Dr Kevin Wallace is the Head of the Department of Humanities and Arts Management at the Institute of Art, Design and Technology (IADT) in Dublin. He has held this leadership position and served as Chair of the Quality Enhancement Committee since September 2015. Dr Wallace has been a lecturer in English at IADT since 2011, teaching across undergraduate and postgraduate programmes, including the BA (Hons) in English, Media & Cultural Studies, BA (Hons) in New Media Studies, and the MA in Public Cultures & Society.

His scholarly work focuses on Irish theatre, drama, and performance, with publications and conference presentations on topics such as Irish plays on international stages, identity and language in contemporary drama, and the structures of symbolic power in Irish theatre. Dr Wallace is an active researcher and has contributed to notable academic publications including The Palgrave Handbook of Contemporary Irish Theatre and Performance and The Theatre of Enda Walsh.

He holds a PhD in English Literature and Drama from University College Dublin. Dr Wallace is also Editor-in-Chief of the IADT Journal of Research + Creativity (IJRC).

There is a flippant analysis suggesting that Irish theatre stopped being political when Irish politics stopped being theatrical about its position vis-à-vis Northern Ireland. However, the post-colonial paralysis, that Prof Kevin Whelan diagnosed in the Irish state post 1922,1 was somewhat resolved in the 1990s when the Good Friday Agreement forced Irish politics to take the national question seriously for the first time in generations.

Irish politics came of age somewhat. Concurrently there was a shift in Irish theatre making. The Abbey receded from being the place where the conscience of the nation was played out theatrically to fill a political vacuum. While Ireland is not unique in having national sporting organisations, national newspapers, national banks and a national theatre that pre-date the foundation of the state, the role of these nonstate institutions and non-state actors in shaping the culture and politics of the Irish nation has been hugely significant.

In the latter half of the twentieth century, several major canonical pieces of Irish theatre have had a bildungsroman – a coming of age – element. In Brian Friel’s Dancing at Lughnasa, an adult looks back on their life as a child; in Tom Murphy’s A Whistle in the Dark, generational trauma and violence is played out. And while one might point to pieces like Marina Carr’s The Mai and Enda Walsh’s Walworth Farce as echoing (in part) similar themes to these two pieces, they do so without the hangover of the “national question” and rather in a new context of the globally mobile Irish.

In recent years this dramaturgical turn has been lamented by, amongst others, Fintan O’Toole in his RTÉ Arts Lives Documentary Power Plays.2 One could grieve this, like O’Toole, or one could ask the question, has Ireland evolved past the national coming of age narrative? This paper will consider this question while examining David Ireland’s Cyprus Avenue and Carmel Winters’s B for Baby. It will posit that an articulation of national issues supplanted the long-held purpose of National Theatre, giving voice to different forms of expression of memory, of history and herstory, and varying forms of subjectivity in the wake of the apparent waning of British Imperial notions of Irishness.