Stage Migrants : Representations of the Migrant Other in Modern Irish Drama [1 ed.] 9781443824415, 9781443823821

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Stage Migrants

Stage Migrants: Representations of the Migrant Other in Modern Irish Drama

By

Loredana Salis

Stage Migrants: Representations of the Migrant Other in Modern Irish Drama, by Loredana Salis This book first published 2010 Cambridge Scholars Publishing 12 Back Chapman Street, Newcastle upon Tyne, NE6 2XX, UK British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Copyright © 2010 by Loredana Salis All rights for this book reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the copyright owner. ISBN (10): 1-4438-2382-1, ISBN (13): 978-1-4438-2382-1

To my mentor

TABLE OF CONTENTS

List of Illustrations ..................................................................................... ix Foreword .................................................................................................... xi Máiréad Nic Craith Acknowledgements .................................................................................. xiii Introduction ................................................................................................. 1 North and South: Preliminary Observations on Migration and the Irish Stage ....................................................................................... 3 The South .................................................................................................. 17 The Canon ................................................................................................. 23 Playboys of this Western World ................................................................ 27 Saint Patrick............................................................................................... 33 The Sporting Metaphor.............................................................................. 39 Immigrant Games: Sport on the Irish Stage............................................... 43 Conclusions ............................................................................................... 53 Appendix A ............................................................................................... 57 Authors and Theatre Companies Bibliography .............................................................................................. 63 Index.......................................................................................................... 71

LIST OF CENTREFOLD ILLUSTRATIONS

Figure 1 UPSTATE At Peace! Leaflet Figure 2 UPSTATE At Peace! Performance Figure 3 Sole Purpose Snow White Leaflet Figure 4 Carl Kennedy and Dan Tudor in Paul Meade's Mushroom Figure 5 Paul Meade - Mushroom in performance Figure 6 PAN PAN The Playboy of the Western World Dublin Premiere Figure 7a PAN PAN Chinese Playboy of the Western World Figure 7b PAN PAN The Chinese Playboy of the Western World Figure 8 PAN PAN Playboy of the Western World Reviews

FOREWORD MÁIRÉAD NIC CRAITH

Ireland, north and south of the border, has witnessed volatile patterns of immigration in the past decade, and stage representations of these fluctuations have begun to emerge. Much of the research in this publication is new and highly original: Loredana explores a series of plays which are relatively unknown – and many of the texts remain unpublished. They have been staged on a small number of occasions – yet the topics they explore are central, not just to Irish society, but to any community in a global context that hosts immigrants. Memory House, for example, which was intended as ‘a dramatic journey down memory lane’, explores the tensions between personal and collective memory. The issue of memory and remembering is central to any immigrant experience – and particularly so in a post-conflict society. We are all familiar with the idea that the grass is greener on the other side, but for the immigrant characters in The Land of the Green Pasture, the move to Northern Ireland has not proved a pleasant experience. The construction of stereotypes is explored in a number of plays examined by Loredana, as well as the issue of the visibility and recognition of immigrants in the host community. Language is a significant dimension in any cultural encounter and features quite strongly in Shalom Belfast, in which one of the central characters, Isaac, struggles to learn the English language in the form of local placenames (many of which actually originate from Irish). Language issues also feature in Darkie, a play exploring the experience of Bosnian workers on a mushroom farm in Northern Ireland. Like Brian Friel’s Translations, the play is set entirely in English. Yet there are occasions when the characters act as if they were using their own language. The exploration of plays in this text by Dr Salis is critical and insightful, and reflects a high degree of original thought. While Loredana engages with many published and unpublished scripts, her analysis is also informed by visits to the theatres, interviews with key stakeholders and unpublished direction notes. Her understanding of the representation of the issues in dramatic form and their contemporary significance is exceptional

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Foreword

and inevitably draws on her own long-established research in the field of dramatic Greek tragedy in Ireland. In her examination of the reworking of canonical texts, she has a particular expertise. The revisiting and reworking of old material in new contexts is especially interesting. While Synge’s Playboy of the Western World, 1907, caused furore and mayhem in the Irish dramatic world, the Nigerian version revisits the original plot and adds further layers to the complexity. In its first rendition, the chief character, Christy Mahon, apparently a murderer, gains the respect of the local community. In the ‘multicultural’ version, the principal actor, Christopher Malomo, a graduate from Nigeria, has apparently killed his father and finds refuge in a pub in Dublin. Loredana explores the old and the new in an insightful and evaluative manner. Although multiculturalism has become an almost jaded theme in academia, much of the material presented here is fresh, original and highly relevant. Loredana’s work should be set in the context of the Academy for Irish Cultural Heritages, where she was a research associate for a number of years. This publication emerges from the theme ‘cultural encounters’ which was a key aspect of Academy’s research during my period as director (2004-2009); and as the population changes, the need for new research continues. L’derry, January 2010

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

For this work I am hugely indebted to Prof. Máiréad Nic Craith at the Academy of Irish Cultural Heritages, Derry, and to Micheal O’hAodha, who proofread the draft and encouraged me to publish it. I am also grateful to all who contributed to enrich my understanding of migration and of its theatrical representations in Ireland. This research was carried out as part of a co-financed project between the Academy of Irish Cultural Heritages, University of Ulster, and the Dipartimento di Teorie e Ricerche dei Sistemi Culturali, Facoltà di Lettere e Filosofia, Università di Sassari, and funded by both the Academy and the Fondazione Banco di Sardegna, Sassari. My gratitude goes to all theatre practitioners, directors, writers, actors, amateurs, but also to staff at various theatre venues and cultural associations around Ireland who shared their views and experience and kindly provided me with unpublished scripts and other relevant material. None of this work would have been possible without their help and generosity. A special thank you to academic and library staff at Magee and Coleraine campuses, to the editors, to my colleagues, my friends and family, not to mention my mentor, Prof. Giuseppe Serpillo, and Prof. Robert Welch whose teachings I treasure especially.

INTRODUCTION

Migration is a phenomenon Irish people are all too familiar with. The history of their country is largely the history of its people’s departure from their native land as the Irish have been for long in search of political and economic stability as well as religious tolerance1. The reality of displacement and mass migration to countries such as Australia, the Americas, Japan, and to mainland Europe is no doubt a crucial aspect of this people’s cultural identity, both North and South of the border. The last two decades of the twentieth century have witnessed a dramatic inversion of such a historic trend: in the Republic, this has coincided with, and was encouraged by the economic boom known as Celtic Tiger. In the North, the peace process and the easing off of the political tension contributed to making the region more appealing and hospitable for newcomers. The media played a significant role in this respect as they helped re-launch the local tourist industry on the international scene, and consequently to attract both short- and long-term visitors. This is not the place to analyse in depth the economic, political and cultural factors that have turned Ireland into one of the top destinations for students, tourists, asylum seekers and the so-called economic migrants, yet it is important to acknowledge the changes that have occurred over the past two decades especially, and the circumstances that have made Ireland the country that it is today. That Ireland has become the land of opportunities for thousands of people is a phenomenon which scholars from different academic backgrounds are seeking to explain given that mass immigration has had, and still has, a big impact on the local economy, social welfare and culture. It is to this final aspect that we turn our attention in the present context as we aim to investigate how migration has shaped and is reflected in Irish culture today. More specifically, the focus of our study is the representation of outsiders in Irish culture, with special attention to the way in which theatre practitioners have dealt and 1

See ‘Introduction’, in Kerby A. Miller, Arnold Schrier, Bruce D. Boling, and David N. Doyle, Irish Immigrants in the Land of Canaan. Letters and Memoirs from Colonial and Revolutionary America, 1675-1815. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003, v.

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Introduction

engaged with debates of national and cultural identities, hybridity, multiculturalism and racism in post-nationalist Ireland up to 2008. That is the main focus of our investigation, which covers a period of time prior to the economic crisis that has swept the whole continent of Europe and the US over the past two years. Our emphasis on theatre finds its justification in the words of Silvia Jestrovic, according to whom “[Theatre] appropriates the exilic perspective, [one that] highlights the duality between familiar and strange present in everything that we consider our own and in everything that we consider as foreign”. [Theatre] shows the world through the eyes of a foreigner, enabling us both to discover the intrinsic otherness within the well-known and to know what’s on the “other side”2.

The question of agency, that is the extent to which the migrants that appear in most theatrical productions today are the object or the subject of new plays from Ireland, is a primary concern in the present context. Accordingly, questions are posed in relation to who represents migrants, and in what way; who their audiences are, and who commissions these new plays. All along, a distinction is made between the Northern and the Southern Ireland contexts as the experience of migration presents different and distinctive traits on either side of this island’s political borders.

2

Silvja Jestrovic, “Exilic Perspectives; Introduction,” Modern Drama 46, no.1 (Spring 2003): 2.

NORTH AND SOUTH: PRELIMINARY OBSERVATIONS ON MIGRATION AND THE IRISH STAGE

The representation of migrants/outsiders is a much more common phenomenon amongst theatrical productions in the South than it is in Northern Ireland. There are a number of reasons for this and the size difference between the two countries is clearly a major factor. Accordingly, and because of the strong economy in the Irish Republic, there are more migrants living there than there are in the North. Arguably, mass migration is a relatively new phenomenon in Northern Ireland also and this fact is reflected in the low representation and participation of non-nationals in the arts to date. Given the current political situation and the healthier economy there are reasons to believe that more people will be travelling to or settling in Northern Ireland in the near future, and that this will, in due course, have an impact on the local culture. In other words, as far as the North is concerned, and in relation to the theatrical representation of migrants and migrancy on stage, it is still “early days”. There are other issues which need to be taken into account when comparing the state of the arts North and South of the Irish border. Funding is a crucial issue when it comes to theatre and the arts in general. In contrast with the Irish Republic, the arts are notably under-funded in Northern Ireland and this affects theatre practitioners who wish to engage in new projects. For some companies the recruitment of foreign actors, whether amateur or professional, has been a problem due to the fact that most migrants are already in full-time employment1. The biggest impediment for most companies, however, has always been related to public funding. Since 2002, there has been a thirty-two per cent loss in public funding for the arts with the result that, for instance, the future of

1 Casting for Snow White the Remix by the Derry-based Sole Purpose Production proved to be problematic as non nationals in the area were in full-time employment and could not engage in rehearsals or in the planned five-venue tour despite the fact that professional fees were offered to successful candidates. In conversation with Patricia Byrne, Co-Artistic Director at Sole Purpose, L’Derry, July 2008.

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big events such as the annual Belfast Festival appears uncertain2. The forthcoming Olympic Games in 2012 have contributed to yet another major loss of funding for the Arts Council of Northern Ireland as UK Lottery funding is diverted to this sports event3. Private sponsorship may be an option, although there seems to be “no great tradition” of this in Northern Ireland especially in the arts sector4. While funding difficulties cannot be denied, albeit there is a general feeling that the arts need support and that the local sector’s self-confidence needs a boost. Again, this may be a matter of time and the situation will hopefully change for the better in a non distant future. Since the 1990s, EU Structural Funds have represented the main funding sources for the local arts. These are non-arts sponsorships which, in the case of Northern Ireland, have been made available in an attempt to “reinforce progress towards a peaceful and stable society and to promote reconciliation by increasing economic development and employment, promoting urban and rural regeneration, developing cross-border cooperation and extending social inclusion”. Under the European Union’s Special Support Programme for Peace and Reconciliation in Northern Ireland and the Border Counties of Ireland (1995-1999), about eighty per cent of the 691 million ECU was allocated to Northern Ireland.5 In 2000, PEACE II funding was also made available in the region to enable support for “a wide range of programmes throughout the region and across all communities. They brought together social partners from the private, public and voluntary sectors to work together for renewal, regeneration and, importantly, reconciliation”6. Community work benefitted enormously and, as part of this process community drama became particularly prolific. Reflecting on recent developments in the Northern theatrical scene, Fintan Brady of the 2 Rachel Andrews, “Staging the Future,” Irish Theatre Magazine, 32, no.7 (Autumn 2007): 31. 3 Ibid, 32. 4 Ibid, 32. 5 The EU’s Special Programme for Peace and Reconciliation in NI, http://www.gppac.net/documents/pbp/10/4_eu.htm [accessed on 6 June 2008]. See also European Commission: Peace and Reconciliation-An imaginative approach to the European programme for Northern Ireland and the Border Counties of Ireland. Luxembourg, Office for Official Publications of the European Communities, 1998. 6 “Pearson welcomes additional €160 Million for Peace II Programme”, Dr Andrew Mc Cormick, Second Permanent Secretary at the Department of Finance and Personnel speaking on behalf of the Finance Minister, Ian Pearson MP (7 March 2005) at http://www.dfpni.gov.uk/news-mar5-peaceii (accessed on 6 June 2006).

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Belfast-based Partisan Productions has observed that “once the funding dried up community drama slowed down; some went back into amateur drama, while some moved into other areas of community work. There is very little community drama as such today7. What is more, the Community Relations Council tends to fund drama work that involves exclusively the Catholic and the Protestant communities, the two largest ethnic groups in the region, a fact which means that there is little sponsorship for plays that deal with foreign migration. Yet, despite this lack of funding, there are signs of good intent on the part of some theatre practitioners, practitioners whose work acknowledges or seeks to involve the non-Irish communities of the region. Partisan Productions, for example has lined up three major projects including two short plays and a feature film all of which involve “outsiders” who live or work locally8. The community drama sector occupies a very important place in the history of Northern Ireland drama. Arguably, David Grant’s pioneering report Playing the Wild Card still remains the most authoritative source on the subject9. Although the situation has changed since its publication in 1993, and an update on the last sixteen years’ activities is now required, this report provides a valuable insight into the significance of community drama for the Northern Irish context, with special attention given to the difficult question of what makes professional drama “professional”, and the extent to which community drama can also be deemed professional10. 7

Fintan Brady, interview with the author, 7 May 2005. Partisan Productions grew out of the work of Belfast Community Theatre, an award-winning arts organization that, since 1992, has worked with grassroots organizations across Belfast. The aim of Partisan Productions is to create public platforms for the presentation and debate of political and social issues in this city in order to support the development of a more civil and democratic society. 8 The first short play is a monologue by a woman who works in a canteen where foreign workers go for their lunch every day. The second play is “a forum production which deals with a sequence of moments of confrontation”. The feature film has been developed by a Dutch director and it is based on the experience of working in a local call centre for African and Latin American migrants in Northern Ireland. “The film explores issues of integration and housing etc… and it is due by the end of 2009”. Interview with Fintan Brady, 7 May 2008. 9 In this respect, it is worth noting that doctoral research has been carried out recently at the University of Ulster by Matt Jennings, PhD research student c/o the Drama Department, University of Ulster Magee Campus, L’Derry. 10 “The line between community theatre and professional theatre remains less clear in a small community such as Northern Ireland”. Here there is ‘a greater fluidity’ and a ‘much readier sharing of professional skills across all these categories’ which means also that ‘defining each category continues to be difficult’. Chrissie Poulter quoted in David Grant, Playing the Wild Card - A survey of community drama and

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In this respect, the work promoted by the Belfast-based Tinder Box Theatre Company is of special relevance. Tinder Box “is dedicated entirely to new writing for the theatre, the playwrights who create it, and the environment in which it takes place”11. Accordingly, the Company has been involved in a number of projects which “celebrate difference” and “nurture encounter” so that the arts are used “to provide quality and challenging creative “intercultural experiences”12. In 2006 and 2007, the company was involved in two projects with NICEM, the Northern Ireland Council for Ethnic Minorities. Their joint effort led to Memory House and In the Land of Green Pasture, which were presented during Refugee Week 2006 and 2007 in Belfast. For Memory House, a group of twenty-five people was involved in workshops, drama games and exercises intended as a “dramatic journey down memory lane”13. In the process, Tinderbox collected and collated phrases, impressions and memories which made up the final script. Performed by five actors, this brief play “explored the themes of shared and contested spaces, as well as the tension between personal and collective memory”14. In the Land of the Green Pasture by Helen Bebey is a short piece about the experiences of asylum seekers in Northern Ireland. Five disappointed and embittered characters share a common feeling that “the grass is not greener on the other side”. It is certainly not greener in Northern Ireland, anyway, and this is a fact which they have learned the hard way: those people who migrated to the region thinking that it would be a land of green pastures have soon discovered instead – “How quickly those dreams fade! How quickly you realise that instead of grass there’s nothing but cement”15. This piece also seeks to dispel certain common assumptions about incoming migrants and especially about the so-called “economic migrants” – those who come ‘to take our jobs’ and who would do even the worst of jobs in order to make money: smaller scale theatre from a community relations perspective (Belfast, Community Relations Council, 1993), 7-8. 11 John McCann, Outreach Director at Tinderbox Theatre Company, Belfast. See Gathering Ground: Promoting Good Intercultural Practice Using the Arts. I am grateful to John McCann who gave me copies of the final scripts for Chaat Masala and In the Land of Green Pasture. Page numbers between brackets refer to those scripts. 12 McCann, Gathering Ground, 7. 13 Ibid, 44. 14 Ibid, 45. 15 Helen Bebey, In the Land of Green Pasture, 2. Script reprinted in McCann, Gathering Ground, 57.

