Recession, Commemoration and Covid-19 (2008–2023)

Abstract

This recent period brought recession, bailout of banks, rising unemployment, and austerity to the Republic. In the North, the legacy of the Peace Process played out against a backdrop of gentrification and rebranding. This chapter charts how state inquiries and the Decade of Centenaries commemorations, led companies to create theatre that juxtaposed the past with the present as they explored the impact of austerity and precarity. It examines #WakingTheFeminists movement and actions by the Arts Councils (Republic and North) exposed how gender and other inequalities of race/ethnicity, sexuality, etc. determine who gets to make theatre. Companies were found to push boundaries collaborating across genres as digital media advanced and the Covid-19 pandemic forced theatre to conceive of itself as no longer bound by physical spaces.

Part I: Historical Context

The dramatic end of the Celtic Tiger period in 2008 brought recession, bailout of the banks, rapidly rising unemployment/underemployment and austerity to the people of the Republic following “the wholescale collapse of the property industry and the destabilisation of the banking and financial sectors” in the context of wider global economic freefall (Bracken and Harney-Mahajan 2017, 1). Ultimately, “[t]he combination of bailing out banks and choosing not to pursue tax related revenue gathering policy options meant reliance on public expenditure cuts to manage the public deficit”—in other words, austerity measures (Murphy 2014, 134). Net outward-migration overtook net-inward migration by 2009, reversing a defining trend of the Celtic Tiger period as “the number of people leaving Ireland more than tripled between 2008 and 2012” with “Irish citizens” at the “epicentre of most political and public debate surrounding emigration” during this time (Glynn with Kelly and Mac Éinrí 2015, 1, 6). In the North, the continuation of the Peace Process’s lived experience and daily legacy played out against a backdrop of gentrification and aggressive rebranding of this former conflict zone. The theatre as building and institution in the North even had its part to play. On 27 June 2012, the Lyric Theatre, Belfast was the site for a historic handshake between Queen Elizabeth II and Martin McGuinness, Deputy First Minister for the Northern Ireland Assembly and a former commander of the IRA, cementing not only the metaphoric but literal role theatre has to play in the ongoing negotiation of a post-conflict society. McGuinness himself described it in advance as “one of the most symbolic handshakes ever seen” (Irish Examiner 2012).

Nevertheless, this period also saw a series of landmark social justice campaigns and referendums including those that resulted in marriage equality (Republic and North) and expansion of abortion rights (Republic and North) and widespread ongoing protests regarding various austerity and bank bailout measures. Significantly for both the Republic and the North, the UK under Prime Minister David Cameron voted to leave the European Union with a slim 51.9% majority in 2016, beginning the protracted and messy Brexit process.

Across the island of Ireland, the 2008 economic downturn and its extended aftershocks also had grave implications for the arts. In the Republic, the funding model moved away from regularly funding independent companies to making emerging and established companies and artists more dependent on once-off project awards and other limited grants. This was similar in the North as “[f]unding cuts in 2015, in particular, were devastating, threatening the survival of many of Belfast’s most established and well-known independent theatres” (Coleman Coffey 2016, 250). But the fight for social justice nonetheless continued within the theatre with the groundbreaking #WakingTheFeminists movement erupting in November 2015 catalysed by a single social media post by freelance set designer and arts manager Lian Bell in response to drastic underrepresentation of female theatre artists in the Abbey’s 1916 centenary programme, “Waking the Nation.”

This period also brought an intensified period of reckoning regarding the physical, emotional and/or sexual abuse of individuals in a network of Church and/or State-run institutions including reformatory and industrial schools, Magdalene Laundries and Mother and Baby Homes among others. Key reports produced by the Irish state during this time include the Murphy Report which addressed the handling of abuse complaints against clergy within the Dublin Catholic archdiocese (Department of Justice 2009), the Ryan Report which focused on the abuse of children in Irish institutions for children, primarily industrial and reformatory schools (Ryan 2009) and the McAleese Report which was tasked with “establish[ing] the facts of State involvement with the Magdalene Laundries” (McAleese 2013, 1). Following the efforts of amateur local historian Catherine Corless, whose painstaking research of death certificates exposed the death and burials onsite of hundreds of children onsite at the former Bon Secours Mother and Baby Home in Tuam, the Irish state also initiated and completed a Mother and Baby Homes Commission and Investigation, which was released in January 2021 (Department of Children, Equality, Disability, Integration and Youth 2021). In the North, the Report of the Historical Institutional Abuse Inquiry which focused on “children in residential institutions (other than schools) between 1922 and 1995” was completed in 2017 (Historical Abuse Inquiry 2017).

This same period has seen allegations of sustained sexual misconduct within the creative arts industry against former Universal Artists Belfast agent Mark Butler and former long-time Gate Theatre artistic director, Michael Colgan, who had served 33 years in this role. Butler was convicted in 2009 of assaulting an actress in 2005 and has been the subject of numerous other allegations. In 2017, he received an Order from an Industrial Tribunal barring him from operating an agency for 10 years following “an extensive investigation by the Department for the Economy’s Employment Agency Inspectorate into complaints received from a number of actresses alleging inappropriate conduct and behaviour on the part of Mr. Butler” (Derry Journal 2017). The Gate Theatre commissioned a confidential independent review following the allegations made against Colgan carried out by Gaye Cunningham which engaged 65 individuals overall and found “Mr. Colgan has a case to answer in respect to dignity at work issues, abuse of power and inappropriate behaviours” (Cunningham 2018, 15). The two subsequent artistic directors of the Gate have both been female: Selina Cartmell (2018–2022) and Roísín McBrinn (2022–present). Their quick turnover in fact follows through by actioning one of Cunningham’s report’s main findings that the length of Colgan’s previous 33-year tenure contributed to the setting up of conditions for a hostile workplace.

2012 also marked the beginning of the Decade of Centenaries and state commemoration programmes in the Republic marking events leading up to the establishment of the Irish Free State in 1922. The purpose of this public period of state commemoration was “to ensure that this complex period in our history, including the Struggle for Independence, the Civil War, the Foundation of the State and Partition, is remembered appropriately, proportionately, respectfully and with sensitivity” (Decade of Centenaries, n.d.). Prior to the onset of the Covid-19 pandemic, this commemorative period centrally influenced creative agendas across art forms during the period under consideration in this chapter. Arguably, ANU Productions’ site-specific and immersive works about the histories of those marginalised within the Irish state, particularly women and/or economic and other minorities, established themselves as the key theatrical key touchstones of this period for their visceral and political explorations of the intersection of the historical and contemporary and heavy commissioning at state and local level.

And finally, to begin the new decade, Ireland and the world were rocked by the Covid-19 pandemic resulting in an almost total halt of the live theatre and wider creative arts industries. Soon after the onset of the crisis, the Republic’s Arts Council announced that it would “honour all existing commitments for 2020” and “allow grantees to drawn down 90 per cent of their funding to allow them fulfil in turn their own business commitments, especially to artists” (Arts Council, n.d.). They in turn announced a series of Covid-19 specific schemes including “enhancing commissioning, projects and bursary awards” aimed at supporting individual artists and organisations in response to the changing needs of the theatre sector as the crisis evolved (Arts Council, n.d.). However, some of these schemes backfired within the theatre sector and their nuances contained disadvantages for those that took them up as Miriam Haughton observes that those who took up the Arts Council’s “Covid-19 Crisis Response Award” in the Republic were then disallowed from accessing “social welfare payments” or “business support monies, such as financing available from Enterprise Ireland.” In addition, these schemes also including Culture Ireland’s “Ireland Performs,” “privileged those who perform, signalling an absence of planning for those who work as designers, technicians, carpenters, electricians, front of house staff, cleaners, company accountants and so on” (Haughton 2021, 44). Nevertheless, in 2021, the Republic’s Arts Council announced its highest grant in the history of the state of €131 million, an increase of approximately 60% on the 2020 grant of €80 million, which had only just closed in on the height of the pre-Celtic Tiger crash grant high of €81.62 million, and that grant decreased only €1 million to €130 million in 2022 although these numbers must also be understood in the context of current inflation at the time of writing (see Chapter 5 for further funding history) (Arts Council 2022a). Similarly, the Arts Council of Northern Ireland by February 2021 had “distributed £17.76 million of Covid-19 emergency funding to 168 arts organisations and 1,562 individual artists” as compared with £9.8 million total funding the previous year (Bamford et al. 2021). Funding to annually funded arts organisations in the North then remained at the same level for 2022–2023 with £13,012,490 allocated but the Arts Council of Northern Ireland’s chair Liam Hannaway noted on announcement of these funds that “we are facing a weakened creative sector, working with reduced income and facing higher costs of delivery” (Arts Council of Northern Ireland 2022). Post-Covid-19, it is clear that the Irish theatre and wider arts landscape on the island is currently undergoing a radical renovation with as yet unforeseen possibilities and consequences if these increased crisis funds are clawed back and/or cut over time after the sector adjusts following this incredibly tumultuous period. But despite this structural instability, some of the performance examples later in this chapter demonstrate how theatre artists and organisations are already creating new artistic horizons in direct response to the ongoing constraints of the Covid-19 pandemic at the time of writing.

Part II: Theatre and Performance Practices

Genres, Methods and Approaches

The end of the 2000s and the 2010s witnessed a continuation of many of the formally experimental theatrical trends that have been identified in previous chapters such as a growth in devising and collaborative theatremaking practices and physical/dance theatre, but these practices continue to undergo subtle shifts. Most significantly, an unprecedented number of companies including THEATREclub, ANU Productions, Brokentalkers, WillFredd, Theatre for Witness (in residence in Derry between 2009 and 2013 as discussed below), and Terra Nova Productions (see Chapter 11 for extended Terra Nova case study) now regularly work with non-theatre/non-professional participants to collaboratively devise new work for theatre. For some, community participants are only engaged in the research and creation phase (THEATREclub) whereas for others their performance onstage is frequently central to the meaning of the work (Theatre of Witness, Brokentalkers).

