“Unthreatening in the provincial Irish air”: Ireland’s modernist theatre

In 1936, the American critic Curtis Canfield stated that there was no longer any need for “the usual naturalistic form” in a modernising Ireland whose theatre was “in an interesting state of transition from Realism to Experimentation and Expressionism”. As Terence Brown suggests, however, whatever subversive energies there were in Irish theatre in this period “became unthreatening in the provincial Irish air”. This article evaluates the realities of plays and theatre in the thirty years after the founding of the Free State within the context of the changes celebrated by Canfield and the timidity and stasis identified by Brown. It focuses in particular on the eight plays in Canfield’s edited collection, Plays of Changing Ireland (1936), and considers the extent to which they can be advanced as convincing examples of modernist theatre when set alongside the radical styles and staging of the contemporaneous European stage.