It is a sad fact that, whatever its merits in other respects, Irish independence has been a disaster for Irish drama. Since casting off the shackles of their English oppressor, the auld sod’s playwrights have been mired in a mawkish parochialism from which they seem barely able to lift their eyes to the broader horizon before slumping back to the comforting emerald glow of stage Irishness. This can be very lucrative, of course, but it owes more to Tin Pan Alley’s synthetic shamrock ballads of a century ago (“Did Your Mother Come From Ireland?,” etc.) than to any living dramatic tradition, and at least those teary parlor songs could plead in mitigation that they were mostly written by pretend bog-trotters.

Two current New York productions make the point with alarming clarity: the Pearl Theatre Company’s Heartbreak House by George Bernard Shaw and Lincoln Center’s Observe the Sons of Ulster Marching Towards the Somme by Frank McGuinness, one of the stars of the current generation, if one is to judge from the frequency with which his plays are staged internationally. I’ve seen both works on several previous occasions, but not since September 11 gave a topical resonance to their subject: the Great War. For all the Saddam=Hitler/UN=Munich/De Villepin=Chamberlain stuff casually bandied about, the First World War seems far more germane—not just because we’re dealing with unfinished business from the post-Ottoman Anglo-French invention of the “Middle East,” but because September 10, 2001 has unsettling echoes of August 1914,