Perspectives on Contemporary Irish Theatre

1. Front Matter

   Pages i-xv

   PDF

2. Introduction

   • Anne Etienne, Thierry Dubost

   Pages 1-13

3. Dramaturgical Approaches

   1. Front Matter

      Pages 15-15

      PDF

   2. Innovation Meets Evocation: Tom Mac Intyre’s Plays at the Peacock Theatre

      • Marie Kelly

      Pages 17-37

   3. From Dementia to Utopia: Tragedy and Transcendence in Frank McGuinness’s The Hanging Gardens

      • Matthieu Kolb

      Pages 39-57

   4. Women and Scarecrows: Marina Carr’s Stage Bodies

      • Mary Noonan

      Pages 59-71

   5. McDonagh’s “True, Lonesome West”

      • Maria Isabel Seguro

      Pages 73-89

   6. The Physical and Verbal Theatre of Michael West

      • Nicholas Grene

      Pages 91-98

   7. A Dark Rosebud on the Irish Stage: Ailís Ní Ríain’s Tallest Man in the World

      • Thierry Dubost

      Pages 99-111

4. Practitioners’ Voices

   1. Front Matter

      Pages 113-113

      PDF

   2. Death of a Playwright

      • Geoff Gould

      Pages 115-122

   3. Looking Back and Forward on Sound Design: Irish Theatre Transformed

      • Cormac O’Connor

      Pages 123-132

   4. Lightning in a Bottle: The BrokenCrow Experiment

      • Ronan FitzGibbon

      Pages 133-139

   5. Interview with Bríd Ó Gallchoir

      • Anne Etienne, Thierry Dubost, Bríd Ó Gallchoir

      Pages 141-151

   6. Interview with Pat Kinevane

      • Anne Etienne, Pat Kinevane

      Pages 153-164

   7. Interview with Mark O’Rowe

      • Thierry Dubost, Anne Etienne, Mark O’Rowe

      Pages 165-173

   8. Enda Walsh, in Conversation with Ger FitzGibbon

      • Ger FitzGibbon, Enda Walsh

      Pages 175-190

5. Political and Societal Reflections on the Stage

   1. Front Matter

      Pages 191-191

      PDF

   2. Slump and Punk in Ray Scannell’s Losing Steam: Envisioning Corcadorca

      • Anne Etienne

      Pages 193-211

   3. Through a Glass, Darkly: Priests on the Contemporary Irish Stage

      • Virginie Roche-Tiengo

      Pages 213-229

This book addresses the notion posed by Thomas Kilroy in his definition of a playwright’s creative process: ‘We write plays, I feel, in order to populate the stage’. It gathers eclectic reflections on contemporary Irish theatre from both Irish theatre practitioners and international academics. The eighteen contributions offer innovative perspectives on Irish theatre since the early 1990s up to the present, testifying to the development of themes explored by emerging and established playwrights as well as to the (r)evolutions in practices and approaches to the stage that have taken place in the last thirty years.


This cross-disciplinary collection devotes as much attention to contextual questions and approaches to the stage in practice as it does to the play text in its traditional and revised forms. The essays and interviews encourage dialectic exchange between analytical studies on contemporary Irish theatre and contributions by theatre practitioners.

• Modern Irish drama
• Thomas Kilroy
• Playwright
• Performance practice
• Enda Walsh
• Performance theory

• University College Cork, Cork, Ireland

  Anne Etienne

• Université de Caen Normandie, Caen, France

  Thierry Dubost

Anne Etienne is Lecturer in Modern Drama at University College Cork, Ireland. She has published widely on theatre censorship in twentieth-century England, and is the main author of Theatre Censorship: from Walpole to Wilson (2007). She is currently expanding her work on Arnold Wesker. Her research in contemporary Irish theatre is devoted to Corcadorca Theatre Company.
Thierry Dubost is Professor of Literatures in English at the University of Caen Basse-Normandie, France. He is the author of Struggle, Defeat or Rebirth: Eugene O’Neill’s Vision of Humanity (1997) and The Plays of Thomas Kilroy (2007). He has co-edited a number of volumes on Irish drama and culture.

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