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.

"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.

Transformative Aesthetics: Between Remembrance and Reconciliation in Contemporary Northern Irish Theatre

This article explores the ways in which two recent plays by the Tinderbox Theatre Company in Belfast – Jimmy McAleavey's The Sign of the Whale and David Ireland's Everything Between Us – engage with current political debates in Northern Ireland about how to deal with the ‘legacy of the past’. Both plays dramatise the uneasy tension between the demands for remembrance and reconciliation. I suggest that they give rise to a ‘transformative aesthetics’ that proposes an un-remembering of the past to make way for a transformative re-remembering for the future. This process, however, does not imply an easy resolution or transcendence of the antagonisms, debates, and traumatic memories. Instead, it suggests an intense and complicated engagement that sits in vexed opposition to the restorative conception of reconciliation and both a politics and a political context of ameliorative forgetting that dominates the Northern Irish Peace Process.

The Advent of Modern Irish Drama and the Abjection of Peasant Popular Culture: Folklore, Fairs and Faction Fighting

This paper is part of a larger project in which the author is interested in recovering popular performative traditions and practices that have been occluded by the modernist project of the Irish Revival. This erasure has been compounded by subsequent historiographical paradigms that have reinforced the revivalist narrative of theatre history and excluded indigenous forms, traditions and practices (mumming, rhymers, strawboys) along with the wider performative culture of patterns, wakes, fairs, faction fights etc. This essay subjects to scrutiny what the author sees as a disjuncture between the riotous reality of peasant popular culture and its representation in Revivalist dramas to argue that Irish Theatre Studies needs to develop alternative historiographies of performance and to methodologically engage with theoretical models extant in Performance Studies.

'A Romanian Perspective on Brian Friel's Translations'

Based on the premise that the history of the representation in drama of the Ulster "Troubles" has been characterised by a move from direct to metaphorical engagement, this paper seeks to explore the signficance of Brian Friel's Translations as a "Troubles Drama" with reference to a production of the play I directed for the Hungarian Theater of Cluj in the Fall of 2001. Interpreting a play about language in a language other than the one in which it was originally written proved to have many implications for the rehearsal process and led me to experiment with the image theatre techniques of Augusto Boal. The nature of Cluj/Kolozsvar as a bi-lingual city added to the complexities of the process, as did my own status as an English-speaking director in a Hungarian-speaking environment. The extraordinary neautre of the wider geopolitical context at the time of the production proved to be the final ingredient in what became an exceptional empirical process of discovery. The discussion of the particular production is placed in the wider context of an exposition of a theory of "cultural gravity" as an alternative to "liminality" in helping to assess the cultural signficance of geopolitical boundaries.