NORTHWESTERN UNIVERSITY Theatrical Discourse and National Development in Ireland, 1919-1932 A DISSERTATION SUBMITTED TO THE GRADUATE SCHOOL IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS for the degree DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY Field of Theatre and Drama By Anne Maureen Pulju EVANSTON, ILLINOIS December 2007 2 © Copyright by Anne Maureen Pulju 2007 All Rights Reserved 3 Acknowledgments There are many people whom I would like to thank for their support during the research and writing of this dissertation. It has been my good fortune to have worked with an interdisciplinary committee of fine scholars at Northwestern University. Professor T. W. Heyck not only supplied invaluable expertise in Irish history, but also was an exemplary editor and advisor, demanding clarity and rigor while serving as a source of unending good humor and wisdom. It has been my privilege to be one of the many students Bill mentored in his illustrious career at Northwestern. I am also glad to have worked with Professor Tracy C. Davis, chair of the Interdisciplinary Program in Theatre and Drama, who not only provides her students with a model of rigorous scholarship but also is a dedicated teacher. I am particularly grateful for her scrupulous attention to terminology and her thoughtful feedback during the dissertation defense itself. I am likewise grateful for the contributions of Professor Christine Froula, whose knowledge of modernism was a great resource throughout my graduate school career, and whose provocative questions in the defense will be extremely useful as I continue to revise and expand upon this work. I would also like to acknowledge the many professors from different academic departments from whom I learned due to their service as members of the faculty of the Program in Theatre in Drama, as well as the inspirational professors and teachers I was lucky enough to encounter at the University of Virginia and before (including the high school drama teacher who allowed me to direct the world’s worst-accented production of Riders to the Sea). I thank Liz Luby, assistant to Northwestern’s Theatre Department, for her helpfulness, efficiency, and 4 wonderful spirit. I am grateful for the assistance of many librarians, including those at the National Library of Ireland, Dublin City Library, Library of Congress, and Johns Hopkins University Library, and especially for the help of Russell Maylone, Susan Lewis, Ellen Howe, and the other staff members of Northwestern University Library’s Special Collections Department. I thank the Social Science Research Council’s Program on the Arts, whose Dissertation Fellowship funded by the Rockefeller Foundation allowed me to spend a year researching in Ireland, and thank Northwestern University for the University Fellowship and Dissertation Year Scholarship. On a personal level, I thank my parents and siblings for the home filled with books and lively debate in which I was brought up, and thank the good friends who continue to fill my life with debate and laughter. I am particularly grateful to both my parents for their assistance with the logistics of the dissertation defense. My many additional debts to my mother, Patty, include her arrangement of surreptitious “appointments” for which she pulled me out of high school classes – most memorably an appointment with the Abbey Theatre’s touring production of The Playboy of the Western World in Washington, D.C. By chance, I unearthed a poster from that production, my first exposure to Irish theatre, in a used bookstore while writing a thesis on Synge and Friel at U.Va., and Synge’s contemplative visage – tinted green – hangs above my desk to this day. My father, Frank, has helped me in many ways, including going above and beyond the call of grandfatherly duty babysitting during this past year. Both Joseph and I are grateful for his time and care. To Moira and Joseph McCudden I offer my profound thanks for those nights on which they slept soundly, and even deeper thanks for the beautiful smiles with which they greeted me 5 every morning, sleep or no. I further appreciate Joseph’s careful artistic emendations on hundreds of pages of discarded drafts (and the sense of perspective thus granted me!) and Moira’s occasional willingness to tolerate as much as three minutes of my work read aloud; Moira, if you still wish to write your own book when you grow up, I sincerely hope that it will take fewer than the “fifty years” you fear. And finally, and most of all, I thank Tony McCudden. I am blessed to have a continually supportive husband, partner, and traveling companion, who has been a constant source of love and laughter since I first sent off those graduate school applications. For everything from midnight chocolate runs to weekend shifts to rare first editions, I owe you more than I can say. 6 ABSTRACT Theatrical Discourse and National Development in Ireland, 1919-1932 Anne M. Pulju This