This chapter explores the history of representations of race in the Irish theatre, with a particular focus on blackface and minstrelsy – a discussion which uses at is focal point the pre-histories and afterlives of Dion Boucicault’s 1859 play The Octoroon. That melodrama is resituated within an Irish performance tradition (one that Boucicault himself would have encountered as a young man in Dublin) that stretches from the late nineteenth century, and which involved the performance on Irish stages of African-American characters – whose identity was often juxtaposed with that of stage Irish characters, and often performed by white Irish actors. In such a context, The Octoroon represents a form of continuity with what came before – and must therefore be seen in Irish as well as American contexts. Its impact on subsequent performance histories is also considered, up to and including the staging on the Abbey Theatre stage of An Octoroon – an adaptation of the original play – in 2022.

This chapter focuses on the ‘Irish’ plays of Dion Boucicault who dominated the world of nineteenth-century anglophone theatre with commercial and critical successes in London, New York and Dublin. His crowd-pleasing melodramas rejected the crude stereotype of the Stage Irishman and provided positive protagonists for his global Irish audiences, while always remaining alert to the commercial imperative. However, in the period of the Literary Revival Boucicault’s plays were seen as perpetuating an image of Ireland as ‘the home of buffoonery and easy sentiment’. Brian Friel’s later equation of Boucicault’s plays with pantomime continued this dismissal of the playwright and none of his work was performed at the Abbey until 1967. Since the publication of David Krause’s Dolmen Press Boucicault in 1964, he has been regarded in more positive, if complex terms and, as Fintan O’Toole argues, if you exclude Boucicault ‘you begin to seriously distort the nature of what the theatrical canon might be’.