Podcast: Thomas Kilroy - The Playwright and the Archive

Thomas Kilroy

Thomas Kilroy is one of Ireland’s most celebrated playwrights and critics. Kilroy is a multi-award-winning playwright, a member of the Irish Academy of Letters, the Royal Society of Literature, and Aosdána. He is the recipient of many awards such as the American Irish Foundation award (1974); the Special Tribute Award from the Irish Times/ESB Irish Theatre Awards (2004); the Irish PEN/ A.T. Cross Award (2008). Kilroy’s archive at the Hardiman Library, NUI Galway, comprising over fifty boxes of manuscripts is a record of his literary achievement as well as an insight into the work of a celebrated writer, his drafts, networks and legacies, across five decades.

In this podcast you can discover the archive of Thomas Kilroy, highlights from the archive and reflections on one of Ireland's most foremost writers and thinkers. 

Flyer from production of "Double Cross" by Thomas Kilroy. From the Kilroy Archive, NUI Galway

Guest Post - Erin Grogan (Fulbright Scholar) - Mary Rynne, Lost Plays and Theatre Archives

Erin Grogan

From August to this past February, I was lucky enough to immerse myself fully in the archives with little other responsibility – a chance most researchers can only dream of. I received a Fulbright research grant that enabled me to leave West Texas for 6 months and focus solely on delving into my dissertation studies at the James Hardiman Library. My research focuses on women playwrights during the Free State years - how they were affected by and contributed to the ideas of Irish womanhood.

Part of applying for a Fulbright grant is being able to articulate why you need to go to this other country, what makes it imperative to your studies? I knew that NUIG housed the digital archives of both the Abbey theatre and the Gate theatre which would be immensely helpful to my work, and I made a decently good argument for why that mattered (I did get the grant, after all). But if I were to answer that same question now, having been with the archival materials in person and working alongside the archivists at NUIG, my answer would look something like this:



Archives are a treasure trove. Much like writing characters in plays, archives take on a life of their own and lead you down paths you never expected. Archivists themselves are muses who point you towards material you didn’t realize you needed but now can’t write without. Without these primary sources and first-hand reflections, my dissertation would be merely speculation.

This may have been too flowery for the application, but I stand by it. When I arrived at NUIG I met with Barry Houlihan, Archivist, and we immediately set out sourcing material of relevance for my research - names of women writers I hadn’t heard of before, plays to read, materials to sort through. Most excitingly, was discovering the personal archive of Mary Rynne that had just recently been donated. Rynne had only one production at the Abbey, Pilgrims in 1938, and it received mixed reviews. While not well known, and not particularly well produced, Rynne has become an important part of my dissertation.

Despite reviews and reflections on Rynne that made it seem as though she was content to have only written one play – her archives painted a clearly different picture. She wrote short stories and radio plays, many of which were published in magazines, and her notebooks were teeming with ideas and starts of many more. In sorting through her archives related to Pilgrims, I came across a full-length script of a stage play that had never been published or produced. With no title page, I began to refer to this script as Rynne’s “Lost Play” to those I’d talk about it with.

Mary Rynne

This “Lost Play” highlighted the limited roles women in the Free State faced and the ways women subverted these expectations or ultimately gave into them. The protagonist struggles between familial duties and her own needs and wants. This script was exciting to me because it was written around the same time as Teresa Deevy’s Katie Roche and explores many of the same themes and issues. Deevy’s play is periodically revived and often lauded as a singular example of a women writing about Irish womanhood on the stage, but this play of Rynne’s proves that other women artists were also exploring the limitations of their own citizenship. The strong themes present in both plays, the relationships between women characters, and ultimately the lack of female support systems within these works highlighted a substantial issue within the wider Irish society of the time.

This archival find is just one example of the many exciting discoveries I had during my studies in Galway. Back in Texas now, I am still processing all that I was able to read and uncover. My time in the archives was invaluable and has allowed me to conduct more thorough, deep, and important research into this time period, these women, and their works. I am grateful to all the archivists at NUIG, as well as Fulbright, for allowing me the tools to write on this important subject. I know that as I continue on my academic and scholarly path, not only will I retain my relationship to this school and their special collections, but that my relationship to archives (both their existence and use) has also been changed for the better.

