Perspectives on Contemporary Irish Theatre

Populating the Stage

Anne Etienne, Thierry Dubost, Anne Etienne, Thierry Dubost

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9783319597102
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Theatre

This book addresses the notion posed by Thomas Kilroy in his definition of a playwright's creative process: 'We write plays, I feel, in order to populate the stage'. It gathers eclectic reflections on contemporary Irish theatre from both Irish theatre practitioners and international academics. The eighteen contributions offer innovative perspectives on Irish theatre since the early 1990s up to the present, testifying to the development of themes explored by emerging and established playwrights as well as to the (r)evolutions in practices and approaches to the stage that have taken place in the last thirty years.
This cross-disciplinary collection devotes as much attention to contextual questions and approaches to the stage in practice as it does to the play text in its traditional and revised forms. The essays and interviews encourage dialectic exchange between analytical studies on contemporary Irish theatre and contributions by theatre practitioners.

Table of contents

• Foreword
• Contents
• About the Editors
• List of Figures
• Chapter 1 Introduction
• Part I Dramaturgical Approaches
• Chapter 2 Innovation Meets Evocation: Tom Mac Intyre’s Plays at the Peacock Theatre
• Chapter 3 From Dementia to Utopia: Tragedy and Transcendence in Frank McGuinness’s The Hanging Gardens
• Chapter 4 Women and Scarecrows: Marina Carr’s Stage Bodies
• Chapter 5 McDonagh’s “True, Lonesome West”
• Chapter 6 The Physical and Verbal Theatre of Michael West
• Chapter 7 A Dark Rosebud on the Irish Stage: Ailís Ní Ríain’s Tallest Man in the World
• Part II Practitioners’ Voices
• Chapter 8 Death of a Playwright
• Chapter 9 Looking Back and Forward on Sound Design: Irish Theatre Transformed
• Chapter 10 Lightning in a Bottle: The BrokenCrow Experiment
• Chapter 11 Interview with Bríd Ó Gallchoir
• Chapter 12 Interview with Pat Kinevane
• Chapter 13 Interview with Mark O’Rowe
• Chapter 14 Enda Walsh, in Conversation with Ger FitzGibbon
• Part III Political and Societal Reflections on the Stage
• Chapter 15 Slump and Punk in Ray Scannell’s Losing Steam: Envisioning Corcadorca
• Chapter 16 Through a Glass, Darkly: Priests on the Contemporary Irish Stage
• Chapter 17 Populating the Irish Stage with (Dis)Abled Bodies: Sanctuary by Christian O’Reilly and the Blue Teapot Company
• Chapter 18 Queering the Irish Stage: Shame, Sexuality, and the Politics of Testimonial
• Chapter 19 A Gendered Absence: Feminist Theatre, Glasshouse Productions and the #WTF Movement
• Index