The Critical "Gap of the North": Nationalism, National Theatre, and the North

Theatre history is suffused by an immanent sense of loss. for it is forever haunted by the spectral presence of past performance as the liveness of theatre can never be recuperated or represented, but remains absent and ineffable, beyond the positivist purview of its written wor(l)d. Nevertheless, for theatre historians, reviews and criticism are never merely material ephemera that recall the lost evanescence of live performance, but vital artefacts that assist their imperfect efforts to empirically and imaginatively reconstruct the theatrical past. Certainly, my own research on the Ulster Literary Theatre (ULT), a much-neglected dramatic movement. is largely dependent on such traces of the theatrical event, especially as many of the ULT's texts were never published. Indeed, fifty years ago, a historian researching the same subject reflected that all that remained of some plays was "a fugitive line in the memory of the players" (see Kennedy). Often, reviews are the only historical residue that remains of their work and they provide tantalising textual traces of plots, performances, scenography, action, and responses to plays that would otherwise have disappeared completely. Of course, whilst theatre scholars, in particular, must always be wary of wholly positivist approaches to the theatrical past, reviews do remind us of another crucial fact: that performances, and their reception, are always local phenomena, and with regards to this, they can partially help us map the local contours of the "human geographies" that affect and inflect the production and reception of theatre.