was a bellwether of what was to come in the wider culture. One of the earliest indications of what lay ahead could be seen on the stage of Dublin’s Gaiety Theatre in 1964, when in Philadelphia, Here I Come! Brian Friel took the stage space of the earlier theatre of place – a country kitchen – and put there a split character, Private Gar/Public Gar, whose sense of self is imprisoned by place, which is the product of memories which are nonetheless fallible, intangible and ultimately non-present. In some respects,

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this was the ‘calamity of yesterday’ of which Beckett wrote in the 1930s, and which would haunt Beckett’s own theatre throughout the subsequent decades: the recognition of a self that is non-identical with past selves, but is nonetheless unable to escape memories of a past that ultimately attach themselves to places, and to bodies in place. Irish theatre in the closing decades of the twentieth century increasingly became a ‘theatre of the calamity of yesterday’, haunted by a past that nevertheless provided only the most shifting and insecure basis for Being in the present, through the persistence of fallible, and often involuntary, memory. Initially, it seemed as if the ghosts that haunted the stage in plays such as Frank McGuinness’s Observe the Sons of Ulster Marching Towards the Somme (1985), or Tom Murphy’s Bailegangaire (1985) were the same ghosts of a fading traditional past that had animated the theatre of Yeats and Lady Gregory seventy or eighty years earlier. However, as the sense of place itself began to be mourned in Irish cultural debate, it became apparent that something more profound was happening. What appeared to be a moment of repetition was in fact the manifestation of a ghostly double. As Irish culture became rapidly immersed in a global culture, initially through television and radio, then through satellite television, digital culture, and intensive engagement with global systems of production and consumption, the old structural binary of a modern culture existing in tension with a traditional culture imploded. By 2002, an Ireland that had imagined its relation to space to be grounded in a communal sense of place was the most globalised country in the world. The hills, once alive with dinnseanchas, the traditional lore of place, were now only dimly lit by the glow of television screens and mobile phones. An Irish theatre that, for much of the twentieth century, had been based on a deeply rooted sense of place responded in at least three distinct ways. Perhaps the most powerful response was in a theatre of spectrality, what we have called a ‘fluorescence of place’ if ‘fluorescence’ is understood as the light emitted by a particle that is dying. This is the theatre of ghosts of a ghost, its spectral effect doubled. The ghosts of Irish writing are no longer the voices that Yeats heard on the Killeenan road, or Synge heard in Aran, speaking from a place where memories carried the listener back through time. They are the ghosts of the time when those voices could still be heard. Or, to put it more simply, the ghosts that are so insistent in contemporary Irish theatre are the ghosts of this theatre’s earlier self, whose ground of Being no longer exists, but whose spectral traces continue to haunt the Irish stage, their voices heard dimly, submerged, as if from the far end of a long-distance telephone line, like the voice of her dead

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daughter heard by Valerie in Conor McPherson’s The Weir (1997). It is a theatre in mourning for its own traditions. This theatre of the fluorescence of place remains a writer’s theatre; like the theatre of place that preceded it, it is able to inhabit the space of the realist stage, although now much as one would inhabit a haunted house. In a theatre world that is globalised, however, this theatre is not immune from the spatial transformation of which Ireland has been at the forefront, and, as Patrick Lonergan has argued, important elements of Irish theatre are now produced globally, intended for audiences in Sydney and Tokyo as much as for Dublin and Belfast. However, the situation is not even as simple as an opposition between a global and a local theatre. As George Ritzer reminds us, very little now escapes some tinge of the global, and where local places once existed, we now have the glocal, produced in plays, such as those of Martin McDonagh, Enda Walsh, or Mark O’Rowe’s Terminus. These works arise from the fluorescence of Irish place; rather than mourning it, however, they are either gleefully free of place, or place is present only as a parodic Other, thus producing a theatre that can happily exist within the spaces and non-places of a globalised theatre touring circuit. The emergence of a globalised theatre, however, now appears to have produced a reaction, in spatial terms, in a growing body of site-specific theatre in Ireland. The Monto plays of ANU Productions (2010–12), for instance, were developed from historical records and oral testimony gathered in Dublin’s north inner city, which are worked into performances that use the material fabric of the city’s buildings and streets to produce for audiences a living sense of place that is non-transferable, incapable of being staged elsewhere, and thus rooted in place. A production such as The Boys of Foley Street (2012) may in some respects be an innovative form of theatre, particularly in an Irish context, in its refusal not only of the proscenium arch, but also of the entire architecture of the theatre, including the playwright. Its ghosts, in Iain Mackintosh’s sense, are not theatrical ghosts at all; they are the living ghosts of the city. However, from another perspective, the flowering of site-specific work in the opening decades of the twenty-first century in Ireland may be an attempt to return to those conditions that made theatre so central to Irish culture in the first instance; the final efforts to tap the last reserves of emplaced memory, in the one location where they cannot be channelled into global systems of production, where place must stay in place. If this is so, we can begin to glimpse, in the years ahead, both the challenges and the necessity of an Irish theatre understood in spatial terms, as a machine for making place from space.

Notes

INTRODUCTION 1 Harvey, Spaces of Global Capitalism, 129. 2 Tompkins, ‘Space and the Geographies of Theatre’, 537. 3 Carlson, Places of Performance; Chauduri, Staging Place; Fischer-Lichte and Wihstutz, Politics and the Performance of Space. 4 Foucault, ‘Of Other Spaces’, 22–7. 5 Lefebvre, Production of Space. Notably the translator, Donald NicholsonSmith, was an associate of the Situationist International. 6 Ubersfeld, Reading Theatre. 7 Brook, Empty Space, 11. 8 Gibson and Brook, ‘Brook’s Africa’, 39. 9 Yeats, Variorum Edition of the Plays, 415. 10 McAteer, Yeats and European Drama, 4. 11 McConachie, ‘Doing Things with Image Schemas’, 587. 12 Yeats, Collected Works, Vol. iii, 265–6. 13 Yeats, Collected Works, Vol. viii, 128. 14 Artaud, Theater and Its Double, 124. 15 Tompkins, ‘Space and the Geographies of Theatre’, 538. 16 Chauduri, Staging Place, x. 17 Kobialka, ‘Theatre and Space’, 559. 18 Ross and Lefebvre, ‘Lefebvre on the Situationists’, 69. 19 Puchner, ‘Society of the Counter-Spectacle’, 8. 20 Ubersfeld, L’école du spectateur, 51. 21 Smyth, Space and the Irish Cultural Imagination; Brewster et al. (eds.), Ireland in Proximity; Harte et al. (eds.), Ireland: Space, Text, Time; Lonergan, Theatre and Globalization; Lojek, The Spaces of Irish Drama. This selection is by no means exhaustive. 1 MAKING SPACE 1 2 3 4

Brook, Empty Space, 11. Helbo et al., Approaching Theatre, 48. Wiles, Tragedy in Athens, 3. Lefebvre, Production of Space, 1. 180

Notes to pages 6–22

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Read, Theatre and Everyday Life, 149. Ibid., 60. Lefebvre, Production of Space, 15. Ibid., 11. Ibid., 26. Ibid., 220. Ibid., 33. Soja, Postmodern Geographies, 44. Wiles, Short History of Western Performance Space, 9–15. McAuley, Space in Performance, 57–8. Lefebvre, Production of Space, 188. Blau, The Audience, 25. McConachie, ‘Doing Things with Image Schemas’, 583. McConachie borrows the concept from Joseph Roach’s Cities of the Dead. 18 Moran, Staging the Easter Rising, 15. 19 Carlson, Places of Performance, 2. 20 Murray, Twentieth-Century Irish Drama, 3. 21 Kruger, The National Stage, 3. 22 Fletcher, Drama, Performance and Polity in Pre-Cromwellian Ireland, 264–5. 23 Yeats, Collected Works, Vol. viii, 32–3. 24 Kruger, The National Stage, 4. 25 ‘Editorial’, Uladh, 1. 26 Pilkington, Theatre and the State, 88. 27 Zucker, ‘Interview with Stephen Rea’, 91. 28 Ibid., 92. 29 Read, Theatre and Everyday Life, 89. 30 Anderson, Imagined Communities, 35, 36. 31 For a fuller version of this argument, see Morash, ‘The Road to God Knows Where’, 101–15. 32 Filewood, Performing Canada, 6. 33 McConachie, ‘Towards a Postpositivist Theatre History’, 465. 34 McConachie, ‘Doing Things with Image Schemas’, 586. This argument is developed at more length in McConachie, American Theater. 35 Postlewait, ‘Spatial Order and Meaning in the Theatre: The Case of Tennessee Williams’, Assaph: Studies in the Theatre, 10 (1994), 49; cited in McConachie, American Theater, 321, n41. 36 Yeats, Collected Works, Vol. viii, 27. 37 Gregory, Our Irish Theatre, 20. 38 W. B. Yeats, Collected Works, Vol. viii, 41. 39 Cave, ‘On the Siting of Doors and Windows’, 97–9. 40 Milligan, Last Feast of the Fianna, 7, 15, 20. 41 Cited in Miller, Noble Drama of W. B. Yeats, 148. 42 McNulty, Ulster Literary Theatre, 106. 43 Bloch, Utopian Function of Art and Literature, 244, 225. 44 Mayne, Selected Plays, 2, 36, 92, 3.

