“[...] but a play”: Laughter and the Reinvention of Theater in \u3ci\u3eThe Resurrection \u3c/i\u3e

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Introduction

On a night like this I remember the childwho came with fifteen summers to her name,and she lay down alone at my feetwithout midwife or doctor or friend to hold her handand she pushed her secret out into the night,far from the town tucked up in little scandals,bargains struck, words broken, prayers, promises,and though she cried out to me in extremisI did not move It is a confusing feeling – somewhere between diarrhoea and sex – this grief that is almost genital. This issue of Études irlandais..

The Irish Dramatic Revival

Anthony Roche’s new book provides a compact history of the Irish dramatic movement from the first year of the Irish Literary Theatre, initiated by Yeats, Lady Gregory and Edward Martyn, to Yeats’s death. Thus Yeats is construed as the tutelary figure of what Roche refers to as the “Irish dramatic revival”, yet the book usefully opens up the canon and incorporates discussions of playwrights not often mentioned in the context of the Revival, such as G.B. Shaw and Teresa Deevy. It also broadens ..

“A player, a playwright, and the most famous poet in the world”: Highs and Lows in The Player Queen

Yeats published The Player Queen, a play he had struggled with for more than a decade, in 1922, just a year before he was awarded the Nobel Prize. This article argues despite its appearance of complete wackiness, The Player Queen constitutes a significant landmark in Yeats’s elaboration of his own theatrical aesthetics, as well as a meditation on artistic responsibility—or failure thereof. Why does the poet Septimus fail to communicate his beautiful vision of the Unicorn to anyone, and why does no-one in the play listen to him? On the one hand, the citizens in the play are figures of the incompetent spectators, reminiscent of the audience who rejected Synge at the Abbey. On the other hand, Septimus himself is an incompetent spectator, who is so engrossed in his poetic vision that he fails to pay attention to the momentous change that is really going on before his eyes, although this concerns his own wife Decima, the eponymous Player Queen who comes to replace the real queen. Septimus fails to make himself heard because he is not paying attention to what really matters, he is not fulfilling his duty, as a playwright and a poet, of translating the shapeless chaos of reality into intelligible forms

Donald E. Morse (ed.), Irish Theatre in Transition. from the Late Nineteenth to the Early Twenty-First Century

The title of Donald E. Morse’s edited volume quotes the first sentence of the first essay in the collection, Christopher Murray’s “The Irish theatre: The First Hundred Years, 1897-1997”: “The best theatre is always in transition”. The whole volume is intended as a homage to Murray’s major contribution as a critic of Irish theatre, and more specifically as a response to this essay which was initially published in 1997, a hundred years after the inception of the modern Irish theatre in 1897. Mu..

