There are very few texts written from the viewpoint of the Catholics in Ireland in the 1640s; among these, A Tragedy of Cold's Furie, OR, Lirenda's Miserie (Kilkenny, 1646), a five-act verse tragedy or tragicomedy, is striking in being a specifically literary, as well as a political, work.

Almost nothing is known about Henry Burkhead, whose name appears in various forms and who has been mistakenly conflated with another similar-sounding writer. Anthony a Wood rather slightingly calls Burkhead ‘no Academian, only a Merchant of Bristol’, and Langbaine also notices Cola's Furie, repeating this description and saying the play was never performed. A search of the Bristol city archives has failed to discover any mention of him, which may indicate that he resided in Kilkenny and traded with Bristol; various forms of his surname do, however, occur there, and it seems to be an English, rather than an Irish or ‘Old English’ one. The authors of the three sets of fulsome commendatory verses printed with the play – William Smyth, Paul Aylward, and Daniel Breede – seem even more obscure than Burkhead himself; all that is clear biographically is Burkhead's strong support of the Catholic cause, inferred from the play itself. As for its printing, it is not known whether the Jesuit press which then existed in the city was used, or that run by the Supreme Council of the Catholic confederates; it is highly unusual in being a literary text amidst the political, religious and administrative documents, pamphlets and proclamations which make up the remainder of the output from Kilkenny.

The Irish Literary Theatre, from which a new Irish theatre was to develop, came to birth at the very point when Ibsen was about to depart from the European theatrical scene. His last play, When We Dead Awaken, appeared in 1899, the year in which Yeats's The Countess Cathleen and Edward Martyn's The Heather Field were produced in Dublin. They were the first fruits of the resolve taken by the two playwrights, with Lady Gregory and George Moore, to ‘build up a Celtic and Irish school of dramatic literature’ and they offered decidedly different foretastes of what that ‘school’ might bring forth. Yeats declared himself an adherent of a poetic theatre that would use fantasy, vision and dream without regard for the limits set by the realistic convention. Martyn, on the other hand, was clearly following Ibsen in his careful observance of day-to-day probability. The central symbol of his play, the heather field, represents an obscure psychological process which might have received more ‘inward’ treatment. But instead it is fitted into a pattern of social activities in something like the way of the prosaically functional but symbolic orphanage in Ghosts.

Space is the essence of theatre, for while we may have theatre without text we can have none without space. This, however, is only to refer to the architectonic space itself, while the problematic concern is not with the space in which we have theatre, but with the space from which the dynamic of the drama itself is derived, particularly as it is located in the analysable dramatic text. This, of course, leads to the contentious question as to whether text or performance has primacy in determining understanding; an issue dismissed by Jiři Veltruský as ‘perfectly futile’ as, in his view, ‘Drama is a work of literature in its own right; it does not need anything but simple reading to enter the consciousness of the public.’ While Veltruský locates the essence of drama in the dialogue, and so argues for ‘Dramatic Literature’, he does acknowledge the dimension of performance in a highly significant qualification to the self-sufficiency of the text: ‘Consequently, the individual arts in their turn influence the development of dramatic literature through the intermediary of theatre. Indeed, when he writes a play, the dramatist is not unaware of the existing theatrical structure and of the various openings it presents to new developments. This is true even though the play is a self-sufficient work of literature which does not necessarily require theatrical performance; the creating subject usually feels, though often unconsciously, the possible applications of his work.’

The values of a community are revealed in its tragedies, and it is increasingly clear that the classical form of tragedy has been unable to accommodate modern values. It is too aristocratic for a democratic age. Sometimes it has been felt that we no longer merit a hero, and sometimes that heroes are now very dangerous and delusive. This latter view was articulated eloquently by the German philosopher-theologian, Karl Jaspers, in the aftermath of the defeat of Nazism:

Tragedy becomes the privilege of the exalted few – all others must be content to be wiped out indifferently in disaster. Tragedy then becomes a characteristic not of man, but of a human aristocracy. As the code of privilege, this philosophy becomes arrogant and unloving; it gives us comfort by pandering to our self-esteem.

(i) A vision and a sense of place

Tom Murphy has responded with some incredulity to an interviewer's suggestion that he has written plays ‘about emigration’. The subject figures in some of the plays; Michael, returned from the exile his tales embroider (Conversations on a Homecoming);, the Carneys, immigrants in Coventry, making a precarious sanctuary of violence (A Whistle in the Dark); John Joe's unsettling meditations on departure from and attachment to his small town (The Fooleen, revised as A Crucial Week in the Life of a Grocer's Assistant). These are, on the face of it, situations familiar enough in the Irish dramatic tradition, from Padraic Colum's The Land (1905) and T. C. Murray's Birthright (1910). Murphy is not, however – nor, indeed, were Colum and Murray – evoking distresses measurable by newspaper editorials or the documentation of government reports. The literal emigrations are made to paraphrase emigrations of the self, interior journeys arrivine: at a goal or losing their way.

The Field Day Theatre Company was founded in 1980 by Stephen Rea, the actor, and Brian Friel, the playwright, at the former's suggestion. The combination of a playwright and an actor in the founding of a theatre in response to a crisis which is both cultural and political recalls the Irish National Theatre Society and the founders of Field Day were conscious that such parallels would be drawn. For both Friel and Rea, the only available models were the Irish Literary Theatre and the Ulster Literary Theatre. The differences between Field Day and other such ventures are however as instructive as the parallels. The Irish National Theatre Society and the Abbey were always Yeats's project; his plays, his theories on drama and speech, and his cultural politics were the informing elements in the development of the theatre. Field Day's founders, however, quickly took on four other fellow-directors – Seamus Deane, Seamus Heaney, David Hammond and Tom Paulin – for just as the Abbey had had Beltaine, Samhain, and The Arrow so Field Day has had its pamphlets and other non-theatrical projects, although in the case of Field Day, these are once again open to contributors from outside the company. The purpose of the pamphlets has been to re-examine the various pieties of Irish cultural life in this past century. In its short history Field Day has already attracted widespread attention, but the time seems right for a stock-taking since by the end of 1988 the company will have reached a plateau of sorts in its development. Since 1980 it has produced eight plays, twelve pamphlets, and one volume of poetry, not to mention the work its directors have produced outside the confines of the company; this work places Field Day at the centre of Irish cultural debate. 1988 saw the production of a new play by Friel, Making History – his first for Field Day since The Communication Cord (1982) – the publication of another set of pamphlets, which for the first time were by non-Irish critics – Terry Eagleton, Frederic Jameson, and Edward Said – and preparations for its anthology of Irish writing. The completion of these three projects should consolidate the company's position.

Margaretta D'Arcy and John Arden's six part cycle, The Non-Stop Connolly Show (1975), is probably the most ambitious attempt in English to dramatize working-class and socialist history. However, productions have been remarkably few even in the ‘alternative’ theatre, so that the work has seldom been seen, even by its critics. Arguably, it is as important as anything in the Arden canon and is certainly the major achievement of the D'Arcy/Arden one. But to say so is to challenge a widely-held view that the D'Arcy/Arden collaborations of the 1970s are significant only in so far as they illustrate a decline in Arden's career. Even when admired, the Connolly plays are usually discussed primarily as an aspect of Arden's development. When not, they are perceived as the clearest indication of his supposed demise as a major playwright, a fall from favour which is often attributed to D'Arcy's influence. Perversely, such discussions may simultaneously fail to acknowledge D'Arcy's role as senior partner in The Non-Stop Connolly Show.