This book focuses on the drama and poetry published since 1990. It also reflects upon related forms of creative work in this period, including film and the visual and performing arts. The book discusses some of the most topical issues which have emerged in Irish theatre since 1990. It traces the significance of the home in the poetry of Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin and Vona Groarke. The book also focuses on the reconfigurations of identity, and the complex intersections of nationality, gender and race in contemporary Ireland. It shows how Roddy Doyle's return to the repressed gives articulation to those left behind by globalisation. The book then examines the ways in which post-Agreement Northern fiction negotiates its bitter legacies. It also examines how the activity of creating art in a time of violence brings about an anxiety regarding the artist's role, and how it calls into question the ability to re-present atrocity. The book further explores the consideration of politics and ethics in Irish drama since 1990. It talks about the swirling abundance of themes and trends in contemporary Irish fiction and autobiography. The book shows that writing in the Irish Republic and in the North has begun to accommodate an increasing diversity of voices which address themselves not only to issues preoccupying their local audiences, but also to wider geopolitical concerns.
9780719075636_4_003.qxd 16/2/09 9:24 AM Page 43 3 Home places: Irish drama since 1990 Clare Wallace and OndPej PilnM To appraise Irish theatre of the recent past is an ominous task; to attempt to predict what might be remembered in the future a treacherous one. From 1990 to mid-2006 the Irish Playography database lists 842 plays, devised pieces and adaptations produced in Ireland by Irish theatre companies and other commercial bodies. Since 1990 critical interest in Irish theatre has grown rapidly, spurred on in part by the Abbey Theatre centenary in 2004
/quotation).’ Having been imported into social discourse from the vocabulary of the theatre, the term performance/ performative is nowadays reapplied by theatre and drama studies and ‘implies a self-aware theatricality’, the ‘conscious use of the practices and conventions of theatre’ and the ‘deliberate manipulation of citation and reiteration’ as a potential strength of the genre.7 In contemporary Irish drama, the renaissance of the monologue signals a self-conscious move towards heightening the performative element in the exploration of the self, according to revised perspectives
rare in an Irish context. 13 Marina Carr, Ariel (Oldcastle: Gallery Press, 2002), p. 38. All future references to the play are to this edition and will be incorporated in the text. 14 For an essay which addresses just these aspects of Ariel, see Cathy Leeney, ‘Marina Carr’, in Anthony Roche (ed.), The UCD Aesthetic: Celebrating 150 Years of UCD Writers (Dublin: New Island Press, 2005), pp. 265–73. See also J. Michael Walton, ‘Hit or Myth: The Greeks and Irish Drama’, in Marianne McDonald and J. Michael Walton (eds), Amid Our Troubles: Irish Versions of Greek Tragedy
could become ‘the most effective patrons of Irish music, Irish drama and Irish talent that [the public] have ever enjoyed’. 30 Any commitment to co-operative principles among leading Sinn Féin individuals is likely to have varied in its levels of enthusiasm. Nevertheless, an appropriation of the language of co-operation emerged as a trope that peppered Sinn Féin commentary on social and economic matters. At times, this commitment went beyond the pages of political treatises. In June 1919, Sinn Féin ordered all local party branches to ‘promote the