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IASIL 2004 - IASIL in Ireland 20-23 July 2004 |
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Abbey Abstracts
1. Patrick Burke, (St Patrick’s College Drumcondra), Professional Amateurs at the Abbey 3. Eamonn Cantwell, W.B.Yeats's Where there is Nothing” 7. Peter Kuch, (University of New South Wales) Abbey Tours to Australia 8. Helen Lojek (Boise State University), Observe the Sons of Ulster: Historical Stages 11. Alexandra Poulain, (UP IV) O Paradiso: Talking, Writing and Singing in The Gigli Concert 12. Nancy E Raftery (Camden County College New Jersey), Lennox Robison 15. Roberta Weldon, (University of Houston), Brinsley McNamara’s Glorious Uncertainty. Dr
Patrick Burke, (St Patrick's College, Dublin) 'Professional Amateurs
at the Abbey' The second period, 1973 to 1992, was one in which, each summer, the winners of the All-Ireland Amateur Drama Finals at Athlone presented their winning play for a week at the Peacock Theatre. Such productions ranged from the familiar --Gerald Healy's The Black Stranger in 1973, Farrell's Doctor Fell in 1981 and 1983--through the classical--Miller's The Crucible in 1979, Beckett's Waiting for Godot in 1980, Friel's Philadelphia in 1984--to the avant garde --Marat Sade by Peter Weiss in 1992. The paper will assess the artistic merits of those productions and the concomitant issue of how amateur standards related to professional during the years in question. Finally, the paper will attempt to argue that, in the light of both sets of theatrical experience as outlined, the very understanding of 'amateur' may require redefinition for the special situation of Ireland. Anne Butler, (Boston College) The Abbey Theatre Years of Una Troy (Elizabeth Connor)-Irish Playwright and Novelist This paper explores the contributions of Una Troy (Elizabeth Connor) to the Abbey Theatre. In its 100th anniversary, it seems only fitting to recognize a writer typically consigned to the footnotes of the theatre’s official history. Writing as Elizabeth Connor until the mid-fifties, Una Troy began her writing career in 1936 with the publication of Mount Prospect. Published in England by Methuen, the book was banned in Ireland. In 1940 she adapted this first novel into a play and entered it into the Abbey’s Shaw Competition. Mount Prospect was a winner and the play was mounted beginning April, 1940. Mount Prospect is what I would call a “Middle-size House” novel exploring a professional Catholic family and its partaking of the trappings of their class. A solicitor’s family grapples with their future upon the death of the father. Inheritance rights (a son and daughter of the deceased, a step mother and her son of the marriage conflict over the will provisions), romantic rivalry between the step-brothers, and the relationship of the daughter and her suitor, a very liberal thinking doctor, make for a somewhat untraditional representation of Irish middleclass life. Troy subsequently had three other plays produced at the Abbey throughout the forties. The second Swans and Geese (1941) and third An Apple a Day (1942) were original material. The fourth was based on her novel Dead Star’s Light which was published in 1938. The play’s title is The Dark Road and it was mounted in 1947. The novel and play explore the consequences of a Christmas Eve automobile accident involving four up-standing citizens. Their car runs over and kills a man. The choices they made evolve from that dreadful evening to form their destinies. I will explore the relationship between her two adapted plays and the original novels. I will begin by discussing the critical reception of these two plays and contrast that to the reviews of the two novels. I also will look at aspects of her critical representation of the church and state that appear in the two novels, but which are absent in the plays. These representations would not have been acceptable to the prevailing standards of the time and I will question the subsequent absence as either silencing of or self-censorship by the author. In her lifetime Troy had seventeen novels and three short stories published, four plays produced at the Abbey, and she co-authored a film She Didn’t Say No, based on her novel We Are Seven, a film that was banned in Ireland in 1958. None of her work is in print in English, but many of her novels remain in print in German, including a manuscript that was discovered after her death by her daughter. Eamonn
