Contemporary Irish Theatre: Histories and Theories began life as what we thought would be a straightforward academic textbook. We pictured bold headings and terms, tidy boxes, and tight word counts as we hopscotched succinctly from one topic or figure neatly to the next. The length and breadth of the book on contemporary Irish theatre since 1957 in the Republic and Northern Ireland that you now hold instead evidence our ultimate realisation that this work needed to be a renovation of the Irish theatre history survey committed to a wider and more kaleidoscopic way of seeing that would preserve some textbook conventions (like headings or parallel chapter structures) but also challenge the reader to take some agency in their negotiation of the material covered by the book as a whole. The book needed to be kaleidoscopic in the sense that the book could rearrange a reader’s vision through placing both familiar and perhaps unfamiliar objects and case studies next to each other to be seen relationally in a new way. It needed to be kaleidoscopic in that it would ask us as readers to shift our perspective frequently between the contributions of individuals and collectives, between the work of well-established companies and those more (or never quite fully) emerging, and between historical and theoretical perspectives. And most importantly, it needed to be kaleidoscopic in that it could make visible a range of achievements from playwrights, actors, directors, scenographers, artistic directors, administrators and other roles in the theatre industry (including crucially treating companies as collectives) as they bounced off and resonated with one another over time and in different combinations across the island.

Our kaleidoscopic renovation of the Irish theatre history survey was driven by passion for not only advancing scholarship, but a sincere commitment to pedagogy and the practical problems we had encountered in the classroom over the years teaching contemporary Irish theatre at both undergraduate and postgraduate levels and even working with PhD students. Again and again, we had difficulty directing students to a contemporary Irish theatre history survey with adequate historical background and modelling of different (but accessible) theoretical perspectives also capable of mapping accurately the Irish theatre landscape that we lived within. For us, this less documented and researched contemporary Irish theatre landscape includes the work of smaller and independent companies, the contributions of directors, dramaturges, scenographers, lighting, costume and sound designers as well as actors that are harder to capture in a published play text that can circulate outside of a production run and internationally. In addition, we searched for attention to the revivals of key Irish plays over time and how these revivals continue to change and shift the meaning of these works and so on. After continually coming up short, we wrote the book that we didn’t feel yet existed and that we imagined being used very concretely in classrooms and beyond to drive forward cross-pollination of contemporary Irish theatre scholarship.

Our renovation of the Irish theatre history survey within these pages makes visible contemporary Irish theatre’s current range of practice by including discussion of well-known companies, playwrights and other key figures like the director and actors but also centralising the contributions of mid-size and/or small companies and artistic roles like designers, scenographers and artistic directors and/or administrators who we felt were less represented. We also are committed to making visible the policy background and material economies of making contemporary theatre in Ireland today as a key component of this book’s arc and arguments which can be traced across the whole. Contemporary Irish Theatre: Histories and Theories ultimately identifies and in some cases introduces multiple new and/or reoriented starting points from which one might negotiate the expanse of the contemporary Irish theatre’s practice more comprehensibly for students, emerging and established scholars, by building on the work of our colleagues in this subfield, both scholars and theatre practitioners.

What Is contemporary Irish theatre?

Contemporary Irish theatre in our examination encompasses work made in the Republic and Northern Ireland since 1957 because despite important differences in these region’s funding structures and foci of practices formally and thematically during this period, their social, political, cultural and artistic histories are interlinked far beyond the fact of sharing the same island. Following Patrick Lonergan therefore, we “present the term ‘Irish theatre’ as encompassing work produced on the island in its entirety” (2019, 9). It was our conviction that a book attempting to survey contemporary Irish theatre had to reckon with the challenges and messiness of balancing the telling of each strand’s genealogies on their own terms, and as intermeshed with the other from the late 1950s onward. This book therefore requires contemporary Irish theatre history travellers engaged with this book—both new and seasoned veterans—to occupy multiple temporalities and geographies at once within and across chapters within this book and to continually expand their perspective on what constitutes Irish theatre today, where it might happen and with whom, and whose contributions on artistic teams are worth memorialising and reflecting on at length.