Who is Katie Roche? - From the Archives

Programme from opening night, 'Katie Roche', 1936, Abbey Theatre Digital Archive

The story of the eponymous young woman of the play, Katie Roche, is often unbeknown to Irish theatre audiences. Lesser known still is the story of the play’s author, Teresa Deevy. One could be forgiven for confusing the stories of both women, Roche and Deevy – their stories interchangeable where either’s ambition and ability were left unfulfilled by demonstrable forces beyond their control. Authority has a habit of getting in the way.

Such was the case for both Deevy and her play Katie Roche. First performed at the Abbey Theatre in March 1936, the play’s opening night review in the Evening Herald included the following remarks: “The point of the play, if point there is, is most evasive. It seems to be little more than a clever psychological study of a girl who gives her name to the piece.” This critic who describes Katie as a “complex creature as near to insanity as makes no difference” spent most of the review trying to define Katie herself, describing her as full of “gamin elfishness . . . queer, fiery, and at times a pitiful character.” We are still left quite unaware of Katie's story or of who she is or the fate that befalls her.

Screenshot from Abbey Theatre Digital Archive, NUI Galway

Deevy’s play presents a young woman, Katie, who as born out of wedlock, is depicted as someone who is somehow, incomplete, unknowable or wild. In marrying an older man, Stanislaus Gregg, an artist of renown, Katie untimely succumbs to the pressures of conformity, to play ' a role' as a wife and within a family.  

As a reader of this review some eight decades later, one would be none much the wiser as to knowing who Katie is, or what she experienced, or what Deevy sought to accomplish with the play. In fact, the review concludes that the “the people in it are unprobable beings in an unprobable world of their own.” The ‘improbable world’ that the reviewer speaks of relates more to conservative Ireland of the 1930s of which the play is both a product of and a response against. Fintan O’Toole writes that: “It is easy enough to see that she didn’t fit in with the increasingly reactionary atmosphere of the national theatre, however, and that her work raises startlingly blunt questions about the role of women in Éamon de Valera’s Ireland.”

Image from 1975 production of 'Katie Roche'. Abbey Theatre Digital Archive 

The play was one of the most popular at the Abbey theatre throughout the 1930s and foregrounded Waterford-born Deevy as a playwright of much promise, vision and talent. But all would not be so. Newly digitised records from the Abbey Theatre Digital Archive, available at the Hardiman library, NUI Galway, allow researchers a new opportunity to study the history of this play and of Teresa Deevy herself. Research by Abbey Theatre Digital Archive Fellow, Tricia O’Beirne, who transcribed the minute books of the first thirty-five years of the Abbey Board as part of a digitisation project discovered that:

In one of the last entries to the minute books, on the 28 April 1939, Teresa Deevy, the playwright who gave the Abbey one of their most successful plays of the thirties in Katie Roche, is rather mysteriously dismissed from her contract. Previous academic research has tended to place Deevy’s break with the Abbey in the early 1940s, when she submitted Wife to James Whelan which was rejected by Blythe, but here is evidence that in response to her inquiring about her play Holiday House, which had been accepted by the board a year previously, the board decide not to produce it ‘and agreed that the contract with Miss Deevy should be allowed to lapse’. This terminology is not employed elsewhere in the minutes and no explanation is given for the dropping of one of their most popular and critically acclaimed playwrights.

Deevy’s involvement with the Abbey theatre, as a playwright of other new work at least, ends with Katie Roche. After its premiere in 1936, the play was revived in 1937, 1938, 1949, 1953, 1954, 1975 and 1994, before being revived currently on the Abbey stage in 2017. The production history and records of the play, newly digitised for the first time at NUI Galway, reveal how this play, much loved by its original audiences has faded into a sporadic production over the subsequent decades.

From the original production, the stage management files, revealing sketches and drawings of the stage and set, lists of props, cue-sheets for lighting and sound, also included detailed annotation down to the detail of the colour of carpets and curtains used on set. In the absence of photographs, for example, these records are an invaluable account of the original staging which was produced by Hugh Hunt and designed by Tania Moiseiwitsch and provide evidence as to why it struck a chord with both audiences and to those who may have considered Katie “a wild” and dangerous figure for modern Ireland.

