Dr Fiona Fearon is a Lecturer in Drama and Theatre Studies at Dundalk Institute of Technology, Ireland. Her principal areas of interest are audience and performance studies, and she has published on audience ethnography and the performance of grief in contemporary society.  Since 2016, she has been researching local professional and amateur performance in Dundalk and County Louth before and after the Easter Rising of 1916, publishing several book chapters and conference papers on this topic.  Her most recent publication was an essay on twentieth century literature and drama in Louth published in Louth: history and society. Interdisciplinary essays on the history of an Irish county, Geography Publications (2023), and forthcoming in 2025, ‘Anti-fascism and the Gothic in the work of Dorothy Macardle (1935-1953)’ in A Nation, not A Parish: The Homewhere-s and Elsewhere-s of 1930s Irish Culture, Peter Lang.

There is a startling moment at the end of Enda Walsh’s 2006 play Walworth Farce where Sean puts black shoe polish on his white face in order to perform the character of Hayley, the black shop assistant who has wondered into the weird world of the Blake family. In contemporary theatre, film and television, for white actors to perform in black or brown face is considered deeply troubling, representative of all the power dynamics of Empire and the legacies of colonial oppression. Until the 1970s many Irish people were introduced to ideas of race through the mainstream television programme, The Black and White Minstrel Show, which continued the more than a century old relationship between Irish performers and audiences and the representation of race in blackface. In the early twentieth century in towns like Newry and Dundalk amateur performers put on popular minstrel shows emulating the professional Christy Minstrel entertainments which toured Ireland at the time. In 1930 a Dundalk writer bemoaned the decline of such shows in the Town Hall, saying that he personally could never see the harm in such entertainments, though many people objected even then.  

This paper will analyse the production and reception of minstrel shows in the early twentieth century in Ireland, particularly in rural towns outside the capital. This paper will examine the pleasures offered by these performances and question the representations of one colonised and stereotyped people by and to another. To what extent were minstrel shows constitutive of Irish people’s understanding of blackness in the early twentieth century, and how did these concepts intersect with local senses of being a colonised people who were widely represented as other in the homeland of their colonisers.