Surprising insights

REVIEW: Dissident Dramaturgies: Contemporary Irish TheatreBy Eamonn Jordan Irish Academic Press, 277pp, €24.95

ONE OF THE most under-rated plays of the last decade was Declan Hughes’s Shiver. Premiering in 2003, it focused on two middle-aged couples who were struggling to come to terms with life in Celtic Tiger Dublin. They had wealth but lacked values; they’d rejected traditional Irish culture, but had nothing to replace it with. Their predicament was brilliantly encapsulated by one of Hughes’s characters. “Well you see,” she drawled, drunkenly, “we’ve had enough of dead mammies and peeling potatoes and farms and bogs and fucking . . . all that old tweedy fucking . . .” And she trailed off, searching for the right words. “Seamus Heaney is made of tweed,” she concluded.

In performance, those lines seemed marvellously iconoclastic, but they also captured incisively the many problems with our culture during the Celtic Tiger period. Hughes’s character saw our literary traditions as clichéd and irrelevant but, like the society at large, she was too hurried, intoxicated and complacent to respond to the situation with anything other than vulgar inanities.

Shiverwarned us that rapid enrichment was making Ireland seem both vacuous and self-important, and it predicted – accurately, as it turned out – that things were going to end badly. So, at a time when some commentators are suggesting that Irish literature ought to be more concerned with the present than the past, Hughes's play is a nice reminder that the best writing will often anticipate the future.

Shiveris mentioned at the beginning of Eamonn Jordan's Dissident Dramaturgies, an analysis of Irish drama since the early 1980s. The play doesn't receive much attention, but is actually an excellent example of the importance of Jordan's argument. He wants to show that Irish theatre is dominated by a small number of recurrent patterns (the dead mammies, bogs and farms that Shiverrails against). And he aims to demonstrate that our writers' ability to re-invent, renew or (like Hughes) to reject those patterns can be transformative for our society.

The book sets out to explore six such patterns. These include over-familiar themes – innocence, the relationship between history and memory, storytelling – and well-worn techniques, such as the use of monologue and pastoral, and the adaptation for the stage of ancient myths. We can refer to those patterns in many ways: as dominant paradigms, as dramaturgical strategies or as clichés. But Jordan’s intention is to show how their recurrence both reveals and challenges our society’s ideologies.

That argument is best articulated in a chapter that explores the links between history, memory and theatrical techniques in Brian Friel's Dancing at Lughnasa, Thomas Kilroy's Double Crossand Frank McGuinness's Observe the Sons of Ulster. But there are many other surprising insights throughout the book.

For instance, Jordan considers the links between Marina Carr's plays and Greek tragedy in a chapter about myth – which is exactly what one would expect him to do. Entirely surprising, however, is the comparison in the same chapter of Howie the Rookie, Mark O'Rowe's play about a pair of Dublin hard-men, with Chuck Palahniuk's Fight Club, the films of Bruce Lee and A Clockwork Orange.

Similarly, the book considers Conor McPherson’s The Weir as an example of Irish pastoral which, again, is exactly what one would expect. But that analysis is greatly enhanced by a discussion of the influence of David Mamet on McPherson and other Irish writers.

Such wide-ranging explorations deepen our understanding of how Irish culture is constituted and provide a timely challenge to the received wisdom about the relationships between Irish literature and international culture, between high and low art, and between drama and other forms of writing.

Jordan states that he isn’t setting out to define a national “house style”, yet in a book that is full of urgency and passion, he provides compelling evidence that the most successful Irish plays are those that conform to a very narrow range of themes and styles. “Irish drama” should be the totality of plays produced in Ireland or written by Irish people, but instead it’s in danger of becoming something more like a genre, with its specific set of conventions and tropes.

The major question to arise from this book, then, is the one hinted at by Declan Hughes in Shiver: what happens to those Irish plays that don't seem "Irish" enough?

Patrick Lonergan lectures at NUI Galway, and is director of the JM Synge Summer School for Irish Drama . His most recent book is Theatre and Globalization: Irish Drama in the Celtic Tiger Era