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.

Jamming the Law: Improvisational Theatre and the 'Spontaneity' of Judgment

Modern ‘nonscripted’ theatre (NST) clearly owes much to improvisation. Perhaps less obviously, and more surprisingly, so too does modern law. In this article I will contend that, despite all the rules of evidence and procedure, statutes and legal precedents that fundamentally govern the decisions and actions of a judge, it is only through ‘spontaneity’ that judgment can take place. This claim may appear strange to those well-versed in the common law tradition which proceeds on the basis of past legal decisions, or reason where no precedent exists. NST, on the other hand, is assumed to rely heavily on the unprecedented and unreasoned. Therefore, when the public watches a NST production, it places its faith in the belief that what is being observed is entirely new and is being produced ‘on the spur of the moment’.

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.