Brian Singleton

Masculinities and the Contemporary Irish Theatre

List of illustrations Acknowledgements Introduction Contesting Canons Performing Patriarchy Monologies and Masculinities Quare Fellas Male Races Protestant Boys After Words Bibliography Index

Introduction: The Pursuit of Otherness for the Investigation of Self

In his introduction to Culture and Imperialism, Edward Said lays to rest my fears of political incorrectness and of being orientalist in my teaching and research of Asian as well as European theatre practices and proto-theatrical forms. Said empowers me by locating my nationality (Irish) and the locus of my vision of the Orient in the very realm of the Orient: amongst the colonized peoples of the world. Theatre historians in recent years have embraced Saids modernist dichotomies of Orientalism, and mistakenly divided the theatrical manifestation of culture into West/East, first world/third world, bad/good, colonizers/colonized. The simplicity of such binary opposites consequently denounces and sanctifies. The politics of culture, however, is a much more complex affair. Modern Irish theatre, for example, contemporaneous with social struggle and revolution, is lauded by Said as a strategy of resistance against cultural imperialism. In Asia the resurrection of pre-colonial dance forms and folk traditions is similarly seen as a cultural assertion of independence. Conversely fin de siecle European theatre divorced from its formalist, societal and religious origins has looked to the oriental theatres for inspiration. In the same mistaken paradigm a la Said, this is branded as eclectic purloining of the surface of foreign cultures of the third world, a colonial plundering disguised as aesthetic pursuit.

The Boys of Foley Street

The Boys of Foley Street offered snapshots of the local community and their struggle to survive poverty and social exclusion in the 1970s and 1980s, particularly their immersion in a heroin epidemic that wreaked havoc on a whole generation of local residents. In addition, the production gestured to the 1974 loyalist car bomb that brought death and destruction in Talbot Street on the Monto’s southern perimeter. The performance captured the chaos of street life before leading us into the interior of a criminal world of crime, sex and drugs, and then to the flipside interior of the community’s vigilantist response. Blurring the boundaries between the real and the performative, the production challenged spectators’ simultaneous copresence in a community and their consumption of culture.

Strangers in the house: reconfiguring the borders of national and cultural identities in contemporary Irish theatre

The Irish literary revival at the beginning of the last century established the concept of ‘house’ as a symbol of ‘nation’ in dramatic writing. Strangers to the house thus took on the mantle of imperialist forces whose colonial project, practices and values had to be resisted and expelled. The allegorical situations of houses and strangers in theatre foreshadowed revolution and eventual independence for the country decades later. Contemporary Irish playwrights continue to use the house/stranger, familiar/foreign dichotomies as templates for their exploration of the current state of the ‘nation’, but they are also beginning to explore the idea that ‘strangeness’ might be a condition that should be embraced to ensure the future health of that nation.

From Dana to Dustin: The Reputation of Old/New Ireland and the Eurovision Song Contest

On 20 May 2008 in the Belgrade Arena during the first semifinal of the Eurovision Song Contest (ESC), the Irish entry was booed unceremoniously off the stage. At the end of the evening, Ireland failed to qualify for the final. This marked the absolute nadir of Ireland’s participation in a contest that it had dominated in previous decades. At the same time, despite government denials, the Irish economy, the wonder of the economic world since 1997, went into freefall as access to capital for Irish banks and businesses dried up, the overheated property market came to a standstill, and unemployment rose on a steep curve. By September 2008, Ireland had officially entered a recession; by 2010 it needed a European Union (EU)/International Monetary Fund (IMF) bail-out, and by 2011 its credit rating had been declared junk. To compound the media assault on its economic reputation, a second ‘I’ for Ireland was added to the pejorative use by economic analysts of the acronym PI(I)GS, once formerly reserved for the comparatively depressed economies in the southern half of the Eurozone (Portugal, Italy, Greece, and Spain). It was wholly appropriate then for Ireland’s worst achievement ever in the history of the contest (in 2008) to have been performed by a turkey puppet in a shopping trolley!

Sick, Dying, Dead, Dispersed: The Evanescence of Patriarchy in Contemporary Irish Women’s Theatre

The patriarchal essentialization and ‘subjective disavowal’1 of Irish woman as the Aisling, Roisin Dubh and Mother Ireland figures, as part of both theatrical canon and nation-formation in the popular imagination in the early twentieth century, is being contested by the emergence of new Irish women playwrights in the early twenty-first century. Their work, configured in a climate of first-time economic prosperity and social change that brought about the crumbling of the last vestiges of a theocratic state, seeks no longer to represent or metaphorically embody the nation on stage. The essentialized iconic and mythical women of the early nation’s male imagination have been replaced by women who reject male authority, seek new lives beyond the strictures of the family unit, and refuse to be haunted by the sick, dying and dead patriarchs in their lives who left traumatized the women of the previous generation. Most of these new writers also challenge the myth-making of the realist form as a dramaturgical strategy to disrupt the time-space continuum and thereby open up new vistas and possibilities for change. All the plays, by Ioanna Anderson, Hilary Fannin, Stella Feehily and Elizabeth Kuti, focus on the contemporary experience of women in Ireland.

World’s End Lane

The first part of the Monto Cycle, World’s End Lane, took spectators on an individual journey through the history of the Monto as the sex capital of the British Empire in the early twentieth century. Encountering historical characters that lived in the area, spectators were copresent in a living past, told though extant texts and reimagined for contemporary audiences. Blurring the past with the present, the performance engaged with spectators as tourists, punters and voyeurs. In the chapter, inspired by Josephine Machon’s concept of (syn)aesthetics, and Marc Auge’s notion of the ‘non-place’, I analyse my individual multi-sensory experience, from the invasion of personal space, direct address by actors, to moments of interaction and ultimate complicity with the past and the histories of place.

K. N. Panikkar's Teyyateyyam : Resisting Interculturalism Through Ritual Practice

Independence India, however, has witnessed those deviant practices of resistance become the dominant ideological performance practices of modern India. Much actor training continued to be modelled on British drama schools such as RADA (Roral Academy of Dramatic Art), classical dances has survived to incorporate certain aspects of western ballet (for example, group sequences in Kathak) and the folk rituals have come increasingly under the microscope of western cultural tourists. Indian theatre practice, therefore, succumbs to the power of the dollar as western academies and practitioners, with their financial and technological power, act as legitimizing agents for the global recognition of Asian culture. We are at a time when great currency is being attached to the notion of intercultural reju venation of home cultures by acts of productive reception of foreign cultures ( a more positive definition of the practice by Erika Fischer Lichte in direct response to Edward Saids charge of cultural colo nialism which he terms Orientalism). It is worth while taking note of how certain forms of modern Indian theatre are resisting inter cultural practices, not by refusal or direct opposition but by theatrical acts of intracultural rejuvenation, without the injection of the foreign culture as a serum.