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Matti: You are not caged here, are you? They offer you money for free when you decide to leave voluntarily, and still none of you want go. Louise: (Angry) Do you think that money is the only thing that attracts us here? Matti: (Defiant) If it’s not for the money then why did you come here? Beatrice: I came here because I wanted to make life better for my family. Do you know how happy my parents are just knowing that I’m still here? (3)

In the play, the characters speak among themselves; they also address the local community and seek a dialogue with them. This kind of exchange is crucial to the Tinderbox’s strategy of using the arts to promote good intercultural practices. Interculturalism is in fact high on the company’s agenda; it is intended as a form of mutual acceptance, and “sharing and exchange between distinct ethnic or cultural groups”, the ideal of an intercultural community arts experience ensures “sustainable good relations … and further challenging collaboration” for diverse ethnic and cultural groups16. Similarly, the Belfast-based ArtsEkta, has been active in providing “a unique display of Indian and other ethnic arts within the North and South of Ireland”. Defining itself as a “cutting-edge, progressive organisation with an international outlook”, ArtsEkta (a word that translates the Indian for “bonding” or “uniting”) works to enhance the practice, understanding and appreciation of Indian and other ethnic arts across North and South of Ireland within a contemporary artistic, social and educational context. ArtsEkta [is] dedicated to strengthening and deepening relationships between all the different cultures through an exciting and inspiring arts-based program17.

In March 2007, Tinder Box in association with ArtsEkta produced Chaat Masala, A Bollywood for Belfast, a play about the Indian experience of Northern Ireland18. Performed in the Waterfront Hall Studio Theatre, this intercultural performance was the result of both improvisation and a series of five-month workshops involving a cast of twenty-five Indian and non-Indian community amateur actors.19. Chaat Masala charts the journey of teenager Vir as he goes from his native Mumbai to Belfast. From the 16

McCann, Gathering Ground, 10. See http://www.artsekta.org.uk/ accessed on 6 June 2008. 18 McCann, Gathering Ground, p. 38. 19 Nearly three hundred people attended the performances between 19 and 20 March 2007. See McCann, Gathering Ground, 37. 17

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beginning, the play draws attention to the way people react to the arrival of the young foreigner, and to the way Vir feels about his life in a foreign country. In Northern Ireland, Vir meets some relatives and members of the local Indian and non-Indian communities. The audience is made familiar with Indian culture, and more importantly, with common perceptions of Indian culture (e.g. arranged marriages, Hindus, music and dance) – as they have been promoted by the Bollywood industry. At the same time, spectators can see Northern Ireland through the eyes of the young protagonist as he meets new people in the workplace, at school, and in the street. Chaat Masala revolves around the issue of stereotypes as much as it explore the locals’ sense of hospitality: “Is Northern Ireland a great place to live?”, asks a teacher to a mixed class of Indian and non-Indian pupils (24). The teacher’s question is perhaps an echo of recent debates in the aftermath of an article which appeared in the German newspaper Der Spiegel and which labelled Belfast as “the the world's most racist city”20 (a reputation that in the opinion of many people, the capital city of Northern Ireland “deserves”)21. This play provides a positive response to the question of Northern Ireland’s hospitality. At the end of the play people celebrate to the sound of a Bollywood tune in a Belfast video store where old acrimonies are resolved and distant families are reunited (43-45). This is a clear example of the type of good intercultural practice which lies at the heart of all Tinderbox’s community projects. Alongside community drama and the inputs provided by both outreach and education projects across the North, a number of “professional” dramas have also been produced which relate to migration and to the presence of foreign nationals in the region. Works such as A Kick in the Stomach and A Kick in the Teeth (Dave Duggan for Sole Purpose, 2006), The Duke of Hope (Conor Grimes and Alan McKee for Tinderbox, 2007), and The Winners (Rosemary Jenkinson for Ransom, 2008) are examples of a type of theatre which acknowledges the presence of migrant workers in Northern Ireland but does not critically engage with the social and cultural impact of immigration. These plays feature economic migrants such as Chris, the Polish bartender, Sophie, the French pianist and model (The 20

Matthias Matussek, “The madness of Belfast”, 28/02/2005. See http://www.spiegel.de/international/spiegel/0,1518,344173,00.html (accessed on February 5, 2007). 21 Anna Lo of the Chinese Welfare Association as reported in an article from the BBC news website on 27/01/2006. See http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/northern_ireland/3434241.stm, accessed on (accessed on February 2, 2007).

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Duke of Hope) or Woman 2, the anonymous pregnant woman who calls for help in Ibo (A Kick in the Stomach) – these are people who have moved to the region in search of a better job and who are likely to return to their countries of origin. There are a few references to racism and stereotypes; migrants are sometimes associated with sexual fantasies or are looked down upon because they are “only over here to take our jobs”, but that is almost all the discussion of this that there is22. Another theatrical piece worth noting for its representation of Northern Ireland’s fast-changing multi-ethnic and multicultural society is Snow White - The Remix. This is a thirty-minute show devised by the Derrybased Sole Purpose Productions to celebrate International Women’s Day in 2002. The play re-works the classic fairytale of Snow White for an audience of young school children. In December 2006, the text was adapted for the Christmas Pantomime and put on at the Playhouse, Orchard Street, Derry, before touring a number of community centres around Northern Ireland. The revised version was about an hour long; it contained musical pieces and focused on the cosmetic industry and on issues of self-image and self-esteem amongst young girls (a clear reference to the ongoing debates over size-zero models and the negative influence of both the fashion and cosmetic industries on children and adolescents)23. By 2008, Patricia Byrne, the new artistic director of the company, had written and directed a third version of the show which sought to “tackle the theme of the beauty industries” while also exploring various aspects of multiculturalism. The play was not primarily about multiculturalism but it used actors from mixed ethnic backgrounds to “reflect the growing cultural diversity of Northern Ireland”. It sought to make the encounter with cultural diversity a “positive experience” for children who come across different accents, traditions, and skin colours in this constantly changing society.24 Hence the decision to employ an actress of an Indian 22

See Dave Duggan, ‘A Kick in the Stomach’, in Plays in the Peace Process (Derry: Guildhall Press, 2008), first produced under commission from the Belfast City Council, by Sole Purpose Productions at Belfast City Hall on 19 October 2006, for a small staff-training event. Conor Grimes and Alan McKee, The Duke of Hope (Belfast: Lagan Press, 2007), presented by Tinderbox Theatre Company and first performed at the Drama and Film Centre at Belfast Queens University on 18 October 2007. 23 For details of the 2002 and the 2006 productions of Snow White – The Remix see Report Five–January 2005-December 2006, published by Sole Purpose Production on the company’s tenth anniversary. 24 The 2008 performance added original music to the previous songs. As regards casting, Sole Purpose auditioned professional actors resident in the area who would be of a non-Irish ethnic background. Adverts were circulated in various venues

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ethnic background to play the Queen; while the plastic surgeon appears to have an east-European accent and the seven dwarfs cook goulash for Snow White25. The works discussed so far reflect one particular trend in contemporary theatre from Northern Ireland. There is also a type of theatre which confirms that, in the longer term, Northern Irish theatre will produce works where migrants play an active role – as writers, producers and actors, for instance – and where plays are performed or composed by migrants or they are about migrants living in the region. Here follow a couple of significant examples. In October 2000, Shalom Belfast! by the Irish playwright Rebecca Bartlett was presented at the Belfast Royal and went on to tour schools and other venues across Northern Ireland26. Produced by Replay Productions, this full-length play in twenty-eight scenes had in its premiere a cast of five actors, one musician and another actor who played the part of the chorus27. Bartlett’s play won the “Diversity 21” Award that year for celebrating “the contribution the immigrant Jewish community has made to the economic, social and cultural diversity of Northern Ireland”28. Shalom Belfast! tells the story of Miriam, a widow of thirty-six and a Jew who is driven out of her native Lithuania and sails to Ireland with her son Isaac, aged sixteen. Set in the past, in the years between 1896 and 1938, the play charts the process of integration by the Kozetski family from their first arrival in Northern Ireland through the years of conflict at including the local University Campus, Magee, while a Polish version of the leaflets was distributed through the local Polski Support Centre, Magazine St., Derry. One person responded to the advertisement, a student at the School of Performing Arts, University of Ulster. In total, six people were auditioned including prospective actors, dancers, singers and musicians from an African background. The cast included Abby Oliveira, a Scottish-African actress who played the part of the Narrator; Tara Vij of Indian descent, who played the part of the Queen, and Miroki Tong, a Chinese actress brought up in Canada who played the double role of the Woodcutter and one of the seven dwarfs. I am indebted to Patricia Byrne who kindly provided the information reported here. 25 In an interview with Patricia Byrne (1 July 2008) I was advised that the Cosmetic Surgeon was to put on an English accent as opposed to his Northern Irish accent. Watching the performance, I had the impression that he spoke with an East European accent. 26 Shalom Belfast! is an unpublished script. I owe a debt to the author who gave me a copy of her play and permission to quote from it. 27 See Replay Productions at www.replayproductions.org accessed 20 March 2007 and programme notes from the original production of the play. 28 Ibidem.

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the start of the century and the depression that followed World War I and the 1920s Troubles. Integration is articulated in terms of transplantation through the metaphor of the family tree. In the opening sequence, a tree is seen from which a number of items are hanging and which Miriam decides to bring with her when preparing for her journey: the tree represents “the life tree of our family ... transplanted here where it could grow, away from the rocks of pogrom and prejudice” (1), and the hanging items are mainly religious objects including “a prayer shawl, the Menorah, covenant bag ... wedding ribbons for the joining of hands ... and a Star of David”29. Significantly, the tree remains onstage until the show ends; by then its roots will “have clutched the Irish soil”, and “its shadow touched the lives of all those people that we have known, have still to know” (Miriam, 70). The passage is exemplary of the way in which the play relates presentday events to both the past and the future since it makes its plot relevant to contemporary social and cultural contexts. The story of Miriam and Isaac provides a narrative pretext with which to recount the many stories of Jewish people who arrived in the North of Ireland and lived there at times of war and deprivation. Likewise, their story is the story of people who have left their countries of origin in search of a safer place to live, and who, in recent years, have made Northern Ireland their new home. Both migrants and locals engage in a long process of mutual exchange which involves negotiation between their cultures, languages, customs and religious practices. Multiple encounters become possible onstage (just as they have occurred offstage in the past and as they it is hoped that they will occur in the future) in a contemporary social and political context which appears to be not that dissimilar after all. As the Nazis (onstage) persecute and segregate the Jews of the 1930s, people in the audience are likely to recognise analogous patterns of “intimidation” and “discrimination” relating to the (Northern) Irish context. The Chorus spells this out in the epilogue: “We recognise it too ... the weight of the past. The burden of the future” (69). These analogies act also as reminders that multiculturalism is not a novelty of the third millennium, on the contrary (Northern) Irish society has long been multicultural, and the real issues are not so much change and transition but rather visibility and recognition. In the words of the Chorus, “Silent voices [are] still to be heard” (70). Language is a crucial aspect of Bartlett’s approach to the cultural encounter of the Kozetski family with the local community. The title of the play itself, for instance, imagines a positive negotiation of differences as it brings together the Yiddish salute “Shalom” and the English toponym 29 Rebecca Bartlett, Shalom Belfast, unpublished script (2000): 1. I am grateful to the author who gave me a copy of her play and permission to quote from it.

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North and South

“Belfast” to indicate both the welcoming of Jews to Northern Ireland, the positive embrace towards Northern Irish life on the part of the migrating Jews, but also the possibility for the coexistence of both cultural identities on equal grounds. These notions are reiterated throughout the play as the process of Isaac’s integration is marked by his acquisition of the English language in the form of local place-names, a process which is not as easy as it first appears. In fact, two years from their arrival Isaac is still struggling to learn local names as he comes across words which are too difficult to pronounce (18). The play reflects the rationale of Replay Production in that it provides “educational entertainment” for a target audience of secondary school youngsters. Thus, the question of “What makes the Kozetskis one of us?” (32) is exemplary of the company’s intent to promote “concepts of shared Cultural Identity and Diversity”. And yet, the play overlooks the reality of anti-Semitism in Ireland, and the issues affecting the smallest ethnic minority on the island at present. In other words, Shalom Belfast! fails to engage critically with the ongoing denial of Jews’ Irishness – the fact that there are Irish Jews and that they have made, and continue to make a significant contribution to the local economy and cultural landscape30. Bartlett’s play is no exception; and likewise most theatrical works that deal with migration tend to avoid the contentious question of Irish racism. That this is so contributes to the possibility that racism is being denied in Ireland, and that this may be at once the cause and the consequence of forms of racism that are specific to this part of the world31. The denial of racism is the theme of Darkie by the Northern Irish playwright, poet and documentary film-maker Damian Gorman. Written for a performance by the Blue Box Theatre Company in May 2005, Darkie is essentially about visibility and inequality for foreigners who live in 30

For a discussion of anti-Semitism in Ireland see Ronit Lentin, “Who ever heard of an Irish Jew?” Racialising the intersection of “Irishness” and “Jewishness”’, in Racism and Anti-racism in Ireland, ed. Ronit Lentin and Robbie McVeigh (Belfast: Beyond the Pale, 2002), 153-66. 31 Racism has been largely unacknowledged in Ireland: “It was not until 1997 that government passed legislation outlawing racial discrimination – thirty years after its counterpart in Great Britain”. Prior to 1997, academics Robbie McVeigh and Ronit Lentin denounced the existence of indigenous forms of racism through a series of influential publications. More recently, a conference entitled “Racism: Moving beyond Denial?” organised by the Dungannon and South Tyrone Borough Council, was dedicated “to the issue of racism and what should be done to tackle it”. See Racism: Moving Beyond Denial?, a report, available online at www.dungannon.gov.uk/index.cfm (accessed on 17 September 2008).

