The Celtic Tiger, Inward-Migration and the Peace Process (1994–2008)

Abstract

The mid-1990s-late 2000s saw an explosion of fragmentation and experimentation in theatrical form with the economic transformation of Ireland during this Celtic Tiger period of financial growth, low unemployment and drastically improved Debt/GDP ratio. Unprecedented inward-migration and the establishment of a peace process in Northern Ireland allowed a greater diversity of theatrical work to be created and circulated globally. The dramatic text was decentralised with movement, dance and scenography increasingly taking centre stage and site-specific and/or site-responsive work developed. But the figure of the Irish playwright as globalised phenomenon and key reference point for Irish theatre was also rejuvenated through key successes while Druid Theatre Company revitalised the legacy of J. M. Synge as an early twentieth-century Irish master with their globally successful phenomenon DruidSynge.

Part I: Historical Context

Between 1994 and 2008, a great deal of what could be assumed about Irish identity North and South of the border changed legally and culturally. Carmen Kuhling and Kieran Keohane go so far as to argue that during this approximate interval: “Ireland was effectively transformed from a premodern, peasant rural community to a postmodern, high-technology urbanised society” (2007, 1). Claire Bracken observes that a “sense of futurity pervaded, as major transformations in the Irish imaginary brought about a perceived shift from a self-identity constructed as postcolonial country to a globalised nation of a networked world” (2016, 4).

Key events in the Republic included the unprecedented economic boom known as the “Celtic Tiger” and its impact on Irish migration patterns and the 1996 legalisation of divorce as well as the emergence of key revelations regarding Catholic Church abuse scandals. In 1999, then-Taoiseach Bertie Ahern made an Irish State apology to victims of childhood abuse and set up a Commission to Inquire Into Child Abuse which would ultimately produce the Ryan Report in 2009 (see Chapter 6). These seismic shifts followed directly on the 1992 Maastricht Treaty (which prompted increased integration into the European Union including cultural and arts activities) and the 1993 decriminalisation of homosexuality. Events in Northern Ireland during this period were dominated by the negotiation of the Northern Irish Peace Process, which began with the 1994 Provisional Irish Republican Army Ceasefire and ended officially with the 1998 passage of the Good Friday Agreement, passed by an all-island vote. A long-term process of peace and reconciliation accompanied by political and social restructuring of the British state in Northern Ireland was catalysed following these landmark paradigm shifts.

The “Celtic Tiger” (as coined by economist Kevin Gardiner in a 1994 Morgan Stanley report) stretched from approximately 1991–2008 and describes a period of Irish economic growth, low unemployment and drastically improved Debt/GDP ratio which “fell from 92 per cent in 1993 to 38 per cent in 1999” (Kuhling and Keohane 2007, 1). During this period, the Republic also underwent an unprecedented social transformation in terms of racial and ethnic diversity. A question on nationality was only asked for the first time on the 2002 census, and subsequently, there was an 87% increase in non-Irish nationals recorded in the next 2006 census (224,261–419,733) with this increase ultimately standing at 143% over nine years by the 2011 census (544,357) (Central Statistics Office 2012, 7). This demographic diversification was unprecedented in Irish history and this group represents a diverse collective of returning Irish-born emigrants, economic migrants, refugees and those seeking asylum amongst others including international students. However, the Celtic Tiger’s economic promise which had partially driven these new inward-migration flows collapsed entirely in the post-2008 global economic crisis. This resulted in the management of the Republic’s economy being overtaken by the International Monetary Fund, the European Central Bank and the European Commission, “compounded by a lock-in to an externally managed austerity programme (under the EU’s 2012 fiscal treaty)” (McCann 2013, 109). This economic downturn did not result in the departure of the “new Irish” (Fanning 2009, 146–150) during the period covered by this chapter or after, but rather increased emigration of white middle-class Irish-born individuals, particularly university educated young people (Coakley and Mac Éinrí 2022, 379–403).

Likewise, the Peace Process did not erase sectarian tensions and/or the economic and social disparities between communities in Northern Ireland that exacerbate these tensions despite a mostly sustained cessation of violence. The years of negotiation between the initial ceasefires saw multiple setbacks including the 1996 IRA bombing on London’s Canary Wharf and the 1998 Real IRA car bombing in Omagh which killed 29 people. While an elected Northern Irish assembly took over the devolved government of the North in 1998 following the Good Friday Agreement, this same assembly collapsed in 2002, before being restored by a “historic accommodation” (McDonnell 2008, xiv) between Sinn Féin and DUP in 2007. As Enda Longley observed in 2001:

Much depends on whether the Agreement parties really desire an inter-cultural sharing of Northern Ireland or whether, or now that culture has become more significant, they will build up their own constituency by intensifying the politicisation of culture. (2001, 30)

As Longley predicted, the aftermath and ongoing negotiation of the Peace Process in terms of local everyday engagements as well as official projects and initiatives rendered theatre particularly relevant in Northern Ireland during the period covered by this chapter and to the present. Northern Irish companies and individual theatre artists have repeatedly made use of theatre’s liveness in both professional and community settings to comment on and/or facilitate the Peace Process and its aftermath, frequently through cross-community projects. In addition, like the Republic, Northern Ireland was also negotiating increased inward-migration and resulting racial tensions during this time. In 1997, the Race Relations (NI) Order was passed into law, a move that officially recognised the existence of racial and ethnic minorities in Northern Ireland, as opposed to diversity and/or interculturalism remaining defined exclusively by the two communities identity paradigm, a fallback that remains still difficult to resist even at time of writing. As Peter Geoghegan observed in 2008, “In less than a decade Northern Ireland has gone from a situation in which discrimination on the grounds of ‘race’ was not illegal to one in which ‘Race Relations’ policy is given a relatively central location in post-Agreement public policy” (127).

1994–2008 therefore stands out as a period of unfinished or arrested reinvention that in addition to large-scale social shifts saw conflicting redefinitions of contemporary Irish citizenship North and South. The Good Friday Agreement reaffirmed birthright Irish citizenship for individuals born on the island of Ireland, while a 2004 Citizenship Referendum in the Republic removed birthright citizenship by an 80% majority due to anxieties about a post-1996 increase in asylum seekers from the Global South and particularly the African continent (Fanning and Mutwarasibo 2007; Tormey 2007). At the same time, a concerted rebranding of both the Republic and Northern Ireland attempted to position both as cosmopolitan and forward-looking (economically and socially) (Neill 2009, 325–342; Moore 2016, S138–S162). The explosion of theatre companies and forms shifting the landscape of contemporary Irish theatre and performance in both the Republic and Northern Ireland ultimately reflects the instability and possibility of this transformative and paradigm-shifting period.

Part II: Theatre and Performance Practices

Genres, Methods and Approaches

The 1990s and first two decades of the 2000s saw the persistence of the figure of the Irish playwright as a nationally and globally lauded figure, exemplified by the international success of Marina Carr, Marie Jones, Conor McPherson, Martin McDonagh, Mark O’Rowe and Enda Walsh. All were emerging figures during this period with the exception of Jones whose co-founding of Dubbeljoint in Dublin in 1991 after leaving Charabanc (see Chapter 4) initiated a new stage of recognition in her career with personal acclaim for her as a playwright and international touring of her plays A Night in November (1994) which transferred to both London’s West End and off-Broadway in New York and Stones in His Pockets (1996), which also had a West End run. These playwrights collectively and consistently tackled themes of Irish identity in flux, particularly in terms of gender, sexuality, class and urban/rural divides. The political engagement of these theatrical representations (despite their thematic focus) has been much debated, especially the work of Carr and McDonagh which Vic Merriman memorably and controversially termed “Tiger Trash.” He comments that: “At a time of unprecedented affluence, Carr and McDonagh elaborate a world of the poorly educated, coarse, and unrefined. The focus is tight, the display of violence inhering in the people themselves, grotesque and unrelenting” (1999, 312).

