Abstract
The authors here attempt to underpin the logic followed in their construction of a landscape of contemporary Irish theatre. Acknowledging how they built on the feminist counter-canonical interventions of the last 20 years the authors tease out how this publication is for them a feminist text. They know the book cannot be read exclusively as a feminist text, or as one type of feminist text but feel as a cisgender female and male writing team it is important politically, pedagogically and methodologically to claim the subtle refrain of the feminist text that guided the criteria for inclusion and discussion in terms of overall balance of representation across theatre case studies. They end by inviting readers to take this project forward to its next iteration.
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Contemporary Irish Theatre: Histories and Theories aimed to renovate and reinvigorate the Irish theatre history survey through combining study of canonical and lesser-known figures and case studies throughout these pages while giving readers multiple points of entry through historical and theoretical routes. We provided historical and social context as well as policy background and information on the material economies of making theatre in Ireland today. We hope that this contemporary Irish theatre history survey has ultimately made visible in a rigorous but comprehensible manner contemporary Irish theatre’s complex ecology of processes “and practices” that form “a meshwork and multifaceted field of cultural production” (Nicholson et al. 2018, 6) involving well-known companies and playwrights but also a wider range of mid-size and/or small companies and individuals working across many artistic roles.
As we built this book over many years and tested its logics and structure as a whole through our process of co-writing and co-rewriting, we often struggled with language to describe precisely what underpinned the logic we were following to construct our landscape of contemporary Irish theatre theoretically and methodologically from the perspective of a birds-eye view of the book as a whole. We knew that we were attempting to “do” the Irish theatre history survey differently in order to make visible a wider range of contributions and texture of practices—particularly that of individuals and companies whose work was lesser known or more ephemeral due to its formal nature or lack of availability of extensive post-performance documentation—while balancing attention to landmark canonical figures and moments that were necessary for a basic orientation to contemporary Irish theatre history. We also knew as we reflected on at the end of the introduction that we were building most consciously on the feminist counter-canonical interventions of the last 20 years within Irish theatre studies and beyond which have repeatedly called into question structures of inclusion, prestige and accessibility to theatrical practice on grounds defined by but not only limited to gender and female gender specifically (Cannon Harris 2002; Clare et al. 2021a, b; Coleman Coffey 2016; Fitzpatrick 2013; Headrick and Kearney 2014; Haughton and Kurdi 2015; Leeney 2010; Sihra 2007). But can a book that expressly does not only deal with or centralise female or female-identified figures and/or histories be claimed as a feminist book, particularly in a moment where questions around gender norms and identification continue to be productively in flux in ways that we and contemporary Irish theatre have not yet caught up to fully in this book? Is there a difference between what one is actually doing as an individual scholar (proceeding from a feminist logic and political commitment) and what one can claim within a scholarly publication (this is a feminist book in terms of methodology, key theoretical frameworks and inclusionary scope)?
Doireann Ní Ghríofa’s 2020 prose work A Ghost in the Throat, which combines memoir with historical excavation and translation of an epic poem by eighteenth-century poet Eibhlín Dubh Ní Chonaill, opens with the lines: “This is a female text” (3). Her proclamation draws attention to the inextricable meaning of this book being written amidst the working conditions of her life as a mother of four young children: “This is a female text borne of guilt and desire, stitched to a soundtrack of cartoon nursery rhymes” (3). This statement also draws attention to the parallels between her search to excavate Ní Chonaill’s personal story and work from the eighteenth century and her own challenged circumstances as a twenty-first-century female writer: “This is a female text, written in the twenty-first century. How late it is. How much has changed. How little” (4).
