Space

Abstract

With Ireland’s division into two territories under different governance, its geographic location at the edge of Europe and its colonial history where its people were dispossessed of their land, it is perhaps unsurprising that space, as a mode of meaning-making in performance, is a key feature of Irish theatre. This chapter examines how space functions in Irish theatre, contextualising cultural and political considerations of space; showing how these contexts can be read into the dramaturgies of theatrical productions and site-specific performances. The three frameworks and accompanying case studies that model the application of these critical lenses are:

• The Home Place (Stewart Parker’s Pentecost).

• Liminal Spaces (Marina Carr’s By the Bog of Cats).

• Sites of Performance/Non-theatre Spaces (ANU’s The Boys of Foley Street).

Theatre theorist, Kim Solga writes of “the epistemological duality” of space, “its imaginary potential, coupled with its literal and constant material impact on our lives” which “inevitably transforms it into territory, into something to be argued over, fought for, colonized, decolonized, hunted, owned, and lost” (2019, 2). With Ireland’s division into two territories under different governance, its geographic location as an island at the edge of Europe and its colonial history where its people were dispossessed of their land, it is perhaps unsurprising that space, as a mode of meaning-making in performance, is a key feature of Irish theatre.

The importance of the physical landscape to Ireland, a country with a long agricultural history, is registered by the fact that the Irish language has thirty-two different words for field. However, the land has also been considered to be capable of telling its own stories or possessing knowledge and memories: early Irish-language texts wrote of the dinnsenchas, the local lore of places and Irish bogs have been found to preserve ancient artefacts along with buried bodies hundreds of years old. Space in Ireland has thus traditionally been valued as a vital resource and also capable of generating meaning.

In more recent times the interpretation of the space of Ireland has been aligned with identity politics and governance. Due to the partition of the island into the Republic of Ireland and Northern Ireland since 1922 many of the people living in six northern counties consider the territory to be British and identify as British while others in the same space identify as Irish. Northern Ireland is a political state whereas the North of Ireland is a geographical area that includes counties in the Republic such as Donegal, Cavan and Monaghan. Henri Lefebvre writes, “space is political and ideological. It is a product literally filled with ideologies” (1976, 31). This conceptualisation of space is most apparent in a divided Ireland where the understanding of the space is dependent on an ideological point of view.

Beyond its colonial history and relationship with Britain, Ireland is also situated both geographically and ideologically between Europe and the United States. Due to sustained emigration from Ireland to the US from the nineteenth through to the twentieth century there are an enormous amount of American citizens who claim Irish heritage, which has led to deep connections between the two countries. In its struggle for independence from Britain, its abandonment of failed isolationist policies of self-sufficiency since the late 1950s and in its membership of the European Union since 1973 Ireland has also been keen to identify itself as a European nation. Ireland is thus also a space that is shaped and changed by how it navigates its relationship to these two spheres of influence and their conceptualisation of it, one that often considers it as “the old country”, romantically characterising it as an unchanging pastoral ideal and the other that views it as a partner nation in a modern economic community dedicated to a shared model of social democracy. With its open market economy in a globalised world Ireland is not set apart from the rest of the planet but deeply connected and affected by international events. It is thus also subject to the pernicious effects of consumer culture and technology that dissuade against and erode community belonging, individual agency and collective action. In this chapter we consider how space functions in Irish theatre reflecting and critiquing these historical and cultural contexts that have led to isolation, division and exclusion but also how it appeals for alternative futures that are connected, inclusive and open to change.

However, it is not only these contexts but also the material conditions of the physical spaces of performance that have also contributed to the development of Irish theatre. The small stage and auditorium of the first Abbey Theatre building encouraged the production of realistic plays that relied on the intimacy of the venue for their intensity. Due to the success of these productions, a fixed set of a domestic interior, small casts and naturalistic acting style suited to the limitations of the Abbey became conventions of the Irish play. In subsequent years as theatre buildings developed and performance spaces changed to be more adaptable to different styles of presentation (the Abbey Theatre included—see Chapter 2) so too were the conventions of Irish theatre challenged in the work created for these various physical spaces. Since the 1970s Irish theatre has increasingly been made outside of theatre buildings allowing different performance sites to shape new processes of making theatre to interrogate the political efficacy of performance.

Before we embark on our analysis it is important at this point to consider how we understand space to function in the theatre. The examination of space has long been identified as central to the study of theatrical events as they unfold in real locations (auditorium, stage, performance site) in front of audiences but also transform those spaces both physically and imaginatively in enacting a theatrical performance. The theatre explores the duality of space, how it is “one of the simultaneously most boundless and abstract, and most grounded and concrete concepts in the human imaginary” (Solga 2019, 2). Spatial studies of the theatre consider “how space, as an independent but also an interdependent function of theatrical composition (along with for example, acting bodies, an audience, and a script, whether pre-conceived or devised) generates aesthetic, social and political value for producers and consumers of the performance event” (Solga 2019, 2). This leads us to ask questions such as: what spaces are depicted on the stage and what significance might these have for the audience? How are certain spaces such as outside/inside, onstage/offstage, real/diegetic (imaginary) navigated by characters and are characters associated with certain spaces? What does the restrictions of the physical environment where the performance is taking place offer in terms of enriching the meaning of the theatrical event or shaping the reception of the performance? These questions and more outline a means by which the aesthetic, social and political value of space in the works examined can be understood and assessed.

This chapter will explore through three elucidating frameworks and three related case studies the particular spatial conventions and dramaturgies that can be identified in Irish theatre and how they contribute to the meaning and performance of Irish plays. We will also consider how the performance site can create meanings specific to Irish social contexts.

• The Home Place

  In its struggle for independence Ireland sought a stable image of home that would mark its difference and give a sense of belonging and value. The country cottage, repeatedly reproduced on the Irish stage in the early part of the twentieth century came to represent an ideal of home. As this domestic space became a convention of Irish drama a spatial dramaturgy developed whereby characters actions were expressed through a dialectic between an onstage space characterised as a real, mimetic and restrictive while the offstage space was expansive and diegetic. This section charts how this staging of home develops and changes over decades in which Ireland’s political divisions, rising Catholic conservatism and economic modernisation are reflected in changes to this established convention of the stage space. It ends by illustrating how many contemporary plays make use of a negative dramaturgy where the drama begins in a defined fixed place but through various theatricalised devices this place is destabilised to become a fluid performative space that offers the potential for change and reimagining. But the transformation of the space does not come without consequence as characters must either suffer, sacrifice and even experience tragic loss in the process.

