Twentieth-Century Irish Drama: Mirror Up to Nation

Rating:
Summary: Excellent, concise literary history
Review: This is the third book I'd recommend that provides an introduction to modern Irish drama. Nicholas Grene's analysis compares about 20 plays through topics relating to political concerns and stage representations of Irishness; Anthony Roche's survey of 1950-90 begins by focusing on Beckett's impact and then extends to a few of the major playwrights, stressing their departure from one lead and a strong plot into more open-ended structures and mostly a double-male lead set-up. Prof. Murray examines a broader range of playwrights while necessarily diminishing the space he devotes to any one playwright or play.

His thesis for Irish drama: 'the mirror does not give back the real; it gives back images of a perceived reality. The play as mirror up to nation, rather than to nature in Hamlet's sense, results in a dynamic in process: you have to stop it in freeze-frame to distinguish what happened (history) from what might yet happen (poltics).' (9) Yeats, Lady Gregory, Synge, O'Casey (on whom Murray has written a biography from Dublin's Gill & Macmillan, 2004) receive chapters, but attention to lesser-studied writers such as Paul Vincent Carroll, Denis Johnston, Behan, and George Sheils gives Murray's survey added detail. He examines drama on and from the North, and adds newer dramatists such as Sebastian Barry, Marina Carr, Dermot Bolger to older contributors like John Leonard, Friel, Murphy, and Stewart Parker. Although I wish he had given more time to the curious M.J. Molloy, his comments on Carr I found particularly astute.

Murray paces himself incisively and sharply. Of the Abbey's Ernest Blythe's determination to produce Irish-language plays ub the 40's & 50s: "Laudable as this cultural aim may have been, its effect was to distract from the dramatic responsibility of confronting audiences with the art which questions assumptions and reveals the gods by which people live." (142) He uncovers tidbits like Tom Murphy's recruitment to join a lay committee to assist the Vatican in crafting a vernacular liturgy better suited to contemporary needs. Drama in Ireland, Murray emphasizes, 'oscillates always between tradition and innovation. It never occupies either pole for long, but invariably registers the tension. Irish drama is a long, energetic dispute with a changing audience over the same basic issues: where we come from, where we are now, and where we are headed. Alternatively, these questions comprise history, identity, home or a sense of place, and visionary imagination or what Shaw above called dreaming, or myth-making." (224)

In closing, this book shows the results of decades of thought, classroom experience, and scholarship. He ends with reflections on the "national dream-life". I will quote his final paragraph.
'This national need to rephrase, however obliquely or symbolically, this Beckett-like obligation to express, is not just a mark of the garrulous Irish swopping yarns in the pub or within earshot of earnest American scholars. It persists as a mode of being. It is the material of performance, of enacting assurances that we are alive and can survive in spite of our unshakeable memory of defeat. For Yeats [. . .], "It was the dream itself that enchanted me", and so it has always been. The dream is always waiting to be fulfilled; the nation is always awaiting completion. It has been the assumption of this book that mirror and dream are two sides of the same mimetic process. Irish drama both records cultural conditions and generates fresh possibilities. As the century draws to a close and with it one hundred years of native Irish theatre, the enabling mirror on the other side of dream shines brightly and magically still." (247)