Table of Contents

Contents: Eamonn Jordan: Introduction - Thomas Kilroy: A Generation of Playwrights - Declan Hughes: Who The Hell Do We Think We Still Are? Reflections On Irish Theatre and Identity - Marianne McDonald: Classics as Celtic Firebrand: Greek Tragedy, Irish Playwrights, and Colonialism - Lionel Pilkington: Theatre History and the Beginnings of the Irish National Theatre Project - Anna McMullan: Gender, Authorship and Performance in Selected Plays by Contemporary Irish Women Playwrights: Mary Elizabeth Burke-Kennedy, Marie Jones, Marina Carr, Emma Donoghue - Fintan O'Toole: Irish Theatre: The State of the Art - Bruce Arnold: The State of Irish Theatre - Ashley Taggart: Theatre of war? Contemporary drama in Northern Ireland - Caoimhe McAvinchey: Theatre - Act or Place? - Joseph Long: Come Dance With Me in Ireland: Current developments in the independent theatre sector - Jocelyn Clarke: (Un)critical Conditions - Redmond O'Hanlon: Brian Friel's Dialogue with Euripides: Living Quarters - Bernice Schrank: Politics, Language, Metatheatre: Friel's The Freedom of the City and the Formation of an Engaged Audience - Declan Kiberd: Theatre as Opera: The Gigli Concert - Anne F. Kelly: Bodies and Spirits in Tom Murphy's Theatre - Terry Eagleton: Unionism and Utopia: Seamus Heaney's The Cure at Troy - Akiko Satake: The Seven Ages of Henry Joy McCracken: Stewart Parker's Northern Star as a History Play of the United Irishmen in 1798 - Deirdre Mulrooney: Tom MacIntyre's Texture - Eamonn Jordan: From Playground to Battleground: Metatheatricality in the Plays of Frank McGuinness - Christopher Murray: Billy Roche's Wexford Trilogy: Setting, Place, Critique - Ger Fitzgibbon: The Poetic Theatre of Sebastian Barry - Riana O'Dwyer: The Imagination of Women's Reality: Christina Reid and Marina Carr - Martine Pelletier: Dermot Bolger's Drama - Melissa Sihra: A Cautionary Tale: Marina Carr's By the Bog of Cats - Eric Weitz: Barabbas at Play with The Whiteheaded Boy - Victor Merriman: Songs of possible worlds: nation, representation and citizenship in the work of Calypso Productions - Karen Vandevelde: The Gothic Soap of Martin McDonagh - Scott T. Cummings: Homo Fabulator: The Narrative Imperative in Conor McPherson's Plays.

About the Author

The Editor: Eamonn Jordan is a lecturer in Drama at the Sligo Institute of Technology. His book The Feast of Famine: The Plays of Frank McGuinness (Peter Lang) was published in 1997. He has also written two critical commentaries for the new Leaving Certificate: the first on Frank McGuinness' Someone Who'll Watch Over Me and the second on Arthur Miller's Death of a Salesman.