Fagan, Paul. Fuchs, Dieter. Radak, Tamara (eds). 2021
Stage Irish: Performance, Identity, Cultural Circulation brings together chapters which revisit and
reconsider diverse modes of (mis)representing, performing, articulating, witnessing, constructing,
and deconstructing ‘Irishness’ from a twenty-first-century vantage. The time is ripe for such a
inquiry. The Celtic Tiger and Brexit, the Marriage Equality referendum and the #Repealthe8th and
#WakingTheFeminists campaigns compel us to turn to history and representation (in literature, drama,
art, music, film, television, non-fiction, popular, and digital culture) to reassess how ‘Irishness’ has
been shaped and reshaped through parochial, national, and international performances and gazes as
a variously class-coded, gendered, sexual, religious, national, and artistic identity. This focus on the
cultural, societal, historical, and political interfaces between performance, performativity, spectatorship,
and identity in diverse Irish and international contexts reveals tensions between self-image and
Othering, innovation and cliché, cultural production and negotiated reception.
Contents:
Introduction: Transcultural Refractions and Receptions of Irishness on Page, Stage, and Screen (Paul
Fagan, Dieter Fuchs, Tamara Radak) – Groves of Blarney: Fake Songs, Mock-Hoaxes, and Stage Irish
Identity in William Maginn and Francis Sylvester Mahony (Paul Fagan) – Staging Irishness in the
Transnational Marketing of Local Colour Fiction (Marguérite Corporaal) – Staging Irishness in Ethel
Colburn Mayne’s “The Happy Day” (Elke D’hoker) – Dion Boucicault, Arrah-na-Pogue, and Stage
Irishry in Finnegans Wake (Richard Barlow) – Austria and the Irish Paddy: Seán O’Casey’s Juno and
the Paycock Staged in 1930 and 1934 Vienna (Dieter Fuchs) – “And Trieste, ah Trieste...”: Stage
Ascendancy and Charles Lever’s Irish Characters (Elisabetta d’Erme) – James Joyce and the Sloveni-
ans: Auto- and Hetero-Stereotypes (Igor Maver) – “Beguiling Shenanigans”: Ireland and Hollywood
Animation 1947-1959 (Michael Connerty) – Object Lessons and Staged Irishness in Darby O’Gill and
the Little People (Michelle Witen) – ‘Wear Something Green’: The Re-Invention of the St. Patrick’s
Day Parade (Eimer Murphy) – Deconstructing Stereotypes and Othering Through Humour in Lisa
McGee’s Derry Girls (Verónica Membrive) – Reconfigurations of Gender in Contemporary Irish Stage
Adaptations, 2019-2020: Deirdre Kinahan’s The Unmanageable Sisters, Edna O’Brien’s The Country
Girls, Marina Carr’s Hecuba, and Michael West’s Solar Bones (Anne Fogarty) – Set Piece, Set Peace?
Negative Emotions and the Possibility of Change in Recent Stage Images of the North (Clare Wallace)
– Regarding the Rights of Others: Spectres of the Middle East in Conall Morrison’s The Bacchae of
Baghdad (Natasha Remoundou)