The Politics of Irish Drama: Plays in Context from Boucicault to Friel

by Nicholas Grene

• ISBN13: 9780521665360
• ISBN10: 0521665361
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2000-02-13
• Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Summary

In this book Nicholas Grene explores political contexts for some of the outstanding Irish plays from the nineteenth century to the contemporary period. The politics of Irish drama have previously been considered primarily the politics of national self-expression. Here it is argued that Irish plays, in their self-conscious representation of the otherness of Ireland, are outwardly directed towards audiences both at home and abroad. The political dynamics of such relations between plays and audiences is the book's multiple subject: the stage interpretation of Ireland from The Shaughraun to Translations; the contentious stage images of Yeats, Gregory and Synge; reactions to revolution from O'Casey to Behan; the post-colonial worlds of Purgatory and All that Fall; the imagined Irelands of Friel and Murphy, McGuinness and Barry. With its fundamental reconception of the politics of Irish drama, this book represents a new view of the phenomenon of Irish drama itself.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgements	x
Chronology	xi
List of abbreviations	xvi
Introduction	1	(4)
Stage interpreters	5	(46)
Strangers in the house	51	(26)
Shifts in perspective	77	(33)
Class and space in O'Casey	110	(26)
Reactions to revolution	136	(34)
Living on	170	(24)
Versions of pastoral	194	(25)
Murphy's Ireland	219	(23)
Imagining the other	242	(27)
Conclusion: a world elsewhere	261	(8)
Notes	269	(21)
Bibliography	290	(11)
Index	301