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Northern Ireland32. Gorman investigates the reality of racism in a context where migrants are said to be “treated like lords here given what they’d be paid at home” (52). The play is set in the present “in the summer of 2005”, and explores the experience of a group of Bosnian nationals who work for a mushroom farm in County Tyrone, Northern Ireland. Run by the Martin family, the mushroom farm employs both local and foreign people but the latter receive a distinctively unequal treatment: “When you are here do what we do; what you’re told” (45). Gorman uses the well-known racist term of “darkie” to compare the working and living conditions of many foreigners today to those of black people in the former British colonies. Accordingly, the play touches upon issues of underpaid labour, poor housing conditions, verbal and physical abuse as it explores the relationship between a group of foreign employees, their local workmates and the farm’s management. Language functions as a primary racial marker in the play: though English is spoken throughout, at times some of the Bosnian characters act as if they were “using their own language”, and when they speak English they adopt an East European accent”33. In an early scene between Rita Carragher, the farm’s Assistant Manager, and Djemal Sadic, one of the Bosnian workers, the former affirms that since the man in front of her cannot speak English “he is stupid” (17). The fact that he can speak French, German and Serbo-Croat is totally irrelevant to her: “Sometimes I think you forget where you are (Sighs) You people …” (17). Later on, the woman presents Djemal with a contract to sign. Her attitude to him is again markedly racist: “His wages will be £ 7 a day for six days – that’s forty quid (Puts a sheet of paper in front of Djemal). Sign that, or make your mark or whatever (18). People like Djemal are silenced; in fact it is never “their turn to speak”; if and when they are given a chance to say something, they are promptly dismissed: Dobrila: My colleague wonders if it might be possible to do something about the cold in the cabin. He’s concerned that his work performance might be impaired. Rita (“Sweetly”): Tell him of course … (Less sweetly:) He can buy his own bloody heater. Now go! (19) 32

Blue Box is composed of final-year students from the Belfast Institute’s Tower Street Building. See http://www.belfastinstitute.ac.uk/news_and_events/article.asp?id=290. Damian Gorman, Darkie, unpublished script (May 2005), 3. I owe debt to John McCann of Tinderbox Theatre Company who helped me make contact with Damian Gorman, and to Damian Gorman who gave me access to the original 2005 script from which all quotations are taken. 33 In the text, words which should be accented are underlined. Gorman, Darkie, 3.

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North and South

A similar behaviour is seen among workmates: as Enver well knows, “We’re all “Darkie” to them. Me, you, Dobrila – it doesn’t matter, we’re all “Darkie” (21). Significantly, when racism erupts in the workplace one of the “darkies” is chased around by three people “wearing a white mask” who push his head down the toilet (42). The incident is reported by Dobrila: speaking with a distinctively foreign accent, she receives little sympathy from Rita whose only reaction is to ask whether the toilet was clean (44). Integration is not an option within the limited confines of the mushroom farm. Though some may express their interest in cultural differences – “Who’s the Catholic and the Protestants in your place”, asks a local woman called Ishie, who later takes part in the assault in the toilet, the positive encounter of diverse people is met with resistance from both sides. Thus, for instance, the prospect of a love union between Djemal and Francesca Martin from the Martin family is unacceptable for people such as Enver for whom Francesca “is different from us” (63). Enver’s views are similar to Rita’s; like her boss, he too “really believes” (65) that the culture line cannot be crossed, and diversity will not “build a bridge”. In his view Francesca cannot be “the one” for Djemal because she is a “western woman”: Djemal: She’s different Enver. Enver: I know she is –different from us. Djemal: No, from the others! Enver: But the others were different from the other too Djemal – I know you Djemal: I am mad about you. Enver: I know you are. But don’t worry, it will pass. Djemal: I’m not so sure my friend. She could be the one. Enver: No she couldn’t, she’s … Djemal: What? … Christian? Enver: and western. It wouldn’t work. Djemal: We’re having fun. Enver: Exactly. Have your fun … that’s what western women are for (6364).

A similar argument is found also in Donal O’Kelly’s Asylum! Asylum!, written and produced for the Abbey Theatre in 1994, and one of the earliest intercultural plays of contemporary Ireland34. Asylum! Asylum! 34

Donal O’Kelly, “Asylum! Asylum!”, in New Plays from the Abbey Theatre 1993-1995, ed. with an introduction by Christopher Fitz-Simon and Sanford Sternlicht (New York: Syracuse University Press, 1996), 113-74.

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centres around the Gaughran family and Joseph Omara, a Ugandan refugee who is to be “deported to country of origin” after his application for asylum is rejected (153). O’Kelly uses the metaphor of inter-racial romance to seek out cultural encounters at least imaginatively; in the play, Mary Gaughran, a solicitor of success, falls for her African client, yet the union between the two is rendered impossible by a combination of unbending law and prejudice from the local people, both of which are predicated upon fear: “Europe thinks we’re leaky. They want to see us plugged ... The result is Operation Sweep ... All illegal aliens out” (153). Fear is a keyword in the play; it is inflicted as a “deterrent ... Fear is the only thing they understand” (166). There is also a fear of the “other”, fear that the “other” looks better or sounds better; that s/he has a better story to tell. It is not a case, in fact, that Joseph wins everyone’s sympathy by virtue of his stories based on recollections of his childhood and his father. Like a playboy of the western world this African immigrant enthrals those who listen to him (Leo, Bill and Mary); some imitate him (Leo), others are overcome by jealousy, indeed by fear (Leo and Pillar). And so Joseph is harassed and evicted firstly by immigration officer Leo Gaughran, Mary’s brother, whose father Bill welcomes the asylum seeker in his house, and secondly, by Pillar, another immigration officer who fancies Mary. During a late-night discussion with Mary, Pillar suggest that Joseph, now an illegal immigrant, agrees to be driven out of the country “quietly ... no struggle. No bodybelt. No binding. Civilised behaviour” (154). Clearly, his proposal is a way to get rid of his love rival who is bound to leave anyway: “What the fuck do you see in him? Are you blind to the fact that he is a chancer ... Ten o’clock tonight. Ring me if you’re interested? (155). O’Kelly’s play has not been staged in the North; in fact, there are no analogous examples of the theatrical experimentation with and articulation of cultural and racial barriers in relation to Northern Irish society. In the South, however, Asylum! Asylum! has helped to set the scene for a host of other theatre plays dedicated to the issues of integration vis-à-vis assimilation, cultural encounter, the legal handling of immigration and the role of the EU along with the possibility of forms of Irish racism and the way in which a traditionally-diasporic people relate to immigrants coming to their country today.

THE SOUTH

In an article dedicated to the representation of exile on the Irish stage, Mary Trotter observes that “many contemporary Irish playwrights are … engaging imaginatively with the issue of Irish emigration on emigrants, Ireland, and the world, and the political, social, and economic forces that inspired emigration both before and after the formation of the Irish Republic”1. Today, few would disagree with Trotter’s observation but many would probably argue as to the extent to which Irish playwrights are actually engaging with the issue of migration and its impact on Irish society at present. Examining the cultural scene generally – theatre, cinema, TV and other forms of popular culture – the question is, what do we mean by imaginative engagement? How and how effectively is migration being represented? “Imaginatively” is a key-word in the quote above as it indicates the level to which “the arts” are contributing to issues of social and cultural mediation, issues which are also being debated in the Southern Irish political arena. To begin answering these questions it is necessary to focus on Irish theatre from the South and compare it with similar theatrical productions from the North. In this respect, it may be suggested that while contemporary “migration drama” from the South is “Multicultural’ (capital M), intercultural and collaborative, drama that features the migrant “other” in the North is not. Both forms are multicultural but there is a fundamental difference between the two, a difference which is best described by Lo and Gilbert in their study of “Cross-Cultural Theatre Praxis”: Broadly speaking, there are two major types of multicultural theatre: small “m” multicultural theatre and big “M” multicultural theatre”. The former features “a racially mixed cast that do not actively draw attention to cultural differences amongst performers … it is a politically conservative practice that gives the appearance of diversity without necessarily confronting the hegemony of the dominant culture”2. 1

Mary Trotter, “Re-imagining the Emigrant/Exile in Contemporary Irish Drama,” Modern Drama 46, no.1 (Spring 2003): 36. 2 Jaqueline Lo and Helen Gilbert, “Towards a Topography of Cross-cultural Theatre Praxis.” The Drama Review 46, no.3 (2002): 33.

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The South

The big “M” multicultural theatre is on the contrary “a counterdiscursive practice that aims to promote cultural diversity, access to cultural expression, and participation in the symbolic space of the national narrative”.3 Theatre from the South is clearly “Multicultural”, and in some instances (i.e. Arambe, below) it is also intercultural in the sense that it is “a hybrid derived from an intentional encounter between cultures and performing traditions”4. This theatre also aims to be “collaborative” since it “explores the fullness of cultural exchange in all its contradictions and convergences for all parties”5. One example of intercultural collaborative theatre is At Peace! written and directed by Declan Gorman for Upstate Theatre Company (Drogheda, Ireland)6. “The play is performed in three languages, English, Yoruba and Latvian. When the actors speak in Latvian or Yoruba, sur-titled translations will be projected onto the set in English”7. It is divided into three acts, Act I takes place in Spring, Act II in the Summer, and Act III in Autumn 2007. Leaving aside winter, the season of rest, death, arrival and end, the play explores, critiques and celebrates all that signifies transition. Thus, for instance, it is not a case that the action takes place between past present and an imagined future8, and between the pagan and secular Irish festivals of Belthaine, St. Patrick (March), Samhain and Halloween (end of October). Nor is it a case that the play is set partly in a cross-border construction site (Act I) and partly in a fictitious border town called Ballyrain. Here, all of the characters undergo rites of passage of one type or another, they all embark on a journey which takes them either to a foreign land or back to their native country, they go back to a time past, or else they enter a mythic dimension inhabited by eternal creatures.

3

Ibid, 34. Ibid, 36. Emphasis added. 5 Ibid, 39. 6 At Peace! is an unpublished script. I am grateful to Paul Hayes of Upstate Theatre Company who gave me access to copies of the company scripts, reviews and production notes. Quotations from the play refer to a working script dated 13 August 2008. At Peace! opened in Dublin at the O’Reilly Theatre on 18 September 2007 and ran until 22 September. It went on to tour different venues around Ireland. 7 At Peace!, direction notes in the script dated 13 August 2007. 8 The play ends on the night of Halloween 2007 but it is staged almost a month before, which means that in its final part it imagines a near future based on the events recounted in the course of the play. This may be accidental, or it may not. There is one exception, and that is the performance in Tallagh, which took place after 31 October 2007. 4

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At Peace! is arguably “a wearisome script”9, which mixes res fictae and res factae as it brings together Yoruba, Latvian and Irish myths with the every-day lives of Nigerian and Latvian migrants and their Irish hosts as well as the Northern Troubles and the peace process. In the play, the almost intact remains of an Iron-age man are found during cross-border bypass excavation works, a Protestant archaeologist and an ex-IRA man fall in love, a Nigerian woman is evicted from the country, a Latvian boy almost kills his brother while the middle-aged Mrs Reilly comes to terms with a multitude of cultural barriers as she seeks to organise the annual St. Patrick’s Parade. Such a dense plot may be due to its long gestation: it took Gorman almost four years to complete this piece, which forms part of The Border Chronicles, a trilogy written over ten years (between 1997 and 2008) and narrates the story of a country, Ireland, from the Good Friday Agreement to date, when peace has been achieved “so suddenly after war, and yet [it is] so angry and troubled” (At Peace!, 51). The public’s response to the first performance reflected not simply the contentious issues dealt with in the play but also the abundance of them. Thus, the audience found that the use of traditional costumes and Yoruba dance was “exciting”, and the play “well researched and well executed”10; yet most critics attacked Gorman’s narrative excesses alongside the “undistinguished acting and direction”11. Reviewers thought that the play was “chaotic rather than convincing”12; a “very honourable failure, but a failure nonetheless”.13 Another fine instance of intercultural collaborative literature is “Guess who’s coming for the dinner”, a stage play by Roddy Doyle and Bisi Adigun based on a short story by Doyle written after the award-winning 1967 film “Guess who’s coming to dinner” (starring Sydney Poitier, Spencer Tracy, Katharine Hepburn and Katharine Houghton) and first published in Metro Éireann, Ireland’s first multicultural paper14. 9

“A Blunt, blinkered missive”, a negative review appeared in The Mail on Sunday, 23 September 2007. 10 See Press Release in the Upstate Theatre Company Archive. All relevant material including press release and reviews, some of which are quoted in the present work, were kindly provided by Paul Hayes at Upstate. 11 “A Blunt, blinkered missive”, The Mail on Sunday, 23 September 2007. 12 Sarah Keating, review in The Irish Times, 21 September 2007. 13 Edward O’Hare, Fringe Review, in Tribune (2008), 17. 14 Founded by two Nigerian journalists, Abel Ugba and Chinedu Onyejelem in 2002. A play entitled “Guess Who's Coming for the Dinner?” by Roddy Doyle was directed by Bairbre Ni Chaoimh at Andrew's Lane Theatre, Dublin 2001. As a short story “Guess Who's Coming for the Dinner?” appeared in the New Yorker in a slightly revised version and with the title of ‘The Dinner’. In 2007, it was

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The South

Doyle’s recasting of the black man-white girl idyll in contemporary Dublin shifts its emphasis towards the problematic encounter of the old and the new Ireland as Ben, the Nigerian guest, and Larry, the Linnane paterfamilias, share dinner at the same table and make each other’s acquaintances. Doyle’s rendition makes no reference to a mixed-race union (except for Larry’s assumption that Stephanie and Ben are a couple – as a matter of fact the two are just friends). Here, the meeting of the two men is the focal point of the whole story – a crucial departure which adds to the piece’s wit as well as giving full emphasis to Larry’s attitude towards “the black fella”. In the days that precede the dinner, Larry questions himself as he seeks to prove almost desperately that he is not a racist. Through his thoughts and monologues Doyle exposes current and common perceptions of black men (stereotypes of physicality and masculinity in particular) and draws attention to the dynamics of subtle or aversive forms of racism. Thus, for instance, being colour-blind – (“he didn’t see skin”) – is not a sign of Larry’s innate tolerance, but rather a denial of his awareness of racial difference. Of course there is also the possibility that racism be used to label attitudes which may have nothing to do with racial intolerance. Hence, perhaps, Michael Billington’s view that “Doyle’s play falls into the same trap as the movie: it never challenges the audience’s own secret prejudices”15. Quite the opposite, in fact, since as recipients of Doyle’s play we are caught in a double dilemma of whether we can show empathy for Larry, or else disapprove of his behaviour. It is hard to dislike this funny middle-class middle-aged Irish man and a loving father to his family, but siding with him may prove just as hard (or inappropriate even), given that he has a problem in welcoming “a refugee in the family”16. Larry is in many ways the protagonist of Doyle’s “Guess who’s coming for the dinner”: the story begins and ends with this character who is there to represent our changing times through the eyes and thoughts of most native Irish who come to terms with multi-ethnicity. The four female characters appear to be more open to novelty and prone to welcome reprinted in Doyle’s collection The Deportees and Other Stories (London: Jonathan Cape). 15 Michael Billington, review of Guess Who's Coming For the Dinner, St Andrew's Lane Theatre, Dublin, in the Guardian, Tuesday 9 October, 2001. Available online at http://www.guardian.co.uk/stage/2001/oct/09/theatre.artsfeatures1 (accessed on September 15, 2008). 16 All quotations are taken from the published short story as the play script is unpublished. See ‘Guess who’s coming for the dinner’, in Roddy Doyle, The Deportees and Other Stories, 8.

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diversity – perhaps an echo of Synge’s women in Playboy of the Western World (see below). As to the migrant other and his role, Doyle lets Ben speak for himself, Ben collides with Larry even, and tells him off for his foul language, but little space is given to “the black fella” and to the people that he should represent and give a voice to – apart from when he says that he wants his children to “live as children do here. I want them to take comfort for granted”. “I want money in my pocket” Ben continues, “Is that wrong, do you think?”17 This is arguably the main flaw in Doyle’s narration, the fact that it fails to engage critically with the migrant it represents precisely because it never questions his thoughts and actions but rather sees him as ‘poor Ben’, an eternal victim18. While it may be conceded that Doyle chooses to explore multiethnicity from the perspective of the native Irish, there is undoubtedly a tendency on his part to give little attention to the other’(s) perspective in the representation of migrants in Irish drama and literature. Yet some attempts have been made in the past, and are being made today. In the South in particular, it is the use of the canon and of the sport metaphor which allows for this kind experimentation.

