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John Ireland. Theater, War, and Memory in Crisis: Vichy, Algeria, the Aftermath. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2025. 375 pp. $85.00. ISBN-978-0-472-05728-3.
Review Essay by Susan McCready, University of South Alabama
While John Ireland’s Theater, War, and Memory in Crisis analyzes a number of plays produced between 1940 and 1988 that address the war trauma of the Nazi occupation of France (1940-1944) and the Algerian war of independence (1954-1962), it is both more and less than a catalog of war plays. In establishing his corpus, Ireland makes no pretense of encyclopedic inclusion or of accounting for every play that treats these two conflicts. Rather, from his readings of plays by eight authors, he develops several, interconnected arguments that illuminate the contested and connected memory of the Occupation and the Algerian conflict in French and Algerian culture and, significantly, the importance of the theater as a privileged site for the negotiation of traumatic memory.
Ireland’s book is both a work of memory studies and literary studies, but while much has been written about both the history and the traumatic memory of the Occupation and the war in Algeria, cultural and literary critics have largely ignored the theater when defining a corpus of literature about these conflicts. In his introduction, Ireland observes, “Given the massive bibliographies attached to both periods [the Occupation and the Algerian conflict] it is striking that none of the French and Algerian playwrights whose work has addressed the conflicts was deemed worthy of mention. Nor is there any book-length study dealing more comprehensively with the theater that has addressed the memory of this dark history” (p. 5). Ireland’s book effectively fills this gap, but it is worth pausing, as Ireland does briefly, to consider why the theater has been so neglected. He gestures at theater’s “diminished status as a cultural force since the late twentieth century” (p. 5), but he does not elaborate further in his introduction.
Throughout the study, Ireland proposes various reasons for the lack of attention accorded the theater. In his chapter on Sartre, Ireland suggests that Sartre’s own ambivalence towards the institution of the theater and his uneasy relationship with his mostly bourgeois theater audience contributed to the relative neglect of his plays in academic studies of his work and, with the exception of Huis clos, his work’s limited appeal in performance. Moreover, the original productions of Sartre’s plays, at the (by then) middlebrow Théâtre Antoine, did not, according to Ireland, inspire subsequent directors to take them up. “Sartre’s long connection with the Théâtre Antoine,” Ireland argues, “discouraged serious practical reevaluation of his theater by the most inventive theatrical directors in France for at least a generation” (p. 120).
The three French playwrights treated in the following chapter, Armand Gatti (1924-2017), Liliane Atlane (1932-2011) and Jean-Claude Grumberg (b. 1939), all wrote plays that addressed the Occupation and the Holocaust, but have not received their share of critical commentary in studies of Holocaust literature. Ireland suggests that their plays, in aestheticizing historical violence, elicit a kind of discomfort that has led to their sidelining. Ireland notes that Gatti and Atlane have been criticized because “their highly stylized approach to the Holocaust overshadows the ‘historical reality’ they are trying to communicate” (p. 192). Grumberg, on the other hand, deploys humor and irony in a fashion that runs counter to the expectation of sincerity that accompanies the critical reception of much of Holocaust literature.
In his final chapter, Ireland treats plays about the Algerian conflict. He mentions that the ambiguous (potentially ambivalent) politics of French playwright Jean Genet’s (1910-1986) Les Paravents make it difficult to assimilate neatly into cultural histories of the memory of the Algerian conflict. As for Kateb Yacine (1929-1989), much of his theatrical work addressing the Algerian war was produced in Algeria between 1972 and 1978 for the Théâtre de la mer and the ACT (Action Culturelle des Travailleurs). Since these troupes focused on community-based productions performed mostly in Arabic, their performances were often not recorded or transcribed. According to Ireland, the ephemeral nature of this work places much of it largely beyond the reach of commentors who were not participants or audience members.
Ireland’s hints and suggestions about the neglect of various plays or authors do not add up to a comprehensive answer to the question of why short shrift is given to the theater in twentieth and twenty-first-century cultural histories. I do not consider this a flaw in Ireland’s book, but it left me curious, in no small part because it is a question that animates my own recent book about theater and war memory (Commemorative Acts: French Theatre and the Memory of the Great War, University of Toronto Press, 2025), which, like Ireland’s book, attempts to bring the overlooked theater into scholarship in cultural and memory studies.
As I argue, in the case of the First World War, the moral imperatives that emerged around the representation of the war (the focus on the combatant’s experience, the exclusion of all but eye-witness testimony as inauthentic, and the privilege accorded to the soldier-as-victim of the war machine) would shape aesthetic imperatives that favored the novel, the memoir, and eventually the cinema. In his magisterial work of Great War memory, Témoins, Jean-Norton Cru explicitly excluded both drama and poetry from his corpus. The goal of his 1929 compilation of memoirs, journals, and novels of the First World War was to point future historians towards the documents that Cru believed should matter the most. He rejects poetry and drama, in which “la part de la littérature y est plus grande que la part du renseignement documentaire.”[1] A subsequent critic (cited by Ireland) who dismisses Atlan’s Monsieur Fugue ou le mal de mer by saying, “History … is eclipsed by poetry” (p. 192) is taking up where Cru left off. In my own work I explore how the drama of the 1920s and 30s was evolving structurally and formally to meet its postwar moment. I would be interested to hear more from Ireland about whether a similar argument could be made about the drama as it reinvents itself in the second half of the twentieth century?
