Lojek provides extensive analysis of space in plays by living Irish playwrights, applying practical understandings of staging and the insights of geographers and spatial theorists to drama in an era increasingly aware of space.
This work provides an overview of Irish theatre, read in the light of Ireland's self-definition. Mediating between history and its relations with politics and art, it attempts to do justice to the enabling and mirroring preoccupations of Irish drama.
Lojek provides extensive analysis of space in plays by living Irish playwrights, applying practical understandings of staging and the insights of geographers and spatial theorists to drama in an era increasingly aware of space.
Seamus Heaney once described the 'sense of place' generated by the early Abbey theatre as the 'imaginative protein' of later Irish writing. Drawing on theorists of space such as Henri Lefebvre and Yi-Fu Tuan, Mapping Irish Theatre argues that theatre is 'a machine for making place from space'. Concentrating on Irish theatre, the book investigates how this Irish 'sense of place' was both produced by, and produced, the remarkable work of the Irish Revival, before considering what happens when this spatial formation begins to fade. Exploring more recent site-specific and place-specific theatre alongside canonical works of Irish theatre by playwrights including J. M. Synge, Samuel Beckett and Brian Friel, the study proposes an original theory of theatrical space and theatrical identification, whose application extends beyond Irish theatre, and will be useful for all theatre scholars.
This book is about the history of character in modern Irish drama. It traces the changing fortunes of the human self in a variety of major Irish plays across the twentieth century and the beginning of the new millennium. Through the analysis of dramatic protagonists created by such authors as Yeats, Synge, O’Casey, Friel and Murphy, and McGuinness and Walsh, it tracks the development of aesthetic and literary styles from modernism to more recent phenomena, from Celtic Revival to Celtic Tiger, and after. The human character is seen as a testing ground and battlefield for new ideas, for social philosophies, and for literary conventions through which each historical epoch has attempted to express its specific cultural and literary identity. In this context, Irish drama appears to be both part of the European literary tradition, engaging with its most contentious issues, and a field of resistance to some conventions from continental centres of avant-garde experimentation. Simultaneously, it follows artistic fashions and redefines them in its critical contribution to European artistic and theatrical diversity.
Drawing on major new archival discoveries and recent research, Patrick Lonergan presents an innovative account of Irish drama and theatre, spanning the past seventy years. Rather than offering a linear narrative, the volume traces key themes to illustrate the relationship between theatre and changes in society. In considering internationalization, the Troubles in Northern Ireland, the Celtic Tiger period, feminism, and the changing status of the Catholic Church in Ireland, Lonergan asserts the power of theatre to act as an agent of change and uncovers the contribution of individual artists, plays and productions in challenging societal norms. Irish Drama and Theatre since 1950 provides a wide-ranging account of major developments, combined with case studies of the premiere or revival of major plays, the establishment of new companies and the influence of international work and artists, including Tennessee Williams, Chekhov and Brecht. While bringing to the fore some of the untold stories and overlooked playwrights following the declaration of the Irish Republic, Lonergan weaves into his account the many Irish theatre-makers who have achieved international prominence in the period: Samuel Beckett, Siobhán McKenna and Brendan Behan in the 1950s, continuing with Brian Friel and Tom Murphy, and concluding with the playwrights who emerged in the late 1990s, including Martin McDonagh, Enda Walsh, Conor McPherson, Marie Jones and Marina Carr. The contribution of major Irish companies to world theatre is also examined, including both the Abbey and Gate theatres, as well as Druid, Field Day and Charabanc. Through its engaging analysis of seventy years of Irish theatre, this volume charts the acts of gradual but revolutionary change that are the story of Irish theatre and drama and of its social and cultural contexts.
This book on modern and contemporary Irish theatre traces how social, cultural and economic capital are circulated in order to demonstrate complex and often contradictory outlooks on equality/inequality. Individual chapters analyse property ownership and inheritance; wealth acquisition; employment conditions; educational access; intercultural encounters; sexual intimacy and violation; and acts of resistance, protest and solidarity. This book addresses complex intergenerational, intercultural, racial, sectarian, ethnic, gender and inter- and intraclass dynamics from the perspective of ranked, objectifying, exploitative and coercive relationships but also in terms of commonalities, complicities, reciprocations and retaliations. Notable are the significances of wealth precarity and shaming; the consequences of anti-materialistic dramaturgical leanings; the pathologising of success; the fraught nature of solidarity; and the problematics of merit, divisive partitioning and muddled mésalliances. Ultimately the book wonders about how Irish theatre distinguishes between tolerable and intolerable inequalities that are culturally and socially but principally economically derived.
The Oxford Handbook of Modern Irish Theatre provides the single most comprehensive survey of the field to be found in a single volume. Drawing on more than forty contributors from around the world, the book addresses a full range of topics relating to modern Irish theatre from the late nineteenth-century to the most recent works of postdramatic devised theatre. Ireland has long had an importance in the world of theatre out of all proportion to the size of the country, and has been home to four Nobel Laureates (Yeats, Shaw, and Beckett; Seamus Heaney, while primarily a poet, also wrote for the stage). This collection begins with the influence of melodrama, and looks at arguably the first modern Irish playwright, Oscar Wilde, before moving into a series of considerations of the Abbey Theatre, and Irish modernism. Arranged chronologically, it explores areas such as women in theatre, Irish-language theatre, and alternative theatres, before reaching the major writers of more recent Irish theatre, including Brian Friel and Tom Murphy, and their successors. There are also individual chapters focusing on Beckett and Shaw, as well as a series of chapters looking at design, acting, and theatre architecture. The book concludes with an extended survey of the critical literature on the field. In each chapter, the author does not simply rehearse accepted wisdom; all of the contributors push the boundaries of their respective fields, so that each chapter is a significant contribution to scholarship in its own right.
This book addresses the notion posed by Thomas Kilroy in his definition of a playwright’s creative process: ‘We write plays, I feel, in order to populate the stage’. It gathers eclectic reflections on contemporary Irish theatre from both Irish theatre practitioners and international academics. The eighteen contributions offer innovative perspectives on Irish theatre since the early 1990s up to the present, testifying to the development of themes explored by emerging and established playwrights as well as to the (r)evolutions in practices and approaches to the stage that have taken place in the last thirty years. This cross-disciplinary collection devotes as much attention to contextual questions and approaches to the stage in practice as it does to the play text in its traditional and revised forms. The essays and interviews encourage dialectic exchange between analytical studies on contemporary Irish theatre and contributions by theatre practitioners.