Irish theatre has often been viewed as synonymous with literary theatre, its drama made distinctive by the use of inventive, performative and often poetic language by characters that are natural storytellers. This perspective has been promoted by critics and playwrights alike and is often an expectation of international audiences. The critic Seamus Deane is indicative of this viewpoint when he proclaims in his preface to The Selected Plays of Brian Friel:

Brilliance in the theatre has, for Irish Dramatists, been linguistic. Formally, the Irish theatrical tradition has not been highly experimental. It depends almost exclusively on talk, on language left to itself to run through the whole spectrum of a series of personalities, often adapted by the same individual. (1987, 12)

Deane’s statement goes too far, as much past criticism has, in overstating the linguistic over the formal accomplishments of Irish theatre. In so doing he elevates the status of the playwright over all other theatre practitioners, something this book, in the historical chapters, has endeavoured to correct. However, to ignore how language operates and contributes to the development and impact of Irish theatre would also be a mistake.

The attention to language identified by Deane can be rooted in Ireland’s colonial history and struggle for independence. Ireland’s own native ancient language, Gaeilge often anglicised as Gaelic, was gradually lost to its people in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries due to its systematic eradication through the laws that prevented its use and teaching implemented as part of British colonialism; the trauma of the potato famine in the nineteenth century and mass emigration. The movement to restore the Irish language subsequently in the early twentieth century was a key driver of cultural nationalism and brought with it a revival of Ireland’s rich mythical inheritance and celebration of its tradition of storytelling. This revivalism also sought to counter the colonial propaganda and stereotype of the stage Irishman which was not only propagated through grotesque caricature but through language with the Irish portrayed either as inarticulate savages or as deviant manipulative linguists whose words were not to be trusted. It was thus that cultural nationalists Lady Gregory, W. B. Yeats, George Moore and Edward Martyn would found the Irish Literary Theatre to counter the misrepresentation of Ireland and show that it was not the “home of buffoonery and easy sentiment” (Gregory 1972, 20). The Literary Theatre evolved into the Abbey Theatre that would enjoy world renown for the plays of J. M. Synge, Sean O’Casey and indeed Yeats and Gregory which were not written in Irish but inventively drew on the rhythms, phrasing and myths of Gaelic to create a new form of Hiberno-English. This legacy of the literary theatre still looms large in contemporary Irish theatre through the repeated revivals of the dramas of these playwrights as discussed in the historical chapters of this book and also due to international expectations of Irish theatre that views work through this tradition. It is also worth observing that stage Irish portrayals did not end with the coming of the Irish Literary Theatre but continue to be perpetuated on stage, in Hollywood movies, sit-coms and soap operas. Anxieties concerning language and the failure of words as well as play with language and performativity that mark so much of contemporary theatre’s concerns and innovations of form are thus acutely determined on the Irish stage.

It is prudent at this point to first qualify what is meant by language in this chapter and to qualify how language is understood to function in the theatre. Language is a term that can be thought of broadly to include any system of communication used by a particular community. The theatre makes use of, reflects and often stylises the linguistic systems of communication of its community but it also possesses its own particular systems of communication. It has been argued, particularly since the application of semiotic theory to performance, that theatre as an ancient highly codified and conventionalised art form communicates with audiences through many different languages of the stage (movement, composition, gestures, lighting, conventionalised forms, archetypes, etc.) that are beyond the verbal or even the referential. Such languages of the stage have been emphasised in this book through a dedicated chapter on the body, production cases studies, charting changing performance strategies and showing how directors, designers and theatre companies have shaped Irish theatre in the short-profile sections. Therefore for the purposes of this chapter we will be concentrating largely on the linguistic systems of communication used by contemporary Irish playwrights and how they play with language. Marvin Carlson writes that

…playing with language in the theatre is not simply a postcolonial or postmodern strategy (although linguistic play has become of major or even central importance in both postcolonial and postmodern theatre) but an activity found very widely in theatrical cultures past and present, around the world, and that such ‘playing’ as is the case with much ‘play’ in theatre, has often involved very serious social and artistic concerns. (2006, 6)

The chapter draws on postcolonial and postmodern strategies in relation to Irish theatre while also emphasising how such approaches are rooted in the medium of theatre, a medium that invites its audiences to play with the cultural conceptions as well as political and historical circumstances of contemporary Ireland. These conceptions and circumstances are of course connected to and often shaped by the wider world.

This chapter charts through its three elucidating frameworks and three related case studies how contemporary Irish theatre negotiates the tension between a strong theatrical tradition that is tied to a conception of an independent Irish nation that aimed to speak in its own distinctive voice and a contemporary interdependent world that speaks with many different voices.

  • Hiberno-English: An Untamed Language for the Stage: The loss and attempted revival of the Irish Language and its creation of Hiberno-English when translated fuels creativity in the Irish theatre and has helped to give it many of its recognisable characteristics. This section firstly explores the theatricality of Hiberno-English in contemporary drama. Secondly, it examines duality in Irish playwriting that manifests in recurring features such as twins, doppelgängers and double meanings. Here, such duality is examined as a result of the status of the Irish language in contemporary culture where it is a ghostly presence that affects the national psyche and is felt in creative expression. Finally it focuses on how the production of Irish-Language dramas could be said to have contributed to the introduction of new staging techniques thus furthering a deeper knowledge and practice of new languages of the stage in Ireland.

  • Storytelling: Language as Community: With Ireland’s strong folk tradition of oral storytelling and the world renowned achievements of its modern literature in the works of James Joyce, W. B. Yeats, Elisabeth Bowen, Lady Gregory, Samuel Beckett, to name a few, it is unsurprising that contemporary Irish drama is often concerned with the nature of storytelling. In much contemporary Irish theatre there are many narratives within a play and these often propel the drama. Stories are themselves actors, within much of Irish drama, with the capacity to change circumstances and characters or to stultify and distract them. In this section the use of language as story and the power of words as an agent of both change and stasis is explored.

  • Adaptation: Language as Heteroglossia: Since the early twentieth-century Irish theatre has been concerned with the translation and adaptation of plays written in other languages other than English. In adapting these plays into an Irish idiom and context Irish playwrights are able to go beyond being situated within an English tradition and position themselves in relation to world drama. This section identifies a rise in Irish adaptations of this sort from the 1980s onward and it explores the translation strategy they employ to deliver texts in a language of heteroglossia, or many voices, that reflects Ireland’s contemporary location within an international community and its negotiation of foreign cultures.