17

Roddy Doyle, “Guess who’s coming for the dinner”, 23-24. A similar attitude reverberates throughout Doyle’s collection The Deportees and Other Stories. I have discussed Doyle’s representation of migrants in the eight short stories in a review essay published in the Italian journal Il Tolomeo 11, no.1 (2008): 72-74. A shorter version of that review appeared in the English language in Anthropological Yearbook of European Cultures 12, no. 2 (2009): 67. 18

THE CANON

Whether based on ancient Celtic and Greek myths, or whether using plays from modern Irish drama as a basis, the reworking of canonical texts provides a powerful means to represent “the other” on the contemporary Irish stage. The translation and adaptation of Greek tragedy in Ireland is a long-established cultural phenomenon and one to which critics have devoted significant attention in recent years1. In the present context, it will suffice to note that Greek myths such as Antigone and Medea, two of the quintessential “outcasts” of Western literature, have been especially appealing to local playwrights and audiences. There are in fact at least seven “new versions” of Sophocles’ Antigone and three of Euripides’ Medea in contemporary Irish theatre2. The theatrical adaptations of these plays, as they have been written in the 1980s and the early 1990s, tend to be openly political since they use ancient myths to denounce the legacy of Ireland’s colonial past. More recently, however, the adaptation of ancient tragedy has been characterised by a significant thematic shift towards issues of migration and cultural negotiation between the Irish host and its “foreign” guests. An early instance can be seen in Marina Carr’s By the Bog of Cats (1998), a recasting of Euripides’ Medea in a contemporary Irish setting. Here, the female protagonist is a member of the local travelling community – that traditional “Irish other” – and is overtly exposed to prejudice and racism. Carr’s Medea fails to conform to the accepted norm as she fails to be wholly assimilated into the settled community. Proud to be a tinker, she is still torn between her nomadic roots and the prospect of a sedentary future; in the end, she commits 1

See for instance Marianne McDonald and Michael J. Walton (eds), Amid Our Troubles: Irish Versions of Greek Tragedy. London, Methuen, 2002. 2 Tom Paulin, The Riot Act (London: Faber, 1984); Aidan Carl Mathew, Antigone (unpublished script, 1984); Brendan Kennelly, Antigone (Newcastle: Bloodaxe, 1986); Marianne McDonald, Antigone (London: Nick Hern, 2000); Crooked House Theatre Company, Antigone (unpublished script, 2000); Declan Donnellan, Antigone (London: Oberon Books, 2000); Conall Morrison, Antigone (unpublished script, 2003); Seamus Heaney, The Burial at Thebes (London: Faber, 2004); Desmond Egan, Medea (Newbridge, Co. Kildare, 1991); Brendan Kennelly, Medea (Newcastle: Bloodaxe, 1991); Marina Carr, By the Bog of Cats (Oldcastle: Gallery Press, 1998).

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The Canon

suicide opting for the eternal in-betweeness of divine death. Carr’s depiction and significant alteration to Euripides’ finale indicates that little choice is left to those who don’t necessarily “fit in”. In the case of the Irish Travellers it appears to be all the more true as this indigenous community remains one of the lesser-integrated ethnic minorities in Ireland. Critics have proposed contrasting readings of Hester’s suicide ranging from an act of ultimate motherly love – she kills her daughter and follows her in the afterlife – to Ireland’s failure to reconcile herself with her past3. Such a paradoxical resolution, however, may also disclose the recognition of a type of alterity which is not entirely negotiable – Hester remains on the Bog even when she is dead – and in these terms the play signals a clear move towards acceptance as opposed to denial. Likewise, the production of Marianne McDonald’s Antigone seeks to assert multiculturalism as a viable alternative to traditional notions of society as a monolithic and homogenous entity. An American classicist who has written extensively on contemporary uses of ancient drama, McDonald translated Sophocles’ Antigone for a multicultural production which toured Ireland in 1999. Though she remained faithful to her sources, McDonald chose to enrich her version with a multi-ethnic cast to tell the story of Oedipus’ rebellious daughter. The production opened at Cork’s Opera house under the direction of Athol Fugard, the author of a controversial version of Antigone (South Africa, 1973) entitled The Island. McDonald’s play relied on different accents and the actors’ different cultural backgrounds to represent the more open and “expansive” Irish nation of today. Similarly, Conall Morrison, a playwright and theatre director who has reworked various classics, presented a new version of the Bacchai in March 2006. Written for the Abbey Theatre, The Bacchae of Bagdad recasts Euripides’ tragedy in today’s war-stricken Iraq. Here, Pentheus becomes the tyrannical leader of the US forces while Dionysus is a Middle-Eastern man who is held captive (he wears an orange boiler-suit which recalls the Guantanamo Bay Prison uniform). Morrison retains the original plot but alters the language so as to modernise the play and adapt it to a contemporary setting. His transposition of Euripides’ classic reiterates some of the themes which Morrison had attempted to tackle two years before when he translated and directed Antigone for Dublin’s Project 3

See Melissa Sihra, “A Cautionary Tale: Marina Carr’s By the Bog of Cats”, in Theatre Stuff: Critical Essays on Contemporary Irish Theatre, ed. Eamonn Jordan (Dublin: Carysfort Press, 2000), and Bruce Stewart, “At the Heart of Irish Atavism: A Fatal Excess”, in IASIL Newsletter, http://www.iasil.org/newsletter/archive/newsletter1999/covers.html (accessed on 20 March 2006).

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Arts Centre4. The apparent failure to convincingly develop the connection between antiquity and today’s Bagdad won him a string of negative reviews: for many critics, the use of recognisable contemporary images was not deemed sufficient so as to create the kind of political theatre which Morrison seems to pursue5. The production may have been “an uneven, confused ride” yet it nevertheless testifies to the current sensibility towards multiculturalism, the more general shift towards global issues and the impact of non-Irish cultures on the local scene6. An eloquent instance of such perspectives is found in the work of Arambe Productions, Ireland’s first African theatre company. Founded by the Nigerian-born Bisi Adigun, Arambe – a Yoruba term meaning “work together” – made its debut on the Irish stage in 2003 with The Gods Are Not to Blame, based on Ola Rotimi’s Yoruba adaptation of Oedipus Rex by Sophocles (1968). Like Oedipus, Odewale fulfils the prophecy and unwillingly kills his father. In Rotimi’s recasting, Odewale fights for the ownership of a farm with a man who makes fun of him for his foreign accent and whom he kills in the end. This plot alteration adds to the author’s use of African music, dance, costumes and localisms yet the play follows its Greek model, and Adigun also remains faithful to his Nigerian source. The Gods are not to Blame was presented in Dublin during the Fringe Festival; it “featured more than twenty actors of African descent” and it was praised as “the most impressive embodiment of Ireland’s multicultural reality that Dublin theatre has ever seen”7. For Roddy Doyle, who was to 4

Antigone a new version by Conall Morrison was commissioned and produced by the Dublin-based Storytellers Theatre Company. It opened at the Project Arts Centre on 4 March 2003 and run until 15 March 2003. See http://www.project.ie/cgi-bin/eventdetail.pl?id4 (accessed on 24 September 2008). 5 In a review for the Irish Theatre Magazine, David Barnett maintains that Morrison’s “failure to acknowledge the centrality of the audience in political theatre renders the topicality of the production little more than spectacle”. For him, Morrison does not “take his subject and the theatre seriously” while “reinforc[ing] a fairly banal view of US foreign policy”. See ‘Thinking Global: The Bacchae of Bagdad’, review by David Barnett in Irish Theatre Magazine, vol. 6, no.37 (Summer 2006) pp. 62-64. Along the same lines see Karen Fricker in The Guardian, Wednesday 15 March 2006. 6 Jim Trageser, “The Bacchae of Bagdad: an uneven, confused ride”, review posted in March 2006, see www.turbula.net/theater/06-03-bacchae.php (accessed on August 25, 2008). 7 Sara Keating, review of The Gods are not to Blame, in Irish Theatre Magazine (2003), 77, quoted in Bisi Adigun, “Arambe Productions: An African’s Response to the Recent Portrayal of the Fear Gorm in Irish Drama”, in Performing Global

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The Canon

cooperate with Arambe a few years later, the production of Rotimi’s play was “what the new Ireland is about”8. Adigun believed that it was “very relevant within Ireland’s emergent discourse of identity and “otherness”’ as it asked questions about representation and self-representation. In other words, “What makes us who we are?”9 Is it our skin colour, our religion, language, heritage? Is it what we think we are (or ought to be), or is it what people want us to be? In 2003, Arambe’s debut play introduced some of the topics which characterise most intercultural theatre in Ireland today.

Networks, ed. Karen Fricker and Ronit Lentin (Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2007), 59. 8 Roddy Doyle, quoted by Bisi Adigun in “Arambe Productions: An African’s Response to the Recent Portrayal of the Fear Gorm in Irish Drama”, 60. 9 See Bisi Adigun in the Programme Notes. The play premiered at Dublin’s Fringe Festival in 2003, and was staged again at the O’Reilly Theatre, Dublin, in 2004. For details of the production see also the information available online at http://www.arambeproductions.com/archive.html accessed on 3/04/2008. Ola Rotimi, The Gods are not to Blame (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1971).

PLAYBOYS OF THIS WESTERN WORLD

The year 2004 marked the first centenary of Ireland’s national theatre. With it came a series of profound reflections by both critics and theatre practitioners on the achievements of Irish drama in relation to the country’s past, present and future. A paper by Christopher Murray summed up the atmosphere of the day as it spelled out the developments of the Abbey Theatre since its inception while also questioning its future1. One possible outcome of the ongoing debates was the re-visitation of the Irish canon, and in a special way of John Millington Synge’s controversial play The Playboy of the Western World. Written in 1907 and staged at the Abbey Theatre that year, The Playboy is one of the most defining and influential texts of Irish drama. The play is set in a village in the west coast of Co. Mayo and tells the story of Christy Mahon, a young man on the run who finds refuge among the local community. Housed in a pub which sells an illegal whiskey called poteen, Christy is a foreigner who breaks the routine of a sleepy country place with his story of patricide. In the eyes of the locals he is a hero: “Not only does the revelation that Christy is (apparently) a murderer win him instant respect, but the severity of his crime only increases that respect”2. The portrayal of Christy’s heroism as synonymous with law-breaking owes something to what Synge had learnt during his stay on the Aran Islands – i.e. that “the impulse to protect the criminal is universal in the west”. This may be due to the association between justice and the hated English jurisdiction, but also, and more directly, “to the primitive feeling of these people – who are never criminals yet always capable of crime – that a man will not do wrong unless he is under the influence of a passion which is as irresponsible as a storm on the sea”3. In the play, nobody can resist the magic of Christy’s 1

‘“Echoes Down the Corridor’: The Abbey Theatre 1904-2004’, presented at the IASIL Conference, Galway 2005, and published in Echoes Down the Corridor, ed. Patrick Lonergan and Riana O’Dwyer (Dublin: Carysfort Press, 2007), 13-27. 2 George Cusack, “In the Gripe of the Ditch: Nationalism, Famine, and The Playboy of the Western World”, Modern Drama, XLV, no.4 (Winter 2002): 583. 3 J.M. Synge, Preface, The Collected Plays, Poems and The Aran Islands, rev. ed., ed. Alison Smith (London: Dent, 1997), 298. Also quoted in the Programme notes for Pan Pan’s version of The Playboy of the Western World.

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story; women especially are mesmerised by his words; they flirt with him and compete with each other for his attention. As it is known, the original production sparked riots in the theatre: people reacted to the language – it was apparently the naming of female underwear items that caused outrage – but most importantly they reacted to Synge’s unflattering representation of the Irish as unlawful, rebellious and promiscuous. This was an image they knew to be true in some respects but yet found hard to accept. As George Cusack notes, the riots confirmed that the Irish were “the very thing the play claimed they were, an angry mob bent on suppressing a truly revolutionary image of themselves”4. A hundred years on from its original premiere, The Playboy of the Western World proved to be equally powerful as a representation of a changing nation and a changing people. Pan Pan, an award-winning and experimental theatre company founded in 1991, reworked Synge’s play for a production at the Project Arts Centre in December 2006. Three months later, the company presented a Chinese version of Synge’s classic at the Oriental Pioneer Theatre in Beijing5. The text was adapted and directed by David Quinn with a translation by Yue Sun, and performed in Mandarin with an all-Chinese cast and English subtitles. It transposed the original events to the contemporary setting of a beauty salon/brothel on the outskirts of the Chinese capital called “Whore Dressers” while using a modern and colloquial idiom. As with Synge’s play, here too there is a man on the run, a stranger named Ma Shang who says that he has killed his father and needs a place to hide from the police. Here also, people are awed by the stranger’s daring act. This Mandarin version also retains the original portrayal of the female characters as (arguably) promiscuous or morally reproachable and thus caused what an English tabloid termed “a sex storm ... because one of the cast shows her knickers”6. Pan Pan’s production is unique in that it places two apparently distinct cultures side by side while asserting the numerous and significant analogies between them in a clearly provocative manner. The Chinese response to the Beijing show may not have been as tumultuous as the 1907 riots, yet the shock was still there at the sight of Lala’s short skirt: “Pegeen Mike evokes a blush in Beijing”; “Short shifts leave Beijingers breathless”

4

Cusak, “In the Gripe of the Ditch: Nationalism, Famine, and The Playboy of the Western World”, 592. 5 See www.panpantheatre.com 6 The Sun, quoted in the Programme Notes for Pan Pan’s version of The Playboy of the Western World.

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read some reviews in The Irish Times7. In Ireland, this experiment contributed to the analysis of the extent to which the country had changed and was fast-changing on the foot of recent waves of in-migration. A few months later, a similar impulse drove Bisi Adigun and Roddy Doyle to adapt The Playboy for the Abbey Theatre8. Produced by Arambe, this Nigerian version is set among rival gangs in west Dublin in the present yet remains essentially faithful to the original plot. The protagonist is Christopher Malomo, a twenty-year-old graduate and a refugee from Nigeria who thinks he has killed his father with a pestle and finds shelter in a suburban pub in Dublin. Like the asylum seekers he represents, Christopher “has a story to tell”; unlike them, however, he gets a unique chance to be listened to: this is arguably the central theme of Arambe’s adaptation, focused on the issue of visibility in the age of Big Brother and CCTVs in a multiethnic society which tends to deny diversity and racism. Adigun speaks from his personal experience – as a student, he arrived in Ireland from Nigeria in 1998 and had to face several difficulties to integrate – but the story of his playboy is also the story of anyone who arrives in a foreign country. It is the story of a difficult cultural encounter. The question of visibility embraces aspects of cultural diversity as well as diversity in broader terms. It is not an accident, for instance, that the Arambe Playboy was available also as an audio-described performance. Audio-described performances are a novel service which are designed for visually impaired audiences. Special needs people wear an earpiece through which they can listen to a “live commentary supplying visual details such as facial expressions and the positions of the characters”. Audio-visual commentaries are also available in Braille and large-print format. In Ireland, this service is “at a delicate stage and needs to be nurtured” reports an enthusiast theatre-goer who attended the show in November 2007, and despite the lack of trained audio describers and the need for theatre companies to cooperate, was optimistic that Arts and Disability Ireland (ADI) i.e. the local relevant agency, would be able to meet the current demand for audio-described performances in the near future9. 7

Programme Notes for Pan Pan’s version of The Playboy of the Western World. The play was put on at the Abbey from 3 October to 24 November 2007. At present, the script remains unpublished. I owe debt to Bisi Adigun who spoke to me about the play and allowed me to read from the script. For detail of the production see www.abbeytheatre.ie/what’s on/playboy (accessed on February, 12 2008). 9 Derbhile Dromey, “Filling the Picture”, Irish Theatre Magazine, 7, no.33 (Winter 2007), 16-19. 8

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Over the years, one of the merits of Arambe (and of Roddy Doyle) has been to contribute to the recognition of multi-ethnicity in the Irish context with special emphasis on the African community, one of the first ethnic minorities to settle on the island. At the beginning of the third millennium, with the enlargement of the EU and the arrival of migrants from overseas, the question of Ireland’s hospitality and the preoccupation with indigenous forms of racism has dominated both the public and the academic arenas. In this respect, Jason King notes that there are “two competing models of interculturalism in Ireland today”: one, as developed by Declan Kiberd, maintains that Ireland has always been multi-ethnic and that Irish culture today is very receptive of foreigners. By contrast, Ronit Lentin speaks of the “racialisation” of the Irish. According to her, an Israeli Jew of Romanian descent and since 1969 an Irish citizen, there exists “an official version of the Irish nation” with concomitant notions of cultural and national identity, which have helped promote “exclusive racial ideals of Irishness”10. Both models seek to interpret Irish society today; both provide useful insights into this changing country. Yet, as King observes, there are limitations to both Kiberd’s and Lentin’s arguments as the former fails to acknowledge “intercultural conflict” while the latter appears to be altogether too dismissive of Irishness11. The two have in common one fundamental aspect, however – that is that they read current responses to the arrival of new migrants as a reflection of Ireland’s traumatic past. Quite simply, it is as if “the pain of emigration return[ed] to haunt the Irish”12. There is in fact a strong feeling of affinity between the fate of the newcomers and the experience of Irish migrants who fled their country during the Famine. A similar strand of thought concerns the Black Afro-Caribbean community. The production of comparative criticism on Irish and Caribbean 10 Ronit Lentin, Foreword to After Optimism? Ireland, Racism and Globalisation, ed. Ronit Lentin and Robbie McVeigh (Dublin: Metro Eireann Publications, 2006), quoted in Jason King, “Black Saint Patrick Revisited: Calypso’s ‘Tower of Babel’ and Culture Ireland as Global Networks”, in Performing Global Networks, ed. Karen Fricker and Ronit Lentin (Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2007), 43-44. 11 Jason King, Performing Global Networks, 43-44. 12 This generates fear, the kind of fear which, as Julia Kristeva has observed, “is predicated upon the more internal anxiety about self-alienation from the Other we harbour within ourselves.” See Ronit Lentin in Jason King, Performing Global Networks, 43-44. King notes that Kristeva’s conceptualisation of fear refers to a “universalised condition of self-alienation” whereas Lentin and Kiberd refer to a fear that is “resolutely historical and culturally specific”. See King, Performing Global Networks, 45. Ronit Lentin in King, Performing Global Networks, 43-44.

