A chara, – I was disappointed to see a critic as admirable and influential as Fintan O’Toole fall prey to such a banal form of generational myopia (Culture Shock, October 13th).
It is easy to agree that Tom Murphy is a great playwright and that we hardly needed another adaptation of The Picture of Dorian Gray on the stage. But in his implicit dismissal of the rest of contemporary Irish theatre as pretentious, apolitical, self-absorbed trickery, O’Toole seems to have overlooked a whole world of aesthetically ambitious, socially engaged, and exciting work of the highest literary and dramatic quality.
If he is looking for “highly wrought verbal language” on the stage, or plays that are not meta-theatrical, but “drama that is, on the one hand, passionately engaged with the social and psychological life of the nation and, on the other, of a very high aesthetic order,” he could find exquisite examples of it in the work of Ray Scannell or Philip McMahon or Hilary O’Shaughnessy, to name but three examples from among many.
To judge the art of one time on the basis of its similarity to the heroes of another is almost the definition of critical shortsightedness. Each historical moment requires and produces its own forms of literary expression, and the aesthetic modes of engagement with political, social and psychological realities must, by definition, be different for different times.
Yes, if the yardstick for good theatre is his own hero, Tom Murphy, O’Toole will be condemned to eternal disappointment. But that would also be a lifeless theatre divorced from the world surrounding it. To write a contemporary play in the mould of Tom Murphy (or of Beckett or Friel or Keane for that matter) would be an artificial, anachronistic exercise. They were the geniuses of other eras and their forms could never hope to engage with or reflect the contemporary moment to contemporary audiences.
We need debate and reflection on the direction of theatre in Ireland and its role in our society, but pessimistic praising of the past glories of another time is not that. As Marcel Proust’s narrator explains, to identify the great writers of the past is easily done; the real challenge is to recognise them in the present where they are always harder to find. – Is mise,