Blue Balls of Fire and the Ethics of Spectatorship: Verlaine, Yeats, Beckett

This paper looks at three short dramatic scenes by Paul Verlaine, W. B. Yeats and Samuel Beckett which all pick up that most conventional of theatrical themes, thwarted love, only in a disturbing way, by shifting the focus from the torments of the soul to the painful embodied experience of sexual frustration, and by having it performed not by youthful “star-crossed lovers”, but by ambiguously incarnated revenants, or by decrepit, nearly dead old people. I first suggest that a certain filiation, conscious or not, runs from one of Verlaine’s most famous poems, “Colloque sentimental”, through the dance of the ghosts in Yeats’s “play for dancers” The Dreaming of the Bones, to the “love scene” played out by Nagg and Nell out of their respective dustbins in Beckett’s Endgame. More importantly, I argue that the three pieces ask uncomfortable questions about the ethics of spectatorship and invite us to think critically about the conceptualising of theatre as a “face-to-face encounter with the Other”, a notion inspired by Levinas which has gained currency since the “ethical turn” hit theatre studies in the mid-2000s. This paradigm, I further suggest, is applied inaccurately to the theatrical encounter, especially in such contemporary productions as Milo Rau’s 2019 show Orestes in Mosul, which rather rests on a problematic ethics of empathy, a notion foreign to Levinas. The three scenes by Verlaine, Yeats and Beckett, on the other hand, offer an alternative model of unempathetic spectatorship which, paradoxically, may go further towards allowing the presence of radical Others on the stage.Cet article lit en parallèle trois extraits dramatiques d’œuvres de Paul Verlaine, W. B. Yeats et Samuel Beckett qui sollicitent l’éternel trope théâtral de l’amour impossible, mais de manière insolite, en insistant moins sur les tourments de l’âme que sur l’expérience douloureusement corporelle de la frustration sexuelle, et en mettant en scène non l’habituel couple de jeunes premiers, mais des spectres ambigus ou des personnages vieux, décrépits et déjà à moitié morts. Je montre d’abord qu’une filiation, consciente ou non, relie le dialogue du « Colloque sentimental » de Verlaine, la dance des spectres dans The Dreaming of the Bones de Yeats et la « scène d’amour » qui se joue d’une poubelle à l’autre entre Nagg et Nell dans Fin de Partie (Endgame) de Beckett. Mon hypothèse est que les trois passages, qui mettent tous en scène un spectateur involontaire, interrogent le rôle éthique du spectateur de théâtre. Depuis le « tournant éthique » des études théâtrales dans les années 2000, il est devenu courant de concevoir la représentation théâtrale comme le lieu d’une rencontre avec le Visage de l’autre, au sens où l’entend Lévinas ; toutefois, cette lecture est contestable, et recouvre trop souvent la notion, étrangère à Lévinas, d’empathie. Prenant pour exemple le spectacle de Milo Rau, Orestes à Mossoul (2019), je montre en quoi un théâtre qui en appelle à l’empathie du spectateur est potentiellement problématique. Les trois scènes évoquées plus haut de Verlaine, Yeats et Beckett proposent un contre-modèle de spectateur résolument dénué d’empathie, qui permet peut-être paradoxalement de faire sur scène une place à l’Autre dans toute son irréductible étrangeté

A Body that Matters: Tom Kilroy's Talbot's Box

This paper looks at Tom Kilroy’s play Talbot Box, and argues that it resorts to the tropes of the Passion narrative, revisited by ex-centric mystic Matt Talbot, to expose the homogenising, normalising and exploitative efforts of the Catholic Church, a powerful institution which is shown to work in collusion with the forces of capitalism. Using a grotesque, often farcical dramaturgy, the play displays the joint attempts of ecclesiastical and temporal powers to appropriate Matt Talbot’s private performance of the Christian Passion for their own purposes, as well as the ways in which he resists instrumentalization by submitting himself to a radical form of bodily exposure. The play thus invents its own version of a theatre of cruelty in order to accommodate a mystical experience which lies beyond the reach of realistic representation.

The Queen’s two bodies: Panti at the Abbey

This article reads Panti’s Noble Call at the Abbey theatre on 1 February 2014 in the light of Didier Eribon’s work on the experience of insult as constitutive of gay subjectivity. However, it goes on to argue that Panti’s narrated experience of stigma, internalised shame and failed self-discipline also reflects the young Irish postcolonial nation’s self-imposed task of performing heteronormative modernity. The drag queen’s performance, turning shame into exhibitionism, points to alternative ways of performing Irishness which reconnect with traditional, non-modern forms of Irish performative practices.Cet article propose une lecture de la performance de Panti sur la scène de l’Abbey Theatre le 1er février 2014 à la lumière du travail de Didier Eribon sur l’insulte comme expérience constitutive de la subjectivité gay. Il suggère que l’histoire de Panti, qui parle de stigmatisation, de honte intériorisée et de son échec à discipliner son corps selon la norme hétérosexuelle, ne reflète pas seulement une expérience spécifiquement homosexuelle, mais fait aussi écho à la performance de la modernité hétéronormative à laquelle est confrontée l’ensemble des membres de la jeune nation irlandaise postcoloniale. La performance de la drag queen, qui renverse la honte en exhibitionnisme, montre qu’il existe d’autres manières de jouer l’Irlandicité, et renoue ainsi avec des pratiques performatives irlandaises traditionnelles qui n’ont pas trouvé leur place dans la modernité hétéronormée

Nothing Quite Like it

Among the host of Irish memoirs which have appeared in recent years, Nicholas Grene’s Nothing Quite Like It sounds a very distinctive note. Subtitled An American-Irish Childhood, the book captures the reminiscences of the boy who arrived in Wicklow from his native Illinois at the age of five in the early 1950’s. What makes this familiar enough story of a childhood in rural Ireland unlike any other is the unusualness of Grene’s identity status (he is hyphenated ‘the wrong way out’, and describ..