Stage management files, 1936, 'Katie Roche', Abbey Theatre Digital Archive

Later records, such as prompt-scripts, give further opportunity to follow how the play was and could be mounted, giving an indication of the craft of Deevy the playwright and evidence as to just why exactly she was known as a playwright of such ability before her contract was “allowed to lapse” in such a crude manner.

Digitised audio reels, 1975, 'Katie Roche' Abbey Theatre Digital Archive

Audio visual records, such as audio files from productions in the 1980s and 1990s give a chance for the first time to hear how the play was scored and a how music and affects were integrated into the production. A video recording of the 1994 production of Katie Roche, on the Peacock stage, starring Dearbhla Crotty in the titular role of Katie, brings the archive story of the play full-circle, allowing us to watch, hear and experience, as far as possible, the play in action and brought to life from the past. More than eighty years after the play was first performed, the archive and records of the play’s production and its reception can bring us closer to knowing more about the complex stories of both Katie Roche and Teresa Deevy.

The transcribed minute books of the Board of the Abbey Theatre 1904 - 1939 are available here.

Seminar: Digitising the Abbey Theatre Archive: journey and destination

The Library at National University of Ireland, Galway, will host a seminar on Tuesday 4 October which will tell the story of the Abbey Theatre Digital Archive, created by the largest theatre archive digitisation project undertaken worldwide.

It reflects on challenges faced, lessons learned, new opportunities and impact on academic mission, library and archives.

Registration is free, with full programme details at https://www.eventbrite.ie/e/digitising-the-abbey-theatre-archive-journey-and-destination-tickets-27430060048

Niall O'Brien, Steven Rea and Kate Flynn in Brian Friel's Aristocrats, 1979

Remembering the Rising - Commemorations from 1966

President of Ireland, Michael D. Higgins, led the commemoration and national remembering of the events of Easter 1916 this past weekend, the centenary of the Easter rising of 1916. As part of a national programme of events, commemorations included a military parade past the G.P.O. on Dublin's O'Connell Street on Easter Sunday to a nation-wide synchronised sequence of events that took place in Galway, Cork, Meath and Wexford on Easter Monday,

Across the weekend a diverse programme of cultural commemoration in the form of lectures, talks, concerts, exhibitions and re-enactments entertained and engaged the public. At the beginning of all these events was a laying of a wreath at the Garden of Remembrance at Parnell Square by President Higgins.

The Garden of Remembrance was officially opened by then President of Ireland, Éamon De Valera, as part of the fiftieth anniversary commemorations of the 1916 Rising in 1966. As the events of 1916 are of such interest to study and understand, so too are the acts of commemoration and understanding how we remember these moments in Irish history at various times in the State's history. Within the archive of actor and revolutionary Arthur Shields at the Hardiman Library, NUI Galway, are original plans for the Garden of Remembrance. Arthur was an actor and stage manager at the Abbey Theatre and who was an active combatant in the Rising as it broke out just streets away from the Abbey Theatre. He was later arrested and interned at Frongoch Prison Camp in Wales.

In a further link between history and remembering, Shields has the unique distinction of being a rebel active in 1916, of playing the lead role of Jack Clitheroe in the 1926 original production of Sean O'Casey's "The Plough and the Stars" critiquing the Rising at the Abbey Theatre and also playing the role of Padraic Pearse in the 1936 film version of "The Plough and the Stars" directed by John Ford with a screenplay by Dudley Nicholas. The below images are all from the archive of Arthur Shields and offer a glimpse into commemorations of 1916 fifty years ago.

 Original plans for the Garden of Remembrance

 A book of commemorative stamps issued by An Post

 A book of commemorative stamps issued by An Post

A photograph of Arthur Shields (centre) as a fallen rebel from the 1926 production of "The Plough and the Stars at the Abbey Theatre 

Photograph of an Taoiseach of the time, Sean Lemass (also a rebel involved in 1916 as a 16-year old) with Christine Shields and Helena Moloney (bottom left) on the occasion of the unveiling of a plaque to commemorate members of the cast and staff of the theatre who participated in the 1916 Rising, 1966. Helena Molony was a central figure in events in 1916 and also afterwards as a leading feminist, trade unionist and socialist.

