Women and Embodied Mythmaking in Irish Theatre

Hill, Shonagh

doi:10.1017/9781108756327

Cited by 8 publications

(1 citation statement)

References 43 publications

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“…In Irish theatre, the prominence of literary texts resulted in the relative neglect of bodies in general and female bodies in particular. Shonagh Hill posits that "the elision of female experience and of female bodies have been perpetuated by Irish theatre, and the study of it, as a predominantly literary theatre tradition" 7 . Murphy, whose works stand within the Irish literary theatre tradition, is thus an important case study; although a male playwright himself, Murphy (and the Abbey production of his play) explores the same issues -of the feminine body and materialism -that expose and condemn the mechanisms by which women are alienated and marginalised.…”

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confidence: 99%

Waking (for) the Nation: Immaterial Materialism and the Feminine Body in Tom Murphy’s The Wake (1998)

Hong¹

2021

etudesirlandaises

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The paper examines Tom Murphy's play The Wake and the significance of its staging as part of the Abbey Theatre's 1916 centenary "Waking the Nation" programme. The play critiques the process by which various elements of capitalism -in particular materialistic culture, bourgeois morality and hypocrisy -combine to commodify, repress and eliminate the human body. Murphy suggests that the pitfalls of materialism point to the ironic truth that it denies the substantive materiality to our bodily existence. The female body in particular is continually subjected to violence and exploitation. By dramatising the emotional consequences of this immaterial materialism through the lens of a marginalised female émigré and sex worker, the play contests and subverts the woman / nation figurations in the context of Irish literary, theatrical and cultural imagination. The meaning of the wake ritual is revisited and experienced as a temporary celebration of theatre as community.

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confidence: 99%

Waking (for) the Nation: Immaterial Materialism and the Feminine Body in Tom Murphy’s The Wake (1998)

Hong¹

2021

etudesirlandaises

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Nation

McIvor,

Walsh

2024

Contemporary Irish Theatre

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Arguably the nation and its many anti-colonial, postcolonial, Troubles-era, post-conflict and early twenty-first-century permutations remain the defining thematic obsession of contemporary Irish theatre. This chapter contributes elucidating frameworks for navigating how contemporary Irish theatre continues to dramatise and negotiate these complex and contested dimensions of the nation from the perspective of past, present and future. The three frameworks and accompanying case studies that model the application of these critical lenses to key theatre productions are: Theatre and the political work of nation-building (Michael West/Corn Exchange’s Dublin By Lamplight), Woman and/as nation (Anne Devlin’s Ourselves Alone), Interrogating national histories through the Irish history play (Frank McGuinness’s Observe the Sons of Ulster Marching Towards the Somme).

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Body

McIvor,

Walsh

2024

Contemporary Irish Theatre

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This chapter explores how bodies work and signify as individuals but also as stand-ins for a greater whole (both materially and representationally) within the contemporary Irish theatre and by extension, Irish society. The participation and presence of bodies in theatrical and extra-theatrical events connected to the contemporary Irish theatre as a network of individuals, practices and institutions indexes not only the aesthetic but the political and social status of the body within Irish society at any given time. Understanding the limits of theatrical representation and participation by individuals and/or communities as artists in the Irish theatre gives us deeper insight into the rights accorded to individual bodies and/or those grouped according to a shared identity such as gender, sexuality, religion, class, race/ethnicity and/or disability, as well as drawing attention to how theatre and performance as live and embodied art forms can sometimes push productively at the limits of what is legally or socially possible at the scale of the body. This chapter proposes the following frameworks for studying the body as a key vehicle towards utopian performatives in contemporary Irish theatre: Acting Bodies (Olwen Fouréré), Bodies as Tools (Panti Bliss/Rory O’Neill and the “Noble Call”), Intersectional Bodies (Christian O’Reilly’s Sanctuary with Blue Teapot Theatre and No Magic Pill).

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Women and Embodied Mythmaking in Irish Theatre

Cited by 8 publications

References 43 publications

Waking (for) the Nation: Immaterial Materialism and the Feminine Body in Tom Murphy’s The Wake (1998)

Waking (for) the Nation: Immaterial Materialism and the Feminine Body in Tom Murphy’s The Wake (1998)

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