Irish Theatre: Interrogating Intersecting Inequalities

This book on modern and contemporary Irish theatre traces how social, cultural and economic capital are circulated in order to demonstrate complex and often contradictory outlooks on equality/inequality. Individual chapters analyse property ownership and inheritance; wealth acquisition; employment conditions; educational access; intercultural encounters; sexual intimacy and violation; and acts of resistance, protest and solidarity.

This book addresses complex intergenerational, intercultural, racial, sectarian, ethnic, gender and inter- and intraclass dynamics from the perspective of ranked, objectifying, exploitative and coercive relationships but also in terms of commonalities, complicities, reciprocations and retaliations. Notable are the significances of wealth precarity and shaming; the consequences of anti-materialistic dramaturgical leanings; the pathologising of success; the fraught nature of solidarity; and the problematics of merit, divisive partitioning and muddled mésalliances. Ultimately the book wonders about how Irish theatre distinguishes between tolerable and intolerable inequalities that are culturally and socially but principally economically derived.

Eamonn Jordan received his B.Comm, MA., and Ph.D. from the University College Dublin, where he is currently Professor in Drama Studies at the School of English, Drama and Film. His previous publications include The Feast of Famine: The Plays of Frank McGuinness (Lang, 1997), Dissident Dramaturgies: Contemporary Irish Theatre (Irish Academic Press, 2010) From Leenane to LA: The Theatre and Cinema of Martin McDonagh (IAP, 2014), The Theatre and Films of Conor McPherson: Conspicuous Communities (Methuen, 2019), and Justice in the Plays and Films of Martin McDonagh (Palgrave, 2020). He has edited/co-edited numerous collections, including The Palgrave Handbook of Contemporary Irish Theatre.