Mary Luckhurst

Martin McDonagh's Lieutenant of Inishmore: Selling (-Out) to the English

Much has been made of Martin McDonagh in the last few years and Martin McDonagh has never been at a loss to make much of himself; as one critic recently put it ‘like Wilde, he seems to have nothing to declare but his own genius’. As notorious for his ‘offstage brio’ as he is for his brand of rural brutishness, he originally found fame with the Leenane Trilogy (1996/97), and all his plays up until the latest, The Pillowman (National Theatre, 2003), have been set in the west of Ireland. Though it is not surprising that McDonagh wanted to move away from Irish settings – even some of his advocates had wearied of their predictability – The Pillowman is a re-write of a play penned in the 1990s at a time before he had hit on his successful Irish formulae. This article concentrates on the The Lieutenant of Inishmore, which was premièred by the Royal Shakespeare Company in April 2001. McDonagh relished the gratifying fact that The Lieutenant had originally been turned down by the National Theatre and the Royal Court in England, and by Druid Theatre Company in Ireland. His pronouncements to the press were manifold and strident, insisting that the refusals were ‘completely ludicrous’ and ‘gutless’ and claiming that the reason for its rejection lay in managements’ fears about how damaging the play would be to the Northern Irish peace process. He had completed The Lieutenant in 1996 by the time The Cripple of Inishmaan opened at the National Theatre; thus it circulated for four years (during which time the playwright rejected the offer of a New York première) before the Royal Shakespeare Company’s then literary manager, Simon Reade, declared it to be ‘a genre-busting and taboobreaking play’. McDonagh hoped that his play would ‘cause a stink’ and positioned himself as an enfant terrible, seeing himself as liberating English and Irish theatre from a deadening complacency. ‘I want to shake it up,’ he said, ‘I want to push it in interesting directions.’ He also 1. Charles Spencer, Daily Telegraph (14 November 2003).

Dramaturgy and Agendas of Change: Tinderbox and the Joint Sectoral Dramaturgy Project

While ‘few terms in contemporary theatre practice have consistently occasioned more perplexity’, the anxiety to define and re-define the functions of ‘dramaturgy’ and the ‘dramaturg’ has intensified rather than abated since 2000. In my book Dramaturgy: A Revolution in Theatre, published in 2006, I historicized and politicized the professionalization of the dramaturg in British theatre since the 1960s. I sought to explore the origins and causes of a recent revolutionary sea change in UK theatre cultures. I traced the recent proliferation of literary management positions and development dramaturgs back through a German lineage, which featured Gotthold Lessing, Friedrich Schiller and, above all, Bertolt Brecht. My project in that book was to provide a map for the cultural transmission of a set of ideas originating in eighteenth-century Germany, and to examine the ways in which practices have been adopted and modified or misunderstood and misapplied. It was the first attempt to provide a cultural history (not the cultural history) for the emergence of official salaried positions for literary managers and dramaturgs, and a project which I knew at the time was just the beginning of an exploration that others would debate, develop and contest. It was the beginning of an attempt to make visible the invisible, and was work which no one had undertaken before.

The New Genetics, Genocide and Caryl Churchill

This essay examines Churchill’s work in the context of eugenics and the new genetics, and argues that Churchill is the foremost theatrical interrogator of the neoliberal dangers of promoting parenting as the improvement of human capital. Luckhurst investigates Churchill’s lifelong interest in reproductive technologies and the female body and looks at her more recent scrutiny of genetic experimentation in relation to war, genocide, cloning and terrorism.

Theatre and Elder Abuse

The human rights of the elderly are among the least regarded, and elder abuse is a taboo subject in both developed and developing countries. On the page of the United Nations website where Ban Ki-moon, the UN Secretary-General, cites a fundamental tenet — ‘All human beings are born with equal and inalienable rights and have the right to age with dignity, respected by their families and communities, free of neglect, abuse and violence’ — elder abuse is also described as ‘a global social issue which affects the health and human rights of millions of older persons around the world’.1 The UN estimates that 4 to 6 per cent of elderly people have experienced some form of mistreatment at home, and in the West there are also growing numbers of reported cases of serious abuse and deaths taking place in care homes and hospitals. In 1995 the global population of people aged 60 and over was 542 million; UN predictions inflate that figure to 1.2 billion for 2025. Accordingly, elder abuse is also forecast to increase. This means many more cases of serious physical injury, long-term psychological damage and premature death. As a consciousness-raising endeavour, and following representation from an NGO called the International Network for the Prevention of Elder Abuse (INPEA), the UN General Assembly announced in 2006 that 15 June would henceforth officially be designated ‘World Elder Abuse Awareness Day’.2

Introduction: Theatre and the Rise of Human Rights

It may be that, in keeping with global political aspirations, the twenty-first century will become the century of human rights.1 As many voices advocate as oppose such an aspiration, and the worlds of theatre and performance are no exception: the empowering qualities of theatre have been acknowledged by many, especially in relation to vulnerable communities.2 In the wake of the human rights legislation that emerged after World War II and the United Nations’ 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights, theatre and performance artists have increasingly promoted specific human rights issues in their work and sought to establish special ties with various forms of human rights advocacy.3 The theatre artists who are connected with human rights are myriad, and some of the most celebrated include Augusto Boal (Brazil), renowned for his ‘Theatre of the Oppressed’ practices; Ariel Dorfman (Argentina); Athol Fugard and Yael Farber (South Africa); Vaclav Havel (Czech Republic); Harold Pinter (Great Britain); Nawal El Sadaawi (Egypt); Farzaneh Aghaeipour (Iran); Marcie Rendon and Cherrie Moraga (United States); Mangai (India); Nighat Rizvi, Madeeha Gauhar and Shahid Nadeem (Pakistan); and Juliano Mer Khamis, who was murdered in 2011 outside his theatre in the Palestinian refugee camp in Jenin, on the West Bank.

Introduction: Theatre and Spectrality

Ghosts are hard to escape in modern and contemporary culture: in film and television dramas, novels, poetry, fine art and installation — and, particularly, we argue in this book, in theatre. Much has been written about ghosts in relation to Freud’s essay ‘The Uncanny,’ in which Freud describes feelings of dread and repulsion at a familiar object suddenly rendered full of alienating menace.1 For Jo Collins and John Jervis, Freud’s uncanny suggests ‘a fundamental indecision, an obscurity or uncertainty, at the heart of our ontology, our sense of time, place and history, which is unsettling, potentially terrifying and intriguing.’2 The confrontation with the uncanny has been perceived as a fundamentally modern predicament: Collins and Jervis identify the uncanny as the ‘constitutive aspect of our experience of the modern,’ while Roger Luckhurst describes the uncanny as ‘a meta-concept for modernity itself.’3

Introduction: The Singularity of Theatrical Celebrity

Celebrity, the condition of being much talked about, is hardly an invisible phenomenon in the history of British theatre. On the contrary, its discourses constitute a silent yet pervasive presence in the accounts of performing lives through which that history has been written. Theatrical celebrity leaves behind many forms of material evidence: plays, anecdotes, photographs, cartoons, programmes, reviews, portraits and costumes. But despite its ubiquity, the nature of celebrity on and off the stage has scarcely begun to be addressed.