Major plays of this period were increasingly packaged or viewed as “trilogies” including Paul Mercier’s Dublin Trilogy (Native City, Buddleia and Kitchensink), Carr’s Midlands Trilogy (The Mai, Portia Coughlan, and By the Bog of Cats) and McDonagh’s Leenane Trilogy (The Beauty Queen of Leenane, A Skull in Connemara and The Lonesome West). These playwright’s strategy of serial playwriting as a pattern during this time eventually led to simultaneous productions of these plays in repertory such as PassionMachine’s 1998 presentation of all three of Mercier’s Dublin Trilogy at Dublin Theatre Festival and Druid’s still-evolving specialisation in “marathon theatre” (Dean 2013, 181–195) offerings which include not only the presentation in repertory of McDonagh’s self-professed trilogy of plays, but linking across the canon of other playwrights work through DruidSynge (2005, J. M. Synge) and later DruidMurphy (2012, Tom Murphy) and DruidShakespeare (2015, William Shakespeare, see Chapter 6). The embrace of contemporary Irish theatre and Druid in particular of this serialised/package strategy for presenting work was perhaps a move to spectacularise the Irish theatre experience as a competitor with film and television and interestingly anticipates the DVD “box set” phenomenon in the 2000s, a shift that transformed the relationship between time and television viewing practices (Kompare 2006, 338). And indeed, the intertextual influences of film and television on new writing for the theatre would become a much more pronounced influence during this era, especially for O’Rowe and McDonagh (Lonergan 2012).

The “monologue play” (whether as single or intersecting monologues) also emerged as a key Irish form in the 1990s particularly in the work of McPherson and O’Rowe, a trend that would continue through the 2000s and 2010s, with Jones’ international success with A Night in November (1994) as a key reference point for the ascent of this genre. As Brian Singleton observes, plays including McPherson’s Rum and Vodka (1992), The Good Thief (1994) and This Lime Tree Bower (1995) and Mark O’Rowe’s Howie the Rookie (1999) were “replete with socially subordinated male individuals who are performing their own abjection in a society in which they have lost their place” (2011, 71), a direct comment on the uneven distribution of the Celtic Tiger’s economic and social invigoration of Irish society. Patrick Lonergan observes that “a significant feature of the form in Ireland is that the audience will rarely share the background of the characters onstage” (2009, 181), a disjuncture that would increasingly become addressed by emerging theatre companies and artists in the 2010s (see Chapter 6).

Study of this period in Irish theatre history has been arguably dominated by focus on these afore-mentioned playwrights, particularly the role of their work in bringing “Irish” theatre to global audiences through touring and international productions of their plays, with some more limited attention paid to Druid Theatre and its ensemble under the artistic direction of Garry Hynes (Lonergan 2009; Jordan 2010; Roche 2009). But this concentrated and playwright-centric focus risks obscuring the proliferation of companies, independent practitioners and performance forms that actually emerged across the island of Ireland between 1994 and 2008. Connecting these strands of inquiry is essential for understanding the evolution of Irish theatre as a form during this period.

The 1990s and early 2000s were characterised by a growth in dance and physical theatre (Blue Raincoat, Fabulous Beast, CoisCéim, Corn Exchange, Barabbas, Irish Modern Dance Theatre, Liz Roche Company), in addition to the use of devising methods and/or the collective creation of work that could retrospectively be classified as postdramatic theatre (Pan Pan Theatre, Operating Theatre) as well as the growth of site-specific and/or site-responsive theatre approaches (Corcadorca, Performance Corporation, Kabosh Productions, Calypso Productions). Within the work of many of these companies, the dramatic text was increasingly decentralised with movement, dance and scenography increasingly taking centre stage in Irish theatre practice. Undeniably this spread of company-based models of collective creation throughout the sector stretched the boundaries of what an Irish “play” could look, sound or move like and challenged attitudes towards playwriting as a solo or stable craft for emerging artists. The lack of critical attention given to these companies with some key exceptions in the work of Christie Fox (2008), Deirdre Mulrooney (2006), Bernadette Sweeney (2008), Carmen Szabo (2012), Aoife McGrath (2013) and Rhona Trench (2015) among others. A funnelled critical focus which has reified the Irish playwright as the dominant figure in this period prior to not only this book but the Palgrave Handbook of Contemporary Irish Theatre and Performance (Jordan and Weitz 2018, see introduction) has likely been due to the challenges of analysing much of this formally layered work in retrospect without in many cases a play text or at least a published one and/or having to be resident or present in Ireland to witness the work and on an ongoing basis. Yet, the output and vision of these companies from the 1990s to the present has profoundly shifted the meaning and practice of “contemporary” and “Irish” theatre as a landscape of practice.

This proliferation of theatrical activity and formal experimentation was due to a number of factors including the ongoing legacy of the community arts movement (which embraced interdisciplinary methods of theatremaking and devised approaches) (Fitzgerald 2004; McIvor 2015) and increased international collaboration and training by Irish-born artists, a development aided by increased financial resources for European Union partnerships post-Maastricht Treaty. Writing in 1997, Christopher Murray argued that: “Ireland is rapidly becoming European, its culture cosmopolitan; yet there is a new-found passion for the arts as a means of articulating and celebrating home-based experience” (2000, 246). Arguably, the dominant factor in Ireland’s multiplication of theatrical form was increased arts funding generally from domestic and EU sources as well as specialised schemes like the EU PEACE Programme whose purpose was “to support peace and reconciliation and to promote social and economic progress in Northern Ireland and the Border Region of Ireland” (European Parliament 2022). To date, there have been five cycles of the PEACE programme with some theatre companies and artists profiled in this book directly benefiting at key points in the evolution of their practice including but not limited to Kabosh Productions, Theatre of Witness and Terra Nova Productions. In the Republic, increased prosperity in the mid-1990s and 2000s resulted in an exponential expansion of Arts Council funding for independent and established theatre companies. Arts Council funding overall increased from £20 million in 1995 (with £5.62 for theatre specifically) (An Chomhairle Ealaíon/Arts Council 1995, 51) to a high of €81.62 million across the arts in 2008 (An Chomhairle Ealaíon/Arts Council 2008), although it must be noted that even during this boom time, more than half the theatre budget went consistently to the Abbey. This overall arts budget hit a post-1995 low of €56.7 million in 2015 (An Chomhairle Ealaíon/Arts Council 2015, 45) before climbing again post-Covid-19 as we detail in Chapter 6 Ainé Shiels and Joshua Edelman attribute this expansion as well to the 1992 establishment of the Department of Arts which allowed representations of the arts “at cabinet level for the first time” and was followed by a “strategic three-year plan…the first policy document of its kind” (2009, 147). As these plans evolved, Shiels and Edelman argue that they “move towards a position in which the idea of the international also carries with it certain responsibilities which may affect the production of art itself” (2009, 149) within the Republic. The founding of Culture Ireland in 2005 in the Republic which aids “Irish artists and companies” in presenting their work “at strategic international festivals and venues” (Culture Ireland 2023) was a key related development that aided in the sustainable internationalisation of key companies profiled in this chapter including Pan Pan, Blue Raincoat and Druid.

The Republic’s short-lived arts funding expansion during the Celtic Tiger helped catalyse the temporary stability and proliferation of an expanded number of professional Irish theatre companies and artists that had been growing in number and strength since the mid-1970s but never before supported to these levels by the Irish state. This proliferation of funded professional theatre activity during this time collectively pushed at the received limits of Irish theatrical and performance forms, with the diversification of the theatre landscape putting pressure on each company to define their own innovative features clearly to remain competitive. For example, Barrabas (founded in Dublin, 1993 by Raymond Keane, Veronica Coburn and Mikel Murfi) established itself as “the leading Irish theatre company in theatre of clown” (Barabbas 2023) while Performance Corporation (set up in 2002, Co. Kildare by Jo Mangan and Tom Swift) billed itself in 2017 as “creating theatrical adventures in surprising places” but more recently describes themselves as specialising in “Immersive Theatre, Virtual Reality Creations and Opera…blending fresh, award-winning work blending thrilling visuals, hi-tech innovation, edgy writing and strong physical intuition” (Performance Corporation 2017; Performance Corporation 2023). This pigeonholing was not always welcomed by theatre artists. For example, the pressure on Barabbas however to define their brand and remain consistent led to Coburn’s departure from the company in 2007 as “she decided that the interference of the Arts Council was too intrusive in the process of artistic creation” (Szabo 2012, 13).

This injection of arts funding also regionalised the professional Irish theatre sector in the Republic more than ever before, as represented by the ongoing or newly established work of regional companies including Macnas (Galway), Upstate Theatre Project (Drogheda), Red Kettle Theatre Company (Waterford) and Corcadorca (Cork) during this time. This regional growth was aided by the construction of a network of new arts centres throughout the Republic that could now receive work. This was made possible through a “EU-financed initiative, known as the Cultural Developments Incentive Scheme which was spearheaded by Michael D. Higgins who served as minister for arts between 1993 and 1997” (Keating 2009). Higgins stated that: “I have always believed that cultural citizenship is as vital a need as economic participation, and the idea behind the Cultural Developments Incentive Scheme was to tackle that” (Keating 2009). Over time, however, particularly following the economic downturn, these arts centres have found it difficult to sustain an audience for theatre as well as other art forms as The Irish Times detailed in a revealing article by curator and writer Gemma Tipton (2010). As former artistic director of the Source Arts Centre in Thurles, Claudia Woolgar, observed in conversation with Tipton in 2010 that: “an active, vibrant community or cultural scene does not guarantee interest in professional work” (Tipton 2010).

