Voices Raised Above the Ruin

In a country where the soil grows naught but sorrow and the poor are driven to piety, one would hardly expect to find a strain of defiance that goes back scores of centuries. And yet, Ireland, a country that has been on the brink of starvation many times, has seen some of the best writers and orators rise from its boggy shore. These men and women wrote novels, poems, songs, articles, and perhaps most importantly, plays. The dramas that were composed borrowed heavily from Ireland’s rich culture, and naturally, could not be contained on one little island. Even from across the Atlantic, Ireland has had a great influence on American theatre.

Most theatre has its origins in a very basic and very ancient custom: storytelling. The first “actors” in Ireland were the seanchai, storytellers who preserved (and no doubt embellished) their history through telling stories rather than recording them in writing. These Celtic performers were travelers; they wandered from house to house and recited epic poems and songs and danced in exchange for a warm bed and whatever food the family could offer. One component of Celtic theatre that almost any modern American would recognize comes not in the form of a play, but in the form of dance, Irish step dance, more commonly known now as Riverdance . Ages before Michael Flately, the

Irish people had been step-dancing, or “clogging” for years. Interestingly enough, these dances were first done at crossroads in the countryside; it was traditional belief that the place where two roads crossed carried magical qualities. Whole towns would turn out for dances where a local band would play and every man, woman, and child could outshine Flately even without any elaborate costumes. The evolution of theatre is astounding; from these old oratorical and musical traditions, musical theatre was born. Eventually, the seanchais’ yarns were written down, and just as Shakespeare was gaining fame an island away, the age of the ancient storytellers came to its curtain-call.

As theatre evolved, so did those who saw it as their calling. The next era of Irish theatre saw names such as George Bernard Shaw and Oscar Wilde, who were both Irishmen, but never chose to identify themselves as such. The playwrights Shaw and Wilde hardly ever wrote anything to do with Ireland, rather they focused on issues that appealed to the masses, such as marriage, education, government, and class. John Millington Synge, however, used his plays to show the real Ireland. His show, The Playboy of the Western World, showed the Irish people in all their poverty and squalor. This play shocked audiences in Ireland, England, and America alike and even boosted contributions from Irish-Americans to their home country. The 20th century also saw the genius of Samuel Beckett, who has a theater named after him in Dublin as well as in New York. Most recently, The Pirate Queen, a musical chronicling the life of Irish clan chieftain and part time pirate Grace O’Malley opened on Broadway to rave reviews.

Tis almost amusing to look back and see the infatuation that America has had with Irish culture. Even those with one-sixteenth of a drop of Irish blood will go back to the Emerald Isle to see where their roots are. The assimilation of the Irish into America’s melting pot has been met with that streak of defiance that does not seem to be too keen on melting away. The Americans are lucky to walk out of theaters and Riverdance halls with the voices of those who rose above the ruin still ringing in their ears.