“Authentic Reproductions”: Staging the “Wild West” in Modern Irish Drama

This article examines two metatheatrical plays written by playwrights from the north of Ireland that bookend the twentieth century. The first is Ulster Literary Theatre (ULT) playwright Gerald MacNamara’s parodic, “proto-Pirandellian”4 The Mist That Does Be on the Bog (1909), which satirizes the peasant aesthetic of the “Abbey play” of the Irish Revival.5 The second is Marie Jones’s international hit, Stones in His Pockets (1999), a “play-full,” postmodern deconstruction of the commodification of Irish culture in the era of the Celtic Tiger. Although separated by exactly ninety years, the two plays can be connected through their critiques of the cultural politics of nationalism and globalization during the periods of the Irish Revival and the Celtic Tiger, respectively. Moreover, both plays are distinguished by their dramaturgical form, as the political critique of each is corporeally embodied in metatheatrical performance.

Genealogies of Partition: History, History-Writing and 'The Troubles' in Ireland

Contemporary political disputes have a long history of expression and contestation through the genre of history-writing in Ireland. The role of history writing and political science writing during the nearly 40 years of the so-called 'Troubles' has been no exception to this. Battles between competing versions of what the conflict 'is about', mediated through academic and popular texts have themselves in turn become constitutive of it. This builds upon centuries of the representation of the complicated politics of this island as 'an issue' in British domestic politics - first 'the Catholic question', then 'the Irish question'. The location of political power outside the island for centuries has created successive battles for the representation of sectional interests in a metropolitan centre. The skills of propaganda, history writing, newspaper writing have consequently been deployed at a remarkable level of skill and intensity. In the recent period one of the consequences of this has been the removal from the debate of the actuality of partition; this builds upon a particular historical representation of partition as an historical inevitability. To seek to restore partition to the debate is not to call for its undoing but to recognise that seeking to circumvent debates about its origins in the key period of democratisation in Irish politics (1880-1920) has been counter-productive. This essay examines the genealogies of partition in Irish and international contexts in the light of these battles for representation, and aims to return a lost dimension to the debate about the so-called 'Troubles'in Ireland. The genealogy of partition is the issue that has been marginalised in academic study and this has affected both policy and politics.

Experiencing Kane: an affective analysis of Sarah Kane's 'experiential' theatre in performance

The article argues for a phenomenological approach to Kane's work in performance. It notes the rise in productions of Kane's work from 2004, and focuses on productions of Crave by 11th Hour Theatre in Melbourne and Acquiesce Speck in Sydney.

Whose play is it anyway?: Theatre Studies, Translation Studies and translation for the stage

This article explores the historical neglect of translation as a consideration in the study and practice of theatre in the United States and Europe. While the study of literature is fairly strictly divided between English-language and Comparative Literature departments, theatre and drama have shown little concern about language as a barrier to reception of the dramatic text. Arguably, this discrepancy may be traced to a fundamental gap between the perceived status of the novel as a completed work of art and the playtext as work of art in progress, waiting to find its completion in performance.