In the North, the theatre’s agenda and funding streams were heavily influenced in this period by the Peace Process and post-conflict processes of truth and reconciliation, as well as pressure to rebrand Northern Ireland for tourism and commerce purposes. As Mark Phelan puts it, “If Troubles drama has been largely defined by the expectations that artists deal with the conflict, perhaps post-conflict theatre in the North can be similarly defined by expectations that it should play some sort of role in the processes of truth and reconciliation” (2016, 384). These intertwined (and frequently conflicting) agendas indeed provide much of the dramatic material as well as setting the material production conditions for Northern Irish theatremakers. Surveying the island of Ireland at large, Christopher Morash observed in 2002 that “there is no such thing as the Irish theatre; there are Irish theatres, whose forms continue to multiply as they leave behind the fantasy of a single, unifying image, origin or destiny” (271).

Key Practitioners and Companies

Pan Pan Theatre

Pan Pan Theatre was established in 1991 in Dublin and is co-directed by Gavin Quinn and Aedín Cosgrove. They are arguably the most versatile and outward-looking company in Irish theatre history with their works frequently premiering outside Ireland as part of international partnerships and a sustained engagement with intensive touring practices that take them throughout Europe and Asia as well as to the United States and Australia. Below is an image from their international smash hit production, Oedipus Loves You by Simon Doyle and Gavin Quinn with original music by Gordon is a Mime, which premiered as a work-in-progress at Dublin Theatre Festival in 2005 before going on to tour nine countries and more than twenty cities in Ireland and internationally (Fig. 5.1).

Fig. 5.1

(Photo Marcus Lieberenz)

The company (from left: Ned Dennehy, Ruth Negga, Derrick Devine, Dylan Tighe and Gina Moxley) in Pan Pan Theatre’s Oedipus Loves You, 2007

Since the early 1990s, the company’s own artistic output has crossed a dizzying array of theatrical terrains including the production of new plays (Mr. Staines, 1999; Standoffish, 2000; For the First Time Ever, a co-production with German Stage Services, 2003; Amy the Vampire and Her Sister Martina, in conjunction with Corcadorca, 2003) and more recently an ongoing collaboration with playwright/performer Dick Walsh (Newcastlewest, 2016; A Dangerman, Some Baffling Monster, 2014), adaptations of Shakespeare and the Greeks as well as seminal modern plays (Mac-Beth 7, 2004; Oedipus Loves You, 2005; The Rehearsal Playing the Dane, 2010; Everyone is King Lear In His Own Home, 2012; A Doll House, 2013; The Seagull and Other Birds, 2014; The Good House of Happiness, 2017), Chinese adaptations of Irish plays (The Playboy of the Western World, 2006 [see seminal revivals below]) including their simultaneous premiere of a Chinese version of The Seagull and Other Birds, 2014) as well as directing the world premiere in China of Sun Yue’s play, Do Di Zhu (Fight the Landlord) (2010) (as part of their long-term collaboration with Chinese theatre artists Wang Zhaohui, producer and Sun Yue, writer and performer), devised work (Peepshow, 1997; Deflowerfucked, 2001), multimedia performance (City, 1995; The Chair Women, a co-production with Scarlet Theatre and Ludowy Theatre, 2004; The Crumb Trail, 2008), plays incorporating original animation (Cartoon, 1998), theatrical adaptations of films (The Idiots, 2007), large-scale site-specific solo performance/installation (One: Healing with Theatre, 2005) and a long-term investigation of Samuel Beckett (All That Fall, 2011; Embers, 2013; Quad, 2013; Cascando, 2016; Endgame, 2019). Even this long summary is not exhaustive of their body of work but gives some sense of its breadth and ambition.

Co-artistic directors Gavin Quinn and Aedín Cosgrove’s enduring collaboration in the roles primarily of director and designer on Pan Pan’s productions also provides one of the most substantial case studies currently available (in Ireland and internationally) of the relationship between directing and scenography practices in the life of a single company. Quinn speaks of Pan Pan working initially with “the simple idea of theatre being conceptual, and very much a medium where you could use the kind of visual arts principles of line, form, colour” (Ruiz 2015, 121) an orientation that makes clear the central role of scenography in their work. Under Quinn and Cosgrove’s co-direction, Pan Pan embraces a formalistic fluidity (jumping from devised work to adapting a film for the stage e.g.) and centres design and technological elements in the experience of their work for audiences (such as in their more recent stagings of Beckett’s plays for radio that centralise performance installation and sound in the audience’s experiences of the work). Speaking of the company’s original intent in forming, Cosgrove observes: “We wanted to make our own identity, kind of like a band: we wanted our own sound” (Ruiz 2015, 212), a process of reinvention that Pan Pan continuously pursues.

Noelia Ruiz points to Pan Pan’s distinctive “performance/acting mode” (2009, 128) as another hallmark aesthetic of their work, a style that has been evolved through working with the same actors over time including Derrick Devine, Ned Dennehy, Gina Moxley and Dylan Tighe among others in addition to a rotating network of other Irish artists and international collaborators. This does mean that their habitual acting collaborators stay confined to these roles over time: Moxley also writes and directs and Pan Pan has produced some of her works The Crumb Trail (2009) and The Patient Gloria (2019) which she has also acted in. Quinn describes Pan Pan’s performance style overall as making actors “want to be onstage” rather than “lying when they are onstage or hiding the fact that they are onstage” (Ruiz 2009, 128). Ben Brantley referred to Pan Pan’s acting style in the New York Times as “a largely affectless acting style that recalls the Dogme school of film” (2008) but which also recalls that of New York’s own Wooster Group. Their characteristic acting style has persisted through Pan Pan’s multiple periods of experimentation, an approach that also leads to direct confrontation with the audience throughout the work in performance.

Finally, Pan Pan under Quinn and Cosgrove’s direction have led vanguard international theatre exchanges and mentorship programmes which have had a discernible impact on generations of emerging and now mid-career theatre artists. These included their Dublin International Theatre Symposium (1997–2003) which according to Quinn was intended to be a “stimulating reference point for discussion and action from which to further our theatrical interaction” (University of Galway 2022, “Thinking About Theatre”) and featured workshops, talks and performances. Over the life of the initiative, the Dublin Theatre Symposium welcomed companies from Japan, Austria, Poland, Britain and the Netherlands among others ultimately growing in “stature to rival the Dublin Fringe and the Dublin Theatre Festival, while still occupying a wholly unique position in the festival calendar” (University of Galway 2022, “Thinking About Theatre”). This was an initiative very much ahead of its time because as Brian Singleton outlines “such work had yet to be curated in Dublin’s theatre festivals, as the theatrical language of some of the companies had yet to find its audience in an Irish context” (2016, 254). Pan Pan wound down this initiative in order to focus back on creating their own work, but then launched and international mentorship scheme in 2012, now in its 11th edition at the time of writing. In this programme, Irish-based artists are paired with international mentors and given a bursary to develop their own work. Finally, they began partnering with Dublin Fringe Festival in 2019 to create the “Pan Pan Platform at Dublin Fringe Festival” which “connects experienced makers and producers with exciting early career artists” (Pan Pan Theatre 2023, “Pan Pan Platform at Dublin Fringe Festival”). Through these ongoing initiatives and their body of work to date, Pan Pan not only led the future of contemporary Irish theatre practices in terms of proliferation and global networking, they continue to lay down the tracks for yet more futures to emerge.

Blue Raincoat Theatre Company

Blue Raincoat Theatre Company was founded in 1991 in Sligo by Malcolm Hamilton, Niall Henry, John Carty and Fionnuala Gallagher. This company operates as a “venue-based professional theatre ensemble” (Blue Raincoat Theatre 2023a) with the founding members taking on distinct artistic roles at different points in their history: Hamilton (writer-in-residence), Henry (artistic director), Carty (performer and director) and Gallagher (performer). Other key long-term collaborators have included Jocelyn Clarke (dramaturge, writer of multiple original adaptations), Kelly Hughes (performer and director), Jamie Varten (set design), Joseph Hunt (resident sound designer), Fiona McGeown (performer) and Sandra O’Malley (performer) in addition to others which Rhona Trench has extensively catalogued in her history of the company up through 2015 (Trench 2015, 124–128). Similar to Pan Pan, Blue Raincoat’s continental European formal influences, their increasing internationalisation over the life of the company through touring and partnerships and also in their case, embeddedness within a regional Irish community are paradigmatic of the period in which they emerged.

