"That a black twisty divil could be hiding under such comeliness": Woman vs woman in Early Twentieth-Century Irish Theatre

This essay investigates representations of womanhood in early twentieth-century Irish theatre, particularly in terms of the disjunction between woman as a physical, social being and the symbolic Woman as an ideological construction promoted by both church and state. It uses Lacanian theory in conjunction with Irish women’s studies scholarship to inform the analyses of plays by dramatists including Maud Gonne, Padraic Colum, Lennox Robinson, and T. C. Murray. The aim is to show how women in Irish society were faced with the impossible task of fulfilling such idealized roles as Woman, Wife, and Mother, and how this situation was variously represented and contested in the theatre during the first quarter of the twentieth century.

Four independent gene phylogenies confirm the ancient relationships of Madagascar endemic species in the Papilio demoleus group (Lepidoptera, Papilionidae).

Madagascar is home to numerous endemic species and lineages, but the processes that have contributed to its endangered diversity are still poorly understood. Evidence is accumulating to demonstrate the importance of Tertiary dispersal across varying distances of oceanic barriers, supplementing vicariance relationships dating back to the Cretaceous, but these hypotheses remain tentative in the absence of well-supported phylogenies. In the Papilio demoleus group of swallowtail butterflies, three of the five recognized species are restricted to Madagascar, whereas the remaining two species range across the Afrotropical zone and southern Asia plus Australia. We reconstructed phylogenetic relationships for all species in the P. demoleus group, as well as 11 outgroup Papilio species, using 60 morphological characters and about 4 kb of nucleotide sequences from two mitochondrial (cytochrome oxidase I and II) and two nuclear (wg and EF-1a) genes. Of the three endemic Malagasy species, the two that are formally listed as endangered or at risk represented the most basal divergences in the group, while the more common third endemic was clearly related to African P. demodocus. The fifth species, P. demoleus, showed little differentiation across southern Asia, but showed divergence from its subspecies sthenelus in Australia. Dispersal-vicariance analysis using cladograms derived from morphology and three independent genes indicated a Malagasy diversification of lime swallowtails in the middle Miocene. Thus, diversification processes on the island of Madagascar may have contributed to the origin of common butterflies that now occur throughout much of the Old World tropical and subtemperate regions. An alternative hypothesis, that Madagascar is a refuge for ancient lineages resulting from successive colonizations from Africa, is less parsimonious and does not explain the relatively low continental diversity of the group.

When Shiels met Liberace: a skirmish with the canon of Irish theatre

Just Shiels, the product of one of the first practice as research programmes undertaken by a theatre professional within the environment of an Irish university, ‘activates’ in performance the archives of the Northern Irish dramatist George Shiels (1881–1949). The play explores Shiels's marginalization from the canon of Irish theatre on grounds of his embodied position as a disabled person, his status as a Northerner writing plays to be performed across the border in the new free Irish state, his geographical peripherality to the centre of theatrical activity in Dublin and his choice of popular forms in his dramaturgy. Just Shiels was first performed in May 2008 at Queen's University Drama Centre, Belfast. This article seeks to explore to what degree Shiels's choice of popular forms and his serious physical impairment might be implicated in his marginalization. It was first delivered as a plenary session to the American Conference for Irish Studies in New York, in October 2008.

Historical Theatre: The Task of the Translator

This article discusses ways in which the translator
may approach the plays of the Spanish Golden
Age in order to create translations free from the
philological deadness that characterises so many
versions to date. By thinking of translation both
as a writing practice that eschews locatedness,
and an ethical regime that is anxious to preserve
the rights of alterity, this article proposes a series
of translational strategies geared to the writing
of translations that give English-language
expression to these classical plays, while
simultaneously belonging to themselves

Adapting musicology’s use of affect theories to contemporary theatre-making: directing Martin Crimp’s Attempts on Her Life

Adopting and adapting musicology’s use of affect theories, specifically Jeremy Gilbert’s idea of an ‘affective analysis’ and David Epstein’s idea of ‘shaping affect’, this article looks at Martin Crimp’s Attempts on Her Life from a practitioner’s perspective. It investigates the challenges and benefits of adopting an ‘affective approach’ to directing recent theatre texts which stress the musicality and corporeality of language along with, and at times above, their signifying roles. Rather than locating Aristotelian dramatic climaxes based on narratological or characterological progression, an affective approach seeks to identify moments of affective intensity, which produce a different sort of impact by working on a ‘body-first’ methodology rather than the directly cerebral. That this embodied impact is not ultimately meaningless is one of affect theories most vital assertions. This approach has resonance in terms of how directors, performers and critics/theorists approach work of this type.