• Liminal Spaces

  This section examines the recurrence of liminal (in-between) spaces in contemporary Irish drama and how these spaces are occupied by wandering/homeless figures that are outsiders to a patriarchal, heteronormative and sectarian Irish society. These plays do not reproduce the domestic space and no longer rely on spatial division or a dialectic between oppositional spaces. Instead, they tell the stories of those denied a part in and even expunged from the national narrative of Ireland. In the creation of these liminal spaces divisions are collapsed into each other revealing the contingent and performative nature of gender, sexuality and national identities. This allows for a space in which identity and society can be reimagined or performed differently. However, the outsider figure that is associated with the liminal space is often exiled or destroyed by the end of the play signalling for the audience an urgency for Ireland to change and become more inclusive.

• Sites of Performance/Non-theatre Spaces

  In this final framework theatre practitioners’ use of non-theatre spaces or sites of performance are examined as leading to new modes of meaning-making in contemporary Irish theatre. When work is moved outside of the theatre the conventions and divisions that the theatre building allows between audience and performer are collapsed. Irish theatre companies engaged in the creation of site-specific productions have been keen to explore the possibilities of a renegotiation of not only the space of the performance but also theatrical processes of production and reception. Much of this type of performance strives towards creating a new sense of communion between spectators, the site and the performance. In doing this we consider how the increased frequency of site-specific production in Ireland since the late 1990s can be viewed as a reaction to the effects of globalisation that paradoxically both homogenise cultures but also emphasise their superficial differences to suit market demands. Thus, Irish theatre artists are drawn to explore ways of making theatre that is rooted to local spaces to confront audiences with the material realities of communities that live in marginalised spaces or to situate them in a shared communal space with diverse communities. How these processes work to activate spectators both to contribute to the creation of the performance but also towards future political action is explained.

These three foundational frameworks are accompanied by brief case studies that model the application of these critical lenses to these key theatre productions.

• The Home Place (Stewart Parker’s Pentecost).

• Liminal Spaces (Marina Carr’s By the Bog of Cats).

• Sites of Performance/Non-theatre Spaces (ANU’s The Boys of Foley Street).

The Home Place

While home is a place of belonging, refuge and permanence it can also be a place of containment, conformism and suffocation. For Una Chaudhuri these contrasting aspects of home create conflict for the individual in the collision of “two incommensurable desires: the desire for a stable container of identity and desire to deterritorialize the self” (1995, 8). She considers the realist plays of the late nineteenth century and early twentieth century as dramatising the contradictions of the home place and as such following a “geopathic dramaturgy” wherein these conflicting desires manifest as “a disease of space and place” (Solga 2019, 65).

In Ireland the concept of home is over-determined due to its history of British colonial occupation whereby people did not own their own land or homes and lived under the constant threat of eviction. A large part of the Celtic revival project was the establishment of a stable image of home for the new emerging Irish nation. It was the domestic setting of the interior of a country cottage in W. B. Yeats’s and Augusta Gregory’s seminal Cathleen ní Houlihan (1902) that would become fixed as a representation of the Irish home. Christopher McCormack examining theatre programmes in the Abbey Theatre Digital Archives counts 176 plays with a domestic setting in the twenty years after the premiere of Cathleen ni Houlihan (McCormack 2018, 54). Marion McGarry has described the symbolic value of the Irish cottage as “a type of Eden unsullied by British colonialism to which the Irish might return” (McGarry 2017, 16). The pastoral homestead offered a singular solid construct to represent Ireland that was grounded in authenticity. This was most important in a postcolonial nation, for as Lloyd suggests, “it is the inauthenticity of the colonized culture, its falling short of the concept of human that legitimates the colonial project” (Graham 2001, 132). Therefore, in terms of identity the rural pastoral allowed for an authentic consensual Irish identity that presented Irishness in terms of stability and legitimacy. However, the country cottage never reflected a lived reality for the largely urban audience that frequented the Abbey Theatre and no sooner had it become a fixed ideal than it began to fade in actuality. By the 1960s modern one-storey bungalows had replaced most of the traditional thatched cottages and larger farmhouses in rural Ireland (Daly 2016, 137). The country cottage was no longer rooted to any authentic representation in contemporary Ireland but yet had become fetishised as the place of Irish drama. As Yi-Fu Tuan explains: “space becomes place as soon as we get to know it better and endow it with value…when a space feels thoroughly familiar to us, it has become a place” (1977, 6).

This geopathology of home in an Irish context plays out not only as a crisis of the individual subject but also an interrogation of national identity that manifests as “dialectic between restrictive and expansive spaces” (Morash and Richards 2013, 25). The onstage space is characterised as the restrictive mimetic familiar home interior while the offstage space is the expansive imaginative strange space outside. This dialectic of space followed a particular dramaturgical pattern established in seminal plays by Yeats, Synge and Gregory whereby the stability of the onstage space is threatened by outside/offstage forces represented by the incursion of a “stranger in the house”. For Nicholas Grene “The dramatic motif of the stranger in the house brings into play axes of inner versus outer, the material against the spiritual, familial, domestic life opposed to a life of individually chosen destiny” (1999, 53). In these early revival plays the stranger lures a member of the household to leave their home and embrace life outside of the safety and comfort of domesticity. To go with the stranger in these plays is a revolutionary act but also destructive. In Cathleen ní Houlihan (1902) a groom forsakes his bride, by leaving his home on his wedding night to fight and die for Ireland after being beckoned to do so by an old stranger, Cathleen ní Houlihan, a personification of Ireland. With his sacrifice Cathleen is made young again. In J. M. Synge’s In the Shadow of the Glen (1903) Nora leaves with the tramp fully aware that in doing so she is leaving the comforts of her domestic situation for a life of hardships and possibly an early death. Self-determination comes only with great sacrifice in these instances and involves departure from home in order to bring renewal and stability. This spatial drama thus maps onto the revolutionary nationalist ideology of Ireland at the time that believed Ireland must embrace loss and sacrifice as a means to gain independence.

In later dramas post-independence the division of restrictive and expansive space as onstage and offstage continues but the stranger is no longer followed offstage. In the dramas after the bloody conflict of the war of Independence and the Civil War the stranger threatens the stability of the now established home/nation and is banished along with any impulse to follow him/her. An extreme and fascinating example of this change in attitude is evident in Frank Carney’s The Righteous are Bold (1946), one of the most popular plays of the 1940s where a young woman returns from England possessed by the devil. She brings a stranger within her onstage that must be exorcised. This play performs the xenophobia of the ideology of the new self-sufficient Church-dominated Ireland of the 1930s and 1940s where Irish (female) souls must be saved from the evil of British modernity. In Teresa Deevy’s Katie Roche the constraints imposed on Irish women since the founding of the state is staged by giving a new twist to the familiar dialectic of restrictive and expansive space and its accompanying stranger in the house trope. The eponymous Katie, an illegitimate domestic servant who is an imaginative dynamic figure longs for the vitality of the offstage space with its regattas and dances but instead remains confined to the onstage deciding to marry the insipid master of the house in which she serves. A wandering tramp enters the onstage and is revealed to be Katie’s father but he does not ask her to follow him. He instead beats and chastens her. For Deevy her heroine’s options are so limited in the new state due to her illegitimacy and her sex that Katie must resign herself to dwell in the restricted onstage. Unlike Synge’s Nora she is unable to leave with the stranger and reside in the expansive offstage space.