Over the course of their history, Blue Raincoat have produced a wide range of European, Irish and classical plays, as well as new plays (including a sustained engagement with those of company co-founder Malcolm Hamilton) and original theatrical adaptations of literary works which include Jocelyn Clarke’s adaptations of Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1999), Alice Through the Looking Glass (2000) and Alice in Wonderland (2006) as well as Flann O’Brien’s The Third Policeman (2007) and At Swim Two Birds (2009). Their focus on canonical Irish playwrights over time has been limited to W. B. Yeats, Samuel Beckett and J. M. Synge despite an influential early 1996 production of Tom Murphy’s A Whistle In the Dark which garnered the company their first Arts Council funding grant (Trench 2015, 25). J. M. Synge’s Playboy of the Western World, along with Yeats’ Purgatory and Cat in the Moon (first produced in 1994 and 1992 respectively), have nonetheless been particularly important touchstones for the company remaining part of the repertoire since almost Blue Raincoat’s origins. This led eventually to the commencement of years-long Yeats Project in 2009, as described later (Fig. 5.2).

Fig. 5.2

(Photograph Peter Martin)

Fiona McGeown and John Carty in W. B. Yeats’ The Cat and the Moon, Blue Raincoat Theatre, 2016

Blue Raincoat’s trademark aesthetic is a mixed physical theatre approach drawing on a range of continental European influences. As Rhona Trench summarises: “Blue Raincoat’s practice is derived from the work of Jacques Copeau, Étienne Decroux (the company’s main influence), and Marcel Marceau” (2015, 13). These formal influences structure the company’s approach to staging, and the physical acting demands of Blue Raincoat’s performance repertoire is a hallmark of their work. As Peter Crawley observed, “the precise gestures and rigorously controlled movements in their work, which is the company’s stock-in-trade” is “a study in minute detail” (2009, 18). The centrality of this formal aesthetic framework evolved over time as Trench details that:

The early productions remained more text-based because the notion of mime and movement as central to making meaning was a one-person project-Niall Henry’s- which could not be fully realized, because at that time, the company performers had not been trained. (2015, 17)

A more decisive move towards precise physical theatre techniques in their work was enabled by further training by Carty and the sustained contributions of performers including O’Malley, McGeown and Hughes who trained at schools including the Theatre de l’Ange Fou (Decroux style of movement, London), the International School of Corporeal Mime (London) and the École de Mime Corporel Dramatique (London). Blue Raincoat’s work is also characterised by vivid and often epic scenographic practices and uses of sound design (such as in their almost entirely worldless 2016 Shackleton, designed by Jamie Varten with sound by Joe Hunt, both long-term collaborators).

Blue Raincoat has been based in Sligo’s Factory Space since 1991, which houses a movement studio, office and a performance space. The Factory is “an artistic hub of Sligo’s community, it provides in addition to its own performances, a venue for touring companies, workshops, exhibitions, music, and poetry recitals” (Trench 2015, 10). Trench’s authoritative history of the company makes visible how Blue Raincoat’s operational structures including local partnerships and employment practices (such as making use of government community employment schemes to integrate local non-professionals into the professional company over time) has been aimed at maximum empowerment of the Sligo arts community to ensure the company’s immersion and local sustainability (2015, 32–34). In 2012, they launched a Blue Raincoat Theatre Academy which builds on their company mission to “implement training, teaching and cultural development programmes with relevant state agencies and third-level institutions throughout Ireland” (Blue Raincoat 2023).

In 2000, they formalised a programming strategy, annually “consisting of three theatre productions developed for repertoire” (Trench 2015, 31). The current composition of their repertoire reflects a consolidation of Blue Raincoat’s theatrical experimentation since their formation. It includes their productions of canonical works by W. B. Yeats, Samuel Beckett and Eugène Ionesco as well as many of Hamilton’s plays (A Brief Taste of Lightning, premiered 2002; The Strange Voyage of Donald Crowhurst, premiered 2003; The Last Mile, premiered 2009) and work by Clarke (Alice in Wonderland, premiered 2006; The First Cosmonaut, premiered 2013). They have had an extended engagement with the plays of W. B. Yeats beginning in 1992 with their first productions of Purgatory and The Cat and The Moon. They officially inaugurated their Yeats Project in 2009 which is devoted to “building our selection of dramatic works by W. B. Yeats on an annual basis” (Blue Raincoat 2017), including recent site-specific productions of his plays in County Sligo (2015–2015). Their extended engagement with Ionesco is also definitive of the company’s evolution with The Chairs (premiered 2005), Rhinoceros (premiered 2010) and The Bald Soprano (premiered 2005) all remaining in repertoire. Most recently, they have expanded on their development of devised work with a four-part series that began with Shackleton (2016) and continued with The School Days of Thaddeus K (2018) which explored experiences in a West of Ireland industrial school in the 1970s, Hunting Darwin (2021) which returned to the Antarctic to explore another epic ill-fated journey to reach the South Pole, and then finally The Last Pearl (2022) which told the “story of M, a pearl diver, in her search to survive in an ever-changing and increasingly challenging world” (Blue Raincoat 2023b, The Last Pearl).

Calypso Productions

Calypso Productions was originally established in Dublin in 1993 by Donal O’Kelly and Charlie O’Neill, who identify primarily as playwrights. Bairbre Ní Chaiomh became artistic director in 1998, serving until the company’s funding-related demise in 2008. During the company’s existence, she worked as an actor, playwright and outreach programme facilitator in addition to this role. Calypso’s 1995 mission statement communicated that through theatre, they hoped to:

change the world…Some of us are lucky enough to have inherited life saving rights, life enhancing social opportunities and life affirming creative opportunities. With those rights and privileges comes a responsibility to defend them for ourselves and others. (Qtd. in Merriman 2011, 165)

Calypso’s work is an important index of the social and aesthetic shifts brought on by the Celtic Tiger in the Republic. Their work addressed social and economic justice in Irish society head-on, their productions of usually new works centring around issues including global economic inequalities (Donal O’Kelly’s Trickledown Town, 1994), the arms industry (Donal O’Kelly and Kenneth Glenaan’s The Business of Blood, 1994), racism against the Traveller community (Charlie O’Neill’s Rosie and Starwars, 1997), the institutionalisation of unwed mothers and unresolved issues around adoption (Bairbre Ní Chaiomh and Yvonne Quinn’s Stolen Child, 2002), women in prison (Paula Meehan’s Cell, 1999) and mental health (Gavin Kostick’s The Asylum Ball, 2000). When Ní Chaiomh took on artistic directorship, Calypso shifted more decisively to focus on national and international issues related to race, racism, asylum and refugeeness. They did so through Irish-located works (Roddy Doyle’s Guess Who’s Coming for the Dinner, 2001, and Maeve Ingolsby’s Mixing It On the Mountain) as well as Irish productions of international plays (Athol Fugard’s Master Harold and the Boys, 2005, Kay Adshead’s Bones, 2007, and Robin Soan’s Talking to Terrorists, 2007). Under Ní Chaiomh’s artistic direction, Calypso began the Tower of Babel programme which set out to:

use our imaginative resources as a professional theatre company to devise an integrated cross-cultural arts programme that would develop and showcase the talent and skills of young people from minority ethnic communities living side by side with their Irish counterparts. (McIvor and Ní Chaoimh 2014, 342)

The minority ethnic cohort that took part in Tower of Babel were predominantly separated children and unaccompanied minors who were seeking asylum in Ireland at the time. This circumstance led to the company becoming directly involved in advocating for some of their cases, a situation that Donal O’Kelly would indirectly dramatise in his play The Cambria (2005), which was not produced by Calypso Productions, but remains one of O’Kelly’s most toured and critically acclaimed works so it is highly relevant to understanding the story and impact of Calypso’s Tower of Babel.

