Ireland, Memory and Performing the Historical Imagination

by Collins, Christopher; Caulfield, Mary P.

• ISBN13: 9781137362179
• ISBN10: 1137362170
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2014-12-05
• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan

Summary

Irish theatre and performance has a perennial impetus to hold a mirror up to the nation. However, the performance of collective memories and forgotten histories creates a peculiar problem for this impetus; all of a sudden unorthodox memories and histories are brought into public performance spaces where they proceed to question idealized reflections. At a time when Ireland's political, cultural and economic climate is changing rapidly, Ireland is once again at odds with the proverbial looking glass. Written by leading experts in their particular fields, each chapter included in this collection locates a performance of memory and/or forgotten history which reconsiders the archive of Irish theatre and performance by rewriting what has been written out. In doing so, this book serves as an intervention into, or anticipation of, the future marginalization of alternative processes of performance.

Author Biography

Christopher Collins teaches at The Samuel Beckett Centre in Trinity College Dublin, Ireland. He has published widely on heritage, history, memory and forgetting in Irish theatre.

Mary P. Caulfield teaches at the State University of New York at Farmingdale, USA. She has published widely on memory and forgetting in Irish Theatre, history, heritage and women's theatre histories.

Table of Contents

Introduction: The Rest is History; Christopher Collins and Mary P. Caulfield
PART I: LEGACY AND HERITAGE
1. Walking In and Out of Place: the Pedestrian Performances of Tim Robinson; Daniel Sack
2. A Theatre of the Unword: Censorship, Hegemony, and Samuel Beckett; Nicholas Johnson
3. Re-considering Oscar Wilde's Flamboyant Flop: Vera or The Nihilists; Aideen Kerr
4. Courtly Love and Heroic Death in W.B. Yeats's Cuchulain Cycle of Plays; Paul Murphy
5. '…Whenever the Tale of '98 is told': Constance Markievicz, the National Memory and 'the women of ninety-eight'; Mary P. Caulfield
6. Theatre of Dissent: the Historical Imagination of the Irish Workers' Dramatic Company; Lauren Arrington
7. Staging the Body in Post-independence Ireland; Lionel Pilkington
PART II: RECOLLECTION AND REMEMBRANCE
8. Pampooties and Keening: Alternate Ways of Performing Memory in J.M. Synge's Plays; Hélène Lecossois
9. '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
10. Boxed Rituals: Eamon de Valera, Television, and Talbot's Box; Michael Jaros
11. Unblessed Amongst Women: Performing Patriarchy Without Men in Contemporary Irish Theatre; Cormac O'Brien
12. The Abuse of History/a History of Abuse: Theatre as Memory and the Abbey's 'darkest corner'; Emilie Pine
13. Forgetting Follow; Christopher Collins
Bibliography
Index