Northern Irish Drama Research Articles

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)

Human Rights and Theatre Practice in Northern Ireland: A Round-Table Discussion

This round-table discussion, edited by Eva Urban and Lisa FitzGerald, took place on 5 July 2019 as part of the conference ‘New Romantics: Performing Ireland and Cosmopolitanism on the Anniversary of Human Rights’ organized by the editors at the Brian Friel Theatre, Queen’s University Belfast. Lisa FitzGerald is a theatre historian and ecocritic who completed postdoctoral fellowships at the Centre de Recherche Bretonne et Celtique (CRBC), Université Rennes 2 and the Rachel Carson Centre for Environment and Society, Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich. She is the author of Re-Place: Irish Theatre Environments (Peter Lang, 2017) and Digital Vision and the Ecological Aesthetic (forthcoming, Bloomsbury, 2020). Eva Urban is a Senior Research Fellow at the Senator George J. Mitchell Institute for Global Peace, Security, and Justice, Queen’s University Belfast, and an Associate Fellow of the Institute of Irish Studies, QUB. She is the author of Community Politics and the Peace Process in Contemporary Northern Irish Drama (Peter Lang, 2011) and La Philosophie des Lumières dans le Théâtre Breton: Tradition et Influences (Université de Rennes, 2019). Rosemary Jenkinson is a Belfast playwright and writer of five short story collections. Her plays include The Bonefire (Rough Magic), Planet Belfast (Tinderbox), White Star of the North, Here Comes the Night (Lyric), Lives in Translation (Kabosh Theatre Company), and Michelle and Arlene (Accidental Theatre). Her writing for radio includes Castlereagh to Kandahar (BBC Radio 3) and The Blackthorn Tree (BBC Radio 4). She has received a Major Individual Artist Award from the Arts Council of Northern Ireland to write a memoir. Tom Maguire is Head of the School of Arts and Humanities at Ulster University and has published widely on Irish and Scottish theatre and in the areas of Theatre for Young Audiences and Storytelling Performance. His heritage research projects include the collection Heritage after Conflict: Northern Ireland (Routledge, 2018, co-edited with Elizabeth Crooke). David Grant is a former Programme Director of the Dublin Theatre Festival and was Artistic Director of the Lyric Theatre in Belfast. He has worked extensively as a theatre director throughout Ireland and is co-investigator of an AHRC-funded research project into Arts for Reconciliation. He lectures in drama at Queen’s University Belfast.

Multilingual Theatre in Brittany: Celtic Enlightenment and Cosmopolitanism

In this article Eva Urban describes a historical tradition of Breton enlightenment theatre, and examines in detail two multilingual contemporary plays staged in Brittany: Merc’h an Eog / Merch yr Eog / La Fille du Saumon (2016), an international interceltic co-production by the Breton Teatr Piba and the Theatr Genedlaethol Cymru (the Welsh-language national theatre of Wales); and the Teatr Piba production Tiez Brav A Oa Ganeomp / On avait de jolies maisons (2017). She examines recurring themes about knowledge, enlightenment journeys, and refugees in Brittany in these plays and performances, and presents the argument that they stage cosmopolitan and intercultural philosophical ideas. Eva Urban is Senior Research Fellow at the Senator George J. Mitchell Institute for Global Peace, Security and Justice, Queen's University Belfast. She has held a Région de Bretagne Postdoctoral Research Fellowship at the Centre for Breton and Celtic Studies, University of Rennes 2, a research lectureship in the English Department, University of Rennes 2, and a British Academy Postdoctoral Fellowship at the University of Cambridge. She is the author of Community Politics and the Peace Process in Contemporary Northern Irish Drama (Peter Lang, 2011) and has published articles in New Theatre Quarterly, Etudes Irlandaises, Caleidoscopio, and chapters in book collections.

Memory, Trauma and Forgetting in Northern Irish Drama

The ethical exhortation ‘not to forget’ runs the risk of ‘a memory that would never forget anything’. At the other extreme is the no less dangerous risk of total amnesia, an erasure of the past that immediately suggests Freud and the return of the repressed. The complex balance to be found between memory and forgetting is particularly fraught in Northern Ireland and the politics of how the past is to be negotiated in the current post peace process climate. I propose to look at this subject in relation to the trauma engendered by decades of violence in two Northern Irish plays: Quietly (2012) by Owen McCafferty, set in the post peace process climate of 2009 but harking back to a violent incident in the same location thirty-five years earlier; and Frank McGuinness’s Carthaginians (1988), a canonical play about one of the central events in ‘the Troubles’, Bloody Sunday of 30 January 1972, but set more than a decade later.

