Abstract
This chapter investigates some of the ways in which traumatic intercultural arrivals and encounters are dramatized and staged in contemporary Irish theatre. Plays examined include Donal O’Kelly’s Asylum! Asylum! (1994); Gavin Kostick’s This Is What We Sang (2009); Elizabeth Kuti’s The Sugar Wife (2005); Gianina Cãrbunario’s Kebab (2007); Mirjana Rendulic’s Broken Promise Land (2013); Paul Meade’s Mushroom (2007); Owen McCafferty’s Quietly (2009); and Stacey Gregg’s Shibboleth (2015). The chapter offers an analysis of the shared critical engagement of these plays with notions of community and immigration and with the links of these notions to social and ethnic divisions. It puts forward the argument that the selected plays question relationships between agency, victimhood and trauma and the artistic representation of pain and suffering. The chapter concludes that in these Irish plays with international protagonists a common focus on shared humanity is applied through the use of familiar Irish dramaturgical techniques that highlight the absurdity of arbitrary political and cultural frontiers between people.
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Notes
- 1.
Brian Singleton has drawn attention to the fact that in Irish mainstream theatre productions “the notion of colour-blind casting remains an alien practice”. Brian Singleton, Masculinities and the Contemporary Irish Theatre (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), 20. Quoted in Staging Intercultural Theatre: New Plays and Practitioner Perspectives, edited by Charlotte McIvor and Matthew Spangler (Cork University Press, 2014), 2. I would extend this to the notion of nationality-blind/ethnicity-blind casting also. This does not mean that works including either international characters or international actors or both are not written or produced, but they rarely make it from the vibrantly cosmopolitan young Fringe scene into the mainstream theatre sector. An important example of international and colour-blind casting was the 2013 international co-production, The Conquest of Happiness. See Eva Urban, “‘Actors in the same tragedy’: Bertrand Russell, Humanism, and ‘The Conquest of Happiness’”, New Theatre Quarterly 31, Issue 04 (November 2015): 343–358.
- 2.
Jason King, “Interculturalism and Irish Theatre”, Irish Review 33, Global Ireland (Spring, 2005), 23–39.
- 3.
Charlotte McIvor and Matthew Spangler, eds., Staging Intercultural Ireland: New Plays and Practitioner Perspectives (Cork University Press, 2014), 2.
- 4.
Loredana Salis, Stage Migrants: Representations of the Migrant Other in Modern Irish Drama (Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2010), 10.
- 5.
For an account of the play’s production and reception history see Victor Merriman, Because We Are Poor: Irish Theatre in the 1990s (Dublin: Carysfort Press, 2010).
- 6.
Merriman , Because We Are Poor, 55.
- 7.
Please see Loredana Salis, Stage Migrants: Representations of the Migrant Other in Modern Irish Drama (Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2010) for a detailed account of an earlier play with a similar theme: Rebecca Bartlett’s Shalom Belfast! (2000), 10–11.
- 8.
Donal O’Kelly, Asylum! Asylum! In New Plays from the Abbey Theatre, edited and with an Introduction by Christopher Fitz-Simon and Sanford Sternlicht, 119.
- 9.
Ibid., 46.
- 10.
Ibid., 46–47.
- 11.
Ibid., 166.
- 12.
Norbert Elias, “The Breakdown of Civilization”, in The Norbert Elias Reader, 1998, 119.
- 13.
Ibid., 114.
- 14.
“The nationalist bourgeoisie, to use Frantz Fanon’s term, inaugurated and maintained a neo-colonial social order in Independent Ireland, in which, broadly speaking, relations of domination established during the colonial period persist.” Victor Merriman, “Postcolonial Criticism, Drama, and Civil Society”, Modern Drama (2004): 626.
- 15.
Ibid., 134.
- 16.
Kurdi , Codes and Masks: Aspects of Identity in Contemporary Irish Plays in an Intercultural Context, Peter Lang, 2000, 93.
- 17.
Merriman , Because We Are Poor, 629.
- 18.
O’Kelly, Asylum! Asylum!, 163.
