This book interrogates the various manifestations of rival systems of justice in the plays and films of Martin McDonagh, in analysis informed by the critical writings of Michael J. Sandel, Steven Pinker, Julia Kristeva, and in particular Amartya Sen on violence, justice, equality and the law. In McDonagh’s works, failures to investigate adequately criminal actions are matched by multiple forced confessions and umpteen miscarriages of justice. The author explores McDonagh’s creative worlds as ones where distinctions between victim and perpetrator and guilt and innocence are precarious, where the burden of truth seldom reaches the threshold of beyond reasonable doubt and where the punishments and rewards of justice are applied randomly. This project considers the abject nature of justice in McDonagh’s writing, with the vast implications of justice being fragile, suspect, piecemeal, deviant, haphazard and random. Tentative forms of justice are tempered and then threatened by provocative, anarchic and abject humour. As the author argues, McDonagh’s writing cleverly circulates rival, incompatible and comparative systems of justice in order to substantiate the necessities and virtues of justice.

The ‘macabre’, as a process and product, has been haunting the theatre – and more broadly, performance – for thousands of years. In its embodied meditations on death and dying, its thematic and aesthetic grotesquerie, and its sensory-rich environments, macabre theatre invites artists and audiences to trace the stranger, darker contours of human existence. In this volume, numerous scholars explore the morbid and gruesome onstage, from freak shows to the French Grand Guignol; from Hell Houses to German Trauerspiel; from immersive theatre to dark tourism, stopping along the way to look at phantoms, severed heads, dark rides, haunted mothers and haunting children, dances of death and dismembered bodies. From Japan to Australia to England to the United States, the global macabre is framed and juxtaposed to understand how the theatre brings us face to face with the deathly and the horrific.

This comprehensive, accessible introduction to one of Britain’s leading contemporary playwrights and filmmakers outlines Martin McDonagh’s body of work, the key critical contexts for understanding and exploring his career, analysis of productions, and includes an exclusive interview with the director of his most recent stage work. Analysis of McDonagh’s writing is broken down into three periods – his early Irish plays, his screenplays, and his later plays that move away from and outside of Ireland. Works are discussed thematically, giving a dynamic reading of the scripts and the ideas around which they circle. The book’s final section then delves in more detail into selected seminal productions of McDonagh’s writing, outlining key phases and transitions in his career. Part of the Routledge Modern and Contemporary Dramatists series, Martin McDonagh is an essential guide for scholars and students who are setting out to understand the life and work of one of the most popular and acclaimed British dramatists and filmmakers of the twenty-first century.

Fifty Key Irish Plays charts the progression of modern Irish drama from Dion Boucicault’s entry on to the global stage of the Irish diaspora to the contemporary dramas created by the experiences of the New Irish. Each chapter provides a brief plot outline along with informed analysis and, alert to the cultural and critical context of each play, an account of the key roles that they played in the developing story of Irish drama. While the core of the collection is based on the critical canon, including work by J. M. Synge, Lady Gregory, Teresa Deevy, and Brian Friel, plays such as Tom Mac Intyre’s The Great Hunger and ANU Productions’ Laundry, which illuminate routes away from the mainstream, are also included. With a focus on the development of form as well as theme, the collection guides the reader to an informed overview of Irish theatre via succinct and insightful essays by an international team of academics. This invaluable collection will be of particular interest to undergraduate students of theatre and performance studies and to lay readers looking to expand their appreciation of Irish drama.

This Companion brings together leading scholars in the field of Irish studies to explore the significance of twenty-first-century Irish writing and its flourishing popularity worldwide. Focusing on Irish writing published or performed in the 21st-century, this volume explores genres, modes, and styles of writing that are current, relevant, and distinctive in today’s classrooms. Examining a host of innovative, key writers, including Sally Rooney, Marion Keyes, Sebastian Barry, Paul Howard, Claire Kilroy, Micheal O’Siadhail, Donal Ryan, Marina Carr, Enda Walsh, Martin McDonagh, Colette Bryce, Leanne Quinn, Sinéad Morrissey, Paula Meehan, Ailbhe Ní Ghearbhuigh, and Doireann Ni Ghríofa. This text investigates the socio-cultural and theoretical contexts of their aesthetic achievements and innovations. Furthermore, The Routledge Companion to Twenty-First-Century Irish Writing traces the expansion of Irish writing, offering fresh insight to Irish identities across the boundaries of race, class, and gender. With its distinctive contemporary contexts and comprehensive scope, this multifaceted volume provides the first significant literary history of 21st century Irish literature.

This book on modern and contemporary Irish theatre traces how social, cultural and economic capital are circulated in order to demonstrate complex and often contradictory outlooks on equality/inequality. Individual chapters analyse property ownership and inheritance; wealth acquisition; employment conditions; educational access; intercultural encounters; sexual intimacy and violation; and acts of resistance, protest and solidarity. This book addresses complex intergenerational, intercultural, racial, sectarian, ethnic, gender and inter- and intraclass dynamics from the perspective of ranked, objectifying, exploitative and coercive relationships but also in terms of commonalities, complicities, reciprocations and retaliations. Notable are the significances of wealth precarity and shaming; the consequences of anti-materialistic dramaturgical leanings; the pathologising of success; the fraught nature of solidarity; and the problematics of merit, divisive partitioning and muddled mésalliances. Ultimately the book wonders about how Irish theatre distinguishes between tolerable and intolerable inequalities that are culturally and socially but principally economically derived.

Law and Literature: The Irish Case is a collection of fascinating essays by literary and legal scholars which explore the intersections between law and literature in Ireland from the eighteenth century to the present day. Sharing a concern for the cultural life of law and the legal life of culture, the contributors shine a light on the ways in which the legal and the literary have spoken to each other, of each other, and, at times, for each other, on the island of Ireland in the last three centuries. Several of the chapters discuss how texts and writers have found their ways into the law’s chambers and contributed to the development of jurisprudence. The essays in the collection also reveal the juridical and jurisprudential forces that have shaped the production and reception of Irish literary culture, revealing the law’s popular reception and its extra-legal afterlives. List of contributors: Rebecca Anne Barr, Max Barrett, Noreen Doody, Katherine Ebury, Adam Gearey, Tom Hickey, James Kelly, Colum Kenny, David Kenny, Heather Laird, Julie Morrissy, Gearóid O'Flaherty, Virginie Roche-Tiengo, Barry Sheils.