Irish Playwrights: Search/Destroy

does this answer your question?

No theatre rockism plz

No one has ever described Marina Carr to me in a way that makes her sound any good.

What do people think of Brian Friel? If nothing else he is probably the richest living Irish playwright.

I liked the two Paul Mercier plays I saw ("Studs" and a play about Dublin whose name I don't remember).

ii) He represents an even worse kind of paddywhackery than Synge.

iii) Just to make things completely clear, he is NO GOOD whatsoever.

Anyone who naysays is a funhata

William Congreve
Richard Brinsley Sheridan

true fact: almost every single English Playwright whose works form the repertory of a modern theatre company has been Irish or partly irish.

why is that?

(PS big up Oscar. though i'm in favour of his essays more than his plays...)

Flann O'Brien wrote a couple of plays, I have a Penguin edition with them in there. They were okay, but not like the prose.

To go to heaven.

Maybe in his own fashion Wilde was wittier than any of the others. His dialogue is hilarious off the page as well as on the stage. And it's the brand of wit that takes you somewhere (perhaps all wit does this; is it part of the job description?). Somewhere in those aphorisms and epigrams is a ... serious demolition of gender as we know it, or as someone knew it; of truth ditto; and of course, here's the rub, of seriousness. One of the hardest points to get straight, to get bent right, about Wilde is that his most serious ideas involved an assualt on seriousness, a rejection of seriousness. Yet their frivolity has an intensity beyond the frivolous, and beyond much of the serious.

To talk of OW's Ideas may be misleading. JtN once admonished me for overvaluing Wilde as if her were a thinker, when all the Ideas were in Nietzsche. True, maybe, if truth matters here. But I recall my reply: that OW had put such material into circulation, into play, in something of the way that... that Dylan did with Ginsberg (bad example?)?. That Morrissey did with ... with Warhol or Shelagh Delaney? (No, the examples hardly work.) That Morrissey did with Wilde?

And there is a cucumber slice of one literature's vocations.

and his jokes are better than Friedrich's...

Boucicault the Vicar reckons the greatest ever. It is nice for such a name to get a fresh airing. I have, alas, in truth, never seen The Colleen Bawn. I would like to know, some day, why the Vicar rates it (or some other plays?) so highly.

But Boucicault will always be somewhere at the back of my canonical school photograph of dramatic history: for without him I guess that the greatest blackhatted clown of them all might never have found his name; though he would have found another; he did that easily enough.

Has anyone read Gerald Griffin's The Collegians (1829), I wonder?

Just thought I'd big him up a bit. I've always liked him.

'death is my portion now; till the silver cord be loosened and golden bowl be broken... a poet and a poltroon, a poltroon and a poet,' an' all that.

Of Shaw I am less... sure than Wilde; I know his work not so well. He wrote much; too much? - well, does it matter? His Prefaces are fine, bold, energetic, voluminous. He was a man of Ideas, who tried putting Ideas on the stage: that may have been a flaw, with Shaw, but the flaw may be with us, if we don't want Ideas bumping into each other and the furniture. There are criticisms one might make of his dramatic forms - his adherence to a kind of Naturalism, essentially; though Brecht wrote an early piece (early 1920s?) called, I think, 'Three Cheers For Shaw'. Whether Shaw wrote good 'characters' I don't feel able to judge right now. Yet he saw the theatre as a place to take things on - issues, problems, movements, follies; he is maybe, whatever his limits, among the most imposing models available for political drama from within a British-Isles canon.

Sidelight on Shaw: a music critic earlier in life, he seems to have believed that his dialogue had a kind of musicality. This seems odd, but he ought to know, better than I. Tra, la.

Some say that Saint Joan is the one, the work with which he achieved at last a Shakespearean epic scale. I had forgotten till now his agon with Shakespeare: amusing, all that bardolatry, that bid to match the best. I like Shaw for that.

Cranky, homespun yet mechanical, a Heath-Robinson mind (Yeats' anecdote may bear repeating: GBS came to him in a dream, as "a sewing machine that smiled always"), a wouldbe practical man who'd invent new allaphbeds and banish bits of punctuation. I am touched when I think of the fund that was set up after his death to reform English; and of the Penguin version of Androcles and the Lion that it produced.

Whatever political misjudgments he may have committed, let us give him credit for one thing: his attitudes on gender seem to have been progressive, all rational dress and equality. In that strange bumptious hardheaded softheaded way, he really may have been an effective friend of feminism.

I could be wrong in some of this: I know him not quite well enough. But let me add that he had wit: look at the old letters to young inquirers framed on the wall of his house in ... Synge Street, and chuckle.

it's possibly the production I saw. It went really overboard on the funny stuff, to the extent that the sad stuff had an air of "hey... what's that all about?" to it.

Recently I read (where) Brian Friel (was) saying (not recently) that there would be no indigenous Irish theatre without Yeats. Perhaps this is true. The motives involved in founding the Abbey must have been mixed, especially as more than one major player was involved. But arguably that venture did more for Irish theatre than any other single venture that we can think of. No?

Theatre business, management of men: paradox that the poet whom Beerbohm sketched with the queen of the fairies should also have been a businessman. "Protestant Magic" (R.F. Foster) meets the Protestant Work Ethic, perhaps. And remember WBY stage front shouting back at the so-called mob that hounded The Playboy, or (hilariously, I think) reprising the role 19 years later over O'Casey. Maybe those were his greatest pieces of theatre.

