Bernard Shaw's Ireland

Today was the last day of the International Shaw Society's conference on Bernard Shaw's Ireland, held by University College Dublin.

On Wednesday, Nelson O'Ceallaigh Ritschel delivered a keynote on Shaw and the 1920s London-Irish Theatre. He noted that the 1919 revival of Arms and the Man began a post-war renewal of interest in Shaw's work on the London stage. This continued throughout the decade with frequent revivals, and in 1929 the Court Theatre premiered a new Shaw play, The Apple Cart.

Next, David Clare chaired a panel on Shaw and Socialism that included Marie Hewelt discussing Pygmalion and Eamon Jordan talking about Widowers' Houses. Audrey McNamara chaired a second session that included Lisa Robertson on John Bull's Other Island and Kumar Parag on Candida. We also had a performance of the discarded defense Shaw wrote for the Irish rebel Roger Casement, and in the evening Paddy O'Keefe performed his one-man show Shaw Invites You.

Thursday morning, Lauretta Lenker delivered a plenary on Shaw and Virginia Woolf, who both coincidentally lived at different times at 29 Fitzroy Square in London. She spoke about Woolf's novel Between the Acts and Shaw's drama Saint Joan. That play was featured prominently in the next talks given by Doborah Payne and Ellen Dolgin, as did Shaw's Geneva. After we broke for lunch, Dorothy Hadfield delivered a second plenary on Charlotte Shaw, and then we heard from Brad Kent and Loic Wright.

I presented my own paper on John Bull's Other Island on Friday morning, accompanied by Mary Christian who discussed The Dark Lady of the Sonnets and Julie Sparks who spoke on Shaw's sequel to A Doll's House by Henrik Ibsen. Tony Roche then delivered a plenary on how Dion Boucicault influenced Shaw, who in turn influenced Brian Friel's play Translations. In the afternoon, both Vishnu Patel and Tae-Yong Eom discussed post-humanism in Back to Methuselah.

The venue for the conference was the Museum of Literature in Ireland, which had some great displays. Tomorrow, I look forward to seeing some of Dublin and then catching a play at the famed Gate Theatre.

Bumbled

I just saw Poor Mouth Theatre Company's Bumbled, a one-man play that is a part of the 1st Irish Festival organized in conjunction with the Origin Theatre Company.

Bumbled was written by Bernard McMullan and performed by Colin Hamell, who is artistic director of Tir Na Theatre in Boston. The play tells the story of an Irish drone bee, Pascal, who falls in love with a sexy French worker bee named Marion, even though his biological purpose is to have sex with the queen until his testicles fall off and he dies. Obviously, it's a comedy.

If you missed Bumbled, there are plenty more Irish plays to see this month as a part of the festival. Irish Rep is presenting Brian Friel's play Philadelphia, Here I Come! The Drilling Company is presenting a new play by Tim McGillicuddy called Herself.  Other plays in the festival include Marianne Driscoll's Last Call for Babe Reilly and Larry Kirwin's The Informer.

The 1st Irish Festival is happening all over the city, so there are plenty of places this month to see plays about Ireland.

Translations

Last night, I saw Irish Repertory Theatre's production of Translations, Brian Friel's disturbingly timely portrait of imperialists and resistance fighters competing to sink to new lows of inhumanity.

Today, Dublin is still dealing with the fallout of riots that followed a recent knife attack. Violence has begotten more violence, just as it does in the play. Translations begins with arguments over words, a topic that remains fraught today as well. While much rhetoric is aimed at the "violence" of language, ultimately words are just words, and as characters in the play make clear, the names of things are continually evolving anyway.

Debates over place names turn violent in Friel's play after British Lieutenant Yolland, played by Raffi Barsoumian, begins to fall in love with a curly-haired Irish lass named Maire, portrayed by Mary Wiseman. He speaks virtually no Irish, and she speaks virtually no English, but they bond while dancing, and their scene together just before the intermission is heartwarming and funny, even if the audience can see the society around them will never allow their budding romance to bloom.

Barsoumian plays the awkward and shy Yolland with a sweetness and good nature, as well as with a conscience that leads him to examine his own role in Britain's colonial project in Ireland. When the lieutenant disappears, it seems that resistance fighters couldn't have found a more innocent victim. The British army responds predictably, with an over-reaction that is likely to accomplish nothing but create more resistance fighters.

Though this production was planned months ago, parallels with the Hamas-Israel conflict seem inevitable. In Ireland, the troubles depicted in the play in 1833 had deep roots, going back to the 1798 uprising referenced by Friel, and much more before that. The violence continued into the 1980s when the play premiered, and did not substantially end until the Good Friday Agreement of 1998.

With the temporary cease fire in the Middle East leading to at least a little progress, we have to hope that other parts of the world don't spiral down into the chaos and violence Ireland suffered for so long.