The Palgrave Handbook of Contemporary Irish Theatre and Performance

The Palgrave Handbook of Contemporary Irish Theatre and Performance
Author: Eamonn Jordan
Publisher: Springer
Total Pages: 862
Release: 2018-09-18
Genre: Performing Arts
ISBN: 1137585889

This Handbook offers a multiform sweep of theoretical, historical, practical and personal glimpses into a landscape roughly characterised as contemporary Irish theatre and performance. Bringing together a spectrum of voices and sensibilities in each of its four sections — Histories, Close-ups, Interfaces, and Reflections — it casts its gaze back across the past sixty years or so to recall, analyse, and assess the recent legacy of theatre and performance on this island. While offering information, overviews and reflections of current thought across its chapters, this book will serve most handily as food for thought and a springboard for curiosity. Offering something different in its mix of themes and perspectives, so that previously unexamined surfaces might come to light individually and in conjunction with other essays, it is a wide-ranging and indispensable resource in Irish theatre studies.

Frank McGuinness's Dramaturgy of Difference and the Irish Theatre

Frank McGuinness's Dramaturgy of Difference and the Irish Theatre
Author: David Cregan
Publisher: Irish Studies
Total Pages: 0
Release: 2011
Genre: Northern Ireland
ISBN: 9781433109331

This book is the broad application of queer theories to the original plays of the contemporary Irish dramatist Frank McGuinness, the only author in Ireland to consistently utilize gay and lesbian themes in his writing. McGuinness continually represents sexual difference in his character development in a way that previous Irish authors have not. In particular McGuinness portrays homosexual protagonists in his dramas, allowing the queer the narrative prerogative, not merely a secondary role in the formation of theatrical perspective. Often it is the homosexual who tells the story or alters the plot through his or her alternative perspective. This book not only analyzes the queer in McGuinness's work, but also contributes to a widening of the conversation and criticism on Irish theatre in general. Its implementation of the internationally recognized paradigm of analysis, queer theory, is cutting-edge in its contribution to the general field of Irish studies as well. As a result of its two-fold agenda of theatrical and cultural analysis, this book not only brings together theories of the queer and the theatre of McGuinness, but it also maps the way in which this queer dramaturgy intersects with contemporary Irish society as it faces a new era of cultural re-invention.

Fifty Key Irish Plays

Fifty Key Irish Plays
Author: Shaun Richards
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Total Pages: 208
Release: 2022-08-25
Genre: Performing Arts
ISBN: 1000631273

Fifty Key Irish Plays charts the progression of modern Irish drama from Dion Boucicault’s entry on to the global stage of the Irish diaspora to the contemporary dramas created by the experiences of the New Irish. Each chapter provides a brief plot outline along with informed analysis and, alert to the cultural and critical context of each play, an account of the key roles that they played in the developing story of Irish drama. While the core of the collection is based on the critical canon, including work by J. M. Synge, Lady Gregory, Teresa Deevy, and Brian Friel, plays such as Tom Mac Intyre’s The Great Hunger and ANU Productions’ Laundry, which illuminate routes away from the mainstream, are also included. With a focus on the development of form as well as theme, the collection guides the reader to an informed overview of Irish theatre via succinct and insightful essays by an international team of academics. This invaluable collection will be of particular interest to undergraduate students of theatre and performance studies and to lay readers looking to expand their appreciation of Irish drama.

Queer Performance and Contemporary Ireland

Queer Performance and Contemporary Ireland
Author: Fintan Walsh
Publisher: Springer
Total Pages: 184
Release: 2016-04-29
Genre: Performing Arts
ISBN: 1137534508

This book examines the surge of queer performance produced across Ireland since the first stirrings of the Celtic Tiger in the mid-1990s, up to the passing of the Marriage Equality referendum in the Republic in 2015.

Dramaturgy of Form

Dramaturgy of Form
Author: Kasia Lech
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 110
Release: 2021-03-01
Genre: Performing Arts
ISBN: 0429535678

Dramaturgy of Form examines verse in twenty-first-century theatre practice across different languages, cultures, and media. Through interdisciplinary engagement, Kasia Lech offers a new method for verse analysis in the performance context. The book traces the dramaturgical operation of verse in new writings, musicals, devised performances, multilingual dramas, Hip Hop theatre, films, digital projects, and gig theatre, as well as translations and adaptations of classics and new theatre forms created by Irish, Spanish, Nigerian, Polish, American, Canadian, Australian, British, Russian, and multinational artists. Their verse dramaturgies explore timely issues such as global identities, agency and precarity, global and local politics, and generational and class stories. The development of dramaturgy is discussed with the focus turning to the new stylized approach to theatre, whose arrival Hans-Thies Lehmann foretold in his Postdramatic Theatre, documenting a turning point for contemporary Western theatre. Serving theatre-makers, scholars, and students working with classical and contemporary verse and poetry in performance contexts; practitioners and academics of aural and oral dramaturgies; voice and verse-speaking coaches; and actors seeking the creative opportunities that verse offers, Dramaturgy of Form reveals verse as a tool for innovation and transformation that is at the forefront of contemporary practices and experiences.