The work of these companies and others including Junk Ensemble, Dead Centre, Talking Shop Ensemble, THISISPOPBABY, Collapsing Horse and Junk Ensemble active at points during this period have continuously rejected formal boundaries between theatre, dance and other art forms, especially visual arts and music. Cormac O’Brien refers to this present cohort of new/recently established companies as “New Century companies” who still “have the state of the nation and Irishness as central concerns” but use the creation of “ensemble works” to “eschew any over-reliance on a central text” and “make strange the familiar structures of narrative drama that have long been entrenched” often bringing the craft of theatre itself into active conflict and/or fusion with other art forms and artists (O’Brien 2018, 256). Brian Singleton elaborates that:

Many of the practitioners who work in contemporary Irish theatre do not subscribe to terminology that delimits their role in production. Directors, designers and actors in the twenty-first century are embraced within the generic nomenclature of ‘theatre-makers,’ who share tasks and are collaboratively engaged in creating what they often call ‘performance’ that is not necessarily theatrical, dramatic, or even taking place in theatre buildings. (Singleton 2016, 560)

Due to this continuing shift towards collective creation by theatremakers and the ensemble as the “author” of works, the role of new writing in the Irish theatre relative to other modes of theatremaking became a hotly debated topic during this period which did not see the creation of new Irish playwright superstars like Marina Carr, Martin McDonagh or Enda Walsh who can cite similar success and global profiles. However, key companies including but not limited to the Abbey Theatre and Lyric Theatre, Belfast still specialise in producing new writing for the stage. Most notably Fishamble: The New Play Company, produce 50% of the new plays produced on the island of Ireland each year and are profiled later in this chapter.

The increasing influence of performance art, visual art and/or installation practices on contemporary theatre in Ireland has perhaps been most impactful in terms of significant formal shifts and trends during this period. Therefore, rather than this period simply continuing to signal the decline of the Irish “playwright” as the primary figure of reference, ongoing interdisciplinary experiments within contemporary Irish theatre continues to expand what form Irish writing for theatre and performance can take in relationship to genre, content and even ultimate venue of expression for the written words. Crucial for situating this turn, performance artist and scholar Áine Phillips published the first comprehensive history of Irish performance art North and South in 2015, with this seminal collection featuring contributions by artists, scholars and those identifying as both, urgently making visible the deep roots of contemporary Irish performance art practices as theatre scholars and practitioners engage with this new turn within our field (Phillips 2015). Key examples of performance art’s specific influence on contemporary Irish theatre include ANU’s ongoing partnership with ground-breaking Irish performance artist Amanda Coogan and Coogan’s own live art sign-language adaptation Talk Real Fine, Just Like a Lady of Teresa Deevy’s play The King of Spain’s Daughter in collaboration with Dublin Theatre of the Deaf and presented in the Abbey’s Peacock Theatre as part of 2017’s Dublin Fringe Festival. In terms of visual art’s intersections with theatre, ANU’s co-artistic Director Owen Boss identifies primarily as a visual artist and socially engaged artist Fiona Whelan also recently undertook an ongoing long-term collaboration with Brokentalker’s Gary Keegan and Feidlim Cannon. Their work together began in 2016 and has resulted in theatrical works (Natural History of Hope, 2016) but also the ground-breaking project What Does He Need? (2018–ongoing) which also involves Rialto Youth Project and explores how men and boys are shaped by and influence the world they live. Keegan, Cannon and Whelan describe this project as “at the intersection of collaborative arts practice, performance, qualitative research and youth work” (“What Does He Need?”, n.d.) This multi-faceted project encompasses experiences like a one-day dialogical workshop aimed at adults and young people, an eight-week programme for children and young people extending that workshop, delayed dance/theatre piece To Be Frank (postponed in May 2020), and a text-based “public poster project” which presented “a range of viewpoints on the needs of men and boys in different scenarios and at different stages of life” and was displayed at various locations in Dublin between 2020 and 2022 including the Irish Museum of Modern Art (“What Does He Need?”, n.d.)

Enda Walsh’s ongoing collaboration with Galway International Arts Festival’s artistic Director Paul Fahy on their Rooms series also registers this shift towards interdisciplinary and visual arts-oriented examinations of the limits of contemporary Irish theatrical form. Walsh and Fahy’s Rooms to date bring to life 8 “poetic short stories” (as the concept was described for a 2017 international exhibition of works to date) which include Room 303 (2014), A Girl’s Bedroom (2016), Kitchen (2016), Bathroom (2017), Office 33A (2017), Waiting Room (2017), Changing Room (2020) and Bedsit (2021). Each has been created to be sited within a “5 M × 5 M white cube” resulting in “installations in a site-specific gallery setting” with narration by well-known Irish actors including but not limited to “Niall Buggy, Charlie Murphy, Donal O’Kelly, Paul Reid and Eileen Walsh” (Galway International Arts Festival, n.d.). Tellingly, some of these “poetic short stories” have also been published and/or performed as short monologue plays by Nick Hern books alongside Walsh’s other plays including Arlington (2016), which also premiered at the Galway International Arts Festival while Room 303, the room that started it all began life as a one-man show premiering at London’s Bush Theatre in 2011 (Nick Hern Books, n.d.).

In a similar vein, Pan Pan Theatre’s explorations of Samuel Beckett’s radio plays All That Fall (2011) and Embers (2013) were also created as installation-style experiences directed by Gavin Quinn with lighting and set design by Aedín Cosgrove and sound design by Jimmy Eadie and hailed by reviewers internationally with Patrick Lonergan commenting that All That Fall achieves “a space that is almost entirely free of sensory distractions, allowing us to listen to the play with a profound concentration” (2011) while Joyce McMillan hailed the production as creating “a marriage of theatre and installation that seems to capture the hard, loving and implacable soul of the work, while giving it a new theatrical life” (2013).

Finally, playwright-poet-performers Felicia Olusanya (FeliSpeaks) and Dagogo Hart’s Boy Child premiered at Dublin Fringe Festival in 2018 and reflected an emerging cross-pollination between spoken word, poetry and rap in Ireland today with theatre. FeliSpeaks and Hart are leaders in this area and have founded the WeAreGriot Collective, a poetry performance/production collective along with Samuel Yakura with their work demonstrating that these kinds of approaches will be a key site for the continuing evolution of contemporary Irish theatre and performance. Rose Ugoalah positions this group as “part of a generation of Irish artists who are using their unique perspectives to draw influences from their indigenous cultures and mix that with their current experiences to tell a distinct story,” with Olusanya herself observing that in Boy Child there was “heavy Nigerian influence in the work without distracting from the beauty of the poetry” (Ugoalah 2018). Yakura’s own one-man show, The Perfect Immigrant, which premiered at the 2023 Dublin Fringe Festival before going on a national tour, also blended semi-autobiographical theatrical storytelling with sections of poetry performance, drawing on his own champion slam poetry experience in both Nigeria and Ireland to cast a critical eye back on Irish culture since emigrating here in 2018 for postgraduate study. A Perfect Immigrant reflects on the challenges of family dynamics, masculinity and remaining connected to home from a Nigerian/African-Irish perspective. In reflecting on the meaning of his show within the contemporary Irish theatre landscape and its enthusiastic reception in three sold-out runs in Dublin, Yakura observed that “there is a noticeable lack of representation in the arts and in audience attendance” (Zapryanova 2023) which this performance tackled head-on.

FeliSpeaks went on to have a work in progress in the 2021 Dublin Theatre Festival entitled Dubh (which is the Irish-language word for Black and which was defined as “blackness” on the poster), for which they collaborated with Poetry Ireland and individual artists including “music producer Fehdah, singer songwriter Tolü Makay and filmmaker Zithelo Bobby Mthombeni” to stage a work-in-progress “visual poetry album inspired by conversations with people from migrant and minority backgrounds in Ireland” (Dublin Theatre Festival 2020). The work-in-progress showing foregrounded FeliSpeaks as a performer and delved into themes of shame, pleasure, desire, gender and femininity through a highly visual, surreal and physical performance style with movement direction by Andrea Williams who also performed in the work along with Walé Adebusuyi and Tolü Makay on vocals with sound design by Fehdah. Crucially for ongoing engagement with FeliSpeak’s work within contemporary Irish theatre and performance studies, this theatre-situated performance must be read in dialogue with FeliSpeaks’s projects with many of these collaborators across the medium of music videos (“Tough Meat,” 2022), short film (“They,” 2022, directed by Ellius Grace featuring Jafaris and FeliSpeaks) and even a web series with singer-songwriter Tolü Makay that features the collaborators in “vulnerable and honest discussions about various topics” ranging “from friendship, to trauma and toxicity, to entrepreneurship” (“The Tolu and Feli Show,” 2022). FeliSpeak’s vanguard cross-medium body of artistic work that engages theatre but moves fluidly in and out of this genre signals a further proliferation of what “theatremaker” can imply for individuals’ practice as an umbrella term within contemporary (Irish) theatre today.

The Republic’s Arts Council also released its first two policies on cultural diversity and the arts in Ireland during this period (Cultural Diversity and Arts, 2010, and Human Rights, Equality and Diversity Strategy, 2019) with the Northern Irish Arts Council Intercultural Arts Strategy appearing in 2011 (Arts Council of Northern Ireland 2011). These policy/strategy measures and documents recognised the unprecedentedly increased racial and ethnic diversity of the Republic and the North post-1990s, a profound period of demographic shift on the island and also considered the accommodation of other kinds of diverse artists and audiences in state-level arts funding and arts provision. The Arts Council’s Human Rights, Equality and Diversity Strategy forcefully stated that

…within the arts in Ireland, many inequities still exist and …there is a substantial number of people who continue to experience barriers to engaging with and participating in the arts because of their socio-economic background, their ethnicity or religion, their sexual orientation or gender identity, their family status, their age, their membership of the Traveller Community, or through lack of accommodation of a disability. (2019a, 2)

These policies’ all-island focus on mobilising diverse artists and audiences seeks to expand representation within the work that is being made as well as access to that work-enabling approaches that range from the participatory/community to the professional or somewhere in-between as we have discussed above in the work of many contemporary Irish theatre and performance artists who trouble these distinctions. We examine the nuances of these particular policies in Chapters 9 and 11 where we focus on the body and interculturalism in detail.

