UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA, SAN DIEGO UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA, IRVINE “To Have Lived is Not Enough for Them:” Performing Irish History in the Twentieth Century A dissertation submitted in partial satisfaction of the Requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in Drama and Theatre by Michael Perin Jaros Committee in charge: Professor Marianne McDonald, Chair Professor Stephen Barker Professor James Carmody Professor John Rouse Professor Donald Wesling 2008 Copyright 2008 Michael Perin Jaros All rights reserved. The Dissertation of Michael Perin Jaros is approved, and it is acceptable in quality and form for publication on microfilm: Chair University of California, San Diego University of California, Irvine 2008 iii DEDICATION To my parents, Joe and Carolyn, and to my Grandmother, Mary-Jo, without whose love and support I could not have made it here. iv TABLE OF CONTENTS Signature Page…………………………………………………………… iii Dedication……………………………………………………………….. iv Table of Contents………………………………………………………... v List of Illustrations………………………………………………………. vi Acknowledgements……………………………………………………… vii Vita………………………………………………………………………. ix Abstract………………………………………………………………….. x Introduction…………………………………………………………….... 1 Chapter 1: Among the Deepening Shades……………………………….. 12 Chapter 2: Brilliant Failure: Memorializing MacLiammóir……………... 54 Chapter 3: Where Lady Gregory’s Image Was Not……………………... 84 Chapter 4: Denis Johnston and the National Longing for Form………… 122 Chapter 5: Boxed Rituals………………………………………………... 161 Conclusion: Spires, Ports and Other Mythologies………………………. 203 Bibliography…………………………………………………………….. 207 v LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS Fig. 1: “The last hour of the Night” by Harry Clarke………………………..…. 131 Fig. 2: Micheál MacLiammóir in The Old Lady Says ‘No!’…………………... 144 Fig. 3: Photo of Henry Grattan in College Green……………………………… 147 Fig. 4: de Valera inspects statue of Emmet……………………………………. 165 Figs. 5, 6: Promotional images from Talbot’s Box……………………………... 194 Fig. 7: Talbot Memorial Bridge………………………………………………… 199 Fig. 8: Statue to James Larkin with Spire in background……………………… 201 vi ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS There are many, many people and organizations to thank, without whom I in no way would have gotten here. First off, I must thank the faculty of the Theatre and Drama departments at the UCSD Department of Theatre and Dance, and the UCI Department of Drama. They have offered me patience, wonderful criticism and unwavering support of my work during the five years we have spent together. I must most especially thank my advisor, Marianne McDonald, who has tried to convince me through various dark periods that I did in fact have something to say worth hearing. My committee and the combined faculty at UCSD and UCI have been both mentors and friends, especially Stephen Barker, John Rouse, Jim Carmody, Donald Wesling, Janelle Reinelt, Janet Smarr, Jorge Huerta, Emily Roxworthy, and Nadine George-Graves. I must also thank the staff of the UCSD theatre and dance department, who both found me money and kept me employed: Lee Montaño, Linn Friday, Charlie Oates, Mark Maltby, Michael Francis, Hedi Jafari, Andy Fenack, Sarah Jafari, and Carolyn Passeneau. Finally, to my fellow PhD and MFA students, candidates, and recent graduates: without you, your constant support, criticism, joint gripe sessions, or potluck dinners I would never have survived graduate school or writing this dissertation. Thank you Aimee, Zack, Rai, Heather, Phil, Rana, Jade, Grace, Fan, Terry, Laura, Maiya, Summer, Ashley, Amy, Greg, Karen, Maggie, Sarah, Lila-Rose and Alex. vii I must also thank those on the academic outside who have encouraged me to keep going: Robert Lublin (UMass-Boston), John Fleming (Texas State), Jane Barnette (Kennesaw State), Oscar Brockett (UT-Austin), Melissa Sirha and Brian Singleton (Trinity College, Dublin), thank you. Special thanks also to the UCSD Center for the Humanities, whose dissertation research fellowship allowed me to travel to Dublin, Ireland for research, as well as take a quarter off from teaching to work exclusively on the dissertation. Thanks also to the staff of the National Library of Ireland and Mairéad Delaney at the National Theatre Archives at the Abbey for their assistance with original materials. Finally, thanks so much to all my family and friends that I have cut short of the attention they deserve while I worked on this dissertation, especially mom and dad. Thank you all. viii VITA 1998 B.A., Trinity University 2000 M.A., University of Texas at Austin 2002 M.Phil., Trinity College Dublin 2001-2003 Adjunct Professor, Texas State University 2003-2007 Teaching Assistant, Dept. of Theatre and Dance, University of California, San Diego 2008 Associate Instructor, Dept. of Theatre and Dance University of California, San Diego 2008 Ph.D., University of California, San Diego PUBLICATIONS “Actor, Aura, Theatrical Event: The Aesthetics of the Pose and the Nostalgic Impulse.” Willmar in the World. Ed. Yael Feiler, Rikard Hoogland and Kalle Westerling. Stockholm: University of Stockholm, 2007. 