Irish Drama Research Articles

Virtual Learning and Student Engagement: What Samuel Beckett Has to Say

In a synchronous virtual learning environment, instructors often struggle with a perceived loss of connection to students, particularly those who opt to leave their video feeds turned off. Understanding the expectations and anxieties underlying this aspect of teaching virtually, in both students and teachers, is a step in the direction of fostering more effective student engagement in distance learning. The Irish playwright Samuel Beckett highlights some of these concerns in his play Happy Days, suggesting that the desire to be seen is crucial to our sense of identity, as well as how this desire may lead to misinterpretation and coercion of our students.

Productive Transfers: Scottish, Welsh, and Northern Irish Drama Across Borders

Abstract The article traces the production paths of three plays by Scottish, Welsh, and Northern Irish playwrights with a view on their specific reception in different cultural contexts. David Greig’s Dunsinane (2010), Gary Owen’s Iphigenia in Splott (2015), and David Ireland’s Cyprus Avenue (2016) all explore the theme of connections, cultural transfer, and identity translation in social and political environments which are composed of their Indigenous cultures and the strong presence of the British idiom. The protagonists of these plays navigate linguistic and cultural landscapes shaped by the legacy of colonial domination and by the resurgence of local ethnicities. All three plays depict the search for a renewed identity in the period of devolution and cultural diversity. It is the aim of this article to analyse the successful transfers across borders of cultural environments which these plays perform, as they articulate “local” identities for the sake of home and away audiences.

Selection of reference data significantly influences biological maturity timing classification in national youth soccer players

This study investigated biological maturity timing (BMT) in 116 Irish U13 and 958 Swedish U15 male national soccer players using various growth reference datasets. BMT was expressed as a Z-score comparing each player's percentage of predicted adult height (%PAH) to age-specific means and standard deviations reported in the: Berkeley Growth Longitudinal (US), UK 1990 growth reference (UK), and Swedish 2000s growth reference (SWE) studies. Multinomial logistic regression was used to compare BMT classification (Early, On-time, Late) between datasets. One-sampled means t-tests were used to examine BMT-related maturity biases per cohort and reference dataset. For both Swedish U15 ( p < 0.001) and Irish U13 ( p = 0.003) players, BMT classification was significantly influenced by the selection of the growth reference dataset. Only 61% of players had the same BMT category across all reference datasets. Significant maturity biases existed in favour of early maturing Swedish players (mean = 96.5%PAH) in all datasets, although moderate using SWE ( d = 0.7), large using UK ( d = 1.02), and very large using US ( d = 1.36) (all p < 0.001). Small significant maturity biases existed in favour of early maturing Irish players (mean = 87.1%PAH) using UK ( p < 0.001, d = 0.48) and US ( p < 0.001, d = 0.33), but not SWE. We conclude that maturity Z-scores must be interpreted with significant caution, given the large variations in BMT classification between reference datasets.

Irish Playwright Marina Carr on Theatre, War, and Palestine: An Interview

Irish Playwright Marina Carr on Theatre, War, and Palestine: An Interview

Mimesis, Diegesis, and Narrative Frames: Gregory, Beckett, McGuinness

Location always matters – especially in Irish drama. Drawing on the spatial theories of Michael Issacharoff, Hélène Laliberté and Ruth Ronen, the article investigates the unique interplay between dramatic space and the thematic concept of the universal in three Irish plays: Augusta Gregory’s The Workhouse Ward (1908), Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot (1953/55) and Frank McGuinness’s Observe the Sons of Ulster Marching Towards the Somme (1985). I trace a special line of influence between these plays through the lens of spatial theory, and further the discussion of the geographies of Irish drama as examined in Chris Morash and Shaun Richard’s Mapping Irish Theatre: Theories of Space and Place (2013).