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playwrights like W.B. Yeats and Derek Walcott, and the popularity of Irish drama among Caribbean audiences confirms a general belief in the historical and cultural affinities of the two islands. This is also manifested in the theatrical practice of both countries13. This is so much the case that, according to Mustapha Matura, Synge’s Playboy is at home in his native Trinidad as much as it is in County Mayo. Matura’s The Playboy of the West Indies is a popular re-casting of Synge’s classic in the Caribbean village of Mayaro in 1950, twelve years before Trinidad gained independence from Great Britain14. Synge’s play is not simply re-adapted but subverted “in ways that open up diasporic remembrance beyond national affiliation to consider other kinds of affiliations throughout the Atlantic world”15. Affiliation is a key term here as it evokes Matura’s basic belief that the Irish and the Afro-Caribbean nations truly have a lot in common16. The notion that the Irish and Black people share a unique history of racist discrimination is crucial to discourses of multiculturalism in Ireland. Dating back to the eighteenth century and reaching its primary expression during Victorian times, the conception of the Irish as Europe’s black people has frequently been recalled in recent analyses of racist attitudes in contemporary Ireland. Robbie McVeigh is an pioneer in the study of antiIrish racism in British culture: as he argues, there is a connection between the Irish and the Black experiences as evidenced by the “ubiquitous No Blacks, no Irish, no Dogs17. Quoting Sivanandan, he also notes that the 13

According to this view, Irish theatre “resists the representation of Ireland as a historical anomaly of the British Empire” while Caribbean theatre resists the representation of the region as “an ahistorical paradise”. See Kathleen McGough, “Polymorphous Playboys: Irish Caribbean Shadow Dancing”, Modern Drama, 48, no.4 (Winter 2005), 778. 14 McGough, “Polymorphous Playboys: Irish Caribbean Shadow Dancing”, 789. Matura’ play was first staged in 1984; it opened at the Tricycle Theatre in London where Matura lived at the time. Playboy of the West Indies was published by Broadway, New York, in 1988. 15 McGough, “Polymorphous Playboys: Irish Caribbean Shadow Dancing”, 795. 16 For a reading of Matura’s play see also Sandra Pouchet Paquet, “Mustapha Matura’s Playboy of the West Indies: A Carnival Discourse on Imitation and Originality”, Journal of West Indian Literature 5.1-2 (1992): 85-96. 17 “Certainly there had been a long tradition of anti-Irish racism in Ireland long before independence – indeed anti-Irish racism was almost the definitive imprimatur of colonialism”. See Robbie McVeigh, “Nick, Nack, Paddywhack: Anti-Irish racism and the racialisation of Irishness”, in Racism and Anti-racism in Ireland, ed. Ronit Lentin and Robbie McVeigh (Belfast: Beyond the Pale, 2002), 139.

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Irish are “politically Black”. With colonialism, they have been depicted as inferior beings, stupid and bestial: “Irish people ... like Black people, were specifically simianised and sub-human ... The simianisation – which is often taken for granted in the analysis of anti-African racism – is equally explicit for the Irish – they are made to look like apes”18.

18

McVeigh refers specifically to the representation of the Irish people in the work of British cartoonists where “racism is easy to see .... and it cannot simply be dismissed as xenophobia or religious prejudice. The invisibility of the white Irish becomes visible – in these cartoons anti-Irishness becomes a racism”. See McVeigh, “Nick, Nack, Paddywhack: Anti-Irish racism and the racialisation of Irishness”, 140.

SAINT PATRICK

Anti-Irish racism feeds on stereotypes and attitudes which have survived through the centuries, and which, in more recent years, have helped nourish endogenous forms of racism. Though it remains largely undertheorised, anti-Irish racism has caused concern among politicians as well as academics and artists. Popular culture has come to reflect the impact of old and enduring racial stereotypes, and this can be testified through recent uses of the foundational myth of Saint Patrick. A contested icon in the North1, Saint Patrick has traditionally been taken to represent the essence of Irishness in the South and among the Irish diaspora. This is well confirmed by the annual celebrations in honour of Ireland’s patron saint on 17 March by Irish communities both at home and abroad. First established in the XVIII century, this almost exclusive expression of national pride has changed in recent years so as to include new forms of Irish identity which define the country’s cultural/ethnic status at present. Multi-ethnicity, in other words, is being paraded across the country2. The recourse to parades is not accidental. In this respect, Christy Fox notes that parades are “grounded in local topical themes” and therefore they “can provide the audience with alternative means to interact with current societal problem”3. John Roach uses the term “surrogation” to refer to the social function of parades as “secular rituals through which a modernizing society communicates with its past”. As he explains, “the process of surrogation does not begin or end but continues as actual or 1

“The concept of Patrick as an exclusively Catholic icon is undergoing a ... serious redefinition ... The Protestant community in Northern Ireland is staking out as never before a claim to a share of the Patrician heritage. ... Steadily his life is being unravelled and re-interpreted, and his reputation as a pastor and harbinger of Catholicism or Christianity in Ireland is being re-assessed”. Chris Ryder, “The Battle of Saint Patrick”, http://www.thetablet.co.uk/article/342 (acc. 3/08/2009) 2 Holly Maples, “Parading Multicultural Ireland: Identity Politics and National Agenda’s in the 2007 St. Patrick’s Festival”, paper presented at the annual ISTR Conference, Dublin, UCD, April 2008. I am grateful to the author who gave me access to the first draft of her paper and permission to quote from it. 3 Christy Fox, “Creating Community: Macnas’ Galway Arts Festival Parade, 2000”, New Hibernian Review 7, no.2 (Summer 2003): 19-37, in Maples, Ibid, 5-6.

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perceived vacancies occur in the network of relations that constitutes the social fabric”4. Viewed in these terms, the St. Patrick Parade in Ireland can help facilitate the kind of social encounter which is equally pursued by theatre companies such as Upstate, Calypso, Barabbas, Tinderbox and Arambe, and aim to “celebrate difference but also create unity” within the context of a street performance. This may work in theory, but in practice the “fusion of cultures” advocated by the Dublin City festival organizers has proved to be problematic5. The 2007 edition of the parade was dominated by issues of representation and self-representation, thus, for instance, the Lithuanian and Polish participants sought to present their national identity through the display of national icons – be it their flag or a traditional costume – while the City Fusion team established that no “logos of any kind ... including banners, signs, national colours or obvious signifiers from the various cultures” would be allowed6. It is significant that some of the participating community groups saw the parade as a platform from which they could assert their presence in the country and achieve or improve their visibility. Likewise, it is worth noting that no representatives from the Travellers community featured among the sixteen groups which took part in the parade presumably because they chose not to7. The experiences of City Fusion and of the many St. Patrick parades across the country are suggestive of the necessity to understand multiculturalism and embrace this new Ireland of multiple ethnicities, yet at the same time, they expose the tensions that come from these new challenges. Declan Gorman gives a clever reading of such difficulties as he seeks to demonstrate that “there is more to understanding the new reality than just saying it’s all lovely and colourful. There is a dark side too”8. In his portrayal of the festival in At Peace!, possibly an allegory of 4 Joseph Roach, Cities of the Dead: Circum-Atlantic Performance (New York: Columbia U. P., 1996) pp. 77-78 quoted in Maples, “Parading Multicultural Ireland: Identity Politics and National Agenda’s in the 2007 St. Patrick’s Festival”, 6. 5 City Fusion was designed as a participatory pageant involving immigrant and Irish community groups. The project would “explore the impact immigration has upon the Irish community and examine how diverse cultures can co-exist without destroying individual cultures”. See Maples, Ibid, 8. 6 Maples, Ibid, 10. 7 I discussed the issue of representation with the author and the criteria for admission to the parade. As an artist herself and a performance facilitator for City Fusion in 2007, the author told me that the various community groups were invited to apply prior to being selected. No Travelling community group showed an interest in the project. 8 Declan Gorman, interview, The Northern Standard, 4 October 2007.

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the 2007 Dublin festival9, people argue over what costumes they would like to wear to represent their culture (9), and a pseudo-diplomatic incident occurs when the too-politically correct Mrs Reilly misinterprets a ritual dance by the (overly sensitive) Nigerian performer Ogunseyi (32). Again, post-national global Ireland and pre-Celtic Tiger/traditionalist Ireland are hardly reconciled; between them “Irishness [is] playing itself out on the Irish social stage”10. On the theatre stage, the myth of Saint Patrick has been no less vociferous as a recent work by Calypso Productions demonstrates. In 2003, the Dublin-based company devised the experimental Mixing it on the Mountain, a musical comedy by Maeve Ingoldsby which recounts “the story of Patrick, long before he became a saint”.11 Performed during the St. Patrick’s Festival in Dublin that year, it “featured a multi-ethnic cast of twenty-two actors and musicians from Ireland, Nigeria, Albania, Angola, Kosovo, Macedonia and Vietnam”. Calypso Productions is a professional theatre company whose work “addresses the way people’s lives are affected by contemporary issues of social justice and human rights”. In 2002, the company launched an intercultural project called “The Tower of Babel”, a weekly workshop involving Irish teenagers as well as young asylum seekers and refugees living in Dublin12. Some of them were involved in the original production of Maeve Ingolsby’s play. Mixing in it on the Mountain is set in a remote past in an isolated place – the mountain of the title – where two groups of slaves are guarded by their Irish masters. The first group comprises ten African nationals (including Patrick) who have been held captive for some time; the second group is made of five white slaves – four Albanians and a Vietnamese – who are taken to the mountain at the start of Scene 4.13 The protagonists live a Big Brother kind of situation as they are forced to live together within a limited area and under constant surveillance of their Celtic masters. Like guinea pigs in a lab they undergo an experiment which seeks to “mix” different people from different backgrounds in order to test the .

9

City Fusion took place a few months before Upstate Theatre Company presented Gorman’s play. 10 Maples, “Parading Multicultural Ireland: Identity Politics and National Agenda’s in the 2007 St. Patrick’s Festival”, 14. 11 Notes from Jason King and Piaras MacÉinrí, “Where is Home? An educational resource on refugees in international and Irish perspective”(Dublin, Calypso Productions, 2005). 12 King and MacÉinrí, Ibid. 13 Maeve Ingolsby, Mixing It on the Mountain, unpublished play, 6. I am grateful to the author and to Calypso Productions who gave me access and permission to quote from the script.

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Saint Patrick

feasibility of cultural integration vis-à-vis assimilation, and question the extent to which diversity can be achieved. The play presents a clear allegory of Ireland and of Irish society today. Like multiethnic Ireland, the mountain is a special place where different people meet, where they encounter other cultures and languages. This is also a place for meditation, a sort of inner pilgrimage, where characters are confronted with their own past. Thus, for instance, Malachy, who is appointed as leader of the guards and has a bad reputation for being strict and cruel is a frustrated warrior, a Celtic hero who finds himself trapped on the mountain and performs a role he detests. Likewise, the slaves in his charge often recall their lives back home as they contemplate their present state. Mixing It on the Mountain is more than a simple reflection on contemporary Ireland. Ingoldsby moves a step further as she seeks to imagine what would happen, for instance, if a black slave fell in love with his white master, or a slave who is destined for the mine were to swap identity with another slave and stay on the mountain. What would it be like if Ireland’s patron saint were a black man, someone in between Martin Luther King and Patrice Lamumba?14 What if it turned out that he was actually a black man? When our firmest beliefs and certainties are shaken to the roots and exposed to doubt, how do we react? And why? These are the questions lying at the heart of Ingoldsby “politically progressive play”15, a play in which interracial romance and cross dressing are deployed to expose and test racial stereotypes and common attitudes. These are strong devices through which the author seeks also to suggest or reconstitute, imaginatively at least, the traditional inclination for hospitality of the Irish. The critical reception of this play suggests that regardless of its theatrical quality, Mixing It on the Mountain can be thought-provoking. For some, Ingoldsby’s production was “a novel and exciting experience” yet it remained “unconvincing”16. For others, on the contrary, it signalled 14

In the closing scene Patrick pronounces a speech which echoes both Martin Luther King’s “I have a dream” speech and Patrice Lamumba’s last speech before he was killed. 15 In “Interculturalism and Irish Theatre”, King defines Mixing It on the Mountain a “politically progressive play”, a “formal reflection of the asymmetrical position of the asylum seeker in Irish society” (34), and a “performative articulation and staged enactment of the right to work in Ireland, which is currently denied to asylum seekers like many of the members of the cast” (35). 16 In a review article Karen Fricker questions the play’s efficacy: “Would it not be have been more empowering ... to show us a fictional world in which our

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an opening up to interculturalism or at least a willingness to express “intercultural contact”17. However contrasting, the response to Mixing It on the Mountain and to migrant plays such as this unveils the worrying truth about the state of Irish arts and artists – that to this day they are expected to do what politics and the State fail to do, and in this specific case that they can find a solution to the contentious issues of migration and social integration. This is different from saying that the arts are symbiotic with reality in the sense that they are both influenced and influential of the reality which produces them18. Irish theatre today is the result of this double impetus, of a tension similar to that signalled some years ago by Seamus Heaney in “The Government of the Tongue” and in “Crediting Poetry”, two lectures where he reflects upon his role as a writer and investigates the role of poetry in the Irish context. The increasing number of intercultural plays from Ireland confirms a preoccupation with cultural diversity and at the same time it warns us of the necessity to cure Ireland’s “haemorrhage” and find a solution to and for this “porous nation” – a country of out-migration in the past which is now being flooded with refugees and asylum seekers going to live there19.

expectations of oppression are played with, queried and overturned?” See Irish Theatre Magazine, 15, no.3 (March 2003), 76. 17 King, “Interculturalism and Irish Theatre”, 25. 18 I refer to an article by Bisi Adigun, the founder of Arambe and a prominent figure in today’s theatrical landscape in Ireland. Adigun affirms that while arts can be “parasitic”, in Ireland they are “symbiotic” with reality, and this is why “theatre in particular has become preoccupied with the recent phenomenon of Ireland’s cultural diversity, and the problem of racism this diversity sometimes engenders”. See Adigun, “Arambe Productions: An African’s Response to the Recent Portrayal of the Fear Gorm in Irish Drama”, 53. 19 King, “Porous Nation: from Ireland’s ‘haemorrhage’ to immigrant inundation”, 49-54.