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

  • Hiberno-English: An Untamed Language for the Stage (Enda Walsh’s Disco Pigs)

  • Storytelling: A Language Searching for Community (Conor McPherson’s The Weir)

  • Adaptation and Heteroglossia (Lucy Caldwell’s version of Chekhov’s Three Sisters)

Hiberno-English: An Untamed Language for the Stage

Despite one hundred years of Irish independence where a systematic effort to revive the Irish language through state education was put in place, English is the tongue spoken by the majority of the population of the Irish Republic. The language is still spoken in particular areas of the country, known as Gaeltachts, such as Connemara in Galway, but the numbers of Irish citizens that claim fluency in the language is in decline and very few speak it on a regular basis. However, the Irish language remains the official language of the Republic and is still a core part of the primary school curriculum and a compulsory subject for the senior education cycle. This means that all children in Ireland are taught the Irish language from the age of 4 to 18 but very few go on to speak it once they leave school. In Northern Ireland Irish is not offered as a school subject and this is a continual source of debate as many from nationalist backgrounds feel they are being denied something that is core to their Irish identity. This connection to a national language that is either unspoken or unavailable links the contemporary experience of being Irish with that of earlier generations as Irish identity is experienced as continually fragmented or split between two languages and two cultures.

This hybridity is registered in speech for the English spoken throughout Ireland is still very much influenced by the Irish language in its phraseology, pronunciation and many dialects. This was mocked in the figure of the inarticulate stage Irishman, or given a roguish and sentimental treatment in Boucicault’s melodramas in the nineteenth century but celebrated by revivalists in the twentieth century. J. M. Synge and Lady Augusta Gregory recognised the musicality, poetic imagery and theatricality of the Irish vernacular uttered on stage. In his preface to The Playboy of the Western World Synge wrote how, influenced by time spent in the rural west of Ireland, he wished for a style of speech that was as “fully flavoured as a nut or an apple” (1968b, 54). This style would come to dominate with the success of Synge’s and Gregory’s plays followed later by O’Casey’s dramas where “this colloquial high colour was a key dimension” of their triumph “though with a shift from peasant lyricism to urban demotic” (Grene 2018, 422). This legacy of a theatricalised hybrid form of speech, Irish English or Hiberno-English, is one that contemporary playwrights have continued and furthered on stage for theatrical effect whether it be Enda Walsh drawing on the staccato of Cork dialect in Disco Pigs (1996), Marina Carr leaning on the sonorous midland’s drawl in her Midlands Trilogy or Mark O’Rowe delivering punchy monologues in a rhythmic Dublin patois in Howie the Rookie (1999). Mic Moroney writes on this:

The chief weapon for Irish dramatists, of course, is the strangely universal appeal and the creative use of the old Hiberno-English dialects, with their beautifully involuted syntactical shapes that emerge partly from the translations of nineteenth-century Gaelic revivalists, and partly from the rich idioms which still survive up and down the country, and indeed island. Sometimes, the Irish protrudes like bone through the hungry hide of the unsuspecting Béarla [English]. (2001, 253)

Debate at the time of the Irish Literary Revival over the status of Hiberno-English on stage concerned the authenticity of the language spoken and how reflective it was of the reality of experience. This was in reaction to how Irish dialects and phrasing had been used as a means to denigrate the Irish as barbarous, wild and ill-mannered in order to serve the colonial agenda of the British. Indeed to this day the use of dialect on stage or screen without significant engagement with the culture behind it carries according to Angela Pao “the potential for ethnic stereotyping as much as performing in blackface or yellowface perpetuates racial stereotyping” (2004, 355). For contemporary Irish playwrights such as Walsh, O’Rowe, Carr and others the use of Irish dialects and phrasing is not done in any effort towards verisimilitude or in an attempt to be authentic. It is instead chosen to heighten the stylised and theatrical world of the play or to create what Moroney calls an “untamed elastication of reality” (2001, 255).

For Gilbert and Tompkins in their Post-colonial Drama “Split or fragmented subjectivity reflects the many and often competing elements that define post-colonial identity” (1996, 23). It can be argued that the particular situation of the Irish language as both ever present and ever absent in contemporary Irish culture, through the education system and in its influence on how English is spoken in Ireland, has led to a prolonged awareness and experience of postcolonial hybridity despite the country’s diverse population. Being caught between two languages is not only about being caught between two cultures but also the feeling of being stuck between modernity and tradition, inclusion and exclusion, power and impotence. The Irish language through the revival movement is still associated with Irish nationalism and its continued minority status serves as a reminder of the history of colonial oppression. The English language is the dominant language of global popular culture, world commerce and western politics. However, there is a sadness at the loss of the language, an understanding that it is of value and in the Republic it is still considered by the state to be of “crucial importance to the identity of the Irish people” (Government of Ireland 2010, 5). All of these tensions concerning the Irish language were most directly addressed and movingly captured in Brian Friel’s Translations (1980) which shows the decline of the language through the eradication of Gaelic place names by colonial geographical surveys, the penal laws that denied Irish speakers education and the coming of the potato famine which led to the death and mass emigration of millions of native speakers. The play being written in English heightens the sense of loss, as if it were written in Irish it would not have been understood by most contemporary Irish audiences. Subsequent to Friel’s play, the Field Day project would continue to explore the issue of language in Irish culture in plays, pamphlets and publications throughout the 1980s and 1990s as described in Chapter 4. The continued relevance of Friel’s play was highlighted on the Abbey theatre’s website when promoting its 2022 co-production with the Lyric Belfast of the play stating: “Brian Friel’s modern masterpiece finds a new potency, in a time where Brexit has thrown current Anglo-Irish relations into sharp relief, redrawing old boundaries, and opening up old wounds” (Abbey Theatre 2022).

However, the conflicting experience of language and identity in Ireland can most easily be read in contemporary Irish plays in the recurrent doubling of characters on stage, representing “split subjectivity” through two actors embodying characters that share a single consciousness, as in the case of Friel’s Philadelphia here I come (1964), or friends connected by an intense private world as with Disco Pigs (1997) or by family ties and resemblance as it is with Portia and her twin Raphael in Carr’s Portia Coughlan (1995) or the comparisons of Hester Swane and her mother Josie in By the Bog of Cats (1997). These are some prominent examples but it is hard to find an Irish play that does not have some kind of doubling of characters. Such duality can be of course read in many ways (doubling is in itself inherently theatrical) but the postcolonial history of Ireland and its specific failure to revive its native language post-independence has created a situation particular to Ireland that allows us to understand this preoccupation with duality. Indeed, with most of these doubles there is usually a conflict where one or both no longer wish to be double and must choose to either separate or merge, often with tragic consequences. Anxieties about hybrid and dual identity that are perpetuated in the contemporary period through unresolved issues concerning the status of the Irish language in the national consciousness are thus staged and played out.

