The Comic Everywoman in Irish Popular Theatre: Political Melodrama, 1890-1925 PDF
Preview The Comic Everywoman in Irish Popular Theatre: Political Melodrama, 1890-1925
PALGRAVE STUDIES IN COMEDY Series Editors: Roger Sabin and Sharon Lockyer THE COMIC EVERYWOMAN IN IRISH POPULAR THEATRE Political Melodrama, 1890–1925 Susanne Colleary Palgrave Studies in Comedy Series Editors Roger Sabin University of the Arts London London, UK Sharon Lockyer Brunel University London, UK Comedy is part of the cultural landscape as never before, as older manifes- tations such as performance (stand-up, plays, etc.), film and TV have been joined by an online industry, pioneered by YouTube and social media. This innovative new book series will help define the emerging comedy studies field, offering fresh perspectives on the comedy studies phenome- non, and opening up new avenues for discussion. The focus is ‘pop cul- tural’, and will emphasize vaudeville, stand-up, variety, comedy film, TV sit-coms, and digital comedy. It will welcome studies of politics, history, aesthetics, production, distribution, and reception, as well as work that explores international perspectives and the digital realm. Above all it will be pioneering – there is no competition in the publishing world at this point in time. More information about this series at http://www.palgrave.com/gp/series/14644 Susanne Colleary The Comic Everywoman in Irish Popular Theatre Political Melodrama, 1890-1925 Susanne Colleary Institute of Technology Sligo Sligo, Ireland Palgrave Studies in Comedy ISBN 978-3-030-02007-1 ISBN 978-3-030-02008-8 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-02008-8 Library of Congress Control Number: 2018962556 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2018 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the pub- lisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, express or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institu- tional affiliations. This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland For my father Eddie with the nut brown hair, we will meet you on the bridge C ontents 1 F ront Cloth 1 2 Popular Theatre in Ireland 5 3 Comic Texts 29 4 Comic Women (Some Men Are Also Involved) 53 5 The Comic Everywoman 83 6 Close In 107 SCENE NINE—The New Play 111 Bibliography 123 Index 127 vii L f ist of igures Fig. 4.1 The Comic Everywoman, courtesy of Sean Mullery 51 Fig. 4.2 Marian, courtesy of Sean Mullery 52 ix CHAPTER 1 Front Cloth Abstract The Front Cloth sets out its stall for the work. It introduces the reader to the shape of the book, which begins by tracing the socio- historical and cultural contexts that informed the world of the popular plays in Ireland. It speaks briefly to melodramatic aesthetics, and it out- lines the dual approaches of academic and practice-as-research strands of analysis that form the spine of the book. It sketches the performance pos- sibilities of Irish comic women on popular stages. It outlines the nature and function of the comic everywoman as a means to recognise comic women and their audiences in popular theatre during some of the most turbulent years in Irish history. Keywords Patriotic • Melodrama • Theatre • Comedy • Comic Everywoman This book is born of a love of comedy and performance. It takes as its focus Irish political melodrama as mass entertainment through the late nineteenth and into the first decades of the twentieth century in Ireland. The timeframe encapsulates some of the most turbulent years in recent Irish history, incorporating as it does the growing struggle to gain inde- pendence from British rule. The study dates are an attempt to capture those years, offering a broad historical guideline, and in that respect, they create the shape for the work. Tackling comedy when nationalist © The Author(s) 2018 1 S. Colleary, The Comic Everywoman in Irish Popular Theatre, Palgrave Studies in Comedy, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-02008-8_1 2 S. COLLEARY politics are in the same sentence can be difficult. Those discourses kept pulling away from the comic elements for some time, because the nation- alist emblem is writ so large through the plays and reflected in the breadth and depth of cultural work about this period in Irish history. Those debates and controversies are well rehearsed elsewhere, and it would do little good to repeat what others have done far better than I. Necessarily, the work begins by tracing the historical, cultural and theatrical contexts of the period, within which the patriotic plays lived; those contexts inform and scaffold the remainder of the book. However, this book represents an exploration into the world of the patriotic melodramas in a related but dif- ferent way. Moving on from those contextualised brushstrokes, the book makes enquiry of melodramatic worlds, its aesthetics as performance on both sides of the Irish Sea, with some discussion of the cultural anxieties surrounding its popularity on Irish stages. It does so in order to direct the enquiry towards alternative comic possibilities for the playtexts as popular theatre, while building on the substantive work of those who have already established the native dramas as significant in Irish political and cultural history. Approaching the work from a comedy studies perspective was reward- ing and challenging in the same measure. Extracting the comic structures from the plays was invigorating and laborious; the plays are built in soap opera repetition and for me, for some time at least, impossible to fully catch hold of. This is in part due to the familiarity of plot and motive, which can meld, but also because, in my view, the texts serve as a key; in other words, the plays only really come to life as performance. I acknowl- edge the bias while also suggesting that the idea is helped by the ways in which the plays came into the world; they are not born of a literary or ‘writerly’ tradition. Reading them, however much you like them, can make you forget, playing them makes you remember. And written as they were by actor-managers for performance, and as popular entertainments they had a ready market in Dublin, along the theatrical axis, and in the ‘smalls,’ which toured the rural towns of Ireland. So this study became about the comedy in the works and the working of that comedy through the totality of the performance text. It also became about practice and performance, and both approaches are detailed in this book. The academic study concentrates on in-depth, comic analysis of four of the patriotic plays, by the playwrights J.W. Whitbread and P.J. Bourke, as exemplary of their type, while also signalling to the works of those who had gone before, including Dion Boucicault and Hubert O’Grady. The selected plays
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