Perspectives on Contemporary Irish Theatre: Populating the Stage

298 Pages·2017·2.913 MB·English

by  Anne Etienne, Thierry Dubost (eds.)

Perspectives on Contemporary Irish Theatre
“Perspectives on Contemporary Irish Theatre gathers together scholars and practi-
tioners to give us a comprehensive picture of the state of Irish theatre. Providing
fresh perspectives on playwrights like McDonagh, Walsh, and Marina Carr, and
on the work of companies like Corcadorca and BrokenCrow (as well as inter-
views with key practitioners), this book is going to be a key part of the debates
over performance in Ireland in the 21st Century.”
—David Pattie, Professor of Drama and Popular Music, University
of Chester, UK
“This book thrusts into view insights into the aesthetics and economics of Irish
theatre at a moment of cultural upheaval. Skilful editing affords space to histo-
ries, chronicles, and cultural analysis in equal measure. Highlights include per-
ceptive chapters on Tom McIntyre, Michael West, and Ailís Ní Ríain. Struggles
for women’s public presence, Irish language theatre, and bare survival in the face
of crushing ‘austerity’, are recorded here in provocative contributions from Geoff
Gould and Bríd Ó Gallchóir. A timely recognition of the variety and vitality of
theatre in Cork is complemented by experiences and critical perspectives from
other European contexts.”
—Victor Merriman, Professor of Critical Performance Studies, Edge Hill
University, UK
Anne Etienne · Thierry Dubost
Editors
Perspectives on
Contemporary Irish
Theatre
Populating the Stage
Editors
Anne Etienne Thierry Dubost
University College Cork Université de Caen Normandie
Cork, Ireland Caen, France
ISBN 978-3-319-59709-6 ISBN 978-3-319-59710-2 (eBook)
DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-59710-2
Library of Congress Control Number: 2017944099
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F
oreword
One of the advantages (if I may use such a word here) of aging is that
you can sometimes catch a glimpse of the future. It has to do with the
dismantling of the world in which you grew up, the disappearance of old
reliables, the emergence of the new and the unfamiliar into the light. You
can have the same experience working in theatre where, sometimes, you
see possibilities of the future opening before your eyes. This book is very
much a book of the future. It may be a record of recent years but it is
also a window into what is to come.
It is a big book because it has to cover a lot of ground. You have the
sense throughout that what is happening is not so much a record as a
process. Reading the book is like watching the actual activity of theatre-
making itself, seeing how it is put together. Theatre has always renewed
itself by going back to first principles of some kind. It strips away the
accumulations of stuff on stage to rediscover an elementary principle of
theatricality. One such principle is that theatre is an arousal of intense
curiosity in an audience. The stage action goes on, then, to try to satisfy
that curiosity.
Perhaps that is why so many plays begin with a question mark. Who
are these people before us? What are they doing? And where exactly
are they located? What is this place? “Who’s there?” The first line of
Hamlet. One of the most striking examples of such questioning in the
theatre that I have seen was Peter Brook’s stripping down of Hamlet in
the shambles of the Théâtre des Bouffes du Nord in Paris in the 1990s.
v
vi FOREWORD
He used a small bunch of actors, African, Asian and European, decon-
structed the text and somehow penetrated it through to its very cen-
tre. The play was laid bare in front of the audience. Part of what Brook
did was create the experience of a director actually working on a play in
rehearsal. It was like a dramatization of the process of direction itself,
with nods towards some of Brook’s great predecessors, directors like
Meyerhold, Stanislavski, Craig, Brecht and Artaud. He called the pro-
duction Qui est là? after that first line of the printed play. After seeing
this, you could never forget the fact that Shakespeare had written a
thriller, a mystery story about the pursuit of a murderer.
When I saw it I was reminded that I had a similar experience of this
same play way back in 1953 while doing the Leaving Certificate in St.
Kieran’s College, Kilkenny. Hamlet was on our Leaving Cert course. A
wise priest had invited the great actor-manager Anew McMaster into
our classroom. The only way I can put this is that McMaster “took” us
through the play. A mixture of performance and florid summary of the