Memory, Trauma and Forgetting in Northern Irish Drama

The ethical exhortation ‘not to forget’ runs the risk of ‘a memory that would never forget anything’. At the other extreme is the no less dangerous risk of total amnesia, an erasure of the past that immediately suggests Freud and the return of the repressed. The complex balance to be found between memory and forgetting is particularly fraught in Northern Ireland and the politics of how the past is to be negotiated in the current post peace process climate. I propose to look at this subject in relation to the trauma engendered by decades of violence in two Northern Irish plays: Quietly (2012) by Owen McCafferty, set in the post peace process climate of 2009 but harking back to a violent incident in the same location thirty-five years earlier; and Frank McGuinness’s Carthaginians (1988), a canonical play about one of the central events in ‘the Troubles’, Bloody Sunday of 30 January 1972, but set more than a decade later.

Reification and Modern Drama: an Analysis, a Critique, and a Manifesto

Drawing on a close reading of Theodor Adorno's essay, ‘Education after Auschwitz’, in this article Eva Urban develops the argument that an analysis of the reification that reduces human relationships to mere business interactions has been a central concern of modern drama. The article offers an analysis of some of the ways in which this theme continues to be represented, interrogated, and challenged internationally in contemporary political plays and theatre performances across a range of genres and grounded in a variety of dramaturgical principles. It asks how drama, theatre-making, theatre-spectating, and theatre-participating can create dynamics necessary to enable a move from reified consciousness towards the development of critical autonomy and solidarity. A negotiation of the principles of critical consciousness and solidarity is problematic within economic structures that cause social, ethnic, and religious atomization and divisions. Her argument concludes with an outline for a manifesto for political drama and theatre practice to work against reification. Eva Urban is a lecturer and researcher in the English Department and an Associate of the Irish Studies Research Centre, CEI/CRBC, at the University of Rennes 2, France. She recently completed a British Academy Postdoctoral Fellowship at the University of Cambridge and is a Life Member of Clare Hall, Cambridge. The author of Community Politics and the Peace Process in Contemporary Northern Irish Drama (Peter Lang, 2011), she has also published articles in New Theatre Quarterly, Etudes Irlandaises, Caleidoscopio, and edited book collections.

Lessing's Nathan the Wise: from the Enlightenment to the Berliner Ensemble

Lessing's Nathan the Wise (1779), exemplary for its enlightenment and humanist ideals, assembles Jews, Christians, and Muslims in dialogue during the medieval crusades in Jerusalem. Their encounters allow them to transcend conflict, to recognize their common humanity, and to resolve their differences through dialectical discourse and group arguments. In this article Eva Urban looks closely at the representation of enlightenment in this play and examines the potential role of plays and theatre practice in developing autonomous citizenship and intercultural understanding. Particular reference is made to the 2013 Berliner Ensemble production of Nathan the Wise in relation to aesthetic debates about modern political drama. Eva Urban is a British Academy Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Faculty of English, University of Cambridge, and an Associate of Clare Hall, Cambridge. She is the author of Community Politics and the Peace Process in Contemporary Northern Irish Drama (Peter Lang, 2010) and has published a number of articles on political drama and Irish studies.

Home-Grown Politics: The Politicization of the Parlour Room in Contemporary Northern Irish Drama

In Stewart Parker’s Pentecost (1987), Christina Reid’s Tea in a China Cup (1983) and The Belle of the Belfast City (1989), and Gary Mitchell’s Loyal Women (2003), the home and nation become inextricably linked, as one serves as a microcosm for the other. Within the volatile political landscape of Northern Ireland, the private space of the home becomes a public forum for the characters in these plays, almost all of whom are women. Often unheard by the predominantly male presence in Northern Irish politics, these women find their voice in the domestic comfort of their homes, with the support and encouragement of other women. Yet despite this reign over the domestic sphere, the women’s perceived power and dominance is continually subverted, through economic, sexual, and political means.

(Lecture de) Community Politics and the Peace Process in Contemporary Northern Irish Drama

Eva Urban, specialiste en etudes theâtrales, a choisi de s’interesser plus particulierement au theâtre politique et a l’espace theâtral en tant qu’espace utopique – laboratoire d’idees et de formes ou peut surgir une infinite de possibles. Auteur d’une these sur identite et communaute dans le theâtre nord-irlandais contemporain (2008), elle entreprend ici, dans un ouvrage solidement etaye d’un point de vue theorique et critique, de mettre en lumiere le regard politique que portent sur le conf...