THE PROBLEM OF NATIONAL IDENTITY IN MARTIN MCDONAGH’S THE BEAUTY QUEEN OF LEENANE

The end of the nineteenth century was a turning point for Irish theatre with the establishment of the Irish Literary Theatre as playwrights attempted to write national plays disengaging from the British theatre. This period is known as the Celtic Revival, a period of building a national identity both by political and cultural action, during which the playwrights contributed to the rejuvenation of the old Irish myths and traditions. However, at the end of the twentieth century when Ireland became a multicultural country with multiple identities, and opened to the outer world politically and economically, the Irish theatre, too, started to change its outlook by problematizing the nationalistic elements of Irishness instead of glorifying the national and cultural values. The Irish playwright, Martin McDonagh has also maintained a pluralist approach challenging the traditional and national elements in his plays. Instead of adhering to a national identity, McDonagh believes in cultural pluralism to adapt to the new century. McDonagh’s pluralist approach will be discussed with Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of ‘nomadic identity’ and ‘rhizome’. Thus, this paper aims to analyze how McDonagh problematizes the national identity in The Beauty Queen of Leenane by portraying characters, who are incarcerated by meaningless national values and norms.

Liminal figures in Marina Carr’s Woman and Scarecrow and Emma Dante’s Vita mia

This article explores the thematic preoccupation with death and dying in the works of Italian theatre practitioner Emma Dante and Irish playwright Marina Carr. Unlike modern narratives that sharply delineate between life and death, Dante and Carr's writings blur these boundaries, featuring characters who exist in liminal spaces between life and death. Drawing on Victor Turner's theory of liminality, this paper examines these "betwixt and between" characters in two plays: Dante's "Vita mia" and Carr's "Woman and Scarecrow." Both plays challenge and reimagine the conventions of deathbed scenes.

‘Liverpool daft’: the growth of British football clubs’ supporters’ clubs in the late twentieth century in Ireland - a history

ABSTRACT This article examines the development of British football clubs’ supporters’ clubs in Ireland. While it has been previously established that this interest was at times linked to domestic and European success, and the fielding of Irish players, this article examines how these supporters’ clubs facilitated travel to and from matches and how British clubs in turn nurtured this interest. How Irish supporters experienced major stadium disasters at Ibrox in 1971, Heysel in 1985 and Hillsborough in 1989 is examined. How these tragedies were marked in Ireland will also be assessed. At times, crowd safety issues involving British clubs’ supporters in Ireland were also noticeable, and how these were dealt with by Irish authorities will also be discussed. By the 1990s, a wider range of British supporters’ clubs were available to those in Ireland, although interest in Liverpool, Manchester United and Glasgow Celtic still remained highest in the early twenty-first century.

“Taking Comedy Seriously”: Humour in Lisa McGee’s Girls and Dolls

Laughter in the midst of tragedy can be one of life’s most disturbing, cathartic and enlightening experiences, a maxim experienced in Northern Ireland during the Troubles, one of the most painful periods of Irish history. Northern Irish playwrights were acutely aware of this when dealing with violence in their plays and so, however grim the events they depicted, the comic element was very much present. After the Good Friday Agreement, along with the change in the political situation in Northern Ireland, there was a generational change in the theatre. What seems to characterise this new wave is the ironic distance taken towards the sectarian divide and the consequences of the conflict on Northern Irish society, which is revealed above all in their use of humour. Lisa McGee, one of the most important representatives of the new generation thanks to the popularity of her television series Derry Girls, had already shown her maturity in her 2006 play Girls and Dolls, performed by Tinderbox the same year. McGee mixes the tragic and the comic to present the terrible consequences of childhood trauma alongside the violence of the late Troubles, while raising questions about guilt, the meaning of friendship and the subtle ways in which violence affects us. This article aims to analyse the different uses of humour employed by McGee to deal with tragic episodes and their theatrical effect, drawing on the existing research on humour in literature and McGee’s own observations given in an interview with the author on 3 March 2023.

«Панталоне» и «Коломбина» в Стране Советов: визит Б. Шоу и Н. Астор в СССР в 1931 г.

