Fabio Luppi. Fathers and Sons at the Abbey Theatre (1904-1938). A New Perspective on the Study of Irish Drama

Recensione di Luppi, F. (2018). Fathers and Sons at the Abbey Theatre (1904-1938). A New Perspective on the Study of Irish Drama. Irvine-Boca Raton (FL): Brown Walker Press, 246 pp.

Deirdre Kinahan’s Unmanageable Sisters: Michel Tremblay’s Belles-sœurs on the Irish Stage

In spring 2018, Deirdre Kinahan’s The Unmanageable Sisters, an adaptation of Michel Tremblay’s landmark Les belles-sœurs (1968), was performed in the Abbey Theatre. A “smash hit” (Abbey programme) with the Irish audience, it was restaged in summer 2019. The Dublin version by a young and accomplished Irish playwright stages the comparability of the language register and of the socioeconomic and cultural circumstances that inspired the original thus underlining the connection between the two theater communities. It also demonstrates theater’s role in voicing the language, lives, and daily traumas of impoverished, undereducated, and marginalized women. This study contends that Tremblay’s and Kinahan’s success is attributable to the dramaturges’ understanding, interpretation, and staging of the intersectionality of the issues addressed. Intersectionality focuses on the layering and interaction of multiple sources of power, oppression, and marginalization. Previous English translations did not capture the intersectionality central to the original.

Becoming a Gordon Craig: Micheál mac Liammóir and Edward Gordon Craig’s Shared Beliefs and Performances of Self

Micheál mac Liammóir (1898-1978) and Edward Gordon Craig (1872-1966) shared many similarities: both were actors, designers, directors, and writers, and both rejected the realist tradition dominant in the theatre of their times. Craig’s developments in design throughout Europe laid a path for mac Liammóir to follow; indeed, mac Liammóir begins his autobiography All for Hecuba (1946) with the claim, ‘I would become [...] a Gordon Craig’. However, their affinities were not only in design and other aspects of theatre practice but in their shared artistic beliefs and performances of identity. This article will examine what mac Liammóir might have meant by ‘becoming a Gordon Craig’, first by considering Craig’s reputation and comparing both artists’ biographies. By contextualising Craig’s collaboration with W. B. Yeats at the Abbey Theatre, and Yeats’ influence on mac Liammóir, the article seeks to define the shared beliefs of mac Liammóir and Craig. Finally, by placing mac Liammóir’s reinvention and performance of self within a wider modernist context, an argument will be made for considering mac Liammóir in light of Craig’s concept of ‘The Über-Marionette’. Keywords: Edward Gordon Craig, Micháel mac Liammóir, Übermarionette, W.B. Yeats, Identity

Gender, Performance, and Authorship at the Abbey Theatre

Gender, Performance, and Authorship offers a different way to consider the creation of the major characters of the Abbey Theatre, holding the lines between writing and performing up to scrutiny, and ending with a connection between theatrical and film performance. The book challenges the way that authorship and ownership have been defined as far back as the earliest productions at the Abbey, offering a redefinition of authorship and gender in these plays that reveals the influence and unheralded power of actresses at the Abbey. The book begins with W. B. Yeats’s collaboration with Laura Armstrong in his earliest plays, his work with Maud Gonne on both The Countess Cathleen and Cathleen ni Houlihan, and then discusses J. M. Synge’s productive work with Molly Allgood (stage name Maire O’Neill) first in The Playboy of the Western World and then in Deirdre of the Sorrows, a play she helped complete after his death. A chapter on the six women necessary to the creation of Yeats’s Deirdre follows, before an Epilogue exploring connections between the tableau movement, the Abbey Theatre, and Sara Allgood’s film work.

J. M. Synge

This is a complete study of the works of the Irish playwright, travel writer, and poet J. M. Synge (1871–1909). A key and controversial figure in the Irish Literary Revival, and specifically in the Abbey Theatre, Synge’s career was short but dynamic. Moving from an early Romanticism, through Decadence, and on to a combative, protesting modernism, the development of Synge’s drama was propelled by his contentious relationship with the Irish politics of his time. This book is a full and timely reappraisal of Synge’s works, exploring both the prose and the drama through an in-depth study of Synge’s archive. Rather than looking at Synge’s work in relation to any distinct subject, this study examines Synge’s aesthetic and philosophical values, and charts the challenges posed to them as the impetus behind his reluctant movement into a more modernist mode of writing. Along the way, the book sheds new and often surprising light on Synge’s interests in occultism, pantheism, socialism, Darwinism, modernization, and even his late satirical engagement with eugenics. One of its key innovations is the use of Synge’s diaries, letters, and notebooks to trace his reading and to map the influences buried in his work, calling for them to be read afresh. Not only does this book reconsider each of Synge’s major works, along with many unfinished or archival pieces, it also explores the contested relationship between Revivalism and modernism, modernism and politics, and modernism and Romanticism.

