Flashes of Modernity: Stage Design at the Abbey Theatre, 1902- 1966
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Provided by the author(s) and NUI Galway in accordance with publisher policies. Please cite the published version when available. Title Flashes of modernity: stage design at the Abbey Theatre, 1902- 1966 Author(s) McCormack, Christopher Publication Date 2018-08-31 Publisher NUI Galway Item record http://hdl.handle.net/10379/14988 Downloaded 2021-09-28T08:53:59Z Some rights reserved. For more information, please see the item record link above. FLASHES OF MODERNITY: STAGE DESIGN AT THE ABBEY THEATRE, 1902-1966 A Doctoral Thesis Submitted to the O’Donoghue Centre for Drama, Theatre and Performance at National University of Ireland Galway By Christopher McCormack Supervised by Dr. Ian R. Walsh August 2018 2 ABSTRACT Responding to Guy Julier’s call for a “knowing practice” of design studies, this doctoral thesis reveals Ireland’s negotiation with modernity through stage design. I use historian T.J. Clark’s definition of modernity as “contingency,” which “turn[s] from the worship of ancestors and past authorities to the pursuit of a projected future”. Over the course of 60 years that saw the transformation of a pre-industrialised colony to a modernised republic, stage designs offered various possibilities of imagining Irish life. In the same period, the Abbey Theatre’s company shuttled itself from small community halls to the early 19th-century Mechanics’ Theatre, before moving to the commercial Queen’s Theatre, and finally arriving at the modern building that currently houses it. This thesis shines new light on that journey. By investigating the design references outside theatre, we can see how Abbey Theatre productions underlined new ways of envisioning life in Ireland. Revivalist design, through incorporation of Arts and Crafts design and realism, roused social issues in the last years of colonial occupation. Expressionist design put shape on the fragmented landscape after the Civil War. Resistance to the cultural isolationism of de Valera’s policies was located in striking cosmopolitan design in the 1930s and 1940s. Frustration with the status quo in the post-World War II period was articulated through costuming inspired by counter-culture in the 1950s and 1960s. Furthermore, significant designers and playwrights in Irish theatre will be uncovered by scholarship for the first time here. These include Tanya Moiseiwitsch, Alicia Sweetman, Maeve O’Callaghan, Samuel John Waddell, Anne Daly, Tom Coffey and Peter Hutchinson. 2 3 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I am indebted to Dr. Ian R. Walsh, my supervisor, whose immense enthusiasm, knowledge and support helped guide this project towards its completion. I thank the staff of the O’Donoghue Centre at NUI Galway for their endless inspiration and encouragement, particularly Prof. Patrick Lonergan, Dr. Charlotte McIvor, Dr. Miriam Haughton, Marianne Kennedy, and Prof. Lionel Pilkington. For their community and friendship, my fellow doctoral students have my gratitude. I must give special mention to Dr. Ciara Conway, from whom I discovered the thrill of archival scholarship, and to Barry Houlihan of the Hardiman Library Special Collections, whose formidable expertise helped sustain my research. This project would be impossible without funding support from the Moore Institute, as well as the teachers who have sparked my research interests this past decade. These include Prof. Chris Morash, Thomas Conway, and Prof. Brian Singleton. For their practical support, I thank Alice Harnon, Rob Partridge and Bradley Rowles. Emmet Jordan Kelly kept me uplifted throughout, and on one unforgettable journey to Paris uncovered the lost Théâtre Libre. Finally, my parents Anne and Michael, sisters Sheelagh, Geraldine and Margaret, and brother Paul: thank you for your love and support. 3 4 TABLE OF CONTENTS Introduction …………………………………………………………………………...7 1 Literature Review: Modernity and Irish Theatre Design ………………………….10 2 Methodology: Archives and Design Culture ………………………………………24 3 Project Overview: Abbey Theatre, 1902-1966 ……………………………………30 Chapter 1: Through Irish Eyes, 1902-1923 ……………………………………….