A feature of contemporary theatre has been to explore the limits of verbal or literary language as a means of expression and a suspicion of any such language in its claim to truth or authenticity. This is also a feature of Irish theatre that is evident in a particular use of storytelling as a device which is examined further in this chapter. However, it also manifests in a theatrical style that moves away from text as the primary maker of meaning in the theatre towards a deeper exploration of the other languages of the stage (movement, lighting, proxemics, scenography, etc.). This is covered in other chapters in this book as already mentioned but it is also worth pointing out that the movement towards what Erika Fischer Lichte sees as the “retheatricalisation of theatre” (1997, 62) in the twentieth century could be read as having been prompted and aided in Ireland through Irish language theatre.

When speaking on the legacy of the revival it has to be noted that there has also been a great deal of theatrical activity and plays written in the Irish language. Some of these plays, companies and institutions, such as An Taibhdhearc, the National Theatre for the Irish Language have already been considered in the history chapters of this book. What I would wish to point out here is how the challenges of staging a play in the Irish language have brought innovation in terms of staging technique. As it could not be assumed that audiences would understand the words spoken on stage, theatre practitioners have had to emphasise visual storytelling through movement, settings, props and theatrical effects to engage the spectators. Hilton Edwards and Micheál mac Liammóir founded the Gate Theatre in 1928 after they collaborated together on producing mac Liammóir’s Diarmuid agus Gráinne (1928) as the inaugural production for An Taibhdhearc. These two men would have a profound influence on stagecraft in Ireland over the next fifty years; Edwards in terms of directing and lighting as already highlighted in earlier chapters; mac Liammóir in terms of costume and set design; with both delivering celebrated acting performances. Also earlier in this book we pointed out how the director and designer Tomás Mac Anna credited his own development of stagecraft to his staging of plays in Irish, which were primarily adaptations of European plays with dramaturgies that allowed for more experimentation than the naturalistic Irish plays in English on at the Abbey. He also credits the demands put upon him to stage an annual Irish language pantomime at the Abbey theatre throughout the 1950s and early 1960s as helping his directing and design practice as he had to contend with the large casts, fantastical locations, quick scene changes and stylised acting of this form of entertainment. The influence of these practitioners on contemporary Irish theatre was immense (O’Gorman et al. 2021) but innovation in terms of staging is still being led by Irish language theatre through the work of companies such as Aisling Ghéar and Moonfish theatre company. Through collaborative devising techniques and experimentation with different technologies Galway-based Moonfish productions have created inventive mediatised productions that inventively incorporate surtitles and translation into the scenographic dramaturgy of their shows, as was most evident in their acclaimed bilingual adaptation of Joseph O’Connor’s Star of the Sea in 2014. Aisling Ghéar based in Belfast, founded in 1997, has also consistently delivered inventive productions in the Irish language including adaptations, new work and revivals with Brian Ó Chonchubair describing their work as “the most sustained innovative, and progressive theatrical experiment in Irish in recent decades” (2016, 266). Of their productions, Makaronik (2014) written by Dave Duggan counts as one of the most imaginative. This was a multilingual sci-fi play that was written in English, Irish and a made up language of Empirish. Joan Fitzpatrick Dean and Radvan Markus remark of this play that it circles back to mac Liammóir in that it “uses echoes of the Diarmuid and Gráinne story in a dystopic setting” (2021, 38–39).

Case Study One: Disco Pigs Written by Enda Walsh

Premiered: Triskel Arts Centre, Cork, 1996 by Corcadorca Theatre, directed by Pat Kiernan

Notable Revival: 58th Avignon Festival, Avignon, 2004, German translation, produced by Baracke am Deutschen Theater (Berlin) directed by Thomas Ostermeier

When Disco Pigs was produced by Corcadorca theatre company in 1997 they had already secured a reputation for exciting inventive productions by “taking performance out of theatre spaces and into the streets and other sites, the development of new writing, and an openness to international forms and styles of performance” (Fitzpatrick 2010, 315). Enda Walsh was a founding member of the company and held the position of writer-in-residence when the play was developed with a young Cillian Murphy and Eileen Walsh who announced themselves as major talents in the roles of the titular Disco Pigs under the creative direction of Pat Kiernan.

Written in a rhythmic language that mixes the Cork dialect, with baby talk, animal sounds and teenage slang, the play confronts us with two disaffected teenagers, Pig (male) and Runt (female) who narrate and act out their violent adventures around “Pork” city. The two share a birthday, live next door to each other and are united in their rejection by others which has led to the creation of their own private language and shared worldview. Runt explains:

So we grow up a bit at a dime an all dat dime we silen when odders roun. No word or no-ting. An wen ten arrive we squeak a differen way den odders. An da hole a da estate dey talk at us. Look nasty yeah. But me an Pig look stray at dem. An we looka was happening an we make a whirl wher pig and Runt jar king and queen. (Walsh 2008, 15)

The pair tell the audience of their escapades on their seventeenth birthday where they drink cider together, head into cork city, beat up a boy they know on a bus for previously refusing to sell them alcohol, then visit a student disco where they play the “piggy dance.” In this game Runt dances with a boy and then Pig pretends to be her jealous boyfriend and assaults the boy. After being ejected from the disco, they eat burgers and end the night by driving to the coast to sit by the sea. Here Pig kisses Runt but she does not reciprocate. The next evening they go out again, this time to a pub where they sing karaoke with supporters of the provisional IRA and then on to the Palace Disco. The division between them grows as Pig begins to fantasise about having sex with Runt while Runt imagines what it might like to be romantically involved with another boy. Runt dances with a boy she likes but Pig confuses the situation as the “piggy dance” but this time he is also really jealous and he savagely beats the boy to death. Runt is disgusted by Pig's murderous actions. She leaves with a final speech in which in her last few words she begins to speak in a more standardised way. It is thus not only through the final violent act but also through language that the dramatic transformation of the piece occurs. Runt’s change in the register of her speech at the end of the play articulates her transformation as she separates herself from Pig and ends their private shared world.