NUI Galway and Abbey Theatre release digitised Abbey Minute Books, 1904-1939

This week the Abbey Theatre/NUI Galway Digital Archive Partnership made freely available online the digitised minute books of the Abbey Theatre 1904 – 1939.

As part of the Yeats2015 celebrations, the online digital archive of Abbey Theatre Minute Books will be made available to the public for the first time. Collectively, the minute books amount to nearly 1,000 pages, covering some of the Abbey’s most significant events from the period 1904-1939, being the period that spans Yeats' lifetime.

'A Digital Journey Through Irish Theatre History', the Abbey Theatre - NUI Galway Digital Archive Partnership is the largest digital theatre project ever undertaken, and heralds a new era in Irish theatre scholarship, both nationally and internationally. Previously unseen, the Abbey Theatre Minute Books include the period in history when both Lady Gregory and W.B. Yeats were involved in the management of the Abbey Theatre.

The Abbey Theatre minute books contain notes from meetings of the theatre’s Board of Directors. They offer a fascinating glimpse behind the scenes of the theatre, showing how the Abbey’s managers dealt with a variety of issues, from choosing plays to determining how much to pay their actors.Along the way, we find important information about leading figures from the Irish Literary Revival and beyond: not just W. B. Yeats, Lady Gregory and John Millington Synge but Sean O’Casey, Lennox Robinson, Teresa Deevy, Sean O’Faolain, Frank O’Connor, and many others. We also learn about great Irish actors such as Molly Allgood, Ria Mooney, Barry Fitzgerald, Cyril Cusack and many more.

Prof. Patrick Lonergan

NUI Galway Professor of Drama Patrick Lonergan said that the minute book will be of huge interest to theatre scholars, historians, and anyone with an interest in Irish culture: “the story of the Abbey Theatre is in many ways the story of our nation in microcosm. This online resource shows the Abbey Theatre and NUI Galway working together to reveal new aspects of that theatre’s story – and, by extension, new aspects of the story of Ireland. Users of the site will be able to search easily through hundreds of pages of records, and can move between the handwritten originals and carefully transcribed webpages. And all of this is available entirely free of charge to readers anywhere in the world.”

The minute books allow us to understand better how theatres are run. Yeats wrote about his approach to theatre business in a poem that was tellingly called “The Fascination of What’s Difficult”, cursing “plays/ that have to be set up in fifty ways”. Here we find Yeats encountering all sorts of difficulties - from the threat of government censorship of Sean O’Casey’s The Plough and the Stars in 1926 to the leaking of his late play Purgatory to a Jesuit priest in 1938. And those difficulties are indeed fascinating.

Dr Charlotte McIvor, lecturer in drama and performance at NUIG, said that the books contain valuable information for scholars and teachers. She said: “I think they are going to be very important in explaining to students the different kinds of labour involved in running a theatre.”Dr McIvor said the books document “in minute detail” the decisions of the board right down to discussions about whether or not to allow cigarette smoking in the theatre. “I think you could honestly take any two pages in these books and build a successful lesson around it,” she added.

Dr. Charlotte McIvor

Playwright and Abbey board member Thomas Kilroy said the books help illuminate the relationship between the early theatre and the changing Irish State.He said: “One extraordinary thing which I had never heard of before which was that in 1939 Dublin Corporation tried to establish stage censorship. They assembled a number of inspectors to establish what was going on in Irish theatres.”

We also learn much about the day to day activities of keeping a theatre in business: the struggles to find appropriate funding, the actors’ requests for extra money or time off, and the maintenance of the building. And of course we learn much about Ireland, both before and after independence. The Abbey Theatre famously was the first state-subsidised theatre in the English-speaking world, earning funding in 1925 from the newly independent Irish Free State.

Bryan McMahon, Chairman of the Abbey Theatre said:  “The Abbey Theatre is proud to reveal, for the first time, our early Minute Books, an exciting milestone in our ground-breaking digital archive partnership with NUI Galway.   It is wonderful to manifest digitally the inner workings of the national theatre during its formative years.  These Minute Books give us fascinating insights into the management style and business acumen of W.B. Yeats and Lady Gregory and the contribution made by the Board of Directors.  Indeed, the Minute Books reveal that Yeats was so integral to the Abbey Theatre, that Lennox Robinson, playwright and Board member, was dispatched to France to assist in the repatriation of his remains.  As we all know, it was an unsuccessful mission.  The Abbey Theatre is delighted that in this Yeats’ commemorative year, the full story of W.B. Yeats as theatre maker can be fully revealed.”

