This chapter explores the history of representations of race in the Irish theatre, with a particular focus on blackface and minstrelsy – a discussion which uses at is focal point the pre-histories and afterlives of Dion Boucicault’s 1859 play The Octoroon. That melodrama is resituated within an Irish performance tradition (one that Boucicault himself would have encountered as a young man in Dublin) that stretches from the late nineteenth century, and which involved the performance on Irish stages of African-American characters – whose identity was often juxtaposed with that of stage Irish characters, and often performed by white Irish actors. In such a context, The Octoroon represents a form of continuity with what came before – and must therefore be seen in Irish as well as American contexts. Its impact on subsequent performance histories is also considered, up to and including the staging on the Abbey Theatre stage of An Octoroon – an adaptation of the original play – in 2022.

On 26 April 1916, British authorities imposed martial law throughout Ireland in the wake of the Easter Rising, an insurgent paramilitary movement that had seized control of strategic landmarks throughout Dublin and proclaimed an independent Irish republic. On 27 April, the day after the announcement of the military curfew, an editorial in The Irish Times urged citizens to turn their ‘enforced domesticity’ to intellectual advantage by reading Shakespeare by the fireside. Why would The Irish Times suggest that Dubliners brush up their Shakespeare while gunfire and artillery shells shattered the city around them – causing, among other casualties, the fiery destruction of Dublin’s grand and newly constructed Coliseum Theatre? This essay uses the editorial and the short history of the Coliseum to explore the significance of Shakespeare in Ireland – first, within the wartime historical context of the Easter Rising, and then within the broader history of Shakespearean performance and reception in Ireland. It explores the often-fraught relationship of Ireland’s writers and revolutionaries to Shakespeare, from the period leading into the Easter Rising up to the present – notably including Irish director Caroline Byrne’s decision to set her 2016 production of The Taming of the Shrew in Ireland in 1916, as a mediation on the evolving legacies of the Rising and Shakespeare.

This chapter argues that Samuel Beckett’s plays function as a kind of fulcrum in a theatrical history of staging and thematising surveillance, extending from Dion Boucicault’s The Octoroon (1859) through Augusta Gregory’s Spreading the News (1904), to Enda Walsh’s Arlington (2016) and David Lloyd’s The Press (2009) and The Pact (2021). Surveillance agencies rely heavily on technology to gather information, but depend on human beings to store, order, and interpret it, and dramatic narratives exploit inconsistencies and injustices arising from slippages between data and its application. Boucicault, Gregory, Walsh, and Lloyd are counterpointed to Beckett’s Waiting for Godot, Endgame, Catastrophe, and What Where, which theatricalise the structuring influence of monitoring and scrutiny on the texture of Irish social experience, personal and public. Once classified in an archive or record, or interpreted in policy and implemented in practice, ‘intelligence’ plays out less as a function of rigorous analysis than ideological determination.

W. B. Yeats began writing about the theatre in the mid-1890s, after a trip to Paris where he first saw French symbolist theatre.From the time that the Irish Literary Theatre (later the Abbey) began producing his plays in the early 1900s, Yeats was regularly, and vigorously writing about theatre, with key essays appearing in the little magazines Samhain and Beltaine.From about 1910 onwards, his writing about theatre becomes more meditative, more concerned with his occult interests, and for a period focused on his interest in Japanese Nō theatre.Collectively, Yeats’s fugitive writings for the theatre constitutes an organum for the theatre, which is consistent across more than forty years, and which stands among the most significant contributions to modernist reconceptualisations of theatre.

This overview of W. B. Yeats’s writings for the theatre begins with his earliest juvenilia, the verse dramas published in the late 1880s, and moves through his best-known work with the Irish Literary Theatre (later the Abbey) in the early twentieth century through to his Nō plays and finally to his last plays, drawing on the techniques of genetic literary criticism to explore the drafts and multiple editions of these works.It also explores, for the first time, several of Yeats’s early unpublished plays in the context of his wider dramatic output.

When W. B. Yeats won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1923, he singled out his contribution to theatre as one of his main achievements. The critical consensus since his death has not shared this view, and his theatrical work has largely been overlooked. This book contends that Yeats is not only an important modernist playwright, but also a thinker about theatre whose originality can be compared to that of Brecht or Artaud.

Chapter 4 investigates the social and political possibilities opened up by the (re)emergence of counter-modern modes of embodiment in the midst of a prominent institution of modernity: a national theatre. It argues that the apparently illegible behavioural patterns of the characters ‒ in The Playboy of the Western World, especially ‒ may be read as tangible traces of forms of embodiment that are incommensurate to modernity. While Synge’s dramatic writing sometimes flirts with stereotypical representations of the Irish body, it does so in order to better submit such representations to critical reappraisal. These forms of embodiment actualize alternative ways of being that both the colonial state and the proponents of middle-class, anti-colonial nationalism strove to suppress. The wild physicality associated with cultural practices, such as keening or faction fighting, stands in sharp contrast to the hegemonic and early twentieth century conception of the modern body. In Synge’s plays, these other expressions of corporeality offer traces of an alternative to the modernity of the (Abbey) theatre as an institution. They register the enduring recalcitrance of peasant popular culture and of ways of being that exist athwart modernity. In this, they allow for a vestigial survival and dissemination of alternative social and cultural possibilities.

This chapter focuses on the ways in which Act Two of Sean O’Casey’s 1926 play, The Plough and the Stars, has appeared onstage at the Abbey theatre between 1991 and 2016. The chapter shows how these four versions of O’Casey’s script navigate a set of contemporary concerns, from historical revisionism, through the Celtic Tiger boom, to the economic crash, and into the era when various kinds of institutional and state abuse have been revealed. Shifts in performance style also reveal changes in thinking about theatrical form in Ireland and help illuminate the role of the Irish national theatre during a period when other nearby national theatres have come to operate in profoundly different ways.

This chapter considers theatre productions in Ireland between the 1950s and 1970s, asserting the continued relevance and sharpness of Irish theatre in relation to social and political transition. Emerging mid-century playwrights such as Tom Kilroy and Brian Friel found themselves at a challenging and uncertain moment in Irish theatre, coming in the wake of the Abbey’s revivalist triumph but exposed too to the experimental movements of European theatre practice. Determined to write against inherited theatrical conventions and the increasing national dependence on a stagnant domestic realism, they looked to forge a new dramatic language adequate to a society in a state of acute and disorienting transition. The Pike Theatre was one of an array of independent theatres that succeeded in staging major avant-garde productions, such as Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot in 1955. Playwrights working more explicitly within inherited naturalistic modes, such as M. J. Molloy, meanwhile, found more subtle means of subverting the spatial conventions of Irish theatre in a way that drew attention to imperative social issues such as mass emigration.