Irish Drama, Modernity and the Passion Play

This book discusses Irish Passion plays (plays that rewrite or parody the story of the Passion of Christ) in modern Irish drama from the Irish Literary Revival to the present day. It offers innovative readings of such canonical plays as J. M. Synge’s The Playboy of the Western World, W. B. Yeats’s Calvary, Brendan Behan’s The Hostage, Samuel Beckett’s Endgame, Brian Friel’s Faith Healer and Tom Murphy’s Bailegangaire, as well as of less well-known plays by Padraic Pearse, Lady Gregory, G. B. Shaw, Seán O’Casey, Denis Johnston, Samuel Beckett and David Lloyd. Challenging revisionist readings of the rhetoric of “blood sacrifice” and martyrdom in the Irish Republican tradition, it argues that the Passion play is a powerful political genre which centres on the staged death of the (usually male) protagonist, and makes visible the usually invisible violence perpetrated both by colonial power and by the postcolonial state in the name of modernity.

Introduction.- Part I. Synge, Irish modernity and the Passion play.- Chapter 1. “Unseen forms of violence”.- Part II. The Passion of 1916.- Chapter 2. Anticipating the Rising.- Chapter 3. Framing the Rising.- Chapter 4. Saint Joan’s unheard voices.- Chapter 5. Re-directing the Passion play.- Part III. After Revolution.- Chapter 6. Reclaiming Robert Emmet.- Chapter 7. Nationalism, abjection and the reinvention of Ireland in Brendan Behan’s The Hostage.- Chapter 8. Intimate Passions.- Chapter 9. Open mouths.- Part IV. The Artist’s Passion.- Chapter 10. Torture and Passion.- Chapter 11. The seduction of silence.- Conclusion. 

Alexandra Poulain is Professor of Irish Studies at Paris 3-Sorbonne nouvelle, France. She has written extensively on modern and contemporary Irish drama, in particular Yeats, Beckett and Tom Murphy.