The invented language although redolent of Anthony Burgess’s A Clockwork Orange and James Joyce’s Finnegan’s Wake is entirely Walsh’s own creation with the sounds of an urban Cork dialect informing its pulsating staccato construction. As such, we can identify many common features of Hiberno-English in the private language of Pig and Runt as well as particular words and idiosyncrasies belonging to Cork. There is the use of words that are particular to Cork such as “buddel” (Walsh 2008, 8) for bottle, which is a version of the Irish word, buidéal and “langer” (Walsh 2008, 8), which is a local term for idiot. But beyond the use of certain words it is the pronunciation of Cork English that is captured so accurately by Walsh and used expertly for theatrical impact. The Irish language has no equivalent to the “th” sound commonly found in English words and so this sound is pronounced instead with a “d” or “t” sound transforming words like “the”, “they” and “think” into “da”, “dey” and “tink”. This is prevalent throughout Disco Pigs but an exemplary line would be at the play’s climax when Pig is in the Palace Disco and proclaims at the height of his rage and paranoia: “Dey all look an laugh at me! Hear dem?!!I can see it, yeah! Dey loads a cash an look a Pig an, who he, dey say!” (Walsh 2008, 28). For Patrick Lonergan this use of the “d” sound aids the rhythm of the piece with “the effect of intensifying the speed of the speech, while emphasizing the manic quality of Pig’s character” (2009, 179). Runt also speaks in a similar manner but in her speech, there is further traits of Hiberno-English to be discerned that sometimes softens her speech betraying her attraction to others and her longing in contrast to Pigs defensiveness, disgust and violence. For example, when she looks at the college students she says, “I look a deez students yeah, I tink a all da learning das goin in ta dem. I tink a da books dey do read all stack tall inside dem oblong heads” (Walsh 2008, 12). The use of a habitual form of the verb “to read” here in “dey do read” is signature of Hiberno-English. T. P. Dolan explains:

Irish has a habitual form of the present tense (“Bíonn”) as well as the substantive form ( “tá”). The habitual form is concerned with the nature or “aspect” of the action involved, whether it is instantaneous, continuing or recurring. This gives rise in Hiberno-English to such idioms as “I do be here every day” or (less commonly) “I bes here every day” (“Bím anseo gach lá”). (2004, xxv)

Epenthesis, the insertion of a sound or letter into a word, is common to Irish people speaking English due to rules concerning the use of slender and broad sounds before vowels and certain consonants in the Irish language. This results in some words such as film being pronounced as “filum” and worm becoming “worrum.” This is evident in Disco Pigs in the use of “Schmack” (Walsh 2008, 10) for smack, “SHLAP” (Walsh 2008, 22) for slap and “whirl” (Walsh 2008, 15) for world. Again, this particularity of Irish speech offers Walsh a means to create a poetic theatrical language that is rich in onomatopoeia, allusion and defamiliarisation. For Jesse Weaver this “language is at once theatrically muscular and utterly baffling, drawing an audience or a reader relentlessly into a private and suffocating dramatic space that the characters inhabit” (2016, 18–19).

These features of Hiberno-English and the Cork dialect in particular are exploited by Walsh to create what Peter Womack refers to as “world-making discourses” (2011, 113). This is often identified in Shakespeare as “scene-painting” where a character conjures the setting of the scene into existence through the vivid imagery of their speech (deixis) to make up for the lack of actual stage scenery on the Elizabethan stage. However, Womack observes that in Shakespeare these passages often go beyond “evoking something that scenery could not portray” giving audiences a vision of the world “saturated in the observer’s emotions and associations” (2011, 112). The language of Disco Pigs works hard for Walsh in not only narrating action, giving a sense of character and place but also managing to reflect the frustration, energy and violence of its two protagonists. This is achieved most directly in the rhythms of the speech but also through the clever pronunciation of words to give them several meanings. For example in Runt’s line “An we looka was happenin and we make a whirl where Pig and Runt jar King and Queen” (Walsh 2008, 15) the cork accent is evident in the pronunciation but also words such as “whirl” in place of “world” manages to capture the frenetic pace of the teenagers environment and “jar king and queen” instead of “are king and queen” points to their difference to, and alienation from others as they jar with the society that they fantasise subjugating as monarchs. Pig’s cynicism and perversity is also to be discerned later in the play in words such as “suckycess” (Walsh 2008, 24) in place of “success” or when he speaks of the national anthem as “da national rant-hymn” (Walsh 2008, 24).

The duality of meaning that is present in such words can be read as indicative of the split subjectivity of the postcolonial subject that has been disinherited from their language. Dualism is key to both the content and form of the play. Walsh’s two-hander tells the story of a pair of teenagers who move from an intense shared relationship toward a violent separation with tragic consequences. The form of the piece which relies on narration by the two actors also creates a distance for the audience between language and movement that draws attention to the duality of the theatrical event. Womack explains this:

In being given the power to narrate herself, the theatrical figure is split in two – the narrator and the hero of the narrative, the one who describes and the one who acts. The always implicit duality of the actor finds explicit dramatic form, and the outcome is a dialogic form, and the outcome is a dialogic language of the stage. (2011, 118)

This theatricality of storytelling on stage that Womack identifies will be elaborated upon in the next section but it is worth pointing out here that while this is a language play that is not to say that it is without performative potential beyond language. Indeed, Weaver has drawn attention to the fact that the “rhythmic lyricism” of the language demands “a heightened physicalisation” (2016, 18–19). As it did in its first production with Corcadorca, the play invites actors and directors to create complex and interesting dynamic movement and bursts of energy to match the cleverness and vitality of the language. This may explain the phenomenal popularity of this play over the years in non-Anglophone countries, particularly in Germany (see Huber 2012, 84).

Storytelling: Performative Language Searching for Community

Storytelling is central to Irish culture and performance. Eamonn Jordan observes “In Ireland, people tend to exchange stories more than they involve themselves in discussion or debate. Dialogue often takes the form of narrative. Sometimes people exchange/inhabit the same conversations/narratives again and again, even with the same people” (2004, 358). Further to this common place use of story, Ireland has a tradition of storytelling as performance in the cultural practice of the seanchaí, who was “a community’s guardian of tales and lore who would travel from house to house or village to village gathering and telling stories in exchange for food and shelter” (Clarke 1995, 62). The seanchaí was both revered and feared by largely illiterate communities as he would impart knowledge and share learning as well as entertain with his stories. Jocelyn Clarke writes how a seanachaí needed to be gifted with “a mellifluous voice” as “stories were often rhymed or sung” and that they were “foremost performers, and their performances were always imaginatively inclusive of the audience” (1995, 62).

