Mark Phelan

Introduction: Cities of Memory

This collection explores the phenomenon of the post-conflict city through the work of contemporary performing and visual arts. It makes no claim to be encyclopaedic or exhaustive, but attempts instead to develop a comparative framework for the study of a complex coincidence of expressive forms and cultural practices. At the crux of this enterprise is the question of the post-conflict condition as it is lived and expressed in modern cities.

Lost Lives: Performance, Remembrance, Belfast

Mark Phelan’s essay explores how institutional theatre and performance as a cultural practice in Belfast is increasingly pressed into performing the peace; staging normality; signifying the success of the peace process in the North of Ireland. Phelan examines how the politics and performance of urban regeneration in Belfast self-consciously stage the economic and cultural rehabilitation of the city, but maintains that this progressive telos of change and its promissory appeal to the future is one reliant on a pernicious and damaging denial of the past. Phelan observes how Northern Ireland’s lack of any formal institution to investigate the past or to undertake truth recovery has helped precipitate a rich commemorative culture of memorials in Belfast (and beyond), but that this commemorative landscape is deeply problematic in a still-divided society. Acknowledging the political and practical difficulties of creating any shared memorial, Phelan argues that performance can offer an effective, ethical alternative mode of commemoration and remembrance.

The Advent of Modern Irish Drama and the Abjection of Peasant Culture: Folklore, Fairs and Faction Fighting

This paper is part of a larger project in which the author is interested in recovering popular performative traditions and practices that have been occluded by the modernist project of the Irish Revival. This erasure has been compounded by subsequent historiographical paradigms that have reinforced the revivalist narrative of theatre history and excluded indigenous forms, traditions and practices (mumming, rhymers, strawboys) along with the wider performative culture of patterns, wakes, fairs, faction fights etc. This essay subjects to scrutiny what the author sees as a disjuncture between the riotous reality of peasant popular culture and its representation in Revivalist dramas to argue that Irish Theatre Studies needs to develop alternative historiographies of performance and to methodologically engage with theoretical models extant in Performance Studies.

Modernity, Geography and Historiography: (Re)-Mapping Irish Theatre History in the Nineteenth Century

The nineteenth century presents Irish theatre historians with an immense lacuna and the inherent limitations of our discipline. Beyond brief historical surveys,3 some studies of Boucicault,4 and recent scholarship on the late Victorian era,5 it is a veritable tabula rasa which vividly contrasts with British theatre history. So, when asked to contribute to a book series dedicated to nineteenth-century theatre and designed to interrogate ‘the methodological... and theoretical bases on which theatre history has been or might be constructed’,6 an enveloping sense of anxiety understandably overwhelmed me. First of all, as one hapless historian declared a decade ago, ‘there was no such thing as Irish drama’ in the nineteenth century; an apparently self-evident fact he finds ‘worth repeating that for nine tenths of the nineteenth century, there was no such thing as an Irish drama’.7 Other historians are equally adamant, ‘It may be said boldly as a fact that all drama in Ireland until the beginning of the twentieth century was English drama.’8 However, such sweeping, simplistic statements in fact describe the ‘determinate absence’ of Irish theatre history of the nineteenth century rather than the absence of Irish drama.9 Given this historiographical void, the tradition of ‘archaeo-historical’ fieldwork of British theatre history, which frustrates historians like Jacky Bratton given its positivist purview of the theatrical past,10 actually provides a methodological process and product that one could get positively nostalgic about, not to mention envious of, as a historian working in Irish theatre in the same period.