Tom Murphy's Theatre of Everyday Space

1. Auflage 2025
ISBN: 978-1-032-76454-2
Verlag: Routledge

Buch, Englisch, 258 Seiten, Format (B × H): 157 mm x 235 mm, Gewicht: 529 g

Reihe: Routledge Studies in Irish Literature

By the time of his death in 2018, Tom Murphy was widely recognised as one of Ireland’s most important modern playwrights. Ireland’s experience of rapid modernisation, emigration, and globalisation is vividly captured in his plays, challenging generic notions of space, place, and the nation. In particular, his drama reconfigures Irish theatre’s uneasy relationship with globalisation, with the peasant kitchen, the pub, and the bog having traditionally been exported as the quintessential Irish spaces. Focusing on one of Murphy’s central innovations—his experimentation with theatre and everyday space—the book considers the significance of Murphy’s work in modern drama more broadly. The idea of “home” has preoccupied modern playwrights since the naturalist dramas of Henrik Ibsen and Anton Chekhov, leading theatre scholars to focus on the everyday space of the home to the exclusion of other everyday spaces. Murphy’s works, by contrast, offer a new politics of the “alterior,” engaging with a diverse range of other spaces such as dancehalls, grocery shops, pubs, hotels, offices, churches, gasworks, and airports. His drama presents a “global sense of the local,” an emotional map of the shifting geographies of everyday life. By applying new theoretical perspectives and showcasing new archival materials inaccessible to previous scholars, the book revisits Murphy as an international playwright— a cartographer of our modern-day “global village.”

Zielgruppe

Postgraduate

Autoren/Hrsg.

Hong, Moonyoung

Fachgebiete

• Geisteswissenschaften Literaturwissenschaft Vergleichende Literaturwissenschaft
• Geisteswissenschaften Literaturwissenschaft Englische Literatur
• Geisteswissenschaften Literaturwissenschaft Literaturwissenschaft: Dramen und Dramatiker

Inhaltsverzeichnis

Introduction

Chapter 1. Social Spaces: Alterior Politics in Murphy’s Early Plays

-On the Outside (1959), On the Inside (1974): The Ballroom of Reality

-A Crucial Week in the Life of a Grocer’s Assistant (1969): The Small Town as Panoptic Dreamworld

Chapter 2. Diasporic Spaces: Dislocation in Murphy’s Tragedies

-A Whistle in the Dark (1961): A Cruel Necessity

-Famine (1968): Staging History and Trauma

Chapter 3. Liminal Spaces: Pubs, Clubs and the Underworld

-The House (2000): Home for Emigrants

-Conversations on a Homecoming (1985): Broken Promises of Homeland

-The Blue Macushla (1980): Neon Images

Chapter 4. Sacred Spaces: A Spiritual Quest

-The Sanctuary Lamp (1975): Restoring Faith

-The Gigli Concert (1983): The Politics of Magic

Chapter 5. Women’s Spaces: “Supermodernity” and Place

-Bailegangaire (1985): Restoring Place

-The Wake (1998): Materialism and the Female Body

-Alice Trilogy (2006): A Super Wonderland

Outro: Afterlives

Über Autor(innen)

Moonyoung Hong is Assistant Professor in the School of English at the University of Hong Kong. She has published in Irish Studies Review, Comparative Drama, Études Irlandaises, and RISE: The Review of Irish Studies in Europe. She is on the Executive Committee of the Irish Society for Theatre Research (ISTR).