5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17

182

Notes to pages 22–35

45 Chaudhuri, Staging Place, 29. 46 Jullien, ‘L’Théâtre vivant’, 77. 47 McConachie, ‘Doing Things with Image Schemas’, 586. 48 Garvin, Preventing the Future, 4. 49 Mac Liammóir, Enter a Goldfish, 190. 50 ‘Realism’, 2. 51 Longford, ‘A National Asset’, 2. 52 ‘Abbey Theatre’, 53. 53 ‘The New Abbey’, 54. 2 STAGING PLACE 1 Ubersfeld, L’école du spectateur, 51. 2 Brook, Empty Space, 11. 3 Wiles, Short History of Western Performance Space, 243. 4 Sophocles, Theban Plays, 111. 5 Helbo et al., Approaching Theatre, 48. 6 s.v. ‘auditorium, auditory’, OED. 7 Aristotle, Politics and Poetics, 227. 8 Cited in Rosenfield, Georgian Scene Painters and Scene Painting, 24. 9 Shakespearean Promptbooks of the Seventeenth Century. 10 Burke, Riotous Performances, 35. 11 Philips, St Stephen’s Green, 49. 12 Bourke, Riotous Performances, 48. 13 Cooke, Memoirs of Charles Macklin, 283–4. 14 Vardac, Stage to Screen, xviii. 15 Clark, Irish Stage in the Country Towns, 230. 16 Vardac, Stage to Screen, xxi. 17 Scolnicov, ‘Theatre Space’, 25. 18 Yeats, Collected Works, Vol. viii, 27. 19 Genette, Paratexts, 1. 20 Ibid., 2. 21 Ubersfeld, L’école du spectateur, 51. 22 Ibid., 9. 23 Serpieri et al., ‘Toward a Segmentation of the Dramatic Text’, 164. 24 O’Sullivan, ‘How Our Theatre Began’, 12. 25 Nic Shiubhlaigh, Splendid Years, 17. 26 Grene, ‘The Abbey’, 215. 27 Katz Clarke, Emergence of the Irish Peasant Play, 36. 28 Gregory, Our Irish Theatre, 80. 29 Katz Clarke, Emergence of the Irish Peasant Play, 38. 30 Ibid., 57. 31 Grene, Politics of Irish Drama, 76. 32 Hughes, ‘Who the Hell Do We Think We Still Are?’, 13. 33 Tuan, Space and Place, 6, 77.

Notes to pages 35–40

183

Katz Clarke, Emergence of the Irish Peasant Play, 35. Irish Times (13 January 1911), in Yeats, The Hour-Glass, xxviii. Nic Shiubhlaigh, Splendid Years, 34. Ubersfeld, L’école du spectateur, 15. From the Greek genêtikos, the term is derived from genetics and refers to the source of generation – in this case to the generation of theatrical and cultural form and meaning. 38 Kristeva, Kristeva Reader, 121. 39 Ibid., 28. 40 Synge, Collected Works, Vol. iv, 295. 41 Gregory, Our Irish Theatre, 79. 42 Synge, Collected Works, Vol. iv, 57. 43 Ubersfeld, L’école du spectateur, 97. 44 Pavis, Languages of the Stage, 156. 45 Ubersfeld, Reading Theatre, 115, 117, 108. 46 ‘la géométrie interne’. Ubersfeld, L’école du spectateur, 72. 47 ‘. . .un morceau arbitrairement détaché du reste du monde, mais qui viruellement pouurait se prolonger indéfiniment. Les ouvertures ne débouchent pas l’imaginaire du spectateur sur l’envers du spectacle, coulisses, couloirs, loges, mais sur un monde homogène au monde qui est montré sur scène’. Ubersfeld, L’école du spectateur, 58–9. 48 However, for Yeats’s ideas to remodel the Abbey on the plan of the Bohemian National Theatre see Grene, ‘The Abbey’, 211–13. 49 W. B. Yeats, Variorum Edition of the Plays, 214–15. 50 Elam, Semiotics of Theatre and Drama, 28–9. 51 ‘Il est inutile de se demander (et le spectateur ne se demande pas) si les verres et les bouteilles dissent autre chose que: nous sommes dans un café; ils se fonctionnent commes les indices métonomiques d’un lieu.’ Ubersfeld, L’école du spectateur, 63. 52 Katz Clarke, Emergence of the Irish Peasant Play, 64, 63. 53 Gregory, Our Irish Theatre, 31–2. 54 Katz Clarke, Emergence of the Irish Peasant Play, 65. 55 Chauduri, Staging Place, 9. 56 ‘Ce qui est donné dans l’espace théâtral, ce n’est jamais une image du monde, mais li’mage d’une image. Ce qui est “imité” n’est pas le monde, mais le monde repensé selon la fiction et dans le cadre d’une culture et d’un code.’ Ubersfeld, L’école du spectateur, 67. 57 Ibid., 68. 58 Lacan, Écrits, 4, 2. 59 ‘L’effet de réel dans la référentialisation théâtrale correspond toujours à un fontionnement idéologique: la scene dit toujours non pas comment est le monde, mais comment est le monde qu’elle montre.’ Ubersfeld, L’école du spectateur, 259. 60 Katz Clarke, Emergence of the Irish Peasant Play, 94. 61 Reynolds, Modernism, Drama, and the Audience for Irish Spectacle, 59. 62 Harrington, Irish Play on the New York Stage, 24. 34 35 36 37

184

Notes to pages 41–53

63 Foucault, ‘Of Other Spaces’, 22, 24, 27, 26. 64 Chauduri, Staging Place, 30. 65 Synge, Collected Works, Vol. iv, 54. 66 Leerssen, Remembrance and Imagination, 226. 67 Johnson, ‘From Time Immemorial’, 98. 68 Synge, Collected Works, Vol. ii, 66. 69 Foucault, ‘Of Other Spaces’, 26. 70 Leerssen, Remembrance and Imagination, 39–40. 71 Foucault, ‘Of Other Spaces’, 24. 72 Nora, ‘Between Memory and History’, 7. 73 Rigney, ‘Plenitude, Scarcity and the Circulation of Cultural Memory’, 12. 74 Tuan, Space and Place, 123. 75 Ibid., 123. 76 Grene, The Politics of Irish Drama, 52. 77 Tuan, Space and Place, 6. 78 Yeats, Variorum Edition of the Plays, 217, 224–5, 231. 79 Ibid., 231. 80 Synge, Collected Works, Vol. iii, 57. 81 Ibid. 82 ‘Chanel’, ‘Plays with Meanings’, Leader, 125. 83 Lefebvre, ‘Reflections on the Politics of Space’, 31. 3 SPACES OF MODERNITY AND MODERNISM 1 Yeats, Collected Works, Vol. i, 189. 2 Lefebvre, La production de l’espace, 34. 3 Woolf, ‘Mr Bennett and Mrs Brown’, 1. 4 Lefebvre, Production of Space, 25. 5 Berman, All That Is Solid Melts into Air, 15. 6 Gregory, Our Irish Theatre, 50. 7 Hyde, Selected Plays, 34. 8 Synge, Collected Works, Vol. iv, 53. 9 Chaudhuri, Staging Place, 29. 10 Szondi, Theory of the Modern Drama, 22. 11 Yeats, Collected Works, Vol. viii, 71. 12 Szondi, Theory of the Modern Drama, 27. 13 Yeats, Collected Works, Vol. viii, 94–5. 14 Joyce, Origin and History of Irish Names of Places, vii, 86. 15 Yeats, Collected Works, Vol. viii, 57. 16 Synge, Collected Works, Vol. iv, 53. 17 Yeats, Collected Works, Vol. viii, 56–7. 18 Engelberg, Vast Design, 73. 19 Yeats, Collected Works, Vol. viii, 81. 20 Colum, Selected Plays, 17. 21 Kern, Culture of Space and Time, 88.

