Carysfort Press Ltd. – serie

The Gate Theatre is one of Ireland’s major theatres. It has produced important new plays by such figures as Brian Friel, Conor McPherson, and Denis Johnston – while also premiering significant works by other writers, including unjustly neglected women dramatists such as Mary Manning, Christine Longford, and Maura Laverty. It has made huge contributions to the art of theatre in Ireland, not only in relation to acting (launching the careers of Orson Welles, James Mason, and Michael Gambon) but also in terms of direction and design. And it has made a major contribution to the world’s understanding of Samuel Beckett, Harold Pinter, and others.Despite these incredible achievements, the theatre has been the subject of very little critical attention to date. This book redresses this problem; it is, in fact, the very first scholarly essay collection devoted entirely to the theatre. It gathers together leading academics and critics who explore the Gate’s achievements in relation to the development of new Irish writing and new Irish theatre practices. The book is written with scholarly rigour but also in accessible language and would therefore be of interest to anyone with a passion for Irish theatre.

Beethoven’s seventy-two settings of traditional Irish airs constitute his most prolific output in any genre. The arrangements were commissioned in the early nineteenth century by the Scottish editor and publisher, George Thomson, who sent airs, but no texts, to Beethoven. Poetry, mostly by less well-known poets, was attached to the finished settings before publication by Thomson, and perhaps therein lies the reason why the songs never achieved the popularity which they deserve: many of the poems have been judged to be of inferior quality. In this edition, the first in which all Beethoven’s Irish folksong settings are published together, the late baritone, broadcaster and musicologist, Tomás Ó Súilleabháin, selected texts, mostly by Burns and Moore, which he felt were more appropriate to the airs and to Beethoven’s settings.

«Perhaps the greatest actor-manager of his time», wrote the distinguished playwright Harold Pinter, whose first job in the theatre was with Anew McMaster’s classical theatre company and whose little book, called Mac, Pinter published as a tribute to him after his death. For over thirty years «Mac», as he was known, toured the Irish provinces giving the country people their first sight of Shakespeare. Anew McMaster died over fifty years ago, and though he figures largely in biographies by Micheal O’hAodha, Simon Callow and his brother-in-law, Micheál MacLiammóir, he has not had, as yet, a full book devoted to his life and work.

This book aims to provide a comprehensive, but succinct analysis of the tragedies and comedies written by Greek and Roman dramatists. The book is comprehensive in the ways it deals not just with Greek tragedy of the fifth century BCE, but also with Seneca’s tragedies of the first century CE. The book also deals with two types of Greek comedy: the comedy of ideas in Aristophanes, and the later social comedy of Menander, this being appropriated in Rome by the comic dramatists Plautus and Terence. The tragedies and comedies of fifth century Athens do not endorse the official ideology of the city. They raise questions about the position of women, the never ending war with Sparta, the nature of religious belief. Crucial here is the depiction by Euripides and by Sophocles of powerful women characters, female intruders who disrupt the male world: Medea, Antigone, Electra, Lysistrata. Comic drama usually concludes on a positive note: with marriage, with plenty of food and drink.

Almost from the beginning, since 1970, new plays became part of the Focus’s repertory. Starting with Peter Terson’s Mooney and His Caravan, and Declan Burke-Kennedy’s The Trespasser in 1973, new plays continued to be produced and some, such as actor-playwright Ena May (Out of the Beehive 1987; She’s Your Mother, Too, You Know 1988; A Close Shave With the Devil 2001), finding an artistic home for their works, though not in the numbers that established plays and classics had been produced under Deirdre’s leadership. Since 2002 under Joe Devlin’s artistic direction, Focus has reversed the emphasis with new plays taking the lion’s share of the theatre’s performances and, in the process, reinvigorated itself during the past decade. Of the seven plays in this anthology, (five are from Joe’s leadership) all exhibit a range in styles from Lewis Carroll’s fantastical world (Alice in Wonderland by Mary Elizabeth Burke-Kennedy), to a couple on the brink of a philandering weekend disaster (The Day of the Mayfly by Declan Burke-Kennedy), to a one-man show about Jonathan Swift with several characters all played by the same actor (Talking Through His Hat by Michael Harding); an examination of two shoplifting thieves and the would-be writer who gets in their way (Pinching for My Soul by Elizabeth Moynihan), a battle royal between two sides of a world-famous painter (Francis & Frances by Brian McAvera), the reactions of multiple New Yorkers to that moment on September 11, 2001 when their world was changed forever (New York Monologues by Mike Poblete), to the final days of an iconic movie star (Hollywood Valhalla by Aidan Harney).Each of these scripts is followed by short notes from the playwright, a memory of the production and in some cases its aims by its author. As will become quite clear, there is no single Focus play, no play which perfectly captures the spirit, the aesthetic aims, the physical abilities of this continually surprising fifty-year-old company.