It is unsurprising then that a distinctive feature of modern Irish theatre that persists into the contemporary is the telling of stories on stage. Anthony Roche goes so far as to say that “Irish drama has its origins as much in the communal art of the seanchaí, the act of oral storytelling, as in a more formal written script performed on a proscenium stage in an urban centre” (1994, 115). Indeed, in Synge’s In the Shadow of the Glen (1903) Nora decides to leave her husband and go with the tramp that has visited her because of his “fine bit of talk” (1968a, 57) and in The Playboy of the Western World (1907), Christy Mahon becomes a hero in the local community due to his fervent telling of the tale of killing his father only to be rejected by them when his story is found to be untrue. In Gregory’s Spreading the News (1904) the invention of a story based on a mishearing of events leads to comic consequences for a small rural community. While in O’Casey’s Plough and the Stars (1926) it is the oration of The Speaker that intoxicates the men with nationalistic fervour that then leads to tragic consequences for the community of tenement dwellers. Stories and how they are told have the power in these plays to make or break individuals and communities. Georges Zimmermann in his book The Irish Storyteller explains:

Storytelling is essentially a social – a co-operative- activity; to narrate is to act on listeners, and an audience’s sense of sharing an experience and thus belonging together may be as valuable as individual imaginary release. The foundations of the art belong to a common heritage of mankind, but some formal details and performance patterns may be specific to a particular culture. People with a common set of stories (and ways of telling them) form a community; conversely, different repertoires may divide audiences – but stories can cross ethnic barriers. (2001, 9)

In contemporary Irish theatre stories and storytelling remains a key feature as playwrights struggle with modernisation and its effects on community, belonging and identity. For Jordan, the storytelling tradition in Irish theatre “deals with characters that are inhibited and inhabited by story, enabled and dispossessed of their narratives, personal, collective or national” (2010, 35). Understood in this way, stories are performative in Irish theatre in the sense that they are performance-like in how they are told but also in the linguistic sense in that they function as performative utterances, whereby when they are spoken they do things and effect change. Stories are thus not primarily used by a narrator figure to inform, comment or interrupt action on stage as they would function in Epic theatre, although Brechtian narrator-figures are found in many Irish dramas such as Friel’s Dancing at Lughnasa (1990), Christina Reid’s Tea in a China Cup (1983) and Vincent Woods At the Black Pigs Dyke (1992). But stories are instead in many Irish dramas active agents that assist or hinder characters from becoming part of or re-entering a shared community. Tom Murphy’s Bailegangaire (1985) is a famous and influential example. In this play a bed-ridden dementing old Grandmother, Mommo persists in continually telling a tale from her past and dominating the lives of her two grown-up granddaughters, Dolly and Mary, that care for her. The action of the play depends on Mommo finishing the tale for once and in doing so offering a communal release for all three women from the burden of its endless telling. Nicholas Grene adds that in addition to this release the completion of the tale also resolves tensions between “the archaic old Ireland of Mommo’s seanchai style with the realities of Mary and Dolly’s 1980s modernity. Telling the story out to its end is a way of at last making a connection between the two” (2018, 430). Here story is both an obstacle to growth for the characters, when it is being incessantly repeated without end but also the means of recovery in its being told to conclusion. This pattern is also repeated in Enda Walsh’s The Walworth Farce (2006) where a father and his two sons are caught in a paralysing ritualistic routine of farcically enacting the story of how they left Ireland and came to live in the London flat where we find them. The story turns out to be a lie made up by the father as a means to control and trap his sons who in continually enacting an invented past are prevented from taking part in the present or imaging a future. The story is finally ended when the sons decide to rebel and an outsider intervenes but Walsh’s characters do not gain deliverance in breaking the cycle only violence, death and a new story in which to be stuck.

Marina Carr’s surreal comedy Low in the Dark (1989) which explores the absurdities of fixed gender roles and patriarchal power, features a character called Curtains who appears on stage as a pair of curtains that never open. This character played by a female actress, who refuses to be reified as an object of display for the male gaze in never presenting her gendered body to the audience, spends the play telling fragmented pieces of a story “about a man and a woman roaming between south and north, following a rhythm of meetings and separations” (Kurdi 2010, 229). Here a performative story is an actual actor in the piece as well as a commentator and again the play cannot conclude until Curtains finally tells a complete version of her tale. For Mária Kurdi, “Considering its overarching presence and disruption of the action, Curtains’s “tale” serves a self-reflexive function in that it highlights as well as qualifies the subversive strategies of gender representation in the whole drama” (2010, 230).

Another version of this use of storytelling as a means of constraining or becoming for individuals as they yearn for inclusion in a shared community is to be found in Irish plays that take the form of a series of character monologues. There are many examples of such work by Conor McPherson, Mark O’Rowe, Deirdre Kinahan and Elizabeth Kuti but Brian Friel’s Faith Healer (1979) is considered by most critics as paradigmatic in this regard. Faith Healer takes the form of four successive intersecting monologues delivered directly to the audience by three characters: Frank Hardy, the Faith Healer, Grace his estranged wife and Teddy his cockney manager. Each share contradictory details of their shared damaged lives together and give their own different perspectives on the events of a particular night when Frank was unable to perform a miracle. Despite their connection the characters never occupy the same space together on stage and only Frank gets a second monologue.

The absence of interaction between the performers highlights the isolation of their characters and the fragmented indeterminate nature of their stories invites the audience to complete the narrative. As such the process the three women undergo in Bailegangaire is repeated here with the audience invited more directly to share in the story making process and as a result enjoy a temporary sense of community. Lonergan explains,

In Irish monologues – especially those that feature more than one character – part of the role of the audience is to piece together the strands of information, judging the credibility of the narration, and attempting to understand the gap between the deeds being described onstage and their mode of transmission. Being part of an audience at the performance of a monologue thus becomes a communal enterprise, in which meanings are created in the interplay between performers and audiences. (2009, 185)

These narrated stories delivered as monologues onstage do not contain any obvious dramatic transformation of the characters. The meaning of what has been represented and what has changed is instead determined by the audience. As such these plays have been considered to adhere to Hans Thies Lehmann’s concept of postdramatic theatre. (Barnett, 2006) When considered in this light, storytelling in Irish theatre can be viewed as at once situated within a national cultural context and a broader international framework. The act of storytelling becomes in the contemporary a means to achieve a sense of temporary “belonging together” in a globalised world that is connected through commerce and technology but often starved of human contact and shared experiences in the presence of others.

