Drama and Theatre Studies (Peer-reviewed publications)

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The teacher as co-creator of drama: a phenomenological study of the experiences and reflections of Irish primary school teachers.
(Routledge, 2017-05-24) McDonagh, Fiona; Finneran, Michael
Classroom drama in the Irish primary school context remains a relatively new endeavour and is largely under-researched. The knowledge base for all aspects of teacher education should be informed by rigorous reflection on teachers’ experiences in the classroom. This paper reports on a phenomenological study conducted with seven Irish primary school teachers which focused on their experiences of co-creating drama with their students. Co-creating drama is held in this work to be the coming together of teacher and students in a collective creative enterprise during the drama lesson. The term proposes a partnership whereby they operate as co-participants and co-artists in the drama experience. The ‘creating’ aspect of co-creating can be considered the artistic enterprise of making drama in a way that is new and unique to the group. In considering the teacher as a potential co-creator of drama, the paper probes the emergent and changing ontological attitudes of the participants throughout the process: the values, attitudes and perspectives that informed their teaching. The paper illuminates the phenomenon of teachers co-creating drama in all its complexity, and seeks to reflect on the meaning of this for the teachers.
The transnational roots of key figures from the early years of the Gate Theatre, Dublin (Pre-published)
(Palgrave Macmillan, 2020-11-04) Clare, David; Morris, Nicola
When considering the avant-garde nature of the early Gate Theatre, critics rightly focus on the queer sexuality and liberal politics of many of the people associated with the theatre at the time. However, it is also important to consider the transnational backgrounds of so many based at the Gate then – especially those individuals whose outsider status and interest in the outré could be linked not simply to foreign origins but also to ethnic and cultural hybridity. This chapter will ﬁll in many gaps and correct various misconceptions regarding the ethnic and cultural backgrounds of four key, English-born ﬁgures associated with the early the under-regarded actor, costume designer and milliner Nancy Beckh. It will be made clear that the work of these four artists at the Gate cannot be dismissed as examples of people from comfortable English backgrounds condescendingly engaging in cultural imperialism (i.e. treating the ‘exotic’ cultures of people from marginalized countries like Ireland and various states in Africa and Asia as artistic ‘raw material’) or shallow cosmopolitanism (Stewart 330). Rather, the mixed backgrounds of these artists helped them to create what scholars in the emerging ﬁeld of ‘new interculturalism’ call ‘intercultural performances’.
Traumatic childhood memories and the adult political visions of Sinéad O’Connor, Bono, and Phil Lynott (Pre-published)
(Peter Lang Ltd, 2020-02-17) Clare, David
Sinéad O’Connor, Paul “Bono” Hewson of U2, and the late Phil Lynott of Thin Lizzy are three of Ireland’s most famous rock musicians, but that is not all that these celebrated singer songwriters have in common. Memories of traumatic events and/or circumstances from their formative years in Dublin greatly influenced the political visions of all three artists in later life, as expressed through their lyrics and live performances. In O’Connor’s songs protesting the handling of abuse cases by the Roman Catholic hierarchy and England’s ill treatment of the peoples it has colonised,1 she has repeatedly returned to the image of the abused or endangered child – a reflection of what she has called the “torture” suffered at the hands of her mother in childhood (qtd in Loughrey). Likewise, the effect of the May 1974 Dublin bombings perpetrated by loyalist paramilitaries on Bono and his best friend’s brother, Andy Rowen, inspired several important U2 songs. Examples include tracks addressing Northern Irish violence, the reconciling of Catholic and Protestant Irishness (which – obviously – also relates to Bono’s half-Catholic, half-Protestant background) and heroin abuse in 1980s Dublin. Finally, while Phil Lynott’s music was not used for political activism in the way – or to the degree – that O’Connor’s and U2’s has been, there is one highly significant political agenda in his work. His experiences of racial prejudice during his Dublin childhood led him to repeatedly (if sometimes subtly) assert the validity and power of a black Irish identity.
Reflections on classic Gate plays by Mary Manning, Christine Longford, and Maura Laverty (Pre-published version)
(ISA [Irish Society for Archives], 2018) Clare, David
Last June, the Waking the Feminists organisation published Gender Counts (its eagerly-anticipated report on gender representation in Irish theatre), and the report confirmed what many Irish theatre fans suspected: during the period under scrutiny (2006-2015), Dublin’s Gate Theatre put on fewer plays by women than any other Arts Council-funded theatre organisation in the country.1 While it is wonderful that light has been shone on this egregious manifestation of conscious and unconscious gender bias, it is also important to note that the Gate was not always resistant to staging the work of female playwrights. Indeed, during the theatre’s early decades, many of its most important and successful new plays were written by women, and the outstanding work by these playwrights has been underappreciated for far too long.
