Research Projects
My Research: Transnational Theatre Histories
As a theatre historian and performance theorist, I research the role transnational and international issues play in the formulation of identities and histories, particularly in Irish theatre and drama after 1945 — both within and beyond Ireland. My work explores two related dynamics: how the circulation of people, media, capital, and ideas influenced the development of Irish drama and theatre; and how Irish dramatic performance participated in and intervened into social debates about politics, religion, sexuality, gender, nationalism, and class around the world. Researching transcultural theatre, especially performances of plays by Irish playwright Samuel Beckett in Europe, have recently led me to begin a second but related line of inquiry exploring the intersections of post-war European theatre and drama and the African and Asian decolonization movements. You can read more about my research projects into transnational theatre history below.
Moving Censorship: Banned Irish Drama and Transnational Theatre
In 1958, the Archbishop of Dublin protested the inclusion of two plays in the proposed program for that year’s Dublin International Theatre Festival: Seán O’Casey’s The Drums of Father Ned and Allan McClelland’s Bloomsday, an adaptation of James Joyce’s novel Ulysses. In my first book project, I reconstruct performances of these plays that took place both within and beyond the Republic of Ireland, from which they were ostensibly — if unofficially — banned for a short time. Even with such an unofficial “ban” the history of their censorship traveled with the plays as they performed, leading artists and audiences to imagine and perform Ireland and their own identities, politics, and histories vis-a-vis Irish censorship.
A scene from the world premiere performance of Seán O'Casey’s The Drums of Father Ned by the Lafayette Little Theatre in Indiana, 1959. Courtesy of the Eileen O’Casey Estate and the National Library of Ireland.
The Long Room of the Old Library at Trinity College, Dublin, which houses one of the archival collections I consulted for my research.
Deeply indebted to archival research, in this expansion and revision of my dissertation, I offer two major interventions. The first is methodological. I offer a new, transnational methodology for understanding the cultural work and reach of censorship and its effects. While most histories of censorship study it within singular nations or compare practices across multiple national spaces, I use transnational performances of banned Irish plays to theorize censorship as mobile. Censorship moves, and each of the performances I analyze reveal a different way that censorship travels. The book’s second major contribution is historiographical. I argue that attending to Irish censorship’s movement through the performances of these plays uncovers transnational Irish performance’s deep entanglement with local and national cultural and political formulations in the mid-twentieth century. Ireland’s unique experience of modernity ensured that Irish censorship’s political and cultural effect of cultivating identities, discourses, and histories continued beyond the Republic’s borders through Irish theatrical performance. In addition to shedding new light on an understudied period of Irish theatre history, the book will disclose how transnational Irish performance acted like censors, themselves within the particular circumstances of their production. As such, the book details how Irish censorship dialogued with local, national, and transnational issues like communism, gender and sex politics, national memory, religion, and perceptions of Ireland and the Irish. Although many of the artists I study staged these banned plays in the name of progress and freedom, I ultimately reveal how transnational Irish cultural production at mid-century worked to entrench hegemonic ideologies and stifle progressive politics.
Portions of this project are already undergoing peer review at scholarly journals and forthcoming as book chapters in edited volumes.
Decolonial absurdities: “Absurd” theatre In the age of decolonization
French director Roger Blin directing Madeleine Renaud in Samuel Beckett’s «Oh, les beaux jours!» (Happy Days) in 1968. The French state blacklisted Blin for signing the Manifesto of the 121, a petition of prominent artists and intellectuals who called on the government to recognize the legitimacy of the Algerian struggle for independence, condemn French torture tactics, and solidarity with French subjects who conscientiously objected to the war.
For the past six decades, critic Martin Esslin’s The Theatre of the Absurd has stood as a primary lens through which scholars and artists alike have interpreted the work of a major cluster of European post-war avant-garde dramatists. For Esslin, the plays of Samuel Beckett, Eugene Ionesco, Jean Genet, and others gave expression to the universal “absurdity” of humanity in the wake of the Second World War. Recently, scholars studying Beckett’s work have have painstakingly shown the degree to which his plays and other writings register deeply particular political responses to history, greatly problematizing any interpretation that evacuates historical and political meanings. Despite such advances, the “theatre of the absurd” remains a wildly popular paradigm outside of the specialists working in this line of Beckett Studies.
