Theatre can give us a front row view of history
Playwrights captured the drama of revolution
Playwrights love the scope the stage gives to skewer doubledealing politicians, but the partnership works best when politics doesn’t barge in like a drunken relative at a family reunion but insinuates itself subtly into the play. In the former Soviet countries, any piece of dialogue in a quite ordinary play, could be interpreted as a political reference. Even an innocuous statement like ‘ I want to get out of here,’ could evoke a round of applause. In Prague during the 1970s, audiences were known to jump to their feet and wave when Masha, in Chekhov’s Three Sisters remarked, ‘The army is leaving.’
That political attachment to drama was particularly notable in Ireland in the early years of the 20th century. Fervent nationalists were passionate about the stage, although their works were more often propaganda exercises than works of art.
I was reminded of all this by the recent commemoration of the death on hunger strike in 1920 of
Ibsen drew attention to corruption, hypocrisy and family problems
Terence MacSwiney, who was a driving force in the Cork Dramatic Society, which drew members from all occupations.
Along with The Abbey, major theatre groups, as well as lots of other clubs and societies that were founded throughout the country, were producing plays with strong nationalist sentiments.
Works by the Norwegian playwright Henrik Ibsen, were also popular because of the way he drew attention to corruption, hypocrisy, or family problems kept under wraps.
At Dublin’s Abbey Theatre, William Butler Yeats, who was a bit of a snob about audiences, didn’t want political propaganda — his preference was for allegories and symbolism, or plays that would present Ireland in the same way that Ibsen’s plays represented Norway, in all aspects of that country’s life. However, in 1903 Yeats had written The King’s Threshold, that exalts a poet’s hunger strike against injustice.
MacSwiney, an admirer of Ibsen, wrote plays while remaining a TD, Mayor of Cork, and a Commandant in the IRA. Joseph Plunkett and Patrick Pearse were other keen performers and would-be playwrights.
One favourite venue was a hall owned by Plunkett’s mother, in Dublin’s Hardwicke Street, a place you couldn’t imagine now being an artistic hot spot.
Pearse loved doing pageants at his school in Dublin, with young boys as figures representing political redemption or liberation. Thomas MacDonagh had his play, When the Dawn is Come, produced at the Abbey, and even James Connolly wrote a play for a drama group attached to the Citizen Army.
Despite his preference for symbolism, Yeats produced MacSwiney’s The Revolutionist at the Abbey after MacSwiney’s death, a play that portrayed an uncompromising revolutionary who wants undiluted action.
The best recent example of somebody who could balance the skills of playwriting and political activity was probably the Czech writer and politician Vaclav Havel, who became president of the new Czech Republic in 1993.
In Audience, his satire on authoritarian rule, the main character is offered promotion provided he’s willing to inform on himself.
The Increased Difficulty of Concentration has been described as a ‘wonderfully absurd allegory,’ that can be seen as a farce or as a comment on life under communism.
Not surprisingly, the government didn’t get the joke, and Havel often ended up in prison during the 70s and 80s, but he continued writing, even when his plays could only be staged abroad or in people’s homes.
A later work, his tragicomedy Leaving is based on his experience of life as president.
Seán O’Casey’s plays remain relevant today, because they’re about poverty, unemployment, poor housing, healthcare and violence that makes things worse for the people it’s supposed to be serving.
But they have the added advantage, as with Havel’s plays, of being funny, while remaining intensely political.