dissertation argues that theatre was a vital element of postcolonial culture in Ireland in the years 1919-1932, the period in which the Irish nation emerged from revolutionary war to become a stable postcolonial state. Although critics have bemoaned the rising dominance of conservative, anti-modernist playwriting and production in Ireland’s post-independence period (drawing unfavorable contrast with the early years of the Abbey Theatre), a more productive approach is to ask why such styles were popular in these particular historical moments. Examining a range of theatrical productions throughout Ireland in the period, I contend that postcoloniality was the crucial influence upon Irish theatrical discourses during these years, resulting in theatrical formations centered upon realism, escapism, domesticity, and nostalgia for a particular vision of a safe, rural life. Through these formations, Irish theatre of the 1920s reflected, circulated, and helped to create cultural discourses that contributed to the stabilization of the new Irish state. Thus, 1920s theatre functioned as a potent element of nationalist culture, and should not be dismissed. Plays like P.J. Bourke’s melodrama Kathleen Mavourneen and George Shiels’s comedy Paul Twyning exemplify the mainstream theatre’s contributions to the stabilizing cultural discourses of the Irish Free State. Theatre was also involved with political issues like the revival 7 of the Irish language (in the founding of Galway’s state-supported An Taibhdhearc theatre) and censorship (manifested in unofficial but intriguing ways in regard to works like Sean O’Casey’s The Plough and the Stars and The Silver Tassie). Because postcoloniality, with its driving impulse toward unity, was the dominant cultural influence, modernism could have little role in the Irish theatre. Productions like W.B. Yeats’s The Player Queen, the work of the Dublin Drama League, and three early productions of the Dublin Gate Theatre – Peer Gynt, Diarmuid and Gráinne, and The Old Lady Says “No!” – demonstrate the ways in which modernism was sequestered as (at best) a niche element in Irish theatre. Drawing upon theories from the fields of historiography and literary and performance studies, this dissertation analyzes theatrical productions as case studies of the ways in which culture and the state interact in postcolonial societies. 8 Table of Contents Acknowledgments 3 Abstract 6 Chapter 1 Introduction I Significance A The case for Irish theatre studies 10 B The case for the 1920s 15 II Theoretical and methodological influences A Historiography and the social sciences 19 B Discourse theory and performance theory 22 C Postcolonial theory 25 D Theories of modernism 29 III Dissertation project A Selection and scope 38 B Chapter outline 40 Chapter 2 War, Escapism, and the Nostalgic Nation, 1919-1922 I Stages of history: the revolutionary culture 44 II The theatrical mainstream A Escaping drama 51 B The mainstream in-depth: Kathleen Mavourneen 54 III The fading fringe: contra-diction and the postcolonial struggle 68 IV Anti-modernism, the Abbey, and the postcolonial moment 76 V Modernism masks the mainstream: The Player Queen 83 VI The rising tide: theatre in Belfast and Cork 94 VII The rising tide: public drama 99 Chapter 3 Cultural Stabilization and the Triumph of Realism, 1922-1928 I Civil War A The struggling state 101 B The struggling theatre 103 II Selling populism: Paul Twyning 109 9 III Free State culture 117 IV The postcolonial and the international: creating an official theatre 125 V Sean O’Casey and modes of censorship: The Plough and the Stars and The Silver Tassie A Early acceptance: the critical and public appeal of O’Casey’s first two major plays 139 B Limits of expressibility: censorship of content 142 C Forms of expressibility: the theatre as National 147 VI Consolidation and stabilization 154 Chapter 4 The Stable Culture and Modernist Marginalia, 1929-1932 I Outside the Abbey: expanding stages, contracting state 158 II Modernity, myth, the language, and the West: Diarmuid agus Gráinne A The play in production 162 B The play’s impact 171 III Back in Dublin: attempts at variation and the official national theatre 177 IV Founding the Gate 183 V The Old Lady Says “No!”; Ireland says perhaps A The play in production 195 B The play’s impact 205 VI Censorship, cinema, class A Censorship and theatre 216 B The rise of cinema 220 C Limerick: censorship, cinema and the amateur stage 223 VII Chapter summary 230 Chapter 5 Conclusion I Summary 233 II Arguments A Dissertation argument 236 B Academic arguments 238 III Epilogue A Implications and extensions: moving forward 242 B Implications and extensions: moving outward 245 Works Cited 247 10 Chapter One Introduction I Significance A: The case for Irish theatre studies Theatre historians have always found the Irish drama attractive, to an extent that can seem rather out of proportion to the size of the dramatic literary canon.