Modern and Contemporary Irish Drama Book

What is Irish Drama? What characterizes a piece as "Irish" besides the fact that the author was born in Ireland? This is the main question my classmates and I explored in my graduate course on Irish Drama. While of course it's too complex to be completely answered, some of the characteristics we came up with were a preoccupation with and ambivalence towards superstition and the supernatural, tragic nationalism, crises of masculinity, family conflict, and fatalism. While some of the themes are often depressing, the language of these plays is often witty, whimsical, musical, and very funny. Romantics will love the emotional intensity and supernatural elements of plays like "The Weir," realists and historians will like the politics of the nationalist plays. Whether you already love drama and/or Irish lit, or you're not familiar with either one, I encourage you to try collection out as an introduction and overview to Irish Drama.

This was the primary textbook for my graduate course on Irish Drama, so I read most of the plays but not all of them. I loved almost everything I read in here, but my favorites are Brian Friel's "Translations" and Conor McPherson's "The Weir." If you're not familiar with Irish Drama (or even if you've never studied Drama at all), I definitely recommend this Norton edition as a good introduction. They've selected a lot of the most popular and important plays from the last 150 years or so. There are a few critical essays in the back if you're interested in digging a little deeper, but they're relatively short and practical (not bogged down in dense academic discourse), so they're great for the armchair literature enthusiast. My professor, Kevin Kerrane, wrote one of the essays on "The Weir," and it's a very basic rundown of the main points of interest in the play; he's a very down-to-earth guy, and a great teacher!

While I really like the plays Norton has selected here, I have one complaint: that the anthology itself includes too few plays spread over too many years. There is so much wonderful Irish Drama that it seems almost impossible to give an overview of 150 years in such a short volume. This is why I would like to see this collection split into two volumes or more. Since 1980, there has been an incredible explosion of great Irish Drama, and my course actually ended up focusing mostly on the contemporary stuff (which also happens to be my favorite, so yes, I'm probably quite biased). You could actually make a great anthology just out of mid-20th c. to contemporary, starting with Beckett and working up to the present day. Since this Norton doesn't include several of my favorite plays from the last 50 years or so, I encourage readers who are interested in contemporary Irish Drama to seek out the works of Billy Roche and other plays by Conor McPherson. Including more contemporary plays would also allow the inclusion of more female playwrights, and perhaps even Northern Irish writers as well.

For all my complaints about the anthology being too broad, in a way this actually makes it really good as a primer for someone who wants a very basic overview of the high points of Irish Drama. I encourage just about anyone to check this out from a library and read a play or two, even if you've never read drama before - plays are short, quick reads and you might discover something new to love! I hadn't studied drama practically at all (except Shakespeare) before I took this course, and now I'm in love!