Introduction

Finola Cronin and Eamonn Jordan

Origins

The origins of this Contemporary Irish Theatre and Performance Studies Reader have a number of different impulses, but most notably the fact that the editors of this e-publication believe that the time is right to select from Carysfort Press’s various publications a variety of essays that would prove to be good starting points for anyone engaged in thinking, reading, and/or writing about Irish Theatre.¹ Additionally, it might also be a resource for those responding to or making Irish work or thinking about how such work is made.

Irish Theatre has been hugely successful over the past one hundred and fifty years, and especially in the last sixty years or so, as theatre companies, directors, designers, actors and playwrights gained significant international reputations, recognition and renown. The Abbey, Gate and Project Arts Centre in Dublin, Lyric in Belfast, Waterford’s Red Kettle, Cork’s Corcadorca, Galway’s Druid Theatre Company and other companies as various as Rough Magic, Pan Pan, Field Day, Irish Modern Dance Theatre Company, Fabulous Beast, Corn Exchange, Barabbas … the company, and Brokentalkers have actively sought to make work that could be performed in Ireland and seen abroad. Significant volumes of work have been produced and toured and companies have embarked on co-productions with international partners. Various festivals in Ireland have brought inspiring international work to audiences. Irish writers have adapted and translated work by their international counterparts. Today, globalisation, festivalisation, new media and new technologies have differently impacted on the processes of theatre making and its reception. It is important to note that all work by Irish writers is not only first performed in Ireland. For instance, Conor McPherson invariably has his work premiered in London. In more recent times work made by non-Irish national performers and companies, such as Polish Theatre Ireland, Arambe Productions, etc., has started to become more and more influential. Mainstream and fringe festivals across the island have been hugely significant in offering opportunities to theatre makers, and for Irish practitioners to see cutting-edge work, and work of international renown. Such festivals are not the only opportunities; many practitioners travel abroad for training and to experience work.

While the predominance of text-based performances remains, more and more work evolves through devised/collective processes. There is also the increasing incidence of work appearing in non-traditional venues, or of people being more creative with traditional spaces. Of course, most recently Anu productions have been very successful with their socially aware, immersive-style, site-specific performances. Such work evades easy categorisation. As many commentators have already noted, traditional distinctions between mainstream and conventional theatre practices and the fringe or avant-garde have become more and more blurred. For instance, THISISPOPBABY’s Alice in Funderland: A New Musical by Philip McMahon and Raymond Scannell, wasproduced at the Abbey in 2012 and Pan-Pan’s Gavin Quin directed a production of A Midsummer’s Night Dream on the Abbey main stage in 2015. Indeed Miss Pandora — Panti Bliss’s Noble Call address about homophobia at the Abbey Theatre in 2014 was one of the seminal moments in the debates on marriage equality for same-sex couples. In May 2015 Ireland voted to make a constitutional change that allows for same sex marriage.

Funding of course is always a dominant aspect. Arts-funding rose considerably during the Celtic Tiger years (1993-2007), but with the age of austerity and recession from 2007 forward, many of the smaller theatre companies in Ireland went out of business having lost state funding, and of those who remain in existence most are now operating on such straightened finances that they barely survive from production to production. In particular, Arts Council project-specific funding, does not allow for the continuities that most companies need, in terms of artistic policy, administrative support structures, and audience development.

Loose Canon is a perfect example of a theatre collective, whose commitments, risk-taking and innovations are sorely missed; sometimes the work was not fully evolved, but it was almost always challenging and extraordinarily creative. Their finest performances compared favourably to the best of international work. Currently, the international successes of writers like Marina Carr, Enda Walsh and Conor McPherson and by companies like Pan Pan and Druid Theatre Company disguise in many respects structural devastation experienced by the theatre sector in the aftermath of the Celtic Tiger period.

