Plumbing the Depths: Irish Realism and the Working Class from Shaw to O'Casey

Abstract

with and read extracts from the plays of Isben [sic] 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'

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