‘Moving On’: The Politics of Shared Society in Northern Ireland

AbstractDebates over the direction of the Northern Irish peace process have moved from decommissioning and all‐party inclusion to community relations and whether society is becoming more or less integrated and shared. This article contends that what is missing from this debate is consideration of the fact that a process of de‐politicisation is occurring – specifically, inspired by a progressivist imperative, political discourse and engagement are increasingly moving from the public sphere to more privatised concerns. I argue that that vision does not speak to the trauma of the past and that the silencings, limitations, and dilemmas it leads to are most lucidly seen in recent Northern Irish drama productions. I conclude by sketching an alternative ethical vision based on an attachment to remembering historical injustices and a repudiation of the social pressure to draw a line under the past.

Rattle Away at Your Bin: Women, Community, and Bin Lids in Northern Irish Drama

Rattle Away at Your Bin: Women, Community, and Bin Lids in Northern Irish Drama

Sam Thompson, Stewart Parker, and the lineage of northern Irish drama

Northern Irish dramatist Stewart Parker (1941-1988) wrote plays typically valued for their wit, intellectual content, and formal experimentation. Nonetheless, he was profoundly influenced as a young man by a very different sort of playwright. Sam Thompson (1916-1965), who began his working life in the Belfast shipyards, squarely confronted Northern Irish sectarianism in his plays. His sense of the political potential of drama left an enduring mark on Parker, who organized and edited Thompson's manuscripts several years after his untimely death. Although their dramatic writings bear little resemblance to each other, the two writers should be regarded as united in a common Northern Irish dramatic tradition by virtue of their shared socialist outlook, belief in the importance of individual stands against conformity, and sense of theatre's social mission.

The Ulster Literary Theatre and the Northern Revival (review)

Reviewed by: The Ulster Literary Theatre and the Northern Revival Richard Rankin Russell Eugene Mcnulty . The Ulster Literary Theatre and the Northern Revival. Cork: Cork University Press, 2008. Pp. 272, illustrated. $60.00 (Hb). Scholarship on drama from the North of Ireland and then Northern Ireland (beginning in 1922) has long languished in the shadow of scholarship on drama in the rest of the country. Sam Hanna Bell's pioneering study The Theatre in Ulster (1972), which covers Northern theatre from the founding of the Ulster Literary Theatre through 1971, is now badly outdated. Ophelia Byrne's pamphlet The Stage in Ulster from the Eighteenth Century (1997) is more comprehensive than Bell's study, but its range makes its individual discussions relatively brief. Marilynn Richtarik's Acting between the Lines: The Field Day Theatre Company and Irish Cultural Politics, 1980–1984 (1994) provides a thorough account, focused on one of the major Northern Irish theatre companies after World War II, while Anthony Roche wrote a very fine long chapter on recent Northern Irish drama in his Contemporary Irish Drama from Beckett to McGuinness (1994). Christopher Murray contributed a helpful overview of contemporary Northern Irish drama in his Twentieth-Century Irish Drama: Mirror Up to Nation (1997). Finally, Bernard McKenna's Rupture, Representation, and the Refashioning of Identity in Drama from the North of Ireland, 1969– 1994 (2003) and Tom Maguire's Making Theatre in Northern Ireland: Through and beyond the Troubles (2006) are welcome full-length studies of recent Northern Irish drama in relation to the so-called "Troubles," but their appearance has made the absence of a book-length study focusing on the theatre of the Northern revival in the early-twentieth century all the more embarrassing. Eugene McNulty's new book fills this critical lacuna with a deft, sure-footed discussion of cultural revival in the North of Ireland in the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries against the backdrop of the gathering Home Rule movement and resistance to that movement in unionist areas of the North. Bulmer Hobson and David Parkhill – founders of the Ulster Literary Theatre, the Northern "answer" to the Abbey Theatre – were some of the prime proponents of a distinctively Northern identity that was also identifiably Irish. Herein, of course, lay the problem for the ULT's dramatists and for other Northern revivalists, such as the radical poet, journalist, and playwright Alice Milligan: how to articulate the North as a site of Irish nationalism in the spirit of the ecumenical 1798 rising that brought together Protestants and Catholics, yet also to suggest the North's peculiar cultural attributes. McNulty's first two chapters set the idea of the North of Ireland in two contexts: the revival taking place in the rest of Ireland and the increasing [End Page 250] religious division in the North because of the gathering momentum for Home Rule in the other provinces in the last decades of the nineteenth century. The first chapter discusses the advocacy for a revived nationalism by a whole cluster of Northern nationalist intellectuals including the Protestant Milligan. In her literary work, Milligan began reclaiming Irish heroes such as Cuchulain as essential to an Ulster-centric nationalism, a manoeuvre that laid the foundation for similarly Northern-centred mythic plays once the Ulster Literary Theatre began operating. A fascinating account of the founding of the Henry Joy McCracken Literary Society in 1895 and its subsequent promulgation of an ecumenical Northern nationalism in the run-up to the centenary of 1798, occupies much of chapter two. Chapter three's close account of the founding of the Ulster Literary Theatre is especially strong, attending as it does to the notion of identity as performance, the interaction between the forerunners of the Abbey Theatre and the founders of the ULT, and the Feis of the Nine Glens in Country Antrim in 1904, which last event enabled the ULT to posit an area of rural, Gaelic Ulster as a counterpart to the valorized West of Ireland in the Abbey repertoire. In this chapter and throughout the study, Yeats is a favourite whipping boy, characterized as haughty and grudging: for example, he refused, at first, to let the ULT perform his and...

