- Contemporary British Theatre, Contemporary Irish Theatre, Irish Studies, Twentieth Century and Contemporary British Theatre, Modern British Theatre, Aesthetics and Ethics, and 21 moreDavid Greig, Marina Carr, Sarah Kane, Mark Ravenhill, Tim Crouch, Martin Crimp, Martin McDonagh, Conor McPherson, Contemporary Irish fiction, Playwriting, Dramaturgy, Theatre, Contemporary Scottish Theatre, Irish Theatre, Theatre Studies, Contemporary Theatre, Irish literature in English, Irish Theatre and Drama, Literary Theory, Harold Pinter, and Judith Butleredit
A survey of Tracy Letts' drama in context published as part of the programme for the Czech production of Mary Page Marlowe in 2022
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Of all Joyce's extant works, Giacomo Joyce is the one that has least received its due. This book presents a collection of essays devoted to Joyce's last published work. It attempts to place critical reception of this text within... more
Of all Joyce's extant works, Giacomo Joyce is the one that has least received its due. This book presents a collection of essays devoted to Joyce's last published work. It attempts to place critical reception of this text within the framework of Joyce studies.
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A thrust stage in semi-darkness is crisscrossed with searchlights as the performers enter and take up positions at small covered tables at the edge of the elevated playing area. The roving spots and low blue and green lights reveal a... more
A thrust stage in semi-darkness is crisscrossed with searchlights as the performers enter and take up positions at small covered tables at the edge of the elevated playing area. The roving spots and low blue and green lights reveal a vague silhouette skyline and a line of six tall pillars. A band is positioned to the side of the stage. Their music gives way to the sounds of sirens, the bleeping of code and radio interference. Lights converge on Peter Hanly, bespectacled, dressed in a brown suit with an argyle vest and tie, perched on a high stool at a large curved wooden bar counter centre stage. Somewhat gangly but at ease, he addresses the audience in an RP accent, overtly presenting himself as the narrator of a story about to unfold. "Some of us were born to be spies", he opens, "not me, though, I sort of fell into it by chance". His tale of answering "an ad in the Telegraphis delivered in rhyming verse accompanied by music, and an encounter with a "soft-spoken" Colonel is re-enacted. The Colonel, decked in military regalia, pops up abruptly from behind the counter with a sheaf of papers concerning the risks of Irish Nazi sympathizers, bizarre meteorological broadcasts and a mission to Ireland: "A field agent! Crikey! I flushed with pride, / Though I had assumed Eire was on our side. / Oh, I know they're independent, and neutral as such; / But really, aren't they British, pretty much?" exclaims Hanly's character, Tristram Faraday. With a sigh the Colonel disappears behind the counter. Blackout.1 2 The first scene of Improbable Frequency promises historical intrigue, a maladroit narrator and a potentially rich seam of irony. Clearly, too, the set design, music, rhyme and mixed diegetic levels augur a ludic attitude towards theatrical convention.Since its foundation in 1984, Rough Magic Theatre Company has been committed to bringing innovative new theatre writing to the Irish stage. Initially much of this work was non-Irish, though latterly the focus has been on fostering new Irish writing as well as creative adaptations of classics, such as Phaedra or The Taming of the Shrew. Central to their project has been the belief that Irish theatre was, as Lynne Parker put it, rather "inward looking"3 and that exposure to other voices and dramaturgies is necessary and vital. As one of the productions marking Rough Magic's twentieth anniversary year Improbable Frequency, written by founding member of the company Arthur Riordan, with music by Bell Helicopter, synthesizes some very familiar motifs in Irish theatre - national identity, linguistic virtuosity, history and memory - with forms not so prominent in its history - the musical and the cabaret. Patrick Lonergan cites many of the Irish points of reference in his review of the 2004 production, remarking how it combines elements of "the comic absurdism of Beckett, Behan's politicised vaudeville, Boucicault's melodrama, and the gallows-humour cynicism of Ireland's younger writers".4 It also treats an historical moment that has long-term ethical resonance, one that has arguably been among the most important, if discreetly suppressed, factors in the shaping of Irish identity since the 1940s.In 2004, just ten years after the official conclusion of the state of emergency in existence since 19395 and almost sixty years after the end of World War II, Improbable Frequency tackles the issue of Irish neutrality. It is not the first play to do so, though in contemporary theatre Frank McGuinness' Dolly West's Kitchen (1999) is the only immediate predecessor. In contrast to the naturalistic and discursive mode of Dolly West's Kitchen, however, Improbable Frequency is staged as a cabaret comedy; its set involves minimal props and dramatic action is interspersed with musical numbers self-consciously directed to the audience.Set in 1941, the plot revolves around improbable connections between a group of fictional and historical characters. Tristram Faraday, a very British "Enigma" style code breaker, is sent to Dublin to investigate the extent of Irish sympathy for the Nazis and curious coincidences pertaining to the weather. …
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... A Micronarrative Imperative. View full textDownload full text Full access. DOI: 10.1080/ 09670880500439752 Clare Wallace a pages 1-10. ... In Theatre Stuff: Critical Essays on Contemporary Irish Theatre , Edited by: Jordan, Eamonn.... more
... A Micronarrative Imperative. View full textDownload full text Full access. DOI: 10.1080/ 09670880500439752 Clare Wallace a pages 1-10. ... In Theatre Stuff: Critical Essays on Contemporary Irish Theatre , Edited by: Jordan, Eamonn. Dublin: Carysfort Press. ...
