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10 - Contemporary drama in English: 1940–2000

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 March 2008

By
Anthony Roche
Edited by
Margaret Kelleher  and
Philip O'Leary
Margaret Kelleher
Affiliation:
National University of Ireland, Maynooth
Philip O'Leary
Affiliation:
Boston College, Massachusetts
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Summary

The years 1940 to 2000 saw Ireland undergo an unprecedented and accelerating degree of social change. The impact of modernisation on a traditionally conservative society had a huge influence on initiating the revival of Irish drama which began in the late 1950s and which witnessed the emergence, development and consolidation of an extraordinary level of dramatic achievement by such playwrights as Brian Friel, Tom Murphy, Hugh Leonard, John B. Keane and Thomas Kilroy, a second Renaissance to set beside the first. Many of their plays dramatise that abrupt, rapid and dizzying transformation, as long-established social practices are broken up by the shock of the new. All of these writers have focused on the forces of change operating upon and within Irish society, drawing on a wide variety of forms. John B. Keane has written of the people of Kerry with the intimate knowledge and ambivalence of an insider. Hugh Leonard has trained his mordant satire on the suburbs of South County Dublin and on the troubled conscience beneath the glossy veneer of his suburbanites. Tom Murphy and Thomas Kilroy are the most restless and experimental of contemporary Irish playwrights, diagnosing a stark existential quandary at the heart of the society. But it is Brian Friel who has become increasingly recognised as the pre-eminent living Irish playwright, managing to present an uncompromising vision of the competing claims of tradition and modernity while securing a wide national and international following. The period is marked by an influx of new theatrical ideas, from England, the US and the Continent.

Type
Chapter
Information
The Cambridge History of Irish Literature , pp. 478 - 530
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2006

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