THEATRE: FROM BOTH a critical and a theatrical perspective, Frank McGuinness's work has received far less attention in his home country than it so patently deserves. Editor John Brannigan sets this to rights in the 40th-anniversary edition of the Irish University Reviewwith an impressive array of essays covering McGuinness's theatrical career, as well as a nod to his poetry.
Brannigan’s editorial direction is to ensure it becomes a “well-thumbed, dog-eared volume, a treasured companion”. To that end he has assembled a heady mix of senior and junior scholars as well as practitioners who have brought McGuinness’s work to life. The mix will appeal to a broader readership than the scholarly community of the book’s primary target. Rich, diverse and revealing, these essays uncover McGuinness’s range, dramaturgical complexity and deep humanity in a lifetime of performance stretching from his native Co Donegal to the bright lights of Broadway.
Crucially, Brannigan gives voice to McGuinness from the outset, first in an essay in which the playwright looks back over his work and career in the previous decade and, subsequently, in an interview with Anthony Roche. Those of us privileged enough to have heard McGuinness speak in public can imagine the essay being performed. It weaves a path through his life’s journey while intercutting it with scenes from his plays.
Being an academic himself, as well as a playwright, McGuinness is able to take us through his oeuvre and relate it more broadly to the gamut of European theatre that gave him a context and an inspiration, with a pristine clarity, along with numerous asides or anecdotes of what happened offstage. More than mere entertainment, McGuinness’s opening salvo sets the agenda for deep insight.
Later in the collection McGuinness again displays his generosity of spirit with further perceptiveness. For instance, he comments on the male characters in his celebrated play Observe the Sons of Ulster Marching Towards the Somme, noting how in many productions the loneliness of the individual man is
masked by the theatrical need to create a spectacular ensemble from the outset. “The psychological pattern in the play is the making of them into a body of men. Too often they are a body of men from the beginning.” This is no simple explanation of a work completed for the benefit of a student or scholar; this is practical advice for future directors of the play.
Patrick Mason, the director of many of McGuinness’s most celebrated plays, augments the invaluable practical usefulness of the collection with an essay on how the plays offer performative possibilities to challenge the myth of nation as constructed by De Valera.
Many of the contributors wrestle with the compulsion to categorise McGuinness, to give him an identity: Irish, gay, working class. Thankfully, everyone avoids pigeonholing him with such narrow definitions. Though he may embrace all three of those identities, his work clearly messes with them, disrupting, challenging or, to use a contemporary, post-Stonewall and poststructuralist term, queering them.
David Cregan assesses the queerness of McGuinness's drama, dramaturgy and characterisation by focusing on how the playwright's gay characters are not "different" but, crucially, similar to their straight cousins, and more often than not how "central, vital, energised and often visionary" they can be. These characters stand in opposition to the bigotry and homophobia McGuinness encountered offstage in Irish theatre, no more so than in the comment by an unnamed director who lauded the success of Someone Who'll Watch Over Meby saying, "Well, you have a winner here, there are no queers in it."
So much of McGuinness's subsequent work has been premiered away from Ireland that this collection focuses a good deal of critical attention on it as a means of redress. Not all of that work met with critical or theatrical success in England. Three of the essays (by Joan FitzPatrick Dean, Nicholas Grene and Anne Fogarty) analyse his 1997 play Mutabilitie, in which McGuinness imagines a fictional meeting between Shakespeare and Spenser in Ireland. It was first performed at the Royal National Theatre, in London, in a production by Trevor Nunn that could not cope with the play's imaginative potential, and it was met with critical disdain for what FitzPatrick Dean calls its "free-wheeling treatment of the past". Though its reputation was recuperated by Michael Caven's production for Theatreworks in Dublin in 2001, critics are only now, and especially in this volume, realising the truly Shakespearian nature of this play. The "free-wheeling" approach to history is mirrored by a free-
wheeling non-realistic dramaturgy, and it is a pleasure to read such fine and restorative analysis here.
Eamonn Jordan usefully offers us a reading strategy for McGuinness’s liberty-taking and liberating drama by invoking Jill Dolan’s concept of a performative utopia in which we might be “seared by the promise of the present that gestures towards a better later”.
And this collection, with Evelyn Flanagan’s content list of the Frank McGuinness Archive at UCD Library Special Collections, sets out the challenge for the next generation of scholars: to revisit his work, to revise his critical reception and to incite Irish theatre practitioners to re-engage with work that looks back only to imagine a future and, with it, to re-energise the Irish stage.
Brian Singleton is a research fellow of Freie Universität Berlin and associate professor of drama at Trinity College Dublin. His book Masculinities and the Contemporary Irish Theatrewill be published by Palgrave Macmillan later this year