Notes to pages 54–66

185

Harvey, Condition of Postmodernity, 272. Colum, Selected Plays, 30, 32, 44. Sollors, Beyond Ethnicity, 6. Colum, Selected Plays, 47. Molloy, Selected Plays, 121, 173. Keane, Three Plays, 136, 141. Harvey, Condition of Postmodernity, 265. Prampolini, ‘Futurist Scenography (Manifesto)’, 275; Moholy-Nagy, ‘Theater, Circus, Variety’, 283. 30 Cited by Allen, Modernism, Ireland and Civil War, 90. 31 Dowling, ‘Surrealism’, 60, 62. 32 Brown, ‘Ireland, Modernism and the 1930s’, 25. 33 Mac Liammóir, All for Hecuba, 45–6. 34 Cited in Brown, ‘Ireland, Modernism and the 1930s’, 26. 35 Canfield (ed.), Plays of Changing Ireland, xiv. 36 Cited in Welch, The Abbey Theatre, 119. 37 Irish Times (28 September 1937); cited in O’Farrell, Louis D’Alton and the Abbey Theatre, 102. 38 Mac Liammóir, All for Hecuba, 46. 39 Hunt, The Abbey, 102. 40 Johnston, ‘Towards a Dynamic Theatre’, 3–4. 41 Ibid. 42 Mac Liammóir, All for Hecuba, 71 43 Allen, Modernism, Ireland and Civil War, 59. 44 Canfield (ed.), Plays of Changing Ireland, viii, xi–xii. 45 Brown, ‘Ireland, Modernism and the 1930s’, 27. 46 Mac Liammóir, Theatre in Ireland, 42. 47 Worth, Irish Drama of Europe, 11, 13. 48 Maeterlinck, ‘Le Tragique quotidian’, 92. 49 Frank, Widening Gyre, 9. 50 Esslin, Theatre of the Absurd, 393. 51 Szondi, Theory of the Modern Drama, 56. 52 Yeats, Variorum Edition of the Plays, 315. 53 McAteer, Yeats and European Drama, 52. 54 Levenson (ed.), ‘Introduction’, 2. 55 Yeats, Variorum Edition of the Plays, 257. 56 Ibid., 259, 315. 57 Yeats, ‘The Irish National Literary Society’, 18. 58 Yeats, Variorum Edition of the Plays, 454. 59 Flannery, W. B. Yeats and the Idea of a Theatre, 261. 60 Ibid., 256. 61 The phrase ‘awful costumes’ is from Lennox Robinson, quoting the early Abbey actor Udolphus Wright, in a letter to Seamus O’Sullivan (29 October 1949); M. J. O’Neill Letters, National Library of Ireland, Ms. 36,668. Yeats’s comments are quoted in Foster, W. B. Yeats: A Life, Vol. i, Plate 22. 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29

186

Notes to pages 66–79

62 Yeats, Collected Works, Vol. viii, 128, 131–2. 63 Yeats, Variorum Edition of the Plays, 415. 64 Heilpern, Conference of the Birds. 65 Yeats, Variorum Edition of the Plays, 417. 66 Ibid., 398. 67 Ibid., 416. 68 Taylor, Drama of W. B. Yeats, 135. 69 Yeats, Variorum Edition of the Plays, 400, 404–5. 70 Puchner, Stage Fright, 129, 130. 71 Yeats, Variorum Edition of the Plays, 401. 72 Puchner, Stage Fright, 130. 73 Foster, W. B Yeats, Vol. ii, 42. 74 Ibid., 46. 75 Yeats, Collected Works, Vol. xiii, 131–2. 76 Ibid., Vol. viii, 73–4, 77, 77–8. 77 Ibid., Vol. xiii, 213. 78 Ibid., Vol. x, 131. 79 Yeats, Variorum Edition of the Plays, 1,041. 80 Ibid., 1,041–2. 81 Szondi, Theory of the Modern Drama, 94. 82 Yeats, Variorum Edition of the Plays, 1,049. 83 McAteer, Yeats and European Drama, 176. 84 Beckett, Disjecta, 70. 85 Beckett, Complete Dramatic Works, 96, 100, 102, 94, 96, 97, 132, 106. 86 Wilcox, ‘Ambient Space in Twentieth-Century Theatre’, 550, 543. 87 Blythe, The Abbey Theatre, 24. 4 T H E CA L A M I T Y O F Y E S T E R D A Y Brook, There Are No Secrets, 81. Synge, Collected Works, Vol. iii, 5. Ibid., Vol. ii, 58–9. Tuan, ‘Space and Place’, 421. Murphy, Plays: 3, 101. Andrew, Concepts in Film Theory, 149. Metz, ‘The Imaginary Signifier’, 52. Bennett, Theatre Audiences, 39. Stein, Writings and Lectures, 75. Murphy, Plays: 2, 38. Deane, Strange Country, 71. Duffy, ‘Literature and Art in the Representation of Irish Place’, 67. Friel, Plays: 1, 410; Synge, Collected Works, Vol. iii, 5–6; Carr, By the Bog of Cats, 19. 14 Murphy, Conversations on a Homecoming, in his Plays: 2, 10–11. 15 Carlson, Haunted Stage, 9.

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13

Notes to pages 80–98

187

16 Casey, Remembering, 182. 17 Ibid., 189. 18 Tuan, ‘Space and Place’, 389. 19 Synge, Collected Works, Vol. iii, 21. 20 Hilton, Performance, 14. 21 Power, Presence in Play, 33. 22 Sartre, On Theater, 11. 23 Dürrenmatt, ‘Problems of the Theatre’, 13. 24 Johnston, ‘Towards a Dynamic Theatre’, 3–4. 25 Wilder, ‘The Art of Fiction, No. 16’, n.p. 26 Szondi, Theory of the Modern Drama, 9. 27 Brecht, Brecht on Theatre, 138. 28 Herrero Martín, Doing of Telling, 22. 29 Ricoeur, Time and Narrative, Vol. iii, 4. 30 Jones, The Dramatic Imagination, 34. See also Power, Presence in Play, 15–16. 31 Friel, Plays: 1, 82, 94–5, 52. 32 Friel, Cass McGuire, 7. 33 Friel, Plays 2, 7. 34 Friel, Plays: 1, 375–6. 35 Bergson, Time and Free Will, 104. 36 Heidegger, Being and Time, 401. 37 Friel, Plays: 1, 370. 38 Beckett, Complete Dramatic Works, 222–3. 39 Ibid., 138, 160, 142, 161, 142–3. 40 Ibid., 35, 53. 41 Ubersfeld, Reading Theatre, 108. 42 Beckett, Complete Dramatic Works, 83. 43 Ibid., 388. 44 Scolnicov, Women’s Theatrical Space, 149. 45 Beckett, Complete Dramatic Works, 388. 46 Beckett, Proust, 13. 47 McGuinness, Plays:1, 97. 48 Devlin, After Easter, 11. 49 Cousin, Women in Dramatic Time and Place, 199. 50 Barry, Plays: 1, 240. 51 Rosen, Plays of Impasse, 281. 52 Murphy, Plays: 2, 94, 93, 95, 76. 53 Ricoeur, Time and Narrative, Vol. iii, 159. 54 Tuan, ‘Space and Place’, 390. 5 T H E F L U O R E S C E N C E O F P LA C E 1 Lefebvre, Production of Space, 222. 2 Ibid., 220. 3 Ibid., 224.