Commemoration, ambivalent attachments and catharsis: David Ireland’s Cyprus Avenue at the Abbey Theatre in 2016

This article analyses David Ireland’s 2016 play, Cyprus Avenue, in which Eric, a middle-aged Ulster Unionist, becomes convinced that his infant granddaughter is Gerry Adams. Ireland is a Belfast-born actor and playwright whose works – Can’t Forget about You (2013) and Ulster American (2018) – have recently generated critical acclaim and debate. Cyprus Avenue, directed by Vicky Featherstone, opened in February at the Abbey Theatre Dublin as part of the theatre’s 1916 commemorative programme, before transferring to the Royal Court. With attention to the nuances of these production conditions, the ways in which Ireland’s play unravels a crisis of northern Irish identity in a post-Agreement context in relation to temporality and gender are explored. Particular attention is focused on how ontological crisis is presented through dislocated, non-linear experiences of time that are enacted within a scenographically crafted space. This crisis is at once personal and impersonal – a metaphor for a northern state of being – and is brutally distilled in acts of violence against women. I will argue that the ideological dimensions to the affective mechanisms of the play and its performance at the Abbey Theatre in 2016 and beyond are deeply ambivalent and deserve scrutiny.

The Stones of Venice: Lady Augusta Gregory and John Ruskin

John Ruskin’s diaries, letters, lectures and published works are testimonies to his life-long interest in Venetian art and architecture. Lady Augusta Gregory of Coole Park, County Galway, Ireland, was amongst those Victorian genteel women who were influenced by Ruskin’s account of the political and artistic history of Venice, following in Ruskin’s footsteps during her visits to Sir Henry Austen Henry and Lady Enid Layard at Ca’ Capello on the Grand Canal. This article follows Lady Gregory’s footsteps around the maritime city, where she was often found sketching architectural details of churches and palaces. By doing so, it reveals the extent of the influence of Ruskin’s Italian travels on the formation of Lady Gregory’s aesthetic sensibilities during the 1880s and 1890s, before she founded the Abbey Theatre in Dublin with the Irish dramatist John Millington Synge and the Irish poet and dramatist William Butler Yeats in 1904. As part of the discussion, it reveals the true subject matter in one of Lady Gregory’s Venetian sketches for the first time, one that is now held in Dublin at the National Library of Ireland.

‘It was then I knew life’: Political Critique and Moral Debate in Teresa Deevy's Temporal Powers (1932)

This article argues that Teresa Deevy's early plays for the Abbey Theatre deliberately intervened in the cultural politics of the Irish Free State. While the focus here is on Temporal Powers (1932), Deevy's first two Abbey productions, The Reapers (1930) and A Disciple (1931), are also considered. Taken together, this article demonstrates how these plays present a striking critique of the new state under the Cumann na nGaedhael administration. Set in 1927, during the Land Annuities crisis, Temporal Powers meditates on the relationship of poor tenant labourers to the land and society they inhabit. In it, Deevy explores themes such as eviction, homelessness, emigration, justice, religion, grief, and poverty. This article introduces this little-known play, contextualises it, and discusses her treatment of key themes through an examination of characters, Shavian influences, dramatic structure and form.

Domesticity in the trilogies of Sean O’Casey and Yu Ch'i-jin

This article examines Sean O’Casey and Yu Ch’i-jin’s portrayal of the domestic realm in the Dublin Trilogy of the 1920s and Nongchon Trilogy of the 1930s, respectively. Yu is indebted to O’Casey for his themes and style in playwrighting, for he saw O’Casey’s works as models for his own dramatic depictions of colonial Korea. A close study of Yu’s approach and the two trilogies reveal that his “deep-rooted admiration” for O’Casey does not indicate Yu’s aims to Westernize Korean theatre, but rather reveals his desire to impact the Korean audiences with realistic depictions of their everyday struggles. Using Lionnet and Shih’s idea of “minor transnationalism,” I argue that this lateral relationship is an instance of transcolonial solidarity in which Yu echoes O’Casey’s methodology to contribute to establishing a national theatre and drama tradition as did O’Casey to the Abbey Theatre.