We identify this book as located in Irish theatre and performance studies but with a primary focus on theatrical productions, events and practitioners that would be classified primarily as theatre in terms of their use of genre classification and other indicators such as funding streams or site of premiere. However, as Contemporary Irish Theatre: Histories and Practice will evidence, the body of practice that we can coherently identify as Irish “theatre” through use of form, funding sources and so on has become increasingly interdisciplinary in execution with increasing intersection with other art forms including performance art, dance, visual art and music among others from the late twentieth century onwards. In addition, companies like Corcadorca, Performance Corporation, Company SJ, ANU Productions and others have consistently produced landmark works which took place outside theatre buildings in site-specific or site-responsive ways (McIvor 2018, 465–486).

Therefore, at this moment, the baseline formal characteristics of contemporary Irish theatre practice remain in flux, a state of ongoing contestation that has in fact been undulating in waves since the mid-twentieth century across mainstream and fringe/independent Irish theatre practices particularly as “international and movements in performance have additionally affected change in Irish theatre, dance and music as cultural globalisation has provoked the common consumption of cultures that have been diffused by the internet, popular culture media, and international travel” (Kelly et al. 2020, 9). Marie Kelly, Siobhán O’Gorman and Áine Phillips crucially also observe that as “cross-disciplinary performance has dissolved traditional boundaries of practice” in the mid-late twentieth and early twenty-first century there has been a simultaneous turn towards artistic expression becoming in their words, more “socially productive” (Kelly et al. 2020, 9) or politically engaged as we explore at length across this book and which has recently been explored in book-length studies by Emer O’Toole (2023) and Ciara L. Murphy (2023). Contemporary Irish theatre’s recent intensified period of politicised enmeshment and engagement develops and, in many cases, actively contests earlier understandings of the entanglement of Irish theatricality, politics, activism and nation(alism) as we document throughout the book. As Murphy puts it, contemporary Irish theatre artists are frequently “artistic makers and change makers” [emphasis ours] whose work contributes actively to “cultural, political, and economic ‘switch points’ of social change on the island of Ireland” (Murphy 2023, 4).

However, despite focusing on theatre as our primary genre of reference in this book, we also acknowledge following Fintan Walsh and Sara Brady that “the categories of ‘Irish culture’ and ‘Irishness’ are highly performative, effected through a multitude of social practices, cultural formations, and discursive utterances” (2009, 1). Therefore, we frequently discuss extra-theatrical performative moments as inextricably linked touchstones within contemporary Irish theatre history particularly when it comes to the intersection of theatre and politics. This has been demonstrated particularly acutely in recent years for example by a lengthy struggle between 2016 and 2018 as to whether street artist Maser’s “Repeal the 8th” mural could be displayed outside Dublin’s Project Arts Centre, the Republic’s foremost experimental theatre venue, after the mural was deemed by the Charities Regulator to constitute “political activity” (Young 2021, 326–332) or the use of ANU Productions’ performers frequently as part of official Irish state commemoration ceremonies during the Decade of Centenaries which blur the line between re-enactments of the past and contemporary political performatives (see Chapter 6). This ongoing inextricability between theatre and the (politically) performative which has been a hallmark of modern Irish theatre since its early twentieth-century origins means our historical and theoretical chapters must too continually emphasise how extra-theatrical performance and the performative bleed over constantly from contemporary Irish social and cultural contexts into theatrical contexts. We consider this link when it happens literally as in the above examples, representationally (in terms of plot, content, theme, site and/or use of theatrical form) and/or through collaborative relationships and/or direct tie-ins with local, regional or national agendas, as in for example the funding of theatre and other arts projects through peace and reconciliation schemes in Northern Ireland post-Troubles or the role of theatre and performance in events related to the Republic’s Decade of Centenaries’ commemorative programme.