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An intensified consciousness of ethical dilemmas and political failures has indelibly stamped the inaugural years of the twenty-first century. While philosophy and critical theory has been gripped by an ethical turn for some time,... more
An intensified consciousness of ethical dilemmas and political failures has indelibly stamped the inaugural years of the twenty-first century. While philosophy and critical theory has been gripped by an ethical turn for some time, digesting the implications of postmodern relativism and Francis Fukuyama’s bold assertion in 1992 that the end of history (or more accurately, ideology) had been reached, such developments may seem far removed from mundane experience. Indeed, this is exacerbated by the multiple valencies attributed to the term ‘ethics’, which seems to lend itself to promiscuous couplings with almost any noun: is ethics the natural inheritor of moral philosophy and criticism, should one regard such a turn as a welcome rerouting of relativism towards judgement and value, or does the current validation of ethics displace or, worse still, neutralize the political as theorists like Jacques Ranciere (2006) or Chantal Mouffe contend (2000)? In the twenty-first century so far, those apparently abstract concerns have been met with a deluge of concrete ones. Fed by the terrorist attacks of September 2001, the War on Terror, Guantânamo, the ever more blatant inequalities of neoliberal globalization and corporate capitalism, a chain of financial crises and the apparent implosion of moral principles in the popular media, the stream of ethics-based debate has unquestionably overflowed the banks of academic or philosophical discourse.
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This paper analyzes Enda Walsh’s three major new plays between 2006 and 2014: The Walworth Farce (2006), Penelope (2010), and Ballyturk (2014). In this period Walsh’s work shifts from being primarily linguistically oriented to becoming... more
This paper analyzes Enda Walsh’s three major new plays between 2006 and 2014: The Walworth Farce (2006), Penelope (2010), and Ballyturk (2014). In this period Walsh’s work shifts from being primarily linguistically oriented to becoming much more attentive to the shape and modalities of performance. Bedbound, Misterman, The Small Things, and The Walworth Farce share a focus on aberrant and confining narrative performance, but a fault line lies between The Small Things and The Walworth Farce. The frenetic pace and surreal tone of the plays remains constant; however, there is a crucial difference in emphasis between carrying on and carrying out such a performance. In this new phase in Walsh’s dramaturgy an elaboration of ritualized, repetitive, and carefully choreographed action in symbolically charged spaces is accompanied by the fragmentation of mimetic and diegetic readability. At the heart of this work is a fundamental set of anxieties. The Walworth Farce, Penelope, and Ballyturk, ...
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Rooted in Chantal Mouffe’s conceptualisation of agonistic pluralism and Jacques Rancière’s work on dissensus, this article analyses the debate scenes of British playwright Lucy Kirkwood’s plays: Mosquitoes (2017) and The Welkin (2020). In... more
Rooted in Chantal Mouffe’s conceptualisation of agonistic pluralism and Jacques Rancière’s work on dissensus, this article analyses the debate scenes of British playwright Lucy Kirkwood’s plays: Mosquitoes (2017) and The Welkin (2020). In Performing Antagonism Tony Fisher suggests that the politics of theatre and performance has formally pivoted towards “a critical politics of the visible.” The article asks what this implies in Kirkwood’s drama. In a contradictory present conjuncture where multiple forms of crisis overlap and interact, Kirkwood’s recent work hones polarised, gendered, antagonistic scenes of encounter where the challenges of dialogue, of understanding and of ethical relations are repeatedly articulated. Through close attention to the ways agonism and antagonism are embodied in the plays, the article argues that for Kirkwood dissensus operates to enact a feminist “critical politics of the visible” in which mutual recognition and resilience are keynotes.