In the contemporary drama from the late 1950s onwards however there is a shift in this neat division of space towards a different paradigm. This model sees the dialectical spatial dramaturgy replaced with a transformation of the space whereby the restrictive onstage space becomes expansive over the course of the play. Here the representational mimetic space is transformed into a diegetic theatrical space. Or in Yi-Fu Tuan’s terms the familiar place is changed back into an unknowable dangerous space. There is no longer a conflict between the onstage place and the offstage space but instead a new process where the hampering place is transformed into an enabling space of possibility. The protagonists of these dramas undergo a journey where they are no longer subject to their environment, victims of the space they inhabit, but are instead made active agents of change, architects of their own future. However the renewal of the space is not without loss and often time comes with destruction and death.

This transformation occurs through a theatricalisation of the space. Anna McMullan’s comments on Friel’s dramaturgy are especially apt in relation to this idea. She writes: “The dramatic dynamic of his theatre seems to lie in the explosive moments of tension when the script is destabilised, when the masquerade is exposed and the possibility of performing otherwise is glimpsed” (McMullan 2006, 151) Patrice Pavis identifies this in Chekhov as “negative dramaturgy” (2000, 70). He claims such a dramaturgical composition presents as a “neo-classical building” where the “cracks are already visible” (2000, 72). We are presented with what seems a well-made-play structure, “A form based on conflict, opposition, dualism and the contrasting qualities of good and evil” but through the course of the play this “dramaturgy will become negative; it will become destructured, dematerialised, disorientated” (2000, 72) by means of theatrical devices. Pavis’ negative dramaturgy can be located in many contemporary Irish dramas from the late 1950s onwards reflecting changing attitudes in Ireland or appeals for change.

As already mentioned this dramaturgy is located in much of Friel’s drama. In Philadelphia Here I Come! (1964) the device of the two personas of Gar undermines the reality of the domestic space, something that is again achieved by the narrator Michael in Dancing at Lughnasa when he theatrically frames, interrupts and steps in and off the home of the Mundy sisters. The exaggeratedly violent male household of Tom Murphy’s A Whistle in the Dark simply destroy the home place on stage as they rage against their marginalisation in England as immigrants forced to leave a new Irish nation that could not sustain them; while Mommo in her bed in the kitchen in Bailegangaire unites her daughters in the finishing of her fantastical tale freeing them temporarily from the material realities of their environment that limit their lives. In the course of Anne Devlin’s Ourselves Alone the home is revealed to be a site of danger and conflict for the women in Catholic communities in Northern Ireland during the Troubles where the violent effects of sectarianism on the men is taken out on daughters, wives and girlfriends who dream of swimming together in the sea where they are free from the land and the men that war to dominate it. Christina Reid’s Tea in a China Cup similarly shows how the women of Loyalist communities suffer the loss of sons, husbands and fathers to a cult of defending the homeland through British military service and sectarianism. Reid shows how such patriarchal structures of division are supported and perpetuated in the reductive roles of sister, mother, daughter that women are confined to play and their keeping of a respectable home place. Beth learns to free herself of these patriarchal roles and the restrictions of the domestic space which is destabilised by the enacting of past memories and direct address to the audience.

These are a few examples that illustrate how common this negative dramaturgy of space is in contemporary drama and how it moves towards breaking down the metonymic house of the nation that with its rigid definitions of identity no longer serves to unite, sustain or offer refuge to its people and must be destroyed, undermined or reimagined so that it can become a space of potential once more a space of reinvention and becoming.

Case Study One: Pentecost by Stewart Parker

Premiered: Guildhall, Derry, 1987, produced by Field Day Theatre Company, directed by Patrick Mason.

Home has been a contentious term in the north of Ireland particularly since the partition of the island that led to decades of violence and death. Ownership of the home place is contested by two different traditions held by some of the people that live there: the Protestant Ulster Unionists who believe northern Ireland to be a part of Britain and the Catholic Republicans who wish to be united with the Republic of Ireland.

Stewart Parker’s Pentecost in its apparent realism first stages the “geopathic dramaturgy” of home in the context of the Northern Irish “Troubles” as a site of conflict. However, as the play develops the rigid unyielding structures of the home place, that cause divisions among those that dwell there, are dismantled by a “negative dramaturgy” where by the end of the drama the stage is transformed into a miraculous open space of theatricality. In this space the characters unite through play and shared human understanding instead of splitting according to fidelity to tradition and religious loyalties creating what Stephen Rea identifies in Parker’s drama as “a vision of a harmonious possibility on the other side of violence” (Parker 2000, xii).

First produced by Field Day Theatre Company at the Guildhall in Derry on 23 September 1987 Pentecost was directed by Patrick Mason with Stephen Rea playing the role of Lenny. The events of the drama take place in 1974 shortly before, during and soon after the Ulster Workers’ Council strike, which was a protest by unionist workers against the establishment of a power-sharing Executive, Northern Ireland’s first concerted effort “at a form of democratic self-government” (Roche 1994, 221). The strikers were supported by loyalist paramilitaries who blocked roads and intimidated workers not on strike. This escalated into violence by terrorist groups on both sides of the conflict with thirty-nine civilians killed in shootings and bombings in Belfast, Dublin and Monaghan over the thirteen days of the strike.

The play is set in the downstairs of a Belfast terrace house with the majority of the action staged in the kitchen, which has a large window that “looks out on the back yard” (Parker 2000, 171). Stewart writes in the stage directions that “Everything is real except the proportions. The rooms are narrow but the walls climb up and disappear into the shadows above the stage” (Parker 2000, 171). This signals to the audience how the drama will at once follow and challenge the conventions of realism with its inherent conflict between the outside and inside, onstage and offstage, restrictive and expansive spaces.

The drama begins with strangers in the house: Marian and Lenny, an estranged Catholic couple. Lenny has just inherited the terrace house as the long-term tenant, a Protestant widow Lily Mathews, has died. Marian wishes to buy it from Lenny but he will only sell it to her on condition she grants him a divorce. She agrees to the deal and moves in, soon meeting the ghost of the bigoted Lily who is unhappy that a Catholic woman has taken residence in her home.