The research is dedicated to the well-known visit of the Irish dramatist Bernard Shaw and the British MP Lady Nancy Astor to the USSR in 1931. However, it seeks to avoid the format of a clichéd observation of commonly known facts concerning their stay in the Land of the Soviets and aims to concentrate on previously unknown circumstances of the preparation of that trip organised by representatives of the People’s Commissariat for Foreign Affairs and diplomats of the Soviet Embassy in London, on the one hand, and the media struggle evoked by that visit within the Soviet and the British press. The novelty of the research is provided by the use of numerous archival documents (AVP RF, RGALI) as well as quoting Bernard Shaw’s private correspondence and his friend Beatrice Webb’s diaries that have not been translated into Russian. The methodological foundation of this article is built upon the biographical and cultural-historic approaches; it also employs narrative techniques in recreating the historical background of Shaw’s visit, and content analysis in commenting on the media publications, and methods of archival research per se. Having considered the abovementioned documents, one can conclude that despite Shaw’s avid interest in Russia, his visit there was to a large extent spontaneous, which, together with Nancy Astor’s unpredictable escapades, caused considerable difficulties to the Soviet officials. Nevertheless, the variety of experiences offered to the British guests as well as the satisfaction of both reasonable and whimsical requests made by the dramatist managed to produce a favourable impression on the company and lead to Shaw’s companions giving generally positive feedback of the trip to the USSR whereas Shaw himself exalted in rave reviews. As a result, the victory scored by the Soviet soft power instigated a deluge of publications in the British media that aimed to discredit Shaw and Lady Astor as central figures of the trip. However, it cannot be said that those angry and even harsh commentaries caused any serious damage to their reputation or influenced their opinions of the USSR at the time.

Extravaganza (hilarious entertainment), a Farce, a Horseplay or a Serious Play – Synge’s The Playboy of the Western World: Ramifications in Contemporary India’s socio-cultural-political landscape

Extravaganza might refer to something very elaborate and spectacular theatrical production. It also can mean an unlimited expression of one’s ideas, thoughts put in through an appropriate mix of style and structure more so by the elements of burlesque or parody. Similarly a horseplay is a type of rough play wherein people push and hit each or behave in a silly way while a farce is defined as something very absurd, ridiculous plots, exaggerated characters and over-the-top situations for comic effect. J.M. Synge’s play The playboy of the Western World offers a fascinating insight into the above-mentioned elements along with the romanticization of heroism and violence. The main purpose of this work is to look into these aspects in the contemporary Indian sociocultural-political landscape where diverse forces are at work. Deploying some of the features of this Irish play, this study seeks to answer whether there were any ‘playboys’ in the Indian political scenario and if so, to what extent does it had an impact on the people. What are the significant horseplay type situations in the real life of Indians during the past decade? Were there any farcical type settings in the Indian context? Detailed probes over a long period of time in the Indian firmament revealed some intriguing aspects of extravaganza, farce and horseplay at work. On the flipside of it, one can find a surfeit of Christy Mahon’s features personified via many people ranging from the Indian prime minister to perceived saints especially after 2014.

Family as a System in Crisis in Christoph Ransmayr’s Odysseus, Verbrecher. Schauspiel einer Heimkehr and Marina Carr’s Phaedra Backwards

As a part of the UIP-2020-02-3695 Analysis of Systems in Crisis and of New Consciousness in 21st Century Literature installation research project, which is being carried out at the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences in Osijek and is financed by the Croatian Science Foundation (https://askins21.ffos.hr/english/),1 this paper focuses on two contemporary plays of Western European literature: Odysseus, Verbrecher. Schauspiel einer Heimkehr (2010), written by the Austrian author Christoph Ransmayr, and Phaedra Backwards (2011), by the Irish playwright Marina Carr. In both plays, the authors use the original myths of Odysseus and Phaedra, reimagining them in a contemporary context in order to show the universality of their experiences, but above all to comment on the society and especially the family as a system marked by crises and conflicts instead of heroic deeds. In this light, the analysis focuses on the text and context within which the state of society and the family are explored. The research is primarily based on the sociological reflections on the system, crisis, and family, drawing on the theoretical approach of the German sociological theorist Niklas Luhmann and focusing on society and social systems. In the selected plays, the family as a specific type of system is examined as well as its dynamics in relation to social changes. In addition to the examination of thematic, compositional, and genre features of the plays, the comparative analysis will reveal their differences and similarities regarding several aspects: the self-concept in context of the family as well as the causes, manifestations, and consequences of the crisis. In other words, its effect on thecharacters and their transformations will be explored.

