CULTURE SHOCK:THE AWKWARD thing about discussing globalisation is deciding when it started. A few years ago, for example, I was researching a book ( White Savage) on the Irish trader and frontier diplomat William Johnson. I discovered that, in the 1740s, he was selling tea-bag style packets of Chinese vermillion to Iroquois warriors who used it for their war paint, writes FINTAN O'TOOLE
It is hard to think of a better example of consumerist globalisation and its impact on culture than the ritual practices of native Americans being directly affected by the purchase of Chinese goods from an Irishman. Yet because all of this was 250 years ago and “globalisation” is supposedly about our contemporary condition, we don’t know what to call it.
To bring this problem closer to home, the question of when globalisation begins to affect Irish theatre is perhaps the great discomfort in Patrick Lonergan's important and highly suggestive study, Theatre and Globalisation: Irish Drama in the Celtic Tiger Era. In some respects the title and the subtitle of the book contradict each other. Globalisation has been stitched in to Irish theatre for far, far longer than the lifespan of that evanescent beast.
Most major Irish plays of the 18th and 19th centuries were written for international audiences. It is more than 150 years since Dion Boucicault invented the single transferrable play, capable of being staged in different cities as if it were a slice of local realism. ( The Poor of New Yorkre-appeared as The Poor of Liverpool, The Streets of London, The Streets of Dublinand so on.)
Migration – the central fact of Irish life and the most intimate form of globalisation – has been a constant theme of 20th and 21st century Irish theatre. There have been returned Yanks on the Irish stage from the very earliest days of the Abbey (Fitzmaurice's The Country Dressmakerand Gregory's Twenty-Five).
Equally the problem of reception – how Irish work is viewed differently at home and abroad – has been with us at least since the early Abbey tours to England and America. It is not at all clear when we ever had an “Irish” theatre that could be extracted from or defined outside of, globalising forces.
It is particularly telling in this regard that Lonergan chooses to sidestep the work of Tom Murphy. Murphy's work in the Celtic Tiger years (The Wakeand The House, for example) is saturated with the psychological distortions of migration and the collapse of a sense of place – big markers of globalisation, surely. It would be reasonable to expect any study of Irish theatre and globalisation in the Celtic Tiger era to consider those plays. Yet, early in his book, Lonergan announces that he has "referred only in passing to the work of Tom Murphy, mainly because I believe that the major plays he has premiered since 1990. . . are not as relevant to my argument as works by other writers."
The truth, however, is not that Murphy's late plays are not relevant but that they hugely complicate the argument that the Celtic Tiger and cultural globalisation are at all the same thing. The problem is simply that while, say, The Houseis an entirely apt case study of the psychology of globalisation, it is also obviously continuous with work that Murphy was doing forty years earlier. As far back as Murphy's On the Outside, written fifty years ago, there's a character who tries to speak in a put-on American accent.
This absence of a genealogy of globalisation within Irish theatre places obvious limits on the reach of Lonergan’s argument. Yet his book is nonetheless a highly significant one. It is simply the best and most thought-provoking analysis we’ve had of a central tension in Irish theatre (and indeed in the wider Irish culture) over the last 15 years. That tension is between, on the one hand, the need for a small, rapidly evolving society to talk to itself and the requirement, on the other hand, that theatre becomes a product within the mobile, globalised marketplace.
There's nothing new about the perception of such a conflict, but Lonergan roots it in both highly concrete description and subtle analysis. His contrast between, for example, Garry Hynes's 1991 production of The Plough and The Starsat the Abbey (in which, to declare an interest, I had a very small hand) and Ben Barnes's 2002 production of the same play in the same theatre has a real edge.
Hynes’s version, he claims, was essentially speaking to Irish audiences, using the play “as a way of analysing and responding to contemporary social arrangements”. Barnes’s, by contrast, was a “heritage” production, designed and packaged to “appeal to the theatregoers’ sense that they were purchasing an ‘authentic’ experience.” This he sees as an example of a shift towards the globalising urge to brand Irishness for general consumption.
Lonergan explores, often brilliantly, the paradox that “authenticity” is completely unimportant in a genuine dialogue between a piece of theatre and its audience but becomes immensely so when theatre is a way of consuming a distinctive “event”.
He convincingly links two simultaneous developments – the selling of the Irish brand to international audiences and the use of international stars by Irish theatre companies as two aspects of the same phenomenon. Both appeal to the same hunger for the authentic – a “real” Ireland on the one side and, on the other, the “real” presence of an actor seen previously on the screen.
All of this, he suggests, represents a major shift. Instead of going to the theatre to have our expectations challenged, we go to have them confirmed.
The pleasure we seek is the meeting of a preconceived notion of what “the real thing” is.
This, he argues in a provocative discussion of the relationship between Martin McDonagh and soap operas, is a function of the loss of geographical specificity in a globalised culture: "McDonagh's Ireland relates closely to the Melbourne of Neighboursor the London of Eastenders. The place being represented does not correspond to geographical, political or social realities. Instead, it is presented to affirm audiences' presuppositions about those locations."
In reviewing Lonergan's book for The Irish Times, Abbey director Fiach MacConghail used it mainly as a springboard for an attack on theatre critics in general. Yet Lonergan has actually done the Abbey a great favour. His book is a great argument for the continued relevance of national theatres as civic spaces in which plays can be, not events or commodities, but dialogues.
fotoole@irishtimes.com