Nevertheless, even though we focus on theatre as genre and art form, we deliberately decentralise the Irish play text and playwright as the most important nodal points for understanding the progression and relational nature of contemporary Irish theatre histories. We have observed a still persistent focus on the Irish dramatic theatre text in approaching the study of Irish theatre in higher education classroom contexts internationally. We would hold this imbalance almost directly responsible for a relative paucity of scholarship and by extension teaching engagement with the practices of contemporary Irish theatre companies like Operating Theatre, Pan Pan Theatre, Fabulous Beast/Tėac Daṁsa, Performance Corporation, Barabbas, Blue Raincoat, ANU Productions, Brokentalkers, Kabosh Productions, Dead Centre and many others whose theatrical work is not primarily reliant on a central dramatic literary text, but rather may interpret “performance text” more widely as involving spoken or recorded text but also sound, movement/dance and scenography as primary languages of theatrical meaning-making. Those contemporary Irish theatre companies named above and many other companies and individual artists who work in and explore non-dramatic theatre text performance modalities have been equally if not more responsible for the evolution of contemporary Irish theatre practice over the period covered by this book. And yet, unless you live in the county, city or indeed country where they make and show work and are of a certain age and level of privilege where you got to witness it live, you may have little to no awareness of their existence and record of innovation even if you consider yourself well-versed in modern and contemporary Irish dramatic literature and theatre history. Contemporary Irish Theatre: History and Theories’ principal aim is to radically change and correct this imbalance of emphasis in telling the story of contemporary Irish theatre for Irish and international readers.

Just as decisively, we argue that this dramatic literary textual bias in Irish theatre scholarship has continued to hinder knowledge and understanding of the full spectrum of figures who populate and actually execute the labour necessary to sustain and make meaning from the contemporary Irish theatre landscape. In response, this book attempts to foreground or at least continually point towards the equally important contributions of directors, artistic directors, scenographers, actors, activists and administrators also active as Irish theatre and performance makers. In particular the contribution of directors has been consciously written into this new history as their achievements have been especially neglected. We, of course, do not ignore playwrights or dramatic texts, but we have deliberately placed them within the larger theatre ecology in Ireland. Ultimately this book’s aim is to make possible a new kind of entry point to contemporary Irish theatre studies that demands a different kind of attention and questioning from the reader in terms of the figures, performance elements and roles that are necessary to understand and map in order to grasp the totality of contemporary Irish theatre as a field of practice. We feel that our inclusive and kaleidoscopic approach is ultimately more representative of the contemporary Irish theatre landscape as it has been lived on the island by those who make and consume theatre since the late 1950s. As such, we focus as much as we can on the unit of the collective—whether at the level of institution, company, festival or movement. And we emphasise wherever we can not only the new as a measure of innovation within contemporary Irish theatre practice—but also the return, the overlap, the missed connection, the erasure and the possibility of the emergent—whether in the form of analysing revivals of plays as a recurring feature across the “Histories” chapters or exploring production histories of landmark plays over time (see discussion of Frank McGuinness’s multiple revivals of Observe the Sons of Ulster Marching Towards the Somme in Chapter 7) or tracing the longer career arcs of key theatrical figures like Druid’s Artistic Director Garry Hynes over decades across chapters.

Renovating the Irish Theatre History Survey

However despite our goal of renovating the Irish theatre history survey we are not claiming that this book ultimately can or will be fully comprehensive of contemporary Irish theatre figures, productions and practices (mainstream or margin)—in fact, quite the opposite. Rather, we intend to continue to highlight more gaps than we can fill within these pages, and raise more questions than we can answer. We very intentionally point readers of this book towards the work of our colleagues in this field encouraging readers to further deepen their exploration of this subject after engaging with our study as an entry point or re-orientation.

This book is ultimately intended as an introductory survey of contemporary Irish theatre histories and theories—but an introductory theatre histories and theories survey with a difference in that we have deliberately chosen to not always feature the most well-known plays, figures or production case studies known on the island of Ireland or internationally. Instead, we have taken the opportunity to weave both a history and a counter-history within and across these pages. We intentionally make use of a chronological framework as described later to multiply and fracture knowledge of a knowable contemporary Irish theatre landscape that cannot only be organised comprehensibly under the names of artists whose work has enjoyed the most mobile international traction such as Brian Friel, Martin McDonagh, Marina Carr or even companies like Galway’s Druid Theatre, arguably the most world-renowned regional Irish theatre company apart from the Abbey, the Republic’s national (and Dublin-based) archetypal institution, but nonetheless actually very underrepresented in contemporary Irish theatre scholarship.

