Joan Fitzpatrick Dean. All Dressed Up: Modern Irish Historical Pageantry.

Jaros, Michael P.

Joan Fitzpatrick Dean. All Dressed Up: Modern Irish Historical Pageantry. Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 2014. Pp. xvii + 335 + 8 color plates. $39.95.

In 2004, Irish theatre scholar Lionel Pilkington called for an expansion of the focus of Irish theatre studies to include more sustained investigations of forms of performance outside of the theatre itself, including mumming, pageantry, and political demonstrations. Dating from William Butler Yeats, Edward Martyn, George Moore, and Lady Augusta Gregory's founding of the Irish Literary Theatre in 1899 (which would become the Abbey, Ireland's national theatre), the critical cachet of the playwright and the literary power of the legitimate stage have had remarkable staying power in Ireland, and remain in most cases the go-to method for organizing surveys of the Irish theatre. In the ensuing decade since Pilkington's call to action, the field has certainly expanded in a variety of dynamic ways to meet his challenge. Professor Joan Fitzpatrick Dean's All Dressed Up represents a substantial addition to this discourse, focusing as it does on forms of performance occurring outside the traditional theatre. Her work is the summation of years of primary-source research: Dean has mined a vast array of private papers, newspapers, and archival collections to produce a formidable work that shall certainly remain required reading for anyone interested in examining the complex interplay between historical pageantry and the changing cultural realities of postcolonial Ireland in the twentieth century.

Pageantry has been critically discussed in Irish cultural debates before, but in a piecemeal fashion, centering (as Dean notes) on events such as the loyalist parades in Northern Ireland celebrating the Protestant victory at the Battle of the Boyne in 1690 and the various, opposing nationalist commemorations of events such as the 1798 rebellion and the 1916 Easter Rising in Dublin. All Dressed Up builds on earlier works, such as Mairin Ni Dhonnchadha and Theo Dorgan's collection Revising the Rising (1991) and Ian MacBride's edited collection, History and Memory in Modern Ireland (2001) to provide a more comprehensive examination of how pageantry specifically functioned in a vast array of contexts.

Dean also situates her work within contemporary theatre and performance studies debates about the interplay between performance and the literary, text-centered tradition of the legitimate stage. Taking her bearing from Diana Taylors well-known work The Archive and the Repertoire: Performing Cultural Memory in the Americas (2003), Dean asserts that the various forms of Irish pageantry that covered the century possessed "affective, ludic, and cultural powers" (2). Developing alongside the more easily archived, literary works of the legitimate stage, she stresses the popular appeal of pageantry as a barometer of cultural memory: "if one asks what theatrical experience was both routine and popular with ordinary Irish people in the twentieth century, pageantry surfaces as a likely candidate" (2). More people within that time period saw pageants than saw legitimate plays by several orders of magnitude. Equally influenced by the work of Pierre Nora and his conception of lieux de memoire (places of memory), Dean focuses on where and when these pageants transpired and on the cultural work they were doing in their specific milieus. Although it was generally "celebrating] rather than interrogating] the past," Dean maintains that historical pageantry consistently reflected a desire to "imagine, understand, or recover the Irish past by dramatizing a narrative" (3). Pageants occupied and transformed non-traditional spaces: halls, squares, public parks, and sporting arenas attracted people that might not ever attend a play in a traditional theatre. The pageants' enormous popularity and broad appeal demanded a more sustained examination of the cultural work they were doing in Ireland, and Dean certainly delivers such.

Dean's work is strongest when it considers how Irish pageantry adapted to a variety of cultural realties in a rapidly changing Ireland. All Dressed Up is organized chronologically, divided into four primary periods. The final phase of colonial Ireland and the first phase of pageantry Dean examines is 1907-14. In many ways, Irish pageantry in these years imitated both military tattoos and the small-town pageantry of the colonizer (England), while at the same time asserting Irish historical difference primarily through reference to its ancient, semi-mythic past. Pageants during this period were also growing in the shadow of the "legitimate" Abbey theatre and its "national" theatrical status. The second period (1924-32) follows the formation of the Irish Free State, when the works were primarily concerned with performing the governments legitimacy in the face of the Irish Civil War that followed independence from Great Britain. The third period, leading up to and including the "Emergency" (as Neutral Ireland termed the Second World War), featured state-supported military tattoos (which demonstrated Ireland's resilience in the face of the outside threat). Finally, the post-1950s period included the tourist-focused "national" pageantry of the Tostal festivals, which waned with the introduction of television to Ireland in the mid-1960s. Dean concludes with an examination of the enduring legacies of pageantry in performance groups such as the Galway-based Macnas, which "recuperated" pageantry in a critical, grassroots way in the mid-1980s.

Since Ireland is a small island, there was notable personnel crossover between the legitimate stage and historical pageantry, and Dean's work provides some interesting glimpses into this process of cross-pollination. Irish theatre scholars are certainly familiar with the founders of the Gate Theatre, Hilton Edwards and Micheal Mac Liammoir, as well as playwright Denis Johnston, to name a few, but might not have heard of their work in the realm of pageantry due to its lack of intellectual, literary acclaim at the time. Mac Liammoir, nursing his own obsession with Gaelic, mythic Ireland, was especially thrilled by the chance to reach such vast audiences as pageantry provided (a picture of one of his costumes of Owen Roe O'Neill, the seventeenth-century Irish victor of the battle of Benburb against the English, graces the cover of the book).

All Dressed Up is most memorable when Dean demonstrates the "ludic" powers of the pageants on their observers and how they transformed the way theatre and performance are imagined in Ireland. While describing the "recuperative pageantry" of the Galway-based group Macnas in her last chapter, she stresses its staying power in the minds of its early audiences and how culturally important it is "that a six-year-old who can remember a New Year's Eve walkabout through Galway city is now a thirtysomething whose commodious understanding of theatre was shaped by Macnas" (256).

This emphasis on de-centered, community-devised theatre is a rapidly developing field of focus in Irish theatre and performance studies. One of the ways, stressed by Dean, that groups like Macnas were recuperative (versus some new wave of nationally endorsed pageantry or commemoration) was in down-playing national culture in favor of a more regional, grass-roots work that was at the same time in dialogue with theatre and performance forms outside Ireland. Such work is more fitting with what political theorist Richard Kearney terms Postnationalist Ireland, where the very idea of the nation and of national memory becomes secondary to local and international influences, and ways of thinking outside the traditional ideas of nation and performance are considered. As Dean's book was published in 2014, one wonders how she might assess the muted celebrations of this years' centenary of the 1916 Rising. Such wondering aside, All Dressed Up is a memorable and necessary addition to our understanding of how historical pageantry was vitally important to the evolution of theatre and performance within an increasingly global Irish context.

MICHAEL P. JAROS

Salem State University