The Long Crisis of Irish Realism: A Phenomenological Reading

• Published in: Modern drama 2018-06, Vol.61 (2), p.192-212
• Main Authors: Morash, Chris, Richards, Shaun
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: Consciousness; Essays; Phenomenology; Philosophy; Reading; Realism; Space; Studies; Theater
• ISSN: 0026-7694; 1712-5286
• DOI: 10.3138/md.61.2.0894

In an essay titled “On the Theory of Image Consciousness and Figment Consciousness,” Edmund Husserl notes, “The space of the stage with its sets, and so on, analogizes actual space.” The desire to stage a world analogous to “actual space” dominated Irish theatrical practice from the founding of Dublin’s Abbey Theatre in 1904 up to the moment in the late twentieth century when it entered a period of crisis, as the social world it purported to stage became fractured and unstable. This article looks to develop the analysis of Irish theatrical space further by using Husserl’s concept of Lebenswelt, or “lifeworld,” which he defines in The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Philosophy as “the spatiotemporal world of things as we experience them in our pre- and extrascientific life.” The article argues that the physical space of the stage gives concrete, experiential form to Husserl’s concept of the epochē, the “bracketing” by which theatrical space is transformed into place and the temporary lifeworld on the stage is generated. Drawing examples from Irish theatre that range from J.M. Synge’s Riders to the Sea (1904) to Enda Walsh’s Arlington (2016), the article explores the progression from stage worlds that correspond spatially to the extra-theatrical world to stage worlds that challenge the theatre’s ability to hold together a single image capable of functioning as a Lebenswelt.