THE SPORTING METAPHOR1

Sport and sport contests are recurring tropes in films, prose and theatre works that feature migration to and from Ireland. A form of popular culture, and “one of the most pervasive social institutions in our society”2, sport acts as a catalyst for social encounter, yet at the same time it can reflect subtle forms of social discrimination. In the words of Eldon Snyder, “sport is a microcosm highlighting and mirroring social values”; or to put it more simply “sport is a value receptacle for society”3. To these and similar issues is dedicated a well known study by Arjun Appadurai which provides a starting point for our reflection on Irish sports and theatre4. Appadurai explores the social aspect of sport in relation to cricket and Indian society in the colonial and postcolonial contexts. As noted, cricket entered Indian society by way of Britain’s colonisation. A game notably “English in origin”, by the nineteenth century cricket became “the most powerful condensation of Victorian elite values’ as well as “a central instrument of socialization”5. What once was a “segregated sport” now played a moral and political role as it became “an ideal way to

1

This section was published with the title of “Immigrant Games: sports as a metaphor for social encounter in contemporary Irish drama”, Irish Studies Review18, no.1 (February 2010): 57-68. 2 Eldon Snyder, and Elmer Spreitzer, The Social Aspects of Sport (Prentice Hall, Englewood Cliffs, NJ, 1983), 1. 3 Snyder, and Spreitzer, Ibid, 46 and 55-56. On the theme of the social aspect of sport see also R.E. Rinehart, Players All. Performances in Contemporary Sport (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1998). In relation to the social impact of Irish national sports and to the cultural, political and social issues that are involved in sports practices among Irish migrant communities around the world see Sport in Society. Cultures, Commerce, Media, Politics – “Emigrants at Play: Sport and the Irish Diaspora”, ed. Paul Darby and David Hassan, 10, no.3, (May 2007) (London: Routledge Journals, Taylor and Francis). 4 Arjun Appadurai, “Playing with Modernity: The Decolonization of Indian Cricket”, in Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization (Minneapolis MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1996): 89-113. 5 Appadurai, “Playing with Modernity: The Decolonization of Indian Cricket”, 9192.

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socialize natives into new modes of intergroup conduct and new standards of public behaviour”6. Appadurai maintains that what used to be a bastion of British identity actually “contained a social paradox”, which eventually allowed for the decolonization and indigenization of cricket in India. The result was that “the Indian nation became a salient cricketing entity”7, and re-invented itself as a nation of cricket acolytes, where sports practitioners are “worshipped, perhaps even more than their counterparts in the cinema”8. Cricket appeals to “a wide variety of groups within Indian society” and to the contemporary Indian social body it acts like a “textual suture” over deeply “divisive scars”9. Images of the wounded body in need of healing are often used to refer to Ireland, North and South, and to the analogous situation of a country whose colonial past and the legacy of British colonisation cannot be separated from the history of indigenous games and their dissemination among the so-called Irish diaspora. Numerous scholars have devoted their attention to the role of the Gaelic Athletic Association and of Gaelic games among Irish emigrants10 but little has been said about the current role of these sports “at home” at a time when Ireland represents the chosen destination of thousands of newcomers from within the EU and beyond. Very little has indeed been written about sports in relation to nationality in post-national Ireland and the impact of migration on current ideas of national identity. Since the late 1990s, and following unprecedented waves of immigration, the notion that Ireland is a country with a “homogenous, white, sedentary, predominantly Catholic, heterosexual society [and] with a progressive capitalist ideology” has been challenged and proved to be untenable11. Today, answers are needed to the questions of who “we” are or have become in Ireland, and of how “Irishness” is to be re-defined in the twenty-first century.

6

Appadurai, 93. Ibid, 97. 8 Ibid, 110. 9 Ibid,103 and 113. 10 In this respect “Emigrants at Play: Sport and the Irish Diaspora” special issue of Sport in Society. Cultures, Commerce, Media, Politics represents a valuable research and study tool. 11 Drazen Nozinic, “One Refugee Experience in Ireland.”, in Racism and AntiRacism in Ireland, ed. Ronit Lentin and Robbie McVeigh (Belfast: Beyond the Pale, 2002), 81. 7

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In the present climate of change, the arts play a significant role in that they address and seek to articulate the transformations of Ireland’s expanding nation12. Irish theatre in particular proves to be especially active and responsive when it comes to issues of multi-ethnicity and identity. It is little wonder, then, that one of the tropes in recent productions is the sports metaphor since sport, like theatre is a powerful means of identity definition. Sport and theatre share a number of “similar traits in that they combine play … and ritual”. As Schechner puts it, in fact, “there is a unifiable realm of performance that includes ritual, theatre, dance, music, sport, play, social drama and various popular entertainments”13.

12

The reference is to a conference held at Trinity College, Dublin in September 1998. Proceedings of the conference were published with title of The Expanding Nation: Towards a Multi-ethnic Ireland, ed. Ronit Lentin (Dublin, 2008). 13 Nick McCarthy, “Enacting Irish Identity in Western Australia: Performances from the Dressing Room”, Sport in Society, ed. Paul Darby and David Hassan, 368-384.

Figure 1 UPSTATE At Peace! Leaflet

Figure 2 UPSTATE At Peace! Performance

Figure 3 Sole Purpose Snow White Leaflet

Figure 4 Carl Kennedy and Dan Tudor in Paul Meade's Mushroom

Figure 5 Paul Meade - Mushroom in performance

Figure 6 PAN PAN The Playboy of the Western World Dublin Premiere

Figure 7a PAN PAN Chinese Playboy of the Western World

Figure 7b PAN PAN The Chinese Playboy of the Western World

Figure 8 PAN PAN Playboy of the Western World Reviews

IMMIGRANT GAMES: SPORT ON THE IRISH STAGE

Among the Irish both at home and abroad, the indigenous games of hurling, football and, to a lesser extent camogie, have been practiced and supported as a way of asserting national identity. As Michael Cronin observes, in fact, both the GAA and the national games “constitute major sites of nationalist ideology, a segment of which relates to the theme of racialisation ... and to the values that ... make the Irish distinct from the English”1. For the Irish diaspora, Gaelic games have played a crucial role in processes of integration and negotiation with the host environment. Likewise, Gaelic games have been taken up by non-Irish nationals abroad, and more recently by the so-called “new Irish”, people who have travelled to and made Ireland their new home over the past two decades2. In this context, it is worth investigating whether today native Irish people feel that “foreigners” have been taking their games as well as their jobs and women. Is “being Irish” a requirement; how strict a requirement is it for one to be able to play the Gaelic games?3 In an attempt to answer these questions we will consider Hurl, a play written by Charlie O’Neill and produced by Barabbas The Company in July 20034. Additional

1

Michael Cronin quoted in Steve Garner, Racism in the Irish Experience (London: Pluto Press, 2004), 153. 2 See Introduction Sport in Society. Cultures, Commerce, Media, Politics, ed. Darby and Hassan. 3 It is not easy to answer these questions if anything because nowadays defining Irishness is in itself rather difficult. In this respect, the GAA and the changes that it has gone through since its foundation in 1884 reflect how the notion of ‘being Irish’ has also changed. 4 Hurl was directed by Raymond Keane and staged at Galway’s Black Box Theatre, 14-17 July 2003. Keane chose a simple set with a goalpost placed at the back of the stage; actors stood or sat in the foreground and switched roles easily. In his review Patrick Lonergan drew attention to the production’s versatility: “The cast switches easily through characters and accents, men playing women, black and Asian actors playing white characters – enacting the idea that identity doesn’t have to be fixed ... we are shown that there are many ways of presenting the same story ... and the use of hurling as a vehicle for all this proves in numerous ways a

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Immigrant Games: Sport on the Irish Stage

examples from other plays will also be cited so as to provide a comprehensive analysis of the sport metaphor in current representations of migrants on the Irish stage. Featuring a cast of thirty-two actors from various ethnic backgrounds, Hurl focuses on the organisation and realisation of hurling matches between local teams and the Freetown Slashers, a team of “foreign nationals” (29) from Africa, East Europe, Asia, and Latin America. The play opens with the image of “a dishevelled priest on a pulpit” (2). The man, Lofty is his name, is drunk; he reads a sermon that is about the “rules for the soul”: these are the rules for playing hurling. The opening draws an immediate parallel between this Gaelic game and religion to suggest not simply the shrinking influence of the church in contemporary Ireland5, the importance of hurling for Irish people or the fact that in secular Ireland hurling is to the Irish like their new religion, but also the religious nature of the game in terms of ritual, and therefore in terms of perpetuation of local traditions in the modern times6. Formerly a missionary in Sierra Leone, Lofty taught locals to play hurling while there. Back to Ireland, and no longer a priest, a few years later (the present in the play) he is asked to train a team of asylum seekers now living in a caravan park nearby, who wish to “join the local club” and play the game alongside other foreign players. Why hurling? Of all games, that is, why would these people want to play the one which most strongly encapsulates the essence of Irishness? Clearly hurling means to them something other than what it means to locals; and clearly they perceive hurling to be their game as much as it is the locals”. In the words of Miroslav, who emigrated to Ireland in 1994, hurling is “a perfect game for Bosnians” (Hurl, 7), or as Lofty puts it, “It’s an immigrant game” (Hurl, 25). While Rusty Cox, the local chairman of the GAA tries to persuade great choice”. See Lonergan, ‘Reviews’, Irish Theatre Magazine 17 (Winter 2003), p. 122. 5 Lofty’s drunkenness also suggests “an intentional gap between what he is saying and how it is to be taken by the audience”. For this and for a number of other relevant remarks I owe debt to Dr. Tom Maguire who read and commented upon an early draft of my study on the sport metaphor on the Irish stage. 6 On the analogy between religion and sport see Schechner, above. Chapter 16 in The Social Aspects of Sports is dedicated to “The religious dimensions of sport”: here it is argued that there is a ‘symbiotic relationship’ between sports and religion, which has to do with stress management and morals (sport practice requires a clean lifestyle, self discipline and respect for authority which are also advocated by the religious institution). Religion and sport, like politics and finance, are “functional for the maintenance of the existing social order”; their overlapping ideologies have a conservative function within society” (277-278).

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them to play football or go running not because of their “origin” but because hurling “is not a priority” in that part of the country, they insist that they want to play hurling there, in Dublin: “We live here. We want to represent this club” (Hurl, 8). The sequence is exemplary of the kind of tension between sets of assumptions and perceptions which are very common in Irish society today7, and which equally lie at the heart of O’Neill’s play. In fact, it is the energy springing from this tension which sets the action and keeps it going to the end of the performance and beyond. O’Neill designs his play accordingly: actors on stage play multiple roles: at times, they are storytellers – and thus address the audience directly; other times, they follow the “normal theatrical conventions” (Hurl, 1). In this process of role-switching the audience is always alert to change as the actors move around, wear masks and take them off, step off stage, they sit and watch the show with them (Hurl, 1). People in the audience are constantly engaged whether in their capacity as a theatrical audience or as part of the supporters” group watching the match within the play. Such make-believe device serves the main purpose of having them reflect, however unwittingly, upon their role in relation to current issues of racism, ethnic identity, the reality of language and cultural barriers. The play’s focus shifts between two major themes: on the one hand is the sports contest which enables encounter and allows for adaptation and for a critical engagement on the part of all participants – actors, characters and members of the audience. On the other, there is the question of race that cannot be negotiated and the suggestion that this plays a major part in Ireland’s response to multiculturalism at present8. Hurl is divided into twenty-three sequences: the first six concentrate upon the setting up of the “exotic team” (Hurl, 29). The recruitment process strikes a strong resemblance with Jimmy Rabittee’s search for musicians in Roddy Doyle’s story The Deportees where the hunt for a band of non-Irish players is the narrative pretext to depict multi-ethnic Dublin9. O’Neill’s hurling players are likewise deportees in many ways: thus, for instance, Santos is “descended from hundreds of Irish emigrants who went [to Argentina] in the 1800’s. Grew up learning Irish songs and poetry” (Hurl, 6); while Vietnamese Dung was “brought over” by his 7

See studies by Ronit Lentin and Robbie McVeigh cited in the course of the present study. 8 For O’Neill, as for O’Kelly in Asylum! Asylum! laws and rules are there to be enforced, they do not adapt. 9 Roddy Doyle, “The Deportees”, in Roddy Doyle, The Deportees and Other Stories (London: Jonathan Cape, 2007): 27-77.

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Immigrant Games: Sport on the Irish Stage

parents when he was “a baby in the 80s” (Hurl, 17). Like Dung, others have also arrived illegally, and they are still asylum seekers with no regular papers to stay in the country. Now a proper team with a proper coach, the Freetown Slashers face their first match against the Killinaclash and win (Hurl, 18); they reach the semi-final and then the final, which they also win (scene 23). The three matches are set at the heart of the play, occupying a symbolic space within it as well as acquiring a special significance in terms of its development and aim: like a play within the play, the stage performance of the rituals that take place on and off the pitch are performances of multiple encounters. Similarly, the sports match becomes the theatre of social and cultural confrontation for both players and supporters. It is here that the meaning of Schechner’s “unifiable realm of performance” becomes more evident. On the (theatrical) pitch traditional Ireland struggles to come to terms with contemporary Ireland: thus for Rusty, the adversaries are not here “to experience the passion of the GAA” – you would have to be 100% Irish to be able to do that – “they’ve come for the novelty” (Hurl, 19)10. For Lofty, however, hurling is all about poetry: playing is not about victory; it is about making things happen, as he tells the “lads” in the changing room: “We don’t have the history to play patriotic hurling ... We’ll play hurling that flies because it’s what hurling was made for. Poetry will be enough to win the day” (Hurl, 19). Hurling, he believes, is not about those traditional values which Rusty and the GAA advocate: a game considered to date back to more than a thousand years before Christ11, hurling has to do with the expression – the poetry – of what one is, or can be. Just as poetry is an imaginative act that pursues clarity where there is none, so the playing of this game in a new Ireland indicates the re-imaging or the re-writing of a national narrative. By the end of the match Rusty’s loyalty is questioned as the “townspeople were beginning to come around to the notion that a mad shower of multi-skin-toned bastards could represent them ... In fact, they were getting so popular that local people christened their new exotic team. And ... the name stuck!” (Hurl, 24). Poetry can make things happen, indeed, at least in this case the poetry of 10

Rusty’s remark is also ironic since hurling is all but a novelty (see also next note) nor is it a novelty for these players who have learnt to play the game in their country of origin. I owe debt to Dr. Tom Maguire for this remark. 11 “Hurling has such a distant ancestry that it’s impossible to pin down its origins. According to the evidence of Irish myth and legend, the game had its devoted followers more than a thousand years before Christ”, see Seamus J. King, A History of Hurling, 2nd edn., (Dublin: Gill and Macmillan, 2005), 1.

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hurling can help “adjust” to difference (Hurl, 27), it can help “negotiate life” (Hurl, 1) and encourage acceptance however imaginatively. This brings us back to O’Neill’s characterization at the start, and in particular to his emphasis on the story-telling and the yarn-spelling acts: playing the game, like playing the part, is a poetic process; it is a powerful act of creation which allows for positive encounter where encounter is likely to be hindered. It is significant, for instance, that the title of the play refers to the act of hurling as opposed to the game itself – attention is drawn to physical engagement and action, which, as the play reminds us, are needed in the face of current migration issues in Ireland. It is in these terms that the sports match is a metaphor for social encounter: there is the clash of two Irelands, and there is the reverberation of it too, against which O’Neill uses theatre’s languages to expose various levels of racial microaggression on the part of virtually every character on stage12. It is one of sport’s most interesting social aspects that it unites people in imagined communities whereby sport supporters are brought together by the national flag, the anthem, and colours (the case of the GAA abroad and of cricket in India are exemplary in this respect). Yet, if sport can create equal opportunities for all social groups – regardless of class, gender or ethnic backgrounds – it can also expose and encourage even inequality and racist attitudes. Sport is in these terms can be also a site for division13. A clear example of this double dynamics is found in Roddy Doyle’s “Guess Who’s Coming for the Dinner”, where football is the parameter used by Larry to check his feelings: He wasn’t a racist. He was sure about that now, positive – he thought. When he watched a footballer, for example, he didn’t see skin; he saw skill. Paul McGrath, black and brilliant. Gary Breen, white and shite ...

