James McKenna Sculptor, Playwright and Poet

James McKenna, stone sculptor, grew up in Co. Wicklow. He was educated at Kilcool National School, Bray Technical School and the National College of Art and Design, (now the NCAD) in Dublin from 1950—1955. He qualified with a Diploma in Sculpture and won a scholarship to Florence.

This scholarship enabled him to spend six months in Italy but on his return to Ireland, with no real economic outlet for his work, he went to London. There, for much of the time, he shared a flat with the painter Brian Bourke and soldiered at various Paddy in the Smoke jobs.

His experiences included tunnelling for the London Underground, and he would often emerge at the end of the day with a small horse modelled in clay. James exhibited work with the Irish Exhibition of Living Art in 1957 and the following year with the Sculptors' Institute Exhibition. In 1960, he exhibited with Noel Sheridan, Patrick McElroy, Patrick Pye, Elizabeth Rivers and others He was a founder member of Independent Artists, a major force in Irish art well into the 1970s. The Group's first exhibition featured a virtual show within a show of his work.

McKenna's interest in theatre developed in tandem with his interest in art. In 1959 he wrote his first and most successful play,' The Scatterin', about emigration in the teddy boy era.

'The Scatterin' became one of the hits of the 1960 Dublin Theatre Festival. The play was later staged in the West End where it ran for five weeks. It has been revived in several productions since. In 1969, McKenna established his own Rising Ground Drama Group, dedicated to theatre of "the mask, verse speech and dance dialogue", in which he functioned as writer, director, designer and mask maker.

Rising Ground Productions included Citizen's Tree, Hotep Comes from the River, Ulster Lies Bleeding, People Without Fame and At Bantry, set during the 1798 Rising, which was staged at The Peacock Theatre.

Much of this theatrical work was overtly agitprop in nature, but all of his artistic endeavour were bound up with his role as a vocal, fiercely idealistic critic of the then Arts Council and what he perceived as a corrupt, moribund political order.

In art, James was an opponent of abstraction and a committed champion of figuration.

McKenna believed art should be accessible, and function as a progressive, egalitarian force in society. His unapologetically combative stance may explain why it was 1977 before he received his first commission for a sculpture.

Major commissions included the 1977 granite Female Figure and Tree which he sculpted for the Central Bank mint in Sandyford and, perhaps his most ambitious work, the multi-figure limestone monument Resurgence at the University of Limerick, begun in 1979 and completed in 1983.

Notoriously unworldly, McKenna ploughed what money he managed to make back into his work, surviving for long periods on a diet of bread and jam. "He was," a friend recalls, "the most unworldly person I've ever known, completely and utterly committed to art."

As a sculptor McKenna eschewed the use of power tools, preferring laborious manual techniques in carving stone or wood, which meant that the creation of his often monumental horses and figures was hugely labour intensive and uneconomic. A natural carver, his pieces have a rough-hewn, rugged quality but also a gracefulness to them.

Horses remained one of his favourite subjects. His enormous composite horses, ingeniously constructed from several discrete blocks of stone or wood, became something of a trademark.

Like many fine equine statues, they possess something of the formality and dignity of classical Greek sculpture.

McKenna Poet and Dramatist

James McKenna has not in recent times received enough recognition for his written work - though Brendan Behan asked him to write the film script for The Quare Fellow and he did. James's own play, The Scatterin' , was the major hit of Dublin Theatre Festival in 1960, drawing full houses every night and transferring to London's West End for another five-week run. It received superlative critical acclaim : ...the most exciting Irish play since The Plough and the Stars ... The Scatterin' is above and beyond criticism' wrote Séamus O'Kelly, Drama Critic of The Irish Times .

The English Spectator critic had equally high praise:

The Scatterin' has many rare virtues. Mr. McKenna's lyrics have a bite and compassion which are the nearest things to Brecht I have seen written in English.

This is not an attack on Law as such, but on the law which is established and enforced upon the majority of the "polititians" - the free citizens of the "polis" - by a tyrant, a "basileus" ( king), or by a restricted oligarchy against the rules of democracy.All of the play from which the lines just quoted have been taken is a passionate cry against tyranny, but also a strong declaration of the rights of man to obtain justice ("justice even in the stones", p. 22), and self-determination, because justice is "man's essence realized" (p.22), and as such is a synonym of beauty and harmony. At Bantry, typically the story of a defeat, is also the story of the final triumph of man's spirit, which will survive after one more "bleak season [...] in a wretched island" ready to resume its fight for dignity and freedom against all odds, and despite all gods: the very spirit of tragedy, the Attic tragedy of the 5th. c. B.C., which always shows us light after darkness and hope after despair.

At Bantry deals with the abortive French expedition to Ireland in 1796 and encapsulates some of McKenna's fierce republicanism and pride in being Irish. The performance which I attended in The Peacock during its perfunctory two-week run (without the dance element) which it received in August 1967, gave a glimpse, at times, of that 'magic sorrow' of which the author later wrote in his preface to the published text - and the chorus there was 'the first in the history of Irish drama'.

James wrote more than 20 other plays, two of which - Hotep Comes from the River and At Bantry won awards (at Listowel and at the 1916 Commemoration competitions, respectively) but he became frustrated by the lack of opportunities to stage modern drama in Dublin and tried to solve the problem by forming, in 1969, his own modest, unsubsidised, theatre company, Rising Ground .

James McKenna and Experimentation

Rising Ground staged experimental mask plays, mostly biting satires on contemporary politics and on the Dublin arty, bourgeois, scene; all of them written by McKenna. Actors were amateur; the 'theatre' no more than an upstairs room (in Westmoreland Street) ; and the seating - for about 25 - could be described as spartan. Yet for all that, and a constant lack of funds, James kept the flag of experimental theatre flying in Dublin and his savage onslaughts on politicians and establishment figures was every bit as exciting - and as necessary - as those of the Kavanagh brothers in Kavanaghs Weekly had been in 1952.

(One of the playlets which I particularly remember, Keep Paddy at the Mixer , on the theme of exile, highlighted the insensitive comment of the then Minister for Foreign Affair, ' We can't put barbed wire round the Mailboat '). Of course, like the Kavanagh broadsheets, (I nearly said broadsides), McKenna's plays won him no friends among influential people and the fledgling Arts Council, many of whom he lampooned in a way reminiscent of Aristophanes. Agamemnon Won't You Please Come Home , published by James at his own expense, was - as he put it -' more light of foot' and written to the beat of the American Civil War ballad When Johnny Comes Marching Home .

Even here, with a larger cast than audience, McKenna exploited the strange poignancy of the mask to real effect - certainly one of the few Irish dramatists to do so. Those masks, painstakingly made by James himself, were themselves things of beauty, like Japanese Noh masks.

His dramatic adaptation of Hopkins's The Wreck of the Deutschland was performed at The Hopkins Literary Festival 1998 outdoors with masks and employed stylised action and costume, on a stage built by James himself and with him taking part, proved a highlight of the Festival.

Modern Irish theatre may not be heavily in debt to James McKenna - but it does owe him something: a spirit of experimentation and of adventurousness and a willingness to embrace contemporary issues with courage.

A history of Rising Ground will probably never be written; it should be.