Overtly political/politicised theatre too played a key role during this period as it has in all chapters in the historical section of this book and between 2009 and 2022 often directly intersected with political campaigns and initiatives, intentionally and strategically blurring the boundaries between theatre and real life. Intensified attention on the experiences of women and children incarcerated in Irish church and/or state-run institutions was a major focus with key productions of this period including journalist Mary Raftery’s documentary-drama No Escape (2010) which distilled the Ryan Report into an ensemble performance on the Abbey’s Peacock stage as part of their 2010 Darkest Corner Series (see Chapter 8 for an extended discussion of this paradigm shifting series), ANU Productions’ landmark site-specific immersive production Laundry mounted in a former Magdalene Laundry (2011), Brokentalkers’ Blue Boy, a documentary dance theatre work based on the testimony of survivors of reformatory and industrial schools (2011, see “Landmark Plays and Productions” below), Mephisto Productions’ 2013 revival of Patricia Burke Brogan’s landmark 1992 play Eclipsed and the Abbey Theatre’s Home (2021) which was made in collaboration with survivors of Mother and Baby Homes and featured their testimonies read by actors, commented loudly, often and directly on these histories, frequently produced in collaborations with survivors and/or directly featuring their testimonies.

There was a spate of limited attention as well on the wider European refugee crisis with some reference to ongoing critiques of the Republic’s direct provision system for housing those seeking asylum post-2016 through productions including Brokentalkers’ This Beach (2016), Fionnuala Gygax’s Hostel 16 (2016), Outlandish Theatre Platform’s Megalomaniac (2016), Martin Sharry’s Playboyz (2017) and Oonagh Murphy and Maeve Stone’s Mouth of a Shark (2017), a documentary musical created for THISISPOPBABY’s “Where We Live” Festival as part of the Dublin St. Patrick’s Festival which juxtaposed accounts of LGBTIQA+ Irish migrants from the 1970s/1980s with contemporary experiences of LGBTQ individuals who have sought asylum in Ireland due to political persecution as a result of their sexual orientation (see McIvor 2023, forthcoming). In Chapter 9, we examine particularly the role of Panti Bliss/Rory O’Neill’s body of theatrical and activist work in relationship to the marriage equality referendum and campaign.

And finally, from 2015 onwards, #WakingTheFeminists transformed the Irish theatre and wider creative industries’ engagement with issues of gender, privilege, access and theatrical creation in the Republic and the North. This “campaign for equality for women in Irish theatre” (Donohue et al. 2017, 5) emerged following a backlash against the Abbey Theatre’s October 2015 announcement of their centenary “Waking the Nation” programme under the artistic direction of Fiach MacConghail which featured “90 per cent male authors and 70 per cent male directors” (Haughton 2018a, 347). As Miriam Haughton recounts, “[a]s questions sprang from artists and the media regarding the gender (im)balance,” MacConghail’s initial response, a “glib, hurtful, and telling Tweet, ‘Them the breaks,’ lit a fire” in the sector which translated into collective and sustained action that ultimately created impact far outside the Abbey and even the Irish theatre sector after gaining national and international support (Haughton 2018a, 347). #WakingTheFeminists defined itself as a one-year campaign, focusing during that time on providing benchmark theatre statistics in their 2017 report Gender Counts: An analysis of gender in Irish theatre 2006–2015 but pushing for ongoing statistical reporting and accountability by boards and arts organisations, a call they echoed in their 2020 five-year interim report (Murphy et al. 2020). #WakingTheFeminists led to a ripple effect in the wider Irish creative industries with cognate initiatives created by Screen Ireland and spin-off initiatives including, for example, Sounding the Feminists which is “an Irish-based, voluntary-led collective of composers, sound artists, performers, musicologists, critics, promoters, industry professionals, organisations, and individuals, committed to promoting and publicising the creative work of female musicians” (Sounding the Feminists, n.d.). #WakingTheFeminist’s 2020 follow-up report, 5 Years On: Gender in Irish Theatre—An Interim View, reported that “the percentage of work being written/created by women has increased across all organisations included in the original research, who also submitted figures for the period since… by an average increase of 23%” (Murphy et al. 2020, 3). The Abbey Theatre, whose programming missteps catalysed the furore, reported improvements in “female representation across every category” measured by the #WTF methodology which includes directors, authors, cast, set designers, lighting designers, sound designers and costume designers (Murphy et al. 2020, 3).

Key Practitioners and Companies

ANU Productions

ANU Productions was created in 2009 and is led by “Theatre Maker Louise Lowe” and “Visual Artist Owen Boss” working closely also with Producer Matthew Smyth and Creative Producer Lynette Moran since 2013 and 2014, respectively (ANU Productions, n.d.) Their extended collaboration explicitly aimed at pushing the boundaries of theatre practice is reminiscent of Pan Pan’s Gavin Quinn and Aedín Cosgrove as director and scenographer, but Lowe, Boss, Smyth and Moran go even further in exploding boundaries between artistic disciplines. They describe their work as “an interdisciplinary approach to performance / installation that cross-pollinates visual art, dance and theatre in an intensely collaborative way” (ANU Productions, n.d.). ANU’s work is self-divided into several categories including theatre, gallery installations and museum interpretation/commemoration—a system of classification that emerged in recognition of Lowe and Boss’s key specialisms (theatre vs. gallery) but also due to the extraordinary number of state and local commissions that ANU began to receive after the groundbreaking success of their Monto Cycle which included World’s End Lane (2010/2011), Laundry (2011), The Boys of Foley Street (2012) and Vardo (2014), sited in Dublin’s north inner city and spanning one hundred years of history in this area. Their typically site-specific and immersive works for small audiences are created in partnership with a rotating (but often recurring) ensemble of multidisciplinary collaborators and performers from within the arts or from community and/or local heritage groups.

ANU are arguably the most critically lauded company of the 2010s in Ireland with influential Irish Times commentator and public intellectual Fintan O’Toole remarking that their Monto Cycle (World’s End Lane, Laundry, The Boys of Foley Street, and Vardo) initiated a “new kind of alternative national theatre, exploring the legacy of coercive institutionalisation, sexual exploitation, poverty social collapse, and the heroin epidemic” (2013). ANU’s approach to exploring these legacies is to emphasise histories of regular people as well as better-known iconic historical figures like revolutionary feminist and politician Constance Markievicz.

ANU’s evolving history as a company has been greatly shaped by their creation in the years leading up to and now encompassing Ireland’s Decade of Centenaries, which we introduced at the beginning of this chapter. ANU were invited to participate in several state commemorations including the National State Commemoration of the Lockout (2013) and the Cumann na mBan National Commemoration (2014), in addition to being commissioned by state-funded or run institutions including Dublin City Council, the Irish Congress of Trade Unions and Irish Heritage Trust, the National Museum of Ireland, the Department of Arts, Heritage and Gaeltacht, and the National Archives of Ireland.

Across this broad range of commission and performance contexts, ANU’s work is unified by the company’s (1) signature aesthetics (immersive, site-specific or responsive one-to-one or small group performances making use of performance art, installation and dance/movement practices), (2) a topical focus on grassroots histories of individuals and communities utilising archival and interview research, (3) ongoing work with a recognisable cohort of performers over time as well as other collaborators behind the scenes and (4) a focus on overlapping or linked historical events related to Ireland’s Decade of Centenaries that push on history’s connection and relevance in the now. Their volume of work from 2015 to immediately pre-pandemic is particularly staggering and also evidences an increasing presentation of their work in non-live performance forms such as art installation (including retrospectives of previously presented work) and short film even pre-pandemic. From 2013 onwards, ANU also began to make work abroad in Manchester focused on diasporic Irish and other local histories: Angel Meadow (2013) and On Corporation Street (2016). Given the extraordinary impact and significance of ANU’s work on contemporary Irish theatre, we re-engage with them as one of the case studies under “Landmark plays and productions” below.

Irish-Language Theatre in the West of Ireland: Fíbín, Branar, Moonfish Theatre, An Taibhdhearc and Garraí an Ghiorria

This cohort of companies and projects (including An Taibhdhearc, Ireland’s national Irish-language theatre) are treated under the same heading not to homogenise their practices as Irish-language artists working in the West of Ireland but rather to make evident the range of practices and aesthetic approaches that characterises Irish-language theatremaking in Ireland today. The critical mass of these companies in the West of Ireland adjacent to or located within the Gaeltacht reflects the concentration of Irish-speaking communities in this region but the mission of each company is driven by the desire to transform theatre generally and not Irish-language theatre specifically.

Both Fíbín (founded 2003) and Branar Téatar do Pháistí (founded 2001) create works for young people. Branar’s mission as led by artistic Director Marc Mac Lochlainn and Executive Producer Joanne Beirne is exclusively focused on art for young people and strongly driven by the conviction that their theatrical work should “advance children’s right to be creative.” This means that Branar embraces an advocacy side to their work as well with their Branarfesto stating outright their believe that “[w]e believe every that every child should see a play at least once a year” and that they “will do our best to make that happen for children in Ireland” (Branar, n.d.). Fíbín produce “new writing as well as classic plays,” catering often specifically to school-going audiences and re-interpreting canonical classics such as Máiréad Ní Ghráda’s An Triail for an abridged restaging (premiered 2016) which brings a “seeming outdated plot into the context of modern society using, puppets, masks, engaging visuals and physical performances to appeal particularly to a younger audience, making it current and more accessible” (Fíbín, n.d.). Branar, under the artistic direction of founder Marc Mac Lochlainn, frequently develops its work through international partnerships including with Dekkoart theatre (Norway), Teatre Refleksion (Denmark), and Starcatchers (Scotland). Their work ranges from original productions in a range of formats such as their 2020 “immersive theatre event, Sruth na Teanga, which “imaginatively realises the evolution and life of the Irish language” (Branar 2021) to non-verbal adaptations works of the internationally popular Irish children’s author Oliver Jeffers’s work (The Way Back Home, co-production with Teatre Refleksion, premiered 2014, and How to Catch a Star, 2018) (Branar 2021). Their work has been presented throughout Ireland, Europe, the USA, China and Japan with The Way Back Home even enjoying a limited run on Broadway in New York City in 2017 followed by a return to the Great White Way with their show Grand Soft Day in 2023 (Connacht Tribune 2017, 2023).

