Knowing Their Place: The Ulster Lyric Theatre, the Lyric Theatre, and the Northern Irish Theatre Scene

Abstract

This article is a revised version of a paper first presented under invitation in 2004 at Ulster Literary Theatre Centenary Symposium at the Queen's University Belfast. Despite its recent centenary (1904-2004), the Ulster Literary Theatre (ULT) - and Northern Irish theatre more generally - remains relatively neglected by theatre criticism. This article seeks to go some way towards addressing this by examining the points of contact and conflict between the project of the Ulster Literary Theatre and its latter day counterparts the Ulster Group Theatre (1939-1972), the Arts Theatre (1947- ) and the Lyric Theatre (1951- ). At the centre of this enquiry is the issue of how ideology and material circumstance compete with or mutually elaborate one another to produce each theatre's sense of `place' and the implications of this for each theatre's developing cultural identity.