The Abbey Theatre Minute Books can be viewed www.nuigalway.ie/abbeytheatreminutebooks/

Excerpt from the Abbey Theatre digitised minute books

Honouring Stephen Rea at NUI Galway

NUI Galway has this week honoured the acclaimed Irish actor, Stephen Rea, by conferring on him an Honorary Doctor of Arts Degree. Rea has amassed a career in the performing arts on both stage and screen that has seen him portray a rich lineage of complex characters who are deeply connected to the Ireland of its time and place and also to an international connection to the wider world.

In advance of the conferring ceremonies, Dr Jim Browne, President of NUI Galway, said:

“NUI Galway is fortunate to be associated with many outstanding honorary graduates throughout its history. This week we are very proud to honour Stephen Rea for his outstanding and distinctive contribution to the world of culture, theatre and film in Ireland and far beyond. NUI Galway is very pleased to be in a position to recognise his exceptional talent and achievement. On behalf of the University I congratulate Stephen and each of the 2,500 students who will be conferred with degrees this week from NUI Galway. ”

Dr Charlotte McIvor, Lecturer in the Centre for Drama, Theatre and Performance, delivered the citation in honour of Rea paid tribute diverse range of work over forty years in the Arts:

"Stephen Rea  has taken us around the world and through time, inhabiting souls whose fragile and often violently conflicted layers of self have laid bare struggles for identity and connection that are fundamental to the human condition.   He is one of the most recognizable faces of the stage and screen, yet always unfamiliar, shape-shifting to meet the terms of the worlds he has inhabited through his work. Through his characters, he has brought us face to face again and again with the brutal and divisive politics of our small island and elsewhere."

Within the archive collections of the Hardiman Library there is a vast array of records that document and highlight the relationships between Rea and writers, playwrights, directors and theatres that have shaped his career. A key relationship is to Irish theatre via Field Day Theatre Company, whom Rea was a founding member and also the connection with the playwright Thomas Kilroy, himself a later member of Field Day and the author of Double Cross, written for Rea and produced in 1986. The plays of Brian Friel again have a large presence in the archives through Field Day records but also via the archive of the Abbey Theatre, digitally available at the Hardiman Library, along with the Thomas Kilroy archive and many other related literary and theatrical collections.

The Kilroy archive contains manuscript drafts and notes of the play Double Cross, programmes and flyers and also correspondence with Rea as well as a range of records relating to Field Day Theatre Company.

Rea starred in many Friel premieres for the Abbey Theatre, including the Freedom of the City (1973) and Aristocrats in 1979 and also Making History for Field Day Theatre Company at Derry in 1988.

Here is a selection of some archive material from these productions as we honour an congratulate Stephen Rea.

For more coverage of the honourary conferring and for video interviews with Rea please click here.

'Moon worship', - Yeats, the West and the Art of Gerard Dillon

Yeats & the West is an exhibition focusing not just on the work and influence of W.B. Yeats, but on the influence on him and wider impact of people, landscapes, languages, crafts, arts, and music from the west of Ireland and beyond. A major addition to the exhibition is a rare oil painting by Gerard Dillon of a night-time scene featuring a moonlight vista of a ‘typical’ Connemara landscape, its figures recalling some lost play by J.M.Synge. These characters, a shawled woman and a virile, moondrunk (or just drunk) young man, bowed in ritual before a moonlit boghole, also appear as shades from out of Yeats’s western phantasmagoria, reminding a viewer of landscapes Yeats himself had created in his first book, The Wanderings of Oisin and Other Poems (1889) (a volume praised by Oscar Wilde and William Morris) – in particular these lines from his poem “Ephemera”:

‘Your eyes that once were never weary of mine
Are bowed in sorrow under pendulous lids,
Because our love is waning.’

And then She:

‘Although our love is waning, let us stand
By the lone border of the lake once more,
Together in that hour of gentleness
When the poor tired child, passion, falls asleep.
How far away the stars seem, and how far
Is our first kiss, and ah, how old my heart!’