Most recently, the Waking-the-Feminists’ initiatives came about in response to the Abbey Theatre’s Waking the Nation programme for the year of commemoration that is 2016, a programme that inappropriately marginalised women. Of the ten events planned, only three were to be directed by women, and one was written by a woman. The Waking-the-Feminists protest gained a good deal of traction over a short period of time, thanks in part to very public expressions by senior theatre people and also thanks to social media. The absence of any substantial action by the Abbey Theatre’s management and Board suggests that statements of apologises and recognition of blind-spots do not really amount to anything of true substance. The National Theatre does not stand alone when it comes to this sort of problematic programming. However, lest we think that this is the only occasion of such debates, such inequalities were cogently articulated by many critical voices over the past decades.²

Reader Rationale

The reader is substantial in breadth, but is not meant to be all encompassing. The essays are a sample from a large volume of books published by Carysfort Press.³ With one exception, all of these essays originally appeared in one of the company’s ninety-plus publications to date. Essays are reproduced here by the kind permission of the authors. The essay selection process was arduous in and of itself, with so much work to choose from. The criteria for selection were manifold: we needed to cover as many of the main players as possible, we had to avoid too much cross-over, and we were obliged to include work that would be somewhat familiar to as wide a variety of reader as possible. We also decided that for the better known figures, two and very seldom three essays would be appropriate. We often selected to include essays on better known plays, rather than what are often very brilliant essays on the lesser known works of a writer.

Other essays were also left to one side for a variety of reasons: some were too specialist in focus, some more challenging to read than others, and some were too long or too wide-ranging. (Essays rather than chapters from monographs were easier to select, as such monograph chapters cross-referenced other sections that made making sense of an extract more challenging.)

We also opted to get a balance between essays that were text-focused and those that were more performance-focused, concerned with liveness and the experiences of performance. Also we faced a challenge as to where to position certain essays, for example the essay by Lisa Fitzpatrick on Fabulous Beast also includes reflections on Marina Carr’s By the Bog of Cats. David Grant’s essay about a production of Observe the Sons of Ulster performed by prisoners in Hydebank Young Offenders Centre in Belfast appears in Section Two, rather than with the other McGuinness essays. As one of the co-founders of Rough Magic Declan Hughes’ essay could have appeared alongside the other essays on this company.

This work is proofed to eliminate (hopefully) any remaining typos or errors that may have been carried in their original publication. Odd lines are cut if they refer to the volumes from which these essays are taken. Sometimes there were references to images that we have not reproduced, so these had to be removed. A couple of authors asked to make minor revisions which we were happy to go along with. Essays remain substantially as they were published. Each essay is of its time, and the books from which these writings have been extracted and year of publication are included in the boxes at the end of each contribution.

We also kept the referencing formats of their original publication. So the e-publication had a combination of endnotes and a referencing system that follows a works cited methodology. It would be hugely time consuming and costly to standardise the referencing in this instance, so we decided against that. As it was our intention to make this book available at a price that was as inexpensive as possible, we had to make such calls, and economise on something that would be neither ours nor CarysfortPress’s normal way of doing things.

Although some critics do appear a number of times, we tried to include as many critical voices as possible. Further, in line with a clear objective of Carysfort Press we wanted to include not only academic commentators, but the critical and reflective voices of actors, designers, directors, and writers—sometimes it is playwrights talking as much about their own work as that of others. Indeed Carysfort Press has always resisted the notion of an academic/theatre community divid.⁴ The relationship between academia and the theatre sector has evolved hugely over the past twenty years; more and more early-career scholars have strong practical training, and more and more professional theatre makers rely on formative learning experiences at a range of accredited academic institutions across the third level sector in Ireland and beyond. Various scholarly approaches and critical methodologies give impetus to the transformation of the theatre landscape.⁵

How to Use

Today, an e-platform offers various advantages: we were less constrained by word-count, in a way that a print publication would have size-associated printing costs. The portability of e-books is obviously beneficial as are computer key word search functions which meant that indexing was not necessary. Readers are encouraged to check the text boxes at the end of each essay, as these make mention of other related essays in this collection of essays or to other books published by Carysfort on the same theme.

