This dossier aims to report on recent developments and interventions that are changing the landscape of Irish theatre-studies scholarship, revealing the ways in which discourses of nationalism, sexuality, gender, class and the family are being renegotiated. Critical analysis of Irish theatre has, up until recently, focused upon the dramatic text in a legacy of work that has traditionally been valued for its ‘literary’ merit. Now, we can see how an interrogation of the process of canonicity and a focus on the conditions and potential of performance are being addressed by a new generation of scholarship. Such research serves to critique the narratives leading up to, and beyond, Irish independence, repositioning the relationship between the founders of the Irish Literary Revival at the turn of the twentieth century and cultural nationalism, as well as resituating the dramaturgical praxis of a central figure such as John Millington Synge. Contributors to this dossier also draw attention to the ways in which recent publications on Irish theatre take social transformations into account, and give a sense of the ever-shifting trajectories of theatre, performance and culture on the island.

From the bleak emigrations of the 1980s to the fickle economic time bomb of the Celtic Tiger in the mid-1990s and its dramatic implosion around 2008, the Republic has undergone many economic and social changes. North of the border has seen the ongoing ‘Troubles’, the ‘Peace Process’ and the Good Friday Agreement of May 1998 which established the Northern Ireland Assembly. May 2011 heralded a previously unthinkable moment in Irish history with the first-ever visit of a British monarch to the Republic when Queen Elizabeth II visited Dublin and Cork and addressed the president and nation in Gaelic – ‘A Uachtaráin agus a Chairde’ (President and Friends). This event was followed within days by a buoyant visit from the president of the United States, Barack Obama, who, in claiming Irish ancestry, expressed his admiration for the Irish in the face of adversity.

J. M. Synge's The Playboy of the Western World is the most performed play of the Irish repertory and our dossier turns first to Synge, as ‘the fulcrum upon which Irish drama and theatre studies is balanced’. Christopher Collins surveys how previously held notions of Synge's dramaturgical praxis – conceived as a unilateral recalcitrance against Catholic orthodoxy – move now towards a more radical ‘dialogue with Irish culture’ which, he contends, proceeds far beyond interactions with cultural nationalism. It is fascinating to see how critical engagements with Synge's oeuvre offer a kind of cultural map of identity politics in Ireland since the turn of the twentieth century. In this overview of Synge studies we can begin to understand the multifaceted trajectories of discourse regarding Synge's dramaturgy and the complexities of his culturally hyphenated ontology as ‘Anglo-Irish’ ascendant, opening up the ways in which Synge has identified with and against the authorities of his own time.

Moving away from Synge, Mary Caulfield places recent scholarship on the contributions of Irish women practitioners and political activists (often mutually informing roles at the turn of the twentieth century) within the contexts of the omissions of our critical, cultural and political histories. Here we are given a sense of the important interventions under way in respect of the exploration of women's authorship and activity over the last one hundred years. On a similar note, Shonagh Hill also considers how ‘feminist discourse has proven to be a vital component in the expanding field of Irish theatre studies owing to its exposure of elided work’. Both Caulfield and Hill respectively observe how idealized and limiting iconographies of ‘Woman’ were at odds with women's everyday realities. Through critical reinterpretations of well-known plays by, for example, Lady Augusta Gregory, and the unearthing of lesser-known (and unknown) works and political contributions, we can see how these women sought, and continue, to express their estrangement through tenacious and previously undervalued acts of self-representation. In their refusal to idealize the place of women within oppressive legislative structures of family and the home and their engagement with the realities of violence – both ontological and physical – these women writers and feminist scholars creatively and critically succeed in opening imaginative spaces of ‘otherness’ and alterity, redefining the courses of critical knowledge and theatrical creativity.

Within her feminist framework, Hill signals the shift away from an emphasis on the literary to greater concerns with performance, a shift that Fintan Walsh also attests to in his scholarship and overview here of ‘Performance and Queer Praxes’. As Walsh points out, ‘performance studies and queer studies are two of the most significant paradigmatic shifts to energize the analysis of Irish theatre and performance in very recent times’, and this is reflected in the recent transformations in Irish society in terms of sexuality and the family in particular, where a new recognition of alternative performances and cultural expressions in social arenas beyond theatrical spaces is taking place. Up until 1993 homosexuality was prohibited in the Republic, divorce was legalized by a mere 1 per cent majority in 1995 and abortion remains a criminal act. The Civil Partnership Act was passed in 2010, and against the backdrop of these social changes Walsh offers an overview of the collaborative and interdisciplinary practice foregrounding ‘the lives of people living on the margins of history and contemporary society’. Through this important contextualization of current ‘non-hegemonic’ practices we can see how performance itself asserts a tremendous power in the ‘ongoing negotiation of Ireland's troubled past’.

Cormac O'Brien brings to the fore research which complicates and troubles monolithic narratives of masculinity and ‘Irish manhood’. In so doing, O'Brien notes how a proliferation of edited collections has offered valuable sites of collaboration and critical contestation in Irish theatre and drama studies (itself a relatively new field growing over the last twenty years), which usefully maps ‘the state of the nation and the masculinist sociopolitical climate that engendered the dramas’. Again we see practice and discourse which ‘is underpinned by an epistemology of masculine violence, both personal and political’, which critiques constructs and enactments of patriarchy and explores the complexities of gender and sexual politics in an ever-changing society. The works referred to process the present and repossess the oppressive past. O'Brien points out the importance of Brian Singleton's critique of masculinity as ‘a pre-ordained fixed identity’, and his assertion that there are ‘numerous masculinities at play in Irish society’, most of which, heretofore, have not been acknowledged.

Recent Irish theatre scholarship situates performance and the body as central to discourse and meaning, and Aoife McGrath historicizes the rich but neglected field of Irish dance, contextualizing vibrant contemporary practices and a growing field of research. McGrath argues that the once prohibited, ever-evolving dancing body is a way to fruitfully explore notions of ‘“Irishness”, Irish national identity and cultural memory’. Once marginalized in terms of cultural significance, dance is now acknowledged as an official art form by the Irish government and a growing body of scholarship is teasing out the aesthetic and sociopolitical resonances of this intrinsic performance tradition ‘in a society in which postcolonial formations of an “Irish” body have led to the oppression of corporealities that do not fit hegemonic norms’.

Each of the contributors contextualizes the most recent paradigmatic shifts in Irish theatre and performance. A through-line can be identified in the ways in which the research defiantly critiques inherited hegemonies, contesting processes of meaning-making and ideologies of production and reception and demystifying canonicity in order to effectively integrate and pluralize our sociohistorical and personal narratives. An important moment is taking place in theatre scholarship in Ireland, North and South, where writers are coming together to pull at the threads that have heretofore singularly woven our experience. Our ‘hidden’ histories – the marginal, diverse and previously unrecognized realities of Irish life and theatre, the excluded traditions – those silenced, exiled and abandoned, are now gaining voice and articulating hope within and beyond the theatre spaces.