The entrance of Lily as a ghost transforms the nature of the space. Anthony Roche writes:

Her ghostly manifestation not only challenges Marian’s reality and her grip on it, but undermines the reality the play is representing. Ironically, while Lily appears to urge strict segregation into Protestant and Catholic, her presence on-stage succeeds in crossing boundaries and established lines of demarcation between the living and the dead. (Roche 1991, 224)

The appearance of a ghost onstage admits the uncanny to the familiar home and undermines the solidity of the representation before the audience. As an actor onstage embodies the character of Lily she appears no less real than the other embodied characters on stage. Her carnality ironically draws attention to the constructed nature of the performance event and its status as “make believe”. Parker playfully hints at this when he later has Marian say to Lily: ‘You think you’re haunting me, don’t you. But you see it’s me haunting you’ (Parker 2000, 210). The theatricality of the ghost is inherent for as Alice Rayner points out: ‘theatre is itself a ghostly place in which the living and the dead come together in a productive encounter” (2006, xii). This is true of the relationship between Lily and Marian who come to understand and care for each other as the play develops, dramatising a process of reconciliation.

Ruth, a Protestant wife to an abusive RUC Officer, joins Marian in the house seeking refuge from her husband. Lenny also comes to stay after his own home is burgled and brings along his old Protestant college friend Peter, a property surveyor, just home from London. Marian agrees to Peter staying provided he survey’s the house as she wishes to transform it into a museum.

Lily again appears to Marian who confronts her about finding a baby’s christening robe. Upset at seeing the little garment Lily confirms for Marian that she had a child but gave it up for adoption. Ruth enters, does not see Lily but does see Marian holding the robe. She tells of having had several miscarriages and that she can no longer have children. Marian opens up about her child, Christopher that died as a baby of cot death. The two women comfort each other with an embrace overcome by their loss. This final image of the first act is one of unity as two mothers from two different traditions embrace as they mourn their innocent dead.

In the second act, after reading her diary, Marian confronts Lily about her affair with an English lodger that stayed with her during the depression while her husband sought work and how it was his child that she had. The final scene takes place after the strike. The four refugees gather in the kitchen where they begin to share personal stories and then Ruth begins to read from scripture about the Pentecost. Marian speaks to the group of Christopher, confronting her own pain and guilt of losing her child. She then declares how she has resolved to no longer turn the house into a museum, but instead wants it ‘to live’ (Parker 2000, 244). The house as metaphor for Northern Ireland is underscored here. It is to be no longer a home stuck in the past, a restrictive place clinging onto deadening barren traditions but to be a fertile living space. In the final moments Ruth opens the large kitchen window to let light and air into the house to show this transformation and Lenny plays his trombone with Peter accompanying him on the banjo. This use of music at the close of the play is powerful in performance as it collapses the structured boundaries between the inside-onstage and outside-offstage space signified by sound throughout the play.

In the first act sounds offstage score the actions onstage. After Marian announces she wishes to buy the house “the soft booming of two distant explosions is heard” (Parker 2000, 177). Just as Lily Mathews enters for the first time “A low distant rumble of explosions is heard.” Ruth’s “hammering” on the front door interrupts Lily and Marian’s argument. Before Lenny arrives with Peter “the sound of half a dozen drunken youths running up the back entry, shouting and whistling is heard off. A beer bottle sails over the yard wall and smashes harmlessly on the floor of the yard” (Parker 2000, 196). And as Lily enters the stage for the second time “In the far, far distance the sound of two lambeg drums head-to-head starts up” (Parker 2000, 208). The outside space is expansive—the words “distant” or “distance” are used repeatedly to describe these sounds but it is also a place of violent threat and danger. The inside space by contrast is restrictive and stultifying, unable to accommodate the loud joy of Lenny’s trombone.

The second act begins with a radio address by the British Prime Minister, Harold Wilson, condemning the Ulster Workers’ Council strikes as an undemocratic act of sectarianism. This is played first through the theatre PA while the stage is dark, but as Ruth enters, with a candle and the lights come up, “the sound of the broadcast from her radio overlaps with and soon takes over from the theatre PA” (Parker 2000, 213). This announces that this act will be one with a “negative dramaturgy” whereby the realism of the situation will gradually become undermined not only by the ghost device but also by the use of sound as the border between a restrictive onstage/inside space and expansive outside/offstage space will be crossed. The final actions of the play make this most clear as Lenny “goes out to the back yard” and “sits down on the window ledge” as Ruth reads from the bible he plays “a very slow and soulful version of ‘Just a Closer Walk with Thee’” (Parker 2000, 245). Noise from outside is thus no longer that of threat and danger but music. Inside Peter on the banjo “starts to pick out an accompaniment to the tune” (Parker 2000, 245). Music in this instance unites both the outside and the inside space, drowning out the previous sounds of violence. This enacts the miracle of the Pentecost as Ruth had earlier described it: “they were all with one accord in one place. And suddenly there came a sound from heaven as of a rushing mighty wind and it filled all the house where they were sitting” (Parker 2000, 245).

Liminal Spaces

Audiences of Irish theatre are frequently presented with stage worlds located in liminal spaces. For Anthropologist Victor Turner, in his seminal conceptualisation, the “limen” or threshold, is defined as an “ambiguous” state “betwixt-and-between” which inhabits a space “neither here nor there” (1995, 95). A liminal space is thus by definition inconstant and boundless in contrast to the stability of the home place. The setting of plays in liminal spaces is a different response by Irish playwrights to Chaudhuri’s problem of place or “geopathology”, what she characterises as a struggle that unfolds as “an incessant dialogue between belonging and exile, home an homelessness” (1995, 15). In the previous section we saw how many contemporary playwrights confront this geopathology by setting their dramas in home places whose fixed boundaries become destabilised by the end of the play through the use of theatrical devices that undermine the mimetic realism of the space. In the close of these plays the characters are found to be in a liminal performative space that exists between “the desire for a stable container of identity and desire to deterritorialize the self” (8). Other playwrights do not follow this negative dramaturgy but instead emphasise liminality throughout their dramas using strategies that include, but are not limited to, the placing of action in outside spaces such as a river bank as Marina Carr does in Portia Coughlan (1996), framing events as relived memories such as in Frank McGuinness’s Observe the Sons of Ulster Marching towards the Somme (1985) where a dying gay loyalist, Pyper endlessly remembers his experiences fighting in the First World War; or choosing a theatricalised style of presentation where multiple changing locations are presented on stage through movement, dialogue (or monologue) and minimal use of props, as in Mary Elizabeth Burke-Kennedy’s Women in Arms (1984) where the heroic legends of the Ulster Cycle are told from the perspective of the women characters or Pat Kinevan’s Silent (2011) which is a dynamic one-man show about a homeless Irishman.

