CULTURE SHOCK: Does Irish theatre still have the capacity to effectively articulate rage at the state of the nation?
ON ST PATRICK'S night 1959, there was a serious disturbance outside the Playhouse Theatre in Limerick, where a controversial new play was being staged. If you read a statement like this, you might well assume that the near-riot was another in the line stretching back to The Playboy of the Western Worldand The Plough and the Stars, the cradle of genius again being rocked by philistine uproar. In fact, the irate mob was not trying to stop the play. It was trying to get in to see it. Inside, the sold-out Listowel Players' production of John B Keane's Sivewas drowned out, not by boos and catcalls, but, as Chris Morash writes in his History of the Irish Theatre, by "bursts of spontaneous applause and cheering".
Fifty years ago today, Eileen Coughlan reported in The Irish Timeson the play's arrival as the "big event" of the Athlone Amateur Drama Festival: "The house was packed and there was a great babble of sound that dropped to a murmur as the lights went out, and utter stillness fell at the first quiver of the curtain." A month later, the paper's Irishman's Diary could still refer to the author of this much-anticipated play as one "Laurence Keane", but very few other people in Ireland were likely to make that mistake.
Sive, which had opened in Listowel in February 1959 and then toured around many of the southern amateur drama festivals, won the All-Ireland prize at Athlone that year. At the same festival, the Tuam Theatre Guild submitted the manuscript by another previously unknown writer to the new-play competition. It won the top prize of 15 guineas. It had been written by two young men who had been hanging around Tuam after last mass, waiting for the pubs to open, when one, Noel O'Donoghue, asked the fateful question "Why don't we write a play?" The other young man, who ended up writing most of On the Outside, was called Tom Murphy. As he later explained, he did not think there was anything odd about O'Donoghue's question: "Everyone in the country in 1959 was writing a play."
If that was not literally true, it was metaphorically so. That extraordinary moment at Athlone 50 years ago, when two superb plays and two major dramatists emerged from outside both the professional theatre and the big urban centres, looks even more astonishing in retrospect. A Listowel publican and a Tuam metalwork teacher, neither of whom had been to university or had any real connection to mainstream artistic life, were as close to “everyone” as could then be imagined. Yet, at a moment of national crisis, they plugged into a potent psychic energy and electrified Irish culture.
It is not that the 1950s had been a cultural wasteland. In spite of literary censorship and the State's appalling assault on Alan Simpson's production of The Rose Tattoo, there was an audience for sophisticated drama. Simpson's 1955 production of Waiting for Godothad been a commercial success, transferring to the Gate and then touring to Dundalk, Navan, Drogheda, Cork, Clonmel, Waterford and Carlow. (It is worth noting that Godottherefore played in Navan before it opened in New York.) Likewise, 50 years ago this month, Dublin audiences could choose between Bertolt Brecht's Mother Courage and Her Childrenat the Gate and Eugene O'Neill's Long Day's JourneyInto Night at the Abbey – hardly philistine fare.
But what happened at Athlone in 1959 was something else altogether. It was not about sophistication, but about anger. Sive and On the Outside are utterly different plays. Keane’s drama is wild and fierce and almost shamanistic in its invocation of pagan blessings and curses; Murphy’s is austere, laconic and beautifully controlled. But they share more than the bare historical facts of being the work of 20-something men in mid-sized market towns. They both express, with a force that is undiminished after 50 years, a generational anger. Both plays are about the young who have no place in an Ireland that is exporting them in great numbers.
That anger was not capable of being contained within the official cultural structures. Sive was rejected by the Abbey; so was Murphy's follow-up, The Iron Men, which won the Athlone prize in 1960 and went straight to Joan Littlewood's Stratford East theatre in London as A Whistle in the Dark. For, unlike Godotor Mother Courageor Long Day's Journey, both Siveand O n the Outsidehave a ragged edge of ugliness.
Sive,after all, is essentially about the sale of an adolescent girl's body to an old farmer. Frank, one of Murphy's two young men hanging around outside a dancehall, describes the town they live in as a big tank, "and we're at the bottom, splashing around all week in their Friday night vomit".
There’s a visceral, almost physical disgust in the rage of these young writers at the corruption of the society they see around them.
Yet, remarkably, that rage and revulsion were recognised and validated, not by professional cultural elites, but by the supposedly conservative and largely rural-based amateur drama movement. Sivein particular was the nearest thing that can be imagined to an organic expression of the popular psyche.
As a play, it was Keane’s creation and as a production it obviously owed everything to the quality and commitment of its original local cast. But as a phenomenon, it was created by its audiences. In the silences that marked their attention to some key moments and the wild cheering that greeted others, those audiences were forming something for themselves – a recognition of emotions and aspirations, of fears and hopes, that Keane had somehow unlocked. Indirectly, but powerfully nonetheless, that recognition enabled the huge political, economic and cultural changes of the 1960s to take place.
Thinking of that moment 50 years ago, it is hard not to wonder whether the theatre or any other art form still has that capacity. Are there artists who could articulate the rage and disgust they feel at what has become of the country without becoming inarticulate or merely bitter? Is there a space beyond the ken of official culture from which such an organic revolution could be launched? If the rational answer to those questions is obviously “no”, the same was probably true at the start of 1959.
fotoole@irishtimes.com