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This series of three volumes provides a groundbreaking study of the work of many of the most innovative and important British theatre companies from 1965 to 2014. Each volume provides a survey of the political and cultural context, an... more
This series of three volumes provides a groundbreaking study of the work of many of the most innovative and important British theatre companies from 1965 to 2014. Each volume provides a survey of the political and cultural context, an extensive survey of the variety of theatre companies from the period, and detailed case studies of six of the most important companies. Volume Three, 1995-2014, charts the expansion of the sector in the era of Lottery funding and traces the resistant influences of earlier movements in the emergence of new companies and an independent theatre ecology that seeks to reconfigure the mainstream. Leading academics provide case studies of six of the most important companies, including: * Mind the Gap, by Dave Calvert (University of Huddersfield, UK) * Blast Theory, by Maria Chatzichristodoulou (University of Hull, UK) * Suspect Culture, by Clare Wallace (Charles University, Prague, Czech Republic) * Punchdrunk, by Josephine Machon (Middlesex University, UK) * Kneehigh, by Duška Radosavljevic (University of Kent, UK) * Stans Cafe, by Marissia Fragkou (Canterbury Christ Church University, UK) TABLE OF CONTENTS 1. Historical and Cultural Background 2. British Theatre Companies of the Period 3. Mind the Gap, by Dave Calvert (University of Huddersfield, UK) 4. Blast Theory, by Maria Chatzichristodoulou (University of Hull, UK) 5. Suspect Culture, by Clare Wallace (Charles University, Prague, Czech Republic) 6. Punchdrunk, by Josephine Machon (Brunel University, UK) 7. Kneehigh, by Duška Radosavljevic (University of Kent, UK) 8. Stans Cafe, by Marissia Fragkou (Canterbury Christ Church University, UK) Endnotes Bibliography Index Notes on Contributors ABOUT THE AUTHOR Liz Tomlin is senior lecturer in the Department of Drama and Theatre Arts at the University of Birmingham, UK.
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An intensified consciousness of ethical dilemmas and political failures has indelibly stamped the inaugural years of the twenty-first century. While philosophy and critical theory has been gripped by an ethical turn for some time,... more
An intensified consciousness of ethical dilemmas and political failures has indelibly stamped the inaugural years of the twenty-first century. While philosophy and critical theory has been gripped by an ethical turn for some time, digesting the implications of postmodern relativism and Francis Fukuyama’s bold assertion in 1992 that the end of history (or more accurately, ideology) had been reached, such developments may seem far removed from mundane experience. Indeed, this is exacerbated by the multiple valencies attributed to the term ‘ethics’, which seems to lend itself to promiscuous couplings with almost any noun: is ethics the natural inheritor of moral philosophy and criticism, should one regard such a turn as a welcome rerouting of relativism towards judgement and value, or does the current validation of ethics displace or, worse still, neutralize the political as theorists like Jacques Ranciere (2006) or Chantal Mouffe contend (2000)? In the twenty-first century so far, those apparently abstract concerns have been met with a deluge of concrete ones. Fed by the terrorist attacks of September 2001, the War on Terror, Guantânamo, the ever more blatant inequalities of neoliberal globalization and corporate capitalism, a chain of financial crises and the apparent implosion of moral principles in the popular media, the stream of ethics-based debate has unquestionably overflowed the banks of academic or philosophical discourse.
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A conversation with playwright David Greig. Originally part of the Contemporary Drama in English conference on Theatre and Spectatorship at the University of Barcelona, June 2015.
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‘[T]here is politics’, states Jacques Rancière, ‘when the boundary separating the political from the social or the public from the domestic is put into question’. In the immediate wake of the Scottish Independence referendum with the... more
‘[T]here is politics’, states Jacques Rancière, ‘when the boundary separating the political from the social or the public from the domestic is put into question’. In the immediate wake of the Scottish Independence referendum with the heightened awareness of the space of democracy it engendered, it is a pronouncement that rings all too true. David Greig’s work has evolved a long running and complex relationship with politics; as he has said himself: ‘in general, I hope to avoid overt political writing. But, I am interested in power and the way that differences in power shape relations between human beings. That inevitably makes my work political.’ As a member of the National Collective of Artists and Creatives for an Independent Scotland, and with a series of Yes/No Plays for Twitter begun in December 2013 running through to the referendum in September, 2014 was a year of unprecedented direct engagement for Greig both as an artist and as a citizen. The Yes/No Plays manifestly ‘put into question’ boundaries in a topical way, but that project is part of what might be described as a broader dissensual tendency in Greig’s work that has matured over the last decade to become one of its most distinguishing features. In borrowing some of the spatial orientation of Rancière’s thought on politics and aesthetics, this article will map the ways Greig’s work harnesses the energies of dissonance and empathy.
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Stella Feehily gained recognition as a playwright in the early 2000s with work that offered ambivalent images of the altered conditions of life in Celtic Tiger Ireland. Her first full play, Duck (2003) and, to a lesser extent, O Go My Man... more
Stella Feehily gained recognition as a playwright in the early 2000s with work that offered ambivalent images of the altered conditions of life in Celtic Tiger Ireland. Her first full play, Duck (2003) and, to a lesser extent, O Go My Man (2006) have been discussed by various theatre scholars mostly with attention to the politics of gender within the Irish context. In this chapter, I explore the politics implicit in the play’s images of circulation. Reading O Go My Man as more than a mere satire of Irish middle-class sexual proclivities, I argue that Feehily’s work advances a suggestive image of, following Raymond Williams’s coinage, the “structures of feeling” that delineate selfhood in the neoliberal, globalized space of twenty-first century Ireland, a space increasingly similar to those of other privileged Western locations.
