In 1968 Tom Murphy's play Famine was staged in Dublin's Peacock Theatre. It was an audacious act of theatrical imagination to represent, in the Irish national theatre's tiny studio space, Ireland's greatest historical disaster. In Murphy's play one family, one village, stand in for the experience of the nation. Famine opens with a split scene. The community is mourning the death of a young daughter of the Connor family with the formal rituals of the wake and the keen. At the same time, on the edge of that scene, the men exchange uneasy, disconnected remarks about the potatoes:

The fear of a second year of failure frays their conversation into broken gestures of talk.

This scene preenacts the movement of the play as a whole. A community which has expressed the rhythms of its being in inherited forms – the wake and the keen – has its capacity for utterance and understanding shattered by the magnitude of the calamity which overtakes it.

Sean O'Casey is best remembered for his engagement, artistic and otherwise, with Irish history during a crucial period of turmoil and revolutionary change. His most famous and enduring drama – the Dublin Trilogy of The Shadow of a Gunman (1923), Juno and the Paycock (1924) and The Plough and the Stars (1926), and The Silver Tassie (1928) which followed it – concerns politically derived suffering: the War of Independence, the Civil War, the Easter Rising and World War One. Formed by these events O'Casey's vision is also manifest in his dramatic representation of them. From the bitter parodies of the Dublin Trilogy to his blistering depiction of the sanctimonious, priest-ridden new state in The Bishop's Bonfire (1955) and The Drums of Father Ned (1959), O'Casey indulges in a drama of socio-political protest. In some of the later, utopian plays of socialist liberation such as The Star Turns Red (1940) and Red Roses for Me (1942), the dramatic action often coarsens into agitprop.

Outside the drama the briefest glance at the Autobiographies reinforces O’Casey’s self-created image as a fierce battler. Throughout his life he was a notoriously pugnacious opponent and proponent in an endless series of professional and personal scraps. It is in one sense an appropriate tribute to O’Casey that the spirit of dispute lives on among his critics. His status as a dramatist is the site of considerable disagreement, particularly as regards his treatment of politics. However, in outlining this debate one can discern elements of O’Casey’s achievement which complicate the premises of both his admirers and his detractors.

The longstanding notion that Irish melodrama before the founding of the Irish Literary Theatre is scarcely worthy of our attention is a well-worn myth. Like many clichés, this one about popular drama is minimally informed by fact, for there were no Shakespeares or Molières plying their crafts for popular audiences during the last half of the nineteenth century. In the past two decades or so, however, popular genres like Irish melodrama once dismissed as ephemeral or culturally negligible have been reclaimed. Equally important, as these once-neglected texts expand our purchase on turn-of-the-century Irish culture, they also enhance our understanding of greater, more canonical plays and playwrights. This essay, then, although focused on nineteenth-century melodrama, necessarily concerns both the popular and the more 'literary'.

Until recently, melodrama was regarded as too insignificant to inform serious discussion of modern Irish drama. Hugh Hunt, former Director of Plays at the Abbey Theatre, writes in the ‘Prologue’ to his 1979 history of the theatre that popular playwrights of the nineteenth century represented Ireland as largely ‘a mythical land of blarney and blather’; hence their names – he mentions J. W. Whitbread, John Baldwin Buckstone and Fred Cooke specifically – and the plays they wrote are ‘best forgotten’.

