Irish Drama Research Articles

Sacred Socialism

Sacred Socialism

Political Discourse in Modernist and Meta-Postmodernist Irish Drama

Political Discourse in Modernist and Meta-Postmodernist Irish Drama

Theatre and Archival Memory: Irish Drama and Marginalised Histories, 1951–1977 By Barry Houlihan. Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan, 2021; pp. xiv + 275, $109.99 cloth, $109.99 paper, $84.99 e-book.

Theatre and Archival Memory: Irish Drama and Marginalised Histories, 1951–1977 By Barry Houlihan. Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan, 2021; pp. xiv + 275, $109.99 cloth, $109.99 paper, $84.99 e-book.

Review of Masculinities and Manhood in Contemporary Irish Drama: Acting the Man, by Cormac O'Brien

Review of Masculinities and Manhood in Contemporary Irish Drama: Acting the Man, by Cormac O'Brien (Palgrave Macmillan, 2021). ISBN: 978-3-030-84074-7, 292pp., €105.49 (hardcover)

Dramaturgical Roles of Present and Past Teenage Characters in Post-Agreement Northern Irish Drama

The Good Friday Agreement (1998) has set in motion significant changes in Northern Ireland, generating new conditions which, however, also brought numerous problems to the surface on various levels of society. Sociologists have called attention to how intensely the persistent afterlife of sectarian hostilities affect especially teenagers who are often unable to see their goals clearly. Several contemporary Northern Irish playwrights have relied on young characters to pinpoint timely and pressing social and cultural issues as well as to throw light on the precarity of the post-Troubles environment. This essay discusses three plays from different decades of the post-Agreement period: Gary Mitchell’s Trust (1999), Lucy Caldwell’s Leaves (2007), and Owen McCafferty’s Quietly (2012). Their respective dramaturgies showcase the long-lasting influence of the historical burden of the Northern Irish conflict on young peoples’ subjectivities as well as demonstrate how middle-aged characters are still haunted by memories of the psychic wounds they suffered during the most formative years of their lives. Through their underage protagonists, each playwright suggests that members of this generation might not be able to further strengthen the peace they have formally inherited. (MK)

John Singer's Comedic Drama and Western Culture

The writing of the West in Irish drama began in the Irish Renaissance in the late 19th and early 20th centuries and continues to this day. During the Irish Renaissance, in order to resist British colonial rule, writers endowed the western frontier region of Ireland with romantic imagery and mythic qualities, seeing it as a cultural symbol embodying nationhood, poetic idyll and Irishness. The West of Ireland fits perfectly with the writers' construction of Irish culture during this period in terms of its colonial history, economic environment, sense of national identity, language and culture, and religious beliefs. Thus, the Irish West became not only a symbol of Irish identity, but also a unique ideological field for the revitalisation of the Irish nation.

Andy Blake; or, the Irish Diamond

This scholarly edition of Andy Blake includes an introduction arguing for its claim to be Dion Boucicault’s first Irish drama. It also emphasises Agnes Robertson’s part in developing Boucicault’s comic heroes, while playing a boy. Consideration of the French source text reveals a connection with a revolutionary figure, the gamin de Paris, and demonstrates how Boucicault’s adaptation added a backdrop of British military imperialism.

History and Religious Imagination: Bernard Shaw and the Irish Literary Revival—an Overview

ABSTRACT An overview of Bernard Shaw’s involvement in early twentieth-century Irish history, both political and cultural. Pressure building since the death of Parnell in 1891 would lead to Ireland’s independence from Britain and the establishment of the Irish free State in 1922, with Shaw’s Irish friends Horace Plunkett, Augusta Gregory, George Russell (“Æ”), and especially W. B. Yeats all prime movers in major new national cultural institutions that sprang up around the turn of the century. Through these four as well as his Irish wife, Charlotte Shaw, Shaw became involved in both the affairs of the nation as well as in Irish drama, especially Dublin’s Abbey Theatre. Yeats and his work were particularly important for Shaw’s contributions to the Irish literary revival, in which, whether in satirical, comic, or tragic modes, his Irish plays comprehend Irish mythology, history, imagination, and religious salvation.

