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People of the Word: Irish Theater Is Alive and Flourishing
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12582 |
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Section : |
THE ARTS
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| Issue
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6 / 1987 |
2,162 Words |
| Author
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Elgy Gillespie
Elgy Gillespie is a free-lance writer living in San Francisco,
California. |
The Irish theater of Synge and O'Casey continues to thrive as theater thrives nowhere else in the world, in countries where a ticket for a play has become the prohibitively expensive pastime of the rich, or has to be massively under-written by the state exchequer.
Like the Irish government itself, which is economically embattled and gives the impression of changing every other day, byzantine politics in the Dublin theater have caused talent to zigzag wildly among theaters and companies and directors from one year to the next. Highly politicized, the Dublin theater world revolves around a small group of working playwrights: Tom Murphy, Brian Friel, Thomas Kilroy, Hugh Leonard, and newcomers like Frank McGuinness or Anne Devlin.
Irish theater today is dominated by a national theater company at the Abbey that can no longer afford to take on any new artistic ventures or risks. In Ireland, artistic subsidies are first to suffer cutbacks, more so because they are relatively recent.
Rebuilt twenty years ago on the site of the old Abbey Theater, where William Butler Yeats brought his Irish Literary Theater in 1904, the home of Irish theater is an unprepossessing red brick box. In sad contrast to the glories of its own past, nowadays the Abbey is cramped by lack of money and incessant feuding between board members.
But last year it invited a young director from Galway's Druid Theater to guest-direct. Garry Hynes dusted off an early play by contemporary writer Tom Murphy, Whistle In the Dark, and won acclaim for her Abbey production. The appointment of
... (1999 of 12916 Characters)
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