Lionel Pilkington is Emeritus Professor of English at the University of Galway and author of Theatre and the State in 20^th Century Ireland: Cultivating the People (Routledge, 2001), Theatre & Ireland (Methuen, 2010), Studies in Settler Colonialism (with Fiona Bateman) (Methuen, 2010) as well as various articles and essays on Irish theatre history and criticism. He is writing a book for Michigan University Press on theatre, performance and political economy in 1980s Ireland.

Thinking about Irish theatre in relation to transnational anti-colonial solidarity and decoloniality seems an almost impossible task. If we accept that the primary ideological work of Irish theatre is that it revitalizes theatre as a global modernizing institution and that it typically equates decolonisation with reconciling indigenous initiatives to received metropolitan systems (Smyth, Decolonisation and Criticism 38), then the transnational solidarity that is so conspicuously and perennially re-affirmed by Irish theatre is not at all decoloniality, anti-colonialism or anything like it, but rather European colonial capitalism. Such dead end impressions dissipate, however, when Irish theatre is considered in relation to its styles of performance or, put differently, when actors come to be thought of momentarily as moving like statues, or statues moving are thought of momentarily to behave like actors.

This paper focuses on the 1980s, the period when Ireland’s political economy alters decisively (and some would argue irrevocably) from the weak distributionism of a post-colonial republican or welfare state model to the country’s current messianically pro-business model with its iron-clad commitments to the overriding interests of capital: that is, to privatization and neoliberalism. The paper begins by examining the extraordinary efflorescence of various institutionally-oriented theatre initiatives in the early to mid 1980s (such as the setting up of various theatre companies, dedicated theatre magazines, theatre archives, and university theatre studies departments) that take place at exactly the same time as a notable deterioration of actors’ pay and working conditions and a growing critical preoccupation with the idea that Irish actors above all require rigorous re-training as well as imposed conditions of discipline and precarity. As with the moving statues phenomenon of 1985, what appears to be at stake in these issues is the independent and sometimes uncanny signifying corporeal power of the performing actor and, in particular, her ability to subvert or interrupt production using tableau (or other discordant movements and gestures) so as to re-activate an illicit anti-colonial aesthetic dominated not by the plenitude and metaphor of the institutional theatre, but by the uncanny and more destabilizing other-speaking of allegory (allos / other; agoria / speaking). My contention is that it is only when the allegorical power of Irish theatrical performance is given a place in Irish cultural history that discussions might begin concerning the urgent intersections of Irish theatre, anti-colonialism and decoloniality.