These plays mostly tell of characters that are Irish outsiders, identities that were excluded from the project of nation building. As already outlined in the historical chapters, in Ireland the imagined community of the nation was one that stressed its difference to a British identity, with Catholicism, the Irish language and republicanism becoming some of the key markers of that difference as well as a resistance to the wild, drunken and violent portrayal of the Irish in British literature and culture. Thus Protestant loyalists, queer identities and the travelling community were cast as outsiders. As too were women excluded from power or privilege in a patriarchal society informed by Catholicism and a nationalism that idealised passive domesticated women (see Chapter 7). Economically marginalised urban communities were also made outsiders of the nationalist pastoral ideal and the petit bourgeois establishment.

As we have shown in the previous section the domestic home place onstage became metonymic of the nation on stage and so an uncanny liminal space in its fluidity can be read as a challenge to the rigid suffocating fixity of a national identity. Liminal space thus conceived can be considered as a queer space. Jean-Ulrick Désert writes that “Queer space crosses, engages, and transgresses social, spiritual, and aesthetic locations” (1997, 20). Such a queer space can accommodate identities that are outside the imagined community of the nation. These outsiders in these plays reveal paradoxically how they are “at home” in the “in-between” and those surrounding them are reframed as the outsiders. As boundaries are transgressed and binaries collapsed in liminal spaces the strict divisions and definitions that mark gender, sexuality and national identities are revealed to be contingent and performative. In such spaces then identity and society can be reimagined and performed differently.

At this point it is prudent to point out that liminality is a prevalent and contested term in Irish postcolonial studies where critics have questioned the use and validity of the liminal and the idea of hybridity it contains. Richard Kirkland in his “Questioning the Frame: Hybridity, Ireland and the Institution” cautions against negligent representations of the liminal arguing that “an awareness of the hybrid, the heterogeneous and the anomalous should not be a catalyst for celebration but rather should investigate a considered process of rereading to assess just how far the frames of representation themselves need to be re-evaluated” (1999, 118). Claire Bracken conducts such a rereading in her essay, “Each nebulous atom in between: reading liminality—Irish studies, postmodern feminism and the poetry of Catherine Walsh” in which she convincingly argues that postcolonial theorists’ view of liminal space as “an entity of non-differentiation” functions to “reinforce the oppositional categories they seek to negate” and runs the risk of “suffocating difference in a generalized totality” (2005, 98–99). As a solution to this predicament Bracken recommends a rereading of the liminal in light of Rosi Braidotti’s postmodern feminist theory of the nomadic subject. Braidotti argues that in its dual process of both roaming and resting, nomadic wandering has the ability to simultaneously articulate elements of diversity and connection (1994). In much contemporary Irish drama that makes use of liminal spaces in its dramaturgy there are wandering figures that move between both liminal and domestic spaces bringing specific issues of exclusion to the fore. Todd Barry in his essay “Queer Wanderers, Queer Spaces: Dramatic Devices for Re-imagining Ireland” situates the wandering figure within queer rather than feminist theory. He draws on the work of Désert quoted earlier, writing how the presence of these wanderers in a drama “catalyses a new understanding of the play’s places and the literal dramatic space of the theatre, because he ‘crosses, engages, and transgresses’ a multiplicity of spaces” (Barry 2009, 152). Barry considers two plays by Frank McGuinness, Carthaginians (1988) and Observe the Sons of Ulster Marching towards the Somme (1985), as well as Brian Friel’s Gentle Island (1971) and Brendan Behan’s The Hostage (1958) in his essay but such characters can be located in many plays such as those already mentioned earlier in this section and in the case study that follows.

In the same essay Barry also asks “If old and unsuccessful national stories are queered, de-centred, and subverted, what stories are put in their place, and what happens to the queer ‘hero’ who brought the old imaginative structure down?” (2009,160). He answers his question by highlighting in the plays he chose to examine how the hero is sacrificed for the community. The eventual erasure of the queer wanderer recurs throughout these dramas, be it through death, exile or silencing and with this heteronormative, patriarchal and neoliberal structures are restored. On the one hand, the tragic force of the loss of these characters should emotionally impact audiences and cause them to wish for a different national story that includes these outsiders. On the other the tragic release could lead to an exhaustion of emotion and any will towards real reform. Barry in his essay discusses how Behan’s The Hostage offers an alternative in its ending through the resurrection of Leslie, the British soldier who has been kidnapped and killed, who he identifies as the queer wanderer of the piece. Leslie rises after his murder at the close of the play to sing a song with the entire cast in defiance of death and of the violent outcomes of sectarianism. For Barry, Leslie’s final song shows how the “inspired doubt in the solidity of boundaries, locations and identities” created by queer space “need not have a destructively deconstructive effect but rather can achieve a kind of cultural unification” (2009, 168). The space in these final moments of Behan’s play is one that is communally shared by the cast and the audience who are powerfully united in the act of performance. This experience of shared space between audience and performers is something that is further explored in the next framework as we examine the work of Irish theatremakers who abandon the theatre building in order to create new modes of performance.

Case Study Two: By the Bog of Cats written by Marina Carr

Premiere: Abbey Theatre, Dublin, 1997 directed by Patrick Mason

Notable Revival: San Jose Repertory Theatre, 2001 directed by Timothy Near, starring Holly Hunter.

Marina Carr has stated “I find a particular metaphor or image and start chasing it down [and] that becomes the plot as much as anything” (Fitzpatrick 2008, 57). The Bog of Cats where Carr’s tragic heroine Hester Swane dwells functions as the primary metaphor and image in By the Bog of Cats, signalled in the title, it is central to the meaning of the play. As Lisa Fitzpatrick points out the bog is “a watery landscape, a liminal space that is neither lake nor dry land” (Fitzpatrick 2008, 178) and “in colloquial speech to say someone is from the bogs is similarly to dismiss them as uncivilised and unsophisticated…Yet the bogland is also celebrated in culture and literature as a characteristic geographic feature of the country and a preserver of its ancient and recent, history” (Fitzpatrick 2008, 176). It is thus a landscape symbolic of Ireland, but unstable, changeable, untamed, dangerous and uncouth. As the character of Monica says in the play “ya know this auld bog, always shiftin’ an changin’ and coddin’ the eye” (Carr 1999, 267). The bog can sustain the living when dried as peat and used to fuel fires but it also preserves the dead. In her play Carr also imbues it with the supernatural, as this is where Hester meets the Ghost Fancier at the opening of the play who wishes to take her away to her death. However, he mixes up the dawn with the dusk and he tells her that he will return later to fulfil his duty. For Melissa Sihra the bog in the play is “synonymous with female agency where the ungovernable terrain is a psychic recess of Hester’s character as much as a physical location” (Sihra 2021, 163).

