Helen Lojek (ed.), The Theatre of Frank McGuinness: Stages of Mutability.

Richards, Shaun

Helen Lojek (ed.), The Theatre of Frank McGuinness: Stages of Mutability. Dublin: Carysfort Press, 2002. 197 pages. EUR15.00 (paperback). Hiroko Mikami, Frank McGuinness and his Theatre of Paradox. Gerrards Cross: Colin Smythe, 2002. xiv + 263 pages. GBP35.00 (hardback).

Since his debut with The Factory Girls in 1982 Frank McGuinness has established a position as one of the most productive and innovative of contemporary Irish playwrights. Yet while he has not lacked critical attention--and commercial success--McGuinness does not sit comfortably within the theatrical mainstream. His restless experimentation with form, which saw him move from the naturalism of The Factory Girls to the magical realism of Maggie and Lizzie in just seven years, along with his voyaging across European theatre in translations of Ibsen, Lorca, Chekhov, Brecht, and others, appear calculated to defy easy categorization. The sheer volume and variety of McGuinness's work then pose challenges for critical texts that attempt to capture the intellectual and emotional dynamic informing his plays. To date only Eamonn Jordan's The Feast of Famine: The Plays of Frank McGuinness (1997) has faced that challenge, now it is joined by Hiroko Mikami's Frank McGuinness and his Theatre of Paradox, a monograph based on her doctoral dissertation, and Helen Lojek's edited collection, The Theatre of Frank McGuinness: Stages of Mutability, which asserts its intention to juxtapose 'heterogeneous contexts and approaches'. Both bring a variety of information and insights to a reading of McGuinness's work, but there is still a sense of absence in the analysis, partial readings that, particularly in the lack of engagement with McGuinness's 'European' dimension, fail to do complete justice to his very Irish concerns.

Mikami's study has all the strengths--and some of the weaknesses--of work derived perhaps too directly from a doctoral thesis: the full and committed engagement with the material and the microcosmic detail of textual analysis offset by the determination to provide density of supportive reference for almost every allusion. The result can be that the forward drive of argument is halted, even hampered, by quotations from critical sources that substantiate, rather than illuminate, the proffered analysis. The strength of the argument is in the detailed scrutiny of play texts--the examination (and illustration) of the paintings of Caravaggio which inform scenes in Innocence, being a case in point; and throughout the study the plays are dealt with precisely, sympathetically, and sometimes illuminatingly: the influence of Alan Ayckbourn's Bedroom Farce--which McGuinness directed at the University of Ulster, Coleraine--and Cubist painting on the structure of Observe the Sons of Ulster Marching Towards the Somme being a (brief) example. But for all its precision of reading, the study finally fails to deliver a convincing and cumulative overview, despite the various individual judgements suggesting critical summation that are scattered throughout.

The study is structured in terms of chapters whose informing premise is thematic rather than chronological, but the analyses of individual plays tend to remain discrete and are signalled as such within the text. While there is some cross-referencing across and within chapters they tend to close on the play-specific point of the final work to be addressed with no sense of harmonization of the theme nominally under scrutiny; indeed there is no clear rationale for this particular ordering of the chapters. The idea of the plays gathered in the various chapters forming diptychs or triptychs is suggestive, but within the work as a whole the chapters--and their constituent elements--hold rather stolidly to their separate identities; no larger image crystallizes clearly from the constituent parts.

The McGuinness who emerges most clearly and convincingly from a reading--and viewing--of his plays is the one captured in Christopher Murray's lines from Helen Lojek's collection: 'As McGuinness sees it, though he is no Marxist, all is amorphous and amenable to change'. This is a McGuinness who, while having advanced stylistically beyond the socially transformative form of naturalism is still committed to the social function of his work, albeit one not limited to the reductive binary of nationalist/unionist as the only one requiring deconstruction. However, while Mikami acknowledges the changing social, sexual, political, and economic structures of the Ireland within which McGuinness works, there is an apparent preference for a reading of both Ireland--and the playwright--which clings to less material determinants. Despite changes, we are informed, 'Ireland, at its core, remains what it used to be', a claim which is bolstered by a quotation from E. Estyn Evans about an Ireland imbued with 'poetic imagination', 'a sense of the unseen world', and 'brooding melancholy'. The tension between this eternal 'Irishness' and any socially corrective imperative in McGuinness might be instructive, but this is a realm where assertion is more attractive than substantiation. The McGuinness advanced in this study, for all his location within, and commitment to, a changing Ireland is ultimately one who transcends the socio-sexual and cultural-political and 'opens up the hinterland beyond both myth and logic'; a playwright whose work, while amenable to aspects of theory-based analysis, ultimately defeats them: 'the quicksilver detail of McGuinness's imagination always shoots ahead, into the awkward, intractable mysteries of human nature'.

However, if the reading of McGuinness which emerges from Mikami's study owes more to a Yeatsian-inflected preference for art as operating on the edge of the ineffable than it does to contemporary theory there is a degree of constancy in the approach. While Helen Lojek's collection has deliberately eschewed finality and fixity in its reading, aiming rather to situate itself 'in that rich domain before conclusion' in order to 'invigorate dialogue' there is something to be said for a stronger sense of orchestrated debate within the collection.

The chapters are organized to follow the chronology of the plays' production and include interesting contributions: Brian Cliff on Borderlands; Christopher Murray on Mutabilitie; Helen Lojek on McGuinness's use of stereotypes; Joan Fitzpatrick Dean on self-dramatization in his work; and Eamonn Jordan on Innocence, to take but five examples from the twelve contributions. However there is significant variation in the space allocated to the various contributions which impacts on the dialogic ambition of the collection as Jordan's chapter, at twenty-six pages, is by far the longest in the collection while Bernice Shrank's piece on Observe the Sons of Ulster has been edited down from its version in Etudes Irlandaises to five. In part, no doubt, this is to allow as wide a range of content and contributors as possible but one at least of these, the discussion of directing Carthaginians in Central Michigan University, could have been omitted without serious loss. This is not to deny the value--and interest--of discussion with directors of McGuinness's work of which that with Sarah Pia Anderson is the most valuable; not least because in the detail provided of her staging of Mary and Lizzie she raises the issue of the stage, as opposed to the page, apprehension of his work, an aspect which merits further consideration, particularly with regard to McGuinness's theatrical sensibility in which Artaud looms larger than the advocates of realism. And it is here, in their non-engagement with the European dimension of McGuinness's work, that both Mikami's monograph and Lojek's collection are most limited and, consequently, fail to convey the full complexity of his oeuvre.

McGuinness has translated some fifteen of the classics of European theatre--roughly half of his total output--and the productions of Ibsen's Rosmersholm and Lorca's Yerma, which premiered within days of one another in May 1987, demonstrated the extent to which he could extend beyond the framework of Ireland, while still engaging in a committed but dispassionate dissection of the process of dehumanization effected by both Protestant and Catholic cultures. What unites Lorca and Ibsen, and explains their attraction for McGuinness, is their assertion of the paramount importance of the individual in the face of a society whose repressive values lead to a denial of humanity. Not to extend analysis to this crucial dimension of his work is to limit our appreciation of the extent to which his overtly 'Irish' plays are the localizations of what McGuinness himself reads as part of a more complex and historically determined European condition.