Taking action and thinking theatre

Like a scene from a play or the screenplay for a film, 30 security personnel disguised as passengers board an Irish Ferries ship and then, several hours later, exchange their civilian clothing for ambiguous paramilitary-style uniforms. With body warmers that look like body armour and carrying accoutrements that look like anti-riot weaponry, what was taking place on board The Isle of Inishmore a few weeks ago was a theatrical show of force. It was a performance of power, presumably designed to intimidate the ship's officers into agreeing to changes that would see their replacement by cheaper staff hired at lower rates. What transpired, however, was a scenario in which the management of Irish Ferries was cast in the role of a lawless bully. Anxious to scrap social partnership in the interests of an even more aggressive pursuit of profits, that considerable section of Ireland's political and business establishment that supports Irish Ferries management was left scrabbling for justification.

For much of the Irish public, the Irish Ferries incident was high drama. Like a theatrical performance, it transfixed our attention, evoking sentiments of sympathy, indignation, anger and a strong desire for intervention. For days, phone-in radio programmes on the topic were jammed with callers. The thing about theatre – and about the real-life actions and incidents that we so frequently describe as dramatic – is that it stretches our conception of what is possible. On stage or off, dramatic incidents invite dramatic responses, a temporary putting aside of what we consider to be normal in the interests of radical change. This is why theatre tends to be carefully regulated, either by means of licensing laws and censorship or, more subtly, by making the theatre appear to be the exclusive property of an Èlite. And this also may explain why, when Socialist Party TD Joe Higgins proposed a national work stoppage in response to the actions of Irish Ferries management, his views were denigrated immediately as unrealistic and inflammatory. For other politicians and most media commentators, the proper response to the dramatic events on board The Isle of Inishmore was for the public not to get dramatic. Instead, we were encouraged to recommit our trust in politicians, and in the relevant union and management representative bodies. Just as in the institutional theatre, the audience delegates imaginative authority to the actors on stage, so the political role of the public tends to be conceived of in terms of a trusting spectatorship. In an information-rich society in which spectacles of cruelty, inequality and social injustice regularly provoke our outrage, this is also a society – or so we are invited to believe – where outrage must never become the basis for taking action. But if, as I am suggesting, the institutional theatre tends to mimic the method in which we conceive of political action in society, a good way to begin challenging such quietist assumptions is to rethink the ways in which we think about theatre.

An often-heard lament at the end of the nineteenth century was that while Ireland appeared eminently theatrical insofar as it had a history marked by the drama of sporadic and apparently unmotivated violence, Ireland itself did not possess a national or literary theatre. "We have been too busy with real dramas," complained a writer in the New Ireland Review in 1895, "and have had no time for dramas of the imagination". Supported by both nationalists and unionists, the effort of establishing a national theatre institution was about demonstrating that Ireland had moved beyond an era of sporadic, insurrectionary and sometimes revolutionary acts, and that it now accepted the eirenic norms of representative democracy. Establishing a national theatre institution, in other words, was not just about providing a forum for the performance of Irish plays. It was about demonstrating and normalising ideas of delegatory politics. "In the theatre", Yeats wrote in 1907, "a mob becomes a people".

As Yeats's remark indicates, the theatre in Ireland was never just about theatre. From the beginning, it was evoked as a way of distinguishing between what is considered good politics and bad. "A stage play in the Mansion House", was how the Irish Times referred, disparagingly, to the first Dáil. But a more revealing illustration is Yeats's story concerning a republican protestor at the first 1926 performance of Sean O'Casey's The Plough and the Stars. Objecting to O'Casey's attack on the motivation of the 1916 leaders, a young republican protestor climbed on stage and then, while standing there, noticed an actress frozen in the part that she had been playing prior to the protestor's interruption. Recognising the actress as the sickly and impoverished Mollser, the protestor put his coat over her to keep her warm. For Yeats, this was an hilarious and a revealing indication of the obtuseness of republican anti-state militancy: what the protestor appeared not to notice was that Mollser and her illness and indigence were all fictional. "She was not the actress in his eyes," japed Yeats to his friend Sir Herbert Grierson, "but the consumptive girl".

But what if Yeats was wrong? What if the conventions of this institutional theatre are an impediment rather than an incentive to cultural knowledge? What if interrupting a performance in order to intervene in a narrative of despair is thought of not as gauche naivety, but as an instance of theatrical and ethical sophistication? The South American theatre director Augusto Boal proposes a radical alternative to the western institutional theatre: a 'forum theatre' that invites the audience to think of itself as an active participant. Audience members are encouraged to intervene in a performance by acting out a part that then changes the direction of the narrative; the word 'spectator', with its historical connotations of passivity and uninvolvment, is replaced by 'spect-actor'. The theatre itself may not be revolutionary, Boal concedes, but its power lies in its potential to rehearse the possibility of revolution. In Ireland today, conventional politics has become drained of ethical value because of the complicity between politicians and the interests of big business. In the world of big business itself, democratic procedures are now routinely cast aside in favour of profit-driven expediency. In such a world, theatre's space for experimentation offers a resource for imagining new modes of social and political intervention. And climbing on stage may well encourage a taking to the streets.