The plot of By the Bog of Cats like its setting is also double as it follows but differs from Euripides's Medea. Like the classical heroine, Hester is an outsider to the settled community, as an Irish traveller woman, who is set on a destructive path after she is rejected by her former lover so he can wed a younger daughter of a man that will bring him acceptance and status within the community. The lover here is Carthage McBride in place of Jason and he tries to force Hester off the Bog of Cats. She retaliates by burning down his house and killing his livestock. She ends the play killing herself and her seven-year-old daughter, Josie, she had with Carthage. However, unlike Medea Hester does not kill her daughter in revenge but does so as an act of love for she does not wish her to live as she has done without a mother in a cruel patriarchal world. Hester is made sympathetic in her pain at being abandoned by her mother, Big Josie Swane and her longing for her return to where she left her on the Bog of Cats. Lisa Fitzpatrick points out how the heroic myth is parodied by Carr in her adaptation of the classical figures of Euripides's drama. She writes,

Carthage is a subsistence farmer. Xavier Cassidy, Carr’s counterpart to Creon, is a brutal incestuous small-time landowner, whose power is strictly local. They are piddling heroes. Hester Swane herself is no better than she should be: an uneducated, dispossessed woman; a fratricide; mother of an illegitimate and half-neglected child; alcoholic. (2009, 180)

Carr’s play also adheres to and strays from the Aristotelian structure of the original. It takes place over the course of a day, there is one action driving the piece that is resolved by the end of the play and the heroine’s violent death promotes catharsis by eliciting fear and pity in the audience enabling a purgation of emotion. It also includes a classical blind seer that takes the form of the Catwoman, although she is again a parodic figure not only in her grotesque mice-eating but also in her counsel that fate can be avoided: “There’s ways round curses. Curses only have the power ya allow them” (Carr 1999, 276) In its movement to the interior of Xavier Cassidy’s house in Act 2 the play breaks with classical convention in having more than one location. Medea is famously saved by Euripides in the final moments by her grandfather the sun god, Helios, who descends in a deus ex-machina but in By the Bog of Cats Hester instead dances at the close of the play with the Ghost Fancier before a knife is plunged into her chest.

Medea is a foreign witch, a barbarian princess, in Euripides’ drama and Jason’s betrayal of her is not condemned, as she is an outsider without status in the ancient society. Carr chose to make Hester a Traveller as “Travellers are our national outsiders” (Battersby 2000). Hester is also without status in the Irish society depicted on stage and the subject of bigoted verbal attack by Carthage’s Mother. As a Traveller Hester can also be considered a queer wanderer as Todd Barry has conceptualised it and we have explained in the previous section. She crosses a multitude of spaces between the natural and supernatural, in her dealings with the Ghost Fancier and the ghost of her dead brother, as well as between the outside of the bog and the inside of Xavier’s house. Her home on the bog was never meant to be permanent and only made there as she awaited the return of her mother. She not only transgresses spatial boundaries but also the patriarchal restrictions on female behaviour in her outspokenness, her rage, her freedom from domestication and her agency. As a queer wanderer she activates the liminal space to show the shortcomings of the self-serving land-grabbing grotesques that make up the settled community in the play. As she puts it herself: “As for me tinker blood, I’m proud of it, give me an edge over all yees, allows me to see yees for the inbred, underbred bog brained shower yees are” (Carr 1999, 289). Through her lover’s name we can associate Hester with the classical figure of Dido, queen of Carthage. The name Dido means wanderer and she is another mythic figure that destroys herself when abandoned by her heroic lover, Aeneas. Hester is a feminist revision of these classical heroines by Carr as she does not kill herself due to rejection by a male lover but because she is overcome by being abandoned and losing her mother. So while the queer wanderer figure is destroyed at the end of the play this destruction rewrites established narratives. In Act 2 Hester in her protestations to remain on the bog says: “I was born on the Bog of Cats, same as all of yees, though ya’d never think it the way yess shun me” (Carr 1999, 314) and “The truth is you want to eradicate me, make out I never existed” (Carr 1999, 315). Although it can be argued that Hester is sacrificed for the community, with her death marking a return of established order, the abrupt violent force of the horrific murder of young Josie and then Hester’s own death at the end of the play are designed to leave the audience deeply affected as the lights go down. The audience are left haunted by Hester and Josie in the same way she claims that she will haunt Carthage:

Ya won’t forget me now, Carthage, and when all of this is over or half remembered and you think you’ve almost forgotten me again, take a walk along the Bog of Cats and wait for a purlin’ wind through your hair or a soft breath be your ear or a rustle behind ya. That’ll be me and Josie ghostin’ ya. (Carr 1999, 340)

Hester is not easily eradicated from the minds of the audience nor is the impression of the liminal Bog of Cats and its appeal to the inclusion of the outsider.

Sites of Performance/Non-theatre Spaces

In the two previous frameworks we have outlined spatial conventions and dramaturgies have been established and challenged in dramas written for the stage. In the discussion there has been an assumption made about the performance space in which these plays are enacted that there is a clear division between the audience space and the playing space. This most commonly takes the form of audiences viewing a performance that takes place on a lit stage in a darkened auditorium. This division may be broken, crossed or played with through various means as in a Brechtian style of production but these devices are only effective so long as the boundaries between audience and performers have been established or assumed. When performances occur in sites outside of the theatre this primary spatial division between audience and performers is no longer certain, along with a host of other conventions as the new site evokes its own spatial divisions, associations and meanings that further, shape, challenge or even contradict the performance enacted there. Kim Solga, drawing on the work of Mike Pearson explains that:

The “site” in site-specific theatre isn’t about physical space, then, so much as it is about process. Journeying through such a space- through its histories, investigating its role in shaping relations in a specific place over time – as either an artist or an audience member means being prepared to shift our shared sense of “space” and “place” from fixed and location bound to social, economic, cultural and changeable. (2019, 80)