Moonfish Theatre, co-founded by Ionia and Máiréad Ní Chróinín, describe themselves as “a collaborative ensemble that blends language, story-telling, music and dance with puppetry, interactive technology and light” (Moonfish Theatre, n.d.). They create work in both Irish and English for young people and adults—classics, new writing and original devised work—including, for example, adaptations of Joseph O’Connor’s acclaimed novels Star of the Sea (premiered in 2015 and has toured internationally) and Redemption Falls (premiered 2019 as a co-production between co-production between Moonfish Theatre, The Abbey Theatre and Galway International Arts Festival, in association with the Town Hall Theatre). All three companies produce visually arresting theatre that makes use of puppets, masks, animation, dance, movement and song to work in and across the Irish language in the theatre with some use of English within the productions or as subtitles.

More recently, Garraí an Ghiorria formed as “collective of multidisciplinary artists working in the Irish language on the western seaboard,” containing “artists across many forms of theatre practice” who include but are not limited to Áine Moynihan, Anne McCabe, Beartla Ó Flatharta, Caitríona Ní Chonaola, Colm Heffernan and Marianne Ní Chinnéide (Giorria Theatre, n.d.). They participated in the Abbey’s 5 × 5 residency in 2018 (developing Téada, Rópaí agus Slabhraí (Strings, Ropes and Chains)) and were also featured as part of the Abbey’s Dear Ireland III in December 2020. Garraí an Ghiorria and the other groups as part of this cohort of Dear Ireland (see below for more information in section on Graham and McLaren) were singled out as “disenfranchised and marginalised” and asked “What does it feel like to be you, right now, in Ireland?” (Abbey Theatre 2021a). Garraí an Ghiorria responded by creating a piece about the effect of Covid-19 on rural Irish-speaking communities, a focus that exposed the intersection of language, class and geography in this community’s experience of being “disenfranchised and marginalised” in line with the other members of their Dear Ireland III cohort who were representing communities or organisations focused on social challenges like domestic violence, homelessness or mental health (Adapt Domestic Abuse Service, Simon Community, Samaritans) or minority statuses including race and/or ethnicity and sexuality (Africa Centre, AkiDwaA, Transgender Equality Network). Yet, despite being Garraí an Ghiorria repeatedly singled out as part of this cohort through the Abbey’s recent theatrical inclusion initiatives (5 × 5 and Dear Ireland), use of the Irish language as a first language is not mentioned with the Arts Council’s most recent Human Rights, Equality and Diversity strategy (see above for discussion of this policy). At the time of writing, the Arts Council is still working to release a new Irish-language arts strategy, the first bespoke policy of its kind with this area previously being provided across other broader strategy and/or policy documents for the arts and/or Irish language generally (Beartla Ó Flatharta. 2023. Message to author, December 22). This follows the creation of the first Irish-language literature policy, Supporting Writing in Irish, launched in December 2022 (Arts Council 2022b). Consultations for the broader Irish-language arts policy from practitioners, audiences or those “interested in the Irish-language arts” closed in December 2019 but the new national strategy was still unreleased at the time of writing (Arts Council 2019b). Ultimately, Garraí an Ghiorria’s work has been key in exposing that theatre made by communities with Irish as their first language and/or in Irish must be examined as interrelated to rather than in parallel with how the Irish theatre and arts community conceptualises of diversity and inclusion in a demographically transformed and now-post-Covid-19 contemporary Irish society. Otherwise, the contributions and rights of Irish-language artists risks being obscured and even disappeared in a twenty-first-century intercultural Irish context instead of their expertise being mined as well as Irish-language arts practice benefitting from the intercultural contributions of a new and unprecedentedly racially and ethnically diverse Irish generation.

Teya Sepinuck and Theatre of Witness

Teya Sepinuck is an American dancer and therapist who spent four years between 2009 and 2013 funded by “the Derry Playhouse, Londonderry City Council, and an EU Peace III Grant (2012–2014) to work with the Derry Playhouse and Holywell Trust in Derry/Londonberry city to produce a cycle of verbatim plays dealing with the legacy of the Troubles conflict” (Pine 2020, 97). She ultimately produced four new works with residents of Northern Ireland who were survivors of and directly implicated in the Troubles or new arrivals-refugees seeking asylum in Northern Ireland. These works included: We Carried Your Secrets (2009), I Once Knew a Girl (2010), Release (2012) and Sanctuary (2013). As Lisa Fitzpatrick details:

…the stories include near escapes from bomb attacks, the murder of loved ones, various paramilitary or military activities, and in the final show, the testimony of refugees seeking asylum in Northern Ireland. The multimedia performances, which include film footage, live and recorded music, song, movement sequences and puppets, appeal directly to the audiences' emotions through the evocation of shared memories, shared grief and hope for the future. (2018, 63)

Sepinuck says of her Theatre of Witness approach which she began developing in 1986 with a project about ageing that “the purpose of this form of theatre is to give voice to people who have been marginalized, forgotten or who are invisible in the larger society, and to invite audiences to bear witness to issues of suffering, redemption and social justice” (2013, 14). While other Northern Irish companies like Tinderbox Theatre, Kabosh Productions, Prime Cut Productions and Big Telly Theatre Company have consistently addressed post-conflict themes in their work during this same period, Sepinuck’s approach of working directly with community members and featuring them in the performance differentiates her work as a coherent approach despite a long history of community arts practice in Norther Ireland working across communities and other landmark projects including The Wedding Community Play (1999), created by Marie Jones, Martin Lynch, with the company led by artistic Director Jo Egan. Quite notably, Sepinuck’s Theatre of Witness residency has garnered significant critical attention from Fitzpatrick, Emilie Pine, Miriam Haughton and Mark Phelan among others whereas analysis of the longer history of Northern Irish community arts practice which employed similar practices working with and between the communities at the intersection of community and professional practice since the 1970s has received more limited attention comparatively with the important exception of Bill McDonnell’s Theatre of the Troubles: Theatre, Resistance and Liberation in Ireland which is an extended study of the emergence of “popular” (i.e. grassroots and community-based) theatre projects in Republican and Loyalist communities between the 1970s and early 2000s. That being said, Sepinuck’s explicit mission to put victims/survivors and perpetrators of violence onstage together after co-developing the work in the three post-conflict focused shows is unique within this longer history. And indeed Sepinuck’s status as an outsider perhaps granted her both a different kind of relationship with her collaborators as non-implicated in the conflict personally, as well as the cachet of her Theatre of Witness methodology’s international track record. Individuals who collaborated in the making of these works were employed during the process of developing and then performing in the work despite their lack of previous performance experience. Miriam Haughton observes that Sepinuck’s work is “not motivated by aesthetic or dramatic objects. The goals are the fruits gathered from the process itself, not the performance to be packaged and purchased in the typical neoliberal framework for cultural consumption of entertainment” (2018, 168). Sepinuck’s background as a therapist also informed how the experience is mediated for an audience, as Emilie Pine details, “counsellors are present at all shows, and every show is followed by a postshow forum to ensure maximum support as well as full participation” (2020, 97). But Pine pushes on the work’s truly transformative aspect noting:

Sepinuck’s dramaturgy works to reconcile victims and perpetrators through a common emphasis on pain and empathy; yet the unity created by Theater of Witness shows during the moment of the production and its immediate aftermath as the audience remediates its meaning, is itself vulnerable, not least because of the absence of political unity outside the theatre— as suggested by the repeated breakdown of a power-sharing government in Northern Ireland and the continuation of sectarian violence, both in terms of actual physical violence and the cultural violence of a sectarian school system. (2020, 114)

With this critique, Pine is pushing particularly on Theatre of Witness’s claim that the Northern Irish theatre project actually delivered on its aim of developing “key institutional capacity for a shared society” (2020, 114), a promise that no theatre project would be likely to fulfil on its own. This kind of ambitious overclaiming for the impact of socially engaged and collaboratively created theatre projects is indeed a trend to watch and check in contemporary Irish theatre as these practices continue to multiply across the island as this chapter demonstrates. Nevertheless, Sepinuck’s facilitation of her Theatre of Witness process across these four productions in the late 2000s and 2010s is an important case study in the increasing centrality of community-engaged collaborative work in contemporary Irish theatre and modelled compelling if overambitious aims for the ongoing role theatre and performance might uniquely play in Northern Ireland’s ongoing post-peace process quest for sustainable social cohesion, particularly with a growth in minority ethnic groups including but not limited to refugees, as we will explore in further detail in Chapter 11.

Landmark Plays and Productions

Brokentalkers, The Blue Boy (2011)

Brokentalkers is the name of the “creative partnership of Feidlim Cannon and Gary Keegan” who describe themselves as making “formally ambitious work that defies categorization” and rejects “ideologies of text-based theatre” and is often made in partnership with “people who do not usually work in the theatre but who bring an authenticity to the work that is compelling,” working directly with the participatory arts sector (Brokentalkers, “About,” n.d.). As McIvor observes elsewhere:

Brokentalkers’ mission involves searching for a new performance language that can be constructed only out of the larger broken pieces of a larger Irish social history, which necessitates breaking down the drama as the representative formal genre of the Irish theatre. (2013, 41)

2011’s The Blue Boy is exemplary in this regard as it mixes modes of theatrical storytelling evocatively to confront “the experiences of men and women who were incarcerated as children in Catholic residential care institutions” (Brokentalkers, “The Blue Boy,” n.d.). Since premiering in 2011 at the Dublin Theatre Festival as a co-production with Dublin Theatre Festival, LÓKAL Theatre Festival Reykjavík, Noorderzon Performing Arts Festival Groningen, Korjaamo Theatre/Stage Festival Helsinki, and Cork Midsummer Festival, Brokentalkers’ The Blue Boy has toured internationally.

