Location, Location, Location: Plays and Realities: Living Between the Pre-modern and the Postmodern in Irish Theatre

Cathy Leeney

This chapter is part of a broader argument about how Irish theatre and performance confronts the post-human condition in the twenty- first century, how it reflects upon and explores the experience of living after humanist values. Here, I try to deal with more specific issues of space and identity in plays written during and after the Celtic Tiger period in Ireland, the period of economic hyper- development that is often dated from the early 1990s to about 2008.

In Ireland it is commonly understood that the history of theatre has been closely associated with the assertion of national identity. Dion Boucicault, in the middle of the nineteenth century, created challenges to colonising English stereotypes of Irishness, while reassuring audiences that a modus vivendi was possible and desirable between landed and peasant classes and between the neighbouring islands. Later, theatres staged new visions of the myths and images of a self-consciously separate Irishness, and, even when playwrights had other issues on their minds, Irish audiences and critics stepped in with some consistency seeing identity everywhere as a defining theme. Conflicts resulting from the partition of the island of Ireland into the Republic's 26 counties and Northern Ireland's six counties have prolonged concerns with identity as they applied to the culture clash between Unionist and Nationalist interests and agendas; issues of identity turned inwards, were often defensive and focussed on exclusion.

Through the latter part of the twentieth century (and powerfully at play long before then) influences from the wider world have impacted on the experience of being Irish. Declan Hughes, who was born in the 1960s, is one of the first critics specifically to articulate the gap between official versions of Irish identity and the felt experience of growing up with Americanised or internationalised culture as the key reference point. Seeing that the pressure on national identity had already won the contest, his argument is that

[t]here are two ways of reacting to the perceived collapse of cultural identities [...] One is, literally, to react: to insist on national and regional identity authenticity [...] the second way of reacting [is] to reflect it, to embrace it, to see it as liberating. It's the condition.

(Hughes 1999: 11, 14)

Although Mary Manning and Tom Murphy, amongst others, had earlier dramatised Irish people's passionate and sometimes painful ties with other cultural contexts, Hughes expressed a generation's alienation from the national identity values promoted by state agencies, and he described a growing sense of disjunction between an ideological localism and an actual globalism. Aspirations towards the images of internationalism had, for Hughes and his peers, replaced the hegemonic prescriptions of church and state, which in Ireland's case were deeply and damagingly integrated. There is nothing unusual about this development, as most small nations feel the pressure of new colonising forces, and probably nothing unusual about its effect on Irish playwriting and theatre making. From a conservatively nationalist Irish point of view, the colonising pressures of England had merely been replaced by those of international capital and multinational enterprise. But is some more radical and complex change taking place that goes further than another kind of colonisation from another source? Is Irish theatre, sometimes tacitly sometimes explicitly, enquiring into human identity as it grows out of rootedness, place, history and community by exploring how it is uprooted, displaced, adrift in the present moment and amidst new definitions of place and community?

The difficulty of totalising analysis in this postmodern context is obvious. It is not possible to reflect the range of kinds of theatre being made in Ireland, to include a properly representative range of plays, dance theatre, devised performance, outdoor spectacle and live art. The material here makes reference to the work of a limited selection of playwrights whose plays bear relation to the idea that identity has migrated from the idea of nation to become a shared concern circling the issue of place and its role in contextualising identity and connecting individuals into communities.

The writer, journalist and theatre critic Fintan O'Toole has argued convincingly that in the twentieth century, Ireland jumped from being pre-modern (or pre-industrial) to being postmodern/post- industrial, missing out on the intermediary stage (O'Toole 2003). He is describing how, in Ireland, the unselfconsciously traditional might be found cheek by jowl with the latest high technology systems and communications. The phenomenon is not unique to Ireland and has been noted across the developing world. In the 1970s an English author told me that his visit to Dublin felt to him like travelling to any regional English city trapped in a time warp in the 1950s. To him Ireland merely lagged behind. But since then time has become far more fractured. During the Celtic Tiger period of economic boom, the Irish may have begun to believe their own publicity – that not only did Ireland offer an unparalleled quality of life and unrivalled opportunities for enjoyment and 'craic', but that they could also wield economic power matching the audacity, greed and high earnings of any other national élite. Those who won success at that time might move with ease between the pre-modern world of their grandparents, perhaps materially poor but supposedly rich in cultural and spiritual resources, and the postmodern sophistication of highly technologised communication, travel and international business and property interests. This sense of movement, this 'betweenness', has, I will argue, become a key image in Irish theatre. Its impact on the setting and structure of plays places new emphasis on a new enquiry: What is it to be one of those who can shrug off one world to enter another, without any burden of commitment, history or vulnerability? There is also a new question: Who are we without a sense of place and how does theatre deal with...