Abstract
This chapter brings conclusions to the study of a critical period in Irish theatre and political history, and which witnessed a new generation of artists emerge and who took ownership over a range of performances spaces where they developed new experimental styles of theatre, often reflecting on contemporary social and cultural issues within a collaborative form/forum. The events in the years and decades that lead towards the end of the 1970s were critical in the development of not just a modern Irish drama, but also drama in a modernising Ireland. This chapter concludes the pivot from neglected and absent performance to a live and reanimated archival memory of performance and reception. Conclusions argue for an inclusive historiography, reflective of the formative impacts upon modern Irish theatre as recorded in marginalised performance histories of experimental as well as provocative works in terms of dramaturgy, design and reception.
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Notes
- 1.
Minutes of the Dublin Theatre Festival, 17 June 1982, PP/1/56 (156), Forristal Archive, NUI Maynooth.
- 2.
Minutes of Dublin Theatre Festival, 14 December 1973, PP/1/56 (174), Forristal Archive, NUI Maynooth.
- 3.
Declan Burke Kennedy, “Contemporary Irish Drama”, Ireland Today: The Bulletin of Irish Department of Foreign Affairs, 1 October 1976. Quoted in a lecture by Desmond Forristal, “Theatre in Ireland Today”, PP/1/56 (184) Forristal Archive, NUI Maynooth.
- 4.
Chris Collins and Mary P. Caulfield, eds., Ireland, Memory and Performing the Historical Imagination (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), 1.
- 5.
Ibid.
- 6.
Gender Counts Report, Waking the Feminists, 2017, http://www.artscouncil.ie/uploadedFiles/Main_Site/Content/About_Us/Gender_Counts_WakingTheFeminists_2017.pdf, Accessed 10 January 2021.
- 7.
In his statement in response to the publication of the report by the Commission to Investigate Child Abuse in Ireland in 2010, Taoiseach Brian Cowan commented that the report shone a light into the ‘darkest corner of Irish society’. “Shining a light into the State’s darkest corner”, Irish Independent, 12 June 2009.
- 8.
Emile Pine, We Have a Culture of Not Listening to Abuse Survivors”, Irish Times, 14 May 2019. https://www.irishtimes.com/opinion/we-have-a-culture-of-not-listening-to-abuse-survivors-1.3891074, Accessed 12 January 2021.
- 9.
Lonergan (2009, 196).
- 10.
Judt (2012, 287).
- 11.
“School for Playwrights at Abbey”, Irish Times, 30 January 1968.
- 12.
J.J. Lee, Ireland, 1912–1985: Politics and Society (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 163.
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Houlihan, B. (2021). Conclusions: Memory and the Periphery in Irish Drama. In: Theatre and Archival Memory. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-74548-6_8
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