In a 1983 article the critic Lynda Henderson offered an acerbic critique of the fascination with history which is a hallmark of much contemporary Irish playwriting. 'A concern for history', she wrote, 'is a perverse desire to remain fallen, to make no attempt to rise, to spend your life contemplating your navel . . . Too many contemporary Irish plays bleat plaintively of old wounds.' While Henderson's remarks are particularly damning, she is hardly the first commentator to draw attention to the preoccupation in Irish culture with Ireland's traumatic past. It was Stephen Dedalus, after all, who (in Ulysses) described history as the nightmare from which he was trying to awake. Yet Henderson's worry is that recent Irish dramatists are determined to remain asleep: in her view too many keep their gaze stubbornly arrested backwards, like Walter Benjamin's famously retrospective angel of history. It will be the aim of this chapter to suggest something quite different about the Irish history play, a genre which contemporary Irish writers have indeed made their stock in trade. Examples abound: Brian Friel has written about the 1601 Battle of Kinsale in Making History (1988); about the mapping of Ireland by colonial forces in Translations (1980); and about the horrific events of Bloody Sunday, 1972, in Freedom of the City (1973). Tom Murphy has dramatized the Irish potato famine in Famine (1968); Stewart Parker’s Northern Star (1984) concerns the 1798 uprising; the list goes on. This is hardly surprising. Ireland’s blood-stained history provides dramatic material aplenty, and it is a rare Irish author who opts to disregard it altogether.

In his biography of J. M. Synge, W. J. McCormack contends that we still view the dramatist 'through a mythology broadcast through Yeats's autobiographies and poems'. This mytho-historiography inserted Synge into the Irish Literary Revival as Celtic Ireland's defence against the filthy modern tide. His 'life' became a variant of Matthew Arnold's artistic Celt, enlisted to serve an Ascendancy motivated by cultural noblesse oblige, facilitating interpretation of the plays as peasant drama conceived by Yeats and delivered through sojourns in the primitive west. This chapter interrogates such authorized versions, tracing certain homologous relationships between the almost always repressed life and the plays. Synge's sensitivity to language as action, to the mediated relationship between gallous story and dirty deed, makes him 'in a way one of the most modern of the moderns'.

In his Nobel Prize acceptance speech Yeats constructed his account of Ireland’s national theatre movement. He and unnamed friends sought a place to perform ‘Irish plays with Irish players’, because Dublin theatres were ‘hired by English companies’.

The idea of 'nation', as both theme and setting, has haunted the development of Irish theatre. From the originary Irish National Theatre Society to the present National Theatre Society Limited, Irish theatre is marked by the 'national' appellation and all its implications. Whether the specific 'national' theatre is that of Britain, the United States, France or Ireland, the assumption is that its role is to stage the pressing concerns, or historical foundations, of the nation and, as in the case of the origins of the national theatre of Ireland, define the characteristics according to which the aspirant nation could be identified and distinguished. As observed by Lauren Kruger, the impulse to 'theatrical nationhood manifests itself fully only in the course of the nineteenth century' and particularly as 'representations of the ruling bloc confront the (counter) hegemonic claims of emergent groups' (The National Stage, 6). Ireland shares the nineteenth-century onset of this phenomenon, and while the Irish case differs somewhat from that of Europe and the United States in that the confrontation is of national rather than specifically class factions, it parallels their use of the stage in the contest for economic and political power. While Ireland had already enjoyed theatre as an art form and entertainment for several centuries, drama in its late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century manifestation sought to define and determine the basis of Irish claims for political independence from Britain. What this involved was a complex series of definitions and exclusions which resonate across the practice and criticism of Irish theatre. Any study of this terrain is necessarily engaged in a consideration of the basis for the original definitions and their implications for the theatre – and state – which subsequently evolved up to, and into, the contemporary moment.

It is difficult to determine precisely whether stage design at the Abbey Theatre was a response to ideological imperatives or to financial constraints. Both probably played a significant part. Certainly after the break-up of the Irish Literary Theatre Society at the close of its third season in October 1901 money was scarce. Between 1901 and December 1904 when the Abbey came into being, theatrical activity was focused on W. G. Fay's amateur group, known first in 1902 as the Irish National Dramatic Company but after 1903 as the Irish National Theatre Society. Though there was a wealth of ambition among the members and varying degrees of staging and acting skills, the budget was markedly limited. Design, of necessity, had in practice to be minimal so the accompanying aesthetic focused on minimalism.

