Performing the Body in Irish Theatre

Performing the Body in Irish Theatre reads recent Irish theatre history through the discipline of performance studies, re-imagining Irish theatre history by considering stagings of the body in canonical works. The five plays and their productions analysed closely here are each significant in terms of the performance idiom and the placing of the body. Bernadette Sweeney focuses on the liveness of the bodies of the actors and on the performance context, using gender and postcolonial studies to set the context of each production. Productions analysed include the high-profile (Dancing at Lughnasa), the influential (The Great Hunger) and the hidden (The Saxon Shore). The book also considers contemporary stagings of the body in Irish theatre, including dance theatre and interdisciplinary work.

About the Author:
Bernadette Sweeney lectures in Drama and Theatre Studies at University College Cork, Republic of Ireland. She is a graduate of the School of Drama, Trinity College Dublin