Tellingly, it has been 20 years since the publication of Christopher Morash’s comprehensive and methodologically expansive A History of Irish Theatre, 1601–2000, which we argue is the last full-length Irish theatre history survey monograph in our field explicitly intended as such (2002). Patrick Lonergan’s 2019 Irish Drama and Theatre Since 1950 comes closest to recently reinvigorating the theatre history survey approach but ultimately employs a thematically focused structure rather than engaging with the chronological in any systematic way. In the intervening years, scholars in our field have more commonly chosen thematically, theoretically or genre-focused approaches in key monographs and edited collection on Irish theatre and performance in modern and contemporary contexts or narrowed in on key practitioners/companies such as Field Day (Richtarik 2001), the Gate Theatre (Pilný et al. 2021) Blue Raincoat (Trench 2015), Barabbas (Szabo 2012), ANU Productions (Singleton 2016), Marie Jones (McNulty and Maguire 2015), Marina Carr (Trench 2010; Sihra 2018), Martin McDonagh (Lonergan 2012), Enda Walsh (Caulfield and Walsh 2015) and others as the focus of study. These post-2002 monographs and edited collections on Irish theatre and performance have therefore trended instead towards using more targeted criteria based on identity (class, gender, sexuality, race/ethnicity/nationality, region, religion, political affiliation), form/genre (dance theatre, devised theatre and performance, experimental theatre, performance/live art, scenography) or theme (globalisation, interculturalism, memory, mythmaking, trauma) as the lenses through which authors have surveyed the entire field of modern and contemporary Irish theatre and performance. Perhaps paradoxically, the more narrowly defined scope of these publications, however, has indispensably proliferated understanding of the volume and nuance of theatre practices taking place on the island of Ireland since the early twentieth century and the social, political and cultural dynamics that continue to shape how these practices are remembered or alternatively, forgotten within the field of Irish theatre studies.

Indeed, at the time of writing, our book might even seem superfluous following so soon upon the rigorous and wide-ranging recently published edited handbooks on modern and contemporary Irish theatre—Nicholas Grene and Christopher Morash’s The Oxford Handbook of Modern Irish Theatre (2016) and Eamonn Jordan and Eric Weitz’s The Palgrave Handbook of Contemporary Irish Theatre and Performance (2018). These two wide-ranging resources cover more than 120 years of Irish theatre practices pre- and post-independence, with the dozens of contributors at a variety of career stages across the two volumes evidencing the plurality and scope of current scholarship on modern and contemporary Irish theatre with Jordan and Weitz also including essays by theatre practitioners.

And yet, our efforts do differ from that of our colleagues in those publications in that we are summarising chronologically in Part I of this book. In addition, we see ourselves as continuing our survey work in Part II with the case studies selected rather than intending only to move forward theoretical discourse in Irish theatre studies. That being said, the aim of Jordan and Weitz’s collection in particular shares most in common with our own, with describing their 866-page handbook as “a multiform sweep of theoretical, historical, practical and personal glimpses of aspects of a landscape roughly characterised as contemporary Irish theatre and performance” (Jordan and Weitz 2018, 3). However, we intentionally chose breadth over depth with Contemporary Irish Theatre: Histories and Theories due to a dearth of more recent full-length publications which take a survey approach to the study and theorisation of contemporary Irish theatre histories as defined by attention to how events unfold linearly and chronologically over time in interrelationship with one another. The broad historical survey as practised within Irish theatre studies, in our opinion, needed an update and a serious expansion of focus and coverage.

