7 - Versions of pastoral

Summary

The year 1964 is often taken as a new beginning in Irish theatre, with the Dublin premiere of Brian Friel's first major success Philadelphia Here I Come! The decade certainly saw the emergence of a fresh generation of playwrights, Brian Friel, Tom Murphy, Hugh Leonard, John B. Keane, Eugene McCabe, Thomas Kilroy, who between them changed the character of Irish theatre. After the social conservatism and economic and cultural isolationism of the previous decades, this was a time of remarkably rapid modernisation in Irish society. Whether the playwrights gave their plays urban or suburban settings (as Kilroy and Leonard did) or, as in the case of the others, preferred traditional subjects in Irish rural and small-town life, there was a new acerbity of social analysis, different angles and some marked changes in dramatic style and technique. In this pattern of theatrical development and innovation, however, it could be argued that, rather than the 1964 Philadelphia Here I Come!, Murphy's A Whistle in the Dark, rejected by the Abbey and produced to great effect in London in 1961, could be taken as the point of departure for new Irish drama. What is more, Murphy in 1962 had written a play with an astonishingly similar ground plan to that of Friel's Philadelphia, the play which was only finally staged as A Crucial Week in the Life of a Grocer's Assistant in 1969, five years after Friel's international success.