- 19.
Ibid., 90.
- 20.
Ibid., 34.
- 21.
Ibid., 147.
- 22.
Ibid., 151.
- 23.
Alan Feldman, “Memory Theaters, Virtual Witnessing, and The Trauma-Aesthetic”, Biography, Volume 27, Number 1, Winter (2004): 188.
- 24.
Ibid., 165.
- 25.
Ibid., 167.
- 26.
Hugh Muir, “Slavery Exhibition featuring black actors chained in cages shut down”, Guardian, 24 September 2014.
- 27.
Elizabeth Kuti, The Sugar Wife (Nick Hern Books, 2005), 31.
- 28.
Ibid., 70–71.
- 29.
Ibid., 71.
- 30.
Gianina Cãrbunario, Kebab, translated by Philip Osment (Royal Court, Oberon Modern Plays, 2007), 49.
- 31.
For a detailed analysis of the representation of the prostitute’s body as dirt in Kebab within a biopolitical framework see Sarah Heinz, “The Shite of Dublin: Body Metaphors, Biopolitics, and the Functions of Disgust in Sebastian Barry’s The Pride of Parnell Street and Gianina Carbunariu’s Kebab”, JCDE: Journal for Contemporary Drama in English. 1.1 (2013): 80–91.
- 32.
Sarah Keating, Review of Kebab, The Irish Times, 1 October 2007.
- 33.
Bernard McKenna, Rupture, Representation, and the Refashioning of Identity in Drama from the North of Ireland, 1969–1994, (Praeger: Westport, Connecticut, 2003), 2.
- 34.
Kuti , The Sugar Wife, 33.
- 35.
Ibid., 34.
- 36.
Ibid., 44.
- 37.
Ibid.
- 38.
Ibid., 53.
- 39.
Ibid., 54.
- 40.
Charles Spenser, “Kebab: A pile of rancid clichés”, Telegraph, 25 October 2007.
- 41.
Charlotte McIvor, “Introduction to Mirjana Rendulic’s Broken Promise Land (2013)”, in Staging Intercultural Ireland: New Plays and Practitioner Perspectives, edited by Charlotte McIvor and Matthew Spangler, 319.
- 42.
Ibid., 320.
- 43.
Caomhán Keane, “New play captures life as a lapdancer in Celtic Tiger Ireland”, Irish Examiner, 11 March 2013, cited in McIvor, “Introduction to Mirjana Rendulic’s Broken Promise Land (2013)”, 319.
- 44.
McIvor , “Introduction to Mirjana Rendulic’s Broken Promise Land (2013)”, 322.
- 45.
Ibid.
- 46.
Ibid.
- 47.
Irene Visser, “Trauma and Power in Postcolonial Literary Studies”, in Contemporary Approaches in Literary Trauma Theory, edited by Michelle Balaev, 106–129, 108.
- 48.
Paul Meade, Mushroom, in Staging Intercultural Ireland, edited by Charlotte McIvor and Matthew Spangler (Cork: Cork University Press, 2014), 249–300 (251).
- 49.
Ibid., 250.
- 50.
Jason King, “Introduction to Paul Meade’s Mushroom,” In Staging Intercultural Ireland, 245.
- 51.
Ibid., 247.
- 52.
Meade , Mushroom, 268.
- 53.
See Salis for a detailed analysis of Darkie.
- 54.
Loredana Salis, “Immigrant games: sports as a metaphor for social encounter in contemporary Irish drama”, Irish Studies Review, 18,.1, February 2010, 57–68 (62).
- 55.
Eamonn Jordan, Dissident Dramaturgies, (Irish Academic Press, 2010), 219.
- 56.
Steven Jaffe, in an interview with Jo Egan, quoted in Jo Egan, “The Lamplighters”, in Gavin Kostick, This Is What We Sang, Belfast: Kabosh, Lagan Press, 2009.
- 57.
Gavin Kostick, This is What We Sang (Kabosh, Lagan Press, 2009), 26.
- 58.
Ibid. 40.
