After over a decade of research predominantly interested in Irish drama's relationship to national identity, a wave of recently emerging Irish theatre books calls for new readings that, by taking the national question out of the spotlight, allow deeper analyses of other issues. Jordan's study offers several fruitful examples for reading contemporary Irish theatre's responses to the economic, social and ideological revolutions that have enveloped Irish and global cultures in the last two decades. By reading a range of dramas in very different ways, he refutes the idea of a unified Irish theatrical aesthetic, as well as a common national identity among the plays and their producers, claiming instead that this dissidence is a truer reflection of the art and culture of contemporary Ireland.

Jordan begins with an overview of the dramaturgical frameworks he wishes to use in his text, followed by chapters examining Irish drama's approaches to ideas of history and memory, innocence and its loss, the contestation of the pastoral, the use of myth, narratives in Irish theatre and the prevalence of monologue plays. In his chapter ‘Playing with History and Memory’, Jordan examines how metatheatricality helps to destabilize our trust in the fidelity of official and unofficial accounts of personal or public pasts. His reading of Dancing at Lughnasa serves as a corrective against performances of Friel's work that sentimentalize the real difficulties of Irish rural life. ‘The Glut of Monologues: Look Who's Talking, Too’ distills current discussions about the attraction to – and limits of – dramatic monologues, which are indeed rampant on the contemporary Irish stage, arguing that these ‘monologues seem to have been a mid-point on the journey between old and new’ years (p. 236), stylistically pointing out individual, in-development responses to the tremendous changes in Irish culture in recent years.

His study, Jordan claims, is interested in ‘the patterns of dramaturgy and what they might suggest and what might need to be considered or subverted in performance’ (p. 37). However, the text's chapters do not always offer rich understandings of the plays or how they exemplify a particular dramaturgical paradigm. The discussion of Marina Carr's By the Bog of Cats, for example, contains overwhelming detail and interposed summaries of Greek myth. Others, like the discussion of Stella Feehily's Duck, are so brusque that one questions why they are included at all. Likewise, the book's discussion of realism, among other issues, needs more subtlety. Still, Jordan has a keen knowledge of contemporary Irish theatre, and every page of this book is heavy with information. Thus, while Dissident Dramaturgies may leave behind those unfamiliar with the plays or the critical problems in question, it still serves as a clarion call to find new ways of reading Irish drama.