Goldsmith, the gate, and the 'hibernicising' of Anglo-Irish plays (Pre-published version)
(Peter Lang, 2018) Clare, David
In recent decades, Irish theatre-makers have frequently imposed Irish elements onto the “English” plays written by London-based, Irish Anglican playwrights. As discerning critics have long recognised, George Farquhar, Oliver Goldsmith, Richard Brinsley Sheridan, Oscar Wilde, and Bernard Shaw frequently signalled their Irish origins in their plays. Often cited are their satirical portraits of the English, their subversive use of Stage Irishmen, and their inclusion of Irish topical references. However, since independence (and even more markedly since the early 1980s), Irish theatres and theatre companies have not been satisfied with such coded expressions of Irishness. Bowing to popular, narrow conceptions of Irish identity – and perhaps demonstrating their discomfort with the Irish/British cultural hybridity of these writers1 – Irish theatre-makers have frequently had certain English, Scottish, or continental European characters in these works played as Irish, or have re-set the plays in Ireland.
John McGahern's 'Oldfashioned' and Anglo-Irish culture (Pre-published version)
(Manchester University Press, 2017) Clare, David
In John McGahern’s 1985 short story ‘Oldfashioned’, he ably demonstrates why a sensitive, bookish, Catholic young man raised in the repressive, anti-intellectual Irish Free State might be attracted to the way of life being led by the country’s dwindling Church of Ireland population. Throughout ‘Oldfashioned’, McGahern suggests that Catholics in the young state are, in the main, overly fixated on money-making, gossip, and a prosaic practicality, and that they are suspicious of anything that smacks of foreign influence. By contrast, he implies that those from Anglo-Irish Protestant backgrounds are often more open to learning and aesthetic beauty, and take a much wider view of the world. McGahern also contends in the story, however, that Catholics cannot cross over to an Anglo-Irish cultural milieu without gravely compromising their ties to their own people. As the story demonstrates, the gulf that exists between the two communities is caused primarily by the fact that Anglo-Irish Protestants are frequently open to the cultural and economic ties that Ireland has to Britain, whereas most Irish Catholics are wilfully blind to the significant influence that the neighbouring island has on their lives. By examining frequently-ignored ‘British’ aspects of Irish life and by paying homage to the Anglo-Irish literary tradition throughout the story, McGahern reveals that his perspective on Anglo-Irish Protestants is quite unlike that of other Irish Catholic short story writers publishing during his lifetime; indeed, McGahern’s ‘Oldfashioned’ can be more easily compared to stories by writers from Church of Ireland backgrounds in which they reflect on the long, slow decline of their own community. Also, McGahern’s openness to the British aspects of Ireland’s past and present – as demonstrated by this story and by his writings more generally – indicate that his view of Irish history is influenced by Irish historical revisionism; McGahern differs from many revisionists, however, in that he does not attempt to downplay the trauma and injustice endured by many Irish people under English (later, British) rule.
Under-regarded roots: the Irish references in Sterne's "Tristram Shandy" (Pre-published version)
(CUP [Cork University Press], 2016) Clare, David
Laurence Sterne has always occupied an uncertain place within the Irish literary canon. Important commentators have consistently denied that his work is, in any significant way, Irish. Referring to the fact that the Tipperary-born Sterne was the son of an English soldier stationed in Ireland, Arthur Clery famously stated that “To call Sterne an Irishman is the mere pedantry of birth administration”. W.B. Yeats contended that Sterne’s Tristram Shandy should not be included in a canon of “national Irish literature” because it fails to reflect the nation’s “Celtic” traditions and character. Seminal surveys of Irish literature, including Declan Kiberd’s Irish Classics (2000), Norman Vance’s Irish Literature: A Social History (1999), and Joep Leerssen’s Mere Irish and Fíor-Ghael (1986), do not mention Sterne at all, even in passing, and, although Derek Hand writes incisively about Sterne in his study, A History of the Irish Novel (2011), he makes the unnecessarily extreme (and untrue) caveat that Sterne placed “no emphasis on his Irish roots whatsoever”.