Exorcising the Ghosts of Conflict in Northern Ireland: Stewart Parker's The Iceberg and Pentecost

Exorcising the Ghosts of Conflict in Northern Ireland: Stewart Parker's The Iceberg and Pentecost Richard Rankin Russell Plays and ghosts have a lot in common. The energy which flows from some intense moment of conflict in a particular time and place seems to activate them both. Plays intend to achieve resolution, however, whilst ghosts appear to be stuck fast in the quest for vengeance. Stewart Parker.1 Stewart Parker's The Iceberg (1974) and Pentecost (1987), works that function as bookends of his all-too-short dramatic career, are haunted by ghosts from Northern Ireland's history.2 Both plays accord with Bernard McKenna's description of Northern Irish drama as "'perform[ing]' moments of rupture that consciously emphasize the destruction of individuals' and communities' identities" (8). The Iceberg stages the loss of pride in the Irish Protestant community surrounding the sinking of the Titanic in 1913, whereas Pentecost explores a seeming triumph of Northern Irish Protestantism, the 1974 Ulster Workers' Council strike—an event, however, that led to a more inflexible political discourse and additional destructive violence in the province. Both works feature revenants, [End Page 42] persistent ghosts whose claims must be recognized and resolved through a process of reconciliation. Parker's revenants share their marginalized status with other ghosts from literature set in Northern Ireland: for example, Brian Friel's three Catholic characters trapped in the Derry Guildhall in The Freedom of the City (1973) and Seamus Heaney's fisherman friend Louis O'Neill in "Casualty" (1979). Friel's and Heaney's ghosts haunt the places where they were murdered and function as emblems of conscience for their respective authors who reject, finally, the official rhetoric of both Irish nationalism and British authority. Parker's ghosts also haunt their localities, watching and waiting for their presence to be realized and their lives given retrospective value and worth; unlike Heaney's shade of his friend O'Neill, however, they are steadfastly sectarian, bound to their respective Protestant communities by religious and cultural ties. Whereas Heaney's vision of his dead friend leads to a realization that he must leave his Catholic "tribe" to write poetry, Parker's imagined ghosts suggest a commitment to work within his own Protestant community to develop a drama that might soften a hardened political divide. Parker belonged to a cohort at Queen's University in Belfast in the early to mid-1960s that included Michael Longley, Seamus Heaney, and Bernard MacLaverty.3 All joined Philip Hobsbaum's Belfast Group, a writing group modeling a "twin emphasis on ethics and aesthetics" that proved crucial in developing the ecumenical, highly crafted work of participants (Russell, "Inscribing Cultural Corridors" 223). Parker would quickly merge an ethical compulsion to ameliorate sectarian tensions with his developing dramatic craft: his dual concern to experiment with a variety of styles and to fashion plays "composed of parts which work together in harmony" equipped him to critique the random violence and fragmentation in Northern Ireland in the 1970s and 1980s in formally diverse plays invoking a vision of cultural wholeness ("The Modern Poet as [End Page 43] Dramatist" 2).4 Parker's early concern with aesthetic harmony coincided with his developing ethical urge to promote social accord in the province through depicting its particularized local situation and engaging members of disparate factions in dialogue. Apparitions in The Iceberg and Pentecost emerge from the sense of deprivation engendered by the conflicts in the North—such as those from the 1910s and 1920s, and the contemporary Troubles that began in 1969, the latter of which includes Protestant opposition that toppled the provisional power-sharing government in 1974. The flitting, circling ghosts in these two dramas invoke that pervasive sense of dislocation among Northern Irish Protestants, who feel neither fully British nor Irish and fear abandonment by Britain. Moreover, these apparitions suggest a generalized Northern Irish working-class dispossession stemming from a shared poverty, a deprivation both fueling sectarianism and existing as a potential bond...

The Boards and the Border: Myths and Mythtakes in the Criticism of Northern Irish Drama

The Boards and the Border: Myths and Mythtakes in the Criticism of Northern Irish Drama