Book Review: Theatre and Archival Memory: Irish Drama and Marginalised Histories 1951–1977

Book Review: Theatre and Archival Memory: Irish Drama and Marginalised Histories 1951–1977

Boucicault-O’Casey-Hansberry: Tracing a Line of Influence

In 1959, Lorraine Hansberry's play A Raisin in the Sun opened on Broadway after a successful tour. This remarkable performance featured a black cast, and staged a generation that was beginning to find intellectual sources of race pride. By contrast, exactly 100 years earlier, in 1859, the ‘great dramatic “sensation”’ of the New York stage had been Dion Boucicault's The Octoroon, a play set on a plantation and which describes blackness as shameful. In form and in subject matter, these two plays appear to have little in common, but this essay traces a connection between the two. The connection is this: the Irish playwright Sean O’Casey felt inspired by reading and performing the work of Boucicault, and, in turn, O’Casey provided a ‘point of departure’ for Hansberry when she scripted her best-known play. By examining these moments of connection, the essay examines a significant if counter-intuitive line of influence.

Heroes on Stage: Robert Emmet, Charles Parnell, and Michael Collins in Three Irish Plays from Interwar Avant-garde to the 1990s

Once they enter the zone of public memory, historical figures, however celebrated they might be, are no longer able to speak for themselves, but become objectified by historians, creative writers, and interested parties down through the generations. Their portraits of revolutionaries might potentially counteract the subjugation imposed by colonial and anti-colonial powers and give them a more humane touch that prompts the audiences’ independent judgments. Representations of these historical figures might therefore put their contributions, personalities and even charisma under the microscope, challenging the historiography that tends to apotheosize them as heroes. The plays under discussion, chosen for their particularly avant-garde innovations and not yet fully discussed in the literature, are Dennis Johnston’s The Old Lady Says “No!” (1929), Larry Kirwan’s Mister Parnell (1992), and Tom MacIntyre’s Good Evening, Mr Collins (1995). These plays feature Robert Emmet, Charles Parnell, and Michael Collins, renowned yet still controversial Irish revolutionaries, respectively.

Ghosts of Tao House

Ghosts of Tao House

Back and Forth to Methuselah: Utopia, Dystopia, and Problematizing Age and Longevity in G. B. Shaw’s Interwar Play Cycle

After the straightforward response to the horrors of the First World War in Heartbreak House (1919), Irish playwright George Bernard Shaw (1856-1950) created a more nuanced and rather allegorical reflection on the aftermath of the military events that reshaped, among several fields of culture, both political and philosophical attitudes in Europe. In Back to Methuselah (1921), the author provides five interconnected plays from five different and, to a certain extent, imaginary eras of human history and civilization. Reaching back to biblical sources and origin myths, as well as forward to futuristic settings and certain predictions, this Shavian Pentateuch, accompanied by an equally complex Preface, is a representative of interwar utopianism. Aimed at general, age-old, and overarching, essentially eternal themes and issues, such as the meaning of life and death, possible ways to achieve maximum longevity, as well as the potential betterment and advancement of humankind, this five-part dramatic work appears to be Shaw’s first, but not only, truly “speculative” writing in the literary sense of the term. This essay presents a reading of Back to Methuselah as both a modernist piece of utopian literature and an authorial answer to wartime inhumanity, keeping the scope of analysis primarily on the features and elements that create and maintain the modern-day scientific and speculative nature of the play(s). Furthermore, I look at the way(s) in which the concept of age and the social phenomenon of ageism are addressed and utilized in the play cycle, also analyzing certain Shavian predictions regarding the future of humankind in general, as well as the dramatist’s views anticipating the emergence of a discourse later identified as posthumanism. Relying on the theoretical approaches and standpoints of recent scholarship, my ultimate goal is to examine the forward-looking plot(s), interwar significance, and present-day relevance of G. B. Shaw’s utopian sci-fi drama cycle.

Rewriting Hippolytus: Hybridity, Posthumanism, and Social Politics in Marina Carr's Phaedra Backwards

This article sheds light on Irish playwright Marina Carr's 2011 Phaedra Backwards, which premiered at the McCarter Theater in Princeton, as a particularly dense and multidirectional twenty-first century retelling of the Hippolytus myth. The centrality of the Minotaur in the drama, the role of technology in his creation, the place of nature in human life, and certain surprising motifs, such as the eating of daffodils, are examined through the lens of posthumanism to show how Carr's play invites reflection on nonconformism in society and on human damage to the natural world.