action. He was a simpering Ophelia, a garrulous Polonius, a demented
Claudius and, at every opportunity, a handsome, young Prince. The
years fell away from him. Describing the action of the play he took us on
a whirlwind trip. The play became an edge-of-the-cliff story of fast mov-
ing action.
I don’t know what my fellow students made of this apparition sit-
ting on a chair in front of our class. I do remember a certain amount of
embarrassed giggling. We had never seen anything like McMaster before
in our short lives: dyed, tossed, blonde hair, the daytime make-up clearly
visible around the glaring blue eyes, the elegant, tweed suit, the contrast-
ing, flowery waistcoat and that voice, oh, that voice!
He simply sat on the chair and, apart from gestures of his hands, he
made no movement whatsoever, yet, nevertheless this was riveting thea-
tre. It was my first experience up close of great acting and a demonstra-
tion that such talent can theatricalize any space, a corner of a room, an
empty backyard or a school classroom.
It was also my first encounter with the element of the monstrous in
great acting, although I couldn’t articulate it at the time. Nevertheless,
I was conscious of the fact that part of what I felt in front of McMaster
was fear, a fear that was thrilling in its intensity. While the performance
was unmistakably human, it had also passed beyond the normal restraints
of decorum and control, creating figures of outlandish proportions.
FOREWORD vii
Most theatrical performances slip out of the mind along with the other
debris of daily life but this kind of performance is indelible. You will
never forget it.
Beckett made space for a new theatre. He eliminated social clutter and
created a space of radical simplicity but one which could also carry pro-
found complexity in the action. He was determined that his own plays
reach their audiences without interpretation getting in the way, that
the experience in the theatre be a frontal one, an engagement with the
thing itself and nothing else. Something begins, something proceeds and
something ends. He considered the obsession with finding meanings,
with putting labels on everything, to be akin to moral failure. Above all,
he resisted the notion of a theatre of representation. The play does not
represent something else, it is, to paraphrase Beckett himself on the sub-
ject of Finnegans Wake, it is the thing itself.
The response to Beckett, and more specifically, the response of this
book, is to offer a new theatre of openness and possibility, above all a
theatre that has escaped the limitations of social realism. This is a thea-
tre of risk and obviously there will be wrong turnings, misdirections
along the way but the emphasis is in the right place upon the intensity of
what is happening in front of our eyes. This book is a celebration of such
intensity.
Kilmaine, Mayo, Ireland Thomas Kilroy
C
ontents
1 Introduction 1
Anne Etienne and Thierry Dubost
Part I Dramaturgical Approaches
2 Innovation Meets Evocation: Tom Mac Intyre’s Plays
at the Peacock Theatre 17
Marie Kelly
3 From Dementia to Utopia: Tragedy and Transcendence
in Frank McGuinness’s The Hanging Gardens 39
Matthieu Kolb
4 Women and Scarecrows: Marina Carr’s Stage Bodies 59
Mary Noonan
5 McDonagh’s “True, Lonesome West” 73
Maria Isabel Seguro
6 The Physical and Verbal Theatre of Michael West 91
Nicholas Grene
ix
x CONTENTS
7 A Dark Rosebud on the Irish Stage: Ailís Ní Ríain’s
Tallest Man in the World 99
Thierry Dubost
Part II Practitioners’ Voices
8 Death of a Playwright 115
Geoff Gould
9 Looking Back and Forward on Sound Design: Irish
Theatre Transformed 123
Cormac O’Connor
10 Lightning in a Bottle: The BrokenCrow Experiment 133
Ronan FitzGibbon
11 Interview with Bríd Ó Gallchoir 141
Anne Etienne, Thierry Dubost and Bríd Ó Gallchoir
12 Interview with Pat Kinevane 153
Anne Etienne and Pat Kinevane
13 Interview with Mark O’Rowe 165
Thierry Dubost, Anne Etienne and Mark O’Rowe
14 Enda Walsh, in Conversation with Ger FitzGibbon 175
Ger FitzGibbon and Enda Walsh
Part III Political and Societal Reflections on the Stage
15 Slump and Punk in Ray Scannell’s Losing Steam:
Envisioning Corcadorca 193
Anne Etienne
16 Through a Glass, Darkly: Priests on the Contemporary
Irish Stage 213
Virginie Roche-Tiengo
CONTENTS xi
17 Populating the Irish Stage with (Dis)Abled Bodies:
Sanctuary by Christian O’Reilly and the Blue Teapot
Company 231
Katarzyna Ojrzyńska
18 Queering the Irish Stage: Shame, Sexuality, and the
Politics of Testimonial 249
Cormac O’Brien
19 A Gendered Absence: Feminist Theatre, Glasshouse
Productions and the #WTF Movement 269
Patricia O’Beirne
Index 291