Enhanced descriptions from Syndetics:

In this book Nicholas Grene explores political contexts for some of the outstanding Irish plays from the nineteenth century to the contemporary period. The politics of Irish drama have previously been considered primarily the politics of national self-expression. Here it is argued that Irish plays, in their self-conscious representation of the otherness of Ireland, are outwardly directed towards audiences both at home and abroad. The political dynamics of such relations between plays and audiences is the book's multiple subject: the stage interpretation of Ireland from The Shaughraun to Translations; the contentious stage images of Yeats, Gregory and Synge; reactions to revolution from O'Casey to Behan; the post-colonial worlds of Purgatory and All that Fall; the imagined Irelands of Friel and Murphy, McGuinness and Barry. With its fundamental reconception of the politics of Irish drama, this book represents an alternative view of the phenomenon of Irish drama itself.

Table of contents provided by Syndetics

• Acknowledgements
• Chronology
• List of abbreviations
• Introduction
• 1 Stage interpreters
• 2 Strangers in the house
• 3 Shifts in perspective
• 4 Class and space in O'Casey
• 5 Reactions to revolution
• 6 Living on
• 7 Versions of pastoral
• 8 Murphy's Ireland
• 9 Imagining the other
• Conclusion: a world elsewhere
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index

Reviews provided by Syndetics

CHOICE Review

Grene (Trinity College, Dublin) revisits the oft-analyzed connection between politics and Irish theater. Focusing on a venerable tradition, the self-conscious staging of the Irish people and nation from the Victorian period to the present, he offers a valuable addition to a literature that includes D.E.S. Maxwell's A Critical History of Modern Irish Drama 1891-1980 (CH, Sep'85) and Christopher Murray's Twentieth-Century Irish Drama: Mirror Up to Nation (CH, Jan'98). Grene examines representations of "Irishness" with an eye to the complexities of audience, insisting that "Irish drama is outward-directed, created as much to be viewed from outside as from inside Ireland." The opening chapter--in which Grene uses three plays by Dion Boucicault, G.B. Shaw, and Brian Friel to illustrate the changes and continuities in the theatrical representation of Ireland--can stand as a useful introduction to the field. The chapter tracking the divergent careers of Friel and Tom Murphy offers a persuasive reading of the pastoral tradition at work in audience responses to their plays. Friel's drama, Grene argues, "owes some of its success outside Ireland to the way it answers to audience needs for Irish drama to act as pastoral," while Murphy's plays "remain fully resistant" to that mode. Strongly recommended for upper-division undergraduate and graduate collections. H. J. Holder; Central Michigan University