The Oxford Handbook of Modern Irish Theatre

The Oxford Handbook of Modern Irish Theatre
Author: Nicholas Grene
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 952
Release: 2016-07-28
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 0191016349

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.

Irish Theatre in the Twenty-First Century

Irish Theatre in the Twenty-First Century
Author: Nicholas Grene
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 257
Release: 2024-09-26
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 0198893086

Irish Theatre in the Twenty-First Century is the first in-depth study of the subject. It analyses the ways in which theatre in Ireland has developed since the 1990s when emerging playwrights Martin McDonagh, Conor McPherson, and Enda Walsh turned against the tradition of lyrical eloquence with a harsh and broken dramatic language. Companies such as Blue Raincoat, the Corn Exchange, and Pan Pan pioneered an avant-garde dramaturgy that no longer privileged the playwright. This led to new styles of production of classic Irish works, including the plays of Synge, mounted in their entirety by Druid. The changed environment led to a re-imagining of past Irish history in the work of Rough Magic and ANU, plays by Owen McCafferty, Stacey Gregg, and David Ireland, dramatizing the legacy of the Troubles, and adaptations of Greek tragedy by Marina Carr and others reflecting the conditions of modern Ireland. From 2015, the movement #WakingTheFeminists led to a sharpened awareness of gender. While male playwrights showed a toxic masculinity on the stage, a generation of female dramatists including Carr, Gregg, and Nancy Harris gave voice to the experiences of women long suppressed in conservative Ireland. For three separate periods, 2006, 2016, 2020-2, the author served as one of the judges for the Irish Times Irish Theatre Awards, attending all new productions across the island of Ireland. This allowed him to provide the detailed overview of the 'state of play' of Irish theatre in each of those times which punctuate the book as one of its most innovative features. Drawing also on interviews with Ireland's leading theatre makers, Grene provides readers with a close-up understanding of Irish theatre in a period when Ireland became for the first time a fully modernized, secular, and multi-ethnic society.

Observe the Sons of Ulster Marching Towards the Somme

Observe the Sons of Ulster Marching Towards the Somme
Author: Frank McGuinness
Publisher: Samuel French, Inc.
Total Pages: 86
Release: 2004
Genre: Drama
ISBN: 9780573629587

Observe the Sons of Ulster Marching Towards the Somme was revived by the Abbey Theatre, Dublin in 1994 as part of an acknowledgement of the peace process. The production was subsequently taken to the Edinburgh Festival in 1995 and opened at the Royal Shakespeare Company's Barbican Theatre, London, in March 1996.

Ireland on Stage

Ireland on Stage
Author: Hiroko Mikami
Publisher: Peter Lang
Total Pages: 212
Release: 2007
Genre: Drama
ISBN: 9781904505235

Essays on Irish theatre in the second half of the twentieth century

The Methuen Drama Guide to Contemporary Irish Playwrights

The Methuen Drama Guide to Contemporary Irish Playwrights
Author: Martin Middeke
Publisher: A&C Black
Total Pages: 482
Release: 2010-05-28
Genre: Drama
ISBN: 1408132680

The Methuen Drama Guide to Contemporary Irish Playwrights is an authoritative guide to the work of twenty-five playwrights from the last 50 years whose work has helped to shape and define Irish theatre. Written by a team of international scholars, it provides an illuminating survey and analysis of each writer's plays and will be invaluable to anyone interested in, studying or teaching contemporary Irish drama. The playwrights examined range from John B. Keane, Brian Friel and Tom Murphy, to the crop of writers who emerged in the 1990s and who include Martin McDonagh, Marina Carr, Emma Donoghue and Mark O'Rowe. Each essay features: a biographical sketch and introduction to the playwright a discussion of their most important plays an analysis of their stylistic and thematic traits, the critical reception and their place in the discourses of Irish theatre a bibliography of texts and critical material With a total of 190 plays discussed in detail, over half of which were written during the 1990s and 2000s, The Methuen Drama Guide to Contemporary Irish Playwrights is unrivalled in its study of recent plays and playwrights.