Daniel Patrick Shea Dissertation zum Erwerb des Doktorgrades an der Neuphilologischen Fakultät der Ruprecht-Karls-Universität Heidelberg Promotionstag war der 3. März 2009 Stage Irishman, Stereotype, Performance: A Perspective on Irish Drama of the Second Half of the Twentieth Century Eingereicht im September 2007 unter dem Titel “The Stage Irish: A Perspective on Irish Drama and Theater of the Second Half of the Twentieth Century”. 2 Στη Βούλα 3 Contents Chapter 1: Introduction 5 Material 10 Writing on the Stage Irishman since the Founding of a National Theatre in Ireland 16 Outline of Chapters 2 through 5 40 Chapter 2: Imitations 47 This Other Eden 60 A Stage Production of Borstal Boy 87 An Adaptation of Love and a Bottle 112 Chapter 3: Entertainers 143 Heavenly Bodies 145 Clowns 177 Faith Healer 214 Chapter 4: Turncoats 262 Cries from Casement As His Bones Are Brought to Dublin 262 Double Cross 287 Mutabilitie 313 Interim Remarks 357 Chapter 5: Irish 359 The Weir, Someone Who’ll Watch over Me, Stones in His Pockets 396 Closing Remarks 436 4 Appendix 438 Productions of Plays Interpreted 438 A Chronology of Writing on the Stage Irishman since the Founding of a National Theatre in Ireland 440 Works Cited 444 5 Chapter 1: Introduction The last word on the Stage Irishman hasn’t been said. As long as there is a country called Ireland so that people may appear in plays as Irish, the Stage Irish will continue. More than an answer to the questions just exactly who and what is Irish, the Stage Irish encounter onstage what Irish means and thereby make this stage a kind of Irish. The key words here are onstage and stage because, as it is the theater context which specifies the endlessly variable significance of the word Irish, so I think it is the Stage in Stage Irish which gives the name meaning by signalizing that this is a performance of Irish and not the real thing—whatever that looks like. Reality as fact and realism as an artistic style have no privilege with the Stage Irish or in the study of them. And any true Irishness expressed in a dramatic figure or embodied by an actor seems to me of minor significance compared to just how that figure or actor assumes this Irishness or, in other words, how he acts Irish. (I consistently apply Manfred Pfister’s structuralist terminology for talking about drama, so here I replace the term character with (dramatic) figure (160-164).) Owen Dudley Edwards perspicaciously defines Stage Irishry as an exercise in “masks and dialogue” (83), or, in a word, as performance. Stage Irishry is, succinctly, Irish Performance. This definition, because it reverses the head nouns Performance and Irishry to focus the theater instead of a 6 national or ethnic group of Ireland, reflects the way I aim to vary the perspective on the most famous stock character of the English-language stage. An Irish Performance occurs when people onstage act like Irish, and to ask whether the actor or actress really is Irish or whether he or she knowingly just plays the part is to neglect to see both the roles we play in real life and the playing-of-parts which theater performance is. The question to the intentions of performers is, at best, an indirect one because conscious as well as unconscious acts are continuously and simultaneously occurring onstage (from the blinking of the eyes to the misread cue to the speaking of the lines) and, also, because this question never concerns one person alone but will apply together to the directors and the producers backstage, the performers onstage, and the audience in their seats. Stage Irishry is a game of Irish identity because it is actors and dramatic figures doing as Irish do—an imitation in the theater of a representation in reality. This I find the touchstone of any Stage-Irish figure or any Stage Irishry at all, and while researchers such as Declan Kiberd, Joseph Leerssen, and Richard Cave have examined in Stage Irishry the issues of the colonial politics of identity and while others such as James Bartley and Annelise Truninger have categorized examples of the Stage Irish according to literary historical methodologies, if their work would have any theoretical validity for this creature of the theater, they 7 must return to the performative aspect of the dramatic figure at hand. Since I view the Stage Irish as Irish onstage, it is the stage and all the stage encompasses that are most important to my study. I am writing on the Stage Irish also with the aim of urging literary critics to rethink how they interpret dramatic texts; therefore, I offer to consideration my approach of interpreting a dramatic text as I’ve imagined it being staged. The warning that a dramatic text is incomplete until produced has long since become banal and has always been unhelpful to the literary