Produced in the almost immediate aftermath of the release of both the Murphy and Ryan Reports as discussed earlier, The Blue Boy weaves together three primary strands of theatrical storytelling. One, there is the personal story of Keegan growing up alongside Artane Industrial School and his grandfather’s work as a local coroner including his regular removal of children’s bodies from the school. Second, The Blue Boy draws on recorded interviews with survivors and archival footage from the period, including that of the acclaimed Artane Band (which still plays for Gaelic Athletic Association (GAA) national matches as a community band, but was comprised of boys from the school up until 1969). Finally, there are masked dancers dressed as schoolchildren and operating a child puppet while performing against Seán Millar’s haunting score with choreography by Eddie Kay. Millar’s score features “repetitive musical structures, a returning drone, and a haunting chorus of children’s voices” as the “musical landscape captures the sensation of a relentless return of the past and translates this effect into an auditory experience that denies the audience and the dancers any escape” (McIvor 2013, 49). As Roísin O’Gorman concurs:

The juxtaposition of the concentrated and extreme movement vocabulary and haunting sound score, with the on-screen documentary footage highlights the gap between social discourses of the civic pride of the work in the school and the social complicity in the silencing of the abuses endemic in the industrial school system. (2018, 70)

The Blue Boy’s performance layers sit intentionally uneasily beside one another, and these layers interact associatively and imagistically rather than narratively throughout the performance. The Blue Boy does not attempt to be comprehensive or even comprehensible in its treatment of the legacies of trauma and resilience indexed in these reports and the histories of individuals attached to them. Rather, the uneasy relationship of these layers of testimony, story and information to one another in the performance intentionally mirror the unresolved and festering status of these histories in contemporary Irish life.

As a concrete example of this dynamic in performance, Keegan’s matter-of-fact storytelling opens the play with an object, an extendable slide ruler he played with as a child. He begins The Blue Boy by telling the story of this ruler, and changing it into different animals for the audience—a giraffe, a horse. He soon reveals that this ruler was a tool of his grandfather’s trade as an undertaker, one that he specifically used to measure the bodies of children when called to the Artane Industrial School. Keegan’s use of this everyday object and account of his family’s and geographical proximity to the school including his grandfather’s morbid and frequent business with the children there vividly captures the way in which mundane and extreme relationships to these institutions were part of the fabric of normal life for a lot of Irish people without its gravity fully being grasped. By animating his family’s own experience through his performative strategy in unfolding their history first as a lighthearted and then as a darker anecdote, Keegan and the production of Blue Boy as a whole provoked audiences to consider the often mundane and everyday nature of systemic state violence and to look more deeply into the complicities they may too share with state-controlled abusive histories. As Dominic Campbell hauntingly noted in a programme note commissioned for the Blue Boy’s premiere: “Haven’t we all these stories in Ireland?,” an uncomfortable recognition that the production confronts its audience with dramaturgically at every turn in the action. As McIvor previously concluded of The Blue Boy, among Brokentalkers’ other works, this production ultimately “issues an invitation for (Irish) audiences to be brave together on a collective journey that can offer no guarantees of stable form or genre to guide them” (2013, 55), a theatrical invitation that can ultimately only create uncomfortable theatrical space for witnessing rather than resolving the processing of the collective and individual traumas dealt with in the work.

ANU Productions, Dublin Tenement Experience—Living the Lockout (2013) and THIRTEEN-Constituents (2013)

We expand our focus on ANU in this chapter through a brief discussion of links between two of their projects in 2013 out of recognition readers will have been unlikely to experience their work due to the time-limited nature of their projects and small audience sizes. Significantly their Dublin Tenement Experience—Living the Lockout, created in partnership with Dublin City Council, the Irish Congress of Trade Unions and Irish Heritage Trust is also available for viewing freely online at the time of writing (Irish Congress of Trade Unions 2013). Briefly discussing key performance moments from these two performances in dialogue with one another will give readers better insight into the ongoing call and response between ANU’s works over time which is a key feature of how they make and remake meaning across their body of work over time. Both projects were created in observance of the 100th anniversary of the Dublin Lockout, Ireland’s largest and most serious industrial dispute centring on tram workers and the Irish Transport and General Workers Union. During a time of debate regarding Irish Home Rule and widespread poverty among working classes, this 1913 conflict and ensuing bloodshed is a flashpoint of Irish labour history. Creating work five years after the contemporary Republic’s catastrophic economic downturn and ongoing austerity measures, ANU sought to collapse the relationship between Ireland’s past and present and re-animate the issues at the centre of the Dublin Lockout (specifically financial and worker precarity) in the context of the contemporary Irish moment. Dublin Tenement Experience—Living the Lockout was presented in July and August 2013 as a site-specific performance free and open to the general public located at 14 Henrietta Street, a building that served as a home for Georgian colonial elites (1700s), the professional upper class (1800s) and finally, as a tenement building (1900s). ANU were given access to the building during a period of refurbishment for use as a museum (which finally opened to the public in 2018). ANU’s intention with Living the Lockout was “to create an experience that explored what it was really like to live with (and inside) the lockout” (ANU Productions 2013). As such, it focused on the conflict between two brothers on opposite sides of the struggle and the wife of one of the brothers who has a small child. Living the Lockout chronicled “the high-octane revolutionary ideals of the young striking brothers at the start of the Lockout, through the bleakest of Christmas times for a young mother and finally” portrayed “the prospect of the strikers giving in and returning to work in January (albeit with the spirit of change in their hearts)” (Lowe 2013). Living the Lockout captured both the idealism and promise of the period, as well as the material difficulties that crippled families, represented particularly through performer Laura Murray’s portrayal of her struggles as a young mother. The performance powerfully brought history full circle by making use of letters from the performer’s own grandmother during the period who had lived in similar circumstances. While Living the Lockout offered no answers and ended in a standoff between the brothers—one returning to work, the other staying on strike—ANU further revised moments of this performance to offer even fewer answers when presented in a revised version as Constituent(s), one part of their thirteen-part cycle THIRTEEN (which built over thirteen days in September adding one new performance a day) during the 2013 Dublin Fringe Festival.

Constituent(s) immediately and directly reprised the optimistic opening moment of Living the Lockout where performer Lloyd Cooney sang “Who Fears to Wear the Red Hand Badge” before enthusing to the gathered audience about the Jim Larkins’ vision as leader of the Irish General Transport and Worker’s Union. In this performance reprise, Cooney was actually now performing on a historic tram car from William Martin Murphy’s tram company whose working conditions sparked the Lockout on the grounds of Collins Barracks, a former army base, now museum, which housed both British and then Irish forces and is believed to perhaps be the longest serving military base in the world (National Museum of Ireland, n.d.). Cooney’s performance is then interrupted by actor Laura Murray, who plays the character of a contemporary woman and mother (after playing the historical mother figure in Living the Lockout), and is joined by her partner, played by Thomas Reilly. They are designated as working class through their dress and accent. Reilly and Murray engage in a heated and ultimately violent conversation about the care of their daughter that begins with language then becoming physical, first concrete then abstract, (notably echoing the dance vocabulary of ANU’s earlier ground-breaking production Laundry), and Reilly’s management of their limited finances, particularly his decision to take out a high-interest loan. These characters are portrayed as interrupting Cooney’s performance rather than being a planned part of it. Murray directly asked the audience why they were watching a play, and what they think doing so will actually accomplish. Constituent(s) ultimately concluded with the couple leaving and Cooney apologised for not being able to fulfil his obligation to perform for the audience. When viewed alongside one another, these performances might seem to actively work against each other conceptually and maybe even undercut ANU’s central conviction that performance making is an important method through which to recover and comment on forgotten or marginalised Irish histories in the context of the Irish Decade of Centenaries as they do across the body of their work. However, ANU’s embrace of this confrontational stance (why are you watching a play instead of taking action) also opens up a space for the audiences as co-creators of the work to become more conscious within the then often overwhelming context of ongoing centenary events, celebrations and performance and question whether or not this overload actually created true critical space for reflection or action. Constituent(s) confronted audiences with the very direct question of what they think they are doing through their participation in these kinds of events and performances and by linking Constituent(s) so directly to Living the Lockout, they also animated an opportunity for knowing audience members to perhaps become more conscious of the perhaps even conflicted and conflicted meanings that may emerge across and between the range of commemorative activities that they participated in over this period. ANU’s staging of a failed commemorative performance through Constituent(s) even while remaining centrally implicated then and afterwards in a number of official state and local commemorative events during the Decade of Centenaries uniquely models what it means to be both inside and outside structures of state power as artists. While Constituent(s) ultimately casts the audience as perhaps inadequate participants in their own contemporary political struggles even while reflecting consciously on the history of the lockdown, the performers and ANU as company implicate themselves as well in this failure. Ultimately, through Constituent(s)’ intentional commentary on Living the Lockout, ANU are not just questioning the power of theatre and theatre audiences to intervene in contemporary politics—why are you watching a play—but confronting the value of commemoration itself as a pastime if it cannot inspire direct debate and engagement with the contemporary manifestations of historical legacies such as the Lockout in working class and other communities in Ireland today.

Druid Theatre, DruidShakespeare (2015)

2015’s DruidShakespeare in a co-production with Lincoln Center Festival NYC marked a new spin for the renowned Galway company on their by then internationally renowned epic cycle approach to productions of Irish theatre classics performed in repertory by the Druid ensemble. Previous landmark cycles included DruidSynge (2005, featuring productions of all six of John Millington Synge’s plays) DruidMurphy (2012, featuring Tom Murphy’s Conversations on a Homecoming, A Whistle in the Dark and Famine) and most recently DruidGregory in the midst of the Covid-19 pandemic (2020, featuring Lady Gregory’s The Rising of the Moon, Hyacinth, Halvey, The Gaol Gate, McDonough’s Wife and Cathleen ní Houlihan written with W. B. Yeats). Druid’s use of the cycle format provides an ideal showcase for the company’s central ethos of the ensemble, formalised in the company’s creation of the Druid permanent acting ensemble in 2013, “a core group of some of Ireland’s leading actors who work closely with Druid to shape the future direction of the company’s work” (Druid Theatre, n.d.). The acting ensemble currently includes Marie Mullen, Derbhle Crotty, Garrett Lombard, Aaron Monaghan, Rory Nolan, Aisling O’Sullivan, and Marty Rea, in addition to designers (including Frances O’Connor, James F. Ingalls) and other production personnel they work with on an ongoing basis, with Garry Hynes and Mullen’s inaugural working relationship remaining nonetheless in their words at Druid’s “heart” (Druid Theatre, n.d.).

