Staging Beckett in Ireland and Northern Ireland

This is the first full-length study to focus on Samuel Beckett’s drama as it has been staged in Ireland and Northern Ireland.

While Beckett’s relationship with his native land was a complex one, the importance of his drama as a creative force both historically and in contemporary practice in those regions cannot be underestimated. The volume brings to light unexamined and little-known productions, for example Beckett’s drama in the Irish language, Druid Theatre Company’s productions, and Beckett at Dublin’s Focus Theatre, as well as previously unpublished archival materials. Leading scholars, such as Anna McMullan and Anthony Roche, and renowned dramatic interpreters of Beckett’s work, such as Barry McGovern, explore Beckett’s drama within the context of Irish creative theatrical practice and heritage, and point towards the theatrical and performance legacies that follow in its wake.

Production analyses are mapped on to the political, economic and cultural contexts of Ireland and the North so that readers are invited to experience Beckett’s drama as resonating in new ways, through theatre practice, against the complex and connected histories of these lands.

Trish McTighe is currently a Postdoctoral Research Assistant at the University of Reading, UK and a visiting scholar at Fordham University, New York. Her book, The Haptic Aesthetic in Samuel Beckett’s Drama, was published in 2013 and she has published in several international journals on aesthetics, corporeality and technology in performance.

David Tucker is Postdoctoral Researcher at the University of Chester and Associate Fellow at St Peter’s College, Oxford. He has published the books A Dream and its Legacies: The Samuel Beckett Theatre Project, Oxford c.1967-1976 (2013), Samuel Beckett and Arnold Geulincx: Tracing ‘a literary fantasia’ (2012) and the edited British Social Realism in the Arts since 1940 (2011). He co-edited Samuel Beckett Today/Aujourd’hui, Vol. 26: ‘Revisiting Molloy, Malone muert/Malone Dies and L’Innommable/The Unnamable’ (2014) with Mark Nixon and Dirk Van Hulle, and he is co-editor of The Year’s Work in Critical and Cultural Theory.