R Cantwell: Yeats’s Where There is Nothing In the latter half of 1900 Yeats and George Moore had collaborated in the writing of the play Diarmuid and Grania, which was performed in the Gaiety Theatre in Dublin in October 1901. The play was not a success, but the idea of further collaboration remained and in July 1902 Moore sent Yeats a draft scenario for a proposed new play in five acts. Yeats later decried the influence of Moore's scenario, stating that his play Where there is Nothing was "founded on a subject which I suggested to George Moore . . . we talked of collaboration, but this did not go beyond some rambling talks". However the scenario, which has remained unpublished to date (it will, I understand, be published in Yeats Annual No.17) is certainly more than an idea for a play. It is quite a substantial working out of a plot over five acts which, as the paper will demonstrate, strongly resembles the play produced by Yeats. Apart from the issue of what Yeats borrowed from Moore, and the subsequent disagreement between them which effectively ended their friendship, there was another unacknowledged borrowing by Yeats in the first published editions of the play which has not to date been noted. In act 3 one of the characters, Tommy the Song, sings a verse of a song called "Oh!Biddy Donahoe". This song was borrowed, without acknowledgement, by Yeats from a west of Ireland song writer, entertainer and sometime circus performer, Johnny Patterson. It disappeared in later published versions of the play being replaced by some lines from the well known "Down by the Salley Gardens". The paper will briefly discuss the carer of Patterson, and will also suggest that the poet's brother Jack Yeats was the likely source of the Patterson connection, having produced two paintings depicting Patterson, a water colour in 1899 and an oil painting in 1928. The oil painting in fact had the original name "Johnny Patterson (Singing Bridget Donoghue)" James P Farrelly “Singing ‘Of what is past, passing, or to come’: The Apocalyptic Vision of Yeats’s Purgatory” In W. B. Yeats’s Purgatory the external conflict is between father and son, Old Man and Boy, the internal between the dream and the world, subjectivity and objectivity, past and present. As a figure of objectivity and moral conscience, the Old Man is unable to forgive the “capital offense” his mother and father committed in marrying and begetting him, and in desperation he tries to block their purgatorial union and free his mother from the re-enactment of her crime. His interference, however, is “all for nothing”–“My father and my son on the same jackknife”–since his murders can neither “Appease / The Misery of the living . . . [nor] the remorse of the dead.” His parents continue to live through their past events, and their rebirth is assured. Clearly the Old Man’s scheme has failed. Blinded by his hatred for his mother and father, he has senselessly contrived to reverse the cycle of purgation and eliminate the consequence of his parents’ transgressions. In my paper I will analyze the motives of the Old Man, their relevance to Yeats’s beliefs about this world and the next, and their links to the purgation process outlined in A Vision. I will show that Yeats’s design in Purgatory is apocalyptic and not reductive. The ruined house, the ruined family, and the ruined tree are all signs of the fragmentation of Irish identity, and Ireland, not the Old Man, is the true tragic figure of the play. On the one hand, Yeats may mourn Ireland “past” and “passing,” but on the other he can rejoice in the purgatorial promise of its future. Therein lies the tragic joy of the play: the heralding of the purification of Ireland and the rebirth of Unity of Culture as “all things run / On that unfashionable gyre again.”
This paper will examine the rift between Sean O’Casey and the Abbey Theatre provoked by the rejection of The Silver Tassie in 1928, as evidenced by O’Casey’s own non-dramatic writing. Starting from the premise that the Autobiographies, written with the benefit of hindsight, offer a perspective which differs from that provided by the immediacy of the Letters, it will be argued that O’Casey’s attitude to some of his colleagues at the Abbey was marked by a profound ambivalence, whose dynamic was largely determined by the traumatic watershed of 30 April 1928. The paper is based upon a study which is to be published in 2004/2005 under the provisional title Sean O’Casey’s Letters and Autobiographies: Reflections of a Radical Ambivalence.