The artist Gerard Dillon was born in Belfast in April 1916 and grew up there, until moving to London in 1934 where he worked a house painter while honing his craft and trying to further his career as an artist. Despite being reared and working in the early years of his life in the urban streetscapes of Belfast, Dublin and London, it was the west of Ireland, most especially Connemara and the western islands which would have a major and lasting effect and influence on his work. Dillon would spend the year of 1950-1951 living and painting on the island of Inislacken. Over the next decade Dillon would receive substantial international recognition for his expressionism steeped in western culture and imagery.

Gerard Dillon, Self Portrait at Roundstone

Dillon did not confine himself to painting. He produced designs for posters, playbills, theatre sets and costumes for productions by the Abbey Theatre, Dublin, in the late 1960s. Working as part of a trio, the artists Arthur Armstrong, Gerard Dillon and George Campbell made up the consortium known, alphabetically, as A.D.C. This group also designed the posters for the first three theatre production posters at the Abbey Theatre after it reopened in 1966 following a fire at the theatre more than ten years before. The programme, from the 1969 production of Juno and the Paycock, two years before Dillon’s death, states in a note that “the posters sprang from the belief that artists should be closely identified with all artistic efforts in the country.”

Gerard Dillon by George Campbell (c) Mrs Joyce Cooper.

The programme also contains cartoon drawings of characters from the play including Juno and Captain Boyle by Micheal MacLiammóir. Other similar artwork by MacLiammóir can be seen in the exhibition in the bookplate he designed for the personal library of actor and director Arthur Shields, examples of which are on display in the exhibition cabinets.

Programme for Juno and the Paycock (Abbey 1969). Cartoons by Michael MacLiammóir

As central part of Yeats & the West, the painting ‘The Moon Worshipper’ by Gerard Dillon is on public exhibition for the very first time at the Special Collections Reading Room. Dating from 1948, the painting, in oils on sturdy wood panel, is a wonderful example from a series of moonscapes over Connemara inspired, according to the artist, by a walk home after a late night in Roundstone.

Preparing ‘The Moon Worshipper’ for hanging. The reverse of the panel has been decorated with outline faces.

With the style deliberately primitivist, and the woman wearing one of the red traditional Connemara costumes noted by Synge, the picture’s central enthusiast perhaps wrily recalls the impassioned western pilgrimages of so many artists and writers. The exhibition curators gratefully acknowledge the loan of the painting for the duration of the exhibition, which is open until Christmas at the Hardiman Research Building, NUI Galway.

The Dillon painting and other artworks by Jack B. Yeats on display at the Hardiman Research Building, NUI Galway

Arthur Shields - The Rising on the Street, Stage and Screen

On the 11th February 1926, rioting greeted the Abbey Theatre performance of Sean O'Casey's "The Plough and the Stars" because of what was viewed as it's anti-Irish sentiment. Yeats tells the audience "You have disgraced yourselves again".

From the Arthur Shields Family Collection is a photograph from that production, featuring G Fallon, Arthur Shields, FJ McCormack and Shelah Richards(T13/B/246). In spite of the controversy surrounding aspects of the play, it played to full houses, and had many re-runs and revivals, as well as a film version in 1937.

In a reply to critics, printed in "The Irish Times" on 19 February 1926, O'Casey tackled some of the criticisms of the play, and went on to state.

The politicians - Free State and Republican - have the platform to express themselves, and Heavens knows they seem to take full advantage of it. The drama is my place for self-expression, and I claim the liberty in drama that they enjoy on the platform (and how they do enjoy it!), and am prepared to fight for it.

In a unique twist, Arthur Shields, an actor and stage manager at the Abbey Theatre, was also an active participant in the Easter Rising of 1916, would star in the 1926 production of "The Plough and the Stars" at the Abbey Theatre and also feature in the 1936 film version of "Plough and the Stars", directed by John Ford.

For more on productions of "The Plough and the Stars" check out the Shields Family Collection athttp://archives.library.nuigalway.ie/cgi-bin/FramedList.cgi?T13 and programmes from the various Abbey Theatre productions of 'The Plough and the Stars' as part of the abbey Theatre Digital Archive, available at the Hardiman Library. 

