DRAMA:The work of a once-popular Abbey theatre dramatist can sometimes resonate with dilemmas still pertinent today
FOR THREE DECADES, George Shiels was one of the Abbey Theatre's most popular dramatists. His 1925 comedy Professor Tim,for instance, was performed almost 250 times at the theatre during Shiels's lifetime, while in 1940 The Rugged Pathplayed there for almost three months - during a period when the usual run for a new Irish drama would have been a fortnight at most.
Yet Shiels's plays are almost completely forgotten now: they've been out of print for years, and are rarely revived. And, although there has recently been a noticeable growth in academic work about Ulster theatre, relatively little criticism of this Antrim writer has been published.
We might assume that Shiels just went out of fashion - that his career illustrates the maxim that the price of popularity today is irrelevance tomorrow. But the purpose of Christopher Murray's collection of six of Shiels's best plays is to resist that view, to remind us that his work shouldn't be dismissed as a "compilation of bygone hits". These plays, Murray argues, have a literary and theatrical value that merits recognition and respect.
OSTENSIBLY, HOWEVER, Shiels seems to cover over-familiar territory. Three of the six plays collected by Murray are set in a country kitchen. We regularly encounter the put-upon Irish mammy and the emasculated, hen-pecked Irish husband - and there are plenty of shadowy gunmen, noble farmers who've fallen on hard times, and feisty colleens too. The ownership and inheritance of land is a major theme; so too is emigration. Alcohol abuse features prominently, poems are recited, and the national question is debated. So if the plays are read superficially, they won't seem to offer much that we haven't encountered before.
But what is surprising - and exciting - about Shiels's treatment of these conventions was his ability to make them seem interesting again and, in doing so, to push Irish drama into areas that wouldn't be fully explored until long after his death in 1949. His early play The Retrievers portrays an Irish-American couple whose return home to take possession of a family farm provokes a hostile response - a situation that would be echoed in later plays by Brian Friel and John B Keane. And his marvellous The Passing Day portrays the last moments in the life of a smalltown shopkeeper, making use of flashback in a manner that draws on Dickens's A Christmas Carolas much as it anticipates Hugh Leonard's A Lifeor Marina Carr's Portia Coughlan.
Of course, there are moments when the plays seem dated. Contemporary audiences could bristle at the presentation of some of Shiels's female characters - the young women who marry men who are vastly inferior to them, the older women who seem to have no purpose in life other than tormenting their husbands. But at other times, the plays resonate strongly with contemporary concerns. The New Gossoonfocuses on a young farmer who thinks he's the height of fashion because he owns a motorbike, while his (apparent) fiancee takes great pride in her ownership of a radio. That might seem old-fashioned to us, but it's easy to relate to the older characters in the play, who are bewildered by their children's materialism, their love of speed, their faith in technology, their distaste for hard work. Similarly - but more profoundly - The Rugged Pathand its sequel, The Summit,explore an ethical dilemma that remains sadly pertinent in Ireland today: whether it's right to risk one's own safety to inform against someone who's been accused of murder.
Those resonances provide an excellent example of how Shiels's plays transcend their geographical and chronological boundaries. He rarely deals explicitly with Ulster life: his use of idiom is colourful but never incomprehensible, most of his plays could have been set in any part of rural Ireland, and there is little evidence of sectarian division in the communities he portrays, apart from the odd reference to what one character calls "the other sort". This is probably because, as an Abbey dramatist, Shiels needed to write plays that would be rooted in authentic locations, but which would also have wide appeal - that would be comprehensible to audiences not only in Dublin but also internationally.
THAT SITUATION WAS complicated by Shiels's difficulty in travelling to Dublin. In his youth, he'd worked in the US and Canada, but was forced to return home to Ballymoney in his mid-20s, after a railway accident that paralysed him from the waist down. His disability meant it was virtually impossible for him to visit the Abbey, with the result that, as Murray points out, "Shiels saw an Abbey production of only one of his own plays . . . when the company travelled to Belfast in 1928". So he rarely encountered the actors who helped to create his characters, never had the opportunity to participate in rehearsals, and had little first-hand experience of audiences' responses to his work.
Interestingly, however, those challenges result in a powerful dynamic between the regional and the universal in his plays. This makes them fascinating examples of how Irish culture attempted to come to terms with the impact of civil war and partition 80 years ago. But they also have much to say to Ireland today - not just about the perennial issues of love and loss, but also about the tension in our own society between the local and the global. This publication shows convincingly why they deserve to be read - and demands that they be revived.
Patrick Lonergan teaches drama at NUI Galway and is director of the Synge Summer School. He is editor of the forthcoming Methuen Drama Anthology of Irish Plays, and his book Theatre and Globalization - Irish Drama in the Celtic Tiger Era will be published in November