Skip to main content Accessibility help
×
Hostname: page-component-78c5997874-ndw9j Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-05T11:59:37.464Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

8 - Women playwrights in Northern Ireland

from Part II - National tensions and intersections

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 May 2006

Elaine Aston
Affiliation:
Lancaster University
Janelle Reinelt
Affiliation:
University of California, Davis
Get access

Summary

In Anne Devlin’s Ourselves Alone, a Belfast Catholic woman is harassed for moving into the 'neutral,' university area of town. Her socialist roommate, however, does not believe she is being victimised until a brick flies through the window of their flat. In Christina Reid’s The Belle of Belfast City, a carefree woman exacts a joking revenge on her Protestant, ultra-loyalist brother by serving him 'Republican' sausages she had smuggled out of the Republic of Ireland. A Belfast Protestant man in Marie Jones’s A Night in November overcomes his sectarian anger as he cheers for the Irish team in the 1994 World Cup with Irish people from the Republic and the USA in a New York sports bar. These three instances from contemporary Northern Irish drama reflect one of the constant dilemmas facing people in Northern Ireland: the negotiation of identity in a region crossed and recrossed by a web of geographical, religious, cultural, economic, and political fault-lines. With the range of national identities co-existing in Northern Ireland’s borders, each person in Northern Ireland finds her

himself on shifting political and cultural sands, negotiating her

his own identity through relationships both within and without that area’s borders.

For Northern Irish writers, writing in the interstice between Eire and the UK, and finding their work influenced by both British and Irish cultural traditions and politics, the notion of national identity becomes complex indeed. Many Northern Irish playwrights have received funding from the Arts Councils both in Great Britain and in the Republic of Ireland, and their works are regularly anthologised and critiqued as Irish, rather than British, dramas. Since many Northern Irish writers are generally considered (and consider themselves) part of an Irish cultural tradition, discussing Northern Irish women playwrights in an anthology of British rather than Irish writing is a problematic, and even volatile, endeavour.

Type
Chapter
Information
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2000

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Save book to Kindle

To save this book to your Kindle, first ensure [email protected] is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about saving to your Kindle.

Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.

Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.

Available formats
×

Save book to Dropbox

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Dropbox.

Available formats
×

Save book to Google Drive

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.

Available formats
×