Kyra Markham: An Introduction

Kyra Markham: An Introduction

Political Censorship on the Late-Victorian Stage: Rereading Oscar Wilde’s Vera; or, the Nihilist[s]

Abstract The publication in 2021 of the Oxford English Texts version of Oscar Wilde’s Russian melodrama Vera; or, the Nihilist (1883), based, as it is, on new archival research by its editor Josephine Guy, deepens the mystery surrounding the alleged censorship of Oscar Wilde’s first play. While Wilde himself promoted the idea that the expression of democratic ideals in his Nihilist play had prevented its performance in England, a genetic analysis of an early manuscript version of the play (1881) made available in the OET Vera and Guy’s reconstructed play-text of the first performance, problematizes the putative censorship of the play on political grounds. In conjunction with new readings of Wilde’s Poems (1881) and his letters from the period, the genetic analysis that follows crystallizes attendant issues concerning the extent of Wilde’s radicalism at the outset of his career and the nature of his commitment to Irish republicanism per se. Where the Chief Examiner of Plays (E. F. S. Pigott) promoted the idea that there was no political censorship of the theatre at the end of the Victorian period, the examples of the alleged suppression of Wilde’s melodrama and the experiences of his mentor, the Irish playwright Dion Boucicault, at the hands of the British press evince the multiple forms of political censorship and self-censorship that came to shape (and impede) the development of the late-Victorian stage.

<관대한 애인>에 투영된 식민 지배자의 형상과 정기공연의 연극적 형상화에 관한 연구

Geugyesuryeonguhoe held the second performance in June 1932. Three works were performed at this time, including The magnanimous lover written by John Ervine. The 2nd performance was not a performance that received much attention overall, and The magnanimous lover was also evaluated as ‘normal’. However The magnanimous lover was an Irish play, and Irish plays performed in the 1920s and 1930s were often regarded as examples of special significance in Korean (Joseon) theater world. At the time of the regular performance Geugyesuryeonguhoe translated the play literally and performed it as it is in the original, and as a result the considerable value of this work could not be accurately portrayed. Therefore, academic research on The magnanimous lover has not been done properly so far, and the problems that appeared in the process of performing such a play on stage have not been essentially discussed. Based on the effect of ‘Injeong-play’ performed by The magnanimous lover, only the evaluation that the performance of the work was ‘normal’ was confirmed. Therefore, in this study, the image of the ruler and the objection of the ruled projected in this work will be explored, and the stage formation of such a theatrical message will be looked into critically.

Kristevan intertextuality between Waiting for Godot and The Pillowman

This study is focused on intertextual interpretation over the common elements in Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot and Martin McDonagh’s The Pillowman. Both plays are excellent examples of how reality and imagination interact with one another. Waiting for Godot and The Pillowman are psychological plays that explore the relationship around existentialism, death, and future hope. Beckett and McDonagh are two well-known Irish playwrights who will probably always hold a special place in world literature. In this context, Beckett is widely regarded as one of the greatest playwrights of the twentieth century, both in Europe and across the globe. Besides, despite the fact that McDonagh began writing plays at the end of the twentieth century, he should be regarded as a playwright of the twenty-first. On the other hand, intertextuality is a text analysis strategy based on postmodernism, introduced by literary theorist Julia Kristeva in the late 1960s. According to the intertextual theory, all texts interact with one another inside the writer’s and reader's social and cultural background. Kristeva's intertextual theory later began to be used as one of the contemporary literary criticism methods. During the intertextual criticism, a bond is formed between the reader and the work they are reading. In this framework, the reader becomes the critic who delivers a unique process by detecting parallels between works. Actually, The Pillowman was written half a century after Waiting for Godot, and the plots of the two plays are quite different. However, the character pairs, character names, told stories, themes, phrases, setting, and feeling of hope in The Pillowman are similar to Beckett’s Waiting for Godot. All these support Kristeva's theory of intertextuality that writers create a new text under the influence of several works they read in the past.

