ABSTRACT
From the establishment of a separate parliament in Belfast in June 1921 to that parliament’s setting up of the Council for the Encouragement of Music and the Arts (CEMA) in 1943, no formal relationship existed between the theatre and the state in Northern Ireland. Unlike the contrasting situation south of the border, with the Cumann na nGaedheal government’s subsidization of the NTS in 1925 and the tension between the Abbey Theatre and the Fianna Fáil government in the early 1930s, there is no evidence that any of Northern Ireland’s uniformly unionist government administrations maintained any similar interest in the theatre or that the theatre was regarded as related to state policy. This is not entirely surprising. Whereas, as we have seen, the Abbey Theatre was associated with a form of cultural nationalism with an intimate and complex relationship with the struggle for Irish statehood, the state in Northern Ireland was oriented towards maintaining a pro-British allegiance. To this end, the professional theatre in Belfast in the 1920s and 1930s continued its long-standing trend of importing most theatre productions from London. In addition, most of the major amateur and semi-professional urban groups, such as the Ulster Group Theatre (1940-59) and the Northern Drama League (1923-39), remained under non-nationalist control.2 An amateur and mainly rural-based, nationalist theatre tradition did exist in Northern
Ireland (as it did also in the rest of the island), often under clerical supervision (Farrell 1941: 87-8). Local theatre groups such as the Omagh Players performed second-hand Abbey Theatre plays or, in much rarer instances, performed published work like Louis Lynch’s 1936 play, Heritage.3 But as far as professional theatre was concerned, theatre managements in Northern Ireland maintained an unwritten policy of avoiding plays that dealt directly with issues relevant to nationalist and republican politics. In so far as such plays existed, that is, the main theatres in Northern Ireland excluded from their repertories drama dealing with issues such as religious discrimination or sectarian violence. The only exception was the tendency to portray such issues as farcical absurdity – all the more laughable because so entirely unrelated to the structures or apparatuses of the state (as in Gerald MacNamara’s much revived Thompson in Tir na nOg (1918)). And while it is true that Northern Ireland dramatists such as Rutherford Mayne and George Shiels did engage with political issues (in plays such as Mayne’s Bridgehead (1939) and Shiels’s The Rugged Path (1940)) this is directed more towards production at the Abbey Theatre, and towards a critique of Irish nationalism and the southern Irish state, than to any consideration of unionist ideology or of the political administration in Northern Ireland. One noteworthy exception, Joseph Tomelty’s The End House (1944), a play that deals with the serious effects of the Special Powers Act on a Catholic community in Belfast, was not performed professionally in Northern Ireland until the early 1990s, despite its successful première at the NTS andTomelty’s established reputation as a skilled dramatist.