But it is nonetheless a risky undertaking to attempt a theatre history survey when we know that true inclusion will never actually be achieved. Again and again, the theatre history survey as a genre has proved incapable in Irish theatre studies and beyond of fully making space for a diversity of theatre approaches and practitioners, particularly those marginalised in terms of their identities including but not limited to women. Indeed in the same twenty years since the publication of Morash’s post-1600 history of Irish theatre, surveys focused on women’s contributions to Irish theatre histories in the form of monographs, edited collections and edited editions of play texts have become a survey genre of their own with notable examples including Susan Cannon Harris’s Gender and Modern Irish Drama (2002), Melissa Sihra’s landmark edited collection, Women in Irish Drama: A Century of Authorship and Representation (2007), Cathy Leeney’s Irish Women Playwrights 1900–1939: Gender & Violence Onstage (2010), Lisa Fitzpatrick’s edited collection Performing Feminisms in Contemporary Ireland (2013), Charlotte Headrick and Eileen Kearney’s edited collection of plays Irish Women Dramatists: 1908–2001 (2014), Miriam Haughton and Mária Kurdi’s edited collection Radical Contemporary Theatre Practices by Women in Ireland (2015), Fiona Coleman Coffey’s Political Acts: Women in Irish Theatre 1921–2012 (2016), Shonagh Hill’s Women and Embodied Mythmaking in Irish Theatre (2021) and the two-volume edited collection, The Golden Thread: Irish Women Playwrights 1716–2016 (2021), edited by David Clare, Fiona McDonagh and Justine Nakase. As Melissa Sihra notes in the coda to these two volumes:

The golden thread of women’s voices demonstrates that we must not merely slot their plays into a predetermined male “canon”, but, rather, tilt the very angles of theatre history itself in order to reveal new spectrums of meaning-making in which women’s creative power is foundational. From this recalibration, theatrical expression by women becomes intrinsic, rather than relational, to Irish theatre, past, present, and to come. (2021, 221)

We therefore revive the model of the Irish theatre history survey in this book as our contribution to this ongoing collective Irish feminist theatre studies project of “tilt[ing] the very angles of theatre history itself” (2021, 221) as it is practised in the context of Irish theatre and performance studies in the twenty-first century.

The Structure of the Book

Part I, “Histories,” surveys periods of twentieth- and twenty-first-century Irish theatrical activity delineated roughly by decade, with splits determined by key events or shifts in theatre or the wider culture at roughly the ten-year mark. Each “Histories” chapter contains two parts: “Part I: Historical Context” and “Part II: Theatre and Performance Practices.” Each “Historical Context” provides an overview of key reference points from social, cultural and economic history of that period to frame that chapter’s “Theatre and Performance Practices,” and can also be used to cross-reference case studies and/or figures from that historical period elsewhere in the book. Each “Theatre and Performance Practices” section covers “Genres, Methods and Approaches,” “Key Practitioners and Companies,” “Landmark Plays and Productions,” “Seminal Revivals” and a “Spotlight on Institutions and Festivals.” We have aimed to capture a representative composite picture of each period as a whole within each individual chapter taking into consideration representational balance within chapters and across the book as a whole on grounds including geography, size of company or institution, availability of a play text (if one exists) or other production materials for further study, and identity categories of theatre artists including but not limited to gender, religion, class, race/ethnicity/nationality and sexuality as appropriate or significant to each period. We have often consciously opted for lesser-known works, figures or companies with the intention of providing newcomers to the field with different orientation points and challenging those established within the field to refocus their view. This means that frequently there is not extensive documentation, recordings or a play text available for work we analyse, but this should not in our opinion diminish the importance of this work as a reference point for understanding the evolution of contemporary Irish theatre. And indeed, it is citation of the barrier of no play text or recording to justify non-inclusion that we feel has constricted accounts of the diversity of contemporary Irish theatre as a living field of practice, particularly as key Irish companies and artists from the late 1980s and 1990s onwards embraced aesthetics and ways of working that are more difficult to translate through the medium of a play text.