Case Study Two: The Weir Written by Conor McPherson

Premiere: The Royal Court, London, 1997 directed by Ian Rickson

Notable Revival: Donmar Warehouse, London, 2013 directed by Josie Rourke

Conor McPherson had established himself as a playwright by writing monologue plays that made use of storytelling directly to an audience with such plays as Rum and Vodka (1994), This Limetree Bower (1995) and St. Nicholas (1997). However, when commissioned by the Royal Court the then artistic Director Steven Daldry stipulated that the new play could not be another monologue. The play that McPherson wrote was The Weir which involves characters telling stories as its central action which Scott T. Cummings considers “McPherson’s characteristically cheeky response to the call for him to write characters who talk to each other instead of an audience” (2000, 308).

Set in a pub in “a rural part of Ireland, Northwest Leitrim or Sligo” (McPherson 1998, 3) the play concerns three bachelors, Jack a mechanic, Jim a handyman gambler and Brendan the publican whose usual social ritual of meeting up together for drinks is enlivened by the arrival of their old friend Finbar, a successful businessman, who brings with him Valerie a young Dublin woman who has just moved into the area. From their banter in the pub we learn about the men’s backgrounds and their isolation. They begin to tell ghost stories prompted by Valerie’s interest in knowing more about the locale. Valerie then adds her own haunting story of personal loss and terror which shocks the men but unites them all in shared empathy. Emboldened by the intimacy the storytelling has created Jack discloses an intimate account of his own regrets and missed steps that have transformed him into a phantom in his own life.

These narratives begin to destabilise the realistic stage world that has been set up for us through the realistic mise-en-scene of the pub and the characters’ convincing naturalistic interactions up to this point. Firstly, the stories introduce a sense of the uncanny to the stage which undermines the familiarity and even fixity of the set as the characters all seem to believe in their confrontations with the supernatural despite their protestations to the contrary. Secondly, the stories reveal the vulnerabilities of these men that have begun the play establishing prowess through competitive banter. This creates a safe space for Valerie to share her very personal story of loss which in turn encourages Jack to finally open up at the close of the play. Thirdly, the stories break down any sense of time as the tales become present in the telling and the preternatural forces of which they tell exist beyond any temporal limits. Mythic Ireland is evoked in Jack’s story of the ancient fairy road that runs through the Nealon house that Valerie is now occupying; Jim’s disturbing tale of a ghostly paedophile that remains predatory even after death conjures the years of horrific abuses perpetrated and covered-up by Church and state in Ireland; and Valerie’s account of her daughter contacting her by phone from beyond the grave brings the spectral into the contemporary. Kevin Kerrane offers further analysis of the “structural elegance” of The Weir writing, “The play incorporates five stories in all, and the first four offer models of intensification, as each narrative becomes more personal and more unsettling than the one before” (2006, 108).

This intensification of experience and the collapsing of temporal divisions of past and future into the present theatricalises the telling of these narratives transforming them into a live event that is full of immediacy for the audience. Indeed, the stage moves from a place of mimetic representation towards a shared theatrical space through the telling of the stories. This is another example of a contemporary Irish play’s use of negative dramaturgy to transform space (see Chapter 9). In his later monologue play Port Authority (2001) McPherson writes in the stage directions that “The play is set in the theatre” (2004, 137). The Weir could also be considered to move from being set in the public house to public theatre through the performativity of storytelling. Furthering this idea Patrick Maley considers McPherson’s plays as creating a theatricalised space of becoming for his characters where “the implied ethos [is] not ‘I have a story, therefore I am’ but rather ‘I have a story, therefore I might be’” (2014, 209–210). He qualifies this by stating how the characters are “not performing identities constituted in their stories but performatively creating identities through the collaborative process of storytelling to an audience” (2014, 209–210).

The verity of the stories is thus not of consequence and the “truth”, or more properly here the meaning-making, resides in the telling as audiences must form their conception of the characters presented on what the different narratives reveal about them. This sense of the instability of the stories and the unreliability of the narrators is perhaps compounded by the details of Valerie’s tale in particular which contains many overlaps with those that come before hers. Jordan writes how this could be considered in gendered terms: “it is possible to read her narrative as a ruse, as a clever deconstructive attack on the male characters struggles for self-definition and the hold that they have over both the space and the storytelling format itself” (2022, 143). Regardless of its sincerity Valerie’s story is powerful, like the others that preceded it, the story creates intimacy between her and the drinkers in the pub allowing Valerie to move from being an outsider to insider within this gathered community while still maintaining her difference to them. Indeed, all the characters are afforded a chance to become and belong, to be different and accepted through the power of sharing stories. The audience are asked to aid in this process as the storytelling demands that they make the meaning from what is being told and enjoy a temporary sense of belonging with relative strangers who all listen together to the theatrical tales of supernatural “otherness” being told.

Adaptation and Performing Heteroglossia

Adaptations of plays written in a foreign language have been a key part of Irish theatre for over a hundred years. One of the founding aims of the National Theatre Society was to stage major European classics alongside new work by Irish playwrights. This lead to Yeats’s adapting Sophocles’s Oedipus plays and Lady Gregory translating “the comedies of Molière into Kiltartan, her own distinctive Hiberno-English dialect; the miser and the would-be gentleman in her versions talked as if they came from East Galway” (Grene 2010, 101). Later in the 1940s and 50s Tomás Mac Anna was tasked with translating and staging more modern European dramas by Gheon, Jalabert, Benevente and others into Gaelic at the Abbey. He credited the challenging dramaturgies of these texts as key to his development as a director and designer (Walsh 2016). It is also arguable that this translation practice lead to a more outward looking approach at the Abbey under Mac Anna’s artistic direction in the 1960s as we outlined in Chapter 2. From the 1980s onward an increasing number of Irish playwrights were found to write adaptations of classical and modern European drama adapting them to an Irish context. The list of playwrights includes Brian Friel, Thomas Kilroy, Tom Murphy, Marina Carr, Enda Walsh, Conor McPherson, Deirdre Kinahan, Michael West, Mark O’Rowe and Lucy Caldwell. Frank McGuinness has written over twenty adaptations of ancient Greek and modern European classics alone.

This section wishes to consider how plays in languages other than Irish or English have been hibernicised through adaptation to an Irish context as well as how Irish theatre has adapted to the proliferation of different languages now spoken in Ireland.

