Max "Bunny" Sparber

399 YEARS OF THEATER is a lot for one book to sum up, but, then, Ireland is a small island and, for much of its history, was dominated by a few small theaters, so A History of Irish Theatre author Christopher Morash manages to pack it all in to about 280 pages. It's not a complete survey by any means, but focuses instead on a few of the epochal scripts, productions, and theaters in Irish history, with an especially unusual -- albeit fascinating -- focus on theater riots; it sometimes seems like one of the distinguishing elements about a really good Irish play is that the audience will riot after it. Sometimes they'll riot during it, leaving stagehands barricaded in the costume room with guns as rioters smash furniture to build a fire.

Theater riots aren't unique to Ireland, of course, but this is the first book of theater history that puts them at the forefront of the narrative, and this is, in part, because Morash's central thesis in the book is that Irish theater has been the staging ground for the development of Irish identity and politics. Never mind that the theaters for the first half of the 20th century would frequently mount cowboy melodramas and blackface reviews -- those get mentioned but rarely examined. No, this book is an examination of the tricky subject of national identity, and, as in the case of Ireland, when that identity is formed in opposition to an occupying empire, things are liable to get a bit heated. There was, for instance, the Theatre of Ireland, a fiercely nationalistic offshoot of the Abbey, which would lose almost all of its founders to death or prison after the Easter Rising. In that sort of atmosphere, theater riots can't simply be dismissed as a footnote to theater history.

Through this lens, the book offers a really interesting look at the history of Irish theater, which can sometimes be presented as merely an intriguing literary tale of an island in the Atlantic with an unexpected talent for producing playwrights. No, in Morash's version, even the Irish playwrights who worked outside Ireland -- and there were a lot of them -- wrestled with how to stage the Irish identity. Of course, that means that all sorts of productions that don't directly address Irish politics or identity get left by the wayside in this book, so we see, as an example, playwright Dion Boucicault represented through plays like The Colleen Bawn and The Shaughraun, both of which have explicityly Irish content, but hear very little about his less-specifically Irish melodramas, such as The Poor of New York and The Streets of London.

Of course, if Morash has expanded the scope of his book to address those sorts of plays, the book would have been several thousand pages, at the very least, and he wisely keeps a tight focus on plays and historical events that assisted in or struggled with the development of an Irish national identity. But this leaves a lot unexplored, including all sorts of performative traditions that require a broader definition of theater than Morash uses, such as the long tradition of the music hall and variety stage in Ireland, which, with its history of short comic sketches based on exaggerated regional caricatures, probably had as much or more of a hand in the development of an Irish identity as did the legitimate stage. But that's another book altogether.

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