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ABSTRACT
In 1936, the American critic Curtis Canfield stated that there was no longer any need for “the usual naturalistic form” in a modernising Ireland whose theatre was “in an interesting state of transition from Realism to Experimentation and Expressionism”. As Terence Brown suggests, however, whatever subversive energies there were in Irish theatre in this period “became unthreatening in the provincial Irish air”. This article evaluates the realities of plays and theatre in the thirty years after the founding of the Free State within the context of the changes celebrated by Canfield and the timidity and stasis identified by Brown. It focuses in particular on the eight plays in Canfield’s edited collection, Plays of Changing Ireland (1936), and considers the extent to which they can be advanced as convincing examples of modernist theatre when set alongside the radical styles and staging of the contemporaneous European stage.
Notes
1. Armstrong, “Muting the Klaxon,” 46.
2. Parsons, The Ordnance Survey and Modern Irish Literature, 2.
3. Lanigan, James Joyce, Urban Planning, and Irish Modernism, 3. Other studies include: Castle, Modernism and the Celtic Revival; Miller, Modernism, Ireland and the Erotics of Memory; Greaves, Transition, Reception and Modernism in W.B. Yeats; Reynolds, Modernism, Drama, and the Audience for Irish Spectacle; Allen, Modernism, Ireland and Civil War; Keown and Taaffe, Irish Modernism; Rubenstein, Infrastructure, Irish Modernism and the Postcolonial; Connor, Beckett, Modernism and the Material Imagination; and Gibbons, Joyce’s Ghosts.
4. Levitas, “Modernist Experiments in Irish Theatre,” 111.
5. Ibid.
6. Cave, “Modernism and Irish Theatre 1900–1940,” 121.
7. Canfield, “Preface”; Manning, “Dublin Has Also Its Gate Theater.”
8. Cave, 122.
9. Canfield, “Preface,” xiii.
10. Ibid., xii.
11. Jackson, Constellation of Genius, 1.
12. Arrington, “Irish Modernism and Its Legacies,” 249.
13. Huyssen, After the Great Divide, vii–viii.
14. Schulte-Sasse, “Foreword,” xv.
15. Berghaus, Theatre, Performance, and the Historical Avant-Garde, xvii.
16. Hutton-Williams, “Against Irish Modernism,” 26.
17. Poggioli, The Theory of the Avant-Garde.
18. Moi, Henrik Ibsen and the Birth of Modernism, 1.
19. Yeats, Collected Works, 128.
20. Worth, The Irish Drama of Europe from Yeats to Beckett, 13.
21. McAteer, Yeats and European Drama, 4.
22. Innes, Irwin Piscator’s Political Theatre, 1.
23. Lawrence, Kangaroo, 220.
24. Woolf, “Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown,” 320.
25. Lefebvre, La Production de L’Espace, 34.
26. Lefebvre, The Production of Space, 25.
27. Pound, “Hugh Selwyn Mauberley,” 98.
28. Berman, All That is Solid Melts into Air, 15.
29. Cleary, “Introduction,” 9.
30. Anderson, “Modernity and Revolution,” 104.
31. L.K. Emory, “Confessional”, The Klaxon (Winter 1923–1924), 1.
32. Laurence K. Emory, “The Ulysses of James Joyce”, The Klaxon, 18.
33. “Confessional,” 1.
34. F.R.H., “Beauty Energised,” The Klaxon, 3.
35. “The Midnight Court,” The Klaxon, 3.
36. The Klaxon, 22.
37. Armstrong, 43.
38. Allen, Modernism, Ireland and Civil War, 55–8.
39. Eagleton, Heathcliff and the Great Hunger, 299.
40. Brown, “Ireland, Modernism and the 1930s,” 25.
41. Hutton-Williams, “Against Irish Modernism,” 23.
42. National Library of Ireland, MS 33,038. Cited in Levitas, 120.
43. Mac Liammóir, All for Hecuba, 71.
44. “Editorial”, Motley 1, no. 1 (March 1932), 4.
45. Correspondence to the Editor from “Cabra,” Ranelagh. Motley, 16.
46. Mac Liammóir, Theatre in Ireland, 42.
47. Sisson, “A Note on What Happened,” 133.
48. Brown, “Ireland, Modernism and the 1930s,” 27.
49. Manning, “An Open Letter to The Leader,” 12.
50. Ibid., 13.
51. Manning, “Dublin Has Also Its Gate Theater.”
52. Ibid.
53. Meaney “Sexual and Aesthetic Dissidences,” 201.
54. Canfield, “Preface,” viii.
55. Canfield, “Introduction,” xi–xii.
56. Ibid., xi.
57. Ibid., xii.
58. Shiel, The New Gossoon, in Canfield, 231.
59. Ibid., 211.
60. Ibid., 243.
61. Ibid., 221.
62. Ibid., 263.
63. Ibid., 221.
64. Ibid., 243.
65. Ibid., 203.
66. Lady Longford, The Jiggins of Jigginstown, in Canfield, 271.
67. Mayne, Bridge Head, 407.
68. Mary Manning, Youth’s the Season…? in Canfield, 323.
69. Ibid., 350.
70. Canfield, 198.
71. Youth’s the Season…? 326.
72. Ibid., 335.
73. Ibid., 332.
74. Ibid., 356.
75. Leeney, Irish Women Playwrights 1900–1919, 128.
76. Youth’s the Season…? 370.
77. Ibid., 330.
78. Ibid., 402.
79. Canfield, 198.
80. Ibid., 195.
81. Mac Liammóir, 21.
82. Canfield, 36.
83. Robinson, Curtain Up, 19.
84. Yeats, The Variorum Edition of the Plays, 970.
85. Canfield, 7.
86. Lord Longford, Yahoo, in Canfield, 185–6.
87. Canfield, 150.
88. Dowling, “Surrealism,” 60, 62.
89. Canfield, xiii.
90. Fallon, “The Future of Irish Theatre,” 100.
91. Ibid., 99.
92. Kilroy, “Groundwork for an Irish Theatre,” 195.
93. Innes, “Modernism in Drama,” 152.
94. Cf. Richards, “‘We Were very Young and we Shrank from Nothing’.”
95. O’Toole, “The Dublin Theatre Festival: Social and Cultural Contexts,” 191.
96. Whitaker, Economic Development, 9.
97. Pine, The Diviner, 41.
98. Kilroy, “A Generation of Playwrights,” 136.
99. Kilroy, Programme Note, 190.
100. King, 139.
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