Rather than focus on why the theater is absent from discussions of the Occupation and the Algerian conflict, Ireland pursues another, related line of inquiry. What is lost to our understanding of these conflicts, their memory and postmemory, he asks, when we fail to take the theatrical genre into account? Here, his response is deeply satisfying. Throughout the book, he develops insights about performance culture, oral tradition, and classical tragedy to answer the question he poses in his introduction, “Can theater, a performance art, take on issues of violence, conflict, and war trauma in ways inaccessible [emphasis mine] to more dominant forms of media (p. 5)?” In other words, what makes theater special and why does it deserve our attention?
Ireland draws our attention to the importance of theater by studying its impact from a variety of disciplinary and thematic angles. I will leave to the historians a full discussion of his first chapter, in which Ireland makes a convincing case for studying the Algerian conflict alongside the Occupation. Chapters 2 and 3 establish the basis for Ireland’s arguments (which he develops further in the discussions of specific authors and their plays in chapters 4-6) in favor of theater’s unique capacity to address war trauma. In chapter 2, Ireland expands on one of the links he has identified between the memory of these two conflicts, the war crimes trials and the official, if tardy and incomplete, judicial reckoning that followed both.
Ireland argues that it is the “convergence of memory and testimony, performance and ceremony that gives theater its unique place among the creative arts seeking to respond to the challenge of representing different dimensions of trauma related to violent conflict and war memory” (p. 50). Trials, in which testimony is offered synchronously to an audience, share some structural elements with theater and are evidence of the persistence and the resonance of oral culture in a world now dominated by the written word. In the case of the war crimes trials that followed these conflicts, Ireland points out that, beginning at least with the Eichmann trial, the “performative power” (p. 49) of testimony was deployed as a prosecutorial tactic. In trials like Eichmann’s, disparate, individual experiences were organized into a narrative that coalesced into a collective memory, structured to confer meaning on the past. The jury had the power to convert that meaning into justice. Plays about wars perform a similar function. They lack juridical precision and do not promise to deliver justice, but plays nevertheless share with the trial the capacity to unite the audience as a community and to shape their collective understanding of the war and its trauma. In the place of justice, they perhaps offer a kind of healing.
To that end, chapter 3 is the most ambitious section of the book. Here, Ireland lays out the historical case for the importance of theater which, since the fifth century BCE with the emergence of classical Greek tragedy has been “an essential forum for reflecting on war and violence” (p. 63). He points to Aristotle’s Poetics as the pivot-point in a cultural shift from oral to written culture that would contribute to the prevailing prejudice that orality is not merely primary but primitive, less sophisticated than writing generally and literature in particular. The Aristotelian turn links classical theater to the colonialist project of bringing supposedly superior cultural forms to the allegedly unsophisticated colonized people. Ireland explores the uneasy colonial relationship at some length in his chapter 6 discussion of the paradoxes of French-educated Kateb Yacine’s approach to theater in his native Algeria in the 1970s. While his earliest work follows the European tradition of Kateb’s education, “it is fashioned, despite its highly stylized literary French, to unsettle European audiences” (p. 212). In the 1970s, he would move in a different direction, reconnecting with oral traditions of pre-colonial Algeria in Arabic-language work produced in a theatrical collective and, in some cases, never transcribed.
After very carefully tracing the history of ancient theater with insights from recent historiography of the period to expose its roots in ceremonial culture and to demonstrate its enduring importance as a collective ritual, Ireland jumps ahead to the twentieth century. Here he makes some important observations about how the work of early twentieth-century anthropologists and later thinkers (notably the Collège de sociologie and then René Girard in, among other works, La Violence et le sacré) would influence postwar theater’s explorations of orality, ritual, and community. He gets a lot right here, in terms of the history of ideas, but ironically, he does not look closely at the French theater of the first half of the twentieth century, during which several overlapping movements sought to reconnect the theater to its ritual origins and to the Dionysiac strain of tragedy identified by Nietzsche.
Ireland is not wrong to say that the nineteenth-century realist aesthetic still dominated throughout the 1920s and 30s, but it was challenged from a variety of angles. There was leftist political theater in which worker-actors staged plays in factories; there were itinerant troupes exploring Catholic spirituality by reviving mystery plays in open-air settings, and there were avant-garde directors working within traditional theater spaces to reimagine a relationship with the ancient Greek repertoire.
Directors of the so-called art theaters of the early twentieth century favored performance over text, were less reverent towards the received theatrical canon, and moved for the recognition of mise-en-scène as an independent theatrical art. In so doing, they laid the groundwork for the eventual breakthrough of theatrical modernism into the mainstream. Given that the sources of their movement go back to a nineteenth-century crisis in the theater, which, incidentally, begins with the romantic reaction against neoclassical dramatic structure and the Aristotelian aesthetics that had dominated French drama since the 1630s, I think it would have strengthened Ireland’s argument to delve deeper here. How were their innovations manifested in the latter half of the twentieth century? What more can that tell us about the enduring importance of ancient theater once its ties to the French neoclassical structure, through which it has been filtered for so long, had been successfully severed?
The three remaining chapters analyze individual authors and plays to demonstrate effectively and expand on the theoretical arguments laid out in the first half of the book.In these cogent analyses, Ireland invites his readers to look at the theater that emerged in response to these conflicts in new ways, and this is certainly useful. What breaks new ground, though, is the way he situates these plays and his readings of them within a theoretical framework that invites the reader to look beyond theatrical form towards what he sees as the theater’s deeply rooted, universal cultural function.
Susan McCready
University of South Alabama
smccread@southalabama.edu
Notes
[1] Jean Norton Cru, Témoins: Essai d’analyse et de critique des souvenirs des combattants édités en français de 1915 à 1928 (Paris: Les Étincelles, 1929), p. 11.
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H-France Forum
Volume 21 (2026), Issue 5, #2
https://doi.org/10.66242/VKON3923