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This book focuses on the drama and poetry published since 1990. It also reflects upon related forms of creative work in this period, including film and the visual and performing arts. The book discusses some of the most topical issues which have emerged in Irish theatre since 1990. It traces the significance of the home in the poetry of Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin and Vona Groarke. The book also focuses on the reconfigurations of identity, and the complex intersections of nationality, gender and race in contemporary Ireland. It shows how Roddy Doyle's return to the repressed gives articulation to those left behind by globalisation. The book then examines the ways in which post-Agreement Northern fiction negotiates its bitter legacies. It also examines how the activity of creating art in a time of violence brings about an anxiety regarding the artist's role, and how it calls into question the ability to re-present atrocity. The book further explores the consideration of politics and ethics in Irish drama since 1990. It talks about the swirling abundance of themes and trends in contemporary Irish fiction and autobiography. The book shows that writing in the Irish Republic and in the North has begun to accommodate an increasing diversity of voices which address themselves not only to issues preoccupying their local audiences, but also to wider geopolitical concerns.
abasement, and the ressentiment of slave morality conquers noble values in modern Ireland. Even as Yeats was recasting The Golden Helmet as The Green Helmet , he was becoming more and more dissatisfied with the national culture of his time and was taking up an increasingly aristocratic stance in relation both to Irish society and the Irish theatre. Synge’s death in the
9780719075636_4_003.qxd 16/2/09 9:24 AM Page 43 3 Home places: Irish drama since 1990 Clare Wallace and OndPej PilnM To appraise Irish theatre of the recent past is an ominous task; to attempt to predict what might be remembered in the future a treacherous one. From 1990 to mid-2006 the Irish Playography database lists 842 plays, devised pieces and adaptations produced in Ireland by Irish theatre companies and other commercial bodies. Since 1990 critical interest in Irish theatre has grown rapidly, spurred on in part by the Abbey Theatre centenary in 2004
the 1990s and 2000s. In the context of an Irish theatre scene criticised by Jason King and George Seremba among others for being largely silent about social change related to immigration (King, 2005: 121; 2007: 41–2), the work of these men is both extremely important and crucially limited. As Patrick Lonergan argues, ‘it is important not to exaggerate the value of white middle-class writers producing plays for white middle-class audiences about the marginalization of Ireland’s most recent immigrants’ (2004: 150). Lonergan implies that the perspectives of white Irish
, Kazem Shahryari (an Iranian-born, Paris-based director), and French translator Emile-Jean Dumay, who had introduced Shahryari to Bolger’s work. Taken together, these plays by writers of different generations, genders, geographical origins and aesthetic sensibilities amount to a series of interventions aimed at bringing to the consciousness of Irish and international audiences the plight of those many immigrants and refugees seeking a new life in Ireland. They bear out Jason King’s contention that ‘more than any other literary or performing art form, the Irish theatre
of Irish nationalism’s historical aspiration to decolonisation’ (Merriman, 2011: 29). While decolonisation appears to be an unaccomplished task, there is a strong feeling that ‘Irish theatre … has the capacity to imagine a Decolonised Ireland of solidarity in diverse citizenships’ (Merriman, 2011: 225). Reading Irish theatre of the 1990s, Victor Merriman advocates an interventionist theatre that acts as ‘a witness’, a central figure which ‘stands among the facts and struggles of history … so that their materiality and their meaning may be available to the lived
] when the Catholics of Ireland ruined themselves in the Stuart cause’.100 The play’s criticism of Catholic allegiance to the Stuart cause is recognised and, it appears, shared and accepted. Gregory’s approach has also been lauded by Ernest Boyd, one of the Revival’s early critics, who argued that the treatment of one of the most delicate and dangerous subjects in Irish history indicates that Lady Gregory is able to bring considerable impartiality to the 151 Anna Pilz portrayal of national subjects. The dramatists of the Irish Theatre have broken with the tradition
the body is a sign of both social positionality and cultural experience associated with the symbolic. At the same time it also reflects individual desire that remains undefined by communal discourses and retains ties with the semiotic. Subjectivity is evoked in this kind of theatre as a process rather than a fixed entity, a site of rivalling forces that ultimately defy strict categorisations of the self. Critical accounts of the Irish theatre have highlighted the privileging, until very recently, of the verbal and literary over the physical and performative
envisages when commenting on the current state of Irish theatre: In recent years, a number of productions have tried to depict the fact that Ireland is no longer a monocultural society – albeit usually through the introduction of a character who is an asylum seeker or a refugee. I have yet to see an Irish theatre production where a black actor comes on stage to play a role that has no relevance to his/her skin. (Adigun, 2004: 31; quoted in Lanters, 2005: 35) The literary works examined in this collection are, therefore, timely artistic statements in a country in which
Irish Theatre that ‘ “Home” in Irish theatre never seems to be a place’. Instead, it is ‘a past memory or a future possibility’ (p. 72). Carr’s plays are haunted by memories. The dead bar the way to the future and they are all-pervasive. The homes in the three plays I explore are all close to water, and, though the protagonists are drawn to water, it turns out to be a source of danger. The ghost stories that are told in The Weir destabilise its realistic setting, creating an imagined, spectral halo (of an alternative, haunted, landscape) around what is depicted on