12

I use the term “micro-aggression” to refer to “brief and commonplace daily verbal, behavioural, or environmental indignities, whether intentional or unintentional, that communicate hostile, derogatory, or negative racial slights and insults”. See D.W. Sue, C.M. Capodilupo, G.C. Torino, J.M. Bucceri, A.M.B. Holder, K.L. Nadal, and M. Esquilin, “Racial Microaggressions in Everyday Life”, in American Psychologist 62, no.4 (May-June 2007), 271. 13 “Subtle forms of discrimination still occur in the world of sport. Discrimination within the larger society inevitably spills over into sport”, in The Social Aspects of Sport, 174. On the theme see also Alan Bairner and John Sudgen, Sport in Divided Societies (Aachen: Meyer and Meyer, 1999).

48

Immigrant Games: Sport on the Irish Stage And it worked the other way too. Gary Breen, black, still shite but no worse ... But, why then? Why didn’t he want a refugee in the family?14

More significantly, and to a shocking effect too, sport is a contested space in Michael Collins’ narrative of his life as an Irish Traveller. In the second half of his recently revised It’s a Cultural Thing, or is it? A Traveller in Progress, the protagonist recounts of his first real encounter with members of the settled community and a black man15. The occasion is a football match between the Travellers’ team and a team of experienced players from the settled community. Among the latter there is also an African national. The events take place in the 1970s, at a time when complete segregation by both Irish institutions and the general public is inflicted upon the itinerant communities. While the protagonist meets black people in different situations and later in his life, his “only contact ever” with the settled community remains this one on the pitch. In the play, the Travellers’ team win most games; it qualifies third place in the tournament, and is signed up for professional teams. Yet, when the players go to the local pub to celebrate and receive their trophies they are refused entrance: “Not tonight. We don’t serve you kind” before they are invited to collect the trophies “outside”. As with the Larry Linnane story, this one also suggests that positive encounters can occur within the physical and imaginative confines of the sports contest. In the case of Collins’ play, however, the pitch, this magical space of acceptance and playfulness, is an exceptionally positive area in stark contrast with the world outside: beyond its confines, in fact, the reality of racism becomes evident and pervasive. As players from the Travellers’ team are kept waiting at the door, their fellow players from the opposite team walk past them and enter the pub, conveniently ignoring what goes on outside: “See you later man”. Paul Meade’s Mushroom showcases an additional instance of sport as a communal experience for migrants. Here too, sport “acts as a brake on the facile adversarial alignment of “us” and “them”“, and “sketches a fragile bridge binding ‘us’ to ‘them’”16. Commissioned by the Dublin-based 14

Doyle, “Guess Who’s Coming for the Dinner”, in The Deportees and Other Stories, 8. 15 Michael Collins, “It’s a cultural Thing, or is it. A Traveller in Progress”, unpublished script based on a play first put on at the Liberty Hall Theatre in March 2004, and produced by Traveller Wagon Wheel Theatre for Dublin’s Project Arts Centre where it opened on 26 May 2008. I owe debt to Michael Collins whom I met on the opening night of his show, and who spoke to me about his work, his community, and the representation of Travellers on the Irish stage. 16 Steve Garner, Racism in the Irish Experience (London: Pluto Press, 2004), 197.

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Storytellers Theatre Company in 2006, Meade’s play is set in a non-distant future in Co. Monaghan and Bucharest. Migrants from Poland and Romania move to Ireland and work there in one of the local mushroom farms; meanwhile the Irish-born Martin visits Radu, an uncle of his who lives in Bucharest, while Ewa, a young Polish girl, visits her father in Ireland. The play follows the parallel lives of the protagonists to show how regardless of their backgrounds and cultural differences these people share more than it may seem at first. Characters are portrayed when they phone friends and family “back home” – the content of their conversations being also very similar – and they all face language barriers when they try to communicate in their mother tongue and strive to learn the idiom of the host country. The play touches upon various aspects of social integration and negotiation of one’s roots in a foreign context, yet its main emphasis lies on the idea that to some extent we are all strangers, and that despite differences there exist significant analogies which are worthy of note. Scene 10 is exemplary in this respect: Martin and Radu are sitting watching a football match. Simultaneously we see Ewa and Andrej at home ... They are all watching the same football match on the same TV but in different countries17.

The TV broadcast of the Man Utd vs Liverpool European Cup final is at once a shared experience and a pretext for both couples to engage in serious conversations and reflections. Ewa complains about Andrej not going back to Poland, she decides to stay in Ireland and tells him that her sister will join them soon: “Why does she want to come so much? Asks Andrej – “To see her father” (Mushrooms, 24). Meanwhile, Martin pretends to watch TV, in reality he is thinking about his situation as he feels frustrated by the fact that Radu does not speak English, and so the two can hardly communicate: “I’d love to ... ask you about my grandparents and my mother. Find out why she left and you stayed. Ask you why you never married. Why I never met you ... where you came from” (Mushrooms, 25). The match is a suggestive metaphor of cultural encounter in a global context where the specificity of place and the connection between place, community and identity are no longer meaningful. It is in this context that sport can bridge the gap between the two pairs – all four sit in front of the TV screen for the duration of the scene – and also between the two contexts – County Monaghan and Bucharest. Significantly, all characters 17

Paul Meade, Mushroom, unpublished script, 23. I owe debt to Paul Meade who kindly provided the script and gave me permission to quote from it.

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end up singing the same song: “Andrej starts to sing a Polish lullaby ... [his] singing is taken up by the whole cast” (Mushrooms, 27). Cultural differences are not eroded in the process; in fact they are retained and negotiated alongside stereotypes and attitudes which are evidently antiIrish: “They are all fat and they have big ears ... Their food is so bad” (Ewa, 25). Meade’s play is about belonging and a vision of change; in the words of Andrej: You are not the centre. You are just a part. But you are a part. The universe flows through you and you flow through it. We will return through the gate ... we will meet the ancestors and we will understand what they understood (Mushrooms, 61).

Stereotypes and cultural assumptions emerge in another work by Charlie O’Neill entitled Rosie and Starwars. Commissioned by the Dublin-based Calypso Productions, the play was presented as the company’s “main project for the European Year against Racism” in 199718. It is based on true events and takes place during the All-Ireland Hurling championship, with the local team running for the final for the first time in eighty years and the local community exploding in exuberant celebrations. The play focuses on the collision of two cultures and two communities in Ennis, County Clare, where the occupants of a halting site nearby are targeted and become victims of vicious incidents of racism. O’Neill recurs to the love-across-the-divide trope to seek cultural encounter (Rosie, a Traveller, and local Séanie “Starwars” have feelings for each other) while the hurling victory allows him to expose race-related themes such as the assumption of “the natural superiority of Clare identity” and “discourses of excess, exuberant tribalism and drunkenness” which are commonly associated with Travellers but in the play are used to refer to the hurling fans from the settled community19. Victor Merriman has defined Rosie and Starwars as “a cultural intervention with limitations” since the performance alone does not “contextualise and problematise ... the range of possible audience positions it may evoke”20. It is for this reason, he maintains, that Calypso promoted a parallel programme of seminars and discussions which involved 18

Victor Merriman, “Songs of Possible Worlds: Nation, Representation and Citizenship in the Work of Calypso Productions”, in Theatre Stuff: Critical Essays on Contemporary Irish Theatre, ed. Eamonn Jordan (Dublin: Carysfort Press, 2000), 285. Rosie and Starwars is an unpublished script; it premiered at Meeting House Square, Dublin, in 1997. 19 Merriman, 285. 20 Ibid, 287.

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members of the settled as well as the Travelling community in an attempt to “initiate social development through dialogue”21. Going back to O’Neill’s approach to migration through theatre and in particular to Hurl this becomes evident in the live commentary of the yarnspinner (he openly takes sides with the Freetown Slashers), and in the dialogues between supporters. Sequence 10 focuses on the exchange between “Man”, “a local born and bred” (Hurl, 27), and “Black man” who supports the local team of Killinaclash. A second exchange expands on the same set of assumptions and reversals: “Chinese man” and “Man 2” are chatting; Man 2 assumes that the Chinese is a refugee only to be confronted with the (shocking) truth that the man is a teacher: Man 2: D’you mind me ashking ... are you one of them ... refugees? Chinese man: No I am not. I’m a teacher. Man 2: A teacher no less. What do you teach? Chinese man: Irish (Hurl, 29)

These dialogues act as reminders of what happens out there beyond what the yarn-spinner calls “the grassy theatre of dream” (Hurl, 32). Accordingly, the post-game and in-between games sections (especially 11 and 24) deal with the issue of deportation. Many foreigners face immigration difficulties and are evicted: the deportation of Musa (section 14) reflects on current migration law, the enforcement of which is often a pretext for discrimination against migrants. O’Neill depicts the reality of institutional racism and the way in which it can lead to subtler forms of racial intolerance. In this respect, Rusty’s attitude represents a typical case of aversive racism (he does not accept nor admits that a non-Irish team has mastered a game which, in his view, cannot belong to them). Hurl ends with news of victory reaching Musa in jail: a short sequence shows the deported man reading “a letter and match programme. He reads of the victory” and recites a formula in the Irish language as if he were on the pitch “accepting the cup on behalf of the Freetown Slashers”. He then “kneels down and cries” (Hurl, 51). The scene bears a significant analogy with that from Collins’ play quoted above as it draws attention to the divide between real-life experience and the shared experience of sport. A similar discrepancy is noted by Jason King in a reading of recent representations of migrants on the Irish stage in which he maintains that there is a gap between theatrical approaches to racism and social discrimination and what actually happens on the ground: “The ideal of multiculturalism [that is being staged] appears at odds with the actual life 21

Victor Merriman, Ibid, 287.

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experiences of those immigrant theatre practitioners who have been called upon to enact it”22. In the article, King refers specifically to the case of immigrant actors involved in Calypso’s “Tower of Babel” project who were arrested and risked or faced deportation in 2003; yet the suggestion is there that where “real life” is defined by inequality and solitude, theatre allows for positive encounter and healing, however imaginatively. Thus, Musa’s tears at the end of O’Neill’s play are tears of joy as well as sorrow.

22

King, “Black Saint Patrick: Irish Interculturalism in Theoretical Perspective & Theatre Practice”, 49.

CONCLUSIONS

Over the past fifteen years contemporary Irish theatre has experienced a significant change as it has sought to come to terms with and adjust to migration. While the trope of Irish emigration has always been a major preoccupation with Irish playwrights, the impact of incoming asylum seekers and EU nationals is a relatively recent phenomenon. A number of new plays feature African, Asian and East European characters: this is an acknowledgement of their presence in the country and of the fact that some of them have become the new Irish. Others, however, are refugees who are faced with the threat of deportation to their home countries: the legal aspect of migration is another important aspect, which is touched upon by some new plays about migration in Ireland. As noted, theatre, perhaps more than other forms of artistic expression, has a capacity for dealing with the urgency of such issues. Yet the fact that a number of plays portray migrants within Irish society does not necessarily mean that they all engage critically with migration and its issues. To sum up then, are migrants subjects, or are they just objects of these plays? With due distinctions between the Northern and the Southern scenarios, the present study suggests that playwrights are now engaging creatively and imaginatively with the issue of migration. In the Republic especially, where the phenomenon of immigration represents a social, political and cultural priority, playwrights and theatre practitioners tend to look at migration from a global perspective and “take into account the transnational identities of the Irish abroad”1. They are also seeking to give a voice to the migrant other through the theatrical medium. A recurrent strategy is the reworking of canonical texts drawn from both ancient and Irish tradition. Greek tragedy proves its arbitrariness at best when revisited for the Irish stage. The myths of Medea and Antigone return in recent translations and adaptations which recast those ancient tales in contemporary settings and where alterity, and dealing with/ accepting the Other remain problematic. Similarly, new renditions of J.M. Singe’s The Playboy of the Western World point towards the clash of cultures in the contemporary global Irish village. Whether Chinese, 1

Trotter, “Re-imagining the Emigrant/Exile in Contemporary Irish Drama”, 36.

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Conclusions

Nigerian, or Afro-Caribbean, Christy Mahon is a foreigner through which Ireland keeps confronting itself and its colonial past. That Synge’s play continues to be so controversial suggests that a century on this country is not ready or else it strives to accept what it has become. “I went to bed in one country and I woke up in another one” writes Roddy Doyle using a Stevensonian image of metamorphosis to articulate the reality of Ireland’s fast radical and somehow traumatic change2. On a more positive note the contemporary reception of Synge’s masterpiece fosters hopes that a step further has been made towards a different/inclusive conception of Ireland and Irishness. The combination of theatre and sport, of a ritualistic form of expression with a popular phenomenon which is intrinsically theatrical, and which enables social and cultural encounters appears to be en efficacious alternative and investigative tool. Sport, as seen, allows both for inclusion and exclusion of the other: it can be “a site for racial tension” and it can “provide the opportunity to exercise a right that does not have to be officially granted by bureaucracies or public administrations and can be engaged in relatively free”3. This means, quite simply that through sports migrants acquire “an opportunity for self-determination and control that may well be lacking in other areas of their lives”4, and it is also for these reasons that sport contests feature much prose and drama from Ireland. Where films and prose works use mainly football as a catalyst for social and cultural encounter, Irish theatre turns to indigenous games – these “privileged depositor[ies] of ... Irishness”5 – to represent the meeting of different cultures and ethnicities on the Irish soil. Hurl by Charlie O’Neill is arguably the most significant instance of this trend. A play which combines issues of identity and integration in post-national Ireland, Hurl reflects on the possibility and need to re-invent or rethink Irishness in a multiethnic society. The performance of sports, the physicality of it, translates into a creative act: hurling become poetry, it becomes a medium proper through which barriers can be brought down and boundaries crossed. O’Neill’s migrants are not the object but rather the subject of his play, however subdued. In this respect, Patrick Lonergan argues that Hurl is “an act of ventrilonquism” given that it speaks “on behalf of people who have 2

Roddy Doyle, The Deportees and Other Stories, “Preface”. Chris Kennett, “Sport, immigration and multiculturality: a conceptual analysis’, online article, Barcelona: Centre d’Estudis Olímpics UAB (2005): 5. (accessed February 3, 2007) http//:www://olympicstudies.uab.es/pdf/wp103_eng.pdf 4 Kennett, 9 and 5. 5 Cronin, quoted in Garner, Racism in the Irish Experience, 153. 3

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no voice in Irish culture”. In his opinion, we “still have a long way to go” as we are still “stuck in an “us against them” dynamic which “allows audiences to dismiss Irish racism as existing only in ... rural Ireland, and not in the country’s businesses, government and media. Or, for that matter, in themselves”6. A similar argument is endorsed by Jason King who points out that while theatre enables social integration, Irish society is still at odds7. This is confirmed by the incidents experienced by the Calypso cast, and even more so by the recurrence of hate crimes and racist attacks in the country, not to mention Michael Collins’ stage Travellers, who are systematically segregated by their settled compatriots. In the face of these issues, myth and sport function like a lingua franca both on and off the stage. To a large extent, both myth and sport retain their ritualistic quality, and this allows for a unique and shared experience that brings local and migrant people in contact with each other in ways that so-called “elite” practices cannot. What Musa says of sport applies in the case of myth also; both function “like therapy” (Hurl, 34); or to paraphrase Appadurai, they truly are like a “suture over deeply divisive scars”8. While the use of the theatrical canon or sport may not guarantee a solution to various social evils, where their presence in Irish theatre is concerned, at least they contribute to re-imagine identity and aid integration rather than assimilation, leading on to positive encounter and healing. In a divided society such as Ireland’s, multiculturalism appears to be a “cure to civil strife and sectarianism” (Hurl, 32); imaginatively, like poetry, sports and myth are there to help negotiate and rewrite one’s sense of belonging in a changing nation.