The “Hibernicising” of George Farquhar’s Plays after Irish Independence

Since the establishment of the Irish Free State in 1922, theatres and theatre companies in the twenty-six counties have had an uneasy relationship with the work of Derry-born playwright George Farquhar. This is presumably because Farquhar’s fervent loyalty to the English crown and his “unenlightened” views on religious tolerance – including the frankly sectarian treatment of Catholicism in his later plays – do not sit well with theatremakers who want to rebrand him as a narrowly and uncomplicatedly Irish playwright. While some post-independence productions of Farquhar have subtly and cleverly exploited Irish elements already present in his scripts, most have crudely imposed Irish elements onto his work. Farquhar is, of course, not the only playwright from the distinguished line of England-based, Irish Anglican dramatists to have had his England-set works “Hibernicised” in this way; works by Oliver Goldsmith, Richard Brinsley Sheridan, Oscar Wilde, and Bernard Shaw have all suffered a similar fate in the Irish Free State and Irish Republic since 1922. However, Farquhar has been subjected to this “Hibernicising” process significantly more than any other playwright from the august Irish Anglican dramatic tradition. And, as this article demonstrates, a reluctance to fully engage with Farquhar’s Irish/British hybridity and his views on religion is a key feature of most productions of the playwright’s work in the twenty-six counties since independence. This is, of course, an insult to a man who – according to legend – was inside the walls during the Siege of Derry, who fought for King Billy at the Battle of the Boyne, and whose childhood home (his father’s parsonage) was burned to the ground by Catholic rebels.

Psychological Growth of the Protagonist in Pygmalion from Ecological System Theory

George Bernard Shaw was an Irish playwright, critic, polemicist and political activist. His influence on Western theatre, culture and politics has extended all over the world from 1880s up until now. He wrote more than sixty plays, including major works such as Man and Superman, Pygmalion and Saint Joan. With the great capacity of using play to reflect the reality, Shaw became the leading dramatist of his era. Shaw’s Pygmalion is one of the most popular of his plays. It has been staged all over the English speaking world. And even a film based on the play called My Fair Lady has proved to be an immense success, and has made everyone knows about this play. Its popularity has been perennial and universal.Henry Higgins, a professor of phonetics, one day overhears a flower girl named Eliza Doolittle and mocks the common way she talks. The next day, Eliza shows up and asks Higgins to teach her talk properly. But his friend Colonel Pickering bets him that he can’t make Eliza talk like a lady in six months’ time. During the time that he accepts the challenge and teaches Eliza, Eliza has many psychological growth. Based on the ecological system theory, this paper makes an analysis of the positive influences of the environment on Eliza from different people and society in reference with five dimensions—microsystem, mesosystem, exosystem, macrosystem and chronosystem. The influence from Eliza’s original family, especially from her father, the guidance and deeds of Higgins, and some effects from the society as the microsystem provide positive help for the psychological growth of Eliza. And the interactions among the microsystem, which construct the mesosystem, together with the exosystem and macrosystem make Eliza, a flower girl, grows into a Duchess Eliza with pride and self-consciousness.

Marina Carr'ın Kediler Bataklığı'nda ve Kanlı Düğün Adlı Oyunlarda Küyerelleşme ve Uyarlama

Embarking on her career by imitating the Beckettian style at the end of the 1980s, Marina Carr (1964- ), a contemporary Irish female playwright, later moves to a phase in which she rewrites ancient myths, Greek tragedies and some other classical works, including those of William Shakespeare, Leo Tolstoy and Virginia Woolf. While Carr brings the female voice and agency into sharper focus in her adaptations, her revisions integrate the global myth or story with local Irish elements. What emerges here is that Carr puts the global in conversation with the local considering that her source text stands for the universal, and her elaboration on Irish culture and troubles resonates with the particular. It is noted that, following the Celtic Tiger period in Ireland, the time Carr initiates her dramatic career, Irish drama has undergone a radical change with globalisation. However, it is the particular argument of this paper that Marina Carr’s way of rewriting corresponds with glocalisation, a term which suggests the incorporation of the local into the global. From the early stage of her writing to her recent works, Carr’s use of glocalisation in her adaptations can be pinpointed. This article explores the elements of glocalisation in Carr’s adaptation of Euripides’s Medea in By the Bog of Cats… (1998) and Federico García Lorca’s Blood Wedding in Blood Wedding (2019) as examples from two different periods of her oeuvre. Hence, this paper considers the Irish playwright’s method of adaptation in terms of glocalisation.