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During the 1990S Ireland underwent a much-publicised transformation and highly dramatic transformation in status. Whether conceived as a Cinderella story or a tale of tiger economy, this devout, under-privileged, and perhaps rather... more
During the 1990S Ireland underwent a much-publicised transformation and highly dramatic transformation in status. Whether conceived as a Cinderella story or a tale of tiger economy, this devout, under-privileged, and perhaps rather peripheral European state, apparently overnight, "definitively joined the rich world [becoming] the icon of the globalisation process”. The speed of transformation has opened much debate as to what is being gained and lost, and - apart from its much-debated impetus and effects — this process of social and economic change in Ireland inevitably bears far-reaching implications for cultural discourse. Specifically, in terms of theatre, the 1990S was a decade of significant activity for both playwrights and practitioners, critics and commentators.
Research Interests: History and Modern Drama
... A Micronarrative Imperative. View full textDownload full text Full access. DOI: 10.1080/ 09670880500439752 Clare Wallace a pages 1-10. ... In Theatre Stuff: Critical Essays on Contemporary Irish Theatre , Edited by: Jordan, Eamonn.... more
... A Micronarrative Imperative. View full textDownload full text Full access. DOI: 10.1080/ 09670880500439752 Clare Wallace a pages 1-10. ... In Theatre Stuff: Critical Essays on Contemporary Irish Theatre , Edited by: Jordan, Eamonn. Dublin: Carysfort Press. ...
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... of a John Wayne style hero, comic-book child millionaire Algernon Carruthers, Francie Pig the Toll Tax Man, and ultimately the Butcher Boy ... Nugent family (each of these is composed of a father-mother-son trinity) and the... more
... of a John Wayne style hero, comic-book child millionaire Algernon Carruthers, Francie Pig the Toll Tax Man, and ultimately the Butcher Boy ... Nugent family (each of these is composed of a father-mother-son trinity) and the three-cornered friendship between Francie, Joe and Philip ...
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A thrust stage in semi-darkness is crisscrossed with searchlights as the performers enter and take up positions at small covered tables at the edge of the elevated playing area. The roving spots and low blue and green lights reveal a... more
A thrust stage in semi-darkness is crisscrossed with searchlights as the performers enter and take up positions at small covered tables at the edge of the elevated playing area. The roving spots and low blue and green lights reveal a vague silhouette skyline and a line of six tall pillars. A band is positioned to the side of the stage. Their music gives way to the sounds of sirens, the bleeping of code and radio interference. Lights converge on Peter Hanly, bespectacled, dressed in a brown suit with an argyle vest and tie, perched on a high stool at a large curved wooden bar counter centre stage. Somewhat gangly but at ease, he addresses the audience in an RP accent, overtly presenting himself as the narrator of a story about to unfold. "Some of us were born to be spies", he opens, "not me, though, I sort of fell into it by chance". His tale of answering "an ad in the Telegraphis delivered in rhyming verse accompanied by music, and an encounter with a "soft-spoken" Colonel is re-enacted. The Colonel, decked in military regalia, pops up abruptly from behind the counter with a sheaf of papers concerning the risks of Irish Nazi sympathizers, bizarre meteorological broadcasts and a mission to Ireland: "A field agent! Crikey! I flushed with pride, / Though I had assumed Eire was on our side. / Oh, I know they're independent, and neutral as such; / But really, aren't they British, pretty much?" exclaims Hanly's character, Tristram Faraday. With a sigh the Colonel disappears behind the counter. Blackout.1 2 The first scene of Improbable Frequency promises historical intrigue, a maladroit narrator and a potentially rich seam of irony. Clearly, too, the set design, music, rhyme and mixed diegetic levels augur a ludic attitude towards theatrical convention.Since its foundation in 1984, Rough Magic Theatre Company has been committed to bringing innovative new theatre writing to the Irish stage. Initially much of this work was non-Irish, though latterly the focus has been on fostering new Irish writing as well as creative adaptations of classics, such as Phaedra or The Taming of the Shrew. Central to their project has been the belief that Irish theatre was, as Lynne Parker put it, rather "inward looking"3 and that exposure to other voices and dramaturgies is necessary and vital. As one of the productions marking Rough Magic's twentieth anniversary year Improbable Frequency, written by founding member of the company Arthur Riordan, with music by Bell Helicopter, synthesizes some very familiar motifs in Irish theatre - national identity, linguistic virtuosity, history and memory - with forms not so prominent in its history - the musical and the cabaret. Patrick Lonergan cites many of the Irish points of reference in