Ibsen and Chekhov on the Irish Stage presents articles on the theories of translation and adaptation, new insights on the work of Brian Friel, Frank McGuinness, Thomas Kilroy, and Tom Murphy, historical analyses of theatrical productions during the Irish Revival, interviews with contemporary theatre directors, and a round-table discussion with the playwrights, Michael West and Thomas Kilroy. Ibsen and Chekhov on the Irish Stage challenges the notion that a country’s dramatic tradition develops in cultural isolation. It uncovers connections between past productions of plays by Ibsen and Chekhov and contemporary literary adaptations of their works by Irish playwrights, demonstrating the significance of international influence for the formation of national canon.Conceived in the spirit of a round-table discussion, Ibsen and Chekhov on the Irish Stage is a collective study of the intricacies of trans-cultural migration of dramatic works and a re-examination of Irish theatre history from 1890 to the present day.

Sullied Magnificence: The Theatre of Mark O’Rowe is a collection of essays that combines the voices of Mark O’Rowe’s collaborators and critics with analysis by leading academics. It examines the role of the actor and director in monologue theatre. It questions the use of violence in O’Rowe’s films and plays. It explores influences and inspirations, and provides a thorough introduction to the work of one of Ireland’s most unique theatrical voices. It also takes a brief look at O’Rowe’s work for film, as both writer and director, and the crossover effect this work has had on his plays.

Devised Performance in Irish Theatre: Histories and Contemporary Practice is the first collection to focus exclusively on devised theatre throughout the island of Ireland by bringing together a range of perspectives from both academics and practitioners. It situates the histories and contemporary practice of devised performance in the Irish theatre, responding to a decisive shift in the working approach of several prominent emerging companies including ANU Productions, Brokentalkers, THEATREclub, and THISISPOPBABY. This collection takes a historical approach that demonstrates how this contemporary surge of work builds on a physical and dance theatre movement in Irish theatre that began to coalesce in the 1990s through the work of companies like Barabbas, Macnas, Blue Raincoat, and Pan Pan which was in turn influenced by earlier community arts practice on the island of Ireland beginning in the late 1970s. Devised Performance in Irish Theatre makes visible a uniquely Irish body of work that will also further international understandings of devised performance as collaborative process and working methodology.

A useful and provocative book that collects the diverse and related practices of theatre makers and theatre professionals deserving of greater attention from artists, teachers and scholars. (Willie White, Director of Dublin Theatre Festival and President of IETM)Radical Contemporary Theatre Practices by Women in Ireland is an important contribution to the fields of Irish theatre and performance studies, and gender and performance in Ireland. The essays and interviews explore the work of women directors, designers, and playwrights on both sides of the Irish Border, who are currently shaping theatre practice on the island. By gathering such an impressive range of material, Mária Kurdi and Miriam Haughton have produced a collection that offers a snapshot of radical practice on the Irish stage in the early 21st century. (Lisa Fitzpatrick, Senior Lecturer in Theatre, University of Ulster)

Marie Jones is one of the most prolific and popular writers working in Northern Irish theatre today. Her work has achieved local relevance and international recognition. In the course of a remarkable career now spanning five decades, Jones has been an actor, playwright, and screenwriter; she also helped to establish two major Irish theatre companies (Charabanc and DubbelJoint) as well as playing a major role in theatre-in-education through her plays for Replay Productions. From her earliest work with Charabanc in the early 1980s to the present day, Jones’s work has engaged with Irish (and, more often than not, specifically Northern Irish) experience in ways that reveal the extent to which the personal is political in a distinctive form of popular theatre. This volume of essays engages critically with Jones’s oeuvre, her reception in Ireland and beyond, and her position in the canon of contemporary drama.

