Description
Book SynopsisOver the last twenty years Deirdre Kinahan has emerged as a significant and original female voice in Irish theatre, with her plays produced in Ireland, the UK, the USA and across mainland Europe. Her work explores issues of personal and communal identity, bringing forward the difficulties that arise for individuals when accepted narratives of identity diverge from contemporary experience. In this collection of ten original essays, and an interview with the playwright, the authors address the ways in which Kinahan’s plays interrogate and seek to renegotiate value systems of family, class, ethnicity, age and gender in the 21st century neoliberal, secular state, with an emphasis on experimental forms and the renewal of the genre of the family play. Theoretical frameworks rely on feminism, intersectionality, genre studies, and age studies, among other approaches, by authors from Ireland, the UK, Hungary, the USA, Nigeria, Canada and Taiwan.
Trade Review«Despite the international acclaim and success of her plays, little commentary on Deirdre Kinahan appears in the existing scholarship. This collection (essays and an interview with Kinahan) brings together well-established scholars as well as fresh voices whose analyses provide a timely as well as long overdue critical introduction to Kinahan. It is most certainly an important book in the field of contemporary Irish theatre studies.» (Joan FitzPatrick Dean, Professor Emerita, University of Missouri-Kansas City)
«This is an impressive collection of essays and one which is timely as Deirdre Kinahan’s status as a playwright both in Ireland and internationally is now well recognised. Collectively the essays make a very good case for an edited collection on Kinahan’s work. There is a good mix of scholars and scholarships and each essay deserves its place in the collection. An interview between Bisi Adigun and Deirdre Kinahan provides an ending which gives space for the author’s own voice.» (Brian Singleton, Professor, Trinity College Dublin)
Table of ContentsContents: Deirdre O’Leary: Reckonings in Small Rooms: Staging Trauma in Moment and Rathmines Road – Donald E. Morse: «The afternoon of life»: Ageing, Dementia and Dying in Deirdre Kinahan’s Halcyon Days – Rebecca (Bex) Wharton: «Haunted by the Past»: Representations of Women in the Plays of Deirdre Kinahan – Aileen Ruane: Translation, Adaptation and Feminism: Revealing «A Familiar Reflex of the Repressed» in Deirdre Kinahan’s The Unmanageable Sisters – Eamonn Jordan: Intersectionality and Form in Five Short Plays by Deirdre Kinahan – Lisa Fitzpatrick: «I suppose I feel disappeared meself»: Shamed and Silenced Characters in Deirdre Kinahan’s BogBoy – Wei H. Kao: Problematizing the Easter Rising in Monologues: Deirdre Kinahan’s Wild Sky and Other Irish Plays – Mária Kurdi: An Act of Love? Filicide and Child-killing in Marina Carr’s By the Bog of Cats and Deirdre Kinahan’s Spinning – Lenke Németh: Moments that Matter: Hue & Cry and Moment by Deirdre Kinahan and American Family Drama – Tanya Dean: Nevertheless, She Persisted: Deirdre Kinahan’s Plays in the United States – Bisi Adigun: An Other Interview with Dee – Lisa Fitzpatrick and Mária Kurdi: Afterword – Links to Significant Critical Reviews of Deirdre Kinahan: Productions in Ireland and Elsewhere.
