Re-Imagining the Emigrant/Exile in Contemporary Irish Drama

Abstract

In 1897, when the founders of the Irish Literary Theatre spurred on the Irish dramatic movement by proposing "to have performed in Dublin, in the spring of every year certain Celtic and Irish plays", they probably had no idea how uncertain the definition of "Celtic and Irish plays" was within the nationalist community, or how hotly the question would be contested in the coming decades. But the definition which ultimately won among most theatre workers in Ireland in the first decades of the twentieth century was a theatre that would serve as, in Christopher Murray's words, a "mirror up to nation" a realist theatre that represented images of Ireland and its people counter to anti-imperialist stereotypes, and that served to develop, affirm, or critique a national identity for individuals living within the borders of the Irish nation . But for Irish playwrights working within Ireland, the desire to create images of Irish experience within the thirty-two counties almost always superseded any interest in representing life within Ireland's emigrant communities.