- 59.
Ibid., 39–40.
- 60.
Ibid.
- 61.
Helen Meany, “Review of Quietly”, Guardian, 28 November 2012.
- 62.
Owen McCafferty, Quietly (Faber and Faber, 2012), 32.
- 63.
Stacey Gregg, Shibboleth, London: Nick Hern Books, 101.
- 64.
Peter Crawley, “Shibboleth: Examining the Walls than run through Northern Irish heads”, Irish Times, 8 October 2015.
- 65.
Ibid.
- 66.
Gregg, Shibboleth, 28.
- 67.
John Martin, “The Conflict in Northern Ireland: Marxist Interpretations”, Capital and Class, 1982, 6, 56–71 (60). Quoted and applied to an analysis of Northern Irish Drama in Eva Urban, Community Politics and the Peace Process in Contemporary Northern Irish Drama (Oxford: Peter Lang, 2011), 27.
- 68.
Peter Crawley, “Shibboleth: Examining the walls that run through Northern Irish heads”, Irish Times, 8 October 2015.
- 69.
Ibid.
Bibliography
Cãrbunario, Gianina. Kebab, translated by Philip Osment. Royal Court, Oberon Modern Plays, 2007.
Crawley, Peter. “Shibboleth: Examining the Walls That Run Through Northern Irish heads.” The Irish Times, October 8, 2015.
Feldman, Alan. “Memory Theaters, Virtual Witnessing, and The Trauma-Aesthetic.” Biography 27, Number 1, Winter (2004): 165.
Goudsblom, Johan and Stephen Mennell, eds. The Norbert Elias Reader: A Biographical Selection. Oxford: Blackwell, 1998.
Heinz, Sarah. “The Shite of Dublin: Body Metaphors, Biopolitics, and the Functions of Disgust in Sebastian Barry’s The Pride of Parnell Street and Gianina Carbunariu’s Kebab.” JCDE: Journal for Contemporary Drama in English 1.1 (2013): 80–91.
King, Jason. “Interculturalism and Irish Theatre.” Irish Review 33, Global Ireland (Spring, 2005): 23–39.
Kurdi, Maria. Codes and Masks: Aspects of Identity in Contemporary Irish Plays in an Intercultural Context. Peter Lang, 2000.
Kuti, Elizabeth. The Sugar Wife. Nick Hern Books, 2005.
McCafferty, Owen. Quietly. Faber and Faber, 2012.
McIvor, Charlotte and Matthew Spangler, eds. Staging Intercultural Ireland: New Plays and Practitioner Perspectives. Cork University Press, 2014.
McKenna, Bernard. Rupture, Representation, and the Refashioning of Identity in Drama from the North of Ireland, 1969–1994. Westport, Connecticut: Praeger, 2003.
Meade, Paul. Mushroom. In Staging Intercultural Ireland, edited by Charlotte McIvor and Matthew Spangler. Cork University Press, 2014.
Merriman, Victor. Because We Are Poor: Irish Theatre in the 1990s. Dublin: Carysfort Press, 2010.
Muir, Hugh. “Slavery Exhibition Featuring Black Actors Chained in Cages Shut Down.” Guardian, September 24, 2014.
O’Kelly, Donal. Asylum! Asylum! In New Plays from the Abbey Theatre 1993–1995, edited and with an Introduction by Christopher Fitz-Simon and Sanford Sternlicht. Syracuse, New York: Syracuse Univeristy Press, 1996.
Salis, Loredana. Stage Migrants: Representations of the Migrant Other in Modern Irish Drama. Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2010.
Singleton, Brian. Masculinities and the Contemporary Irish Theatre. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011.
Urban, Eva. Community Politics and the Peace Process in Contemporary Northern Irish Drama. Oxford: Peter Lang, 2011.
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Urban, E. (2018). Intercultural Arrivals and Encounters with Trauma in Contemporary Irish Drama. In: Jordan, E., Weitz, E. (eds) The Palgrave Handbook of Contemporary Irish Theatre and Performance. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-58588-2_39
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