CONFLICT OF IRISH CULTURAL IDENTITY IN BRIAN FRIEL’S TRANSLATION

Having been colonized by Britain, Ireland was in a very deprived condition for a very long period, especially for poor Catholic Irish. Britain had destroyed Irish civil rights by forcing them in a massive potato plantation merely to fulfill British people’s need for food, which caused the Irish in a great famine and poverty. Written by an Irish playwright in 1980, which is set in agricultural land, northern side of Ireland, Brian Friel’s Translations illustrates clearly the suffering of Irish villagers in 19th century. By applying Homi K. Bhabha’s post-colonialism theory, the dialogues from the play are analyzed to explain Irish cultural identity conflict. This play is analyzed by using a descriptive qualitative method. The result of analysis reflects the mimicry concept from Bhabha, in which it shows an ambition that Irish tradition must be vanished and replaced by British tradition. The dialogues in Brian Friel’s Translation describe that Irish language and tradition which tells a lot of Greek mythology must be replaced with the culture of Standard English language. The translations on Irish local place names into English language are forced for the sake of British imperialism importance in the Ordnance survey.

A Study of Irish Cultural Identity in J.M. Synge’s Riders to the Sea

John Millington Synge (1871-1909) is one of the most outstanding Irish playwrights. He is known for his realistic vision and authentic contributions to Irish drama. He was one of the earliest realistic writers to represent Irish society brilliantly in his plays. One of his greatest contributions has been his association with the Irish Literacy Revival. The Irish Literary Revival also called the Irish Literary Renaissance or Celtic Twilight began around 1885 and ended during the early twentieth century. Though the primary aim of this movement was to gain home rule and independence from England, it also resulted in vigorous literary productions. Writers and scholars struggled to create works that were authentically and originally Irish. Here Synge played an active and key role in writing plays in stylized peasant dialect. He was a prominent figure in the Abbey Theatre of Ireland, founded in 1903 by William Butler Yeats and Lady Augusta Gregory, which opened its doors in 1904. Thus, he contributed immensely to the development of modern Irish drama and left an indelible impression on Irish literature. This paper aims to analyze Synge’s role in the Irish Literary Renaissance and the formation of Irish cultural identity vis-a-vis his play Riders to the Sea. Riders to the Sea (1904) is a one-act tragic play that contains both modern and classical elements of tragedy. This play deals with the sorrows and predicaments of human beings on Aran Island. The paper will further explore the representation of Irish peasant society which is based upon his keen observation of the sufferings, perils, and traditions of Irish people during his staying in Aran Island.

“You’re like a vegetarian in leather shoes”: Cognitive Disconnect and Ecogrief in Stacey Gregg’s

In this article, we analyse how Northern Irish playwright Stacey Gregg’s Override (2013) can be read through the lens of the Anthropocene, a term from the geological sciences that has been appropriated by the humanities to question issues of human exceptionalism. Firstly, we examine the ways in which the play, by means of Vi and Mark’s failed attempt to escape technological misuse, challenges the nature/culture dichotomy, which is central to the instrumentalisation of nature for human domination Secondly, we consider how ecogrief comes with the loss of social and humanistic elements that were once grounding and grounded, but are now unstable and murky, such as the idea of what entails a human being. Ultimately, we contend that that derives from the cognitive disconnect resulting from not being able to understand one’s role in the development of an ongoing catastrophe.

‘Save Me from My Friends’: The Transnational Intimacies of an Irish-Latvian Couple within and beyond the Irish Revolution, 1916–1921

What can a focus on intimacies and affinities between radical immigrants in Ireland and their Irish counterparts tell us about the transnational scope of the global Irish revolution? This article answers this question through the lives of Rose MacKenna, an Irish playwright and socialist, and her husband Sidney Arnold, a Latvian literary translator. The activist career of this obscure Irish-Latvian couple took them from revolutionary Dublin in the wake of the Easter Rising to Petrograd in the aftermath of the Russian Revolution. This article argues that MacKenna and Arnold, by virtue of their obscurity and marginality, rather than in spite of it, can suggest the sources and methodologies required to uncover the transnational world of Ireland's radical intelligentsia.

A Talk with Irish Playwright Deirdre Kinahan

An interview with the highly acclaimed Irish Playwright Deirdre Kinahan.