188

Notes to pages 98–109

Tuan, ‘Space and Place’, 412. Casanova, World Republic of Letters, 304. Yeats, Collected Works, Vol. viii, 97. Smyth, Space and the Irish Cultural Imagination, 1. Said, Culture and Imperialism, 6. Said, Yeats and Decolonization, 11. Hederman and Kearney, ‘Editorial 1/Endodermis’, 4. Richtarik, Acting Between the Lines, 92. It is worth noting that the phrase emerged in the mid 1960s and was given currency by George Seddon’s Sense of Place: A Response to an Environment: The Swan Coastal Plain, Western Australia (1972). 13 Heaney, Preoccupations, 131, 141, 135–6. 14 Heaney, ‘Place and Displacement’, 127. 15 Heaney, Preoccupations, 148. 16 W. J. Smyth, ‘Explorations of Place’, 3. 17 Sheeran, ‘Genius Fabulae’, 191. 18 Loter, ‘Cathal Black’s Pigs’, p. 128. 19 W. J. Smyth, Map-Making, Landscapes and Memory, 65. 20 Yeats, Collected Works, Vol. viii, 99. 21 Heaney, ‘Sense of Place’, 131. 22 Foster, Nature in Ireland, 43. 23 Kealy, Kerry Playwright, 17–18. 24 Nash, ‘Embodied Irishness’, 109. 25 Tuan, ‘Review of Senses of Place’, 92. 26 Ubersfeld, L’école du spectateur, 59. 27 Synge, Collected Works, Vol. iii, 3. 28 Whelan, ‘The Bases of Regionalism’, 42. 29 Synge, Collected Works, Vol. iii, 5–6. 30 Friel, Plays: 1, 436. 31 McClelland, ‘Review of Translations’, 10. 32 Hardt and Negri, Empire, xiii. 33 Friel, Plays: 1, 399, 437. 34 Synge, Collected Works, Vol. iii, 13, 5, 9. 35 Barrell, Idea of Landscape, 225–7. 36 Synge, Collected Works, Vol. ii, 75. 37 McCormack, Ascendancy and Tradition, 250. 38 Synge, Collected Works, Vol. ii, 58. 39 Fitzpatrick, ‘Synge and Modernity’, 124–5. 40 Jordan, Dissident Dramaturgies, 119. 41 Gregory, Geographical Imaginations, 359. 42 Synge, Collected Works, Vol. iii, 15. 43 Ubersfeld, Reading Theatre, 26. 44 Soja, Postmodern Geographies, 80. 45 Lefebvre, Production of Space, 188. 46 Friel, Essays, Diaries, Interviews, 75. 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12

Notes to pages 109–24

189

47 Tuan, Space and Place, 6. 48 Ibid. 49 Synge, Collected Works, Vol. ii, 103. 50 Friel, Brian Friel in Conversation, 148. 51 Heidegger, Poetry, Language, Thought, 213. 52 Ibid., 129. 53 Heidegger, History of the Concept of Time, section 6, 56. 54 Heidegger, Poetry, Language, Thought, 154. 55 Heidegger, The Question of Being, 24. The comments are those of Wilde and Kluback in their introduction. 56 Heidegger, Basic Writings, 243. 57 Kearney, ‘Brian Friel and Ireland’s Verbal Theatre’, 22. 58 Gregory, Our Irish Theatre, 50. 59 Yeats, Collected Works, Vol. viii, 6, 8. 60 McKenna, ‘The Word and the Flesh’, 90. 61 Russell, ‘My Opinion of Broadcasting’, 56. 62 Lefebvre, Production of Space, 221. 63 Tuan, Space and Place, 33. 64 Ibid, 157, 178. 65 Lojek, The Spaces of Irish Drama, 36. 66 Kilroy, ‘A Generation of Playwrights’, 3. 67 Canfield (ed.), ‘Introduction’, xi–xii. 68 Kilroy, ‘A Generation of Playwrights’, 3. 69 McDonagh, Plays:1, 3. 70 Ibid., 3, 22. 71 Ibid., xi–xii. 72 McDonagh, The Cripple of Inishmaan, 1. 73 ‘Il est inutile de se demander (et le spectateur ne se demande pas) si les verres et les bouteilles dissent autre chose que: nous sommes “dans un café”; ils se fonctionnent commes les indices métonomiques d’un lieu.’ Ubersfeld, L’école du spectateur, 63. 74 McDonagh, Plays: 1, 18–19. Appropriately, given the range of cross-cultural references, the song is ‘The Body of an American’. 75 Walsh, The Walworth Farce, 5, 7, 59, 42, 85. 76 Walsh, The New Electric Ballroom, 43. 77 Wallace, ‘A Micronarrative Imperative’, 1. The phrase ‘obsolescence of metanarrative apparatus of legitimation’ is from Jean-François Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition, xxiv. 6 THEATRE OF THE WORLD 1 2 3 4

Massey, ‘Global Sense of Place’, 24. ‘Measuring Globalisation’, 54–69. Augé, Non-Places, vii-viii. Bachelard, Poetics of Space, 4.

190

Notes to pages 124–38

5 Augé, Non-Places, 5. 6 Lonergan, Theatre and Globalization, 9–14. 7 Kearney, ‘Brian Friel and Ireland’s Verbal Theatre’, 23. 8 Ritzer, ‘Rethinking Globalization’, 207. 9 Ibid., 195. 10 Graham-Jones, ‘Editorial Comment’, ix. 11 Ritzer, ‘Rethinking Globalization’, 195. 12 Grene, Politics of Irish Drama, 98–9. 13 Ritzer, ‘Rethinking Globalization’, 202. 14 Ubersfeld, Reading Theatre, 6, 19. 15 Hynes, ‘Roundtable Discussion’, 89. 16 Ubersfeld, Reading Theatre, 36. 17 Morash, History of Irish Theatre, 136. 18 Holloway, Joseph Holloway’s Abbey Theatre, 81. 19 Quoted in Kilroy (ed.), The ‘Playboy’ Riots, 9–10. 20 Quoted in Murphy, ‘From Scrapegrace to Grásta’, 32. 21 McFeely, ‘Between Two Worlds’, 60, 64. 22 Harrington, Irish Play on the New York Stage, 68, 61. 23 Byrne, ‘Belfast Said “No”’, 43. 24 O’Toole, ‘The Dublin Theatre Festival’, 191. 25 Smith, ‘Reflections on a 21st Anniversary’, n.p. 26 Playboy of the Western World (dir. Hurst). 27 Synge, Collected Letters, 74. 28 Frazier, ‘“Quaint Pastoral Numbskulls”’, 61. 29 Frazier, ‘Postmodern Paddywackery’, 124. 30 Note in programme for Children of the Wolf by John Peacock, staged 27 November to 2 December 1975 at Jesuit Hall, Sea Road, Galway. 31 Burke, ‘The First Ten Years’, 14. 32 Delaney, ‘An Instinctive Response’, 52. 33 Hynes, ‘Druid Go To Sea’, 75–6. 34 Hays, ‘Suggestions about the Social Origins of Semiotic Practice in the Theater’, 371. 35 Mighty Talk: A Journey with DruidSynge. 36 O’Toole, ‘Starting from Scratch’, 51. 37 ‘About Druid’. 38 Rebellato, ‘Playwriting and Globalisation’, 103, 109, 111. 39 ‘About Druid’. 40 Gregory, Our Irish Theatre, 20. 41 Central Statistics Office, This is Ireland, 35–41. 42 Adigun and Doyle, Playboy of the Western World, 1. 43 Ibid., 19. 44 Allen, ‘Synge, Reading, and Archipelago’, 170, 159. 45 Adigun, ‘Re-Writing Synge’s Playboy’, 261. 46 Adigun and Doyle, Playboy of the Western World, 84. 47 Lonergan, Theatre and Globalization, 223.

Notes to pages 138–50

191

48 Pilný, ‘The Translator’s Playwright’, 155, 154. 49 Lonergan, ‘Irish Theatre and Globalisation’, 182. 50 Ibid., 185. 51 Harrington, Irish Play on the New York Stage, 7. 52 Grene, Politics of Irish Drama, 198. 53 Eagleton, ‘The Ideology of Irish Studies’, 13. 54 Quinn, Playboy of the Western World, Act I, 1. Pagination in the manuscript runs from page 1 for each of the three acts. 55 ‘The Playboy of the Western World’, panpantheatre.com 56 Quinn, Playboy of the Western World, Act 1, 6. 57 Synge, Collected Works, Vol. iv, 71. 58 Quinn, The Playboy of the Western World, Act 1, 8. 59 Liang and Ma, ‘China's Floating Population’, 467–8. 60 Tatlow, ‘The Chinese Playboy’. 61 Quinn, Playboy of the Western World, Act 2, 9. 62 Ubersfeld, Reading Theatre, 19. 63 Barthes, ‘Putting on the Greeks’, 59. 64 A video of the 1999 production in Rotterdam can be viewed in the British Library, London. 65 Swettenham, ‘Irish Rioters, Latin American Dictators, and Desperate Optimists’ Play-Boy’, 242. 7 T HE AT RE O F T H E S T RE ET 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17

Yeats, Collected Works, Vol. iv, 215. Carroll, ‘Asbestos Work to Close Abbey Stage’. Sweeney, ‘O’Casey’s “Plough and Stars” Returns To Teach New Generation’, 3. O’Casey, Collected Plays, Vol. i, 161, 93. Carlson, Places of Performance, 206. Katz Clarke, Emergence of the Irish Peasant Play, 34. Singleton, ‘The Cartoucherie’, 139. Katz Clarke, Emergence of the Irish Peasant Play, 35. Carlson, ‘Theatre as Civic Monument’, 24. Hays, ‘Lincoln Center and Some Other Cultural Paradigms’, 25–30. Carlson, ‘Theatre as Civic Monument’, 27. Elsom and Tomalin, History of the National Theatre, 82. ‘Adjournment Matter: Abbey Theatre’, Seanad Éireann Debates, Vol. 165 (21 February 2001). ‘Lyric Theatre Mission Statement’. Culture and Arts Unit, Belfast City Council, Integrated Cultural Strategy for Belfast, 3. Tourism, Culture and Arts, Belfast City Council, Cultural Framework for Belfast 2012–15, 3, 28. ‘Adjournment Matter: Abbey Theatre’, Seanad Éireann Debates, Vol. 165 (21 February 2001).

