This book on modern and contemporary Irish Theatre traces how social, cultural and economic capital are circulated in order to demonstrate complex and often contradictory outlooks on equality/inequality. Individual chapters analyse property ownership and inheritance, wealth acquisition, employment conditions, educational access, intercultural encounters, sexual intimacy and violation, and acts of resistance, protest and solidarity. This book addresses complex intergenerational, intercultural, racial, sectarian, ethnic, gender and inter- and intra-class dynamics, from the perspective of ranked, objectifying, exploitative and coercive relationships, but also in terms of commonalities, complicities, reciprocations and retaliations. Notable are the significances of wealth precarity and shaming, the consequences of anti-materialistic dramaturgical leanings, the pathologising of success, the fraught nature of solidarity, and the problematics of merit, divisive partitioning and muddled mésalliances. Ultimately the book wonders about how Irish Theatre distinguishes between tolerable and intolerable inequalities that are culturally, socially but principally economically derived.

Irish theatre has never been so successful, yet at the same time never more in need of rigorous evaluation. Many of the plays by Brian Friel, Thomas Murphy, Thomas Kilroy, Frank McGuinness, Anne Devlin, Sebastian Barry, Conor McPherson, Martin McDonagh (LondonIrish), Marina Carr, Billy Roche and Marie Jones have been critically acclaimed and won substantial awards. In addition, Irish directors, designers, actors and administrators have worked at some of the best theatres in the world and with some of the most talented professionals available. In this comprehensive collection of essays, playwrights, directors, journalists, theatre practitioners, critics and academics, from many different countries and backgrounds, give their perceptive points of view. Each contributor takes an approach which is passionate, idiosyncratic, astute, provocative and refreshing. All of the writing, in one way or another, hints at the demands, magic, urgency and ephemeral qualities of good theatre. This extremely valuable collection of accessible essays will promote discussion and is a timely and welcome addition to the critical debate on Irish drama.

Multiple productions and the international successes of plays like The Weir have led to Conor McPherson being regarded by many as one of the finest writers of his generation. McPherson has also been hugely prolific as a theatre director, as a screenwriter and film director, garnering many awards in these different roles. In this collection of essays, commentators from around the world address the substantial range of McPherson's output to date in theatre and film, a body of work written primarily during and in the aftermath of Ireland's Celtic Tiger period. These critics approach the work in challenging and dynamic ways, considering the crucial issues of morality, the rupturing of the real, storytelling, and the significance of space, violence and gender. Explicit considerations are given to comedy and humour, and to theatrical form, especially that of the monologue and to the ways that the otherworldly, the unconscious and the supernatural are accommodated dramaturgically, with frequent emphasis placed on the specific aspects of performance in both theatre and film.

This Handbook offers a multiform sweep of theoretical, historical, practical and personal glimpses into a landscape roughly characterised as contemporary Irish theatre and performance. Bringing together a spectrum of voices and sensibilities in each of its four sections - Histories, Close-ups, Interfaces, and Reflections - it casts its gaze back across the past sixty years or so to recall, analyse, and assess the recent legacy of theatre and performance on this island. While offering information, overviews and reflections of current thought across its chapters, this book will serve most handily as food for thought and a springboard for curiosity. Offering something different in its mix of themes and perspectives, so that previously unexamined surfaces might come to light individually and in conjunction with other essays, it is a wide-ranging and indispensable resource in Irish theatre studies.

This book interrogates the various manifestations of rival systems of justice in the plays and films of Martin McDonagh, in analysis informed by the critical writings of Michael J. Sandel, Steven Pinker, Julia Kristeva, and in particular Amartya Sen on violence, justice, equality and the law. In McDonagh's works, failures to investigate adequately criminal actions are matched by multiple forced confessions and umpteen miscarriages of justice. The author explores McDonagh's creative worlds as ones where distinctions between victim and perpetrator and guilt and innocence are precarious, where the burden of truth seldom reaches the threshold of beyond reasonable doubt and where the punishments and rewards of justice are applied randomly. This project considers the abject nature of justice in McDonagh's writing, with the vast implications of justice being fragile, suspect, piecemeal, deviant, haphazard and random. Tentative forms of justice are tempered and then threatened by provocative, anarchic and abject humour. As the author argues, McDonagh's writing cleverly circulates rival, incompatible and comparative systems of justice in order to substantiate the necessities and virtues of justice.

The spellbinding premiere of The Weir at the Royal Court in 1997 was the first of many works to bring Conor McPherson to the attention of the theatre-going public. Acclaimed plays followed, including Shining City, The Seafarer, The Night Alive and Girl from the North Country, garnering international acclaim and being regularly produced around the globe. McPherson has also had significant successes as a theatre director, film director and screenwriter, most notably, with his award-winning screenplay for I Went Down. This companion offers a detailed and engaging critical analysis of the plays and films of Conor McPherson. It considers issues of gender and class disparity, violence and wealth in the cultural and political contexts in which the work is written and performed, as well as the inclusion of song, sound, the supernatural, religious and pagan festive sensibilities through which initial genre perceptions are nudged elsewhere, towards the unconscious and ineffable. Supplemented by a number of contributed critical and performance perspectives, including an interview with Conor McPherson, this is a book to be read by theatre audiences, performance-makers and students who wish to explore, contextualize and situate McPherson's provocative, exquisite and generation-defining writings and performances.

Songs, airs, and dance music from Ireland. A delightful and handy book, crammed with songs and dance tunes with specific notes and hints for most traditional instruments. Eighteen songs and more than 60 tunes.

The spellbinding premiere of The Weir at the Royal Court in 1997 was the first of many works to bring Conor McPherson to the attention of the theatre-going public. Acclaimed plays followed, including Shining City, The Seafarer, The Night Alive and Girl from the North Country, garnering international acclaim and being regularly produced around the globe. McPherson has also had significant successes as a theatre director, film director and screenwriter, most notably, with his award-winning screenplay for I Went Down. This companion offers a detailed and engaging critical analysis of the plays and films of Conor McPherson. It considers issues of gender and class disparity, violence and wealth in the cultural and political contexts in which the work is written and performed, as well as the inclusion of song, sound, the supernatural, religious and pagan festive sensibilities through which initial genre perceptions are nudged elsewhere, towards the unconscious and ineffable. Supplemented by a number of contributed critical and performance perspectives, including an interview with Conor McPherson, this is a book to be read by theatre audiences, performance-makers and students who wish to explore, contextualize and situate McPherson's provocative, exquisite and generation-defining writings and performances.