Lojek provides extensive analysis of space in plays by living Irish playwrights, applying practical understandings of staging and the insights of geographers and spatial theorists to drama in an era increasingly aware of space.

Seamus Heaney once described the 'sense of place' generated by the early Abbey theatre as the 'imaginative protein' of later Irish writing. Drawing on theorists of space such as Henri Lefebvre and Yi-Fu Tuan, Mapping Irish Theatre argues that theatre is 'a machine for making place from space'. Concentrating on Irish theatre, the book investigates how this Irish 'sense of place' was both produced by, and produced, the remarkable work of the Irish Revival, before considering what happens when this spatial formation begins to fade. Exploring more recent site-specific and place-specific theatre alongside canonical works of Irish theatre by playwrights including J. M. Synge, Samuel Beckett and Brian Friel, the study proposes an original theory of theatrical space and theatrical identification, whose application extends beyond Irish theatre, and will be useful for all theatre scholars.

This work provides an overview of Irish theatre, read in the light of Ireland's self-definition. Mediating between history and its relations with politics and art, it attempts to do justice to the enabling and mirroring preoccupations of Irish drama.

Featuring original essays by leading scholars in the field, this book explores the immense legacy of women playwrights in Irish theatre since the beginning of theTwentieth century. Chapters consider the intersecting contexts of gender, sexuality and the body in order to investigate the broader cultural, political and historical implications of representing 'woman' on the stage. In addition, a number of essays engage with representations of women by a selection of male playwrights in order to re-evaluate familiar contexts and traditions in Irish drama. Features a Foreword by Marina Carr and a useful appendix of Irish women playwrights and their works.

The Oxford Handbook of Modern Irish Theatre provides the single most comprehensive survey of the field to be found in a single volume. Drawing on more than forty contributors from around the world, the book addresses a full range of topics relating to modern Irish theatre from the late nineteenth-century to the most recent works of postdramatic devised theatre. Ireland has long had an importance in the world of theatre out of all proportion to the size of the country, and has been home to four Nobel Laureates (Yeats, Shaw, and Beckett; Seamus Heaney, while primarily a poet, also wrote for the stage). This collection begins with the influence of melodrama, and looks at arguably the first modern Irish playwright, Oscar Wilde, before moving into a series of considerations of the Abbey Theatre, and Irish modernism. Arranged chronologically, it explores areas such as women in theatre, Irish-language theatre, and alternative theatres, before reaching the major writers of more recent Irish theatre, including Brian Friel and Tom Murphy, and their successors. There are also individual chapters focusing on Beckett and Shaw, as well as a series of chapters looking at design, acting, and theatre architecture. The book concludes with an extended survey of the critical literature on the field. In each chapter, the author does not simply rehearse accepted wisdom; all of the contributors push the boundaries of their respective fields, so that each chapter is a significant contribution to scholarship in its own right.

This book is about the history of character in modern Irish drama. It traces the changing fortunes of the human self in a variety of major Irish plays across the twentieth century and the beginning of the new millennium. Through the analysis of dramatic protagonists created by such authors as Yeats, Synge, O’Casey, Friel and Murphy, and McGuinness and Walsh, it tracks the development of aesthetic and literary styles from modernism to more recent phenomena, from Celtic Revival to Celtic Tiger, and after. The human character is seen as a testing ground and battlefield for new ideas, for social philosophies, and for literary conventions through which each historical epoch has attempted to express its specific cultural and literary identity. In this context, Irish drama appears to be both part of the European literary tradition, engaging with its most contentious issues, and a field of resistance to some conventions from continental centres of avant-garde experimentation. Simultaneously, it follows artistic fashions and redefines them in its critical contribution to European artistic and theatrical diversity.