192

Notes to pages 150–60

18 ‘Abbey Theatre: Statements’, Seanead Éireann Debates, Vol. 190 (26 June 2008). 19 Keating, ‘The Abbey and the GPO’, B3. 20 Norris, ‘Iconic Marriage of Yeats and Pearse’, 13. 21 Hegarty, ‘Abbey Theatre Saga Takes New Twist’. 22 Dowler, ‘Planning the Culture of Cities’, 21. 23 Planning Department, Dublin City Council, Dublin City Development Plan, 2011–2017, 106. 24 Florida, Cities and the Creative Class, 167. 25 Dublin City Council, ‘Notes for Media Day’, 2006. Cited in Philip Lawton, ‘Creative Entrepreneurship’, 146. 26 McKinnie, City Stages, 11. 27 Ibid., 39. 28 Bennett, ‘Performing Ireland’, 30. 29 Ibid. 30 Maitland, Audiences for the Performing Arts in Ireland, 35. The authors would like to thank the Theatre Forum for use of this report. 31 Kirby et al., Reinventing Ireland, 10. 32 Abbey Theatre, abbeyonehundred, 46. 33 Kruger, The National Stage, 3. 34 Crowley, ‘The Plough and the Stars’, n.p. 35 McKinnie, ‘Urban National, Suburban Transnational’, 258. 36 Ibid., 259. 37 ‘Minister announces details of design competition for new national theatre in Dublin's Docklands’; see also ‘Abbey Theatre Development: Written Answers’ (25 October 2007), Dail Debates, oireachtasdebates.oireactas.ie. 38 McKinnie, ‘Urban National, Suburban Transnational’, 276. 39 Lonergan, Theatre and Globalization, 219. 40 Rebellato, ‘Playwriting and Globalisation’, 103. 41 McGrath, A Good Night Out, 58. 42 Gardner, ‘“Site-Specific Theatre”?’, n.p. 43 Schechner, Environmental Theater, x. 44 Kaye, Site-Specific Art, 3, 2. 45 Massey, ‘Places and Their Pasts’, 188, 190. 46 Harvie, Staging the UK, 42. 47 Cited in Malone, Theatre in Urban Regeneration, 221. 48 ‘Ballymun Regeneration’. 49 Ballymun Regeneration Ltd, Sustaining Regeneration, 21. 50 Gregory, Geographical Imaginations, 359. 51 Bolger, Ballymun Trilogy, 107. 52 Keating, ‘Home in a Foreign Land’, n.p. 53 Bolger, Ballymun Trilogy, 104, 196, 300, 17, 69. 54 Brecht, Brecht on Theatre, 186. 55 Keating, ‘Home in a Foreign Land’, n.p. 56 Malone, Theatre in Urban Regeneration, 235.

Notes to pages 160–9

193

57 Keating, ‘Home in a Foreign Land’, n.p. 58 Bolger, ‘Dermot Bolger’. 59 Malone, Theatre in Urban Regeneration, 240. 60 Derry Frontline Culture and Education, programme for Threshold, 19. 61 Pilkington, ‘Resistance to Liberation’, 26, 20. 62 Baron Cohen, Threshold, 1. 63 Pilkington, ‘Resistance to Liberation’, 23, 27, 23–5. 64 Baron Cohen, ‘Listening to the Silences’, 181. 65 Cited in Mayer, ‘Culture, Property and Theatre’, 313. 66 Moriarty, ‘The Wedding Community Play Project’, 13. 67 Urban, Community Politics and the Peace Process, 86. 68 Rea, speaking in ‘History Boys on the Rampage’. 69 Gibbons and Whelan, ‘In Conversation with Stephen Rea’, 11. 70 Rea, speaking in ‘History Boys on the Rampage’. 71 For detailed accounts and analysis of convictions see Urban, Community Politics and the Peace Process, 74–90; Harvie, Staging the UK, 53–72; and McKinnie, ‘The State of the Place’, 580–97. 72 Holland, ‘Voices from the Past’, 18. 73 Harvie, Staging the UK, 58. 74 Moriarty, ‘The Wedding Community Play Project’, 15. A documentary on the making of the production can be seen on vimeo.com/6034613. Accessed 16 January 2013. 75 Ballybeen Community Theatre, ‘Our Wedding Video’. 76 Moriarty, ‘The Wedding Community Play Project’ 26. 77 Cited in Urban, Community Politics and the Peace Process, 87. 78 Moriarty, ‘The Wedding Community Play Project’, 14. 79 The wedding was held in Rosemary Street Presbyterian church, the same church in which Northern Star was produced in 1998. In both cases the church’s association with the non-sectarian ideals of the United Irishmen emphasised the values informing the productions. 80 Ballybeen Community Theatre, ‘Our Wedding Video’. 81 Urban, Community Politics and the Peace Process, 75. 82 Moriarty, ‘The Wedding Community Play Project’, 28. 83 Paula McFetridge interview with Eva Urban (2010); cited in Urban, Community Politics and the Peace Process, 75. 84 Swift, Selected Plays, 32. 85 Macnas, Cargo de Nuit, ,n.p. 86 Maples, Culture War, 67. 87 Swift, Selected Plays, 164. 88 Casey, Remembering, 182, 202, 189. 89 O’Toole, ‘Anomalous Operation’, 35. 90 Artaud, Theater and Its Double, 89–90. The full passage – ‘le rapprochement de deux épidermes dans un stupre sans landemain’ (Oeuvres Complets Vol. iv, 95) – is expressive of the full intensity of Artaud’s aesthetic, one which few of his advocates wished to emulate.

194

Notes to pages 169–77

Grimes, ‘Interview with Roger Doyle’. These events form the basis of Saint Artaud by Aidan Mathews. Artaud, Theater and Its Double, 86–7. Swift, Selected Plays, 29. Hall, ‘Proxemics’, 95, 83. Pavis, Dictionary of the Theatre, 290. As described by Louise Lowe this ‘four-part (over four years) multi-layered project allows the audience to at once watch it, reflect on it, and live it simultaneously. Ultimately creating environments where 100 years of history can fold, clash, interact, contradict and tell its own story in its own way. Together the four-parts will reveal the interpenetration of space, place and culture, creating an evolving work of historical and contemporary detail. No work of this scale, looking at a specific area has ever before been achieved in Ireland. This is not a work of fiction. It is a geographical project exploring the quarter mile history of Foley Street and its environs over the last one hundred years.’ Communication to the authors, 7 September 2012. 98 Weaver, ‘Geography and Community’. 99 Crowley, ‘The Boys of Foley Street’. 100 Keating, ‘What Site Specific Really Means’. 101 Keating, ‘Laundry’. 102 Comment to authors, 7 September 2012. 103 Artaud, Theater and Its Double, 125–6. 104 O’Casey, Letters, 131. 91 92 93 94 95 96 97

C O N C L U S I O N : S P E C T R A L S P AC E S 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8

Yeats, Collected Works, Vol. iv, 123–4. Synge, Collected Works, Vol. ii, 112. Gregory, Our Irish Theatre, 142. Yeats, Collected Works, Vol. iv, 123–4. Synge, Collected Works, Vol. iv, 54. Mackintosh, Architecture, Actor and Audience, 84. Carlson, The Haunted Stage, 1. Yeats, Collected Works, Vol. iv, 215.

