Reviewed by:

• Avant-Garde Nationalism at the Dublin Gate Theatre, 1928–1940 by Ruud van den Beuken
• Matthew Franks

No cultural institution dominates Irish studies like the Abbey Theatre during the first decades of the twentieth century. In Avant-Garde Nationalism at the Dublin Gate Theatre, 1928–1940, Ruud van den Beuken refocuses the spotlight on an establishment and time period that, he argues, has been marginalized by comparison.

The Abbey loomed large for the Gate's founders, too, who defined their venture against Ireland's newly subsidized national theatre. They took the Abbey to represent provincial folk dramas and cottage kitchen interiors rather than a more expressionist European and American repertoire, the staging of which, they believed, would shore up Dublin's credentials as a modern Western capital. That mission largely informs how the Gate has been remembered: as an adventurous director's theatre operating within an insular Free State. In his revisionist account, van den Beuken suggests that this is only half the story, and it must be balanced against the theatre's attempts to nurture homegrown talent by tracing out a native repertoire among lesser-known experimental playwrights such as Denis Johnston, Mary Manning, and Gate co-founder Micheál mac Liammóir. This combination of reflecting Irish themes onstage and articulating Irish identity in relation to cosmopolitanism, van den Beuken argues, gave the Gate its distinct avant-garde nationalism.

Van den Beuken divides his study into two parts, with the first three chapters devoted to writings by the Gate's leadership and the latter three to different subsets of native plays produced by the theatre— [End Page 118] a structure that balances institutional history with close readings of plays where many theatre studies tend to favor one approach over the other. In the first part, he demonstrates that the Gate's Irishness reveled in contradiction. Fervently nationalist mac Liammóir was actually the invented persona of an Englishman from London who had over-romanticized the Easter Rising. The Gate itself was modeled on Peter Godfrey's London Gate Theatre, and mac Liammóir, along with co-founder (and genuine Irishman) Hilton Edwards, copied the London Gate in their staging style, suggesting that postcolonial parity might involve collaborating with and even emulating the metropole. While one flank of the Gate's leadership contrasted the theatre with the institutional, no-longer-revolutionary Abbey, its prime financier Lord Charles Longford called the Gate "the true National Theatre of Ireland" in an attempt to secure state subsidy (61). (The Gate finally began receiving subsidy in 1970, one of the many reasons it is still very much active today.) Such examples serve as the basis for van den Beuken's rigorously theorized meditations on postcolonial memory, modernity, and nationalism, setting up the thematic concerns of the plays discussed in the book's second part.

If the Gate failed to discover any playwrights to rival Synge or Yeats, it was not for want of optimism. Manning suggested at the time that "material of sufficient merit was temporarily lacking" (64), while another critic speculated that "one of these days [Johnston] will write a play which will leave all the O'Caseys, the Eugene O'Neills and the like in the halfpenny place" (148). In practice, the Gate ended up at least in part a home for Abbey rejects. One play featuring prominently in van den Beuken's study, Johnston's Pirandellian The Old Lady Says "No!" (1929), earned its title from Lady Gregory's scrawled refusal on an early draft. But far less important than dramatic quality or canonicity are the nationalistic tropes that emerge across these post-revolutionary plays when read together. Van den Beuken fills in the contours of a Free State repertoire consisting of mythological, historical, and social plays and pageants. In his engaging analysis, unhappy marriages and father–daughter spats emerge as allegories for finally casting off British rule. Historical dramas about the conflict between Protestants and Catholics evoke more immediate threats posed by the paramilitary Anti-Treaty IRA, the rise of fascism...

审核人：

• 都柏林门剧院的前卫民族主义，1928-1940年 Ruud van den Beuken
• 马修·弗兰克斯

在 20 世纪最初的几十年里，没有任何文化机构像修道院剧院那样主导爱尔兰研究。在1928-1940 年都柏林门剧院的前卫民族主义中，Ruud van den Beuken 将焦点重新聚焦在他认为相比之下已被边缘化的体制和时期。

对于 Gate 的创始人来说，修道院也显得很重要，他们将自己的冒险定义为爱尔兰新获得补贴的国家剧院。他们将修道院视为省级民间戏剧和小屋厨房内部装饰，而不是更具表现主义的欧美剧目，他们认为，这些剧目的演出将巩固都柏林作为现代西方首都的地位。该任务在很大程度上说明了大门是如何被记住的：作为一个在孤立的自由州内运作的冒险导演剧院。在他的修正主义叙述中，范登博肯认为这只是故事的一半，它必须与剧院通过在丹尼斯约翰斯顿、玛丽曼宁等鲜为人知的实验剧作家中寻找本土剧目来培养本土人才的努力相平衡。和 Gate 的联合创始人 Micheál mac Liammóir。van den Beuken 认为，舞台上反映爱尔兰主题和表达与世界主义相关的爱尔兰身份的结合，赋予了大门独特的前卫民族主义。

Van den Beuken 将他的研究分为两部分，前三章专门介绍盖特领导层的著作，后三章专门介绍剧院制作的不同本土戏剧的子集—— [完第 118 页]一种平衡机构历史与戏剧细读的结构，其中许多戏剧研究倾向于一种方法而不是另一种方法。在第一部分中，他证明了盖特的爱尔兰人在矛盾中陶醉。狂热的民族主义者 mac Liammóir 实际上是一位来自伦敦的英国人的虚构角色，他将复活节起义过分浪漫化。门本身是仿照彼得戈弗雷的伦敦门剧院，麦克·利亚莫尔和联合创始人（也是真正的爱尔兰人）希尔顿爱德华兹以他们的舞台风格复制了伦敦门，这表明后殖民平等可能涉及与合作甚至模仿大都会。虽然盖茨领导层的一侧将剧院与制度化的、不再具有革命性的修道院进行了对比，它的主要金融家查尔斯·朗福德勋爵称门为“真正的爱尔兰国家剧院”，试图获得国家补贴（61）。（The Gate 终于在 1970 年开始接受补贴，这是它今天仍然非常活跃的众多原因之一。）这些例子是 van den Beuken 对后殖民记忆、现代性和民族主义进行严格理论化思考的基础，建立了主题本书第二部分讨论的戏剧问题。

如果 Gate 未能找到任何能与 Synge 或 Yeats 匹敌的剧作家，那并不是因为缺乏乐观。曼宁当时建议“暂时缺乏足够有价值的材料”（64），而另一位评论家推测“这些天[约翰斯顿]将写一部将离开所有奥凯西的剧本，尤金奥尼尔等半便士的地方”（148）。在实践中，Gate 至少部分地成为了 Abbey 拒绝的家。范登博肯书房中的一出戏剧，约翰斯顿的皮兰德利安老妇人说“不！”（1929 年），由于格雷戈里夫人潦草拒绝草稿而获得了它的称号。但是，当一起阅读时，这些革命后戏剧中出现的民族主义比喻远不如戏剧性或规范性重要。Van den Beuken 填补了由神话、历史和社会戏剧和选美组成的自由州剧目的轮廓。在他引人入胜的分析中，不幸的婚姻和父女争吵成为最终摆脱英国统治的寓言。关于新教徒和天主教徒之间冲突的历史剧唤起了准军事反条约爱尔兰共和军、法西斯主义崛起所构成的更直接的威胁……