123251 AR Literature Course - Literature 1/2 (MA) British/Irish/New English (2011W)

Writing in 2000, in an essay entitled "Who the Hell Do We Think We Still Are?" the playwright Declan Hughes mocked what he perceived as the backwardness of contemporary Irish theatre:
I could live a long and happy life without seeing another play set in a Connemara kitchen, or a country pub. I think it's significant that in contemporary theatre and cinema, so much attention gets paid to the nineteen fifties, the decade before Ireland opened for business, the time when we were a "special little enclave". [Theatre Stuff, ed. Eamonn Jordan (Dublin: Carysfort Press, 2000), p. 13].
Now that the Celtic Tiger is dead such pessimism regarding possible representations of contemporary Ireland appears wildly exaggerated. There is quite sufficient evidence for the engagement of Irish drama (and Irish film) with the Celtic Tiger as a contemporary phenomenon, esp. with the darker sides of its "underbelly". Following this period of economic boom (between 1996 and 2008) and the enormous socio-political and cultural changes it brought with it, the Connemara kitchen -- and the Quiet Man's cottage, for that matter -- have indeed become obsolete and have since been replaced by alternative locations such as the mean streets of Dublin, council flats in North London or any place in the Irish diaspora.
Texts to be studied include: Martin McDonagh, The Beauty Queen of Leenane (1996); Jimmy Murphy, The Kings of the Kilburn High (2000); Enda Walsh, The Walworth Farce (2006); Dermot Bolger, In High Germany (1990) and The Parting Glass (2010).