Buffoonery In Irish Drama

Generations of Irish playwrights have tried to assert the reputation of the stage Irish figure as other than comic, but each effort was in its turn assailed as buffoonery. Using post-colonial and performative theory, Buffoonery in Irish Drama demonstrates the ways the Irish struggled to create a sense of identity in a colonial structure, and it explores the distortion and appropriation of that new identity that elicit further calls to eradicate negative stereotypes. Demonstrating the pervasiveness of the reclamation efforts, Buffoonery in Irish Drama covers a wide range of well-known and obscure plays to show the trajectory of twentieth-century drama that brings us into a globalized twenty-first-century Ireland.

In this fascinating reappraisal of the non-literary drama of the late 19th - early 20th century, Christopher Fitz-Simon discloses a unique world of plays, players and producers in metropolitan theatres in Ireland and other countries where Ireland was viewed as a source of extraordinary topics at once contemporary and comfortably remote: revolution, eviction, famine, agrarian agitation, political assassination. The form was the fashionable one of melodrama, yet Irish melodrama was of a particular kind replete with hidden messages, and the language was far more allusive, colourful and entertaining than that of its English equivalent. There was much diversity, as shown in plays as different as Murray & Shine's An Irish Gentleman, Hubert O'Grady's The Priest Hunter, J.W.Whitbread's The Victoria Cross and Edward Selden's McKenna's Flirtation.

The Oxford Handbook of Modern Irish Theatre provides the single most comprehensive survey of the field to be found in a single volume. Drawing on more than forty contributors from around the world, the book addresses a full range of topics relating to modern Irish theatre from the late nineteenth-century theatre to the most recent works of postdramatic devised theatre. Ireland has long had an importance in the world of theatre out of all proportion to the size of the country, and has been home to four Nobel Laureates (Yeats, Shaw, and Beckett; Seamus Heaney, while primarily a poet, also wrote for the stage). This collection begins with the influence of melodrama, looks at arguably the first modern Irish playwright, Oscar Wilde, before moving into a series of considerations of the Abbey Theatre, and Irish modernism. Arranged chronologically, it explores areas such as women in theatre, Irish-language theatre, and alternative theatres, before reaching the major writers of more recent Irish theatre, including Brian Friel and Tom Murphy, and their successors. There are also individual chapters focusing on Beckett and Shaw, as well as a series of chapters looking at design, acting and theatre architecture. The book concludes with an extended survey of the critical literature on the field. In each chapter, the author does not simply rehearse accepted wisdom; all of the authors push the boundaries of their respective fields, so that each chapter is a significant contribution to scholarship in its own right.

Publisher Description

This 1981 volume begins with the French revolt against naturalism in theatre and then covers the European realist movement.

Ireland’s Abbey Theatre was founded in 1904. Under the guidance of W. B. Yeats and Lady Augusta Gregory it became instrumental to the success of many of the leading Irish playwrights and actors of the early twentieth century. Conventional wisdom holds that the playwright Sean O’Casey was the first to offer a new vision of Irish authenticity in the people and struggles of inner-city Dublin in his groundbreaking trilogy The Shadow of a Gunman, The Plough and the Stars, and Juno and the Paycock. Challenging this view, Mannion argues that there was an established tradition of urban plays within the Abbey repertoire that has long been overlooked by critics. She seeks to restore attention to a lesser-known corpus of Irish urban plays, specifically those that appeared at the Abbey Theatre from the theatre’s founding until 1951, when the original theatre was destroyed by fire. Mannion illustrates distinct patterns within this Abbey urban genre and considers in particular themes of poverty, gender, and class. She provides historical context for the plays and considers the figures who helped shape the Abbey and this urban subset of plays. With detailed analysis of box office records and extensive appendixes of cast members and production schedules, this book offers a rich source of archival material as well as a fascinating revision to the story of this celebrated institution.

Vaudeville is often viewed as the source of some of the crude stereotypes that positioned the Irish immigrant in America as the antithesis of native-born American citizens. Using primary archival material, Mooney argues that the vaudeville stage was an important venue in which an Irish-American identity was constructed, negotiated, and refined.

This volume explores the cultural, literary, theatrical, and political changes in Irish society from 1980. The so-called ‘Celtic Tiger’ brought about cultural and economic rejuvenation in Ireland but this new found confidence and prosperity was destabilised by other events, such as the scandals in the Catholic Church, bringing into question the role of traditional institutions in contemporary Irish life. The ending of the Troubles and signing of the Good Friday Agreement similarly heralded a new era in terms of positive political change, but recent paramilitary activity threatens to undermine the progress made in the 1990s, as waves of new violence hit the North. Equally, recent economic recession has halted the radical growth seen in the Republic over recent decades. This book therefore problematises the concept of change and progress by juxtaposing these events, and asking what real changes can be traced in modern Ireland. The contributors frequently reflect on the changes and upheavals this period of dramatic economic, political and cultural change has prompted. The volume includes contributions from the fields of politics, cultural studies, sport, history, geography, media and film studies, and theatre and literature. As such it is a decidedly interdisciplinary study, exploring wide-ranging topics and issues relevant to contemporary Irish Studies.