Patrick Lonergan, Irish Drama and Theatre Since 1950

2017

Perspectives on Contemporary Irish Theatre "Perspectives on Contemporary Irish Theatre gathers together scholars and practitioners to give us a comprehensive picture of the state of Irish theatre. Providing fresh perspectives on playwrights like McDonagh, Walsh, and Marina Carr, and on the work of companies like Corcadorca and BrokenCrow (as well as interviews with key practitioners), this book is going to be a key part of the debates over performance in Ireland in the 21st Century.

Ilha do Desterro A Journal of English Language, Literatures in English and Cultural Studies

He is the author (with Chris Morash) of Mapping Irish Theatre: Theories of Space and Place (2013) and has published on Irish Drama in major journals and edited collections, most recently (with Chris Morash) an article on Irish theatre and phenomenology in Modern Drama (Summer 2018

Theatre History Studies, 2021

The Australasian journal of Irish studies, 2011

Deakin home > Deakin University Library > Deakin Research Online > Modern Irish theatre (Book review). Modern Irish theatre (Book review). Devlin-Glass Frances 2008, Modern Irish theatre (Book review), The Australasian journal of Irish studies, vol. 8, 2008-2009, pp. ...

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content: The Dublin Theatre Festival (DTF) is an annual celebration of Irish and world theatre, usually taking place in the autumn. Since it was established in 1957, it has become one of Ireland’s most important cultural events. At the beginning of Willie White’s tenure as artistic director in 2011, DTF commissioned the essay collection that would become “That Was Us”: Contemporary Irish Theatre and Performance. Conscious of the variations in arts practice that followed Ireland’s economic downturn, White wanted to ensure that the changing character of Irish theatre would be documented and analysed. Editor Fintan Walsh, in his insightful introduction, situates contemporary Irish theatre practice connected to DTF in the climate of political, social, and economic upheaval in Ireland from 2007 to 2013 – the main timeframe of the book. “That Was Us” is divided into five sections: (1) “Theatres of Testimony”; (2) “Auto/Biographical Performance”; (3) “Bodies out of Bounds”; (4) “Placing Performance”; and (5) “Touring Performances.” Each subdivision comprises two or three critical essays, followed by a practitioner’s reflections on her/his work. The book makes its most important intervention in its engagement with forms that “don’t depend upon written play texts or the production of illusion, but rather make performances about real people, places, and events” (5). Companies employing different combinations of co-created, improvised, physical, documentary, site-responsive, and participatory practices have recently risen to prominence in Ireland. The proliferation of practices that privilege performance making over pre-existing scripts (many of which have a longer – though relatively marginalized – history in Ireland) has made the issue of documenting performance all the more pressing. Brokentalkers is one such path-breaking company whose work receives timely discussion in “That Was Us.” Under the artistic direction of Feidlim Cannon and Gary Keegan, Brokentalkers devises original performances with a range of collaborators, offering varying blends of music, song, dance, documentary theatre, and autobiographical performance. In doing so, the company tackles a range of challenging subjects, including the experience of grief shared by Cannon and his mother after a family tragedy, in Have I No Mouth (2012); abuse in Catholic care institutions, incorporating survivors’ testimonies, in The Blue Boy (2011); and the personal stories of older gay men, interviewed by singer/songwriter Seán Millar, in Silver Stars (2008). Charlotte McIvor’s rigorous analysis of Brokentalkers’ work appears in the first section of “That Was Us,” serving to hone and develop issues raised in Walsh’s introduction. She closely reads Have I No Mouth, The Blue Boy, and Silver Stars, to illuminate the relationship between “theatrical form and contemporary Irish social fragmentation” (37). Locating these important works within Carol Martin’s concept of the “theatre of the real,” McIvor powerfully concludes that such theatre “must constantly push at its own limits to reach further, to expand the collective that can be invited in and represented through Irish theatre, whether as performance collaborators, givers of testimony, or members of the audience” (55). Brokentalkers reappears in the concluding chapters of the book. In the penultimate contribution, theatre critic Peter Crawley surveys a range of Irish works that have toured internationally, often with DTF as their point of departure. Crawley considers how various contextual factors and each production’s stylistic features might influence its international success. Discussing works by such companies as Rough Magic, Pan Pan, THEATREclub, and Fabulous Beast Dance Theatre, as well as Brokentalkers, Crawley raises questions about what defines a production as Irish, in the context of increasing cultural globalization. Brokentalkers’ co-director, Gary Keegan, meditates further on this issue in his thought-provoking reflection, which concludes the volume. Keegan maintains that, although Brokentalkers is “concerned with telling Irish stories,” various encounters with work from outside of Ireland have inspired the company “to tell these stories in a way that international audiences recognise” (232). ANU Productions is another company that receives extended consideration in the volume. ANU has garnered national critical and scholarly acclaim in recent years for its immersive, site-specific work within the “Monto,” Dublin’s one-time red light district. Brian Singleton’s essay, contextualized with long international histories and recent theories of site-specific theatre, moves toward a strikingly personal record of how he...

