Theatre Journal

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, and changes in parliamentary leadership. Van den Beuken lifts the curtain on a Free State mired in dilemmas about Protestant descendancy and a growing urban–rural divide. If Yeats and Lady Gregory's Cathleen ni Houlihan famously roamed the countryside, Robert Collis's Marrowbone Lane (1939) reimagines her as a Dubliner on an urban quest to feed her malnourished infant. Over all these plays hangs a miasma of disappointment reflecting the gulf between pre-revolutionary idealizations of national independence and its messier reality.

The book's argument about avant-garde nationalism might have been strengthened by devoting more attention to how the Gate's mixed repertoire was received. One wonders what kinds of audiences the theatre attracted in its attempts to represent the nation to itself, and whether those audiences responded to Irish or foreign plays differently, or with anything approaching the energy of the Abbey's infamous spectators. Such a discussion might have touched on how these plays were received abroad as well, since, as van den Beuken tantalizingly observes, the 1930s Gate toured Europe, Egypt, and the United States. Yet for his rich and nuanced readings of overlooked Free State plays alone, van den Beuken makes an important contribution to Irish studies. Surveys of Irish drama that leap straight from O'Casey to Beckett now will have a much harder time justifying that move. Van den Beuken's also appears set to be among several studies reassessing the Gate, which boasts an expanding international research network, a recently digitized archive, and a new volume of scholarly essays about the theatre edited by van den Beuken along with Ondřej Pilný and Ian R. Walsh.

Beyond Irish studies, Avant-Garde Nationalism at the Dublin Gate Theatre extends a line of inquiry that over the past several decades has ranged from Loren Kruger's seminal study of national theatres to recent books by Donatella Galella on Washington, D.C.'s Arena Stage and Julie Burelle on Indigenous performances of nationhood in Quebec. While the Gate's founders debated whether it should aspire to be "a national theatre" or "simply a theatre," today's theatre and performance scholars continue to narrow the gap between the two, locating performances of national identity in an increasing variety of spaces never officially designated as national theatres (68). Why has the concept of national identity remained so generative for our discipline? The reasons no doubt are many, and the trend shows no sign of abating. [End Page 119]