Since its foundation in 1991, Blue Raincoat Theatre Company is Ireland's only full-time venue-based professional theatre ensemble and has become renowned for its movement, visual and aural proficiencies and precision. This book explores those signatures from a number of vantage points, conveying the complex challenges faced by Blue Raincoat as they respond to changing aesthetic and economic circumstances. Particular consideration is given to set, costume, sound and lighting design.Influenced and informed by renowned international theatre makers such as Étienne Decroux, Jacques Copeau, Roy Hart and Anne Bogart, Blue Raincoat productions are generally non-natural in their sensibility, with a few notable exceptions. Productions such as the stage adaptations of Flann O'Brien's The Third Policeman, At Swim Two Birds and The Poor Mouth, Samuel Beckett's Endgame and Eugène Ionesco's The Chairs speak to the artifice of the theatre itself, where actors and designers work collaboratively to reveal the function of the performance. W.B. Yeats's one act ritual dramas demand physical, vocal and technical rigour and flexibility. This book explores the marvellously textured and complex nature of Blue Raincoat's work, revealing the magic that results from their unique style of theatre making.

Thomas Kilroy’s long and distinguished career is celebrated in this volume by new essays, panel discussions and an interview, reconsidering the work of one of Ireland’s most intellectually ambitious and technically imaginative playwrights. Contributors are drawn from both the academic and theatrical spheres, and include Nicholas Grene, Wayne Jordan, Patrick Mason, Christopher Murray and Lynne Parker.This volume follows Kilroy’s own practice of connecting the creative and the critical, and publishes for the first time an extract from his play «Blake». Illustrated with photographs from major productions, this book also reproduces previously unseen materials from the Thomas Kilroy Collection held in the James Hardiman Library, NUI Galway.

Humour claims no ideological affiliation – its workings merit inspection in any and every individual case, in light of the who, what, where and when of a joke, including the manner of performance, the socio-cultural context, the dynamic amongst participants, and who knows how many other factors particular to the instance. There are as many insights to be gained from the deployment of humour in performance as people to think about it – so herein lie a healthy handful of responses from a variety of perspectives.For the Sake of Sanity: Doing things with humour in Irish performance assembles a range of essays from practitioners, academics, and journalists, all of whom address the attempt to make an audience laugh in various Irish contexts over the past century. With a general emphasis on theatre, the collection also includes essays on film, television and stand-up comedy for those insights into practice, society and culture revealed uniquely through instances of humour in performance.

Stanislavski in Ireland: Focus at Fifty is an insight into Ireland’s only arthouse theatre from the people who were there. Through interviews, articles, short memoirs and photographs, the book tracks the theatre from its inception, detailing the period under its founder Deirdre O’Connell and then the period following Joe Devlin’s arrival as its new artistic director. Many of Ireland’s leading theatre and film artists trained and worked at Focus, including Gabriel Byrne, Joan Bergin, Olwen Fouéré, Brendan Coyle, Rebecca Schull, Johnny Murphy, Sean Campion, Tom Hickey, and Mary Elizabeth and Declan Burke-Kennedy. The book comes complete with a chronological list of Productions. It is aimed at students of theatre, actors, directors, academics, as well as the casual reader.

Multiple productions and the international successes of plays like The Weir have led to Conor McPherson being regarded by many as one of the finest writers of his generation. McPherson has also been hugely prolific as a theatre director, as a screenwriter and film director, garnering many awards in these different roles.In this collection of essays, commentators from around the world address the substantial range of McPherson’s output to date in theatre and film, a body of work written primarily during and in the aftermath of Ireland’s Celtic Tiger period. These critics approach the work in challenging and dynamic ways, considering the crucial issues of morality, the rupturing of the real, storytelling, and the significance of space, violence and gender. Explicit considerations are given to comedy and humour, and to theatrical form, especially that of the monologue and to the ways that the otherworldly, the unconscious and the supernatural are accommodated dramaturgically, with frequent emphasis placed on the specific aspects of performance in both theatre and film.

