The famine de Hubert O’Grady

This essay explores some of the issues at stake in the staging of the Famine by a nineteenth century Irish playwright. Focusing on O’Grady’s play, The Famine, it examines the difficulty of resorting to dramatic modes to represent this national tragedy. The political nature of the subject implies that censorship has to be taken into account in the analysis of the play. Beyond immediate social hindrances connected to the staging of the Famine, this paper also focuses on the links between aesthetics and ideology. O’Grady’s The Famine attempted to provide spectators with a vision which could heal the wounds of the past, while paying a respectful tribute to the dead. The analysis of O’Grady’s dramatic modes leads to a series of questions. How could the playwright stage the Famine without betraying the dead, or offending the authorities, while remaining within the frame of a genre which may not have been the most adequate for this purpose ? In other words, how could O’Grady represent a tragedy, while resorting to the aesthetics of melodrama