The Literary Tradition in the History of Modern Irish Drama

Abstract

If it be accepted that the Irish Dramatic Movement as founded on the cusp of the twentieth century was part of the European revolution initiated by Ibsen and Strindberg on the one hand and such theatrical innovators as André Antoine, Otto Brahm and Constantin Stanislavski on the other, and therefore committed to naturalism, it must also be acknowledged that realism was never sufficient to the ideals and objectives of modern Irish theatre. Yeats put his stamp on Irish drama, and that stamp was poetic. Even though Synge and O’Casey avoided Yeats’s formal use of poetic drama, which was still tied to iambic pentameter, their use of language was “poetic” inasmuch as they wrote a heightened form of prose in which rhythm, imagery and richness of colour dominated. “In a good play every speech should be as fully flavoured as a nut or apple”, Synge famously asserted in his preface to The Playboy of the Western World (1907), and O’Casey concurred. Indeed, in an essay entitled “The Green Goddess of Realism”, O’Casey attacked realism as obsolete and insisted that “it is the imaginative transformation of reality, as it is seen through the eyes of the poet, that we desire”.

In the roll-call of significant Irish playwrights after O’Casey, from Denis Johnston and Brendan Behan through Brian Friel, Tom Murphy and Thomas Kilroy, to Sebastian Barry, Marina Carr, Conor McPherson and Mark O’Rowe, this dissident form of realism has characterized the Irish contribution to modern theatre. The premise is that this form is literary, prioritizing language over characterization or plot. Accordingly, this chapter argues that the endurance of a poetic language is traditional because indebted to Yeats’s aesthetic introduced to the Abbey Theatre, creating a form ‘beyond realism’.