…39 1 Cultural Revival and Revolution …………………………………………………..42 2 Abbey Theatre Scenography: Domesticity is Dominant …………………………..56 3.1 Deirdre (1906) by W.B. Yeats …………………………………………………..64 3.2 Staging the Heroic Period ……………………………………………………….66 3.3 Stage Design as Revivalist ………………………………………………………67 3.4 In Performance: De-etherealising Reality ……………………………………….70 4.1 Broken Faith (1913) by Susanne R. Day and Geraldine Cummins ……………..71 4.2 Staging the Labour Question …………………………………………………….72 4.3 Stage Design as Realist ………………………………………………………….74 4.4 In Performance: Signs of Maternalist Feminism ………………………………...77 5.1 Ann Kavanagh (1922) by Dorothy Macardle …………………………………....78 5.2 Staging the War of Independence ……………………………………………….79 5.3 Stage Design as Impoverished History ………………………………………….81 5.4 In Performance: Signs of Anti-Militaristic Drama ……………………………....83 6 Conclusion ………………………………………………………………………....85 Chapter 2: Troubled Histories and Expressionist Design, 1924-1934 ………………92 1. The Irish Free State and Modernism ……………………………………………...94 2. Abbey Theatre Scenography: Staging Inside Ireland and Outside ……………...104 3.1 The Emperor Jones by Eugene O’Neill ……………………………………......110 3.2 Staging the Shock of Modernity ………………………………………………..112 3.3 Stage Design as Expressionist ….........................................................................113 3.4 In Performance: Signs of Traumatic Dislocation ………………………………114 4.1 From Morn to Midnight by Georg Kaiser ……………………………………...116 4 5 4.2 Staging Crises of Labour, Patriarchy and Religion …………………………….118 4.3 Stage Design as Schrei Expressionist …………………………………………..120 4.4 In Performance: Signs of Critique …………………………………………..….121 5.1 King Lear by William Shakespeare ……………………...…………………….122 5.2 Staging the Civil War …………………………………………………………..123 5.3 Stage Design as Emblematically Expressionist ………………………………..125 5.4 In Performance: Signs of Partition ……………………………………………..126 6 Conclusion ………………………………………………………………………..126 Chapter 3: Internationalising Ireland and Cosmopolitan Design, 1935-1949 ……...131 1 The Republic of Ireland and Cosmopolitanism …………………………………..134 2 Abbey Theatre Scenography: Further Glances at the North ……………………..145 3.1 Hassan by James Elroy Flecker, adapted by Basil Dean ………………………152 3.2 Staging Irish Decolonisation …………………………………………………...154 3.3 Stage Design as Orientalist …………………………………………………….155 3.4 In Performance: Signs of Orientalism ………………………………………….157 4.1 Wind from the West (1936) by Maeve O’Callaghan …………………………...158 4.2 Staging Irish Feminism …………………………………………………….......159 4.3 Stage Design as Cosmopolitan …………………………………………………161 4.4 In Performance: Signs of Feminist Theatre …………………………………….164 5.1 Peter by Samuel John Waddell ………………………………………………...165 5.2 Staging Irish Epochalism ………………………………………………………167 5.3 Stage Design as Cosmopolitan …………………………………………………168 5.4 In Performance: Signs of Irish Internationalism ……………………………….170 6 Conclusion ………………………………………………………………………..171 Chapter 4: Embodying New Formations and Costuming, 1950-1966 ……………..175 1 Urbanisation and Censorship …………………………………………………….177 2 Abbey Theatre Scenography: Still a Rural Idyll? ………………………………..189 3 Costuming: From Conspicuous Consumption to Situated Bodily Practice ……...195 4.1 Leave it to the Doctor (1959) by Anne Daly ………………………………...…197 4.2 Staging the “Woman of the House” ……………………………………………198 4.3 Costuming as Feminist …………………………………………………………201 4.4 In Performance: Signs of a Feminist Revolution ………………………………205 5 6 5.1 Stranger, Beware (1959) by Tom Coffey ……………………………………...206 5.2 Staging the Next Generation …………………………………………………...207 5.3 Costuming as Counter Culture …………………………………………………209 5.4 In Performance: Signs of a Rebellious Generation …………………………….213 6.1 No Man is an Island (1959) by Peter Hutchinson ……………………………...214 6.2 Staging the “Soldiery Man” ……………………………………………………215 6.3 Costuming as a Spectacle of Masculinity ……………………………………...216 6.4 In Performance: Signs of New Masculinities …………………………………..218 7 Conclusion ………………………………………………………………………..219 Conclusion …………………………………………………………….....................227 1 Project Overview …………………………………………………………………230 2 Future Research …………………………………………………………………..235 6 7 INTRODUCTION Flashes From the Past Sometime in the late 1990s T.J. Clark, a professor of modern art at University of California, Berkeley, sat down to write his latest book. His 1985 study The Painting of Modern Life had roused lively debate in the letters section of the New York Review of Books for suggesting French impressionism was the house style of the haute bourgeoisie. Clarke had arrived at a new idea. For him, experiments in modern art were linked to senses of a future espoused by socialism, a project he views as having ended with the collapse of the Berlin Wall. Without socialism as an inspiration, those artistic experiments may have run their course. In Farewell to an Idea: Episodes from a History of Modernism, published in 1999, he wrote: “Modernism is our antiquity” (3). To 21st century eyes, many objects of modernist design may be unreadable. For instance, the Central Bank building (1978) on Dublin’s Dame St, with its concrete bunker-like appearance, is daringly brutalist in character but remains widely unloved. It hardly inspired more buildings in the same style. Clark says that the future these modernist forms prophesised gradually failed to match the future that arrived. According to him: “Modernism is unintelligible now because it had truck with a modernity not yet fully in place”