Irish Drama

Re-Translations, or, Can the Postcolonial Construct a Home? A Reading of Brian Friel's The Communication Cord

by Aidan O'Malley

Published in: 'EnterText', 2003, 2; 2, pp. 68-83

Challenging Englishness from the Racial Margins: William Charles Macready’s The Irishman in London; Or, The Happy African

by Christopher Flynn

Antigone Stopped in Belfast: Stacey Gregg's "Ismene".

by Anastasia (Natasha) Remoundou-Howley

published in New Voices in Classical Reception Studies, August 2011, Issue 6, Open University.

This article explores the resurgence of Sophocles’ Antigone in Stacey Gregg’s Northern Irish play.... more


This article explores the resurgence of Sophocles’ Antigone in Stacey Gregg’s Northern Irish play. Gregg transplants the Greek heroine’s apolitical act in Northern Ireland to question politics, society, as well as estimate the impact of the internal sectarian divisions and the (im)possible means of reconciliation in the present and the future. The political inflections and valuable individual insights into notions of violence, mourning, history, memory, ethics, nationalism, belonging, community, civil disobedience, kinship, love, hatred, justice, reconciliation, forgiveness and peace with which Gregg invests her adaptation, are delivered with admirable originality. Taking over from the 1980s ‘conventionally dated’ (Hall 2004:20-21) political conflicts to a new millennial figuration of the myth, the young playwright interrogates Irish history, politics, culture and the legacy of revenge in Northern Irish society. Most significantly, Gregg voices the troubling effects of violence and its exorcism through mourning practices that shift their focus on Ismene’s persona after whom her version takes its title. Gregg takes note of the immense impact the McCartney case had in Irish society in recent years, and in 2007 decides to adapt Antigone as a response to that overwhelming real-life family drama which resembles the two sisters’ agon against the state and each other to bury their slain brother.

M. Jennings (2009) ‘Playing Your Role: Identity and Community-Based Performance in Contemporary Northern Ireland’, About Performance 9: Playing Politics: Performance, Community and Social Change, 103-125.

by Matt Jennings

Community-based theatre has been a key element of the peace building strategies deployed in Northern Ireland since the... more Community-based theatre has been a key element of the peace building strategies deployed in Northern Ireland since the Good Friday Agreement of 1998. Local, national and international political institutions and NGOs have supported an unprecedented level of ‘community drama’ activity in the name of such interventionist agendas as social regeneration, conflict transformation, educational outreach and cross-border development. Community and arts organisations have applied a wide range of performance practices in their attempts to facilitate these outcomes.

This article will discuss the findings of detailed case studies on the work of two organisations: The Playhouse, based in Northern Ireland, and Upstate Theatre Project, based in the Republic of Ireland. The Playhouse and Upstate Theatre are both located in towns close to the border, and this article will focus on their cross-border work The intention is to explore the relationship of their applied theatre practice to the policies of conflict transformation, and to analyse the praxis of Upstate and The Playhouse with regard to the interplay of public policy, organisational culture and ‘grass-roots’ participation. This analysis will focus on the various concepts of identity deployed at these three levels, teasing out some of the complexities implicit in the relationship of public discourse to lived experience and praxis.

Synge’s Abbey Theatre: Space and Performance

by Hugh Denard

Visiting Research Fellow, Long Room Hub, Trinity College Dublin, Jan-March 2011. Digital modelling by Noho (www.noho.ie).

A digital reconstruction of Dublin's Abbey Theatre as it was on its opening night, 27th December 1904, more A digital reconstruction of Dublin's Abbey Theatre as it was on its opening night, 27th December 1904, http://blog.oldabbeytheatre.net/. This new, three-dimensional model is opening up fresh ways of exploring the stories and histories of the early years of Ireland’s National Theatre. Images of the completed digital model are freely available from the project's website, which has also tracked, step by step, the process of researching and creating the model, making the process visible and accountable.