Irish plays and English audiences

THEATRE GOING tourists in London these days might be forgiven for wondering whether their airline hadn't made a terrible mistake and landed them in Dublin instead. Since the huge success last year of Sebastian Barry's The Steward of Christendom, which swept the 1995 Best Play awards, there has been an avalanche of Irish plays on the London stage. So far this year, Frank McGuinness's Observe the Sons of Ulster Marching Towards the Somme, Jimmy Murphy's Brothers of the Brush, Dermot Bolger's Baby Jean, Bryan James Ryder's The Soldier's Song, and Martin McDonagh's The Beauty Queen of Leenane, and Marina Carr's Portia Coughlan, have played theatres from the Barbican to the Battersea Arts Centre, mostly to critical acclaim.

This influx of Irish plays and productions would be less remarkable if it formed part of the dialogue between Irish and British cultures that is supposed to be integral to the process of political reconciliation. But the theatrical traffic is in fact nearly all one way. English audiences are seeing most good new Irish plays, but Irish audiences see hardly any contemporary English work. With the exception of an excellent festival of Harold Pinter plays at Dublin's Gate theatre last year, little beyond Shakespeare and the occasional Ackybourn makes its way west across the Irish Sea. The plays of Edward Bond, Howard Barker and David Hare, not to mention those of younger English writers, are exotic rarities in Dublin. While in every other area of life Irish people know much more about England than English people know of Ireland, in the theatre the situation is reversed.

THE reasons for the abundance of Irish theatre in London and the dearth of English theatre in Dublin are in fact the same. Irish theatre is still largely obsessed with Irish society, which has been in a state of continual flux. This obsession results in a flow of new plays, which, in turn leaves little room for work from abroad. And, in theatrical terms, England is more abroad than anywhere else. Samuel Beckett, asked by a French journalist if he was English, replied au contraire". Since its establishment at the turn of the century the Irish theatre movement has tended to define "Irish" as "not English". The current flood of Irish plays in London has done little to disturb this habit of mind.

One of the reasons why there are so many new Irish plays in London, is simply that there are so many new Irish plays. In the last five years, close to half of all productions in Irish theatres were of new Irish plays. About a third of these were first works by previously unknown writers. These figures are, by international standards, quite extraordinary. To an outsider like Neil Wallace, the former programme director of the Tramway in Glasgow, the centrality of the writer in the Irish theatre seems "without parallel in Europe".

That the best work of these writers should find an audience in the biggest English speaking city in Europe is unsurprising. Where as theatre in most European countries is dominated by directors and technicians, in Ireland it is still driven by writers. It remains, as it always has been, rich in words, and after a period in which it was fashionable to look down on "text based theatre" as somehow stodgy and outmoded, audiences are again looking to theatre for a luxuriance of language that most television and cinema cannot offer.

Nevertheless, this may be a good time to question the relationship between the theatre in Ireland and England. It needs to be questioned because it has, historically, been based on a rather dubious assumption. Kenneth Tynan expressed it most succinctly in his review of the first production of Brendan Behan's The Hostage in London in 1958. "It seems, he wrote, "to be Ireland's function, every 20 years or so, to provide a playwright who will kick English drama from the past into the present." It was, of course, a compliment but a decidedly double edged one, revealing a strange mixture of adulation and arrogance. If an American critic wrote that the function of English theatre was to provide a playwright every yes kick American drama into the present, the English theatre would hardly be amused.

AND there is another side to this assumption an element of cultural cringe in Ireland itself. Every Irish theatre management knows full well that a play that has been successful in London is more successful at the box office on its return home than it was before it crossed the Irish Sea. For all the vaunted confidence of contemporary Irish culture, other people's praise seems still to be a necessary validation of our own judgments. The current wave of Irish theatrical success in England, however welcome, carries the risk of perpetuating this curious situation.

It should be admitted, of course, that London, even in this century, has often provided Irish playwrights like Sean O'Casey, Brendan Behan and Tom Murphy with a necessary refuge. And not just in the bad old days. In the late 1980s, Billy Roche, one of the most important Irish playwrights of recent years failed to have any of his work taken up by an Irish theatre company until the Bush Theatre in London spotted his outstanding talent and produced three of his plays in quick succession.

Equally, even though Irish theatre is now much more open to controversial subjects than it used to be, there are times when England provides a stage for topics that remain too uncomfortable in Dublin. Dermot Bolger's most recent play, Bahy Jean, which played the Battersea Arts Centre in London last month under the banner of the London Irish group Lucid Productions, has not been produced in Ireland. An earlier version was submitted to the Abbey, where many of Bolger's plays have been staged, but could not be produced because the plot was judged to be too close to the infamous X case of 1992.

And this is, in fact, a good example of the need for some rethinking of the relationship between the Irish theatre and the English. There is a sense in which that relationship can let everyone off the hook. The existence of an alternative audience in England removes some of the pressure for Irish theatre companies to tackle awkward subjects. On the other side, it is arguable that the steady supply of new plays from Ireland takes some of the pressure to find new British playwrights off English companies. For London audiences, too, challenging explorations of the dark side of history or of contemporary life are made more comfortable by being delivered in Irish accents and in relation to a country across the sea. It is hard not to suspect that Irish plays are not so much an alternative to as a substitute for hard edged theatrical explorations of contemporary Britain.

TURNING the one way flow into a two way relationship seems both necessary and possible. It is necessary because all the talk at a political level of the need for mutual understanding of Irish and British cultures has led to very little action. And it is possible because at least some more profound collaborations between Irish and English theatre artists are bearing fruit. There are encouraging signs that writers and directors on both sides of the Irish Sea are themselves becoming dissatisfied with one way theatrical excursions.

The Steward of Christendom, for instance, came out of a three way relationship between the Gate in Dublin, the Royal Court in London, and Max Stafford Clarke's own production company. Garry Hynes, the consultant artistic director of Druid in Galway, is also an associate director at the Royal Court, and The Beauty Queen of Leenane is the first of a planned series of co productions between the two companies. And, perhaps most importantly, that play's author, Martin McDonagh, who was born in London of Irish parents, is the first theatrical product of a community that genuinely has a foot in both camps.

Perhaps with time, that community may become a link between Irish and English theatres that is more complex and more deeply rooted than any we have had before.