Tower of Babel’s activities had multiple dimensions. Participants had the opportunity to perform in some of Calypso’s productions alongside professional performers including most notably Mixing It on the Mountain (which had been commissioned for the group) and which Jason King observes “created space for sympathetic engagement recent immigrants to Ireland by relating their experiences to the nation’s most foundational myth and most iconic forms of historical memory” namely the myth of St. Patrick with the character of St. Patrick played by Solomon Ijigade who was then seeking asylum from the Irish state but is now long settled in Ireland and a professional musician, teacher and facilitator (2005, 27). Tower of Babel participants also created their own work including the theatre pieces The Museum of Me (in partnership with London’s Phakama), Where is Home, Suitcases and Re-Imagining the World as well as “a series of short films based on their dreams and fantasies, which were shown in European Parliament in Brussels in 2008 as part of the European Year of Intercultural Dialogue” (McIvor and Ní Chaoimh 2014, 346). Calypso’s explicit focus on a social-justice centred mission and sustained commitment to educational outreach and professionalisation of minority ethnic actors singles them out as a unique company in Ireland during this time. Their post-crash demise left a vacuum in the late 2000s/early 2010s Irish theatre landscape, particularly for emerging minority ethnic artists and the treatment of race and migration-related themes on Irish stages. As Jason King observed writing in 2016, the shuttering of Calypso Productions among others as a result of the “economic collapse” precipitated an attrition of visibility for “emergent immigrant and minority ethnic arts practitioners” (like Ijigade) who then “largely disappeared from the Irish professional theatre scene” with the consequence being in his opinion “a kind of cultural atrophy in which community and non-professional productions largely fill the void” (73). Chapter 6 will reveal that this tide has begun to turn for theatre artists from minority ethnic and/or migrant backgrounds but even so, this contextual moment as evidenced by the story of Calypso Productions is important to remember and theorise.

Marina Carr

Born in Offaly, Marina Carr is a leading member of an internationally recognised cohort of contemporary Irish playwrights who emerged in the 1990s and early 2000s also including Martin McDonagh, Conor McPherson and Enda Walsh among others. As arguably the only internationally recognisable and/or regularly produced internationally cisgender woman of this group, and the only female playwright produced on the Abbey Theatre’s main stage in the 1990s as well as on other Irish and international leading stages, Carr’s body of work takes on arguably increased significance relative to her male peers. Melissa Sihra argues that Carr along with Lady Gregory have been repeatedly pressed into service as the “token women” of Irish theatre who after being “validated by patriarchal standards” is then “allowed conditional entry to mainstream culture” and then, as a result of her “extraordinary status” “the token woman is permitted to stand-in as a totalizing representative of all women” (2018, 1–2). However, Carr’s work pushes back against this very representational burden of the token female playwright, Carr’s plays are feminist (in that they address centrally the social construction of gendered roles) as well as female-driven. As such, Carr’s plays comment explicitly on the exclusionary landscape of Irish theatre and society as well as being exemplary within it deconstructing token or simple understandings of femininity often with simmering rage boiling underneath and not a small amount of magic animating her dramatic landscapes.

Carr is perhaps best known internationally for her Midlands Trilogy: The Mai, Portia Coughlan and By the Bog of Cats, which were produced in the mid-late 1990s despite remaining prolific since this time and particularly in the last five years. The Midlands Trilogy plays works are centrally concerned with gender and the politics of sexuality, particularly as it plays out within heteronormative family structures circumscribed by Irish norms of family, community, church and state. They dramatised midlands Irish women, families and communities in crisis with themes of incest, rape, suicide, alcoholism, depression, marriage and motherhood prominently and unrelenting. Carr’s emergence as a playwright during a decade of enormous social upheaval particularly as regards gender, economics and the waning power of the Catholic Church rendered these plays not only timely but transformative of and in direct dialogue with the cultural landscape into which they emerged. Powerfully, Portia Coughlan “was commissioned by the National Maternity Hospital as part of its centenary celebrations and was entirely paid for by 89 high-profile women who each donated 50 pounds” (Sihra 2007, 210).

Carr’s plays began being produced professionally in the late 1980s and gained momentum throughout the 90s: Low in the Dark (1989, Crooked Sixpence Theatre Company in association with Project, 1989) Ullaloo (1991, Abbey Theatre, Peacock stage), This Love Thing (1991, Tinderbox Theatre Company/Pigsback Theatre Company), The Mai (1994, Abbey Theatre, Peacock stage), Portia Couglan (1996, Abbey Theatre, Peacock stage) and By the Bog of Cats (1998, Abbey Theatre, main stage). She had been made a writer-in-residence at the Abbey in 1995, and By the Bog of Cats received a West End production at the Wyndham Theatre in 2004 with U.S. film actress Holly Hunter in the lead role of Hester Swayne. By the 2000s, she was a more than well-established mainstay of the Abbey Theatre’s programming and her work was also being premiered internationally: Meat and Salt (Abbey Theatre, Peacock stage, 2003), Woman and Scarecrow (The Royal Court Theatre, 2006), The Cordelia Dream (Royal Shakespeare Company, 2008), Marble (Abbey Theatre, main stage, 2009), The Giant Blue Hand (The Ark, 2009), Phaedra Backwards (McCarter Theatre, Princeton, 2011), 16 Possible Glimpses (Abbey Theatre, Peacock Stage, 2011), Hecuba (Royal Shakespeare Company, 2015) and Anna Karenina (Abbey Theatre, main stage, 2016). Within this most recent body of work are two plays for young audiences: Meat and Salt and The Giant Blue Hand and also two musical collaborations (“a new, contemporary translation of Rigoletto for Opera Theatre Company which toured Ireland in 2015; and an oratorio, Mary Gordon, as part of a commission for Wicklow County Council,” 2016) (Irish Theatre Playography 2023a). Most recently, she has premiered Girl on an Altar (Abbey Theatre and Kiln Theatre, 2023), Audrey, or Sorrow (Abbey Theatre and Landmark Productions, 2024) and The Boy (Abbey Theatre, 2024). Actresses Olwen Fouréré and Derbhle Crotty have appeared across multiple premieres of Carr’s plays in leading and now iconic roles from the early 1990s such as the title role in Portia Coughlan (Crotty, 1996) and Hester Swayne in By the Bog of Cats (Fouréré, 1998). Fouréré also appeared in the premieres of Ullaloo and The Mai and most recently iGirl (2021) while Crotty appeared in the premieres of Marble, The Mai, 16 Possible Glimpses and Hecuba. In addition, Druid Theatre’s Garry Hynes directed the premieres of both Portia Coughlan and On Raftery’s Hill, one in her tenure as Abbey artistic director between 1991 and 1994, the other after she went back to Druid in 2000.

Siobhán O’Gorman characterises Carr’s early work (including Low in the Dark, The Deer’s Surrender, This Love Thing, and Ullaloo) as dependent on “non-sequential structures” which “resist closure,” “satirically excavating the interconnections of genders, customs and cultural histories” (2014, 488). By Carr’s own repeated admission, these earliest works were influenced by Samuel Beckett but O’Gorman crucially identifies Low in the Dark and This Love Thing as “partially devised, developed through work-shopping and improvisation” (O’Gorman 2014, 489). Carr herself would conclude by writing in a devised and co-created way with others that “writing like that is dicey; I learned that it doesn’t work for me” (Trench 2010, 5). Nevertheless, this earlier lineage of Carr’s playwriting craft places her in a continuum with rather than opposed to shifting trends in Irish theatremaking at the time.

Rhona Trench locates “Carr’s transition into a more “mainstream” theatre in 1994, coinciding with her Irish Times Award of Best Play” for The Mai (2010, 5). This transition included the adoption of more straightforward dramaturgical structures that Trench summarises as a move towards “recognizable forms of behaviour for her characters, such as causally related plots with observable time frames and identifiable settings” (2010, 5). If her earliest work riffed on Beckett, the epic scale of Greek tragedy would become an increasingly important landscape for Carr. Beginning with The Mai, Carr positions the mythic and poetic more centrally in her work and frequently builds her plays around responding to archetypal female characters from contemporary perspectives such as Greek myth’s Medea (By the Bog of Cats), Iphigenia (Ariel) and Phaedra (Phaedra Backwards), as well as Shakespeare’s Cordelia (Cordelia’s Dream). Paula Murphy argues that there is a throughline between Carr’s Midlands plays and this formal strand, offering that “the literary influences of the midlands plays, Shakespeare, ancient Greek drama, and ancient Egyptian narrative, mirror the plays’ concern with the lost other” (2006, 391). She also took on the life of Anton Chekhov in 16 Possible Glimpses, a move that recalled the earlier panoramic perspective of This Love Thing which featured “Renaissance artists and some of the characters they depicted” in a “lighthearted analysis of love” (Irish Playography 2017, “This Love Thing”). As the mythic and interrogation of canonical writers such as Chekhov, Shakespeare and the Greeks has grown in significance within Carr’s playwriting, a trenchant focus on the sociological and political particularly within a local Irish context has arguably receded. Claire Wallace asserts “[f]rom the perspective of positive, politically aggressive feminism, Carr’s work might be said to have developed in a negative sense veering from a playful, satirical feminism to grim, patriarchal tragedy” (2000, 87). Paula Murphy counters this however arguing that Carr’s “appropriation of classical forms and themes, particularly Greek tragedy, places her in a theatrical tradition that crosses national boundaries,” also “representing” an Irish “cultural anxiety about moving from a relatively insular, economically unsuccessful island nation to a wider global community, politically, culturally and technologically” (2006, 390, 391).