Charlotte McIvor, who has charted how Irish theatre practitioners and companies have been creating performances in non-theatre spaces since the early twentieth century to the present, reflects Solga’s emphasis on process in this type of work, arguing that the move into these spaces “constitutes varying but directed political manoeuvres that call into question the meaning and political efficacy of theatre as a communal act in Irish society, as well as in the inter/transnational networks through which Irish theatre and performance circulate” (2018, 465). While McIvor has shown that contemporary site-specific work can trace its genealogies to the development of street theatre and community arts as well as pointing out productions of this nature in earlier periods, site-specific production became progressively more common from the mid-1990s onward. Its increased frequency corresponds with Ireland’s economic boom. Fintan O’Toole writes that “Over this period, after all, Ireland did not merely become more globalised. It became, according to the A. T. Kearney/Foreign Policy Magazine Globalisation Index, the most globalised society in the world in 2002, 2003 and 2004. (Ireland’s ranking dropped by 2007, but it is still ranked fifth, well ahead of countries like the United States and Britain)” (O’Toole 2009, x). The “directed political manoeuvres” to move Irish theatre to performance sites outside of traditional theatre spaces can be considered as a reaction to the effects of globalisation which continued in Ireland even after the economic crash in 2008 on to the present. In its exploration of site as process, following Solga and Pearson, this work counters globalisation’s paradoxical process of cultural homogenisation (making places look the same throughout the world as global franchises like Starbucks take over public spaces) and differentiation of cultures by superficial reified characteristics (making local places serve market expectations of how different they should be rather than difference based in authenticity, for example the “Irish pub” that is found all over the world). Chris Morash and Shaun Richards make this connection between the rise of site-specific work and globalisation writing:

The flowering of site-specific work in the opening decades of the twenty-first century in Ireland may be an attempt to return to those conditions that made theatre so central to Irish culture in the first instance: the final efforts to tap the last reserves of emplaced memory, in the one location where they cannot be channelled into global systems of production, where place must stay in place. (p. 179)

However, we would argue that the processes of varied site-specific performances go beyond this effort to reclaim emplaced memory as it also calls “into question the meaning and political efficacy of theatre as a communal act”. The emphasis on breaking down divisions between performers, spectators and site as well as the process of sharing spaces with often marginalised communities sees this work move towards creating what Miriam Haughton calls “moments of communion”. She explains:

This ‘communion’ occurs as moments of sharp, tense and interior reflection for the individual, without the security of an audience or a theatre building. One is guided into alien places, where the histories of the sites explode with such powerful energy that one no longer seeks to distinguish between performers and community, but the ghosts and the living. (Haughton 2014, 154)

Haughton’s conceptualisation derives from her analysis of the confrontational The Boys of Foley Street, which is discussed in our case study below. However, “moments of communion” between the performance and the spectators can be usefully applied in relation to less directly provocative work and achieved via other performance processes such as in Corcadorca’s production of The Merchant of Venice in 2005.

Established in Cork in 1991 Corcadorca are considered to have “pioneered the art of theatre performance in unusual venues” (Irish Theatre Playography 2023) as well as developing new writing, most notably producing the early plays of Enda Walsh, a founding member of the company, to great international success (see ‘Disco Pigs’ Chapter 8). Through their sustained 31-year interrogation of different sites in Cork city, until they ceased operations in 2022, Corcadorca would become a “part of the cultural fabric” (Corcadorca 2023) of the city producing landmark performance events that include A Midsummer Night’s Dream in Fitzgerald Park; Woyzeck at Haulbowline Naval Base and even during the Covid-19 pandemic they brought “Contact, a travelling theatre performance, to greens and estates across the city” (Corcadorca 2023).

The company’s production of The Merchant of Venice was presented during Cork’s year as a European Capital of Culture in 2005, as part of a larger Corcadorca-led project entitled “Relocation”, which involved partnership with three other European site-specific theatre companies. In these contexts Pat Kiernan explained that the intention behind this staging of Shakespeare’s play was “to examine the city as it is today, particularly within a European context” (Corcadorca 2023). He elaborates:

How we judge the caskets in Belmont (“All that glistens is not gold”) or Shylock (“Hath a Jew not eyes?”) is a central theme in the play. It seems appropriate to look at ‘The Merchant of Venice’ at a time when in Cork and Ireland we find ourselves suddenly exposed to different resident cultures and colours. How tolerant and welcoming are we? (Corcadorca 2023)

The production featured professional and community actors and musicians, with Polish actors playing the Jewish roles and thus standing in for the increased number of racial and ethnic identities that had settled in Ireland during the economic boom (see Chapter 5). While the production in its casting choices was asking the question “How tolerant are we?”, the site of performance was in the process of creating what such tolerance might constitute. Lisa Fitzpatrick writes, “Although this production foregrounded the persecution of Shylock, it also offered an experience in which various races and nationalities gathered in the same space and engaged with a living performance as a unified community of spectators” (2007, 169). She elaborates:

The scenes were performed in a number of spaces in Cork, the production travelling through the streets and over the bridges of the city to map the streets of Venice, blurring the relationship between the real and performed one, and creating, from the real city, an iconic map of the fictional one. Cork’s history as a merchant trading port and its watery landscape (the rivers Lee and Blackwater wind through its centre) facilitated the relationship between real and the performed, and creating, from the real city, a map of the fictional one. (2007, 171)

Corcadorca’s production situates The Merchant of Venice in sites around Cork city but also it places it within “a wider network of European identity, merging the work of an English playwright with an explicit focus on Italian, Irish and Polish national identities” (McIvor 2018, 474). The sense of place and space are shifted through the process of the site-specific performance that points towards an ideal intercultural space in which different identities co-exist and work together in performance. This performance then is placed in communion with varied sites in Cork City and spectators who share the spaces with the different communities who live in these spaces but are also from other places. Through these moments of communion created by site-specific theatre the transformation central to theatrical performance is not so much undergone by characters presented before an audience but is instead one experienced by the individual spectator through the process of the performance.

Case Study Three: The Boys of Foley Street by ANU Productions

Premiere: 2012, Dublin Theatre Festival

Louise Lowe, co-artistic director of ANU Productions has acknowledged that for her “the most exciting part of theatre is the process.” She elaborates, “I’m not interested in audiences sitting back in comfort for two hours”, instead, “we need to take advantage of the live nature of theatre, the energies that exist in any space, what that can lead towards, and the visceral effect that that can create” (Keating 2009). In The Boys of Foley Street Lowe’s and ANU’s exploration of space, liveness and visceral effect was most evident where spectators were shocked out of their comfortable roles as passive observers and made into co-creators of a show that interrogates the ethics of spectatorship itself.