While some readers will come to this collection with specific needs, we also encourage speculative sampling of other essays so that you might awaken an interest in a writer, director, actor, or company. In part, this e-publication also reminds the reader of the massive volume of other work also available in print and electronic formats published many other publishers as well.⁶ Bibliographies and Works Cited sections regularly point the reader towards many of these other sources.

This publication has two sections. Section One is dedicated to theatre makers, playwrights, actors, directors, companies, and is arranged alphabetically. The essays are selected to give where possible diverse perspectives on the works of playwrights and productions. A number of contributions examine plays in performance in Ireland while other essays focus on the reception of Irish theatre productions abroad. Some essays focus on themes and tropes arising in playtexts; the work of Tom Murphy, for example, is the subject of essays on dramaturgy and narrative, and also on violence and belonging. Other essays read plays against history, see for example, Nicholas Grene’s essay on the work of Sebastian Barry, and Helen Lojek’s contribution on Frank McGuinness’ play Observe the Sons of Ulster Marching towards the Somme which contextualises the play in relation to the Abbey Theatre and to the Aids epidemic of the 1980s.

The work of all major Irish playwrights is addressed in Section One, and while the work of director Patrick Mason is the topic of one essay, interviews included enable insight into the working processes of other major theatre directors including Garry Hynes of Druid Theatre Company, and Lynne Parker, a co-founder of Rough Magic Theatre Company. Performer and theatre maker Olwen Fouéré is the subject of a number of essays, and her reflection on her role in the original production of The Mai by Marina Carr, might be read in conjunction with Enrica Cerquoni’s essay that explores ideas of space and the visual image in Carr’s By the Bog of Cats. International influences on Irish theatre making are traced in essays on Blue Raincoat and Pan Pan theatre companies, while the contribution by playwright Conor McPherson, whose own work is a subject of a number of essays, maps influences on his working process in an appraisal of the work of Billy Roche.

In Section Two of the e-publication critical writing from playwrights, critics and scholars, on notions of audience reception, identity, gender and multiculturalism, gives emphasis to contextualization of these topics in pre and post Celtic Tiger Ireland in a society that has witnessed rapid growth of cultural diversity and global connectivity.

The essays in this section are not organised alphabetically, but are principally, but not exclusively clustered to speak to each other in various ways. The first essay, by playwright Tom Kilroy traces the influence of W.B. Yeats on Irish theatre and reflects on legacies of tradition to do with form and aesthetic. Kilroy’s essay and that of Declan Hughes, which follows, delivers sharp and fresh perspectives on relationships in theatre between tradition and innovation. Playwright Elizabeth Kuti gives an account of production processes of a number of her plays, while Ursula Rani-Sarma considers who it is she writes for. In the absence of ‘knowing’ her audience must she then write to /for herself? Following this cluster, Fintan O’Toole, Irish Times Theatre Critic, contributes essays on the Dublin Theatre Festival and on his role as theatre critic and spectator.

Essays by David Grant and Lisa Fitzpatrick consider the Northern Irish context in discussion of selected theatrical events in the period after the Good Friday Agreement of 1998. Essays that examine gender from different perspectives follow, including one by Anna McMullan, which examines selected works of Irish women playwrights. A number of essays examine plays through the lens of multiculturalism: Patrick Lonergan who considers influences on Irish theatre from abroad, Christopher Murray discusses Playboy, a 2007 version of J.M. Synge’s The Playboy of the Western World adapted by and Bisi Adigun and Roddy Doyle, and Jason King considers representations of Africa in selected Irish productions.

Scholarly theories of reception and audience usefully designate methods of investigating audiences and reception but there is little research on the subject in Irish theatre scholarship. It is hoped that the essays in Part Two of the e-publication identify the fields of audience and reception within the Irish context and provide a frame of reference for future study and scholarship.