By 1903 Annie Horniman had begun to direct some of her small private fortune to assist in the appropriate staging of Yeats’s plays (The King’s Threshold in 1903 and On Baile’s Strand for the opening of the Abbey in 1904). Wanting to have a direct hand in the proceedings, she took over the design of the costumes with very little knowledge of the principles which must govern choice and matching of colours to achieve satisfying stage images. Her work on The King’s Threshold produced a riot of tints, textures and shapes for what is fundamentally an austere morality play.

At the very end of the twentieth century, more precisely on 22 December 1999, the Mayor of Paris, Jean Tiberi, unveiled a plaque renaming a portion of l'avenue René Coty in the fourteenth arrondissement of Paris in honour of Samuel Beckett. The plaque reads:

'Samuel Beckett Alley' seems especially appropriate for the writer whose most memorable characters were tramps lacking middle-class values and fond of off-colour jokes. But it is even more appropriate that at the end of the century the French government would recognize and certify that a writer living in France and often writing in French could nevertheless remain an Irish writer. The Irish government essentially did the same much earlier by establishing the Samuel Beckett Centre at his alma mater in Dublin, Trinity College, in 1981. At the end of the twentieth century Samuel Beckett’s status as an Irish writer seemed so clear that the Irish critic Anthony Roche, in his study Contemporary Irish Drama, could state: ‘the presiding genius of contemporary Irish drama, the ghostly founding father, is Samuel Beckett’.

The European and British background

Nineteenth-century playhouses attracted little original dramatic writing. The emphasis was on dramatizations of novels; on opera, operetta and melodrama; and on the production (often 'theatrical' and 'spectacular' productions, in the more tinselled sense of the words) of established classics. Conversely, romantic and postromantic authors were more inclined to lyric poetry and the novel than to drama – the transition being marked, perhaps, by Goethe's Faust, Shelley's The Cenci and Hugo's Hernani.

A revival of the drama was instigated by Henrik Ibsen. With A Doll's House (1879), Ghosts (1881), An Enemy of the People (1882), Hedda Gabler (1890) and When We Dead Awaken (1899) he revolutionized and rejuvenated European theatre. While Wagner was taking the large-scale theatrical pomp of dramatic opera to its extreme in Bayreuth, and Labiche was offering ironically comic entertainment in the Boulevard theatres of Paris, Ibsen’s drama was spare, verbal rather than spectacular, and offered no amusement or historical-picturesque escapism.

Ibsen’s drama gave Europe a signal that the theatre could once again turn from spectacle to dialogue, and his example triggered the rise of the ‘literary theatre’ or ‘art theatre’. His work paved the way for the careers of new playwrights such as Chekhov in Russia, Maeterlinck in Flanders, and Strindberg in Sweden.

The activities of the Field Day Theatre Company must be seen against the backdrop of the communal violence which preoccupied people in Northern Ireland from 1969 to 1999, when power-sharing arrangements took effect. More than 3,300 people died in the course of this protracted struggle between the more extreme factions of the unionists (mostly Protestant), who want Northern Ireland to remain part of the United Kingdom, and the nationalists (mostly Catholic), who favour some sort of united Ireland. The questions of whether and how to deal with the 'Troubles' worried artists in every medium and genre throughout this unsettled period in Northern Ireland. Failure to confront the atrocities left one open to the charge of ignoring the most vital, dramatic subject matter available.On the other hand focusing too exclusively on current events might make one's art ephemeral while raising suspicions that one was cashing in on the crisis or exploiting other people's pain for personal benefit. Field Day, founded in 1980, represented an attempt by six Northern artists and intellectuals – Brian Friel, Stephen Rea, Seamus Deane, Seamus Heaney, David Hammond and Tom Paulin – to respond to the unsettled political situation in the Province in a manner which seemed to them socially, morally and creatively responsible. The company has now been in existence for more than twenty years, and its legacy includes, in addition to its solid record of theatre production, publications which have set the terms for critical debate in Irish Studies through much of that time. This chapter, however, will focus mainly on the drama produced by Field Day and on its life and achievement as a theatre company.

