Panel: Touring Outside Ireland

Panel chair: Anna McMullan

Patrick Lonergan

National University of Ireland, Galway

Druid's Leenane Trilogy on Tour

Druid Theatre had toured internationally for two decades before they brought Martin McDonagh's Leenane Trilogy abroad. Nevertheless, the international success of the Trilogy – and the ensuing controversy about McDonagh's work – were in many ways unprecedented, resulting in an interesting divergence between popular and academic considerations of the Trilogy. The popular media celebrated Druid's success abroad, but rarely considered what McDonagh's plays might be saying about – or to – contemporary Ireland. Meanwhile, Irish critics expressed concern about the possibility of non-Irish audiences receiving McDonagh's plays as literal representations of Irish life – but overlooked the role of Druid in the plays' reception, instead concentrating on analysis of the scripts.

My paper considers the significance of Druid's international tours of The Leenane Trilogy. I examine the role of touring in the development of Druid, arguing that responses to The Leenane Trilogy must be considered in the context of the company's style and reputation. I suggest that the controversy generated by McDonagh exposes a troubling question: how may a criticism that styles itself as national – as Irish criticism currently does – meaningfully address the achievements of Druid and McDonagh, when the reception of both is so strongly predetermined by global factors?

Richard Pine

Durrell School of Corfu

The Gate: Home and Away

The Dublin Gate Theatre, under the management of Hilton Edwards and Micheál mac Líammóir, worked outside the Irish Free State/the Republic of Ireland on nineteen occasions between 1935 and 1962. Nine of these were excursions into Northern Ireland. Of the remainder, two involved London, five were to Egypt, the Balkans or the Mediterranean, one was to Glasgow, one to Canada and New York, one to Elsinore, and one to Belgium and Holland.

This paper will examine the pre-war tours to London, Egypt, and the Balkans, focussing in the first case on the plays presented before the split between the Edwards-macLíammóir partnership and Lord Longford (the Gate's principal sponsor 1930-36), in the second on the cause of the split, and in the third on the relevance of the Gate's presence in the Balkans on the eve of World War II.

Melissa Sihra

Queen's University, Belfast

‘My kind of Irish are not interested in such trash’: Perception, Conflict and Culture in Irish Theatre Abroad

This paper will look at the ways in which recent productions of contemporary Irish plays by Marina Carr have been produced, critically mediated, and received in the United States. In looking at the images and themes that are evoked in Carr's plays, questions of culture and perception necessarily arise. I will consider the broader issues of ‘cultural touring’ and the implications of this for the country being represented. Additionally, I will focus on popular notions of ‘Irishness’ within the context of Irish theatre in the United States, and look at how Carr's plays affirm, and / or contest these ever-evolving and often utopian concepts. Specifically, the paper will look at an Irish touring production of Carr in addition to American productions of Carr as a means through which to explore questions of myth, authenticity, cultural re-production, and authority.