Since the late 1970s there has been a marked internationalization of Irish drama, with individual plays, playwrights, and theatrical companies establishing newly global reputations. This book reflects upon these developments, drawing together leading scholars and playwrights to consider the consequences that arise when Irish theatre travels abroad. Essays discuss some of Ireland’s major theatre companies – Druid, the Abbey Theatre, Rough Magic, Blue Raincoat, Field Day and others – while also exploring the presence of Irish drama in the UK, the USA, Germany, and throughout Ireland. The volume also presents the views of key playwrights, featuring essays by Elizabeth Kuti and Ursula Rani Sarma, and including a new interview with Enda Walsh.

What Shakespeare Stole From Rome analyses the multiple ways Shakespeare used material from Roman history and Latin poetry in his plays and poems. Three important tragedies deal with the history of the Roman Republic: Coriolanus, Julius Caesar, and Antony and Cleopatra. From the tragedies of Seneca, Shakespeare took the theme of evil in the ruler, as in Richard III and Macbeth. The comedies of Plautus lie behind the early play The Comedy of Errors. From Ovid, Shakespeare took nearly all his Greek mythology, as in the miniature epic Venus and Adonis. Shakespeare, who knew Latin very well, introduced some 600 new Latin-based words into English.

The year 2009 was the centenary of the death of John Millington Synge, one of the world’s great dramatists. To mark the occasion, this book gathers essays by leading scholars of Irish drama, aiming to explore the writers and movements that shaped Synge, and to consider his enduring legacies. Essays discuss Synge’s work in its Irish, European and world contexts – showing his engagement not just with the Irish literary revival but with European politics and culture too. The book also explores Synge’s influence on later writers: Irish dramatists such as Brian Friel, Tom Murphy and Marina Carr, as well as international writers like Mustapha Matura and Erisa Kironde. It also considers Synge’s place in Ireland today, revealing how The Playboy of the Western World has helped to shape Ireland’s responses to globalisation and multiculturalism, in celebrated productions by the Abbey Theatre, Druid theatre, and Pan Pan theatre company.Contributors include Ann Saddlemyer, Ben Levitas, Mary Burke, Paige Reynolds, Eilís Ní Dhuibhne, Mark Phelan, Shaun Richards, Ondvrej Piln´y, Richard Pine, Alexandra Poulain, Emilie Pine, Melissa Sihra, Sara Keating, Bisi Adigun, Adrian Frazier and Anthony Roche.

Throughout the twentieth century, Irish theatre was fully engaged with the pressing questions of independence - how to achieve it, and how the gap between what was desired and what was settled for might be addressed.In Because We Are Poor, Victor Merriman reads Ireland's postcoloniality as a state of critical desire for a postponed project of decolonization in Independent Ireland. He develops insights from Awam Amkpa, Luke Gibbons, Peadar Kirby, Joe Lee, David Lloyd and others to argue that Irish theatre is staged in a neo-colonial social order, dominated by economic analyses and public policies designed to secure the position of indigenous elites, usually at the expense of the majority of Irish people. Theatre emerges as a key site in which the contradictions arising from frustrated but enduring desires are embodied, enacted and enabled. During the 1990s, the state's monopoly on public discourse in Independent Ireland comes under severe pressure, with hitherto marginal concerns appropriating public space and demanding to be heard. Irish theatre responds to the range and diversity of those voices, to the extent that the Review of Theatre in Ireland (1995-1996) envisages a National Theatre in dialogue with a Theatre of the Nation.The expanded theatrical activity of the 1990s is the focus of Because We Are Poor, and the author's intimate involvement in that moment, as scholar, practitioner, and policy-maker makes the analysis offered here especially compelling. This book brings together concerns which the author has worked to articulate in Irish theatre criticism.It critiques contemporary appropriations of the postcolonial, or post-colonial, among scholars of Irish drama, and proposes a nuanced postcolonial critical practice, challenging critical vocabularies applied to Irish drama. The book addresses the role, crises and potential of Irish theatre, as the cultural and political consequences of globalization manifest themselves.

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.

