Excavating Theatre History: Text, Performance and Biographies

James Pethica is a name famous in the scholarship of Irish theatre; his work has long been deemed crucial to an understanding of the Irish Literary Revival and the establishment of the Abbey Theatre as the country’s National Theatre. In 1988, Pethica wrote a landmark essay which asserted that Lady Augusta Gregory was, in fact, a co-author of Yeats’ seminal play Cathleen Ní Houlihan. He marshalled archival and other evidence to argue that Gregory was not simply a patron, but her ideas and writing were fundamental contributions to the form and content of the text. In chapter two of this fascinating volume, Brewer Redwine notes that Pethica’s argument was not a new discovery; the same substantiated argument had been made by Elizabeth Coxhead in 1962 (21). Yet, Pethica is consistently credited with this revelation. Subtly and without a glimmer of disrespect, Brewer Redwine picks apart the accepted history to reinsert the important work of a female scholar into the narrative of academic scholarship. This is, one comes to realize on reading her book, a characteristic move; it is one the author carries out with elegance at regular intervals. She diligently excavates Irish theatre history to reveal vital truths that have always been there, but never acknowledged as meaningful. While the facts and clues have been available, it is in the assiduous, inherently feminist work of picking apart the presented story and piecing the facts back together, while also laying bare this excavation process, that she presents a compelling counter-narrative of authorship at the Abbey Theatre. There is a wealth of scholarship on the social history of Ireland’s Abbey Theatre and how issues of class and political nationalism sparked the crucible from which the theatre emerged (Pilkington; Morash; Grene). Elizabeth Brewer Redwine, Gender, Performance, and Authorship at the Abbey Theatre, Oxford: Oxford UP, 2021, HB £60, 240 pages, ISBN: 9780192896346