critic wanting sensitively to interpret that dramatic text. The warning is unhelpful foremost because it proceeds solely from the text and ventures into the realm of the performance only to gather novelties that might well serve one’s interpretation of the dramatic text. When it comes to interpreting a play, I, on the other hand, consider the dramatic text not primary nor secondary nor otherwise hierarchically situated, but one equally relevant element of the performance alongside the playwright, the director, the producers, the actors and actresses, the audience, the scenography, the lighting, the props, and anything or anyone else that goes into making the performance. Even though Alan Read offers throughout Theatre and Everyday Life devastating criticisms of theater which is predominantly textually based, he affirms that “there is nothing intrinsically untheatrical about a text, and texts themselves have interactive qualities” 8 (99). What I always try to be interpreting, then, is a staging of the play at hand, though not exclusively or even necessarily an actual staging, but one as I imagine it possible and worthwhile. This I call imaginative staging in literary criticism. Although I give actual performances their due, I recognize with Read that it is through the images onstage and in the imaginations of the performers and their audience that a play becomes intelligible and, therefore, (in every sense of the word) meaningful. Because the imagination is formative to what is said and done onstage and because it belongs to a full understanding of theater performance, I propose imaginative staging as a provisional yet workable compromise between privileging the dramatic text over the performance and unseating the literary critic from his rightful place—as an audience to the dramatic text at hand, as an actual member of past theater audiences, and as a potential member of any future theater audience—in interpreting plays. Because of my own imaginative staging in the following interpretations or, in other words, because of my role as critical spectator to these stagings of the plays, I subtitle this literary critical study “A Perspective on...”; at the same time, the subtitle credits J. Hillis Miller’s “hypothesis of possible heterogeneity of form in literary works.” Miller supposes the contingency as well as the peculiarity not only of literary pieces, but also of one critic’s interpretation of any piece or, as it is more fittingly expressed for dramatic 9 texts, of that critic’s perspective on the piece: “The specificity and strangeness of literature, the capacity of each work to surprise the reader, if he can remain prepared to be surprised, means that literature continually exceeds any formulas or any theory with which the critic is prepared to encompass it” (5). I am not advocating for its own sake an anything-goes approach to literature, but I am pleading for what will derogatorily be called a subjective approach. Sometimes the best, most convincing, even most rational interpretations of literature result from exercises in seemingly poor, untenable, irrational thought. In interpreting literature I regard concepts not as the elements of a systematic, disciplinal methodology, but as “tools,” as instruments for opening a piece and extracting a meaning. This is Gilles Deleuze’s philosophy “pragmatics”: “its goal is the invention of concepts that do not add up to a system of belief or an architecture of propositions that you either enter or you don’t, but instead pack a potential in the way a crowbar in a willing hand envelops an energy of prying” (qtd. in Read 237). Deconstructionism has been attacked for a criticism without system and for a philosophy without positive tenets, but for just these reasons I find it a good tool in the unregulated activity of interpreting literature as well as in my present task of understanding the Stage Irish. Before sketching how my study of the Stage Irish proceeds through the next four chapters, I first address my selection 10 of the material for inquiry and I then briefly review various writing on the Stage Irishman. Material Choosing twelve plays to represent fifty years of drama and theater in any country is very difficult, and Ireland is no exception. In addition to or in place of the playwrights I’ve chosen to study, many critics would consider the following obligatory: Sebastian Barry (b. 1955), Dermot Bolger (b. 1959), Marina Carr (b. 1964), J. B. Keane (b. 1928), Hugh Leonard (b. 1926), Martin McDonagh (b. 1971), Jimmy Murphy (b. 1962), Thomas Murphy (b. 1935), or Donal O’Kelly (b. 1958). I think good arguments can be made for the inclusion of every one of these playwrights, but the play limit I’ve set myself for more focused interpretations has forced me to exclude them.