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Index

Abbey Theatre (Dublin), 2, 5, 13–14, 19–22, 24, 34–40, 47–54, 56–7, 61–2, 66, 69, 74, 98, 112–13, 115, 127–31, 137, 143, 145–9, 170, 175–6, 183 Irish Literary Theatre, 11, 19–20, 23, 35, 44, 48, 59, 69, 101, 133, 135 Irish National Dramatic Society (and Company), 39, 68, 146 Irish National Theatre Society, 11–13, 38, 146–8, 150, 176 Peacock, stage size, 23–5 peasant realism, 2, 24, 34, 43–5, 48–52, 56, 112, 117, 146, 177 proposed relocation, 150–4 scenic design, 1930s, 57–9 stage size (1904), 48–51, 66 stage size (1966), 25–6 Adigun, Bisi, 137–8, 142 AE see Russell, George All at Home (anon.), 30 Allen, Nicholas, 20, 61, 137, 183 All-Ireland Theatre Festival, 13 An Phoblacht, 106 Anderson, Benedict, 17–18, 124 Andrew, Dudley, 77 Antient Concert Rooms (Dublin), 146 Antoine, André, 31, 34, 39 Théâtre Libre, 31, 39 ANU Productions (Dublin), 5, 170–1 Boys of Foley Street, The, 170, 172–4, 179 Laundry, 170, 172–3 Monto plays, 170–4, 179, 194 World’s End Lane, 170 Ardowen Theatre (Enniskillen), 14 Aristotle, 28, 94 Artaud, Antonin, 3, 171, 173 influence on Operating Theatre, 168–9 Augé, Marc, 124, 167 axis theatre (Dublin), 14, 156, 160 Bachelard, Gaston, 124 Bakhtin, Mikhail, 41

chronotope, 41 Barrell, John, 107 Barry, Sebastian, 5, 92 Steward of Christendom, The, 92 Baudry, Jean-Louis, 77 Bauhaus, 2, 56 Beckett, Samuel, 4, 63, 72–4, 87–91, 94, 123, 125, 177 body in plays of, 89–90 calamity of yesterday, 90–2, 178 Proust, 91 Endgame, 72–3, 88 Happy Days, 88 Krapp’s Last Tape, 87 Not I, 90 Rockaby, 89 That Time, 89–90, 177 Waiting for Godot, 72–3, 87–9 Behan, Brendan The Quare Fellow, 92 Belfast Festival, 164–5 Belfast Opera House (Belfast), 98 Bennett, Susan, 77, 152 Bergson, Henri, 85–6, 89, 92 Berman, Marshall, 48 Blau, Herbert, 8–9, 18 Bloch, Ernst, 21 Blue Raincoat (Sligo), 112 Blythe, Ernest, 74 body, 7, 40, 43, 70, 79–81, 92–3, 104, 111, 121, 125, 168–9, 176, 178 Bolger, Dermot, 156, 159, 161 Ballymun Trilogy, 156–61, 167 Bonn, Carl, 59 Bord Gáis Energy Theatre (Dublin), 155 Boucicault, Dion, 19, 26, 31, 40, 47, 130–1 Colleen Bawn, The, 19, 31 Shaughraun, The, 26, 130 box set, 21, 23, 25, 34, 49, 52, 134 Boyle, William Building Fund, The, 128

210

Index Braun, Kazimierz, 125 Brecht, Bertolt, 82, 94, 159, 161 Mother Courage, 94 Brennan, Séamus, 154 broadcasting, 17–18, 54–5, 102, 114–15, 118, 124, 135, 178 Brook, Peter, 2–3, 6, 27, 92, 176 Theatre of Cruelty, 2–3 Brown, Terence, 57, 62 Burkhead, Henry Cola’s Furie, 29 Butler, Judith, 7 Campbell, Kelly, 145 Canfield, Curtis, 57, 61, 117 Capek, Karl, 25 Carlson, Marvin, 1, 9, 79, 145, 147–9, 176 Carr, Marina, 78, 112, 136 By the Bog of Cats, 78, 136 Cartoucherie (Paris), 146 Carville, Daragh, 164 Casanova, Pascale, 98 Casey, Edward S., 73, 80, 90, 93, 168, 176 Cave, Richard Allen, 20 Censorship of Publications Act (1929), 23 Chaudhuri, Una, 1, 3, 22, 39, 49 cinematic identification, 76–7 Civic Theatre (Dublin), 14 Clark, Brian Whose Life Is It Anyway?, 92 Cleary, Joe, 100 Cohen, Dan Baron Threshold, 160–2 Colum, Pádraic, 44, 53–4, 63, 84, 117 Fiddler’s House, The, 44 Land, The, 53–5, 63, 84, 177 convictions, 164–7, 170 Corn Exchange (Dublin), 112 Costello, Joe, 149 country kitchen set, 23, 36, 113, 119, 177 Craig, Edward Gordon, 21, 23–4, 35 Crane Bag, The, 100, 112 Crawley, Peter, 153, 171 Cultural Framework for Belfast 2012–15, 149 D’Alton, Louis The Man in the Cloak, 58 Deane, Seamus, 78, 100 Decroux, Étienne, 112 Deenihan, Jimmy, 151 Delaney, Frank, 133 Derry Frontline, 160, 165 Desperate Optimists, 144 Play-Boy, 142–4 Devlin, Anne

211

After Easter, 92 diegesis, 20, 28, 31–2, 43, 49, 64, 67–8, 73, 89, 104–7, 109, 138 dinnseanchas, 103, 110, 178 Donovan, Dave, 167 Dowler, Kevin, 151 Dowling, John, 56 Doyle, Roddy, 137–8, 142 Doyle, Roger, 111, 168–9. See also Operating Theatre Draíocht Theatre (Dublin), 14 Druid Theatre (Galway), 14–16, 128, 132–6, 155 Dublin City Council Development Plan for 2011–2017, 151 Dublin Theatre Festival, 125, 132 Dudgeon, Vere, 59 Duffy, Patrick, 78 Dürrenmatt, Friedrich, 81 Easter Rising (1916), 9, 69, 151, 157 École de Mime Corporel Dramatique, 112 École Jacques Lecoq, 112 Edwards, Hilton, 23–5, 57, 60, 62. See also Mac Liammóir, Micheál Egan, Jo, 166 Elam, Keir, 39 Engelberg, Edward, 52 environmental theatre, 155, 167–8, 170. See also site-specific; place-specific Ervine, St John, 69 Esslin, Martin theatre of situation, 63 Evreinov, Nikolai, 25 Theatre of the Soul, 61 expressionism, 59, 61–2, 82, 134 Fay, Frank, 36, 39 Fay, William, 34, 39, 147 Field Day Theatre Company (Derry), 14–16, 99–103, 110–11, 134, 162–4, 166 Fifth Province, 100 Filewood, Alan, 18 Fitzpatrick, David, 107 Flaherty, Robert Man of Aran, 38, 116 Flannery, James, 66, 185 Florida, Richard, 152 fluorescence of place, 117, 178–9 Ford, John The Quiet Man, 153 Foreign Policy, 122 Foster, John Wilson, 103 Foster, R. F., 68 Foucault, Michel, 1, 3 heterotopia, 3, 40–2, 44

212

Index

Fouéré, Olwen, 111, 168–9. See also Operating Theatre Frank, Joseph, 63 Frazier, Adrian, 132, 135 Friel, Brian, 4, 83–7, 91, 111–12, 115–16, 177 Aristocrats, 83 Communication Cord, The, 162 Dancing at Lughnasa, 83–4, 86–7, 113–17, 120–1 Faith Healer, 84–5, 87, 92, 114, 117 Freedom of the City, The, 84 Loves of Cass McGuire, The, 84 Making History, 163–4, 167 Philadelphia, Here I Come!, 83, 115–16, 177 Translations, 14, 78, 83, 104–11, 114–17, 162 Futurism, 56, 61 Gaelic American, 129 Gaiety Theatre (Dublin), 34–5, 132, 146, 177 Garvin, Tom, 23 Gate Theatre (Dublin), 4, 14, 23–5, 57, 59–62, 125 Motley, 24–5, 57, 59 Genette, Gérard paratext, 33, 41, 116 geography, theatrical, 3, 13 Gibbons, Luke, 100 globalisation, 5, 19, 26, 33, 40, 55, 106–7, 123–7, 131, 134–9, 142, 144, 149–55, 167, 178–9 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, 25 Gorman, Damian, 164 Graham-Jones, Jean, 126 Grand Canal Theatre. See Bord Gáis Energy Theatre Gregory, Augusta, 2, 11–13, 20–1, 34, 36, 39, 44, 46, 48, 66, 105, 112, 135, 175, 178 Travelling Man, The, 44 Gregory, Augusta and Yeats, W. B. Cathleen ni Houlihan, 20, 34, 38, 43–7, 49, 124, 146, 177 Gregory, Derek, 108 Grene, Nicholas, 34–5, 43–4, 125, 127, 139 Guildhall (Derry), 162–3 Hall, Edward T., 170 Handke, Peter, 161 Hardt, Michael, 106 Harrington, John, 40, 130, 139 Harvey, David, 1, 17, 53, 56 Harvie, Jen, 156, 164 Hawk’s Well Theatre (Sligo), 14 Hays, Michael, 134, 148 Heaney, Seamus, 100–1, 103, 111–12 Heath, Stephen, 77 Hederman, Mark Patrick, 100 Heidegger, Martin, 80, 86–7 Being-towards-Death, 87