'All women are exiles' says the playwright and critic Hélène Cixous. Since James Joyce named exile as one of the conditions of his artistic life it has become associated with Irish writing. The distance exile implies invites an association, in turn, with alienation. However, Seamus Deane argues that while modern Irish literature as a whole 'registers alienation, it is not a literature of alienation'. This comment has a particular resonance for Irish women's writing, and for women playwrights. If women are, as Cixous suggests, already exiles in their own land, how does alienation characterize their work; how might their work be a literature of alienation? The boundaries around Irish women's realities define containment as a form of exile: exile from self-expression, from self-determination. Only the crossing of a boundary makes that boundary visible. How does the work of Teresa Deevy and Marina Carr cross boundaries, and how do those crossings take shape in performance?

Irish plays by women in the 1930s reflect a high register of female alienation which is most thoroughly expressed in the work of Teresa Deevy. Deevy’s plays register alienation; but, in the sense that they form a corpus of work expressive of an occluded reality, kept out of the canon of Irish theatrical history, they are also a dramaturgy of alienation. In contemporary Irish theatre the work of Marina Carr pushes the boundaries of theatrical representation to the limit before crossing them to reveal a passionate enactment of exile and alienation.

When Sex Pistols Svengali Malcolm McLaren can convince the Irish Times (19 July 1997) that he is planning a film with Steven Spielberg about how Wilde discovered rock 'n' roll in the United States, it is clear that his name has acquired a resonance and currency which even Oscar would have been surprised by. 'Wilde' is now a pop-cultural icon, a multiform signifier of youth, rebelliousness, individualism, sexual freedom, modernity. Indeed the commemorative industry surrounding the centenary of his death in 2000 resolutely commodified him as such: his image is now almost endlessly reproduced on playing cards, ties, T-shirts, mousemats and fridge magnets.

This relocation ofWilde among the ephemera of a supersophisticated consumer culture has been accompanied by an efflorescence of academic interest. Writing in the 1930s Wyndham Lewis dismissed Wilde as a ‘fat Dublin buffoon’, frozen into a posture of adolescent refusal and revolt: an historical curio who could be consigned to the snobbish ‘Naughty Nineties’. These remarks represent the nadir of Wilde’s critical reputation, while Christopher Nassaar’s Into the Demon Universe (1974) marks the beginning of a thorough and almost exclusively favourable reassessment of his writing.

The film Mise Éire (1959) was produced at a time of profound cultural change in the Republic of Ireland. Eamon de Valera was about to relinquish executive office to his successor as leader of Fianna Fáil, Sean Lemass. Lemass, with T. K. Whitaker, was embarked on the First Programme for Economic Expansion, the economic logic of Fianna Fáil's abandonment of republican nationalism. In place of an All-Ireland national unity – that grail of the Lemass/de Valera generation – would come a new compact with capitalism itself. The nation would be fulfilled not in the achievement of a complete independence, but in an alignment with global capital. Needless to say, this pragmatism was not publicly promulgated in so many words. It had, however, long been available to consciousness at the lived level of individual, family and class experience.

Mise Éire’s triumphalist account of Irish nationalist progression amounted to an almost unchallengeable hegemonic narrative until Northern Ireland exploded in ‘The Troubles’ of 1969. The film contains one sequence which is of particular interest to a discussion of contemporary Irish theatre. A hoist camera pans across a city street crammed with heaving humanity assembled to greet the 1916 revolutionary Constance Markievicz, on her return in 1918 from incarceration in a British jail.

