Tongue-tied?: An Active Analysis of Brian Friel's Translations

This article has arisen from a research-led production of Translations by Brian Friel for Queen’s University’s Tyrone Guthrie Society in February 2010. Drawing partly on a review of the existing critical literature and also from questions left unresolved by a previous experience of directing the play, the production sought to address through ‘active analysis’ (Merlin 2001) a number of research questions relating to the embodied nature of the rehearsal process and the historicity of Friel’s play. The analysis invokes Bergson (1910), Lefebvre (1991) and Worthern (2006) in establishing a performative correlative for insightful but more literary studies by Connolly (1993), Lojek (1994) and McGrath (1989 & 1999). A detailed account of the rehearsal process helps reveal the extent to which the idea of failure of communication is embedded in the text and embodied in performance, while an experiment with the partial use of the Irish language casts further light on Friel’s extraordinary device of rendering two languages through the medium of one. The use of music to counterpoint, rather than underscore the action, together with an achronological sequence of projected historical images inspired by Andrews (1983) provided me as director a means to challenge the audience’s presuppositions about the play. The sense of palimpsest, of the layered histories, that this evoked also served to highlight Friel’s use of the wider stylistic palette of Anglo-Irish drama, revealing Translations as a forerunner for Stewart Parker’s more explicit formal experiments in Northern Star. In rehearsal and performance Friel’s place in the continuum of the Irish theatrical canon became clear, as stylistic allusions to O’Casey, Shaw, Wilde and Beckett were embodied by the actors on the rehearsal room floor.

Choreographies of Irish Modernity

Although movement is often viewed as forming the ‘kinetic basis’ of the modern age, the analysis of movement practices such as dance is often neglected in theories of modernity. Dance theorists such as André Lepecki (2006) and Randy Martin (1998) have argued for an awareness of how the kinaesthetic politics of modernity perform a colonization of space and bodies in their constant drive toward movement and mobility. This chapter examines how an analysis of two dance works by Irish artists, one from the early twentieth century and one from the early twenty-first century, can contribute to these discussions of modernity and dance, and how the works might illuminate connections between dance and politics in Ireland in their alternative approaches to these modernist kinaesthetic politics. Taking a brief, contextualizing look at an early dance play by William Butler Yeats, the chapter then focuses on what echoes, or afterlives, can be found from this early modernist work in a piece by contemporary dance theatre choreographer Fearghus Ó’Conchúir. In both works we see the ability of dance to create an alternative space within the pervading discourses (or movements) of a sociopolitical and cultural landscape that allows the spectator – through a visceral connection with a dancer – to experience a different perspective on the ‘idea of a nation’.

British Irish Institutional Structures: Towards a New Relationship

Growing institutional cooperation between the Republic of Ireland and the UK,
initially directed explicitly at resolution of the Northern Ireland conflict, has taken the form of three parallel institutional structures. First, an Anglo-Irish (later, British–Irish) Intergovernmental Conference has dealt with matters relating to the government of Northern Ireland in areas to which power is not devolved, and with certain other ‘sovereign’ matters. Second, a British–Irish Council links not just the two sovereign governments but also the devolved institutions in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland and the crown dependencies of Jersey, Guernsey and the Isle of Man. Third, a matching British–Irish Parliamentary Assembly provides common ground for representatives of the legislative bodies of the same jurisdictions. The
paper tracks the evolution of these structures, and assesses the significance of the new institutions for the British–Irish relationship.

Accounts of debates in the House of Commons, March– April 1731, supplementary to the diary of the first earl of Egmont

John Perceval (1685–1748), 1st Viscount Perceval and (from 1733) 1st Earl of Egmont, was an assiduous recorder of his own life and times. His diaries, published by the Historical Manuscripts Commission from manuscripts in the British Library, are the best source for parliamentary debates at Westminster in the 1730s. For the years 1730-1733, when Perceval sat in the Commons (as an Irish peer) they are remarkably full. His practice seems to have been to prepare two versions (presumably on the basis of notes taken in the House), the first attributing speeches to individuals, and the second, entered up in the diary, which listed speakers and summarized all arguments on each side. His letterbooks for 1731 contain accounts of five debates that embody his first editing process, with speeches attributed to individuals. They were sent to an Irish correspondent, Marmaduke Coghill, and largely omitted from the diary because Perceval had already transcribed them elsewhere. They are new to historians and cast light on two main issues: the unsuccessful attempts by Perceval and the ‘Irish lobby’ to persuade the British parliament to settle the Irish woollen trade, a question bedevilling Anglo-Irish relations in this period; and an attempt by the opposition to stir up anger against perceived Spanish aggression against Gibraltar. One of the most interesting features is the insight afforded into the Commons performances of Sir Robert Walpole: his management of debates, his own style of speaking, and his sharp exchanges with opponents like William Pulteney.

Terry Eagleton, Postmodernism and Ireland

Terry Eagleton devoted considerable thought to the nature of postmodernism during the heyday of the postmodernist debate in the Eighties and Nineties, and always expressed strong reservations about it.1 It is worth noting that these reservations do not imply any hostility to formal experimentation, or to the registering of alienation in its postmodern form. Rather, he seeks to show how there might be a politically and morally engaged art which was very much of our time. His position is consistent with those he adopts in dealing with other subjects, and may be illuminated by reference to those works where he does so. Of all these other subjects, the most illuminating for understanding his work is that of Irish literature, for it was during this period that Eagleton became a major figure in Irish studies, and his thinking on postmodernist relativism was developed alongside his critique of revisionism in Irish historiography.