dwelling, 80, 112, 123 language, 110–11 Helix Theatre (Dublin), 14 Henry, Paul, 37 Herrero Martín, Rosana, 82 Hill, Derek, 37 Hilton, Julian, 80 Holloway, Joseph, 129 home, 54–5, 75–6, 111, 116, 121, 129, 135, 158–60 Hone, Nathaniel, 37 Horniman, A. E. F., 66, 69 Hughes, Declan, 35 Shiver, 124 Hunt, Hugh, 57–9 Hurst, Brian Desmond, 132 Husserl, Edmund, 110 Hyde, Douglas Casadh an tSúgáin, 44, 49 Hynes, Garry, 128, 133–4 Ibsen, Henrik, 42, 47, 49 Ghosts, 50 Peer Gynt, 23–4 Icre, Fernand Butchers, The, 31 Integrated Cultural Strategy for Belfast, 149 Ireland To-Day, 56 Irish Bookman, 72 Irish Independent, 145 Irish Literary Society, 64 Irish Literary Theatre. See Abbey Theatre (Dublin) Irish National Dramatic Society (and Company). See Abbey Theatre (Dublin) Irish National Theatre Society. See Abbey Theatre (Dublin) Irish Radio Review, 114 Irish Times, 58, 150, 153, 164, 171 Jarry, Alfred Ubu Roi, 2–3 Johnson, Nuala C., 41 Johnston, Denis, 24, 59–62, 74, 81, 123 Old Lady Says ‘No!’, The, 60 Jones, Marie, 164–5 Stones in His Pockets, 125 Jones, Robert Edmond, 82 Jordan, Eamonn, 108 Joyce, James, 91 Joyce, P. W., 51 Jullien, Jean, 22 Katz Clarke, Brenna, 34, 40, 146 Kavanagh, Patrick, 100 Kaye, Nick, 156

Index Keane, John B., 55, 103 Field, The, 55–6 Kearney, Richard, 100, 109–12, 125 Keating, Sara, 173 Kern, Stephen, 53 Kilroy, Tom, 91, 112, 117 Klaxon, 56 Kobialka, Michal, 3 Kristeva, Julia, 36 Kruger, Loren, 10–11 LAB (Dublin), 171 Lacan, Jacques, 40–1, 76, 94, 97 Lee, Joe, 102 Leerssen, Joep, 42 Lefebvre, Henri, 1, 3–180 conceived space, 10, 14, 18, 27, 49, 53, 102, 109, 123–4, 126, 136, 139, 141 l’espace de “bons sens”, 4, 48, 56, 83, 85 lived space, 7–8, 24–5, 42–3, 48, 55, 60, 107, 114, 131, 136 monumentality, 97–8 perceived space, 9, 14, 18, 53, 114, 141 spatial triad, 3, 7, 32 Leventhal, Con, 56 Libeskin, Daniel, 155 local, 5, 13, 18, 41, 55, 101, 103, 124, 126–7, 131, 135, 138, 142, 152, 154–5, 158–61, 174–5, 179 Locke, John, 110 Logan, John, 154 Lojek, Helen, 5, 117 Lonergan, Patrick, 5, 125–6, 138–9, 154, 179 Longford, Christine, 25 Lowe, Louise, 5, 146, 170–4, 194 Lynch, Martin, 164–5 Lyotard, Jean-François, 189 Lyric Theatre (Belfast), 14, 149 Mac Conghail, Fiach, 151 Mac Liammóir, Micheál, 23–5, 57, 59–62. See also Edwards, Hilton Mackintosh, Iain, 175 Macklin, Charles, 30 Macnas (Galway), 167–8 Maeterlinck, Maurice, 63 Malone, Niamh, 159–60 Maples, Holly, 168 Martyn, Edward, 11, 135 Massey, Doreen, 6, 156 Mathews, Aidan, 168 Matura, Mustapha, 144 Mayne, Rutherford Drone, The, 22 Troth, The, 22 Turn of the Road, The, 22

213

McAteer, Michael, 2, 64, 72 McAuley, Gay, 7 McCafferty, Owen, 164 McCartney, Nicola, 164 McConachie, Bruce A., 2, 8, 18, 22, 25, 197 McCormack, W. J., 107 McDonagh, Martin, 5, 112, 117–18, 179 Beauty Queen of Leenane, The, 117 Cripple of Inishmaan, The, 118 Leenane Trilogy, 118 Lonesome West, The, 117 Skull in Connemara, A, 117 McFeely, Deirdre, 130 McFetridge, Paula, 165–6 McGrath, John, 155 McGuinness, Frank, 112 Observe the Sons of Ulster Marching Towards the Somme, 91–2, 94, 178 McKenna, David, 112 McKenna, Siobhan, 132 McKinnie, Michael, 152, 154 McMaster, Anew, 13 McNulty, Eugene, 21 McPherson, Conor, 92, 108, 112, 120 Weir, The, 35, 92, 94, 108, 179 Merleau-Ponty, Maurice, 80 Metz, Christian, 76–7 Mies van der Rohe, Ludwig, 25 Mill Gate Theatre (Belfast), 31 Mill Theatre (Dublin), 14 Miller, Arthur Death of a Salesman, 71 Milligan, Alice Last Feast of the Fianna, The, 20 mimesis, 24, 30, 32, 38, 42, 68, 76, 88, 104, 108, 113 Mitchell, Gary, 164 Mnouchkine, Adriane, 146 modernism, 48, 57, 59–63, 65, 73–4, 81–2, 87, 123, 150, 176 Moholy-Nagy, László, 56 Moiseiwitsch, Tanya, 57–9, 62 Molesworth Hall (Dublin), 23, 64, 147–8 Molière Le Misanthrope, 128 Molloy, M. J., 54 Wood of the Whispering, The, 54 Moloch, Harvey, 154 Montague, John, 100–1 Moran, Robert, 9 Moriarty, Gerri, 162, 166 Morris, William, 64 Mulvey, Laura, 77 Murphy, Tom, 76, 78, 91, 112 Bailegangaire, 92–4, 117–18, 178

214

Index

Murphy, Tom (cont.) Conversations on a Homecoming, 78–9 Sanctuary Lamp, 76 Murray, Christopher, 9 Murray, Ciaran, 157 Murray, T. C. Blind Wolf, The, 52 Nash, Catherine, 103 national theatre, 10–18, 24–5, 33, 124, 127, 134, 138, 149, 151, 175 National Theatre (London), 149 National Theatre Music Hall (Dublin), 16 nationalism, 14, 17, 46, 57, 78, 106, 129–30, 165 naturalism, 21–2, 31, 39, 49, 71, 113, 118, 158 Negri, Antonio, 106 New Theatre Quarterly, 143 Nic Shiubhlaigh, Máire, 34, 36 Nicholson-Smith, Donald, 48 Noh, 32, 67–8, 70, 104 Nora, Pierre, 3, 42, 79, 105 lieux de mémoire, 3, 42, 45, 71, 79, 91, 105, 116, 120, 154 Norris, David, 150 Northern Ireland, 14, 23, 101, 112, 149, 161–6 O’Casey, Sean, 174 Dublin Trilogy, 21, 151, 153 The Plough and the Stars, 145, 151, 154, 197 O’Connor, Francis, 134 O’Keeffe, John The Giant’s Causeway, 31 O’Neill, Eugene, 24 O’Reilly Theatre (Dublin), 145, 148 O’Rowe, Mark Terminus, 121, 144, 179 O’Sullivan, Seamus, 34 O’Toole, Fintan, 118, 132, 134, 168 Operating Theatre (Dublin), 111, 168 Angel/Babel, 168 Ci Git/Here Lies, 169 Diamond Body, The, 168 Ouroboros Theatre Company (Dublin), 163 Pan Pan Theatre Company (Dublin), 142, 155 Playboy of the Western World, The, 139–42 Paris Opéra, 148 Parker, Stewart, 162 Northern Star, 92, 162, 193 Pentecost, 92 Pavillion Theatre (Dun Laoghaire), 14 Pavis, Patrice, 37, 170 Peacock Theatre (Dublin). See Abbey Theatre (Dublin) peasant realism. See Abbey Theatre (Dublin)