Significantly, DruidShakespeare also commemorated the company’s 40-year anniversary, a bold statement by Ireland’s most enduring independent ensemble-based theatre company as they took on arguably the most universally renowned playwright in the English language in this epic cycle format. Cross-gender casting and showcasing of the Druid ensemble was also central to their concept with Derbhle Crotty as Henry IV, Aisling O’Sullivan as Henry V, John Olohan as Mistress Quickly and Marie Mullen in a variety of roles across the cycle including Northumberland, the Lord Chief Justice and Silence. Emer McHugh argues that this casting strategy overtly “uses gender to engage with the history of Druid’s repertoire” (n.d.). And as Patrick Lonergan has observed, the gender-blind casting of Derbhle Crotty as Henry IV and Aisling O’Sullivan as Henry V was particularly symbolically notable in the year that #WakingTheFeminists later erupted, but it also indexed a longer history of cross-gender casting in Irish Shakespeare performance as Fanny Furnival was the first woman ever recorded as playing Hamlet at Dublin’s Smock Alley theatre in 1741 (Lonergan 2018a) (Fig. 6.1).

Fig. 6.1

Derbhle Crotty as Henry IV and Aisling O'Sullivan as Henry V in DruidShakespeare (Photo: Matthew Thompson)

The DruidShakespeare cycle embraced earthiness and dark shadows literally as in Frances O’Connor’s peaty soil-based playing space and the company’s visceral and frequently gutturally charged performances, with Brantley pronouncing the cycle “a lean, purposeful organism that is built for speed” with this “organism” of the production doubling “as history itself, casting precisely patterned shadows as it moves” (2015). The full cycle ran approximately six hours if viewed in full, and “the production alternated between a presentation over a full day or across two evening performances” (Irish Theatre Playography, n.d.). Emer McHugh perceptively identifies that DruidShakespeare’s “set design recalls and ghosts their previous marathon theatrical events” as the “peat moss floor that becomes a key aspect of DruidShakespeare’s set design was also crucial to the sets used for DruidSynge and DruidMurphy” (n.d.). Peter Crawley also perceptively picks up on this throughline in his Irish Times review noting that Hynes’ treatment “holds satisfying echoes of Synge in both its earthy aesthetic, fleet progression and more outlandish characterisations” (2015).

DruidShakespeare may first appear in some ways a departure for Druid from working with “Irish” playwrights in this cycle format particularly on the momentous occasion of their 40th anniversary as a company. However, they engaged playwright Mark O’Rowe to adapt Richard II, Henry IV: Part 1, Henry IV: Part 2, and Henry V, rooting their approach to the Shakespearean cycle firmly within contemporary traditions of Irish playwriting. DruidShakespeare also built on their own more distant production history of engagement with Shakespeare (Much Ado About Nothing, directed by Garry Hynes, 1981/1982) and As You Like It (directed by Maelíosa Stafford, 1999), engaging with the Bard it seems roughly every 15–20 years.

DruidShakespeare toured around Ireland after premiering in Galway at the Mick Lally Theatre and to New York City’s Lincoln Center as part of their co-production with the New York Times’ Ben Brantley ultimately praising the cycle as possessing a “fierce, revitalizing clarity and momentum to the undertaking” and highlighting the “sum effect” of the cross-gender casting of the kings particularly as “not distorting but illuminating, setting off a steady chorus of ‘Eurekas’ in your head” (2015).

We attended the inaugural run of DruidShakespeare in Galway, where audience members began the performance outside of the Mick Lally theatre watching performers such as Aisling O’Sullivan, Marie Mullen and others warm up and prepare in the archaeological remains of the Hall of the Red Earl, a set of thirteenth century ruins and the oldest recovered from medieval Galway, before moving into the playing space of the theatre. Between plays, audience members emerged to a lobby filled with graves of murdered characters that multiplied in number over the course of the six hours and were able to avail of boxed meals from local caterers as well as beverages during a long interval between the two parts of the cycle. Our local experience of DruidShakespeare’s inaugural run is relevant to closing out this brief case study as Druid’s attention to these local flourishes and historical sites that made the most of resignifying local landscapes and environments (including the theatre lobby) that long-time audience members and city or local residents would be very familiar with was very deliberate and especially meaningful on the occasion of the company’s 40th birthday. Druid’s ability to scale between the local and the universal, the national and the international and the particular and the epic distinguish them among contemporary Irish theatre companies and their approach to DruidShakespeare’s inaugural run in Galway and subsequent national and international tour played upon every bit of that expansive range knowingly and boldly.

Dead Centre, To Be a Machine (Version 1.0) (2020)

Dead Centre’s To Be a Machine (Version 1.0) premiered during the 2020 Dublin Theatre Festival and was described as a “live audience upload experience,” intended to be consumed online and requiring ticket buyers to upload videos and images of themselves prior to attending the online performance (Dead Centre, “To Be a Machine,” n.d.). Dead Centre are a theatre company based between Dublin and London founded in 2012, helmed currently by Bush Moukarzel, Ben Kidd and producer Mags Keohane. They work with “a close team of collaborators who work with us on an ongoing basis-writers technicians, inventors, artists, designers and performers” (Dead Centre, “About Us,” n.d.). They tour internationally “including to the USA, Hong Kong, China, Australia, France, Estonia, Holland, Romania, Italy, and throughout the UK” (Dead Centre, “About Us,” n.d.).

Dead Centre described this work as:

An early iteration of a future project, To Be a Machine (Version 1.0) is an adaptation of the Wellcome prize-winning book by Mark O’Connell: an exploration of Transhumanism, a movement whose aim is to use technology to fundamentally change the human condition, to improve our bodies and minds to the point where we become something other, and better, than the animals we are. (Dead Centre, “To Be a Machine,” n.d.)

O’Connell worked on the adaptation with Dead Centre, and he was played by actor Jack Gleeson (well-known for playing Joffrey Baratheon on the HBO adaptation of Game of Thrones). Presented at the first Dublin Theatre Festival during the pandemic in 2020, Dead Centre’s adaptation of O’Connell’s work met this unprecedented context head on in the concept and execution of the performance. They announced this performance as “Version 1.0” playing on both the constant updating of digital software and announcing that this is only the first but will not be the only engagement with O’Connell’s book. Indeed, the substance of the book itself or even the general concept of transhumanism seemed ultimately far less important to the performance than its interrogation more generally of theatre, the digital, liveness and the future of all three in the post-Covid-19 era.

The performance began with a tight shot on O’Connell (as played by Gleeson) as he might appear to us on a video call before panning out to reveal that he is in fact in a theatre (in the Space Upstairs, the Project Arts Centre’s 220 seat first-floor performance space in Dublin) with his screen image on a monitor stand beside him. This reveal primes the audience from the opening moments of the performance to experience and parse how different registers of the real or the live can actually still be experienced through and on screens due to the extremely obvious difference between O’Connell performing as a Zoom image in the first sequence and the pan-out to reveal the crisper image of O’Connell on the stage at the Project next to the more granulated image of him on Zoom on the monitor next to the “live” O’Connell. An “audience” too is revealed as “live” in the fold-down seats of the Project’s Space Upstairs (a background familiar to any regular attendees of Irish experimental theatre) on tablets featuring close-ups on faces and upper torsos, the pre-uploaded moving images required by audiences prior to attending the show. Throughout the performance, there are cut-aways to audience member’s pre-recorded expressions, reactions or non-reactions which are deliberately manipulated by the theatremakers/editors to “perform” as reactions at orchestrated moments—for example, a laugh at a joke or to punctuate an uncomfortable moment in the performance, or the use of audience members’ deadpan, blinking, blank expressions used out of context to signal rejection or dissatisfaction with a point made during the performance (Fig. 6.2).

Fig. 6.2

Performer Jack Gleeson in front of the screens on which audience members’ faces and reactions were displayed during the live performances of Dead Centre’s To Be a Machine (Version 1.0), 2020 (Photo: Ste Murray)

To Be a Machine (Version 1.0) used these devices to simulate the live, but also never attempted to hide how mediated the company’s manipulation of the non-live to appear to be an actual live performance actually is—an ultimately compelling game of theatrical cat and mouse that posed more questions than the theatremakers ultimately cared to answer in this iteration.

In fact, To Be a Machine (Version 1.0) stages concerns that are not unique to this production within Dead Centre’s wider body of work and many of its theatrical preoccupations pre-dated Covid-19. Formal experimentation with voice, authenticity and presence, for example, run as a concern across Dead Centre’s work pre-Covid-19, as in their 2019 production Beckett’s Room which featured no actors' bodies onstage but instead used puppeteers and shadows to animate characters’ ghostly non-embodied presence in the room as cushions sunk under the weight of invisible bodies, cigarettes emitted smoke as they hovered in mid-air held by invisible hands, and shadows were cast without bodies to project them. Covid-19 forced production conditions that ultimately served this particular work but the broader thematic concerns and theatrical cum digital strategies showcased in To Be a Machine (Version 1.0) were already key ingredients informing Dead Centre’s evolving contribution to contemporary Irish theatre’s newest horizons.

To Be a Machine (Version 1.0) reckoned directly with the Covid-19 zeitgeist to raise questions about how we transpose or activate theatre’s liveness within digital contexts while also calling attention to how theatre and particularly acting are already technologies of representation that require transposition of mind, body and spirit for audience and performers. This iteration in Dead Centre’s longer process of adapting the book productively spent only limited time with source text and instead leaned most into more general reflections on theatre, liveness and how individuals and audiences might be able to gather within the digital realm for an experience that is recognisable as theatre in how it feels and unfolds dramaturgically. To Be a Machine (Version 1.0) also raised the suggestion that if this simulation of the liveness of theatre in digital space can be accomplished more regularly and credibly and we understood better about why it works when it works, we might also be better able to understand how the potential for experiencing theatre’s kind of liveness within everyday digital experiences such as chatting, making calls and interacting with apps. Mastering the rules of this kind of transference of knowledge might place theatre at the centre of comprehending the digital world rather than in constant threat of being made obsolete by it—a utopian goal worth further pursuing. Irish Times reviewer Donald Clarke did argue that “questions remain about” To Be Machine (Version 1.0)’s status as theatre “but recognised that the “piece’s creators almost certainly savour that ambiguity” (2020). Indeed, they do and in fact they so fully embraced the full possibility of the Covid-19 restrictions that set the conditions for the making and experiencing of the performance in October 2020 that it makes it hard to imagine how this work could be improved through experiencing it live in an actual theatre with other live bodies. By leaning so fully into the constraints of their working conditions but refusing to give up questions of theatrical liveness as the central preoccupation of the company’s work, Dead Centre not only made the best of a challenging situation but have continued to open up new languages for grasping theatre’s relevance and role in a digital and post-Covid-19 world in Ireland and beyond.