Marvin Carlson writes:

The tradition of a theatre closely tied to a particular nation and a particular language still may dominate a generally held idea of how theatre operates, but the new theatre that is most oriented toward the contemporary world no longer is restricted to this model, and one of the most important challenges it faces is the presentation of a newly interdependent world that speaks with many different voices. The heteroglossic stage, for centuries an interesting but marginal part of the dramatic tradition, became in the late twentieth century a truly important international phenomenon. (2006, 19)

As other chapters in this book have argued, theatre in Ireland is closely aligned to the concept of nation and as outlined earlier in this chapter the particular way English is spoken in Ireland, a legacy of colonisation, continues to be explored by playwrights for theatrical effect. However, as the population of contemporary Ireland is now made up of diverse people that speak many languages it is important to see how such heteroglossia is reflected in Irish theatre. In the historical chapters we have already charted how Irish theatre in the contemporary period has continued to adopt international modes of production in terms of movement, acting, lighting, and design. Further to this in Chapter 11 we outline frameworks to aid in the analysis of the complexities of intercultural performances in Ireland. Aspects of these chapters are directly relevant to what is presented here and readers are encouraged to connect the chapters but the focus for this section is the speaking of and the translation/adaptation of linguistic systems of communication that are singular to particular nations and cultures as they are written in a dramatic text. As a way to navigate our examination of heteroglossic stages in Ireland we employ Margherita Laera’s distinction between “vertical heteroglossia”: “productions that feature one or more regional/social English dialect/accent” (387), and “horizontal heteroglossia”: “productions that feature two or more national languages” (386). Many Irish plays that feature Irish, English and American characters can be considered to be examples of vertical heteroglossia and many Irish language theatre productions such as those already mentioned in this chapter by Moonfish and Aisling Ghéar are representative of horizontal heteroglossia in their speaking of both English and Irish onstage.

Here, we wish to consider those productions that have been originally written in another language other than Irish or English and have been translated into a modern Irish context. Laera writes “Plays originally written in a foreign language and performed in English can feature a degree of horizontal or vertical heteroglossia, the intensity of which may depend on the source text itself, the translation strategy, or its mise-en-scène, casting, and acting approaches” (389). All aspects of Laera’s frameworks could be applied to productions in Ireland by companies like Corn Exchange, Pan Pan and others that have adapted work originally written in another language. Indeed, Polish Theatre Ireland, formed in 2008 was a company that was dedicated to producing heteroglossic theatre aiming “to intertwine Polish and Irish theatre traditions” (Lech 2018, 603). In 2011 they used the poetry of the Nobel poet Czesław Miłosz to devise Chesslaugh Mewash. Kasia Lech, academic and member of the company, writes of this fascinating production that “Under the direction of Anna Wolf, the company spoke verse in Polish, English, Lithuanian, French, Irish, and Slovak to explore their own precarious and transnational identities in relation to globalization and social networks” (2018, 603). We have chosen here to review some of these productions in Chapter 11 through intercultural frameworks and instead concentrate in this section solely on the translation strategy employed by Irish playwrights in this examination of language in dramatic texts.

As already analysed, a core identifier of Irish drama is the use of Hiberno-English which can be considered to be double-voiced in being written in a unique English dialect that is formed by the residual presence of the Irish language. However, the use of Hiberno-English in the adaptation of modern European classics originally written in Russian, German, Swedish, French or Norwegian arguably allows for a heteroglossia that goes beyond colonial history to situate Ireland in relation to languages and cultures other than that of the former coloniser. These adaptations by Irish playwrights of foreign language drama cannot be accused of a hegemonic domestication of the foreign that obscures the source material, as with some English translations, due to the “also and” duality of Hiberno-English.

The rise of adaptations by Irish dramatists from the 1980s onwards can be traced to two influential productions of Chekhov in 1981: Friel’s adaptation of Three Sisters produced by Field Day and Kilroy’s version of The Seagull for the Royal Court. Friel’s production furthered the interrogation of language and identity that he had begun in Translations (1980) a year earlier. He writes that his motive for adapting Chekhov’s play was to remove the Englishness of the productions which for him stood in the way of the plays connecting with Irish audiences. He writes:

Somehow the rhythms of these versions do not match with the rhythms of our own speech patterns, and I think that they ought to, in some way…this is something about which I feel strongly – in some way we [in Ireland] are constantly overshadowed by the sound of [the] English language, as well as by the printed word. Maybe this does not inhibit us, but it forms us and shapes us in a way that is neither healthy nor valuable for us. (Delaney 2000, 145)

It should be noted here that Friel did not translate Three Sisters from the Russian but adapted it from a literal translation, a process he repeated with all his later adaptations. Kilroy would also follow this method of using a literal translation as the source material as would all subsequent Irish playwrights referring to their works as versions or adaptations rather than translations.

Friel’s intervention in his Three Sisters was with the dialogue, he did not change the setting or time period of the play. This was not the case with Kilroy’s The Seagull. He relocated the play to a crumbling Anglo-Irish Big House in the West of Ireland and in his version of Chekhov’s masterpiece “Konstantin Treplev, the young would-be dramatist, son of the famous actress Arkadina, became a Yeats-like figure trying to stage a fey Celtic Revival drama, mocked by his mother used as she was to traditional nineteenth-century theatre” (Grene 2010, 101). Lonergan views these two approaches as achieving different outcomes in their style of adaptation. He writes “Where Friel had made Chekhov’s foreignness more evident Kilroy showed how his Russia had much in common with Ireland” (Lonergan 2019, 102). Both plays are heteroglossic in that they give voice simultaneously to both an Irish and Russian experience in the English language but in Laera’s terms Friel’s play stresses horizontal heteroglossia in its reference “to culture-specific objects and names” (389) that are Russian, while Kilroy’s play emphasises vertical heteroglossia particularly in placing “the translated text within the literary tradition of the target language” (389). Although, here it is placed within a tradition of Anglo-Irish literature rather than an English literary tradition.

Subsequent Irish adaptations could be said to follow the trajectories of these two influential plays by Friel and Kilroy, some stressing a vertical heteroglossia and others a horizontal heteroglossia which both estranges and makes familiar the work of foreign playwrights. As such these plays reflect a contemporary conceptualisation of Ireland as a modern nation with an open economy situated within a global community where it is understood to have many varied voices that make it similar and different to other countries. The complexities of this situation is something that is addressed in the case study below and in Chapter 11.

Case Study Three: Three Sisters by Anton Chekhov in a Version by Lucy Caldwell from a Literal Translation by Helen Rappaport

Premiere: 15 October, 2016 The Lyric Belfast

In her essay “On Writing Three Sisters” Lucy Caldwell recalls being at a dinner where a Russian scholar warned her that the “play very rarely works in English. A typical Russian toast, he said, might go along the lines of: ‘You are my dearest friend and I want you to know how much I love and esteem you.’ This just doesn’t translate into English, reserved and ironic and understated as it tends to be” (2017, 85). Caldwell replied to the scholar “it might not work in English-English, but it works in Belfast-English: I fucken love you mate, you’re sound as a pound” (2017, 85).

