|
Showing 1 - 8 of
8 matches in All Departments
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.
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.
|
You may like...
Donker Web
Fanie Viljoen
Paperback
(2)
R270
R119
Discovery Miles 1 190
|