29-40. “When I am Laid in the Earth: Dido and Aeneas, Nahum Tate, and Anglo-Irish Consciousness.” Text and Presentation (2004): 35-44. “Locating the True-Born Irishman: Patriotism, Nationalism, and Charles Macklin.” New Voices in Irish Criticism, Vol. 3. (Feb. 2002): 63-70. FIELDS OF STUDY Major Field: Drama and Theatre Studies in Irish Theatre: Professor Marianne McDonald, University of California, San Diego Studies in Modernism: Professor John Rouse, University of California, San Diego Studies in Contemporary Theory Professor Stephen Barker, University of California, Irvine ix ABSTRACT OF THE DISSERTATION “To Have Lived is Not Enough for Them:” Performing Irish History in the Twentieth Century by Michael Perin Jaros Doctor of Philosophy in Drama and Theatre University of California, San Diego, 2008 University of California, Irvine, 2008 Professor Marianne McDonald, Chair This dissertation addresses the need in contemporary Irish theatre scholarship for a more elastic examination of how history has been performed in Irish culture in the twentieth century. Combining methodological and theoretical approaches from the fields of Irish cultural studies, anthropology, performance studies and theatre history, this study offers a unique approach to analyzing how the past has been performed, challenged, and reinterpreted in various forms of performance, including funerals, parades, and traditional theatre. Beginning with an analysis of the common ways the canonical figures William Butler Yeats and Samuel Beckett thought of history and then envisioned it in performance, the project then widens its scope to consider how abstract narratives of Irish history predicated on failure were solidified in the performing body of the Irish x actor Micheál MacLiammóir, who combined the tragic falls of the Irish Patriot Robert Emmet and Oscar Wilde with his own nostalgic style of performance. From there the work examines several performance events which occurred at moments of historical crisis in Ireland, including the 1898 Wolfe Tone commemorations and President Eamon de Valera’s funeral in 1977. I examine how the history these events told was itself challenged and revised in actual theatrical pieces by Lady Augusta Gregory, Denis Johnston, and Thomas Kilroy (authors often sidelined in histories of Irish theatre). The work thus seeks to show that the Irish theatre existed as one strand in a dense web of interrelated forms of performance. When the theatre itself sought to perform history, the relationships between the various ways culture was imagined through performance become all the more apparent. Each chapter therefore traces how different understandings of historical reality were imagined and contested theatrically. xi Introduction but the brick walls of this sagging district, against which it alerts me to knock my head. With a scruffy nineteenth century history of half-finished colonials and upstarts. Still with us. (1) Thomas Kinsella, “One fond Embrace,” 1994 VLADIMIR. To have lived is not enough for them. ESTRAGON. They have to talk about it. VLADIMIR. To be dead is not enough for them. ESTRAGON. It is not sufficient. (58) Samuel Beckett, Waiting for Godot, 1955 I began this dissertation with a single, substantial question: how have debates about the past figured so heavily in imagining Irish culture in the twentieth century? Even as Ireland as a county has moved into the twenty-first century, with its cosmopolitan, European capital, its per capita income equal to that of Great Britain, and the Good Friday Agreement in place in Northern Ireland, the past’s place in the present remains a hotbed of contention. The “memory of the dead,” John Kells Ingram’s nineteenth-century Irish ballad, was sung at the beginning of the twentieth century to remind those living of the obligation they owed to the nationalist past. “Lest we forget” was a clarion call to remember a largely unwritten history long before it became a favored slogan in the sectarian murals of West Belfast. 1996 was the year that the Good Friday Agreement was signed—possibly signaling the end of a bitter, sectarian conflict which had raged since the partition of the 1 2 country in 1922—and also the date that the per-capita income of the Republic equaled that of the former Imperial power. “For the first time in recorded Irish history,” Fintan O’Toole notes, “it became possible to understand the Republic of Ireland without reference to Great Britain” (Ex-Isle 11). If Great Britain could no longer be regarded