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Ibsen and the Irish Theatre

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 January 2009

Katharine Worth
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Extract

The Irish Literary Theatre, from which a new Irish theatre was to develop, came to birth at the very point when Ibsen was about to depart from the European theatrical scene. His last play, When We Dead Awaken, appeared in 1899, the year in which Yeats's The Countess Cathleen and Edward Martyn's The Heather Field were produced in Dublin. They were the first fruits of the resolve taken by the two playwrights, with Lady Gregory and George Moore, to ‘build up a Celtic and Irish school of dramatic literature’ and they offered decidedly different foretastes of what that ‘school’ might bring forth. Yeats declared himself an adherent of a poetic theatre that would use fantasy, vision and dream without regard for the limits set by the realistic convention. Martyn, on the other hand, was clearly following Ibsen in his careful observance of day-to-day probability. The central symbol of his play, the heather field, represents an obscure psychological process which might have received more ‘inward’ treatment. But instead it is fitted into a pattern of social activities in something like the way of the prosaically functional but symbolic orphanage in Ghosts.

Type
Articles
Information
Theatre Research International , Volume 15 , Issue 1 , Spring 1990 , pp. 18 - 28
Copyright
Copyright © International Federation for Theatre Research 1990

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References

Notes

1. Yeats, W. B., Autobiographies (London: Macmillan, 1955), p. 388.Google Scholar

2. Joyce, James, ‘When We Dead Awaken’, in Fortnightly Review (London), Vol. 73, 1900.Google Scholar

3. Edward Martyn, quoted by Gwynn, Denis in Edward Martyn and the Irish Revival (London: Jonathan Cape, 1930), p. 142.Google Scholar

4. Frank Fay, quoted by Fay, Gerard in The Abbey Theatre (London: Hollis & Carter, 1958), p. 21.Google Scholar

5. Martyn set up the Irish Theatre in 1914, following the model of the Independent Theatre, London. It lasted till 1920.

6. See for example ‘The Trembling of the Veil’ (first published 1926), in Autobiographies, p. 279.Google Scholar

7. The revised edition of Where There is Nothing was published by A. H. Bullen in 1903. An account of the peculair history of the text is given in the modern critical edition by Katharine Worth, Where There is Nothing and The Unicorn from the Stars (Washington, D.C.: Catholic University of America Press and Gerrards Cross, Bucks: Colin Smythe, 1987).

8. Walkley's review appeared in the Times Literary Supplement (26 06 1903).Google Scholar For Yeats's reply, see The Letters of W. B. Yeats, ed. Wade, Allan (London: Hart-Davis, 1954), p. 405.Google Scholar

9. See the prefaces to The Tinker's Wedding and The Playboy of the Western World.