Publication details
Performing Representation : Living the Lockout and Beckett’s Fizzles
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| Year of publication | 2018 |
| Type | Appeared in Conference without Proceedings |
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| Description | This paper examines two productions which challenge the paradigms of modern Irish theatre: Anú Productions’ Living the Lockout (2013)—a site-specific work which re-imagines the lives of tenement-dwellers during the 1913 Lockout of Dublin workers from their places of employment—and Company SJ’s production of three of Samuel Beckett’s short prose pieces, collectively entitled Fizzles (2014). Both productions took place in the same preserved Dublin tenement. In their innovative use of the specificities of this resonant performance space, Anú and Company SJ provide new ways of imagining the domestic setting which has been the spatial blueprint for Irish theatre since the foundation of the Abbey Theatre in 1904. The paper draws on Shaun Richards and Chris Morash’s argument (2018, forthcoming) that Irish theatrical realism has, from its very inception, been involved in staging a crisis of mimetic representation. I further argue that productions such as ANU’s and Company SJ’s, rather than representing a clean break with the category of the dramatic, constitute new ways of dealing with the problem of representation and the dominance of realism as a dramatic form in Ireland. |
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