Theatre And Ireland

What is the significance of theatre and performance within Irish culture and history? How do we understand the impact and political potential of Irish theatre? This innovative survey of theatre in Ireland covers a range of drama and performance, from the 17th century to the present. Expanding the field of Irish theatre to include mumming, wake games, prison protests and theatre riots, the book argues that Ireland's longstanding association with performance illuminates key aspects of its cultural history and politics. Foreword by Fiona Shaw.

Winner of the Susan Smith Blackburn Prize, 1997. 'Carr's harrowing play has the scale and anguish of myth, and the immediacy of a contemporary anecdote.' Independent on Sunday There's a wolf tooth growin in me heart and it's turnin me from everywan and everthin I am. Portia Coughlan lives life in monstrous limbo, haunted by a yearning for her spectral twin brother lying at the bottom of the Belmont river, unable to find any love for her wealthy husband and children, seeking solace in soulless affairs, deeply afraid of what she might do. Portia Coughlan premiered on the Abbey Theatre's Peacock Stage, Dublin, in April 1996 and transferred to the Royal Court Theatre, London, in May that year. It was revived at the Almeida Theatre, London, in October 2023. 'Taut and haunting, funny and sad . . . Carr plays with time and place to resonant, ultimately devastating effect.' The Stage 'One of the most important Irish plays of the twentieth century.' Arts Review 'Marina Carr goes to a deep place that has not just to do with society now but that touches an inner tragedy of existence. The female quality of her writing comes through not only in the way she writes about women, it's in the physicality in her writing. She is right in there with the cycles of life, with the blood and the dirt.' Joyce McMillan, New York Times

Morash and Richards present an original approach to understanding how theatre has produced distinctively Irish senses of space and place.

Sometimes a person needs to create an act that destroys the world because the world is broken. The virus has ravaged Thebes. Millions are dead and the economy has tanked. Vaccinations have been administered and the Festival of Liberty is imminent. Things are finally about to change. The countdown is on but leader Creon and his quarantined niece, the self-identifying X'ntigone, have unfinished business before the celebrations can commence. What happens when old-world order meets a radical new world vision? In this thrilling meditation on Sophocles' timeless Greek tragedy, political expediency meets the voice of a generation who want to tear down the power structures that have ill-served a crumbling state. Darren Murphy's X'ntigone is a fresh and vital discourse for our times, when even truth has been sacrificed at the altar of political gain and avarice.

This major new study presents a political and cultural history of some of Ireland's key national theatre projects from the 1890s to the 1990s. Impressively wide-ranging in coverage, Theatre and the State in Twentieth-Century Ireland: Cultivating the People includes discussions on: *the politics of the Irish literary movement at the Abbey Theatre before and after political independence; *the role of a state-sponsored theatre for the post-1922 unionist government in Northern Ireland; *the convulsive effects of the Northern Ireland conflict on Irish theatre. Lionel Pilkington draws on a combination of archival research and critical readings of individual plays, covering works by J. M. Synge, Sean O'Casey, Lennox Robinson, T. C. Murray, George Shiels, Brian Friel, and Frank McGuinness. In its insistence on the details of history, this is a book important to anyone interested in Irish culture and politics in the twentieth century.

Publisher Description

Dublin's Abbey Theatre opened its doors to the public on December 27, 1904. Over the course of the past century, it has survived fire, riot, and perpetual artistic disagreement to become one of the greatest theaters in the world, presenting over 740 new plays by some of the greatest Irish writers of the modern age, including W. B. Yeats, J. M. Synge, Sean O'Casey, and Brian Friel. Christopher Fitz-Simon celebrates the Abbey Theatre's centenary by offering a witty chronological survey of the company's distinguished and colorful history. Beautifully illustrated with cartoons, sketches, and production photographs, The Abbey Theatre: The First 100 Years provides an overview of the great actors, directors, and playwrights of twentieth-century Irish theater, as well as detailing the company's long and illustrious relationship with American theaters and playwrights. It also contains a complete list of plays produced at the Abbey Theatre since 1904 and features a preface by its current artistic director, Ben Barnes. 200 illustrations, 20 in color.

In the annals of Irish studies and theater history much has been written about the Abbey Theatre. Now, Mary Trotter not only sheds new Light on that company's history but also examines other groups with a range of political, religious, gender, and class perspectives that consciously used performance to promote ideas about nationalism and culture in Ireland at the turn of the last century. This innovative, interdisciplinary work details how different nationalist organizations with diverse political and artistic goals employed theater as an anticolonial tool. In Dublin's turbulent cultural and political arena during the first decades of the twentieth century, nationalist audiences read popular Irish melodramas in subversive ways; the Daughters of Erin staged tableaux of great women heroes; and the Abbey players earned both acclaim and apprehension within the nationalist community. Here is a compelling analysis of these and other groups' prominent role in Irish nationalism in the years before Easter 1916, and the way these political theaters gave birth to modern Irish drama.

The historiography of Irish theatre has largely been dependent on in-depth studies of the play-text as the definitive primary source. This volume broadens the concept of evidential study of performance through the use of increasingly diverse sources, including annotated scripts, photographs, correspondence, administrative documents and recordings.