his review of the 2004 production, remarking how it combines elements of "the comic absurdism of Beckett, Behan's politicised vaudeville, Boucicault's melodrama, and the gallows-humour cynicism of Ireland's younger writers".4 It also treats an historical moment that has long-term ethical resonance, one that has arguably been among the most important, if discreetly suppressed, factors in the shaping of Irish identity since the 1940s.In 2004, just ten years after the official conclusion of the state of emergency in existence since 19395 and almost sixty years after the end of World War II, Improbable Frequency tackles the issue of Irish neutrality. It is not the first play to do so, though in contemporary theatre Frank McGuinness' Dolly West's Kitchen (1999) is the only immediate predecessor. In contrast to the naturalistic and discursive mode of Dolly West's Kitchen, however, Improbable Frequency is staged as a cabaret comedy; its set involves minimal props and dramatic action is interspersed with musical numbers self-consciously directed to the audience.Set in 1941, the plot revolves around improbable connections between a group of fictional and historical characters. Tristram Faraday, a very British "Enigma" style code breaker, is sent to Dublin to investigate the extent of Irish sympathy for the Nazis and curious coincidences pertaining to the weather. …
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Rooted in Chantal Mouffe’s conceptualisation of agonistic pluralism and Jacques Rancière’s work on dissensus, this article analyses the debate scenes of British playwright Lucy Kirkwood’s plays: Mosquitoes (2017) and The Welkin (2020). In... more
Rooted in Chantal Mouffe’s conceptualisation of agonistic pluralism and Jacques Rancière’s work on dissensus, this article analyses the debate scenes of British playwright Lucy Kirkwood’s plays: Mosquitoes (2017) and The Welkin (2020). In Performing Antagonism Tony Fisher suggests that the politics of theatre and performance has formally pivoted towards “a critical politics of the visible.” The article asks what this implies in Kirkwood’s drama. In a contradictory present conjuncture where multiple forms of crisis overlap and interact, Kirkwood’s recent work hones polarised, gendered, antagonistic scenes of encounter where the challenges of dialogue, of understanding and of ethical relations are repeatedly articulated. Through close attention to the ways agonism and antagonism are embodied in the plays, the article argues that for Kirkwood dissensus operates to enact a feminist “critical politics of the visible” in which mutual recognition and resilience are keynotes.
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Most of the chapters also include discussion of at least one play from the troupe’s repertory, although i would have welcomed more attention to the troupe’s plays and the ways in which griffith’s contextual research invites scholars to... more
Most of the chapters also include discussion of at least one play from the troupe’s repertory, although i would have welcomed more attention to the troupe’s plays and the ways in which griffith’s contextual research invites scholars to reappraise them. An appendix listing the plays and its members would have been a useful addition.. Overall, though, this an impressively researched work which is sure to prove valuable to early modern drama scholars.
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Mapping the state of contemporary theatre from the 1990s to the present, this volume focuses upon the work of six major dramatists to emerge at the beginning of the 21st century: Marina Carr, Martin McDonagh, Conor McPherson, Sarah Kane,... more
Mapping the state of contemporary theatre from the 1990s to the present, this volume focuses upon the work of six major dramatists to emerge at the beginning of the 21st century: Marina Carr, Martin McDonagh, Conor McPherson, Sarah Kane, Mark Ravenhill, and David Greig.
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Of all Joyce's extant works, Giacomo Joyce is the one that has least received its due. This book presents a collection of essays devoted to Joyce's last published work. It attempts to place critical reception of this text within... more
Of all Joyce's extant works, Giacomo Joyce is the one that has least received its due. This book presents a collection of essays devoted to Joyce's last published work. It attempts to place critical reception of this text within the framework of Joyce studies.
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Výbor Theatre Theory Reader: Prague Schools Writings představuje dosud nejucelenějsi a nejkomplexnějsi výbor studii divadelni teorie vychazeji z ceskeho strukturalismu. Zahrnuje jak zname, tak některe poněkud opomijene texty Jana... more
Výbor Theatre Theory Reader: Prague Schools Writings představuje dosud nejucelenějsi a nejkomplexnějsi výbor studii divadelni teorie vychazeji z ceskeho strukturalismu. Zahrnuje jak zname, tak některe poněkud opomijene texty Jana Mukařovskeho, Jiřiho Veltruskeho, Petra Bogatyreva, Jindřicha Honzla, Karla Brusaka a Miroslava Kouřila, doplněne kratkými eseji režiserů Jiřiho Frejky a E. F. Buriana a nezbytným kontextovým doslovem.