Theatre and Archival Memory: Irish Drama and Marginalised Histories, 1951–1977 by Barry Houlihan

Theatre and Archival Memory: Irish Drama and Marginalised Histories, 1951–1977 by Barry Houlihan

Ireland, Enlightenment and the English Stage, 1740–1820 by David O’Shaughnessy

Reviewed by: Ireland, Enlightenment and the English Stage, 1740–1820 by David O’Shaughnessy Misty G. Anderson David O’Shaughnessy, ed., Ireland, Enlightenment and the English Stage, 1740–1820 (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 2019). Pp. 282; 21 b/w illus., 5 tables. $99 cloth. What did Irish theatre, Irish playwrights and actors, and the idea of Irishness in the anglophone theatrical world contribute to Enlightenment values? David O’Shaughnessy, serving as both academic editor and impresario, has answers. His collection brings together some of the top voices in eighteenth-century theater studies to make visible what has been a submerged Irish influence and to consider its collective impact on Enlightenment ideas. Rejecting the “barometer” metaphor [End Page 403] Michael Brown uses in The Irish Enlightenment (2016) to contain theater as reflective, O’Shaughnessy and his contributors read for mediations that shape the anglophone Enlightenment imagination. These essays paint a picture of Irish theatrical contributions that move far beyond Teagues and brogues to show how Irish actors, playwrights, and sensibilities were not peripheral but central. The claim, well substantiated, is that a deep bench of Irish talent, including Catherine Clive, Peg Woffington, Charles Macklin, Oliver Goldsmith, Arthur Murphy, Richard Brinsley Sheridan, and John O’Keeffe, defined Georgian theater. Part of the magic of this collection is the conversation O’Shaughnessy has hosted, most directly in the two accounts of London-based Irish actor John Johnstone’s influence, but also through the gracious references to other essays in the volume, evidence of true collaboration that models the values of the cosmopolitan Irish Enlightenment O’Shaughnessy maps out. The three sections of the collection draw our focus first to performance, then place, then political perspective, in ten essays that leave the reader with no doubt about the central function of Irish players and playwrights in eighteenth-century theater and with a new working thesis about an Irishness without borders, figuring and performing the migrant in the metropole that makes so many of these plays “‘excentrically’ cosmopolitan” (Burke, 248). It is fitting that the conclusion, which frames out the overarching thesis, comes from Helen Burke, the theater scholar who has contributed the most to our understanding of Irish influence and representation in the long eighteenth century.1 O’Shaughnessy’s own introduction reflects the partly reparative mission of this collection: to show that Irish plays, playwrights, and influence are everywhere. That celebratory trend, which could drift into encomium, stays within O’Shaughnessy’s deft control, beginning with his introductory, non-exhaustive, yet still impressive overview of a missing Irish theater history. His critical intervention in this volume is to explore why it’s been hiding in plain sight, in bodies and bodies of work that often blurred Irish difference but that collectively defined the Georgian theater world from within the London metropole. Performance and Irishness serve twinned functions in this collection, recalibrating an Irish Enlightenment that is not limited by, or to, negative Irish stereotypes but instead defined by a positive Irish influence on Enlightenment values of mobility, self-improvement, knowledge, and equality. Michael Brown’s “door-stopping” The Irish Enlightenment grounds O’Shaughnessy’s approach, both because it acknowledges theater’s productive work in a field of print Enlightenment studies and because the centering of Irishness or, more accurately, multiple types of Irishness that embody the principle of civility in action, shows how the Irish were fundamental to the Enlightenment concept of civilization. His attachment to the concept of Enlightenment risks what Al Coppola calls “Enlightenolatry” and the need to think through Enlightenment’s Cold War (rather than Kantian) production and twenty-first-century pop culture re-animation. But the notion of a “thick” Enlightenment that isn’t over yet (as Joseph Roach has argued) comports with the overarching vision of a more capacious geography of Enlightenment ideals within imperial Britain, starting at home.2 O’Shaughnessy argues that performances between London and Dublin crossed borders through an Irish Enlightenment that was “energized by its national kinesis and the cosmopolitan environs of London” (13), an Irishness not merely but always peripatetic, always translating, always mediating. This collection is structurally and intellectually engaged with a capacious notion of Enlightenment oriented around political justice, even...