ABSTRACT
One of the Abbey Theatre’s most popular plays in the 1930s and 1940s was Lennox Robinson’s comedy, Drama at Inish. First performed in February 1933 (a few weeks after Fianna Fáil’s momentous electoral victory), Robinson’s play appears to herald a new cultural epoch, one in which the NTS forgoes its previous role of rebarbative social criticism and opts instead for comedy and popular appeal. Indeed, the narrative action of Drama at Inish is marked by a theatrical self-consciousness that suggests the playwright’s awareness of this very significance. A travelling theatre group, presided over by the ostentatiously Robinsonesque figure of Hector de la Mare, arrives as cultural missionaries at an Irish seaside town. Invited there by a committee of local worthies (a Monsignor, a Member of the Dáil, and the proprietor of the main hotel), it is hoped that the theatre’s aura of cultural prestige will restore the town’s ailing tourist industry. The experiment is a disaster. The
townspeople of Inish react to the performances of Ibsen, Chekhov and Tolstoy first with literal-minded astonishment and then with lugubrious despair. It is a situation of farcical naïveté, reminiscent of Yeats’s anecdotal account of the republican demonstrator against The Plough and the Stars so zealously worried about Mollser’s tuberculosis that he interrupted his protest in order to wrap her in a blanket (Yeats 1954: 711). Far from improving Inish’s social and cultural life, the actors’ performances have the effect of making matters far worse. What quickly becomes apparent is that for this apparently homogeneous community to exist its many unsavoury truths must be left concealed. By the time of the play’s conclusion, the community has eschewed the European theatre tout court and has welcomed, with great relief, the return of its annual circus.
