Challenging Myth and Tradition: National/Cultural Identity and the Irish Theatrical Canon

The constructions of national and cultural identities in Ireland have been contemporaneous and, in the Irish psyche, synonymous with one another. The Irish theatre canon at the tum of the last century, engineered by W.B. Yeats, Lady Gregory, and J.M. Synge, inter alia, came at the height of modernism but harked back to a pre-modem and pre-colonial Gaelic native culture in an attempt to establish a peculiarly Irish body of literature and drama. The simultaneous interest in the revival of the Irish language joined with Yeats to form part of a cultural resistance to British Home Rule and the struggle for independence. Theatre used as allegory (as in Yeats's Cathleen Ni Houlihan, for instance) for such a struggle made the medium highly politicized. Subsequently, as a new nation emerged and was forged, the drama from that early period became enshrined as the new national culture. In particular, in establishing an alternative. to the colonial representation of the Irish, such drama also established a tradition of theatrical myths, an agrarian Celtic twilight, and an urban revolutionary politics. But as practised by Yeats, theatrical myth making absented itself from contemporary realities and carved out a cultural niche for Protestants and ("West Briton Kiltartanry”) who had been displaced politically by revolutionary upheavals. The latter, as enshrined in the way O'Casey was performed, turned out to be still more damaging, establishing a comfortable tradition of ignoring the critique of Romantic nationalism and effectively replicating the old colonial system, leading to urban deprivation, that it produced. This indeed was satirized by Shaw, in John Bull's Other Island (1904), and in the early O'Casey plays — but to perform such plays in the 1920S would have been cultural suicide. G.N. Reddin was typical in attacking them as the cultural construction of the colonial project: "The spirit of the Abbey Theatre was Cromwellian ... This Kiltanan jargon, and the venerable authors of it were the creation of the same foreign biased mind as evolved, for the same political motives, that mirth-provoking, buffoon-stage Irish pat"

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