In this edited collection in-progress, Oxford University scholar Hannah Simpson and I seek to extend such analyses to the wider group of avant-garde writers Esslin identified and more and bring these conversations to the attention of theatre artists, historians, and performance studies more broadly by specifically critiquing Esslin’s work and historicizing the play’s against one of the most pressing historical issues of their own time: the decolonization of Africa and Asia immediately following WWII. We argue that applying Camus’s absurdism to the works of Beckett, Genet, Ionesco, and others incinerates cultural difference – a logic that props up white supremacy by taking the straight, cis, able-bodied white male as its standard. The irony of using such a theory to describe these writers is that their work is deeply invested in critiquing the violence of European modernity clearly on display in France’s decolonial wars and debates surrounding them. The plays, we argue, express, critique, and expose imperial logics and institutions and critique them through such figures as Ionesco’s villagers in Rhinoceros who argue over whether it’s African or Asian rhinoceroses that ravage their town or Genet’s queer or colonized subjects who suffer under hegemonic structures. We reclaim these artists as allies and hope to radically revise how their works are taught, interpreted, and staged.
An early treatment of our work is forthcoming as a chapter in The Routledge Companion to Theatre and Literature of the Absurd.
John Kavanagh in a revival of James McKenna’s 1960 Irish rock musical The Scatterin’ at the Abbey Theatre.
Something sort of Grand-ish: Musical Theatre in Ireland, 1945 to the present
I found my love for theatre by going to and later performing in musicals. My professional acting career has led me back to musical theatre time and time again, and Broadway history was the first kind of theatre history I studied. In the coming years, I look forward to building upon my past research on Irish theatre and love of musical theatre toward a second book project: a history of the musical in Ireland from 1945 to the present. This project will study international tours and indigenous productions of well-known US-American and British musicals in Ireland alongside less-recognizable musicals (outside of Ireland, anyway) by Irish composers and playwrights. By placing the development of modern Irish musical theatre alongside the presence of Broadway and West End musicals, I seek to explore the globalizing influence on Irish cultural production within specific historical national and international contexts. From quiet outrage from Dublin’s most religious theatregoers over the Broadway hit Guys and Dolls in 1956, to audience interruptions during James McKenna’s Irish rock musical The Scatterin’ in 1960, to protests over Jesus Christ Superstar in Belfast during the Troubles, to Máire Stafford’s Irish-language translation of Annie in 1981, to the journey Glen Hansard, Markéta Irglová, and Enda Walsh’s Irish-set Once took from Off-Broadway to Dublin’s Gaiety Theatre in 2013, the project will think through musicals as popular sites of intercultural negotiation and global modernity.
Other Research
My research publications and presentations at regional, national, and international conferences investigate similar concerns about the relationships between theatrical form, history, and politics from transnational perspectives. For instance, in my contribution to the collection Beckett Beyond the Normal (Edinburgh University Press, 2020), I argue that Samuel Beckett’s dramaturgy in his play Happy Days is informed by and responds in part to the history of censorship in Britain, France, and Ireland. Thinking through queer theory to analyze Beckett’s use of time as a regulative engine in the performance he directed in 1979, I posit that the play performs an embodied, affective, and gendered critique of biopower and political normalization.
In the coming years, I look forward to writing additional standalone researched articles, chapters, and conference papers on such subjects as performing/imagining race as a sign of the foreign in mid-century Irish theatre and drama.
Publications
Book Chapters
“Beckett’s Queer Time of Défaillance: Ritual and Resistance in Happy Days.” In Beckett Beyond the Normal, edited by Seán Kennedy, 105—16. Edinburgh University Press: 2020.
“Mobile Censorship: Following Censorship’s Movement in Alan McClelland’s Bloomsday.” In The Palgrave Handbook of Theatre Censorship, edited by Anne Etienne and Graham Saunders. Palgrave Macmillan: Forthcoming.
“Re-thinking the Theatre of the Absurd in the Age of Decolonization.” Co-authored with Hannah Simpson. In The Routledge Companion to Theatre and Literature of the Absurd. Edited by Michael Y. Bennett. Routledge: Forthcoming.
Article Under Review
“The Memory of Censorship in the World Premiere Performance of Seán O’Casey’s The Drums of Father Ned: Lafayette, Indiana, 1959.” Under Review with Theatre Survey.