Eamonn Jordan's timely study of Irish theatre concentrates on work emerging since the 1980s; it thereby encompasses a few of the years preceding the appearance of the “Celtic Tiger” (the heyday of the Republic of Ireland's economic boom years), and the subsequent collapse and recession that continues to grip the country. Jordan organizes his study around “six very specific, if restricted, dominant patterns, configurations or constructions that shape the blatant dramaturgy of primarily text-based Irish theatre” (13): history and memory, innocence, the pastoral, myth, and variations on narrative. Each of these terms could be used to structure its own book-length study, but Jordan employs only a few plays to illustrate his discussion of each one. This creates a somewhat uneven examination, with extensive, penetrating analyses of some plays followed by scant one-or-two-page synopses of others. In his introduction, Jordan acknowledges this shortcoming of his work; he speculates that in his attempt to identify and foreground dramaturgical dynamics in Irish theatre, he is potentially building a house of cards. Still, Jordan sets his thematic parameters and provides a critically engaging study of many of the better-known—and some lesser-known—Irish plays of the past thirty years.
In Chapter 1, Jordan sets out his book's theoretical framework, drawing on the work of various theatre academics and theorists including Jen Harvie, Roland Barthes, Bertolt Brecht, Eugenio Barba, Jerzy Grotowski, Anna McMullan, and Brian Singleton. Asserting that dramaturgy is concerned with how meanings are embedded in dramatic texts, Jordan locates his definition of it at the intersection of text, theory, history, and theatre practice.
Chapter 2 considers the preponderance of history plays in Irish theatre. Jordan concedes that the history play is commonly criticized for being so disproportionately skewed toward the past that it avoids critically engaging with the present; he argues, however, that through metaphor, metatheatricality, and subversive play, the history play allows theatre artists to reimagine, restage, and problematize the concept of the nation-state. To illustrate the argument he sets out in this chapter, Jordan points to Brian Friel's Translations, Thomas Kilroy's Double Cross, and Frank McGuinness's Observe the Sons of Ulster Marching towards the Somme as his primary examples.
In Chapter 3, Jordan examines the construction of innocence as a dominant theme in Irish drama. He asks how the conception of innocence is complicated in globalized Ireland, and he argues persuasively that contemporary writers repeatedly employ “not so much the politics of innocence, [but] an innocent politics, achieved by romanticizing or sentimentalizing a structure of innocence” (81). Using Marina Carr's On Raftery's Hill, Frank McGuinness's Innocence, and Marie Jones's A Night in November, Jordan outlines three strands of thought that make up the notion of “innocent politics”: the destruction of innocence through death or trauma, innocence as a religious/political construct, and innocence as a weapon of optimism, particularly in understanding charged political identities in Northern Ireland.
In Chapter 4, Jordan examines the convention of the pastoral both as the symptom of a cultural nostalgia for an imagined rural past, and as a liminal—and therefore safe—space in which to situate cultural interrogation. Rather than casting the pastoral as a stifling, conservative form, Jordan argues that its inherent immobility might be comforting to the characters within it, providing them with what he calls “the illusion of idealization” (131), which may lead to introspection and revelation. These ideas work quite well in his analysis of Conor McPherson's The Weir.
The prevalent use of myth in contemporary Irish drama is Jordan's concern in Chapter 5. A number of scholars have noted the trend of Irish writers—from Marina Carr to Thomas Kilroy to Frank McGuiness—adapting Greek myths by resituating them in an Irish mise-en-scène; Jordan, however, furthers this analysis by examining it in conjunction with a variety of other issues, including masculinity, trauma, violence, the working class, and popular culture. Jordan's expanded focus means that he undertakes the examination of an unwieldy number of myths for a single chapter; a consideration of fewer myths may have served the goals of this chapter better.
In the final two—and strongest—chapters of Dissident Dramaturgies, Jordan examines narrative trends, specifically those of storytelling and monologue. He argues that these provide artists with the opportunity to create a sense of place that is uniquely Irish. Characters, of course, have been talking forever in Irish drama, but Jordan maintains that storytelling in contemporary drama transforms the relationship a character has to the space he or she inhabits. He asserts that monologues, which became very popular in 1990s Irish drama, suggest a single, unified identity usually absent from Irish drama. As such, he speculates that the popularity of monologues might signal a response to the postmodern, postcolonial fracturing of identity, the “split subjectivities [that] were the inevitable consequence of oppressive rule” (221).
The strength of Dissident Dramaturgies lies in Jordan's analysis and description of the plots and stagings of many contemporary plays, although the choices he has made regarding the objects of his study simultaneously reflect a weakness of the work. I often found myself thinking of plays and companies whose work might have been discussed, but weren't. For example, while Jordan admits that he reluctantly did not include physical theatre in his study, productions by companies such as Macnas would be germane to his chapters on both pastoral and storytelling. In addition, while he extensively documents trends and arguments in critical scholarship, Jordan sometimes—inexplicably—truncates his own discussions. Nonetheless, Dissident Dramaturgies is a worthy contribution to the established field of Irish theatre studies. Jordan reminds us that contemporary performance and drama can contest established narratives of Irishness, and facilitate new meanings for artists and audiences alike.
Another worthy contribution to Irish theatre studies is Lionel Pilkington's Theatre & Ireland, a provocative addition to Palgrave Macmillan's critically acclaimed Theatre& series. For Pilkington, the most important word in his book's title is neither Ireland nor Theatre, but and. Much critical scholarship has focused on theatre in Ireland, and this focus has often been limited to text-based, naturalistic drama. Pilkington argues that to understand the relationship between theatre and Ireland, it is not enough to study theatrical representation as it takes place within the institutional theatre. Irish theatre, he maintains, is a cultural phenomenon that should “not be restricted to professional, urban, building-based theatre” (9). As such, although he begins his study with one of the most familiar images in Irish theatre—the stage Irishman—he subsequently opens up his discussion to include a wide range of dramatic forms and performance, from the seventeenth century to the present. Pilkington presents his audience with a convincing challenge to expand its definition of Irish theatre to include practices and events such as mumming, wake games, and theatre riots, as well as prison protests and hunger strikes.
Although all of the discussions Pilkington launches in Theatre & Ireland are interesting, there are a few standouts, such as his examination of the H-Block prison protests as counterpublic performances of resistance. Pilkington writes about the “dirty protest,” during which prisoners, after suffering repeated beatings by prison guards, opted not to use the lavatories and showers, and instead smeared their cell walls with their own excrement. He frames the protests as the “ironic performance of brutality” (62), and relates them to the work of American performance artists Annie Sprinkle, Tim Miller, and Karen Finley.
Occasionally, I wished Pilkington had developed his ideas a bit further, although I suspect his failure to do so is more the result of the short form of the books in the Theatre& series than of his own writing and research style. Nevertheless, with Theatre & Ireland Pilkington asks us to consider questions pertinent not only to Irish theatre, but also to our reflections on the enormous economic, social, and political changes that have occurred in Ireland in just the past few decades. This short, significant book reminds us to remember the consequences (and political potential) of Irish theatre and performance across multiple platforms.