While female and feminist are not always interchangeable as identities and/or affiliations, we will chance joining ourselves to Ní Ghríofa’s refrain here, revising it for our purposes as “This is a feminist text.” This is a feminist text, and in this basic underlying conviction lies both this book’s refrain and call to action for the future of contemporary Irish theatre scholarship. This is a feminist text, written as a female and male co-writing team in-between caring and other core work duties over more years than originally planned due to the demands of family and constant institutional pressures and crises. This is a feminist text, whose structure is both linear and anti-linear, fragmented and tightly structured, rejecting the possibilities of neither side of the binary as is characteristic of recent feminist theatre examinations of formal theatrical innovation and re-assessment of prejudice against realism/naturalism for example (Solga 2015). This is a feminist text, which began as most closely aligned to feminist theatre scholarship projects specifically about the recovery of women’s histories and contributions in modern and contemporary Irish theatre, but which revealed through its writing the ever more urgent importance of applying the inclusive, destabilising, anti-canonical and politicised principles of feminist theatre scholarship not only to the study of theatre work by female and female-identified persons. As such, we have ultimately attempted through this book’s kaleidoscopic structure and broad coverage to continue the work of our colleagues in even more widely applying a feminist sensibility and set of theories and methodologies to treatment of as much of contemporary Irish theatre’s landscape on the island of Ireland as we could fit between these pages, profiling work created by or with thematic consideration of all genders and often with consideration of multiple complex subject positions in addition to gender.
We also know that this book cannot be read exclusively as a feminist text, or as one type of feminist text (although we have drawn most consistently on materialist and intersectional feminism in considering the interplay between the historical, economic and individual identities in the making, consumption of and access to theatrical work over time). But we did feel as a cisgender female and male writing team that it was important politically, pedagogically and methodologically to ultimately transparently claim the subtle refrain of the feminist text that guided our chapter-by-chapter criteria for inclusion and discussion in terms of overall balance of representation across theatre case studies, including not only gender but attention to other categories of identities such as sexuality, race/ethnicity, disability, class and nationality. This speech act we hope keeps the currently raging flame of Irish feminist theatre scholarship growing and expanding in its interpretation and remit. We are not kidding ourselves that we have fully succeeded in our intentions, or that it is possible to use guiding feminist principles to achieve an inclusive new canon that eliminates the future need for separate volumes and deeper studies based on identity or aesthetic categories. And we are certainly not suggesting that the ongoing study of contemporary Irish theatre should only be guided solely by the lens of identity as a criteria for inclusion or not of productions and artists as worthy of scholarly study. Otherwise, what would happen to the study of aesthetics or other aspects of craft within theatre and performance as art forms? However, we are calling on our field to keep questioning whose stories are told and how, and who is omitted and why, and to keep tilting our perspective again following Melissa Sihra (2021, 221) to continually readjust our understanding of how contemporary Irish theatre has evolved over time from the scale of individuals to small companies to large companies to big and sustainably funded state institutions while understanding that we are in part if not in full indebted to feminist theoretical methodologies as a catalyst for this line of ongoing questioning.
Echoing Ní Ghríofa again and looking back at our own now finished work—“How late it is. How much has changed. How little” (4)—and how much we know that we have still missed, or still repeated despite our best efforts. We are now counting on you as readers to pick up the pieces and take this project forward to its next iteration. And indeed, of the many better alternative versions of this book that could exist, what would a renovation of the Irish theatre history survey have looked like if we had always started with the designers in each chapter (as in the urgent work of Siobhán O’Gorman) (2018) or with the actors? Or if we had actually prioritised the perspective of stage managers or those responsible for the production’s finances? Or if we had only covered theatre produced in cities other than Dublin and Belfast? If we had consciously prioritised work that had “failed” commercially, artistically or collaboratively to see what that had to teach us not only about what contemporary Irish theatre is but what it could have been? The next and better version of the contemporary Irish theatre history survey is now up to you, because in our final assessment, even a renovated survey is not a mapping of a landscape that already or verifiably exists, but an invitation to continuous and ongoing remapping starting out from previous coordinates, such as those now logged within these pages.
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McIvor, C., Walsh, I.R. (2024). Conclusion. In: Contemporary Irish Theatre. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-55012-6_12
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