This book presents an analysis of more than 30 plays written by Irish dramatists and poets that are based on the tragedies of Sophocles, Euripides and Aeschylus. These plays proceed from the time of Yeats and Synge through MacNeice and the Longfords on to many of today’s leading writers. A special feature of the book is that, in order to cater for these who may know little about Greek tragedy, it begins with a chapter entitled ‘A Brief Reading of Greek Tragedy’, and then, in regard to each Greek play analysed, it presents a mini-essay on that play, before coming to the Irish version(s) of it. Three features of these Irish appropriations stand out. Firstly, there are three methods of using a Greek tragedy: straight translation, which requires us to interrogate the original play; version, which preserves the invariant core of the original, but which can add or subtract material; loose adaptation, which often moves the action into the modern world. Secondly, there is a considerable stress on Sophocles whose emphasis on the theme of recognition resonates in a postcolonial society that must define itself. Thirdly, there is a considerable stress on the experience of women – such as Antigone and Medea – that can relate to the position of women in Irish society after independence.

This book contains an exciting collection of essays focusing on a variety of alternative performances happening in contemporary Ireland. While it highlights the particular representations of gay and lesbian identity it also brings to light how diversity has always been part of Irish culture and is, in fact, shaping what it means to be Irish today. Inside there are provocative chapters from scholars, theatre producers, and theatre artists from around the world analysing everything from the drag scene in Dublin to the Gay Pride Parades in Belfast. Cathleen Ni Houlihan will never be the same!

Modern Death is written in the form of a symposium, in which a government agency brings together a group of experts to discuss a strategy for dealing with an ageing population.The speakers take up the thread of the ongoing debates about care for the aged and about euthanasia. In dark satirical mode the author shows what grim developments are possible. The theme of a «final solution» is mentioned, though the connection with Hitler is explicitly denied. The most inhuman crimes against human dignity are discussed in the symposium as if they were a necessary condition of future progress.The fiercely ironical treatment of the material tears off the thin veil that disguises the specious arguments and insidious expressions of concern for the well-being of the younger generation. Though the text was written nearly thirty years ago, the play has a terrifyingly modern relevance.

From the late 1940s, until shortly before his death in 2007, John Devitt was one of Dublin's most avid and discerning theatre-goers. For John, attending the theatre was something more than an evening out: it was a passion, a commitment, almost a vocation. A born raconteur, John could talk about productions from the 1950s, 1960s or 1970s as if he had just stepped out of the theatre, fresh from the experience that meant so much to him. This book is much more than a record of the oral history of Dublin theatre-going that his memories contained — it is a glimpse into a life that was witty, argumentative, and vigorous, but never dull.

Ireland on Stage: Beckett and After, a collection of ten essays on contemporary Irish theatre, focuses primarily on Irish playwrights and their works, both in text and on the stage, in the latter half of the twentieth century. It is symbolic that most of the editorial work for this book was carried out in 2006, the centenary year of the birth of Samuel Beckett. While the editors consider Beckett to be the most important playwright in post-1950 Irish theatre, it should be noted that the contributors to the book are not bound in any sense by Beckettian criticism of any kind. The contributors draw freely on Beckett and his work: some examine Beckett’s plays in detail, while others, for whom Beckett remains an indispensable springboard to their discussions, pay closer attention to his or their own contemporaries, ranging from Brian Friel and Frank McGuinness to Marina Carr and Conor McPherson. The editorial policy of the book was flexible enough to allow contributors to go as far back as a hundred years in their attempt to contextualise post-1950 Irish theatre. The works of Oscar Wilde, W.B. Yeats, J.M. Synge, Bernard Shaw, Sean O’Casey, and James Joyce are frequently mentioned throughout the book; this undoubtedly added to the dynamics of the book, as well as to the rigour which the editors believe should be apparent in the collection as a whole

This collection of fourteen new essays explores Irish theatre from exciting new perspectives. How has Irish theatre been received internationally – and, as the country becomes more multicultural, how will international theatre influence the development of drama in Ireland? As Ireland changes, how should we think about the works of familiar figures – writers like Synge, O’Casey, Friel, Murphy, Carr, and McGuinness? Is the distinction between popular and literary drama tenable in a Celtic Tiger Ireland where the arts and economics are becoming increasingly intertwined? And is it time to remember less established Irish writers? Drawing together a range of international experts, this book aims to answer these and many other important questions.