Abstract
The Boys of Foley Street offered snapshots of the local community and their struggle to survive poverty and social exclusion in the 1970s and 1980s, particularly their immersion in a heroin epidemic that wreaked havoc on a whole generation of local residents. In addition, the production gestured to the 1974 loyalist car bomb that brought death and destruction in Talbot Street on the Monto’s southern perimeter. The performance captured the chaos of street life before leading us into the interior of a criminal world of crime, sex and drugs, and then to the flipside interior of the community’s vigilantist response. Blurring the boundaries between the real and the performative, the production challenged spectators’ simultaneous copresence in a community and their consumption of culture.
A small section of this chapter was previously published as part of an essay entitled ‘ANU Productions and Site-specific Performance: The Politics of Space and Place’, Breac: A Digital Journal of Irish Studies, 10 July 2014.
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- 1.
Ireland’s national broadcaster, Raidió Teilifís Éireann.
- 2.
A fourth bomb exploded in Monaghan on the same day.
- 3.
Larry in The Boys of Foley Street, in Patrick Lonergan, ed., Contemporary Irish Plays. London and New York: Bloomsbury Methuen Drama, 2015, p. 351. (Larry 2015)
- 4.
Wireless radio frequency electromagnetic field used to transfer data.
- 5.
- 6.
Noely in The Boys of Foley Street, in Patrick Lonergan, ed., Contemporary Irish Plays, p. 351.
- 7.
Veronica Guerin’s interview with Anne, wife of Tony Felloni, http://www.independent.co.uk/news/in-her-final-article-for-the-sunday-independent-published-this-week-veronica-guerin-interviewed-the-1339093.html (Accessed 3.1.16.) See also Paul Reynolds, King Scum: The Life and Crimes of Tony Felloni, Dublin’s Heroin Boss. Dublin: Gill & Macmillan, 1998. (Reynolds 1998)
- 8.
Carol Martin, Theatre of the Real. Basingstoke & New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013, p. 5. (Martin 2013)
- 9.
Ernst Van Alphen, Caught by History: Holocaust Effects in Contemporary Art, Literature, and Theory. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1997, p. 31. (Van Alphen 1997)
- 10.
Paul Connerton, How Societies Remember. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014, p. 13. (Connerton 2014)
- 11.
Review by Susan Conley, Irish Theatre Magazine, 29 September 2012. http://www.irishtheatremagazine.ie/Reviews/Current/Dublin-Theatre-Festival–The-Boys-of-Foley-Street (Accessed 3.1.16.) (Conley 2012)
- 12.
See Chapter 1 for a discussion of ‘affect’ for the embedded spectator in performance.
- 13.
Review by Peter Crawley, The Irish Times: http://www.irishtimes.com/blogs/festival-hub/2012/09/27/review-the-boys-of-foley-street/ (Accessed 3.1.16.)
- 14.
Caomhan Keane’s review on entertainment.ie: http://entertainment.ie/theatre/feature/Dublin-Theatre-Festival-The-Boys-of-Foley-Street-ANU-Productions/211/3383.htm (Accessed 30.12.15.)
- 15.
I discuss the spectator’s ‘experience’ in terms of ‘praesence’ in the Introduction and Conclusion as it was only after the conclusion of the cycle of performances that I had enough critical distance to determine that my principal focus as spectator was not the subject of representation but my own performance in relation to the subject.
- 16.
Walter Benjamin, The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction. 1938. London: Penguin, 2008, Chapter Four. (Benjamin 2008)
- 17.
Sophie Gorman’s review in The Irish Independent, 29.9.12. http://www.independent.ie/entertainment/books/dublin-theatre-festival-review-the-boys-of-foley-street-28815460.html (Accessed 30.12.15.) (Gorman 2012)
- 18.
Chris Morash & Shaun Richards, Mapping Irish Theatre: Theories of Space and Place. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014. (Morash and Richards 2014)
- 19.
Caomhan Keane, Review, entertainment.ie: http://entertainment.ie/theatre/feature/Dublin-Theatre-Festival-The-Boys-of-Foley-Street-ANU-Productions/211/3383.htm (Accessed 30.12.15.)
- 20.
Louise Lowe, ‘The Boys (of Foley Street) are Back in Town: Interview with Louise Lowe’, 30 September 2012. http://www.independent.ie/incoming/the-boys-of-foley-street-are-back-in-town-28815905.html (Accessed 30.12.15.) (Lowe 2012)
- 21.
Manuel Castells, The Rise of the Network Society, Vol. 1, The Information Age: Economy, Society, and Culture. 2nd Edition. Oxford & Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2000, pp. 407–459. (Castells 2000)
Bibliography
Benjamin, Walter. The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction. 1938. London: Penguin, 2008.
Castells, Manuel. The Rise of the Network Society, Vol. 1, The Information Age: Economy, Society, and Culture. 2nd edition. Oxford & Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2000.
Conley, Susan. ‘Review of The Boys of Foley Street’. Irish Theatre Magazine, 29 September 2012. http://www.irishtheatremagazine.ie/Reviews/Current/Dublin-Theatre-Festival-The-Boys-of-Foley-Street
Gorman, Sophie. ‘Review of The Boys of Foley Street’. The Irish Independent, 29 September 2012. http://www.independent.ie/entertainment/books/dublin-theatre-festival-review-the-boys-of-foley-street-28815460.html
Lonergan, Patrick, ed. Contemporary Irish Plays. London & New York: Bloomsbury Methuen Drama, 2015.
Lowe, Louise. ‘The Boys (of Foley Street) are Back in Town: Interview with Louise Lowe’. The Irish Independent, 30 September 2012. http://www.independent.ie/incoming/the-boys-of-foley-street-are-back-in-town-28815905.html
Martin, Carol. Theatre of the Real. Basingstoke & New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013.
Morash, Chris & Shaun Richards. Mapping Irish Theatre: Theories of Space and Place. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014.
Reynolds, Paul. King Scum: The Life and Crimes of Tony Felloni, Dublin’s Heroin Boss. Dublin: Gill & Macmillan, 1998.
Van Alphen, Ernst. Caught by History: Holocaust Effects in Contemporary Art, Literature, and Theory. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1997.
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Singleton, B. (2016). The Boys of Foley Street. In: ANU Productions. Palgrave Pivot, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-349-95133-8_4
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-349-95133-8_4
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