Seminal Revivals

Teresa Deevy’s Katie Roche (2017, directed by Caroline Byrne)

Teresa Deevy stands out as perhaps the most acclaimed but under-produced modern Irish female playwright next to Lady Gregory, making the Abbey’s production of Katie Roche post #WakingTheFeminists both obvious and long overdue as it had last been produced at the Abbey in 1994, and before that 1975. This production ran in August–September 2017, in performance briefly parallel to Amanda Coogan and the Dublin Theatre of the Deaf’s live art adaptation of another Deevy play, The King of Spain’s Daughter, which was presented by the Abbey on the Peacock Stage as part of Dublin Fringe Festival.

Directed by Caroline Byrne with dramaturgy by Morna Regan and starring Caoilfhionn Dunne as Katie, this 2017 revival of Deevy’s 1936 expressionist play (with set and costume design by Joanna Scotcher and lighting design by Paul Keogan) situated the action in a dirt landscape within the exploded architecture of a house which physically closes in on the actors over the course of the performance. The artistic team and performers not only consciously rejected but exploded the naturalistic approach taken by previous Abbey productions of the play exploiting objects and set pieces for their full imagistic potential from the mausoleum-like kitchen table that rises from an open grave in the centre of the stage from which Katie also first appears to the absurdist, riotous and deeply revealing use of cups of teas as a social prophylactic device throughout.

These directorial and scenographic choices were meant to create not only imagistic but also affective resonance as Byrne recounts: “I like to capture what the play feels like and in this I use ideograms (images that bypass language) when working on the world of the play to ensure the audience has an emotional, sensory and visual experience” (Abbey Theatre 2017). And whereas Deevy’s original dramatic text is continuously animated by binaries between inside and outside the home and civilisation versus nature, Byrne’s direction and Scotcher’s scenography collapsed these binaries in a tense staging that embraced the dynamic tension of doubleness in the play’s text and central actions in ways that restored agency to Katie in some moments (repeatedly giving her control over shaping and reshaping the dirt within and outside the home) but also amplified the oppressiveness of her confinement within home, nation and the female body in 1930s Ireland through moments of stunning iconoclastic spectacle (such as the appearance of an outsized gallery of religious paintings of Jesus and female saints that Katie gazes blankly upon). This production was ultimately unflinching in its portrayal of Katie’s inability to find either freedom on her own or fulfilment in either her marriage or capricious flirtations with her neighbour Michael (Kevin Creedon) despite revealing over the course of the play that Katie comes from a noble but impoverished background. Under Byrne’s direction, Katie’s repeated stagnation and lack of direction or outlet culminated in the production’s unequivocal final image of her trapped behind a glass wall despite her final line in this production being “I was looking for something great to do…and now I finally have it” (Quoted in Abbey Theatre 2017, 6). For Irish Times reviewer Peter Crawley, the glaring contradiction amplified by this closing image exposed what he perceived to be dramaturgical deficits in the original character, remarking that “[Katie] has no real character to lose” making moments such as this closing one “mostly academic” (2017) in terms of the stakes of her lost potential for contemporary audiences. However, this critique of the play itself seems to miss the point that for Deevy as playwright and this contemporary artistic team who realised the production, the stiltedness and discontinuities in Katie’s character are symptomatic not of her individual inadequacies as a would-be heroic figure, but rather systemic failures and blindspots that make her desires and longing incomprehensible not only to audiences but also to herself and to the wider society she is implicated within. And how could she ever approximate the wholeness of a tragic heroic figure, when this archetype was created by definition through Aristotle’s Poetics as a male and patriarchal standard to be emulated? By embracing the brokenness of Katie’s character and the 1930s Ireland she inhabited (as well as the potential paucity of tragic heroic paradigms) and translating the play and characters into such uncanny, rich and deliberately contradictory theatrical images, Byrne, the wider artistic team and the performers delivered a contemporary production of Deevy’s best-known play in the era of #WakingTheFeminists that animated what it means to not wait for the perfect female (or even feminist) protagonist or playwright but to lean fully into the potential of what is on the page with an expansive of imagination and keen dramaturgical insight that faces gender head on but does not reduce its meaning down to this theme only. As Byrne observed, “I told Graham [McClaren] and Neil [Murray, then Abbey directors, see below] that I didn’t want to stage this as a museum piece, nor did I want it to be an exercise that was purely about the politics of programming work by women. I felt strongly that the piece had to stand on its own without an agenda or narrative around it” (Abbey Theatre 2017, 36). And yet, by taking the play on its own terms, Byrne and the wider artistic team unlocked one of the most searing and unequivocal explorations of gender, history, confinement and its impact on the imagination in recent times. Byrne et al.’s interpretation of Katie Roche epitomised the #WakingTheFeminists era working from within the Abbey theatre archives of earlier productions but also against them to create new horizons for the understanding of the play.

Spotlight on Institutions and Festivals

Fishamble: The New Play Company: “Show in a Bag,” “Tiny Plays for Ireland,” “A Play for Ireland” “Duets” and “Transatlantic Commissions Scheme”

Fishamble was established in 1988 (initially called Pigsback Theatre) and from soon after its inception committed itself exclusively to supporting and producing new plays and the playwrights who create them—an agenda anchored through the enduring collaboration between artistic Director Jim Culleton and literary manager Gavin Kostick. We highlight Fishamble’s particular interventions in this period because of four key initiatives—“Show in a Bag,” “Tiny Plays for Ireland,” “A Play for Ireland” and “Duets”—intended to influence and respond to the contemporary state of writing for the stage in Ireland and which indeed did have transformative effectives. These innovative schemes kept pace with the ways in which playwriting and “the playwright” were being contested within the wider theatre industry by designing schemes for ambitious playwriting to emerge from established and emerging artists and/or those who may not yet identify as such. Fishamble’s initiatives also deliberately foreground the institutional factors, challenges, opportunities and barriers that may be experienced by would-be writers and shape the future of playwriting in Ireland, a concern that brought them quickly into line with the #WakingTheFeminists movement. They’ve continued nuancing their perspective current landscape with broadening definitions of “Irishness” increasingly being referenced in their calls for participation—a move that has recently caused some troubling racist backlash at the time of writing after announcing a workshop. Show in a Bag was launched in 2010 and ran through 2018 as a collaboration between Fishamble, Dublin Fringe Festival and Irish Theatre Institute, garnering an Irish Times Theatre Special Award for the collaboration’s impact in 2017. The initiative was described as “an artist development initiative” to “resource theatre makers and actors”—providing a bridge for those previously identifying mainly as performers to write and perform in their own work (Fishamble, “Show in a Bag,” n.d.). Show in a Bag launched at a time of increasing instability in the definition and practice of being a theatre artist in Ireland as noted above. But this project’s genesis also had a link to Ireland’s economic precarity at the time with Róise Goan (then director of the Dublin Fringe Festival) identifying performers’ particular vulnerability as free agents, therefore Kostick and Fishamble co-created a performer-focused initiative. Show in a Bag served this aim by creating a scenario where the performers can “own the work” (Kostick 2017) to present and tour, with the scale of the works produced also serving an ongoing need for highly portable theatre content to send throughout the expansive network of regional arts centre throughout Ireland as discussed in Chapter 5. Show in a Bag ultimately produced 31 new plays overall involving “41 artists” and “over 1250 performances” with many notable successes in terms of altering individual career trajectories, for example, launching Sonya Kelly as a playwright. Following the premiere of her one woman show Wheelchair on My Face (2011) about her experience growing up with glasses, Kelly went on to write and star in How to Keep an Alien (2014) for Rough Magic, and enter into a period of extended collaboration with Druid Theatre who have premiered to date Kelly’s Furniture (2018), Once Upon a Bridge (2021) and The Last Return (2022) works which saw her move away from performing in her own work. In 2012, Fishamble ran “Tiny Plays for Ireland” in partnership with The Irish Times, which was a call out to “the Irish public” asking “what can be achieved with three minutes of stage time, what are the issues that need to be addressed and who are the people that should be brought to life in the theatre?” (Fishamble, “Tiny Plays,” n.d.) There were 1700 plays submitted to this first round, with Patrick Lonergan commenting of the premiere of the selected 25 “tiny plays for Ireland” in March that:

[u]nder the direction of Jim Culleton, the theatre space became a kind of citizens’ assembly, in which established playwrights, emerging authors, and people who’d never before had their work staged were all presented together on an equal footing. (2018b)

Featuring only a minority of already established playwrights including Deirdre Kinahan, Michael West, Jody O’Neill and Dermot Bolger, Tiny Plays for Ireland powerfully communicated Fishamble’s conviction that “there are people all across this island who have something to say on page and stage” (Lonergan 2018b)—values that they followed through on in a second edition of Tiny Plays in 2013 and in the crafting of their 2017 callout for “A Play for Ireland” to celebrate their 30th anniversary in 2018. Their aim with “A Play for Ireland” was “to find one, big ambitious play, that bursts with humanity and tackles a subject about which the playwright feels passionate” (Fishamble, “A Play for Ireland,” n.d.) “A Play for Ireland” was a two-year process that “encouraged the citizens of Ireland, and non-Irish citizens living on the island of Ireland, to write plays, engaging people aged 18+, from all communities, throughout the country” (Fishamble, “A Play for Ireland,” n.d.) and resulted in the supported development of 30 new plays winnowed down from 370 submissions from across the island of Ireland, with five plays workshopped at 6 partner venues located throughout the regional Irish arts centre network including the Pavilion (Dún Laoghaire, Dublin), Draíocht (Blanchardstown, Dublin), The Everyman (Cork), Lime Tree Theatre/Belltable (Limerick), Town Hall Theatre (Galway) and Lyric Theatre (Belfast). Peter Crawley of the Irish Times called A Play for Ireland “an unabashed appeal for a new state of the nation drama, tinged with the frustration that writers were not being encouraged to be ambitious” (2019) hinting that perhaps Fishamble’s aim was not ultimately celebrating the singularity of “one play for Ireland” but catalysing ambition and collaboration across the sector.