Part II, “Theories,” offers five key theoretical lenses—nation, language, body, space and interculturalism—for navigating this wide terrain of contemporary Irish theatre practices with case studies chosen thematically rather than on chronological grounds although we have also been conscious of representational balance particularly in terms of geography and identities. Each chapter is also argument-driven in that it identifies and argues for three key strands of how each theoretical lens has been realised on Irish stages and in collaborative production contexts over time. Due to the call and response nature of theatre history where both historical events and the work of other artists influence theatremakers conceptually and thematically in real time, there is some chronological bunching within chapters (such as looking at the 1985 premieres of Anne Devlin’s Ourselves Alone and Frank McGuinness’s Observe the Sons of Ulster Marching Towards the Somme in our nation chapter) but overall, we move more quickly and consciously back and forth across chronological time in our “Theories” chapters individually and as a group. We also continue to treat historical background as relevant to the arguments in each “Theories” chapter and frequently reference pre-1957 theatrical and historical events.

Indeed, while “Part I: Historical Contexts” is organised chronologically and can be read straight through, it is not only useful in this regard and it is a key contention of this book that Irish (and other) theatre histories should not be understood linearly. Rather, each chapter stands on its own and continually cross-references other chapters across the book as a whole. And while “Part II: Theories” offers only five theoretical key words out of the many discursive strands that have shaped the field of contemporary Irish theatre and performance studies (and Irish Studies more broadly) over the last several decades, we strategically offer our selected terms as orientation points to one another and the wider field, not authoritative pronouncements that should re-endow these already familiar (even hackneyed in some instances) lenses with more authority to continue constricting the future of contemporary Irish theatre and performance studies. Rather, we hope that assessing where the bulk of the discourse on contemporary Irish theatre has landed to date will instead provide a launchpad for emerging scholars to push even further into new areas of study, catalysed by the easier comprehensibility of a bird’s-eye view. That being said, our last keyword, “interculturalism,” is least established within contemporary Irish theatre studies (McIvor 2016). Therefore, through our curation and presentation of this term, we are pushing here for a theoretical refocus regarding how an unprecedentedly demographically diverse island of Ireland in terms of race, ethnicity and nationality of origin might view itself, its population and its theatre practices going forward—as well as through historical lenses as this chapter also engages.

Conclusion

We ultimately intend Contemporary Irish Theatre: Histories and Theories to be an introduction for all, but equally a dislocation for many of us in systematically challenging within these pages where our critical emphasis might be needed now and moving forward in both modern and contemporary contexts in the field of Irish theatre studies. You might still be wondering then why we still chose to use a cover image from the Abbey Theatre’s 2017 revival of Katie Roche, directed by Caroline Byrne and starring Caoilfhionn Dunne as Roche, which we use as a case study in Chapter 6, for this book. This image of Dunne as Roche looking backward at a gallery of Catholic religious iconography in the midst of Joanna Scotcher’s set and costume design, amidst Paul Keogan’s lighting design, on the main stage of the Abbey, the Republic’s national and still most highly funded theatre might seem surprising despite its beauty given our book’s ultimate remit and mission to diversify and layer how we think about a broader performance ecology of contemporary Irish theatre. Why then stay on the stage of the national theatre, trapped in Catholic iconography, literally looking backward?

We made this choice because although Contemporary Irish Theatre: Histories and Theories demands that we fragment understanding and vary points of attention within contemporary Irish theatre histories, we argue that huge value does remain in looking back to look forward or to the side. This means that individual scholars and artists must be equipped to travel across and negotiate their own experiences with these temporalities of event and influence in order to understand what work is in conversation with who and why. And just as Dunne as Roche repeatedly dug into the literal dirt on the stage floor in Scotcher’s densely semiotically coded expressionistic set during this 2017 revival, as students, scholars and theatre practitioners working within “Irish” theatre, we must continue and repeat our own excavations. To dig up from a different spot will yield new discoveries as Byrne’s searing 2017 production of Deevy’s 1936 play did, and we hope our book will also do this in terms of its ripple effects within the field at large. Therefore, we now invite you take up our invitation to dig anew but in a broader landscape. You may commence with a bird’s-eye view of the flux and flow of histories and a range of theatrical practices in “Part I: Historical Contexts” before moving to fragmentation in “Part II: Theories,” or move backward and forward between Part I and Part II based on areas of interest or spark, or begin with your own figure, production or moment of interest following the currents of the book outwards from there.