Caldwell’s Three Sisters transposes the economic and social upheaval of late nineteenth century Russia in Chekhov’s original drama to nineties Belfast, during the years of the peace process in Northern Ireland. Her play begins in 1993 a year before the IRA ceasefire and ends in 1998 with the withdrawal of British troops after The Good Friday Agreement. The transitional times the sisters are living in that contrasts with the stasis of their lives is thus given an immediacy and relevance in an Irish context. Caldwell felt Chekhov’s play chimed “most clearly with what it was like to grow up in 1990s Belfast: the turmoil, the tedium, the restlessness, the resentment, the desperate desire to get away, to be somewhere, anywhere but here, now” (2017, 84). In her version of the play the three sisters Olga, Masha and Irina become Orla, Marianne and Erin whose sense of displacement is not due to differing social class as in the original but one of national identity and religious affiliation in a sectarian city where “You always have to watch what you’re saying and who you might be talking to and who might be listening and how you pronounce your constants and what might be betraying you without your even knowing” (Caldwell 2016, 16). The sisters have a mixed identity placing them outside of any British/Irish, Protestant/Catholic division. Marianne explains that they are “not one thing nor the other” as they had an English Catholic Dad and Ulster Protestant Mum, “who gave us Irish-sounding names” (Caldwell 2016, 36). The soldiers who court Erin are British officers, now named Baron and Simon, and their commanding officer Vershinin, retains his name from Chekhov’s play but is found here to have been born in New York with Lithuanian heritage. In Caldwell’s adaptation the sisters do not long to go to Moscow but the United States, their brother Andy is a gifted linguist rather than an accomplished musician, their Uncle is not an army doctor but a hospital porter with a thick Belfast accent and Orla’s husband is no longer a teacher but a disc jockey called D. J. Cool. With all of these identities come different accents and registers giving the piece a vertical heteroglossia and the changes in location, time period and some of the occupations of the characters draws attention to the similarities of the Russian source material to an Irish situation rather than further estranging it.

However, the most significant change made by Caldwell is with the character of Natasha, the lover and later wife of Andy. She is reimagined as Siu Jing, a Cantonese-speaking immigrant from Hong Kong. Caldwell writes of her reasoning for this alteration:

In most versions, as in the original, she [Natasha] is cast as a girl of a lower social class, to whom the sisters are disdainful and snobbish. A hundred years on, the corollary of internal, class-based social upheaval seemed to me to be immigration. I loved the idea that while the sisters endlessly talk about moving across the world and starting their lives again, right under their noses is someone who has done just that, who has arrived in the country barely speaking any English and by the end of the play is fluent. (2017, 86)

In this character’s speaking of Cantonese Caldwell’s Three Sisters is found to emphasise a horizontal heteroglossia where more than one national language is voiced on stage. This heteroglossia goes further than many earlier adaptations by Friel and others where another language is only present predominantly through naming and reference. Here a foreign language is spoken alongside English and thus Caldwell’s play is not only situating Ireland within an international community by adapting a Russian play into an Irish context but it is also showing how Ireland itself must adapt to new cultures and include new voices in its story. In writing the character of Siu Jing it should be noted that Caldwell received help from members of the Chinese community in Belfast who met with her and shared their experiences (Caldwell 2016, 7). Lonergan proposes that Caldwell uses the metaphor of the “foreign” in the figure of Sui-Jing to demonstrate the need for openness to new influences, new people and new definitions of what identity might mean in Northern Ireland today (2019, 108) (Fig. 8.1).

Fig. 8.1
A photo of a female actor performing on stage. She holds a stuffed toy close to her chest. Her eyes sway to the left slightly and her mouth is slightly open and stretched.

(Photo Steffan Hill)

Shin-Fei Chen as Siu-Jing in Three Sisters by Lucy Caldwell, Lyric Theatre, 2016

Full size image

Caldwell does not write Siu Jing’s integration into her new community as simple and seamless. She is not accepted by the sisters who make casual racial comments about her and they resent her presence in their house and their lives. But Caldwell makes her the heart of the play signposting this in a prologue where Siu Jing speaks directly to the audience telling them that while this is the story of three sisters, “It is also my story. It might not have my name on it, but it is my story too” (Caldwell 2016, 18). In Caldwell’s adaptation the sisters are outsiders to the sectarian conflict with their mixed English/Irish and Catholic/Protestant background and Siu Jing is a further cultural outsider as a Chinese national in Northern Ireland. In the final moments of the play, the three sisters come to accept their situation and speak of their steadfast resolve to face “a new dawn” (Caldwell 2016, 102), and to “hold out just a little longer” in order to—“know what all the suffering meant” (Caldwell 2016, 102). Their continued stasis comes with the loss of their old dreams of moving to the US but the Belfast they will continue to reside in is changing and has the potential to become more like the US they dream off—an open-minded culturally diverse place. This is cleverly signified in the last moments of the play as the sisters deliver their final lines while Andy is seen to be pushing one of his mixed-race children in a buggy. Siu Jing and her offspring in their “foreignness” are distanced from the sectarian politics of Northern Ireland’s past and “hint at a much-needed plurality in generations to come” (Caldwell 2017, 86).

Conclusion

Concentration on the use of language and its literariness has been stressed in the reception and criticism of Irish theatre often to the detriment of the design, direction and acting that have also contributed to its achievements. In this book we have made an effort to reclaim the importance of these elements in the production of Irish theatre and offer frameworks in which they can be analysed in terms of the body, space, nationhood and interculturalism. We have also tried in this chapter to make sure not to tip the balance and forget an analysis of language and how it functions theatrically and thematically in Irish theatre. English as it is spoken in Ireland is influenced by and translated from the Irish language and as this chapter has made evident, this process has led to it being inherently theatrical in its strangeness, intensity and immediacy. This is something that Irish writers have utilised to further the dramatic impact of their plays on audiences. They have also explored the performance tradition of storytelling in Ireland which we have examined here in terms of its power to create communion amongst characters and audiences. Finally, we have investigated how the unique phrases and rhythms of Hiberno-English have been employed by playwrights to adapt works written in other languages in order to register the similarities and differences of other cultures. We argue that this adapting process has created a heteroglossic stage that speaks in many voices enabling the language of Irish theatre to be considered beyond the postcolonial binary of English/Irish but to be also thought of in terms of Russian or Norwegian or French. In the final case study of the chapter we propose that the concept of a heteroglossic stage offers a model of Irish theatre that is multi-voiced and intercultural reflecting the contemporary diversity of cultures and languages in Ireland today.