Carr’s work (particularly the Midlands Trilogy) animates many of the key tensions and transformations experienced both in the heat and aftermath of Ireland’s Celtic Tiger era. The increasing internationalisation of her work in form, theme and collaborative partnerships between the early and late 2000s also represents a trajectory taken by other leading Irish playwrights of her generation including Martin McDonagh, Conor McPherson and Enda Walsh most prominently. As argued by Patrick Lonergan, this turn in Carr’s work among others perhaps suggests that “globalization- rather than the ‘national question’-is now the dominant paradigm in Irish theatre” (2009, 27). To what end, and what this means for Irish feminist theatre practice and criticism particularly, is a matter still evolving especially in the aftermath of 2015’s Waking the Feminist’s movement, which is directed towards national infrastructural transformation of gender equality in the theatre industry. In addition, waves of attention to racial and ethnic equity in the Irish theatre sector for minority ethnic and/or migrant theatremakers re-emerged as priorities as the conversations and structural change initiatives around racial equity catalysed by the initially U.S.-based Black Lives Matter movement became more globalised post-2020 and increasingly impacted priorities and conversations even within the Irish arts sector (McIvor 2016) (see Chapter 6).

Landmark Plays and Productions

Riverdance (Premiered 1994)

Riverdance’s premiere as the interval entertainment for the 1994 Eurovision song contest held in Dublin that year was impeccably timed. In retrospect, the first preview appearance of this ultimately full-length dance spectacular (created by producer Moya Doherty, director John McColgan and composer Bill Whelan with original soloists Michael Flatley and Jean Butler) epitomised as well as anticipated the spirit, excesses and internationalisation of the Celtic Tiger era in Ireland, premiering the same year that the Morgan Stanley report coined the very term. Hazel Carby observes that the premiere of “Riverdance” on Eurovision was the “cultural vision of the economic narrative of the Irish as the success story of the new Europe” (2001, 329). Following the premiere of the interval entertainment excerpt, Riverdance was developed as a full-length performance which is still touring worldwide with regular returns to the Republic of Ireland at the time of writing almost thirty years later (Riverdance 2023a).

Riverdance’s perhaps most iconic image, its thunderous chorus line, registered from that very first performance as an adjusted influence for Ireland (economically and culturally) on 1990s world stages. As Aoife McGrath puts it, “the chorus line in Riverdance, using the technique of competitive step dance, can be read as an example of an aestheticization and advertisement of a late capitalist Irish labour force that is young, dynamic, mobile and always striving to move upwards and forwards ‘in step’” (2013, 8). Riverdance also packaged together many of the most recognisable signifiers, sounds and moves of stage Irishness including a liberal use of green and sentimental evocations of home and displacement with many of the piece’s based on “such traditional” Irish “rhythmic forms as the reel, slip jig, and slow air” (Scahill 2009, 72). These tropes however are crucially recycled through the lens of a cosmopolitan, new age (and sexed-up) worldview, staging and soundscape (with Riverdance’s soundtrack repeatedly characterised as “world music”) (Scahill 2009, 74). Some scenes are titled according to familiar Irish nationalist and diasporic tropes, “The Countess Cathleen” or “American Wake,” while others are called by more generic titles like “The Heart’s Cry,” which is described as staging how we “need and sustain each other” and “keep this knowledge in song since the beginning of time,” an inclusive “we” that absorbs all potential audience members, not just those of Irish descent (Riverdance 2023b). Through a two-act structure, Riverdance ultimately dramatises Irish history and its diaspora in particular as perpetually in motion and shaped by contact with a multicultural cross-section of performers, including African-American tap dancers and a gospel choir, Argentinian flamenco dancers and Russian whirling dervishes. Carby summarises that “the cultural and aesthetic politics of Riverdance imagine and present Irishness for global consumption as the story of one successful ethnic group among many, an Irishness to be understood with the frame reference of multiculturalism” (2001, 330).

Riverdance’s spectacular blend between the universalist and the particular, the Irish and the global, has generated one of the most lucrative performance franchises in history. It has, in turn, spurred other franchises such as Michael Flatley’s follow-up solo enterprises including Lord of the Dance (1996), Feet of Flames (1998), Celtic Tiger (2005) and Lord of the Dance: Dangerous Games (2014) and stimulated the increased circulation of Irish step dancing practices due to the show’s popularisation of the form (Foley 2001, 34–45). According to the most recent figures available from 2017 on the Riverdance site, since the 1995 Dublin premiere, there have been over “11,000 performances” which have been “seen live by over 25 million people in over 467 venues worldwide, throughout 46 countries across 6 continents.” When television audiences are taken into account, it has been seen by more than 3 billion people since its initial debut (Riverdance 2017, “The Journey”).

For better or worse, Riverdance has to a large extent shaped how Irishness is read and consumed by audiences around the world due to its massive reach. It is a phenomenon that has outlasted the Celtic Tiger. Despite being performed continuously for almost thirty years, Riverdance has never been significantly altered in form or content apart from the addition of one scene “Anna Livia” for a group of female dancers in 2015 inspired by “James Joyce’s personification of Dublin’s River Liffey” (Riverdance 2023b) and to mark twenty years of Riverdance on tour. This means that attending Riverdance today allows one to gain live access to an important relic of Irish contemporary performance history that has intentionally not kept pace with the evolving nature of Irishness in the second decade of the twenty-first century. That being said, the original creators did premiere original creators did premiere Riverdance: Heartbeat of Home in 2013 (choreographed by David Bolger and John Carey) which is still being performed. This new extension of the franchise draws on “the multicultural fusion of Irish, Latin and Afro-Cuban dance” and uses performers who are “not only at the top of their profession in Irish but also in other dance forms” (Heartbeat of Home 2023).

Martin McDonagh, The Leenane Trilogy (The Beauty Queen of Leenane, The Lonesome West, A Skull in Connemara) (Premiered 1996/1997)

Garry Hynes and Druid Theatre’s “discovery” of Martin McDonagh through Druid’s blind submission process for new writers and the company’s decision to produce all three plays of his Leenane Trilogy simultaneously (in a co-production with the Royal Court Theatre, London) is the material of legend. It also directly followed on Hynes’s resignation as artistic director of the Abbey and her subsequent unexpected return to Druid. Druid’s international success with McDonagh’s work and the impact of this experience on how the company consolidated its “Irish” reputation was a landmark event that again reflected and influenced wider patterns in the global circulation of Irish theatre at this time.

Druid’s production of the Leenane Trilogy launched McDonagh’s stage and film career and inaugurated a new international phase of prestige for the Galway-based theatre company. This included runs on the West End, Broadway and as part of the Sydney Festival, and Hynes’ 1998 Tony Award for best director for The Beauty Queen of Leenane, the first ever awarded to a female director, in addition to Tony Awards for three of the cast: Marie Mullen (Best Actress), Anna Manahan (Best Supporting Actress), and Tom Murphy (Best Supporting Actor).

Druid had premiered the three new works in Galway: The Beauty Queen of Leenane (1996) first as a stand-alone piece and then as the Trilogy with The Lonesome West (1997), and A Skull in Connemara (1997). This continued Druid’s long-established pattern of production which firmly routes the origin of their work in the West of Ireland despite their international profile (and touring schedule). As Fintan O’Toole quipped, “If Martin McDonagh had not existed, Garry Hynes would have had to invent him,” for the Leenane Trilogy is “uncannily in line with what she and Druid have been about for 21 years…a long demythologization of the West” (1997).

McDonagh’s public persona generated perhaps as much press as the critical acclaim for his work, especially an infamous drunken encounter with Sean Connery at the 1996 Evening Standard Awards in London. Born in London to parents from Galway and Sligo, McDonagh has been claimed for both British and Irish theatre with Anthony Roche terming him “one of the first, and certainly most high profile, playwrights of the Irish diaspora in England” (Roche 2009, 236).

The Leenane Trilogy featured Druid co-founders Marie Mullen and Mick Lally, as well as associate artist Maeliosa Stafford who had served as artistic director during Hynes’ tenure at the Abbey. They joined a company of actors including Anna Manahan, Aidan McArdle, David Ganly, Dawn Bradfield and Brián F. O’Byrne (with O’Byrne performing in all three works).

