Mapping Irish Theatre Theories of Space and Place

Seamus Heaney once described the 'sense of place' generated by the early Abbey theatre as the 'imaginative protein' of later Irish writing. Drawing on theorists of space such as Henri Lefebvre and Yi-Fu Tuan, Mapping Irish Theatre argues that theatre is 'a machine for making place from space'. Concentrating on Irish theatre, the book investigates how this Irish 'sense of place' was both produced by, and produced, the remarkable work of the Irish Revival, before considering what happens when this spatial formation begins to fade. Exploring more recent site-specific and place-specific theatre alongside canonical works of Irish theatre by playwrights including J. M. Synge, Samuel Beckett and Brian Friel, the study proposes an original theory of theatrical space and theatrical identification, whose application extends beyond Irish theatre, and will be useful for all theatre scholars.

Introduction; 1. Making space; 2. Staging place; 3. Spaces of modernity and modernism; 4. The calamity of yesterday; 5. The fluorescence of place; 6. Theatre of the world; 7. Theatre of the street; Conclusion: spectral spaces.

Chris Morash is founder of the School of English, Media and Theatre Studies in the National University of Ireland, Maynooth. He is the author of A History of Irish Theatre, 1601–2000 (Cambridge, 2002), which won the 2002 Theatre Book Prize and which has become the standard history of Irish theatre. He has published widely in the field of Irish theatre studies and is also known for his pioneering work on Irish famine literature, Writing the Irish Famine (1995), and his more recent work on Irish media history, A History of the Media in Ireland (Cambridge University Press, 2009).
Shaun Richards is Professorial Research Fellow at St Mary's University College, Twickenham. Co-author of the seminal Writing Ireland: Colonialism, Nationalism and Culture (1988) and editor of The Cambridge Companion to Twentieth-Century Irish Drama (Cambridge, 2004), he has published widely on Irish theatre in major journals and edited collections and is a member of the editorial boards of the Irish Studies Review and the Irish University Review.