Review of Irish Studies in Europe (Jun 2021)
‘No comfort talking when there’s a man around’: Maura Laverty’s Tolka Row (1951) and a neglected tradition of popular drama at the Gate Theatre, Dublin
Abstract
This essay presents a case for Maura Laverty’s play Tolka Row (1951) to be recognised as a highly-accomplished prototype of the soap opera in Ireland. It argues that Tolka Row is an important Irish iteration of a quintessentially modern form that swept across Europe and the rest of the world in tandem with advances in broadcasting in the twentieth century. The analysis focuses on the unique way in which the play portrays the lived experiences of working-class women through unadorned, everyday ‘talk’. The innovative approach to dialogue in Tolka Row situates the play as an important precursor to the development of the television serial in Ireland – not merely due to its popularity and working-class milieu, as has been acknowledged in the past, but due to its creative formal characteristics. This paper thus suggests a reassessment of the legacy of the Gate Theatre, which has to date been defined primarily in relation to its production of avant-garde plays. While the Gate has been widely acknowledged as a bastion of European modernism in Ireland, Tolka Row forms part of the theatre’s contribution to the development of a different kind of response to modernization, in the form of popular culture. By drawing on previously unexplored archival material which shows evidence of significant cuts to the original script, this paper suggests that the directors of Gate Theatre Productions – Hilton Edwards and Micheál mac Líammóir – either denied or disavowed the extent to which a more popular drama could impact Irish theatre and society.
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