Symposium on Famine Memory, Thursday 12 February, Hardiman Building

Performing Famine Memory:

Irish Theatre and the Great Hunger Symposium

National University of Ireland, Galway, February 12-13, 2015.

Date: Thursday February 12, 1-7pm. Friday February 13, 10am -12pm.

Venue: Hardiman Research Building, G010.

Conference Convener and Contact: Dr. Jason King (Jason.king@nuigalway.ie)

            

This symposium examines Irish Theatre and Famine Memory between the periods of the Irish Revival and the rise and fall of Ireland’s Celtic Tiger.  It places special emphasis on the performance of Famine remembrance to register moments of national crisis and forced migration in Ireland, both past and present.  The symposium brings together leading Irish theatre and famine scholars and theatre practitioners to explore recent productions about the Great Hunger in the era of the Celtic Tiger, such as DruidMurphy’s revival (2012) of Tom Murphy’s Famine (1968), Sonya Kelly’s How to Keep An Alien (2014), Moonfish Theatre’s bilingual English and Irish language adaptation of Joseph O’Connor’s novel Star of the Sea (2014), Jaki McCarrick’s Belfast Girls (2012), Fiona Quinn’s The Voyage of the Orphans (2012), Caroilin Callery and Maggie Gallagher’s “Strokestown - Quebec Connection Youth Arts Project - 'The Language of Memory and Return'” (2011-2014), Donal O’Kelly’s The Cambria (2005), and Elizabeth Kuti’s The Sugar Wife (2005).  Representations of the Great Famine during the Revival in Maud Gonne’s Dawn and early plays staged at the Gate Theatre will also be discussed. The performance of traumatic remembrance of the Famine and pivotal historical events in W.B. Yeats’s The Dreaming of the Bones (1916) will be explored in a keynote address by Professor Chris Morash.  Dr. Marguérite Corporaal will also deliver a keynote address on the development of international Famine studies and research networks and opportunities for collaboration.

Symposium Schedule Thursday Februrary 12:

1-2pm. Irish Famine Memory and Migration in Contemporary Theatre Productions:
 
Barry Houlihan (NUIG), Overview of Irish Theatre Archival Resources at NUI Galway.

Dr. Jason King (NUIG): “Performing the Green Pacific: Staging Female Youth Migration in  Jaki 
McCarrick’s Belfast Girls (2012) and Fiona Quinn’s The Voyage of the Orphans (2012)”.

 Dr. Charlotte McIvor (NUIG): 'The Cambria (2005) and How To Keep An Alien (2014): Famine Traces and the Palimpsestic Time of Irish Migration'    

 2-3pm. Staging Famine Memory: Theatre Practitioner Perspectives  

Máiréad Ni Chroinin (NUIG and Moonfish Theatre): “Moonfish Theatre's production of Star of the Sea, based on the novel by Joseph O'Connor” (2014).

Caroilin Callery (Cultural Connections Theatre Group): Strokestown - Quebec Connection Youth Arts Project - 'The Language of Memory and Return'.

3-3:30pm coffee break

                   
3:30-5pm. DruidMurphy and Early Twentieth-Century Representations of the Great Famine on Stage:

Professor Patrick Lonergan (NUIG): DruidMurphy (2012) and Abbey Productions of Tom Murphy’s Famine.

Dr. Marguérite Corporaal (Radboud University Nijmegen): “Starvation in the Shadows: (Un)staging the Famine in Maud Gonne's Dawn (1904)”. 

Ruud Van Den Beuken (Radboud University Nijmegen): “'My blessing on the pistol and the powder and the ball!': Prospective Memories of Landlord Murders in the Earl of Longford's Ascendancy (1935)”.

6pm. Keynote address: Professor Chris Morash (MRIA, Trinity College, Dublin):

“Re-placing Trauma: Yeats’s The Dreaming of the Bones”.

Symposium Schedule Friday February 13 (10am-12pm)
Venue: Hardiman Research Building, G010.

Plenary Workshop: Dr. Marguérite Corporaal, “Building Irish Famine Research Networks”.