LUX: A Transdisciplinary Journ al of Writing & Research from Claremont Graduate University, 2013

Two Epigraphs “All profound changes of consciousness, by their very nature, bring with them characteristic amnesias. Out of such oblivions, in specific historical circumstances, spring narratives.” -Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities “Nations, like narratives, lose their origins in the myths of time, and only fully realize their horizons in the mind’s eye.” -Homi K. Bhabha, Nation & Narration In his Discourse on Colonialism, Aimé Césaire writes, “A civilization that proves incapable of solving the problems it creates is a decadent civilization. A civilization that chooses to close its eyes to its most crucial problems is a stricken civilization. A civilization that uses its principles for trickery and deceit is a dying civilization” (Césaire np). Postcolonial and historicized readings of Irish literatures describe the evils of colonialism, and the ways it has distorted nationhood and nation-building to serve the ends of greedy empires. But, what happens to a nation or nations in the vacuum after a major colonial power abandons the colony or is driven out? Obviously, there is much hard work involved, sacrifice on all sides, and recognition of past wrongs inflicted. In the epigraphs above, Anderson and Bhabha remind us that more than simply politics, there is also a cultural element involved, indeed, essential to such work. For the Irish, whose civilization and lands have been ravaged by colonization and internal struggles for centuries, this cultural element often finds voice in the theater. Dramatic theater allows artists to create socio-reflective spaces in which audiences can participate in the postcolonial experience to some extent, and certainly find their preconceived ideas challenged. In the space of theater, a mirror is held up to the nation, vital questions are proposed, and a community emerges to collectively search for answers. The cultural artistry of Ireland allows these nations to reconceive of themselves and their pasts in terms of their present and future. The liminal space which postcolonial drama occupies presents audiences and participants with questions of hybridity, as a potential solution to cultural and national essentialism.

Modern Drama, 2014

Irish Theatre in Transition, 2015

If all the world's a stage, then any theatre is already theatre-within-thetheatre, any play is a play-within-a-play. But, what would that make the Hamlet-mousetrap-like plays within plays? Plays within plays within plays? What would theatricality mean in a world of theatricality? Metatheatricality responds to the crucial importance of performativity in social behaviour, identity-formation and interpersonal relationships that contemporary psychology, sociology and other social sciences readily acknowledge. Realizing ubiquitous performativity and play-acting in human behaviour and relationships in the postmodern world, it becomes more apparent that theatre has always been concerned with just that, indeed, its existence is built on that. Instead of considering the play-within-a-play in such a very broad sense, however, I wish to think about it in a more traditional way as a structural part of the play. The play-within-a-play and other forms of metatheatricality in that sense are pre-eminently fruitful in the presentation of self-search, both that of the plays' characters and that of theatre itself as an art form. They allow self-reflection, a conscious presentation of not only the issues within the plays but also of theatre's state, possibilities, functions, values and the significance, successes and failures of performance. Of course, the deployment of play-within-the-play is not new; in European drama it is well known at least since Shakespeare. Irish audiences, in Frank McGuinness's observation, expect 'to see in a play [...] a sense of the innate theatricality of life, so that an Irish audience will accept very willingly a play-within-a-play' (qtd in Dean 145). The proliferation and variety of plays within plays in Irish drama from the end of the twentieth century on, intimates Irish theatre's increasing concern with and desire to hold a mirror up to theatre, together with, or instead of, the previous century's 'mirror up to nation'.

2014

Études irlandaises, 2015