The Shaughraun - Dion Boucicault

Dublin, Abbey Theatre
May 28 - July 31, 2004
and
November 24, 2004 - February 26, 2005

shaughraun.jpg (7091 bytes)

Selected Plays of Dion Boucicault
(includes The Shaughraun)

A collection with all three Boucicault Irish plays

    Dion Boucicault was an opportunist, a plagiarist, and a living legend not only of the Irish, but the British and American stage of the nineteenth century. Irish-born, latterly established in England as an "adapter" of French plays, finally hitting the big time in the United States in the 1850s (where he was instrumental in the development of copyright law), Boucicault was, as writer Chris Morash describes him "Irish theatre’s first international superstar." His trio of "Irish plays," The Colleen Bawn, Arragh-na-Pogue, and The Shaughraun firmly established the stock characters and standard themes associated with "Irishness." Bringing the structuring force of the Victorian melodrama to bear on existing stereotypes and adding a touch of political agitation amid the safe boundaries of romantic comedy, he practically invented the theatrical vocabulary which still haunts the imagination of the world when it thinks of Ireland.
    The Shaughraun is the story of how a roguish poacher named Conn (Adrian Dunbar) becomes embroiled in personal, social, and political struggles in County Sligo amid a plethora of comic situations while he aids Fenian escapee Robert Ffolliot (Stephen Darcy). Dastardly magistrate and landlord Corry Kinchela (Don Wycherly) has conspired with slimy informant Harvey Duff (Aaron Monaghan) to have Ffolliot deported so Kinchela can seize his estate and move in on his bride-to-be, Arte O’Neill (Emily Nagle). Arte’s best friend is Robert’s sister Claire (Fiona O’Shaughnessy), a girl who has attracted the romantic attentions of well-meaning British Officer Captain Molineux (Hadley Fraser) under the watchful eye of local priest Fr. Dolan (Des Cave). Yes: it’s one of those plays; definitively so... so much so in fact that it is widely regarded as one of the best examples of the comic melodrama and a touchstone "Irish" play.
    Director John McColgan’s elaborate National Theatre production stirs up some old ghosts though. W.B. Yeats, co-founder of the Abbey, once snidely wrote that Boucicault "has no relation with literature" and despised the commercial demagoguery which had made the latter rich and famous both at home and abroad. There is no small irony to this production taking place where and when it does. McColgan comes to the Abbey as chairman of the ‘abbey one hundred’ committee and is best known as among the original team responsible for Riverdance: a phenomenon which has already become the new international benchmark for Irish cliche. The production is clearly intended as the centerpiece of the Abbey’s summer schedule, designed to appeal to out-of-town visitors (particularly Americans) while also giving locals the chance to see the kind of material they have often heard scoffed at but probably never actually experienced.
    The Shaughraun is all about the experience: it demands to be seen in performance. This production is an impressive spectacle, a triumph of production design (complete with rotating scenery, fulsome costumes, and a multiform Irish cottage), coups-de-thêatre (including Dunbar swinging across the stage hero-style on a rope) and on and off stage hijinks (the cast pass through the auditorium more than once) which achieve exactly what they set out to: to play to the crowd as Boucicault always did. In the program, Chris Morash flirts nervously with the notion that Boucicault have been a kind of primordial postmodernist "at home everywhere and nowhere, constantly playing games with he artifice of his own work, suspicious of authenticity or originality yet capable of political gestures" and this idea holds sway in the production. Magician Joe Daly appears in the opening scene, hurling jets of flame as the curtain rises. He later reappears and performs puppet-master gestures as the cast take their bows and dance. Clearly Boucicault the showman is evoked here, a highly appropriate spectacular flourish designed to enchant and entertain.
    The show is entertaining. It is marvelously choreographed and filled with enough music and song to make it more like a concert than a play at times (Riverdance anyone?). The cast are both able and game, with Wycherly (Eden) having a splendid time working with the archetypal moustached villain to find new possibilities for both humor and loathsomeness. Monaghan (She Stoops to Conquer) makes an excellent sidekick, and the "Dastardly and Muttley" routine these two have going works pretty well. Dunbar (Conversations on a Homecoming) clearly enjoys himself in the role Boucicault frequently reserved for himself. He brings a touch of self-effacement to aspects of his characterization without losing touch with the basics.
    On the whole though, the show is presented without apology. The immanent production of Stewart Parker’s Heavenly Bodies, a reflexive theatrical biography of Boucicault, is clearly intended to provide the perspective that this production intentionally lacks. In fact the program for The Shaughraun is also the program for Heavenly Bodies, which is a not particularly subtle way of reminding patrons that this presentation comes with a past and a future tied to ideas of Ireland and Irish theatre which are constantly in flux.