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This article analyses David Ireland’s 2016 play, Cyprus Avenue, in which Eric, a middle-aged Ulster Unionist, becomes convinced that his infant granddaughter is Gerry Adams. Ireland is a Belfast-born actor and playwright whose works –... more
This article analyses David Ireland’s 2016 play, Cyprus Avenue, in which Eric, a middle-aged Ulster Unionist, becomes convinced that his infant granddaughter is Gerry Adams. Ireland is a Belfast-born actor and playwright whose works – Can’t Forget about You (2013) and Ulster American (2018) – have recently generated critical acclaim and debate. Cyprus Avenue, directed by Vicky Featherstone, opened in February at the Abbey Theatre Dublin as part of the theatre’s 1916 commemorative programme, before transferring to the Royal Court. With attention to the nuances of these production conditions, the ways in which Ireland’s play unravels a crisis of northern Irish identity in a post-Agreement context in relation to temporality and gender are explored. Particular attention is focused on how ontological crisis is presented through dislocated, non-linear experiences of time that are enacted within a scenographically crafted space. This crisis is at once personal and impersonal – a metaphor f...
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If Stewart Parker’s theatre plays are well known and have been the subject of considerable critical attention, the same cannot be said of the writer’s work for television. Yet Parker worked repeatedly in radio and television from the... more
If Stewart Parker’s theatre plays are well known and have been the subject of considerable critical attention, the same cannot be said of the writer’s work for television. Yet Parker worked repeatedly in radio and television from the late-1970s until his death. Between 1977 and 1987 eight of his plays were broadcast on British television. Drawing on Parker’s 1986 lecture ‘Dramatis Personae’, this paper considers the ways he explored the genre of the television drama, his playful attitudes to popular culture and how these works provide him with another platform for the depiction of Northern Irish life at the height of the Troubles. I propose that a full appraisal of Parker’s work must take his television drama seriously as an artistic parallel to his theatre plays. The paper concludes with discussion of three of Parker’s plays for television: I’m A Dreamer Montreal; Iris in the Traffic, Ruby in the Rain and Lost Belongings.
Stewart Parker ranks among Ireland's most innovative dramatists and yet as the twentieth anniversary of his death approaches, critical engagement with his work has still much ground to cover. With the exception of The Actress and the... more
Stewart Parker ranks among Ireland's most innovative dramatists and yet as the twentieth anniversary of his death approaches, critical engagement with his work has still much ground to cover. With the exception of The Actress and the Bishop (1976) and Kingdom Come (1977), Stewart Parker's theatre plays have remained in print with Methuen. This is the only material that is currently widely available to scholars, students and readers. However, Parker's work extends well beyond this known core including numerous journalistic writings, literary criticism, radio and television plays.
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Full text available for free from publisher, see link below.
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Monologue is to be found across the spectrum of modern and postmodern theatre and drama, from Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter to Karen Finley and Spalding Gray. The theatre of monologue revolves around the ambiguities of narrative as a... more
Monologue is to be found across the spectrum of modern and postmodern theatre and drama, from Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter to Karen Finley and Spalding Gray. The theatre of monologue revolves around the ambiguities of narrative as a means of knowing and communicating, and is conditioned by dubious authenticity. This collection will bring together original essays on monologue by theatre scholars and practitioners that address the complexities of the form as it appears in contemporary drama and performance.
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Stella Feehily gained recognition as a playwright in the early 2000s with work that offered ambivalent images of the altered conditions of life in Celtic Tiger Ireland. Her first full play, Duck (2003) and, to a lesser extent, O Go My Man... more
Stella Feehily gained recognition as a playwright in the early 2000s with work that offered ambivalent images of the altered conditions of life in Celtic Tiger Ireland. Her first full play, Duck (2003) and, to a lesser extent, O Go My Man (2006) have been discussed by various theatre scholars (including Eamonn Jordan, Elaine Aston and Cormac O’Brien) mostly with attention to the politics of gender within the Irish context. Mária Kurdi’s chapter in Irish Theatre in Transition (2015) titled “Troubled Relations of Gender and Generation in Celtic Tiger Drama: Stella Feehily’s Duck and O Go My Man”, provides the fullest analysis of both plays in this regard. Kurdi incisively remarks upon the “moral chaos” (p.70) of the worlds of these plays, a feature that is signalled by the titular anagram, O Go My Man. Monogamy is blatantly absent in the play’s images of promiscuous circulation, profit and loss. Feehily satirically charts the disordered realities of contemporary Irish experience – globalized, precarious and (belatedly) sexually liberated. The couplings and uncouplings of the play’s various characters are juxtaposed with other forms of compromised exchange: investigative journalism and genocidal violence in Darfur, celebrity fundraising and publicity work in Dublin, photography and performance. In this paper, I want to explore the politics implicit in the play’s images of circulation. Reading O Go My Man as more than a mere satire of Irish middle class sexual proclivities, I will argue that Feehily’s work advances a suggestive image of, following Raymond Williams’s coinage, the “structures of feeling” that delineate selfhood in the neoliberal, globalized space of twenty-first century Ireland, a space increasingly similar to those of other privileged Western locations. Drawing on Sara Ahmed’s notion of “affective economies” (2004) and Jim McGuigan’s analysis in Neoliberal Culture (2016), I will attend to the ways in which the multiple facets of affect (passion, sympathy, empathy, receptiveness to being affected by something/someone) are plaited with economies of exchange and the commodification of human experience in the play. The paper will take O Go My Man as indicative of a development of Feehily’s work that is only partially served by the label Celtic Tiger Drama, that is to say, her keen and ongoing interest in artistically reflecting upon systems of power and precarity in a hyperconnected and predominantly neoliberal environment.
