Lukas Ernst is a PhD student at Trinity College Dublin’s School of English. His main academic interest is in twentieth- and twenty-first-century Irish theatre, and his current research project examines how contemporary Irish drama engages with the transformations in the country’s recent past through questions of (post-)Irish identities.

The recent Irish past has witnessed seismic economic, social, and cultural transformations. From the 1990s, the ‘Celtic Tiger’, along with the effects of Europeanisation, globalisation, and secularisation, has transformed Ireland and the concept of Irishness. How, then, may we position theatre within the context of these transformations? As a public art form, Irish theatre has self-consciously engaged with such transformations in a predominantly text- based tradition that dates back to the cultural nationalist movement against empire and has defined the Irish theatre landscape throughout most of the twentieth century.

However, reflecting on this connection between politics and performance, during a time when Ireland changed utterly, Irish theatre, drama in particular, did not seem to keep pace with the dizzying speed of these changes, as critics accused playwrights of ignoring the country’s transformations, a charge specifically held against Ireland’s text-based tradition, and playwrights such as Marina Carr, Martin McDonagh, and Conor McPherson. In the face of the transformations, and with neoliberalism on the rise, contested representations of Irishness in a global marketplace, and the economisation of culture, the text-based tradition appeared to lose its momentum, its creative impetus to tell us who we are, its capacity to approach society at an angle and to envision meaningful ways of being in the world.

Reflecting on these developments, what political and creative role can text-based theatre still play in contemporary Ireland? How are playwrights still invested in the word as language, and how can we map this investment in the changes of Celtic Tiger Ireland? And, finally, is the generation of playwrights emerging with the Celtic Tiger the last flourishing of a text-based tradition, a fluorescing of a type of play that ultimately seems ill-fated to engage with the ends of empire, or is this form still equipped to deal with contemporary Ireland?