The scheme’s open call, multi-centred and partner-led support structures across the island and ultimate award of the “Play for Ireland” title to a co-authored play (The Alternative by Michael Patrick and Oisín Kearney) provides a powerful model of how to create the conditions for excellence in Irish playwriting through leading a process based on openness and interdependence as core values of the exploration. That Fishamble’s work continues of course is further testament to that it can never be about finding that one play or playwright but continuing to engage in a renewal of the play development process with space for more voices and more experimentation in playwriting processes. Their 2020 and 2021 scheme, Duets, again ran in collaboration with the Dublin Fringe Festival and Irish Theatre Institute, and was “aimed at professional theatre makers from any discipline working in pairs to tell an undeniable story through the unique combination of their skillsets” (Fishamble, “Duets,” n.d.) with the ambition of achieving a tourable production from the collaboration. Finally, their most recently announced scheme, the 2022 “Transatlantic Commissions Scheme,” mentored by US playwright and Pulitzer Prize winner Dael Orlandersmith, is an “endeavor that aims to address head-on the historical inequalities in representation that have existed in the theatrical canon” (Fishamble 2022) by amplifying the work of Black-Irish artists in partnership with New York City’s Irish Repertory Theatre, a scheme we return to in Chapter 11 on interculturalism.

Fishamble’s constant testing of where the energy and momentum for new Irish playwriting lies recognises the instability of current artistic roles and the precarity faced by artists working in theatre including but not limited to playwrights. These visionary schemes have already left a lasting impact within the contemporary Irish theatre industry and continue to expand access and vision of Irish playwriting as Fishamble and their partners lead in continuing to chip away at the question of “what is an Irish playwright?”

The Abbey Theatre (Under the Joint Directorship of Neil Murray and Graham McLaren, 2016–2021)

Murray and McLaren’s tenure as joint artistic directors came at a time of enormous upheaval in Irish theatre following the eruption of #WakingtheFeminists in 2015 and then artistic Director Fiach Mac Conghail’s off the cuff and callous reaction to the initial uproar via Twitter: “Them’s the breaks” (Haughton 2018a). Murray and MacLaren came to the Abbey directly from their previous roles as executive producer and associate director, respectively, of the National Theatre of Scotland (NTS). Murray was on the founding artistic team when they launched their successfully and critically acclaimed decentred national Scottish theatre model not based around a building in 2006, a “theatre without walls.” McLaren, a director and designer, joined NTS in 2010 after an extensive international career and was “responsible for some of the most successful shows in the NTS repertoire” (McMillan 2015). There was both celebration and anxiety regarding their initial appointment on account of their status as outsiders to Ireland, appointment as co-directors (the first since W. B. Yeats and Lady Gregory), and the very different operational model of the NTS which did not draw regularly from canonical works or seek to create work for traditional (i.e. proscenium and black box theatre spaces) as a primary mission. To counter this anxiety, Murray pointed to the comparability of the budget between the two institutions and commented that “The theatre tradition in Ireland is amazing, and there are so many brilliant theatre artists, many of whom we already know through various projects over the years,” vowing particularly to build on his expertise at NTS by “creating more shows that are not made in Dublin, but reflect the whole rich geography of the island” (McMillan 2015). But it was precisely their relationship to Irish theatre artists and the Irish theatre tradition more broadly that would be most controversial during their tenure. In January 2019, more than 400 theatre “actors, directors, designers, technicians, and producers” delivered a letter to Minister of Culture Josepha Madigan “about the effects of a large increase in co-productions and a reduction in self-produced work” (i.e. produced by the Abbey) under their co-direction (Barry 2019). The letter detailed key statistics including:

In 2016 the Abbey directly employed 123 actors in Abbey productions and 90 actors in readings and workshops. Then, in 2017 the Abbey directly employed only 56 actors. No figures are available for readings or workshops that year. Fifty-six. That is a reduction of 54% of actors appearing on stage directly employed by our National Theatre. (Qtd. in Barry 2019)

The letter also exposed the Abbey’s increased move towards co-production as the most highly funded Irish theatre institution as having knock-on effects like payment of lower rates to actors, directors and designers by contracting them to the co-producers who pay lower rates than the Abbey for runs at the Abbey and resulting in “double funding” for the Abbey who were then benefiting from funding won by the independent companies. Based on the initial letter, the “national theatre committed to increasing its percentage of in-house productions and to paying in-house rates to those working on co-productions” (Falvey 2019b) in addition to other measures although these promises were soon challenged as unmet with a second letter again alleging in May 2019 that “the current executive and board do not understand the responsibilities of a National Theatre to theatre ecology, the theatre community and the public” (Falvey 2019a).

As Chapter 11’s discussion of labouring bodies in the contemporary Irish theatre will engage in more detail, the nuance of who is employed within the theatre sector with what funding and how individuals are compensated or supported to create work has often been sublimated within Irish theatre studies, a silence this book seeks to correct throughout and this controversy over Murray and McLaren’s tenure brings usefully into sharp relief. After Murray and McLaren took over at the Abbey, there was indeed a decisive shift towards co-production with Irish and primarily UK-based theatre companies and the re-presentation of work by leading Irish independent theatre companies. This means that many of Ireland’s leading and emergent independent theatre companies including ANU Productions, Collapsing Horse, Moonfish Theatre and THEATREclub indeed responsible for many of the formal and dramaturgical shifts we cite here as at the vanguard of key trends in contemporary Irish theatre during this period were presented or co-produced by the Abbey Theatre for the first time or re-appeared after a long absence (Pan Pan Theatre and Corn Exchange). Murray and McLaren also focused on diversity and inclusion as a key facet of the theatre’s overall mission under their leaders—initiating, for example, a Free First Previews programme to broaden access and encourage new audience members, creating the 5 × 5 series for “communities” who identify as “marginalised and silenced” to develop work at the Abbey over 5 day periods, presenting the first relaxed performance at the Abbey as co-producers of playwright and producers Jody O’Neill’s What I (Don’t) Know About Autism which featured and was co-created by performers with autism and registering a notable uptick of in producing female creator/writer’s new works following #WakingTheFeminists with premieres of new plays by Margaret Perry, Stacey Gregg, Deirdre Kinahan and Lisa-Tierney-Keogh. Given that the Abbey’s underrepresentation of female creators/writers and directors in particular is what tipped off #WakingTheFeminists, these statistical changes are highly significant—female creators/writers went from 17% to 35% and female directors increased from 20% to 46% between 2016 and 2021 (Murphy et al. 2020, 3)^. They also pursued international partnerships as key to enhancing the profile of the Abbey globally—a long-term strategy however that backfired with its stark repercussions on the employment of freelance Irish theatre artists across the sector between 2017 and 2020. Notable co-productions with international partners included the stage adaptation of Emma Donogue’s novel Room (2017, A Theatre Royal Stratford East and Abbey Theatre co-production in association with National Theatre of Scotland and Covent Garden Productions) and Come from Away, the 2018 European premiere of the musical (An Abbey Theatre co-production with Junkyard Dog Productions and Smith & Brant Theatricals)—particularly controversial for being presented in the winter holiday slot which is typically occupied by a large-cast production employing Ireland-based actors.

The controversy remained still largely unresolved with the onset of the pandemic in 2020 with theatres directed to close from 12 March 2020, and the Abbey board announced in July 2020 that it did not plan to renew Murray and McLaren’s contracts. Caitríona McLaughlin and Mark O’Brien were announced as artistic director and executive director, respectively, in February 2021, and their tenures began in summer 2021. Murray and McLaren did continue to produce work digitally throughout the pandemic, initiating the Dear Ireland: Reflections on a Pandemic series in 2020 which was “originally conceived as a rapid response to the pandemic, to support artists during the early days of lockdown” (Abbey Theatre, “Dear Ireland,” n.d.). It ultimately ran to three editions at the time of writing, featuring well over 100 artists including recently or frequently Abbey produced playwrights and familiar performers as well as emerging artists and extending to inclusion of playwrights from abroad including the United States and China. They also responded to the publication of the 2021 report of the Commission of Investigation into Mother and Baby Homes with Home: Part One, a “direct response to the report on Mother and Baby Homes, focusing on the testimonies of survivors” presented as a streamed reading featuring actors and other public figures including authors and politicians (Abbey Theatre 2021b) (see Chapter 7 for more detail on this performance). Given their recent departure, Murray and McLaren’s legacy is too soon to assess in full but the controversies engendered during their time at the Abbey did bring many of the fault lines in Irish theatre to the surface, particularly regarding the precarity of theatre workers and the differential funding conditions and infrastructure for the large well-funded companies like the Abbey and the smaller independent companies who continue to innovate across the nation.

Conclusion

Over the last decade, contemporary Irish theatre has manifested an almost constant state of change in terms of practice, forms and funding structures as well as the impact of national and world events on the sector. Modern Irish history (particularly that of the founding of the Irish state and the ongoing legacy of the Troubles) was continuously brought into living contact with the contemporary through theatre, whether in relationship to the release of state inquiries or the official Decade of Centenaries commemorative programme. Theatremakers, playwrights, directors, actors and scenographers pushed the boundaries of what Irish theatre is or could be through collaborations across and at the intersection of an ever proliferating number of artistic genres, as digital media advances and then the onset of the Covid-19 pandemic, forced new considerations of what it might mean for theatre to conceive of itself as not bound by occurring in physical spaces. Theatrical work was also heavily influenced formally and thematically by the anguishing impact of austerity, recession and precarity on a generation of emerging and established artists as well as by the #WakingTheFeminists movement and related actions undertaken by the Arts Councils in the Republic and North regarding how gender and other structural inequalities such as disability, race/ethnicity, sexuality, class and/or nationality impact who gets to make theatre. As an unprecedentedly diverse generation comes of age in contemporary Ireland in the aftermath of Covid-19, the future of Irish theatre will be shaped not only by its own history, but by as yet unimagined horizons driven by variables that cannot yet be seen or understood.