'A Land Beyond the Wave': Transnational Perspectives on Easter 1916

Despite the appeal and significance of nationalism as a near universal political force, Irish historians – in common with the historians of most nationalist movements – have struggled to analyse nationalism from beyond the perspective of the nation state. The reasons for this are varied, arising both from practical aspects, such as the availability and accessibility of sources, to more conceptual issues such as the resilience of the national perspective in the framing of historiographical narratives. This paper considers the Easter Rising as a case study in assessing how a transnational framework complicates traditional historiographical perspectives. Accounts of the Easter Rising generally interpret the rebellion within local, national, or international (particularly Anglo-Irish or imperial) frameworks. Interpretations that adopt a broader framework have tended to focus on international rather than transnational dimensions: the First World War context, revolutionary links with Germany, and the role of the United States. This paper assesses the potential of a transnational approach by analysing four aspects of the Rising: the significance of the transnational movement of people prior to the event; the influence of the transnational circulation of political ideas; the impact of transnational cultural currents in shaping the framing of revolutionary ideals; and the impact of the Rising on Irish nationalist communities beyond Ireland.

Protestantism, Spectacle, Motherhood and Vice: Dublin's New Pleasure Gardens

In 1748, Bartholomew Mosse, a curious combination of surgeon, obstetrician and entertainment impresario, established a pleasure garden on the northern fringes of Dublin. Ostensibly designed to fund the construction of a maternity hospital to be located adjacently, Mosse’s New Pleasure Gardens became one of the premier leisure resorts in Dublin. This was to have a profound effect on the city’s urban form. Within a few years the gardens became an epicentre of speculative development as the upper classes jostled to build their houses in the vicinity. Meanwhile, the creation nearby of Sackville Mall, a wide and generous strolling ground, established a whole section of the city dedicated to haute spectacle, display and leisure. Like other pleasure gardens in the British Isles, Mosse’s venture introduced new, commodified forms of entertainment. In the colonial context of eighteenth-century Ireland, however, ‘a land only recently won and insecurely held’ (Foster, 1988) by the Protestant Anglo-Irish settler class, the production of culture and spectacle was perhaps more significant than elsewhere. Indeed, the form of Mosse’s gardens echoed the private city gardens of a key figure in the Anglo-Irish aristocracy, while the hospital itself was constructed in a style of a Palladian country house, symbol of colonial presence in the countryside. However, like other pleasure gardens, the mix of music and alcohol, the heterogeneous crowd culled from across social and gender boundaries, and a landscape punctuated with secluded corners, meant that it also acquired a dubious reputation as a haunt of louche and illicit behaviours. The curious juxtaposition between a maternity hospital and pleasure garden, therefore, begins to assume other, hitherto hidden complexities. These are borne out by a closer examination of the architecture of the hospital, the shape of its landscape and the records of its patrons and patients.

Dublin 1916: theatre of revolt

At Easter 1916, Dublin city centre was one of a series of sites throughout Ireland where a rebellion was staged against British rule. It was a strategic failure, swiftly crushed by superior British forces. The event, however, subsequently took a central role in the mythology of modern Ireland.

The first visual representations were of the conflict’s aftermath: photographic journeys through landscapes of ruin. From the distance of the camera, we see none of the pockmarks of shell bursts, nor the etchings of machine guns. Instead, traces of life in the city seem to have been swept aside by an unseen hand: the passing of millennia or a violent action of nature. Architecture alone has witnessed and recorded its presence. Amongst the fragments, the shell of the General Post Office (G.P.O.) in Sackville Street is one of the few buildings still wholly recognizable. The remnants of its classical form, portico and pediment, columns and entablature seem to transcend its prosaic modern functions and allude to something more ancient. The bewilderment of city’s inhabitants is also recorded. Dubliners have become inquisitive tourists in streets which hitherto were the locus of everyday life. They wander around aimlessly in a landscape as alien and picturesque as Pompeii. This shift in perception was captured by the Irish poet W.B. Yeats who hinted that Dublin, purged of modern commercialism had transcended its petty inadequacies to revive a slumbering heroic past.

‘I have met them at the close of day
Coming with vivid faces
From counter or desk among grey
Eighteenth-century houses [.]’
All is changed, changed utterly:
A terrible beauty is born.’

His comments were prescient. Initially unpopular, the republican leaders, executed by the British, slowly became recast as heroic martyrs. Similarly, the spaces where their heroism was forged became venerated. The G.P.O. and Sackville Street, however, already had a republican history. It was originally conceived in the eighteenth century as part of a series of magnificent urban spaces to provide an arena of spectacle and self-celebration for the colonial Anglo-Irish and their vision of a Protestant republic. O’Connell/Sackville Street became the temporal, geographical and mythical hinge upon which two different versions of Irish republicanism waxed and waned. Its recasting after independence as a space of Catholic Nationalism bore testimony to its consistency in providing a backdrop for the production of ritual and myth. In the 1920s and 30s, as the nascent country, beset with economic stagnation and political tensions, turned to spectacle as a salve for it social problems, O’Connell Street and the G.P.O. provided its most sacred sites. Within the introduction of new myths, however, individual as well as national identities were created and consolidated. The emerging identity of modern Ireland became inextricably linked with that of one ambitious politician. His uses of the G.P.O. in particular revealed a perceptive understanding of the political uses of classical architecture and urban space.