Ireland's wildest playwright

Dion Boucicault was the most celebrated – and infamous – Irish playwright of his time, but his work was eclipsed by the aristocratic comedies of Wilde. Now, his plays are enjoying a timely revival, writes SARA KEATING

DIONYSIUS Lardner Boursiquot: it is a name you would hardly forget. And yet the work of the 19th century’s most popular and infamous playwright has been largely neglected over the last hundred years, although in the 21st century he has started to make a comeback.

Dion Boucicault, the name by which he would achieve his renown, was a 19th-century celebrity. His life reads like the plot of some improbable potboiler, a plot that would not be out of place in one of his own comic dramas. Depending on which account you read, he was born on several dates, the son of merchant Samuel Boursiquot, or science writer Dionysius Lardner, who was a lodger at the Boursiquot house. The young Dionysius left Dublin for London at the age of 13 to become an engineer, but wound up apprenticing as an actor instead. He started to write almost immediately and had back-to-back box-office smashes throughout the 1840s and 1850s, before giving himself a leading role and gaining the public visibility that would define the rest of his life.

Boucicault moved to New York in 1854, where he quickly seduced audiences with his situation comedies, including The Octoroon, his 1859 anti-slavery drama, which earned him $1,363 in its first week. He demanded more, but was fired and replaced, so Boucicault returned to England and became his own producer, supplementing his income by introducing the royalty system into theatres for the first time. Not that this guaranteed him solvency. He bounced in and out of bankruptcy throughout the 1860s and 1870s, before returning to New York in 1875, where he stayed until his death 15 years later.

If Boucicault's professional life was heady, so was his personal life. He married his first wife in 1845, but she died in a mysterious mountaineering accident later that year. Or so Boucicault claimed. She may still have been alive in 1848. His second marriage was also a sensational one, an elopement with the youngest member of his theatre troupe, with whom he had five children, before he left her for another young actress 44 years his junior, whom he married bigamously while on tour in Australia. He had to sell the rights to many of his plays in order to finance alimony payments. A colourful life is what we would call it these days; "conspicuous" was what the New York Timescalled it in his obituary in 1890.

BUT BOUCICAULT'S ability to get tongues wagging was supplemented by a prodigious talent for reinventing Victorian commercial theatre. By 1866 he claimed to have written between 180 and 200 plays. Many were adaptations of popular novels of the time ( The Colleen Bawnwas based on Gerald Griffin's The Collegians), and many more were adaptations of his own work to suit new venues on his tours ( The Poor of New Yorkwould become the poor of Liverpool, Dublin etc where appropriate). This opened up debates about intellectual property for the first time, and he was nearly prosecuted for plagiarism ("Originality is a quality that never existed," he protested. "An author cannot exist without progenitors any more than a child can.")

But he was also, without qualification, the most popular writer of his generation. Queen Victoria saw the first production of The Colleen Bawnthree times. So what happened? In London he was simply written out of fashion by sophisticates such as Oscar Wilde, who moved the comedy of manners back into aristocratic territory. Explanations of Boucicault's disappearance from Irish theatre are more complicated. His plays were hugely popular in Ireland because many of them had Irish settings or characters and they heralded, according to the Catholic Telegraphat the time, "a new era in Irish character"; "instead of a blundering blockhead, with jigs, howls and shillelaghs, we have the true son of the sod, bold and courageous." And yet, with the foundation of the Abbey Theatre, which preferred a more refined aesthetic, Boucicault became the byword for "stage-Irish". The commercial popular theatre tradition was too British for post-colonial Ireland; Boucicault was virtually banned.

IN 2004 THE REVIVAL OF interest in Boucicault's work began with a production of The Shaughraunat the Abbey. Although the production was said to have had the highest box-office returns in 14 years at the theatre, its production costs ("four times the usual", according to Ben Barnes's published diaries) were thought to have contributed significantly to the Abbey's financial debacle at the end of the theatre's centenary year. The production transferred to the West End in 2005, although mooted plans to tour to New York were cancelled after bad reviews and poor houses in London. However, London jumped on the Boucicault bandwagon earlier this year with a production of London Assurance, which has just finished a sellout three-month run at the National Theatre.

The enthusiasm has continued in Ireland, meanwhile, with three major theatre companies simultaneously working on productions of Boucicault's masterful melodramas this summer: Pan Pan Theatre in New York with The Octoroon(see below), Bedrock with The Colleen Bawn, which runs for a record seven weeks at the Project Arts Centre this summer; and Arragh-na-Pogueat the Abbey at Christmas.

WILLIE WHITE, who is producing The Colleen Bawn, is confident that Boucicault can make an impact on a contemporary audience. Because the plays are largely unknown, he says, they offer a chance for artists to take a look at classical Irish work outside of the traditional frame of reference in which it is often interpreted. "Why can't we have the same latitude with a classic Irish play as we have with Shakespeare or the Greeks? Boucicault coined the term mash-up," says White, and although the production was only in its second week of rehearsal when we talked, he hints at ways in which it might blend a variety of performance styles and contemporary influences.

“The play is very much about the idea of performance, and in many ways also how we perform Irishness,” he says. As Ireland faces an enormous cultural and economic crisis, that old question is still vitally important to contemporary life as it was in Boucicault’s day.

The Colleen Bawnruns at Project Arts Centre from tomorrow to September 4, followed by a national tour.

Arragh-na-Pogueopens at the Abbey Theatre in December.

Noises off: How Pan Pan's 'Octoroon' in New York came undone

Pan Pan's reinterpretation of the minstrel melodrama The Octoroonachieved notoriety of Boucicauldian heights in New York last month, when the show was cancelled at the last minute. In an article published on the very day the production was to open, the New York Timesreported that director Gavin Quinn had withdrawn from the project at PS122 after creative differences with his collaborator Branden Jacobs-Jenkins.

“They’re both artists we love,” Vallejo Gantner, artistic director of PS122, said in an official press statement. “But they come from two very different artistic backgrounds . . . I want to protect their privacy and the privacy of the creative process, so I don’t really have any more to say.”

However, one of the cast members had plenty more to say in a leaked e-mail attributed to him and which appeared on the Village Voicewebsite on the morning of the new opening date. He invited audiences to the "trainwreck" show.

“Our original director Gavin Quinn (of Pan Pan, who have been making amazing work since 1991) had to quit, citing artistic differences with our playwright Branden Jacobs-Jenkins (who has been making theatre since a year ago or so).

“So now the play has transformed from an engaging piece of contemporary theatre . . . to a piece of crap that wouldn’t hold a candle to some of the community theatre I did in high school. I am ashamed to be in this play . . . The only good thing I can say is that enough of the play was cut yesterday to reduce its running time from over two and half hours to 90 minutes. So there will be less suffering for all of us.”

Other cast members, production staff, and a commentator posing as Jacobs-Jenkins weighed in to trade insults and threats. The resulting brouhaha proved a catalyst for several actors to quit the show. The play was performed in workshop style for four performances at the end of June.

A dignified Quinn commented that there was “a mutual agreement to dissolve” the collaboration. “But put it this way, Pan Pan have worked with hundreds of different artists and actors from all over the world in similar collaborations in the last 20 years and we have never not finished a project. Yes, it is disappointing and frustrating but luckily we are moving straight into new projects.”