Performance Corporation, 9, 166–8. See also Swift, Tom Philips, William, 29 St Stephen’s Green, 29, 32, 67 Pilný, Ondřej, 138 place-specific, 80, 139, 143–4, 155–6, 160–4, 166, 168–9. See also site-specific Playhouse Theatre (Derry), 161 Pomerance, Bernard Elephant Man, The, 92 postcolonialism, 57, 99 Postlewait, Thomas, 19 Pound, Ezra, 63 Power, Cormac, 80, 82, 167 Prampolini, Enrico, 56 proscenium arch, 2, 9–10, 22–3, 25, 27, 30, 34, 58, 69, 123, 133, 156, 163, 166, 169, 179 Puchner, Martin, 3, 68 Quinn, Gavin, 139–42. See also Pan Pan Theatre Company (Dublin) Rea, Stephen, 14, 16, 162–3 Read, Alan, 6–7, 16–17 realism, 3–4, 21–4, 42–3, 49–63, 68, 72–5, 83–4, 87, 91–4, 104, 108, 112–13, 116, 118, 122–3, 126–8, 137, 161, 177, 179. See also Abbey Theatre (Dublin), naturalism Rebellato, Dan, 135 McTheatre, 154 Red Kettle Theatre (Waterford), 14 Reynolds, Paige, 40 Richards, Shelah, 132 Richtarik, Marilynn, 100 Ricoeur, Paul, 82, 94 Rigney, Ann, 43 Ritzer, George, 126–7, 179 glocal, 126–7, 135–7, 179 grobalisation, 126 Riverbank Theatre (Naas), 14 Roach, Joseph, 8, 181 Rosen, Carol theatre of impasse, 92–3 Russell, George (AE), 114 Ryan, Eamon, 150 Ryan, Fred, 21 Said, Edward, 99, 102 Samhain, 50, 68–9 Sartre, Jean-Paul, 81 Schechner, Richard, 155 Schlemmer, Oskar, 2 Scolnicov, Hana, 31, 90 Scott, Michael, 25 Seddon, George, 188

Index sense of place, 4–5, 43–6, 52, 55, 57, 74, 76, 78–80, 83, 87, 91–2, 94, 96, 99–104, 109–13, 115–18, 121–3, 129, 136, 139, 142–3, 154, 166, 174, 177–9 Serpieri, Alessandro, 33 Shakespeare, William Hamlet, 28, 32 King John, 31 King Lear, 28 Macbeth, 30 Romeo and Juliet, 30, 67 Sheeran, Patrick, 102 Sheridan, R. B., 24 Singleton, Brian, 146 site-specific, 3, 5, 9, 42, 77, 112, 146, 156, 159, 162, 164, 166–74, 179. See also place-specific Situationist International, 3 Slater, Eamonn, 102 Smith, Brendan, 132 Smock Alley Theatre (Dublin), 10, 16, 28–30, 67 Smyth, Gerry, 5, 99 Smyth, W. J., 102–4, 110 Soja, Edward, 6, 108 Sollors, Werner consent/descent, 54 Solstice Arts Centre (Navan), 14, 16 Sophocles Oedipus Rex, 27 space. See also Lefebvre, Henri; Ubersfeld, Anne conceptual space, 24, 28, 32, 35, 38, 42, 47, 69, 105 diegetic, 67–8 offstage, 20–1, 23, 27, 37–9, 44–7, 49, 52, 56, 61, 64–5, 68, 73, 84, 87–9, 93, 105–9, 113–15, 117–21, 124, 133, 137, 177 onstage, 20–1, 37–8, 44–5, 49, 63, 65, 68, 73, 77, 87–8, 105–7, 113–15, 117, 120–1, 128, 170, 177 physical space, 13, 38 signifying space, 32, 70, 139 space and place, 4, 54, 56, 62, 75–7, 80, 83, 86, 94–5, 118, 160, 168, 176 spatial identification, 76, 78, 94–6, 125, 160, 164 spectrality, 71–2, 74, 91, 105, 122, 178 St Teresa’s Hall (Dublin), 23, 34, 146–7 Stein, Gertrude, 77 Strindberg, August, 49 structuralism, 4, 8 surrealism, 56, 61 Sweetman, Alicia, 59 Swettenham, Neal, 143 Swift, Tom, 167, 170 Doctor Ledbetter’s Experiment, 170 Drive-By, 167 Lizzy Lavelle and the Vanishing of Emlyclough, 9

215

Power Point, 167 Swampoodle, 168 symbolism, 49, 62 Synge, J. M., 4, 13, 37–9, 42, 49–51, 62, 76, 78, 101, 104–5, 107–9, 115, 118, 122, 127–34, 137–82 Aran Islands, The, 76, 107, 116 ‘Murderer (A Farce), The’, 36 Playboy of the Western World, The, 5, 35–6, 41, 44, 46, 49–51, 118, 125–44, 153 Riders to the Sea, 39, 75–6, 78–81, 104–10, 113, 115–16, 177 Shadow of the Glen, The, 44, 46–7, 147 Tinker’s Wedding, The, 101, 136 Well of the Saints, The, 37 Szondi, Peter, 49, 63, 71, 82 Taylor, Richard, 67 Theater am Schiffbauerdamm (Berlin), 162 Theatre Journal, 126 Theatre Royal (Dublin), 98 Times, 132 Tolstoy, Leo, 25 Tompkins, Joanne, 1, 3 tourism, 107, 116, 127, 132, 152–3 Town Hall Theatre (Galway), 14, 16 Tuan, Yi-Fu, 4, 6, 35, 43–6, 50, 54, 71, 73, 76, 80, 95, 98, 100, 102–4, 109, 111, 115–16, 176 fields of care, 98–9, 105, 121–2 Turner, Brad Paris or Somewhere, 144 Ubersfeld, Anne, 1, 4, 33, 36–41, 68, 108, 118–21, 127–8, 142 dramatic space, 1, 33, 144 géno-text antérieur, 36, 38, 40, 44, 78–9, 87, 122, 126, 142, 176 location of performance, 33, 36, 68, 131, 133 scenic space, 8, 29, 32–3, 52, 58, 67, 69–70, 72, 75–6, 83, 93, 109, 113, 121, 131, 137, 143, 161–2 zone-A/non-A, 37, 46, 56, 64, 68, 75, 87–9, 104–6, 177 Ulster Literary Theatre (Belfast), 13–14, 21 Ulad, 13 Urban, Eva, 162, 166 urban space, 145–52 Vanek, Joe, 113 Vardac, Nicholas, 31 Wallace, Clare, 120 Walsh, Enda, 112, 139, 179 New Electric Ballroom, The, 120 Walworth Farce, The, 118–20

216

Index

Walsh, Michael, 59 Wedding Play, The, 165–6, 170 Weiss, Peter Marat/Sade, 92 West of Ireland, 35–7, 39, 41, 47, 50, 55, 78, 93, 100, 104, 107–8, 115, 118, 122, 128–30, 134, 142, 175 Whelan, Kevin, 100, 102, 104 Wilcox, Dean, 73 Wilde, Oscar, 24 Salome, 61 Wilder, Thornton, 81 Wiles, David, 6–7, 27 Williams, Tennessee, 19 Glass Menagerie, The, 113 Woolf, Virginia, 48 Worth, Katharine, 62

Yeats, Anne, 59 Yeats, W. B., 2–4, 11, 13, 19–24, 32, 35, 38–9, 48–52, 55, 59, 62–72, 74, 78, 99–100, 103–5, 112, 123, 135, 145, 175–8, 185 ‘Second Coming, The’, 48, 69 At the Hawk’s Well, 67–9 Cathleen ni Houlihan. See Gregory, Augusta and Yeats, W.B. Green Helmet, The, 65 Hour-Glass, The, 35 King’s Threshold, The, 64–6, 147 On Baile’s Strand, 63–6 Pot of Broth, The, 35 Purgatory, 70–2 Vision, A, 48, 51, 69–71 Zola, Émile, 49