The intertextual presence of Samuel Beckett’s "All That Fall" in Martin McDonagh’s "Six Shooter" (Pre-published version)
(EUP [Edinburgh University Press], 2015) Clare, David
As many critics have pointed out, Martin McDonagh's work for the stage and screen is deeply indebted to the drama of Samuel Beckett. While critics have spotted most of McDonagh's intertextual debts to Beckett, they have curiously failed to recognise that his Oscar-winning short film, Six Shooter (2004), draws heavily on Beckett's classic radio play, All That Fall (1957). As Julia Kristeva contends, intertextuality always involves the ‘absorption and transformation’ of the earlier text. There is much evidence of Six Shooter's ‘absorption’ of All That Fall: both works centrally feature trains, the death of young children, childless couples, animals, reflections on Christianity, and haunting Irish memories which inspire bizarre and, indeed, violent behaviour in the present. With regards to ‘transformation’, McDonagh's film challenges and updates the reflections on Christianity, adult-child relationships, and Dublin found in Beckett's play, and McDonagh uses the visual medium of film to extend the unexploited ‘performativity’ of Beckett's earlier, audio work.
Review of Rough Magic's 2013 production of R.B. Sheridan's "The Critic"
(University of Toronto Press, 2015) Clare, David
Review of Druid Theatre Company's 2016-17 production of Samuel Beckett's "Waiting for Godot"
(Edinburgh University Press, 2017) Clare, David
Review of "Bernard Shaw, W.T. Stead, and the new journalism: Whitechapel, Parnell, Titanic, and the Great War" by Nelson O'Ceallaigh Ritschel
(Penn State University Press, 2017) Clare, David
Irish-American identity in Eugene O'Neill's early plays
(Penn State University Press, 2018) Clare, David
This article examines Irish-American identity in Eugene O’Neill’s early work, including his “lost” plays. It demonstrates that characters such as Al Devlin in The Movie Man, Joe and Nellie Murray in Abortion, Eileen Carmody and Stephen Murray from The Straw, Robert “Yank” Smith in The Hairy Ape, and even the “Papist” child Mary Sweeney in The Rope are socially marginalized by American WASPs due to their Irish Catholic backgrounds. In the case of Yank such marginalization eventually convinces him that he is too “animalistic” to find a place in mainstream American society. Like Yank, the Irish-American characters in the other plays being examined find it hard to connect with (or are brutally disrespected by) the WASPs in their lives. Previous discussions of WASP/Irish- American tensions in O’Neill’s work have focused primarily on O’Neill’s late masterpieces; this article demonstrates that such tensions are a key feature of O’Neill’s early work as well.
Landlord–tenant (non)relations in the work of Bernard Shaw
(Penn State University Press, 2016) Clare, David
As a child, Shaw was horrified by the appalling poverty of the Dublin slums, and, while working in a Dublin estate office as a teenager, he actually had to collect slum rents. On a more personal level, both sides of Shaw’s family were tied to the Protestant Ascendancy, possessing land throughout Leinster and Munster. Although Shaw himself was raised in “shabby genteel poverty,” he was taught to take pride in his family’s exalted social connections. He gradually came to realize, however, that his revered relations were complicit in the unjust land distribution prevalent in Ireland prior to the Land War. The unjust relations between landlords and tenants that Shaw witnessed in Ireland cast a shadow over not only his politics (leading him to embrace socialism as a young man) but also his drama. As this article demonstrates, Shaw deals with Irish landlord-tenant relations directly in his three plays set in Ireland: John Bull’s Other Island, O’Flaherty, V.C., and Tragedy of an Elderly Gentleman. In addition, his exposure to Dublin slums as a child and teenager informs Widowers’ Houses, and his numerous visits to Irish (and not simply English) Big Houses were a clear influence on Heartbreak House.
Review of "Where Motley is Worn; Transnational Irish Literatures" Amanda Tucker and Moira E. Casey eds.
(Center for Irish Programs of Boston College, Massachusetts, 2016) Clare, David
'Turns wick low': Samuel Beckett's darkening vision and an Irish county (Pre-published Version)
(Irish Province of the Society of Jesus, 2017) Clare, David
Brian Friel’s invocation of Edmund Burke in "Philadelphia, Here I Come!"
(Alfred University, 2015) Clare, David
Why did George Farquhar’s work turn sectarian after "The Constant Couple"? (Pre-published Version)
(Irish Province of the Society of Jesus, 2014) Clare, David
A Belgian town as Purgatory and an Irish gangster as Christ in Martin McDonagh's "In Bruges"
(University College Dublin School of English, Drama and Film, 2012) Clare, David
Anglo-Irish "distortion": double exposure in Francis Bacon’s 'Portraits' and Beckett’s 'The Old Tune'
(Center for Irish Studies (University of St. Thomas), 2018) Clare, David
Bernard Shaw, Henry Higgins, and the Irish diaspora
(Center for Irish Studies (University of St. Thomas), 2014) Clare, David

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