Chris Morash

The Girls in the Big Picture: Gender in Contemporary Ulster Theatre. By Imelda Foley. Belfast: Blackstaff Press, 2003; pp. xvi + 170.

“A new language of criticism is essential to describe and inscribe dramatic forms” (145): so writes Imelda Foley at the conclusion of her study of gender in contemporary Ulster theatre, The Girls in the Big Picture. It is not without irony, therefore, that her book is a perfect example of the exuberantly lively business of theatre in performance continually bursting through the limits of an overly schematic theoretical paradigm.

25.95 paper.

my title is deliberately provocative: “Famine/Holocaust.” The placing of those two words—“Famine” and “Holocaust”—in conjunction can almost be guaranteed to stimulate a response which, for reasons that will become clear later on, I want to call “aggressive.” This “aggressivity” can be expected both from those who believe that the Famine can and should be equated with the Holocaust, and from those who insist, for a variety of reasons, on their radical difference. For the moment, it is enough to observe that the scandal of the conjunction is not the scandal of novelty; the Famine and the Holocaust have, we might say, a history together, at least in historiographic terms. It is to a large extent a subterranean relation, part of what could be called the “unconscious” of Famine writing. This historiographic unconscious is my subject.