Staged as part of the 2012 International Dublin Theatre Festival, The Boys of Foley Street was the third instalment of the Monto Cycle, a tetralogy of productions about the history and social issues of a part of north inner-city Dublin, once known as the Monto. This area was notorious as a red-light district during colonial times and has been blighted by poverty and crime throughout the twentieth century up to the present day. The impetus and name for the show came from a series of RTÉ radio documentaries featuring interviews with four boys from Foley Street (part of what was the Monto). They were interviewed first as teenagers in 1975, then again in 1988 and finally tracked down in middle-age in 2008 where they were asked to listen back to and comment on the previous interviews with their younger selves. These documentaries chart over decades how these men’s lives are marked by stasis, hardship and neglect, as they are caught in a cycle of poverty and crime due to a lack of opportunities caused by social exclusion. ANU revisits the lives of these men in their production but situates their story within the social and historical conditions that shaped their lives, predominantly the heroin epidemic in the 1980s but also the legacy of the 1974 Loyalist car bombings that destroyed part of the area. The production brought spectators to the spaces that these men live in, to Foley Street and the local surrounding streets. In doing so it highlighted, as Haughton writes, “The power of the setting in the construction of these identities’ with the audience having ‘to come to them in their home-place”’ (2014, 148).

Audiences were composed of only four people, who would be separated into groups of two on arriving at the LAB, a purpose-built arts facility on Foley Street where they were also asked to leave their wallets and phones for the duration of the show to “ensure, safe, uninterrupted passage” (Haughton 2014, 149). Performances ran every thirty minutes throughout the day and night. The show does not follow a narrative structure but unfolds through a spatial dramaturgy where spectators are guided through various inside and outside spaces where different scenes take place. Brian Singleton writes of his experience of the show and how its disjointed structure functioned:

In each scene we caught glimpses of or gestures to what happened, but they were glimpses and gestures, not recreations or reenactments. It was only by piecing together the fragments we encountered did we accumulate a sense, not of a story, but a whole community, and a community through time. (2016, 70)

With this fragmented non-narrative structure ANU were able to offer audiences different experiences of the show as they could send them on alternative routes through the various spaces. In whichever order, audiences experienced, over a period of just under hour, listening on headphones to snippets of the interviews with the boys from the 1975 documentary; witnessing a violent altercation between two men on the street that one of the spectators is asked to video on a phone; viewing a short film showing “four teenage boys in contemporary clothes walking down Foley Street, intercut in short flashes with historical photos of the street and its residents” (Singleton 2016, 60) projected onto a wall while inside a car where a woman on the roof slowly descends covered in debris and describes the effects of a bomb; being in a car chase; seeing a film of a gangrape through a peephole in a bathroom; helping a woman pin her ripped dress realising this woman is the victim of the rape just seen; dancing with the residents of a squalid council flat, including a schoolgirl who drinks vodka and smokes; sitting near a drug dealer measuring out bags of heroine, squirming as the drug dealer gets his ear bitten by his strung-out jealous lover; getting into a car and brought to a CPAD (Concerned Parents Against Drugs) meeting room where photographs of audience members at the drug dealer’s flat are on the wall; having a mother of one of the boys accused of pushing drugs confront them asking who gave up her son’s name to CPAD knowing he will be violently assaulted by the vigilante group or worse; suffering the glare of the bomb victim covered in rubble who throws a large brick on the ground and washes herself (Fig. 10.1).

Fig. 10.1

Caitríona Ennis in ANU Productions’ The Boys of Foley Street, 2012 (Photo: Pat Redmond)

A key line that is repeated in the performance, is one taken from the documentary spoken by one of the “boys”, Larry:

Its crazy isn’t it? You see old films; its like looking at an old film, y’know what I mean? It’s crazy and I’m saying Jaysus, y’know, that’s, that was us! That was us. (Lowe 2015, 376)

This line contrasts with the experience of ANU’s show where the audience cannot distance themselves from what they have seen as something from the past (“Like looking at an old film”). Their production seeks to go beyond identification with characters (“that was us”) towards implication in the action and complicity with characters. Singleton writes based on his own experience “the spectators of ANU’s performance had no such distancing medium. We had been implicated and had performed as part of the life of The Monto and there were photographic and video traces of our complicity with criminality” (2016, 65). The past is made present for the audience through the participatory performance, as it is for the community around Foley Street where little has changed in terms of social mobility since the 1980s. The processes employed by ANU in the production such as involving the audience in the action, temporal distortion and experiencing the locality in the movement through different spaces functions to avoid, as Singleton puts it, “scopically observing the community as other, and thus contradicting what otherwise might be considered as ‘dark tourism’ or ‘poverty porn’”. For him, “the audience participation required in the performance by proxy implicated spectators in and as community though they were not of community” (2016, 71). The process developed for the site-specific performance thus moves towards creating a communion between spectators, performers and the site that makes sure the problems of the community are not viewed from a superficial distance but intimately felt and thus not easily forgotten.

Conclusion

The topic of space in Irish theatre is vast and continually developing. We are unable to cover all aspects in one chapter but have tried to outline some of the major areas of focus by artists and academics since 1957 to the present. One area that Irish theatre artists have been exploring, particularly since the Covid-19 pandemic, that we did not feature in our frameworks but that we would encourage further consideration is how space in theatre is changed by technology. The anonymity provided by the online space was directly addressed by Enda Walsh in Chatroom (2007) where a group of teenagers in an online chatroom encourage another adolescent to commit suicide. This was an early exploration of the moral consequences and responsibility that are at stake in the online space where technology distances and filters reality, making it indistinguishable from fantasy and entertainment. The theatre in this instance, as a communal space where people must gather and turn off their phones to be present to the shared experience of the performance, can function as contrary to the isolating and polarising effects of online spaces. This is something that has of course become a much more prevalent and pressing issue in the age of smartphones, social media and virtual reality. However, as became most evident during the pandemic when companies were forced to produce work online, technology also offers new possibilities for storytelling and immersive interaction. The Performance Corporation is an Irish company that has had a sustained engagement with the possibilities of technology and how it changes our perception of sites of performance and audience-performers relations. Since 2008 they have run the SPACE programme, “a professional development residency for artists and creative technologists with a focus on collaboration across form and medium” (The Performance Corporation 2023). With many multinational technology companies such as Google and Facebook operating out of Ireland and Irish economic fortunes being tied to the success of these companies, a consideration of space, technology and Ireland is worthy of further study.

This chapter has emphasised some of the ways in which space functions in Irish theatre, contextualising cultural and political considerations of space in Ireland and showing how these contexts can be read into the dramaturgies of Irish drama and site-specific performances. The three frameworks developed in which to analyse space in Irish theatre also chart a movement in Irish theatre away from fixed notion of place which might limit identity, agency and exclude communities towards a conceptualisation of space that is boundless in terms of imagination offering opportunities for inclusion, communion and change.