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The Greening of London Theater
| Article
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20239 |
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Section : |
THE ARTS
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| Issue
Date : |
7 / 1992 |
2,233 Words |
| Author
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Claudia Woolgar
Claudia Woolgar is a free-lance theater critic and arts
journalist based in London. |
Ireland and England have long been uneasy bedfellows. Each new IRA bombing on mainland Britain sends a perceptible shiver through the London Irish community. But the English remain fascinated by the Irish--by their culture and by their politics. And, ironically, it is this political tension that seems to swell the audiences and fuel the creativity of Irish theater in London. The Irish may not have the access they deserve to the main stages, but Irish theater in London is thriving on the fringe.
The Irish community in London ghettos itself--as do other minority groups--into specific areas of the capital. All things Irish are available--even Guinness on tap. But these areas offer one more aspect that eschews the traditional image of the Irishman--they have theaters buzzing with Irish plays performed by Irish actors.
The Bush and the Tricycle are the best-known Irish fringe theaters in London. The former offers a traditional London fringe performance space--a small theater above a busy pub. The latter is a theater in its own right. Neither limits itself exclusively to Irish theater, but the Bush has recently housed an Irish season, which featured a number of strong new plays by Irish playwrights commissioned especially for the festival, including the final part of Billy Roche's highly successful Wexford Trilogy.
Dominic Dromgoole, artistic director at the Bush, explained they carried so much Irish theater "because for a long time now the best plays we have received have been Irish. I was a script reader when we received A Handful of Stars, the first play by Billy Roche. He had tried to get Irish theaters interested, but everyone had turned down the text, so he sent it to us. We took it and only later did the idea for a trilogy emerge. Through the three plays you can see how Roche developed from a very raw play to the maturity of Belfry." All three parts have received huge critical acclaim and were also great successes with London audiences.
The plays produced at the Bush differ from much of the other Irish work in London in that they tend to avoid the political element that can often seem to obsess the interest of English London audiences in Irish theater. "The politics of Ireland can alienate English audiences," Dromgoole observed. "Irish writing should be allowed to show the Irish as they are, and certainly the plays we produce at the Bush have a more general appeal. Politics is there, of course, because it informs Irish writing, but it is not necessarily
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