The plays of the Leenane Trilogy divided critics and academics, with The Beauty Queen of Leenane being consistently regarded as the strongest of the three. McDonagh was lauded by some such as Fintan O’Toole for his intertextual reworking of twentieth-century Irish drama in form and content (particularly the work of J. M. Synge) with a postmodern twist, but attacked by others for crass nihilistic opportunism that rebranded the “Stage Irish” for ever wider global audiences (Merriman 1999, 305–317).

Tinderbox Theatre, Convictions (2000)

This landmark site-specific theatre work was staged at Belfast’s Crumlin Road Courthouse—“the site of many of Northern Ireland’s paramilitary trials and the home of the secretive Diplock courts” (McKinnie 2003, 583)—only two years after the Good Friday Agreement. At that time, the Crumlin Road Courthouse had been closed since this event as “part of the general restructuring of the British state in Northern Ireland” (McKinnie 2003, 583). Under the artistic direction of Paula McFetridge with design by Houston Marshall, Convictions featured seven new dramas by Northern Ireland’s leading playwrights staged throughout the courthouse, including work by Daragh Carville (Male Toilets), Damian Gorman (Judge’s Room), Marie Jones (Court No. 2), Martin Lynch (Main Hall), Owen McCafferty (Court No. 1), Nicola McCartney (Jury Room) and Gary Mitchell (Holding Room). As a theatre event, Convictions brought together many of Northern Ireland’s leading playwrights and artists as part of one project. In doing so, this event provides a unique snapshot of the wider landscape of Northern Irish theatre at a key moment of political and social transformation. It also made clear Tinderbox Theatre’s evolution since their “low-budget beginning” in 1988 to their clear status at the time of Convictions as a “champion” of “much of the new writing through which dramatic output from Northern Ireland has been reshaped” (Maguire 2006, 150). McFetridge later became artistic director of Belfast-based Kabosh Productions, founded in 1994 whose mission involves creating “provocative theatre that transforms our understanding of who and where we are, through giving voice to site, space and people” (Kabosh Productions 2023, emphasis ours), continuing the legacy of Convictions in her own independent company.

The plays focus on evocative vignettes rather than attempting to dramatise a representative history of the courthouse’s landmark cases or events and engage subject positions including defendants, victims, family members, judges and guards.

As Michael McKinnie outlines, each short play:

was self-contained and bore no causal or correlative relationship to any other- there were no recurring characters, no overarching plot, no consistent themes apart from expected and expansive ones like incarceration and justice, and no dominant writing style beyond a fairly broad adherence to the conventions of naturalism. (2003, 589)

Convictions also featured original music by composer Neil Martin and visual art installations by Amanda Montgomery which “attempted to revive” the “essence or soul (if there was one) of the areas which were once a prominent feature in the lives of those passing through this building over the years” (Montgomery 2000, 13).

Each individual drama had a different director, and audience members did not all experience the work in the same order. They instead moved in rotation in small groups through rooms including the Jury Room, Courts No. 1 and 2, a Judge’s Office, the toilets and the holding cells for prisoners, experiencing Montgomery’s installations and the soundscape of the production during their transitions. As a total experience, Convictions:

offered to lead spectators physically and imaginatively through the cultural memory for which the courthouse stood as metonym, and part of its appeal lay in the fact that it allowed the spectator to experience state space in ways previously inadmissible and unimaginable. (McKinnie 2003, 583)

Premiering so soon after the Good Friday Agreement, Convictions strongly communicates anxieties about the next phase of identity politics or rebranding for Northern Ireland, as well as the seething legacies of undelivered justice. Daragh Carville’s Male Toilets features a character savagely suggesting that bombings will need to continue being staged at appropriate intervals to preserve the Northern Irish brand as “we’re disappearing from the world agenda” but building “Tourist Information Centres, hotels, theme parks, heritage centres” (Carville, in Convictions 2000, 35). Other plays including Martin Lynch’s Main Hall and Nicola McCartney’s Jury Room probe the intersection between class, criminality and incarceration while Owen McCafferty’s Court No. 1 features a victim still seeking justice in their unsolved murder case. McKinnie faults Convictions for sidestepping “the political motivations for, and sectarian consequences of, the events that caused the pain” (2003, 593), but it seems that the inability to capture the enormity of these “motivations” and “consequences” in the theatre let alone Northern Irish society at large is what Convictions did ultimately dramatise on a panoramic scale. Karen in Marie Jone’s Court No. 2 insists “we are planning a heritage centre, it is not our responsibility to tell people what to think” (Jones in 2000, 10). This may be a debatable point, but this character’s assertion does strike at the heart of the representational challenges faced by theatremakers from all sides of the sectarian debates particularly when engaged in a cross-sectarian project.

Seminal Revivals

The Playboy of the Western World Revivals (Druid Theatre, Abbey Theatre, Pan Pan Theatre)

2007 marked the 100-year centenary of the infamous premiere of John Millington Synge’s Playboy of the Western World which sparked riots and public debate over the role of the national theatre and the limits of representation at the Abbey Theatre. As would be expected, this anniversary catalysed multiple revivals and adaptations in the years leading up to the event. Taken together, they index the still dynamic role of Synge’s play as a vehicle for commentary on and contestation of contemporary Irish society.

Some productions arguably sought to consolidate Synge’s reputation for national and international audiences including Druid’s 2004 production initially starring Cillian Murphy as Christy Mahon. This production “embarked on a unique tour along the Western seaboard, retracing (in reverse) the journey undertaken by the bold Christy Mahon after ‘murdering’ his father,” touring to locations including the Aran Islands and Geesala, County Mayo “where the play is set” (Druid Theatre 2023a). This production (albeit recast and restaged) served as a building block for Druid’s landmark acclaimed DruidSynge which was “the first ever staging of John Millington Synge’s entire theatrical canon,” seven plays in total including Playboy but also The Shadow of the Glen, The Well of the Saints, The Tinker’s Wedding, Deirdre of the Sorrows, Riders to the Sea and When the Moon Has Set (Druid Theatre 2023b). DruidSynge premiered in 2005 at the Galway Arts Festival before touring nationally and internationally to the UK, U.S. and Australia. As a company, Druid’s reputation is frequently linked centrally to Synge with Patricia Byrne arguing that Druid’s “definitive” 1982 production of Playboy of the Western World “revived Synge for Irish audiences and established Druid’s reputation worldwide” (2008, 135).

Pan Pan Theatre’s 2006 Playboy of the Western World “emerged out of co-artistic director Gavin Quinn’s explicit desire to work in a Chinese context,” as “the production concept for a Mandarin Chinese Playboy preceded the finding of… Chinese collaborators’” (McIvor 2016, 55). Pan Pan eventually collaborated with producer Wang Zhaohui and translator/dramatist Sun Yue to reimagine Playboy as “[t]ransposed to a modern setting of a hairdressers and foot massage parlour, otherwise known as a ‘Whore Dressers’ on the outskirts of Beijing” (Pan Pan 2023). Christy Mahon became Ma Shang, a rural outsider to the cosmopolitan hairdressers in Beijing hailing from “Xinjiang, the remote Muslim region bordering Afghanistan and Pakistan, which is China’s own Western World” (Morash and Richards 2013, 140). The particularities of this regional Chinese identity to Pan Pan’s adaptation both key to and controversial in the circulation of the work within China itself (McIvor 2016, 57–58), and Christy/Ma only wore the “taquiah (the Muslim cap)” in Dublin where Christopher Morash and Shaun Richards argue that its significance was “unlikely to be fully appreciated” (Morash and Richards 2013, 141). Pan Pan’s production of Yue’s translation/adaptation of Playboy premiered at the Oriental Pioneer Theatre in Beijing with an all-Chinese cast before touring to the Project Arts Centre in Dublin. The company would continue their collaborations with Zhaohui and Sun into the 2010s with a number of other adaptations and staging of original works including Sun Yue’s Do Di Zhu (Fight the Landlord) (2010) and a simultaneous premiere of a Chinese-language version of The Seagull and Other Birds in 2014 at Beijing Fringe Festival while their English-language version of the same production was opening simultaneously at the Dublin Theatre Festival, both directed by Gavin Quinn (McIvor 2016, 61–64; Tatlow 2014).