Although he has somewhat slipped into obscurity and no major studies has been done on him, Shoyo Matsui was one of the prominent reformers of Japanese theatre and produced a multitude of translations, adaptations as well as plays of his own creation during the foundational period of new drama. In the same way that Lennox Robinson was sent by Yeats to London in 1910 for intensive training in stage-management for Abbey, Matsui went to Europe between 1906 and 1907 to study the actual modern Western plays. Matsui also invited Sadanji Ichikawa II, a Kabuki actor, to Europe so he could study the acting style of current western plays. After returning to Japan, Matsui introduced a substantial array of theatrical reformation ranging from new performance skills to new theatrical systems. This led to fierce oppositions from the conservative theatre cooperation though this subsequently gone way to acceptance and introduction of new theatre Matsui was also one of the first people to be intrigued by the Abbey Theatre movement of and my research has led me to find that at least four of his plays are based on Irish ones. Tea Making House which is based on Harvest by Lennox Robinson is probably one of his best adaptational works. Although Matsui does contrast “country” and “city” characters as Robinson does, he chose to excludes the “fantasy” towards "soil" and "country" sometimes described in Harvest. He portrays the characters as stereotypes of Joruri (Japanese narrative drama) or Kabuki to some degree to simplify the complexity of the original play and make it more appealing to the Japanese audience. The vogue for the Irish drama in the Taisho era (1912-1926) synchronised with the birth of the concept of the "people" in Japanese society as an empowered mass. The idea of the "countryside" was also born simultaneously as the majority of the Tokyo populace was consisted of immigrants from the rural areas. Under such conditions, intellectuals dealing with the foundation of the new drama started to discuss drama for the people. Abbey plays, which focused on "people in the countryside", were suitable materials to be adapted into new Japanese plays. Being resonant with the ideas of the National Theatre of Abbey, Matsui emphasised concept of, "plays for the people". He especially, tried to educate the populace by writing plays for the countryside theatres. By setting himself against the idea of drama as high art, he produced a large amount of plays for the people.
Helen
Lojek (Boise State University) Observe the Sons of Ulster: Historical
Stages The play premiered just before the seventieth anniversary of the Battle of the Somme, a time period when commemorative journeys were taking World War I soldiers back to the battlefield, and when the Republic was searching for ways to commemorate the World War I contributions of soldiers from its part of the island. The Easter Rebellion, of course, coincided with the Battle of the Somme, and that anniversary was also coming up. Sons of Ulster was also a model for the cross-cultural understanding which seemed the best hope for resolution of the conflict in Northern Ireland. Productions (The Abbey's Peacock, 1985; the Hampstead, 1986; the Lyric, 1990) emphasized such connections. Programs and lobby displays featured historical commentary, photos, and displays. Reviews emphasized the connections between 1916 and contemporary Irish issues. By coincidence the Abbey's main stage production (1994) premiered at a time when a lasting peace in Northern Ireland seemed a possibility, but there was no coincidence about the gala opening night, which included special guests from both sides of the border and both sides of the conflict. The Irish Times published a full-page spread of commentary that emphasized cross-cultural understanding. The Abbey remounted the play in 1995, this time in deliberate conjunction with the IRA ceasefire in Northern Ireland. Like the 1994 production, the 1995 production went on tour, arriving in London on the eve of the eightieth anniversary of the Battle of the Somme and (ironically) just as IRA bombs were once more exploding there. The production went on to Paris for the Imaginaire Irlandais celebration, and Irish President Mary Robinson attended the performance (which coincided with her birthday) with French President Jacques Chirac. In July 1998, when Irish President Mary McAleese organized a reception for Orangemen from the Republic, the cross-cultural entertainment included Frank McGuinness reading from Observe the Sons of Ulster. Such details of the play's stage history add substance to Lionel Pilkington's suggestion (in Theatre and the State in Twentieth-Century Ireland: Cultivating the People, 2001) that the "political vision" of Sons of Ulster "coincided with the state's own official response to the conflict" in 1985. Such issues were of importance not only to the government of the Republic, but also to the government of the U.K.—and to ordinary residents of both Ireland and England. The Somme and the Troubles are not the only issues emphasized in productions and reviews, however, and there are clear indications that Sons of Ulster grabbed audiences' imaginations in a variety of ways. The play's presentation of gay lovers, for example, clearly resonated in Irish culture. The 1980s witnessed not only the explosion of AIDS, but also the mounting campaign to decriminalize homosexual behavior in both Irelands. Gays from Northern Ireland and from the Republic triumphed in parallel cases before the European Court of Human Rights in 1981 and 1988, and in 1993 Ireland's Sexual Offenses Act effectively equalized the code for heterosexuals and homosexuals. Discussion of the play's presentation of gay love became increasingly open. When Red Kettle's 1990 production of the play in Waterford coincided with the Lyric's production in Belfast, for example, one review focused not on Unionist/Republican understanding, but on the greater success with which Red Kettle depicted same sex love. When the play finally arrived in the U.S. (Williamstown Theatre, spring 2001) September 11 and the War in Iraq were still in the future. The play was remounted in Boston (Wilbur Theatre, spring 2002), but by the time it arrived at Lincoln Center in February 2003 its relevance to U.S. history seemed so clear and compelling that one reviewer suggested the play be re-titled Observe the Sons and Daughters of America Marching Towards Iraq. Some of the discussion swirling around the play has come from particular productions' clear awareness of dates and contemporary issues. Some of the discussion has stemmed from unplanned coincidences. In sum, though, the stage history of Observe the Sons of Ulster Marching Towards the Somme reveals the complexity of the play's presentation of social and cultural issues, and the extent to which particular time periods and audiences have been able to find in it powerful messages about their times.