6

Lonergan, Review, 122. King, “Black Saint Patrick: Irish Interculturalism in Theoretical Perspective & Theatre Practice”. 8 Irish sports may not be decolonised the way cricket has been in India, yet their socio-cultural as opposed to political role is similar in the Irish experience when seen in terms of socialization between the indigenous and the foreign peoples. 7

APPENDIX A AUTHORS AND THEATRE COMPANIES1

Playwrights and theatre directors Bisi Adigun Bisi Adigun is originally from the Yoruba nation of the western part of Nigeria. He moved to England in 1993 where he lived and worked as a performing artist for three years before relocating to Ireland in 1996. He has since worked as a musician, a storyteller, a theatre practitioner and an academic. He is the artistic director of Arambe Productions, Ireland’s first African theatre company, which he founded in 2003. In 2007 he coauthored a new version of The Playboy of the Western World with Roddy Doyle, which was performed at the Abbey Theatre as part of the 50th Dublin Theatre Festival. Patricia Byrne Patricia Byrne lives and works in Derry. A performer, writer and coartistic director of Sole Purpose Productions with Dave Duggan. She has written and directed Under the Carpet and Snow White – The Remix. She has performed in Duggan’s Don’t say a word and The Peace Process Trilogy. She performed in Duggan’s Waiting both in New York and Edinburgh. Roddy Doyle Born in Dublin in 1958 Roddy Doyle is a well-known novelist, short-story writer and playwright. His first novel, The Commitments, was published to great acclaim in 1987 and was made into a successful film by Alan Parker in 1991. This was followed by several best-selling novels including The Van (1991), Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha (1993),The Woman Who Walked into Doors (1998),and more recently The Deportees and Other Stories 1

Sources for “Appendix A” include Programme Notes of the various productions mentioned and information retrieved from the companies’ websites and publications.

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Appendix A

(2007) a collection of eight short stories set in multiethnic post-Celtic Tiger Dublin. He has been cooperating with Metro Éireann, Ireland’s multiethnic magazine, as well as writing stage plays dedicated to the themes of racism and migrancy in the country. Theatre plays include Guess who’s coming for the dinner? (2001) for Calypso Theatre Company and a Nigerian version of J.M. Synge’s classic The Playboy of the Western World with Bisi Adigun for Dublin’s Abbey Theatre. Dave Duggan A playwright, a novelist and a theatre director, Dave Duggan lives in Derry and has been working for Sole Purpose Productions since 1996. He is the author of several plays as well as radio plays and screenplays for short films, and conducts workshops on drama-therapy. In 2007 he was awarded the prestigious Stewart Parker Trust/BBC Award for writing in Irish. Damian Gorman Born in Newcastle, County Down, 1961, Damian Gorman has written extensively for television, radio and the stage. He has also worked as a documentary film-maker and as a writer with many community groups in Northern Ireland. Gorman's stage plays include 'Broken Nails' (winner of four Peacock Ulster Theatre Awards), 'Loved Ones' and 'Sometimes' (Nominated for 'Best Production' in the 1998 Belfast City Council Awards). He was awarded the Stewart Parker Playwright Award and in 1998 received an MBE for services to the arts. In 2006 he was awarded a Major Individual Artist Award by the Arts Council of Northern Ireland. Declan Gorman Artistic Director of Upstate Theatre Project since its formation in 1997, Gorman began his career as an actor and a playwright. In 1990 he became Development Officer at City Arts Centre, Dublin, where he concentrated on producing and developing new work in the theatre and community areas. For Upstate he has directed professional productions including Shakespeare’s Macbeth and Hauptman’s The Weaver and his own plays Hades and Epic ... or The Curse of Macha.

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Maeve Ingoldsby Maeve Ingoldsby has written many plays for children, two children's operas, numerous pantomimes and scripts for Radio and TV. Her plays include Firestone (1991); Earwigs (1992); Out of Line (1994); Bananas in the Bread Bin (1997); Kevin's Story (2001). She has also written and staged War & Peace, the musical, and Mixing It on the Mountain both in 2003. She lives in Dublin. Paul Meade Originally from Limerick, Meade studied both at TCD and UCD. He is a writer, a director, an actor and a joint artistic director of Gúna Nua Theatre Company. He has written for film and television (The Tudors for BBC, The Clinic and Rebel Heart for RTÉ) as well as theatre. His play Mushrooms was written and produced for Storytellers Theatre Company in 2007. Meade has directed plays such as Friel’s Translations and Medea and acted in Hamlet (Gúna Nua; Storytellers), Juno and the Paycock (Abbey Theatre); God’s Gift (Barabbas), to name a few. He has received important awards including a Dublin Fringe Best Production Award for Scenes from a Water Cooler (2001) and a Stewart Parker Award for Skin Deep (2003). Donal O’Kelly A well-known playwright and an actor, Donal O’Kelly has received an Irish Arts Council literature bursary, and in 1999 he was awarded the Irish American Cultural Institute Butler Literary Award. He is a founder member and former director of Calypso Productions for which he wrote Asylum! Asylum! (1994) and Farawayan (1998). He is also a co-director of Donal O'Kelly Productions, which he set up in 2000. In 2007 he was elected to Aosdana. Charlie O’Neill Charlie O'Neill has been involved in theatre in Ireland for many years as a writer, actor, producer and set designer. His play, Rosie and Starwars (Calypso, 2007), was premiered in a tent in Dublin's Temple Bar, toured throughout Ireland and awarded a Stewart Parker Playwriting Trust award. Gavin Quinn Director and founder of Pan Pan, Gavin Quinn In 2006, Quinn adapted JM Synge’s classic The Playboy of the Western World for a production at Dublin’s Project Arts Centre (December 2006). The play was translated by

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Appendix A

Sun Ye and performed in Mandarin with English surtitles with an all Chinese cast at the Oriental Pioneer Theatre in Beijing (March 2006).

Theatre Companies Arambe Productions Arambe Productions is Ireland’s first African Theatre Company. Based in Dublin, the company was founded in 2004 with the aim of producing classic and contemporary plays in the African tradition as well as reinterpreting Irish classical drama. Arambe is directed by its founder Bisi Adigun, and it aims to develop an artistic community within Ireland’s black and ethnic community. Among its productions are Ola Rotimi’s The Gods are not to Blame (Dublin 2004), Once Upon a Time... (2005), Jimmy Murphy’s The Kings of the Kilburn High Road (Dublin, 2006), The Playboy of the Western World (for the Abbey Theatre, Dublin, with Roddy Doyle). ArtsEkta Based in Belfast, ArtsEkta promotes ethnic arts to people from the North and the South of Ireland. It unites statutory authorities, community and voluntary organisations and the citizens in a common effort to promote integration and inclusion. Of this, the production of Chaat Masala in 2007 is a clear example. It organises and produces performances, festival, cultural events and exhibitions of works of cultural value. It also provides training support and facilities for artistic expression. Calypso Productions Founded in and based in Dublin, Calypso Productions aims to push the boundaries of theatrical activity while producing distinctive and challenging new work that challenges injustice and social exclusion in today’s rapidly changing world. As well as performing their work in designated theatre spaces, the company has taken its productions into prisons, psychiatric hospitals and Accommodation Centres for Refugees and Asylum Seeker. Calypso’s productions include Rosie and Starwars by Charlie O’Neill (1997), Farawayan by Donal O’Kelly (1998), The Asylum Ball by Gavin Kostick (2000), Guess who’s coming for the dinner? by Roddy Doyle (2001) and Mixing It on the Mountain by Maeve Ingoldsby (2003).

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Pan Pan Pan Pan was founded by Aedin Cosgrove and Gavin Quinn in 1991. The company creates and produces contemporary live performances in a variety of locations and situations both nationally and internationally. It has toured throughout Europe, Australia, Canada, China and South Korea. Pan Pan also founded the Dublin International Theatre Syposium. Pan Pan’s most recent productions include For the First Time Ever (2003), Mac-Beth7 (2004), One: Healing with Theatre (2005), Oedipus Loves You and The Playboy of the Western World (2006). Replay Productions Replay Productions is a professional theatre company based in Belfast, Northern Ireland. Established in 1988, this company has since been committed to providing high quality educational theatre and related activities to students from primary, secondary and special schools throughout Northern Ireland. All projects provide unique curriculum support, encourage development and learning. Replay has commissioned scripts from local and international writers including Mary Jones, Gary Mitchell, Damian Gorman and Rebecca Bartlett. Sole Purpose Productions Sole Purpose is a Derry-based professional theatre company founded in 1995 and directed by Patricia Byrne and Dave Duggan. The company aims to make theatre using the discourse of imagination to investigate and illuminate social and public issues. Their theatrical work is situated at the crossroads of art and politics, and it produced and toured in a manner that makes it accessible to working class urban and rural communities. Since its foundation Sole Purpose has participated in theatre and arts festivals, it has made projects and workshops in partnership with a wide range of individuals and groups. In the past few years it has resourced dramatically the Peace Process. Recent productions include AH 6905 by Dave Duggan (2006), Snow White – The Remix (2006) and Don’t Say a Word (2005) by Patricia Byrne. TinderBox Theatre Company Tinderbox Theatre Company is based in Belfast. Formed in 1988, it is one of Northern Ireland’s longest established and most respected independent theatre companies. Tinderbox is dedicated to new writing for the theatre, the playwrights who create it, and the artistic environment in which its work takes place. Tinderbox produces two to three productions per year, carries out a range of initiatives to develop new writing for the theatre, and

62

Appendix A

runs a year-round Outreach Programme in schools and communities across Northern Ireland. The company performs in various venues in Belfast, and tours its productions across Ireland. Traveller Wagon Wheel Theatre Traveller Wagon Wheel Theatre Company exists to enhance Traveller potential, ability and skills to address the issues which affect the quality of their lives through the medium of Arts. Founded by the Irish Traveller playwright and actor Micheal Collins the company has produced Mobile in 2007, and in 2008 It’s a Cultural Thing, or is it? for Project Arts Centre, Dublin.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

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Kennelly, Brendan. Antigone. Newcastle: Bloodaxe, 1986. —. Medea. Newcastle: Bloodaxe, 1991. Kerby, A. Miller, Schrier, Arnold, Boling, Bruce D., and Doyle, David N. Irish Immigrants in the Land of Canaan. Letters and Memoirs from Colonial and Revolutionary America, 1675-1815. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003. King, Jason, “Black Saint Patrick Revisited: Calypso’s ‘Tower of Babel’ and Culture Ireland as Global Networks”. Performing Global Networks, edited by Karen Fricker, and Ronit Lentin, 38-51. Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2007. —. “Black Saint Patrick: Irish Interculturalism in Theoretical Perspective & Theatre Practice”. In Global Ireland, edited by OndĜej Pilný and Clare Wallace, 45-55. Prague: Litteraria Pragensia, 2005. —. “Interculturalism and Irish Theatre”. Irish Review 33 (2005): 23-39. —. “Porous Nation: from Ireland’s ‘haemorrhage’ to immigrant inundation”. In The Expanding Nation: Towards a Multi-ethnic Ireland, proceedings of a conference held in TCD, Dublin, 22-24 September 1998: 49-54. King, Jason, and MacÉinrí, Piaras. “Where is Home? An educational resource on refugees in international and Irish perspective.” Dublin: Calypso Productions, 2005. King, Seamus J. A History of Hurling, 2nd ed. Dublin: Gill and Macmillan, 2005. Kristeva, Julia. Strangers to Ourselves, translated by Leon S. Roudiez. New York: Columbia University Press, 1991. Lee, Josephine. “Bodies, Revolutions, and Magic: Cultural Nationalism and Racial Fetishism.” Modern Drama 44, no.1 (Spring 2001): 72-90. Leeney, Cathy and McMullan Anna (eds). The Theatre of Marina Carr: ‘before rule was made. Dublin: Carysfort Press, 2003. Lentin, Ronit. After Optimism? Ireland, Racism and Globalisation, edited by Ronit Lentin and Robbie McVeigh. Dublin: Metro Éireann Publications, 2006. —. “Is this really ‘anti-racism’?” Metro Éireann (27.03-2.04 2008): 15. Lentin, Ronit, and McVeigh, Robbie (eds.). Racism and Anti-racism in Ireland. Belfast: Beyond the Pale, 2002. Lo, Jaqueline and Gilbert, Helen. “Towards a Topography of Crosscultural Theatre Praxis.” The Drama Review 46, no.3 (2002): 31-53. Lonergan, Patrick. Review of “Hurl”. Irish Theatre Magazine 17 (Winter 2003): 120-23. Long, Joseph. “Come Dance With Me in Ireland: Current developments in the independent theatre sector.” In Theatre Stuff: Critical Essays on

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INDEX

Adigun, B.; Arambe; 18; 25; 26; 29; 34; 57; 60; 63; 68 ArtsEkta; 7; 60; 68 Chaat Masala; 6n; 7; 8; 60 Asylum! Asylum!. O'Kelly, D.; At Peace!. Gorman, D.; Barabbas The Company; 34; 43; 59 Bartlett, R.; 10; 11; 11n; 12; 61; 63 Shalom Belfast; 10; 10n; 11; 11n; 12; 63 Blue Box Theatre Company: Gorman, Damian. Darkie; Carr, M.: Medea; 34 Collins, M.; 71; 72; 76; 80; 86; 95 Community drama; 14; 15; 19; 88 Darkie. Gorman, D. Diaspora; 53; 62; 65; 87; 95 Doyle, R.; 34; 35; 36; 42; 47;48; 68;71; 87; 88 Duggan, D.; 19; 24n; 87 Euripides. 39; 40; 41 Friel, B.: Translations; 59 Gorman, Damian; 12; 13n; 58; 61; 64 Gorman, Declan; 18; 23n; 34; 34n; 58; 64; 66 Upstate Theatre; 18; 18n; 19n; 34; 58; Greek tragedy; 23; 23n; 53; 66; Greek myth; 23 Heaney, S.; 23n; 37; 64 Hurl. O'Neill, Charlie Immigration; 1; 8; 15; 34n; 40; 51; 53; 54n; 69 Ingolsby, Maeve; 35; 36; 59; 60; 64 Mixing It on the Mountain; 35; 35n; 36; 59; 60; 64

Integration; 5n; 10; 11; 12; 14; 15; 35; 37; 43; 49; 54; 55; 60; 68 (Republic of) Ireland;1; 2; 7; 10; 12; 15; 17-20; 23-27; 29-31; 33-37; 40-41; 44-50; 53-61; 65-68 McDonald, Marianne: 24; 66 Meade, Paul; 48-50; 49n; 59; 68; Medea. Greek tragedy Morrison, Conall; 24; 24n; 25; 25n; 66 Multiculturalism; 2; 9; 11; 24; 25; 31; 34-35; 45; 51; 55; 68 Northern Ireland; 3; 4-13; 17; 58; 61; 62; 68; 69 O’Kelly, Donal; 14; 15; 15n; 45n; 59; 60; 67; 72 O’Neill, Charlie; 43; 45; 47; 50-52; 54; 59-60; 67; 69; 73 Pan Pan; 27n; 28; 28n; 59; 61; 69 Racism; 2; 9; 12-15; 12n; 20; 23; 29; 30-33; 30n; 31n; 32n; 37n; 40n; 45; 48; 48n; 50-51; 54n; 55; 58; 64-67; 69; 73 Saint Patrick; 18-19; 30n; 33-35; 33n; 35n; 36n; 52n; 65 Sole Purpose; 3n; 8; 9; 9n; 57-58; 61; 63 Sophocles; 23-25 Sport; 4; 21; 39; 39n; 40; 45-48; 43n; 47n; 54; 55n; 63; 67 Synge, JM; 21; 27; 27n; 28; 31; 54; 58; 64; 68 Playboy of the Western World; 21; 27-29; 27n; 28n; 29n; 31; 53; 57-61; 63; 6669 Tinderbox; 6-8; 6n; 9n; 13n; 61; 66 Travellers: 24; 34; 48; 48n; 50; 55