Yet the question of Yeats the playwright abides; and I wish I knew more of what one needs to answer it. The Vicar, atop this thread, clearly has some of it. I don't think he's wrong, neither. Meanwhile, I read his (WBY's, not DV's) first play The Countess Cathleen last year, and was struck by maybe two things:

1) hard to pull off on stage, that extraordinary dramatic action of devils and angels fighting over souls (!) -- but then, what inviting matter for cinema?

2) he was trying, earlier than Synge (the play premiered at the Antient Concert Rooms on 8 May 1899: nearly its anniversary, now), to get at a dramatic and literary version of peasant speech. But he was less successful at that than Synge: he was less able to give the impression that he had rolled his words through the dirt and the flowers, rather than penned them at a great oak table.

I would like to read, or even see, more of his drama. Probably it has become neglected. But still, his greatest drama was the biography of his greatest creation, W.B. Yeats.

an interesting comment, but what makes you think Synge's sodom and begorrah bollocks is any truer to peasant life than Yeats' stylings?

When I wrote that, I knew that if it was ill-phrased you would say just what you have said. I know well enough your antipathy to Synge and will try to come back specifically on him some time soon. But look: I did not say that Synge was truer to peasant life - I said that he was more successful than WBY at forging a dramatic and literary version of peasant speech, and more able to give the impression that he had rolled his words through the dirt and the flowers.

Key words, possibly: 'dramatic and literary version', 'give the impression'.

(Admittedly the other words could be key words too.)

I would not want to claim that Synge's idiom is authentic - though it *may* well have been more authentic than WBY's, as I think JMS had spent longer among peasants and island people; and his knowledge of Irish was certainly better. What I *am* definitely claiming is that his dramatic version of peasant speech made a more lively and resonant idiom than WBY's equivalent.

not sure that this WAS a paradox at this date: j. m. barrie eg wz one of the most successful popular playwrights of his day; conan doyle ditto as a shortstory writer; the three robinson brothers and arthur rackham as book illustrators (kids books and grown-up books)

fairies were big business

But did WBY think of fairies in terms of business? Maybe he did. Maybe he believed in them too. I suppose Conan Doyle did.

There is still a general point about the combination in WBY of, call it, idealism and pragmatism: misty lakes and hard cash - and the one *not* simply a cynical route to the other.

(haha he helped ruskin build a wall)

I think Pater comes in the middle of this: 'see the object as the product of our act of perception', or sth?

Schematic. I am half-remembering from Richard Ellmann.

"I don't worry about whether Shakespeare is truer to medieval speech than Marlowe - I still reckon there's more poetry in Richard II than in Edward II".

But I should be careful here:

1) I don't really know what I'm talking about nowadays, re. those two - it's been too long; and I don't want to attack Marlowe (or Yeats!)

2) I DO suspect that Synge was closer to peasant speech than WBY - I am not *totally* ducking out of the rockist defence. But, I don't think that Synge has to read like a transcript of peasant speech c.1900 any more than Falstaff has to talk like a real medieval knight.

Perhaps I am wrong, perhaps I am cutting a corner or missing something.

If so, I didn't know.

Gothic weather indeed.

Bernard Shaw educed almost innumerable persons or dramatis personae: the most ephemeral of these is, I suspect, that G.B.S. who represented him in public and who lavished in the newspaper columns so many facile witticisms. (Labyrinths, 250-1.)

Only while typing that out did I realize that it said in fact the opposite of what I had said about WBY. Well - I would not have noticed had I not started this post.

My understanding is that Synge thought he was being true to the ways of the peasantry in a "This IS Life!" kind of way, while Yeats was self-consciously imagining a peasantry that existed outside of real history and culture. I don't know if that is enough to make one more lively and resonant than the other. My suspicion in any case is that in this context "lively" means "stage-Irish".

critical discourse (often by non-Irish people) is more interested in how Irish playwrights (and writers generally) relate to Irishness than it is to how whatever other playwrights write their whateverness. Or so I think.

a lot of this is based around a conversation with an Irish playwright in which he moaned that because his plays are not about Irish themes they would never get performed outside Ireland.

this is somewhat ironic, as the Irish playwright in question is actually English.

who's that?

I don't think that the Vicar implied, originally, that the plays had to be about Ireland.

I think he did imply that there is a long history of great playwrights of Irish origin. Coincidence? Maybe, maybe not; either way, they arguably form a tradition that is worth talking about.

Also, Ireland is interesting, to some people, and so is its literature, if such a thing exists.

In conversation, Rener reckons the difference between Boucicault and Synge is that B's paddywhackery is funny.

beautiful thread

quote: true fact: almost every single English Playwright whose works form the repertory of a modern theatre company has been Irish or partly irish.

why is that?

unquote

answer: because anglo irish has more hooks than english and enjoys a wander besides

synge was no better at island speech than o'casey was at dublin speech. i agree that yeats was not aiming for realism tho.

i cant off top of the head nominate an island speech writer, that said.

the field maybe is a reasonable effort that springs to mind. nice scrabble english.

hardscrabble, not wordscrabble

beautiful thread

quote: true fact: almost every single English Playwright whose works form the repertory of a modern theatre company has been Irish or partly irish.

It is. Not at all sure about that 'true fact' though.

Meh 2 'English' theatre tho.

yeah probably yr right there