The Irish National Theatre Society introduced realism to the Irish stage. While greatly influenced by the innovative theatre techniques created by André Antoine and the dramatic works of Henrik Ibsen, the Irish National Theatre Society was unique in its use of realistic representation as an act of Irish resistance to colonial rule. Realism became synonymous with nationalism for the creators of the society and their public. However, by its very nature, the theatre can at best be an artificial image of reality and not reality itself. Thus the nationalistic realism of the Abbey theatre was self-consciously created out of a specific interpretation of Irish identity. The predominantly protestant and aristocratic originators of the company found themselves both acclaimed and criticized for their attempt at realism depending on the spectators’ own interpretation of Irish identity and whether the self-titled “National” theatre reflected or denied that interpretation. In this paper, I will discuss how the timbre of terminologies such as “nationalism” and “realism” creates multiple cadences and overtones when tied to a theatrical landscape. When a country is redefining itself, these overtones become charged with a significance that would be unnecessary in an established, solidified community. In the colonial context representations of reality become, by definition, performances of nationalist identity. The Abbey’s depiction of “The West” as undiluted Ireland coincided with that of their audience. However, the audience and the INTS found themselves at odds with one another when their conceptions of how Ireland should be portrayed diverged. In this way, the realism and naturalism of Ibsen and Antoine becomes fraught with controversy in colonial Ireland. To the Irish public, artistic depictions of reality cannot be detached from displays of national identity. However, despite the polemics surrounding the INTS’ interpretations of identity, they remained an important part of Ireland’s journey towards a cultural, and territorial, independent nation.
This paper will examine the problematic relationship between the Abbey Theatre and the Ulster Literary Theatre (ULT) with regards to how the ‘imagined community’ of the ‘National’ theatre was incapable of reaching Northern audiences or representing their specific political/cultural mise-en-scéne. This paper will also argue that the North’s lack of constituency in the Abbey’s national stage, encouraged the ULT to develop a radical, regional approach that produced a large body of Ultonian drama which ‘showed the North to itself’, whilst providing a concomitant critique of some of the verities of southern nationalism. Furthermore, the ULT’s critique of the ideological essentialism of the Revivalist movement was also accompanied by a critique of the aesthetic excesses of the ‘Abbey play’, (in terms of its idealisation of peasantry, the past, and the west), and its eschewal of the florid Synge-songy excess of their southern counterparts. In particular, this paper will examine how Gerald McNamara’s satirical metadrama, The Mist That Does Be on the Bog, which played at the Abbey in 1909, scathingly deconstructs Synge’s pseudo-realism as well as the increasingly performative nature of ‘Irishness’ in contemporaneous discourse. It will argue that in this and other plays, McNamara and the ULT deconstructed both the Abbey’s representation and performance of Irish identity and instead, promoted a more pluralist and playful dramaturgy many years before this was attempted by later generations of playwrights and critics.
In this paper I would like to show how Murphy uses the operatic paradigm to question the logocentric tradition of Western drama and me taphysics within which he is writing.
Eglantina
Remport, ELTE, Hungary“See the play as a picture”: Lady Gregory's
pictorial spectacle Futoshi
Sakauchi “The Triumph of Failure: Yeats's At the Hawk's Well in 1916
“ Roberta
Weldon, (University of Houston), Brinsley McNamara’s Glorious Uncertainty.
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