Deputy Thom Kluk from the Embassy of the Kingdom of the Netherlands will introduce keynote speaker Dr. Marguérite Corporaal (Radboud University Nijmegen). Dr. Corporaal will discuss her European Research Council funded project Relocated Remembrance: The Great Famine in Irish (Diaspora) Fiction, 1847-1921 (http://www.ru.nl/relocatedremembrance/) and her Dutch Research Council funded International Network of Irish Famine Studies (INIFS) (http://www.ru.nl/irishfaminenetwork/). She will consider the challenges of building international research networks and explore the opportunities and themes for research collaboration.  

'Performing the Archive' conference, NUI Galway, July 2015

'Performing the Archive' Conference

National University of Ireland, Galway

22 – 24 July 2015

Co-sponsored by the American Society for Theatre Research

Speakers: 

Professor Tracy C. Davis (Northwestern University)

Dr. Doug L. Reside (New York Public Library)

Professor Catherine Cole (University of California, Berkeley)

Dr. Hugh Denard (Trinity College, Dublin)

Professor Patrick Lonergan (National University of Ireland, Galway)

Professor Lionel Pilkington (National University of Ireland, Galway)

Dr. Emilie Pine (University College, Dublin)

'Performing the Archive' responds to new innovations in archival practices including digital methodologies and will bring together formative thinking among scholars, artists and archivists engaged in working with archival materials and on research and performance projects to explore the uses and possibilities of the archive today from theoretical and methodological perspectives.

We will debate: 

• What is the status of archival research methodologies in published research and graduate training today? 

• What are the possibilities of collaboration between researchers and practitioners working together to remount work based on the archives or research on new material? What working models exist and what have yet to be imagined? 

• How has the digital humanities begun to reshape the possibilities of archival engagement? 

• How can we support the labour of not only archival research methodologies but the maintenance of the archives themselves? How does the holding location of archives (university vs. community archive) affect the circulation of these resources?  How can partnerships be expanded or reimagined?  

• How has the cataloguing of new/recent archives contributed to new learning and change?

• Connection of archives, theatre and society: Documentary theatre and socially responsive theatre

• Theatre, Peace and Conflict – How memory of theatre and conflict, especially that of Northern Ireland, is newly understood and experienced through the archives and contributing to resolution and reconciliation

• The craft of the playwright: Drafting, editing and writing for stage or radio through adapting the archive

• How is contemporary performance shaped by memory of past performance?

This conference capitalizes on NUI Galway’s unparalleled strength in Irish theatre and literary archives, taking advantage of holdings including the Abbey Theatre Digital Archive and archives of Druid Theatre, Lyric Theatre Belfast, Taibhdhearc na Gaillimhe, Thomas Kilroy, Siobhan McKenna and the Galway Arts Festival, among others, to facilitate a national and international conversation about the place of archives in not only theatre and performance research and teaching, but arts practice and perception of theatre history more broadly. 

Coinciding with the Galway Arts Festival, the conference will immerse participants in the living performance culture of Galway as the Galway Arts Festival links together artists from around the world to mount Ireland’s largest international arts festival. 

Participants will take part in intensive working group sessions as well as participate in keynote and plenary sessions with leading scholars, archivists and performers working at the intersection of practice and research. 

You may propose either an individual paper or panel of three speakers.  Abstracts for individuals for individual papers should be no more than 350 words in length and panels should submit their panel title and grouped abstracts to be considered.  Proposed papers can address practical projects in the area of digitization, curation, or archives administration as well as presenting creative, scholarly or theoretical case studies. 

Individuals will also designate a working group to be associated with for an intensive workshop during the conference.   

You can apply to the following strands: 

• Archival Materials In/As Performance 

• Digitization: Methodology and Ethics 

• Early-Mid-Twentieth Century Irish Theatre

• Irish Theatre After Beckett

• Conflict, Memory and Trauma

• Scenography and Theatre Technologies

Please submit a 350-word abstract for your proposed paper as a PDF file ONLY with brief bio by 30 March 2015 to performarchive2015@gmail.com

For more information, please contact Barry Houlihan (barry.houlihan@nuigalway.ie), Charlotte McIvor (charlotte.mcivor@nuigalway.ie) or Ian Walsh (ian.walsh@nuigalway.ie).

http://performingthearchive2015.wordpress.com/ 

http://www.library.nuigalway.ie/collections/archives/

http://www.nuigalway.ie/drama/

http://nuigarchives.blogspot.ie

 

@NUIGarchives 

@NUIGDrama