Ireland, Memory and Performing the Historical Imagination

1. Front Matter

   Pages i-xiv

   PDF

2. Introduction: the Rest is History

   1. Introduction: the Rest is History

      • Christopher Collins, Mary P. Caulfield

      Pages 1-15

3. Legacy and Heritage

   1. Front Matter

      Pages 17-17

      PDF

   2. Walking In and Out of Place: the Pedestrian Performances of Tim Robinson

      • Daniel Sack

      Pages 19-35

   3. A Theatre of the Unword: Censorship, Hegemony and Samuel Beckett

      • Nicholas Johnson

      Pages 36-54

   4. Re-considering Oscar Wilde’s Flamboyant Flop: Vera or The Nihilists

      • Aideen Kerr

      Pages 55-68

   5. Courtly Love and Heroic Death in W. B. Yeats’s Cuchulain Cycle of Plays

      • Paul Murphy

      Pages 69-86

   6. ‘… Whenever the Tale of ‘98 is Told’: Constance Markievicz, the National Memory and ‘The Women of Ninety-Eight’

      • Mary P. Caulfield

      Pages 87-100

   7. Theatre of Dissent: the Historical Imagination of the Irish Workers’ Dramatic Company

      • Lauren Arrington

      Pages 101-117

   8. Staging the Body in Post-Independence Ireland

      • Lionel Pilkington

      Pages 118-136

4. Recollection and Remembrance

   1. Front Matter

      Pages 137-137

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   2. Pampooties and Keening: Alternate Ways of Performing Memory in J. M. Synge’s Plays

      • Hélène Lecossois

      Pages 139-154

   3. ‘Why Do You Always Be Singin’ That Oul’ Song?’: the Subversion of Emigrant Ballads in John B. Keane’s Many Young Men of Twenty

      • Joseph Greenwood

      Pages 155-170

   4. Boxed Rituals: Eamon de Valera, Television and Talbot’s Box

      • Michael Jaros

      Pages 171-189

   5. Unblessed Amongst Women: Performing Patriarchy Without Men in Contemporary Irish Theatre

      • Cormac O’Brien

      Pages 190-206

   6. The Abuse of History/A History of Abuse: Theatre as Memory and the Abbey’s ‘Darkest Corner’

      • Emilie Pine

      Pages 207-222

   7. Forgetting Follow

      • Christopher Collins

      Pages 223-238

5. Back Matter

   Pages 239-244

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This book explores the performance of Irish collective memories and forgotten histories. It proposes an alternative and more comprehensive criterion of Irish theatre practices. These practices can be defined as the 'rejected', contested and undervalued plays and performativities that are integral to Ireland's political and cultural landscapes.

• Irish performance memory and performance
• Irish theatre
• Beckett
• Samuel Beckett
• television
• theatre
• William Butler Yeats
• British and Irish Literature

“While it might appear a purely historical book, Ireland, Memory and Performing the Historical Imagination ensures that the past is interrogated with the lens of current concerns—theatrically, theoretically, and philosophically.” (Brian Singleton, Theatre Journal, Vol. 68, (3), September, 2016)

“It serves as an excellent addition to the vast field of Irish theatre and performance studies research, and will be of great benefit to anyone with a keen interest in Irish theatre histories and the act of ‘remembering’ and ‘re-performing’ memory on the Irish stage.” (Carole Quigley, New Theatre Quarterly, Vol. 31 (3), August, 2015)

'With such a rich diversity of critical voices and perspectives, this laudable and exceptionally wide-ranging collection astutely brings to bear on Irish theatre historiography numerous marginalized discourses that address the interfaces between society, texts, archives, cultural memory and performance research.

These essays address legacy, heritage, recollection, remembrance, neglected or denied histories, counter-normative and minority pasts, and the re-possession of the repressed in ways that memory and history interdigitate to complicate relationships between presence and absence, amnesia and awareness, censorship and enablement. Interfaces between fiction, performance, intervention and a utopian consciousness are deemed to be hugely important.

Judicious, imaginative, thought-provoking and on many occasions very surprising, this new collected body of work adds with great distinction to the ever-expanding field of Irish Theatre scholarship and will appeal greatly to those interested in Irish, Memory and Performance Studies.' - Eamonn Jordan, University College Dublin, Ireland

• Samuel Beckett Centre, Trinity College Dublin, Ireland

  Christopher Collins

• State University of New York, Farmingdale, USA

  Mary P. Caulfield

Lauren Arrington University of Liverpool, UK Joseph Greenwood, Queen's University, Belfast, UK Michael Jaros, Salem State University, USA Nicholas Johnson, Trinity College Dublin, Ireland Aideen Kerr, Trinity College Dublin, Ireland Hélène Lecossois, Université du Maine, France Paul Murphy, Queen's University Belfast, UK Cormac O'Brien, University College Dublin, Ireland Lionel Pilkington, NUI Galway, Ireland Emilie Pine, University College Dublin, Ireland Daniel Sack, University of Massachusetts in Amherst, USA

Policies and ethics