Panel: Touring Within Ireland

Panel chair: Cathy Leeney

Helen Burke

Florida State University

Theatrical Touring and Eighteenth-Century Irish Popular Culture

In The Irish Stage in the Country Towns, William Smith Clark argues that Ireland first developed a nationwide theatrical tradition in the eighteenth century, and he suggests that touring companies and strolling players from the capital played a central role in this development. In this paper, however, I argue that this is an overly ‘top-down’ view of theatrical expansion, and I suggest that it also oversimplifies the ideological role of the traveling theater company. As I show through looking at the careers, performances, and works of John Edwin, John Bernard, Robert Owenson, and John O'Keeffe, the traveling company was never merely the passive conduit of metropolitan culture. It was also the site of cultural traffic, a point of transfer between the hegemonic Anglo performative tradition and a still vital, though subordinate, Irish popular entertainment tradition. English strolling actors, such as Edwin and Bernard, participated in, and learned from, Irish popular rituals and entertainments as they traveled around the Irish countryside during the summer months. And actors and writers from a native Irish background such as Owenson and O'Keeffe, who later went on to bring Irish music and culture to the Dublin and London stage, perfected their hybridized dramatic art in the culturally fluid spaces created by the traveling theater company.

Mark Phelan

Queen's University, Belfast

Irish Melodrama in Belfast and Dublin

This paper examines the production and reception of Irish political melodrama in Dublin and Belfast. In particular, it will examine the phenomenon of Irish Nights: occasions featuring the performances of popular, political melodramas which elicited a ritualised, riotous response of para-theatrical activity from Belfast's working class audiences.

The recrudescence of nationalist feeling in the late nineteenth century generated a new, popular genre of Irish political melodrama. In Belfast, however, Irish Nights were unique given the city's context as a crucible of inter-communal conflict throughout the various Home Rule crises. However, the lack of any real rioting outside theatres on Irish Nights suggests that the off-stage performance of these in-house ructions functioned as a ritualised part of the theatrical event in a city racked all too often by very real rioting.

This paper will also examine rural performances in Ulster of military melodramas about the Battle of Aughrim and the Siege of Londonderry, which were perfervidly performed by local loyalist and nationalist (secret) societies. These melodramatic performances mirrored the violent, public, political performances of identity enacted by their urban counterparts in the increasing ghettoised Belfast of the nineteenth century.

Lionel Pilkington

National University of Ireland, Galway

The Pike Theatre on Tour

Founded in 1953, the Pike Theatre Club was a short-lived Dublin-based cultural phenomenon which, unlike the Abbey Theatre, resisted the claim to be nationally representative and opted instead for its reputation as an urban centre for a resurgent Irish modernity. A private theatre club that served as the venue for avant-garde, satirical and modernist performances, the Pike seemed to proclaim its secession from the traditional political and economic prerogatives of Irish society. Within such a context, the notion of touring - motivated by commercialism or nationalist ideology - seems entirely anomalous. Yet in 1956 the Pike toured its long-running production of Samuel Beckett's Waiting for Godot to numerous Irish towns, and in 1957 Alan Simpson's controversial production of Tennessee Williams' The Rose Tattoo was toured to Belfast. This paper considers how an inquiry into the circumstances surrounding these tours can assist a revised understanding of the Pike and of the cultural and political history of Ireland in the 1950s.