The Abbey commissioned Arambe Productions’ Bisi Adigun and Roddy Doyle to write a “new version” of Playboy of the Western World for the 2007 centenary that would feature a Nigerian playboy, Christopher Malomo. Adigun had founded Arambe Productions in 2003 as the Republic’s first African-Irish theatre company with the aim of “fostering a better understanding of African cultural values through an innovative approach to the interpretation and performance of classic and contemporary African plays” as well as “foster[ing] new work by reinterpreting Irish classics” (Irish Theatre Institute 2023) such as Playboy and another celebrated adaptation of Jimmy Murphy’s The Kings of Kilburn High Road as The Paddies of Parnell Street, substituting white Irish immigrants working in London for Nigerian immigrants working in Dublin and reflecting on their lives and relationship to home (Irish Theatre Playography 2023b). In Adigun and Doyle’s Playboy, Malomo arrives in Dublin from Lagos, believing that he has murdered his father and seeking far-flung cousins, a criminal fugitive confused by many characters in the play for an asylum seeker (and by reviewers of the play itself who often erroneously referred to him as such) (McIvor 2016, 69–72). As Charlotte McIvor and Matthew Spangler observe, this play would come to be regarded as the “most high-profile and indeed controversial Irish theatre production on the themes of inward-migration and interculturalism” (McIvor and Spangler 2014, 2). It premiered to mixed reviews, but was a popular success and was revived in 2008/2009 due to popular demand. By this time, however, legal proceedings had been “initiated by Adigun/Arambe against the Abbey Theatre and Doyle, which alleged breach of contract among other charges despite repeated protestations from both parties that ‘it was written line by line together’” (McIvor 2016, 43). Jason King perceptively argues that:

…this legal controversy off stage was more symptomatic of the cultural condition of Ireland in economic collapse than the content of the play itself, or many works produced during the era of the Celtic Tiger and its aftermath. Its main beneficiary was not Bisi Adigun nor Arambe Productions, who at best seem to have won a pyrrhic victory, but rather the legal industry which enjoyed a hidden subsidy from the cultural sector and its ever diminishing proportion of taxpayer funding. (2016, 72)

Playboy of the Western World: A New Version’s contested appearance at the eclipse of the Celtic Tiger indeed made manifest the incremental work that would be necessary to revise the Irish theatre canon as a more inclusive site for minority ethnic and migrant individuals in particular, work that still continues today (see Chapter 6). In this moment however, the aspirations of the Celtic Tiger as economic miracle and the Adigun/Doyle collaboration as transformative of the Irish theatre canon in terms of racial and ethnic diversity were both outpaced by structural and interpersonal realities.

Taken together, these three landmark re-envisionings of Synge’s Playboy of the Western World demonstrate the divergent yet complementary routes along which Irish theatre in the Republic developed during this period. Druid’s long-term interrogation of Synge within a West of Ireland context came to a climax with DruidSynge as they ignited local national networks of touring and collaboration before touring the production internationally. Druid and Pan Pan’s international partnerships and touring activities demonstrated the continuing legibility of Irish theatre as a mobile brand (with Synge’s Playboy as a particularly valuable dramatic passport to cross-cultural legibility). But Pan Pan and Adigun and Doyle’s adaptations of Synge’s dramatic text in relationship to contemporary contexts multiplied Irishness and questioned the outer limits of the “Irish” theatrical canon. Both productions perhaps did so only partially, but they established that that racial and ethnic identity of an “Irish” Playboy was nowhere near clear or one-dimensional on the occasion of the play's centenary.

Spotlight on Institutions and Festivals

The 1995 establishment of the Dublin Fringe Festival (DFF) was a pivotal event that continues to shape the development of new directions in Irish theatre and performance (particularly work for performance that operates at the intersection of art forms). Theatre company Bedrock, under the artistic direction of Jimmy Fay, “initiated and administered the first Dublin Fringe Festival” (Irish Theatre Playography 2023c). Fay served as the director for its first two years before passing it on to Ali Curran. Curran would serve until 2000 and was then succeeded by Vallejo Gantner (2001–2005), Wolfgang Hoffman (2006–2007), Roisé Goan (2008–2013), Kris Nelson (2014–2017) and Ruth McGowan (2018–2023) with David Francis Moore taking over from her at time of writing. From its beginnings, the DFF was curated, claiming in 2011 to be the “only fully curated Fringe Festival in Europe” (Shorthall 2011, 14–15), an organisational structure that has resulted in increased infrastructural support for programmed artists despite arguably restricting grassroots access. Former DFF Director Ali Curran (1996–2000) claimed by 2000 that “the Dublin Theatre Festival has altered its programming since the Fringe came into existence” (Meany 2000). Writing in 2014, Miriam Haughton reconstructs the DFF’s evolution thus:

Over forty productions were proposed by companies and artists for the inaugural 1995 Festival. From those early years came significant successes, including Conor McPherson’s This Lime Tree Bower (1995) and Enda Walsh’s Disco Pigs (1996). Today, approximately 300 to 400 presentations are proposed, with sixty to eighty programmed. (2015, 131)

In 2003, then-director Vallejo Gantner said of DFF: “The focus of the Dublin Theatre Festival is on quality, but the focus of the fringe is on fresh, on new, on next. I want to see work asking questions, engaging with new ideas, with the politics and issues of its own form” (McKeon 2003, 13). Gantner credited the DFF, for example, with developing dance and performance art from the late 1990s onwards (McKeon 2003, 13). Despite the DFF’s origin as an initiative from within the workings of Bedrock, a theatre company (albeit one which described itself as crossing “the boundaries of theatre, performance art, dance, and video”) (Irish Theatre Playography 2023c), this festival embraced multiple genres from the beginning, including comedy, dance, performance art, music, and film, experimenting over the course of its years of programming with balance and focus. Within just a few years of the DFF’s creation, it was also international in scope bringing companies including acclaimed New York director Anne Bogart’s SITI Company and giving the Irish premiere to landmark productions including Mark Ravenhill’s Shopping and F***ing (produced by Out of Joint and the Royal Court Theatre, London) in 1997. Many of its former directors including Vallejo Gantner, Wolfgang Hoffman and Kris Nelson came from outside Ireland to lead the festival (Australia, Germany and Canada respectively), periods of stewardship that emphasise the internationalism of DFF’s outlook.

Ultimately, the programming history of DFF is a key archive through which to map and historicise the widening circulation of interdisciplinary performance techniques in contemporary Irish theatremaking. Although theatre became less central as a programmed art form as DFF evolved, DFF's producing trends diagnose shifting priorities in contemporary Irish theatre such as a post-1990s decline in new playwriting and the rise of devised, postdramatic and/or physical theatre methods which emerged incrementally and with many false starts. The scale and diversity of work presented by the DFF since the late 1990s from both individual artists and short-lived as well as established companies indeed troubles linear genealogies of practice transfer that might otherwise credit individuals or companies with inaugurating new forms in Ireland on their own. DFF’s long-term focus on staging events in non-traditional spaces provides for example a key index of the rise of site-specific and immersive theatre in Ireland since the 1990s. In 2023, DFF describes itself succinctly as “a curated multidisciplinary arts festival and year-round artist support organisation,” focused on “seek[ing] out and present[ing] contemporary provocative and playful new work made by Irish and international artists of vision in an annual celebration all over the city” (Dublin Fringe Festival 2023), with the last part of this statement firmly signalling the importance of the particularities of place to DFF’s ongoing work. As to whether we can still regard it as truly fringe, Peter Crawley observed in 2017 that the “second word” in DFF’s title has long seemed “vestigial” as it “hasn’t operated at the edge of another festival for years” (Crawley 2017, 14). Instead, by 2017, “the Fringe has pushed the alternative firmly into the mainstream” (Crawley 2017, 14) of Irish theatre and the arts more broadly.

Conclusion

If we were to characterise the mirror that theatre and performance held up to the Republic of Ireland and Northern Ireland during this time, that mirror would undeniably be fragmented, indicating a proliferation of aesthetic modes and approaches as well as the singular contributions of theatremakers across many disciplines of theatre craft. As this chapter has demonstrated building on the chapters to date, this mid-1990s-late 2000s explosion of fragmentation and experimentation in theatrical form had been long percolating within the twentieth-century history of Irish theatre and performance but the economic transformation of Ireland during this period as well as our increased and unprecedented inward-migration and progress on the Northern Ireland conflict created conditions that allowed a greater diversity of theatrical work to be not only created but circulated globally in some key instances. That being said, the figure of the Irish playwright as globalised phenomenon and key reference point for Irish theatre as a total art form was also rejuvenated through key successes by individual playwrights like Martin McDonagh, Marina Carr, Enda Walsh and Conor McPherson while Druid Theatre as a company revitalised the legacy of J. M. Synge as an early twentieth-century Irish master with their globally successful phenomenon DruidSynge. Therefore, while much changed and gathered momentum due to new funding streams and structures, many things remained the same in terms of accepted norms around ideas of Irish theatre and performance broadly, a push and pull that the next period of work would continue to wrestle with.