History can be a fickle judge. After enjoying enormous popularity in the United States, Great Britain, and France for almost one hundred years after his death, Thomas Reid (1710-96) disappeared from the philosophical canon. Reid's disappearance did not have the consequence that his thought failed to influence subsequent philosophers: One can discern, for example, distinctly Reidian themes and methodology at work in Moorean “ordinary language” philosophy. But it did mean that Reid made no appearance in the story that philosophers in the last century have told - and continue to tell - about the development of early modern philosophy. The basic shape of this story is familiar enough and goes something like this:I

Early modern philosophy was animated by two central worries: First, given its dismal history of disagreement and present state of faction, how could philosophy progress in the way and to the degree that the natural sciences had? And, second, how could traditional objects of philosophical inquiry such as free will, the soul, and God be fit into the world as described by the new science? The urgency of both these issues occasioned a crisis in modern philosophy. In their own way, and with varying degrees of success, rationalists such as Descartes and empiricists such as Hume grappled with these issues. But only in the figure of Immanuel Kant do we encounter a sustained and ingenious attempt to blend the rationalist and empiricist ways of addressing these problems.

It is fitting that one of the last pieces of philosophical writing to come from Reid's hand should bear the title “Of Power.” For the concept “power” lies at the foundation of Reid's account of agent-causation, which in turn is the central idea in his account of human freedom and responsibility. In this final piece of philosophizing on this subject, Reid begins by pointing out that: “Every voluntary exertion to produce an event implies a conception of the event, and some belief or hope that the exertion will be followed by it” (OP: 3). Accordingly, our willing (deciding) to take a walk in the woods implies our having a conception of our taking a walk in the woods and some belief or hope that an exertion of ours intended to bring that about will be followed by our taking a walk in the woods. Reid takes this claim of his to imply that a conception of power is antecedent to every deliberate act.

Does he think that the earliest exertions by an infant involve a conception of power? No. Reid thinks that our earliest exertions are instinctive, unaccompanied by a conception of some goal to be accomplished. It is only when experience teaches us that certain exertions are followed by certain events that we learn to make these exertions voluntarily and deliberately in order to produce such an event. And once we believe that the event depends upon our exertion, we then have “the conception of power in ourselves to produce the event” (ibid.). Reid therefore concludes that our conception of power “is the fruit of experience and not innate” (ibid.).

Reid held that every sane human being who has emerged from infancy and is not severely impaired mentally shares in common with all other such human beings certain “principles of common sense,” as he called them. These principles, so he argued, lie at the foundation of our thought and practice.I

The claim proves interesting and challenging in its own right. However, it seems unlikely that Reid would ever have developed his doctrine of common sense had he not believed that these principles play an important and indispensable role in the practice of philosophy. The doctrine of common sense has its home, in Reid's thought, in his understanding of the limits of philosophical thought and in his radical picture of the task of the philosopher which emerges from that understanding.

The philosopher has no option but to join with the rest of humanity in conducting his thinking within the confines of common sense. He cannot lift himself above the herd. Philosophy “has no other root but the principles of common sense; it grows out of them, and draws its nourishment from them; severed from this root, its honours wither, its sap is dried up, it dies and rots” (IHM I.iv: 19). Philosophers now and then profess to reject the “principles which irresistibly govern the belief and conduct of all mankind in the common concerns of life” (IHM I.v: 21).

Around the time of Thomas Reid's death in October 1796, his contemporaries took stock of his accomplishments as a man of letters. One of the most challenging interpretations of Reid's life and career to appear came from the pen of his colleague, the Glasgow Professor of Mathematics, James Millar. Writing in an article devoted to the Gregory family (to which Reid was related), Millar commented that Reid was 'peculiarly distinguished by his abilities and proficiency in mathematical learning. The objects of literary pursuit are often directed by accidental occurrences. An apprehension of the bad consequences which might result from the philosophy of the late Mr. Hume, induced Dr. Reid to combat the doctrines of that eminent author. . . . But it is well known to Dr. Reid's literary acquaintance, that these exertions have not diminished the original bent of his genius, nor blunted the edge of his inclination for mathematical researches; which, at a very advanced age, he still continues to prosecute with a youthful attachment, and with unremitting assiduity.I

Millar’s portrait contrasts sharply with that found in what remains the most influential biography of Reid to date, Dugald Stewart’s Account of the Life and Writings of Thomas Reid, first published in 1802.