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While writers such as Friel and Murphy seemed to provide a certain continuity in the closing years of the twentieth century, and opening years of the twenty-first century, a new generation of writers emerged for whom the Irish dramatic... more
While writers such as Friel and Murphy seemed to provide a certain continuity in the closing years of the twentieth century, and opening years of the twenty-first century, a new generation of writers emerged for whom the Irish dramatic tradition seemed less an inheritance than a foil to be played against (or with) or, in some cases, an irrelevance. For instance, while Martin McDonagh’s work was sometimes associated with British ‘in-yer-face’ theatre of the 1990s, to some commentators his work made more sense as a subversion of an earlier Irish tradition. In the case of Conor McPherson, the breakdown of a community that made a shared theatre culture possible was registered in a turn to monologue, while writers such as Mark O’Rowe and Enda Walsh showed a freedom of dramatic form and a set of dramatic concerns reflecting immersion in a mediatized, globalized late modernity. This chapter analyses the nature of these disruptions in Irish theatrical tradition.
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If Stewart Parker’s theatre plays are well known and have been the subject of considerable critical attention, the same cannot be said of the writer’s work for television. Yet Parker worked repeatedly in radio and television from the... more
If Stewart Parker’s theatre plays are well known and have been the subject of considerable critical attention, the same cannot be said of the writer’s work for television. Yet Parker worked repeatedly in radio and television from the late-1970s until his death. Between 1977 and 1987 eight of his plays were broadcast on British television. Drawing on Parker’s 1986 lecture ‘Dramatis Personae’, this paper considers the ways he explored the genre of the television drama, his playful attitudes to popular culture and how these works provide him with another platform for the depiction of Northern Irish life at the height of the Troubles. I propose that a full appraisal of Parker’s work must take his television drama seriously as an artistic parallel to his theatre plays. The paper concludes with discussion of three of Parker’s plays for television: I’m A Dreamer Montreal; Iris in the Traffic, Ruby in the Rain and Lost Belongings.
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Rough Magic’s 20th anniversary production, Improbable Frequency, synthesises some very familiar motifs in Irish theatre—national identity, linguistic virtuosity, history and memory. As Patrick Lonergan in his review of the 2004 production... more
Rough Magic’s 20th anniversary production, Improbable Frequency, synthesises some very familiar motifs in Irish theatre—national identity, linguistic virtuosity, history and memory. As Patrick Lonergan in his review of the 2004 production remarks, it combines notes of “the comic absurdism of Beckett, Behan’s politicised vaudeville, Boucicault’s melodrama, and the gallows humour cynicism of Ireland’s younger writers” (Irish Theatre Magazine vol.4, no.20 2004 p.103). It also treats an historical moment that has resonances in the ethical dilemmas of the present, one that has arguably been among the most important factors in the shaping of Irish identity from the 1940s to the latter decades of the 20th century. Arthur Riordan and Bell Helicopter’s ironic, musical treatment of such a topic might seem not only an unlikely generic choice, but also a rather doubtful subject for the marking of Rough Magic’s anniversary. Yet in its critique of isolationism, the play is in keeping with Rough Magic’s aesthetic project. More significantly for the purposes of this paper, formally Improbable Frequency presents a challenge to the conventions of Irish theatre. The paper proposes an analysis the fusion of the non-naturalistic generic elements in the play and their effects. It considers the implications of formal references in conjunction with performance analysis of the 2004 production.
