The Joy and Roy of Irish

A short play as part of theatre company Kabosh's walking-tour-with-performances 'The West Awakes', focusing on aspects of the history and culture of West Belfast. My piece dramatised the contribution of Belfast Protestants and Unionists to the Irish language.

Release:A Theatre of Witness Documentary

‘RELEASE’ a documentary by Declan Keeney

Everyone has a past; but should they be defined by it? The legacy of the conflict in Northern Ireland weighs heavily on many of those who experienced it. The pain and loss is as relevant today as it was 30 years ago. The act of remembering itself can be a difficult and dangerous journey. The documentary film 'Release' shot and directed by Declan Keeney explores the life stories of six remarkable men, told in their own words and in their own way through an original Theatre of Witness production of the same name that toured Northern Ireland and the Border Counties in 2012. The film explores themes of forgiveness, remembering and the pain of living with our ever-present past.
With great courage and conviction, a former RUC detective, a former Prison Governor, a former British soldier, two ex-prisoners and a community activist who survived a car bomb as a child come together across the sectarian divide to create a group of men working for peace. Their journey is at times heart breaking, extraordinary, breathtakingly brave but ultimately transformational. It is a story of survival, but most importantly it is their story and in their own words.

“Do You Want to See My Hornpipe?”: The Traditional Irish Dancing Body at Play in the Work of Jean Butler and Colin Dunne.

This chapter considers the radical re-imaginings of traditional Irish step dance in the recent works of Jean Butler and Colin Dunne. In Butler's Does She Take Sugar (2007) and Dunne's Out of Time (2008), the Irish step dancing body is separated from its historical roots in nationalism, from the exhibitionism required by the competitive form, and from the spectacularization of the commercialized theatrical format. In these works, which are both solo pieces performed by the choreographers themselves, the traditional form undergoes a critical interrogation in which the dancers attempt to depart from the determinacy of the traditional technique, while acknowledging its formation of their corporealities; the Irish step dance technique becomes a springboard for creative experimentation. In order to consider the importance of the creative potential revealed by these works, this chapter will contextualize them within the dance background from which they emerged, outlining the history of competitive step dancing in Ireland, the "modernization" of traditional Irish dance with the emergence of Riverdance (1994), and the experiments of Ireland's national folk theatre, Siamsa Tíre.

Dublin 1916: theatre of revolt

At Easter 1916, Dublin city centre was one of a series of sites throughout Ireland where a rebellion was staged against British rule. It was a strategic failure, swiftly crushed by superior British forces. The event, however, subsequently took a central role in the mythology of modern Ireland.

The first visual representations were of the conflict’s aftermath: photographic journeys through landscapes of ruin. From the distance of the camera, we see none of the pockmarks of shell bursts, nor the etchings of machine guns. Instead, traces of life in the city seem to have been swept aside by an unseen hand: the passing of millennia or a violent action of nature. Architecture alone has witnessed and recorded its presence. Amongst the fragments, the shell of the General Post Office (G.P.O.) in Sackville Street is one of the few buildings still wholly recognizable. The remnants of its classical form, portico and pediment, columns and entablature seem to transcend its prosaic modern functions and allude to something more ancient. The bewilderment of city’s inhabitants is also recorded. Dubliners have become inquisitive tourists in streets which hitherto were the locus of everyday life. They wander around aimlessly in a landscape as alien and picturesque as Pompeii. This shift in perception was captured by the Irish poet W.B. Yeats who hinted that Dublin, purged of modern commercialism had transcended its petty inadequacies to revive a slumbering heroic past.

‘I have met them at the close of day
Coming with vivid faces
From counter or desk among grey
Eighteenth-century houses [.]’
All is changed, changed utterly:
A terrible beauty is born.’

His comments were prescient. Initially unpopular, the republican leaders, executed by the British, slowly became recast as heroic martyrs. Similarly, the spaces where their heroism was forged became venerated. The G.P.O. and Sackville Street, however, already had a republican history. It was originally conceived in the eighteenth century as part of a series of magnificent urban spaces to provide an arena of spectacle and self-celebration for the colonial Anglo-Irish and their vision of a Protestant republic. O’Connell/Sackville Street became the temporal, geographical and mythical hinge upon which two different versions of Irish republicanism waxed and waned. Its recasting after independence as a space of Catholic Nationalism bore testimony to its consistency in providing a backdrop for the production of ritual and myth. In the 1920s and 30s, as the nascent country, beset with economic stagnation and political tensions, turned to spectacle as a salve for it social problems, O’Connell Street and the G.P.O. provided its most sacred sites. Within the introduction of new myths, however, individual as well as national identities were created and consolidated. The emerging identity of modern Ireland became inextricably linked with that of one ambitious politician. His uses of the G.P.O. in particular revealed a perceptive understanding of the political uses of classical architecture and urban space.

Beneath an Irish Sky:A new play by Kieran Kelly

A fictionalised account of one Letterkenny man's journey, questioning what made him pick up a gun to fight for his country and how one moment in his youth affected the rest of his life. Part of the 'Ireland 2016 Centenary Programme'

From matron to matrix: gender, authority and (dis)embodiment in Beckett’s Theatre

An examination of Samuel Beckett's representation of women in a selection of his plays for stage and radio.

Performing Irishness: translations of Irish drama for the Galician stage (1921-2011)

This PhD thesis provides a detailed analysis of the role and significance of Irish drama in the Galician cultural context, from the early twentieth century onwards, through scrutiny of key works translated, adapted and mediated for the Galician stage. Drawing primarily on the theoretical framework of Descriptive Translation Studies, informed by Polysystems theory (Toury), Post-colonial Translation, research on processes of cultural translation (Bassnett, Lefevere, Venuti, Aaltonen), as well as careful comparative attention to the specificities of literary, theatrical and cultural context, I examine the factors governing the incorporation, reshaping and reception of twentieth century Irish plays in Galicia in order to produce a cultural history of the representation of Ireland on the Galician stage. Focusing on the five key periods I have identified in the translation/reception of Irish drama in Galicia, as represented in specific versions of plays by Yeats, Synge, O’Casey and McDonagh, my thesis examines in detail the particular linguistic, sociopolitical, theatrical and cultural dimensions of each rewriting and/or restaging in order to uncover the ways in which Irish identity is perceived, constructed and performed in a Galician context. Moving beyond the literary, historical and philological focus of existing studies of the reception of Irish literature and foreign dramatic texts in the Galician system, my own approach draws on Theatre and Performance Studies to attend also to the performative dimension of these processes of cultural adaptation and reception, giving full account of the different agents involved in theatre translation as a rich and complex process of multivalent cultural mediation.

‘Do you want to see my hornpipe?’: the traditional Irish dancing body at play in the work of Jean Butler and Colin Dunne’, in Anthony Shay and Barbara Sellers-Young (eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Dance and Ethnicity, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016, pp.41-65.

This chapter considers the radical reimaginings of traditional Irish step dance in the recent works of Jean Butler and Colin Dunne, in which the Irish step-dancing body is separated from its historical roots in nationalism, from the exhibitionism required by the competitive form, and from the spectacularization of the commercialized theatrical format. In these works the traditional form undergoes a critical interrogation in which the dancers attempt to depart from the determinacy of the traditional technique, while acknowledging its formation of their corporealities; the Irish step-dance technique becomes a springboard for creative experimentation. To consider the importance of the creative potential revealed by these works, this chapter contextualizes them within the dance background from which they emerged, outlining the history of competitive step dancing in Ireland, the “modernization” of traditional Irish dance with the emergence of Riverdance (1994), and the experiments of Ireland’s national folk theater, Siamsa Tíre.