Plumbing the depths: Irish realism and the working class from Shaw to O'Casey

Irish University Review: a journal of Irish Studies, Spring-Summer, 2003 by Ben Levitas

Early in 1899 the seedling Irish Socialist Republican Party held a public meeting to consider what had become a salient question. The minutes record that on 12 February Frederick Ryan 'delivered a lecture entitled "A Word on the Democratic Drama" in the course of which he dealt with and read extracts from the plays of Isben Isici and Bernard Shaw'. (1) Elsewhere in Dublin arrangements were underway for the inauguration of a new theatrical dynasty. W.B. Yeats exerted his prodigious energies publicizing the first stagings of the Irish Literary Theatre, soon to result in debut performances of The Heather Field and The Countess Cathleen, and an equally legendary dinner hosted at the Shelbourne Hotel. But Ireland's theatre business was never confined to such elite tables. The potential for a drama that would respond to the social polemics available in Ibsen and Shaw and become capable of staging the radical agendas of the Irish left would develop into a wiry thread of theatre practice running through the fabric of the Revival.

Consideration of that tradition is crucial to a re-evaluation of realism's impact in Ireland; too often reduced to an inevitably conservative force placing formal restraints on Ireland's capacity to re-imagine possibilities. Raymond Williams's commentary on the curious history of English naturalism, in which he observed that melodrama absorbed 'the social and moral consciousness that was to inform serious naturalism' while formal naturalism 'moved away from themes based in a radical consciousness' (2) acknowledged that something different occurred in Ireland. But even where the Irish dramatists' thematic concerns did provide that lacking social dimension, Williams argued, it was still confined by the conservatism of naturalism itself. Confinement within an overwhelming--and tragic--social reality came with the territory. (3) However, Williams's influential criticism of O'Casey as an example of naturalism typical in its restriction of potential missed an important process behind his appearance. Since the Reviv al was characterized by reflexive attempts to alter cultural consciousness, Irish mimesis was always a hotly contested process, deployed polemically to shift perception. It was only occasionally allowed to fit into the narrow band of properly deterministic naturalism. The Irish school was more typically realist, generating rhetorical descriptions of a reality already open to alteration, rather than prescribing or naturalizing a fixed condition. And because not only national, but class, gender, and regional identities were up for examination, an array of realisms was available in Ireland, refracting a range of politics. Indeed to delimit the range of competing Irish realisms is to miss its combative, political operation. More specifically, consideration of Revival realism has been too confined to the Abbey's famous 'Peasant Quality' to factor in another type of 'PQ': that of proletarian quotient. (4) Placing the development of a distinct drama of Ireland's urban working class in the context of Ireland's reviva l-period socialist and trade unionist movements indicates that 'radical consciousness' could indeed find its form in realist responses to Ireland's ills. (5)

Fred Ryan's talk to the ISRP was part of a continuing interplay of left politics and theatre discourse that stretched--rather than jumped from Shaw to O'Casey. Although little can be found of the content of his 1899 speech, it may be deduced from Ryan's earlier and more fully reported discussion at the inaugural meeting of the Dublin Literary Society in 1896. 'The stage,' he proposed, 'could not be prevented from having an educational value, and in that case the question was whether they should have education true or false.' (6) If theatre was to effectively engage with the changing conditions of Irish class-and-colonial struggles, a necessary 'reaction against [the] excessive romanticism' of melodrama's 'impossible characters in impossible situations' was in his view essential. (7)

Ryan's attempt to manifest his vision finally found form as the two-act building-trade allegory of Irish politics, The Laying of the Foundations, performed by the Irish National Theatre Society during (the year of its founding) 1902. Ryan's play was the first treatment of a distinctly Irish class conflict. But it also came as a culmination of earlier Irish incursions into the subject of social division. In 1893, William Archer had remarked on two examples of 'very remarkable dramatic experiment' facilitated by Jacob Grein's London-based Independent Theatre: Bernard Shaw's Widowers' Houses and George Moore's The Strike at Arlingford. (8) Both authors had found their subjects through familiarity with socialist circles in the 1880s, whose adventures in Ibsenism had helped lay the ground for the establishment of the Independent Theatre in 1891. (9)

Moore's play depicted strike-leading socialists in a losing battle against the double debilitations of sexual intrigue (loosely based on the Marx-Avelings), and the 'realities' of capitalist necessity; both given as insurmountable forces of human nature. Widowers' Houses in contrast rhetorically demonstrated the systemic nature of capitalism, exposing the implication of even the most philanthropic examples of privilege. Taking slum landlordism as a model he knew well from his days as a rent-collecting clerk for the Dublin land agency, (10) Shaw's observations drew an assertive moral equivalence between the collector Lickcheese, the landlord Sartorious, and the independently-incomed Dr Trench, whose ethical investments, it turns out, derive from mortgages on the same landlord's properties. (11)