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Theatre has more than its fair share of ectoplasmic activity; from Brighton to Lanarkshire theatres boast of resident ghost. Indeed haunting features as a privileged theatrical device ranging from King Hamlet and the “blood-bolter’d”... more
Theatre has more than its fair share of ectoplasmic activity; from Brighton to Lanarkshire theatres boast of resident ghost. Indeed haunting features as a privileged theatrical device ranging from King Hamlet and the “blood-bolter’d” Banquo who rank among its most esteemed spectral figures, to the melodramatic excesses of Andrew Lloyd Webber’s Phantom of the Opera. And of course at a theoretical level, scholars and practitioners like Herbert Blau and Marvin Carlson contend “one of the universals of performance, both East and West, is its ghostliness, its sense of return, the uncanny but inescapable impression […] that ‘we are seeing what we saw before.’” Specifically in The Haunted Stage, Carlson maintains that theatre is perpetually haunted by itself, functioning as a “repository of cultural memory.” Theatre is constituted by repetition, recycling and the associations borne not only by the stories presented, but by the physical presence of actors, props, even theatre buildings. For Carlson then theatre is a type of “memory machine” whose cogs and levers include the spectral, the spectacular, and ‘re-lived’ experience. Among the many possible dimensions of theatre’s spectrality, Hamlet’s ghost’s injunction to remember points to a rich and complex territory for investigation—that of the interactions between memory and repetition, reiteration and the revenant. This paper proposes an exploration of the interplay of these elements focused through the lens of a very particular form—the theatre of monologue—as it is used by three major playwrights in Post-War British and Irish drama: Brian Friel, Harold Pinter and Samuel Beckett. In the hands of these dramatists, the theatre of monologue is, I contend, a subtle and supple form that solicits vital questions concerning very nature of theatre itself, about the nature of performance and audience response, truth and illusion, narrative and experience. Moreover, it is a form that is particularly imbricated with ghosting.
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Acts of disclosure in McPherson’s drama are complemented by an acknowledgement, in interviews, of his interest in the collusive and mischievous aspects of the theatre experience. Perhaps paradoxically, simultaneous with the recognition of... more
Acts of disclosure in McPherson’s drama are complemented by an acknowledgement, in interviews, of his interest in the collusive and mischievous aspects of the theatre experience. Perhaps paradoxically, simultaneous with the recognition of this sense of playfulness is a certain critical consensus that McPherson is, as reviewer Patrick Brennan recently put it, ‘a deeply moral playwright.’ So how do these elements interact? In this paper I explore the implications of the monologue form, and trace the contours of relations between monologous disclosure and the question of ethics in McPherson’s three most significant monologue plays: St. Nicholas, This Lime Tree Bower and Port Authority.
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Published in 2003 The Speckled People is one of a pair of memoirs written by Hugo Hamilton that attempt to excavate the experience of straddling two national identities and three languages. Hamilton, the author of eight novels and a... more
Published in 2003 The Speckled People is one of a pair of memoirs written by Hugo Hamilton that attempt to excavate the experience of straddling two national identities and three languages. Hamilton, the author of eight novels and a collection of short stories, has regularly focused on senses of displacement both physical and ontological drawing upon his German heritage, post-war European history and his Irish environment in fictional terms. The Speckled People aligns these concerns in a personal account that interweaves his memories of childhood alienation deriving from a transcultural identity, with stories of his mother’s and father’s pasts. As Aoileann Ní Éigeartaigh notes, “Hamilton constitutes a fascinating example of a ‘transcultural personality,’ growing up in a family whose values and tropes of identity were unrecognized by, and unacceptable to, the surrounding culture.” (Ní Éigeartaigh 113) Hamilton himself also foregrounds this sense of being between worlds, “We were ‘the homesick children,’ struggling from an early age with the idea of identity and conflicting notions of Irish history and German history” (Hamilton, “Speaking to the Walls in English”). Despite the topicality of heterogeneous identities or the growing critical interest in forms of life writing, relatively little scholarly commentary exists on The Speckled People; two notable exceptions being Ní Éigeartaigh’s essay on transcultural identity and alienation, and Emily Pine’s treatment of the book in a chapter on Irish memoirs in The Politics of Irish Memory (2011). What I will explore in the following paper are the ways in which Hamilton refracts questions of ideology, agency and identity through private experience. He explores not only the vulnerability of his childhood sense of identity, but also fundamental ethical questions of resistance, the use of violence, the politics of cultural and linguistic heritage. This essay presents an analysis of the interactions between history, memory and narrative in the text and its contexts, and will consider the book as an exemplar of memory work, intersecting with a broader set of issues concerning the performance of cultural memory.
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Provocative, superficially shocking, brutal, sensationalist are just some of the terms which have been applied to Kane’s theatre. Her work has been discussed in terms of neo-Jacobean or neo-Classical sensibilities, Antonin Artaud’s... more
Provocative, superficially shocking, brutal, sensationalist are just some of the terms which have been applied to Kane’s theatre. Her work has been discussed in terms of neo-Jacobean or neo-Classical sensibilities, Antonin Artaud’s Theatre of Cruelty and approached through the Lacanian concept of the Real and trauma theory. Taking the term Kane used herself to describe her work and its aims—experiential—this paper will trace some genealogies of pertinent types of experiential theatre of relevance to Kane’s work, and will go on to explore how Kane works with elements of this heritage in a manner which reflects upon the question of experience in postmodernity.
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A conversation with playwright David Greig. Originally part of the Contemporary Drama in English conference on Theatre and Spectatorship at the University of Barcelona, June 2015.