Making Theatre in Northern Ireland: Through and Beyond the Troubles, Tom Maguire

Abstract

Making Theatre in Northern Ireland: Through and Beyond the Troubles, Tom Maguire (University of Exeter Press, 2006).

Tom Maguire’s stated focus in this book is interventionist theatre in a colonial context, and his aim is to relocate theatrical output from Northern Ireland, specifically concerned with representing ‘the Troubles’, within a ‘wider understanding of the ways in which culture can intervene in processes of representation and public politics’ (12). A further stated aim is to redress an imbalance in the ways in which certain playwrights, and a select number of their plays relating to the politics of the North, have been allocated serious critical weightings at the expense of many other writers and their work. In Maguire’s opinion, this critical imbalance has not only ‘skewed the sense of theatre history’ (16) in Ireland, but has overlooked the importance of audience response in the North to a range of other productions.