Dr Michael Finneran is Head of the Department of Drama and Theatre Studies at Mary Immaculate College, University of Limerick, Ireland. He is a theatre scholar, educator and artist. He studies the ways in which theatre projects impact their participants and audiences. His books include Critical Themes in Drama (2021, Routledge); Education and Theatres (2019, Springer); Drama and Social Justice (2016, Routledge). His forthcoming book The Need to Act: Why Theatre Matters will be published in 2025.  

Michael recently directed Rapunzel (Lime Tree Theatre 2024/25) and currently lighting designer for Paddy – The Life and Times of Paddy Armstrong (National Tour 2025). Michael led the establishment of the Lime Tree Theatre and served on the board for a decade. He chairs the boards of Dance Limerick and Branar. He contributes to national arts policy, most recently by leading the development group for the new Leaving Certificate curriculum in Drama, Film and Theatre Studies.

The question of the relevance of drama and theatre to Irish life is an increasingly pressing one as society accelerates (Rosa 2013). In examining it, there is a hidden but constant tension. That tension is described by the place and purpose of drama in society. It is characterised by an unwritten and largely invisible struggle which is framed by questions of class, language, the rural and urban, the professional and amateur, and increasingly community and ethnic identity.

The paper will draw on the work of Raymond Williams (1961) and in particular his seminal cultural theory of structures of feeling and its allied concept of a lived culture. Sitting between it, and the recorded culture, is the selective tradition: that which is omitted or forgotten. A silent culture.  

In examining the selective tradition in Irish dramatic culture, a simple fact leaps out: much of that which constitutes the canon of historical Irish theatrical practice and dramatic literature is from the mid 19th century onwards. Prior to that we have some, but scant knowledge. In any attempt to critically engage with the end of empire and decolonise our ontological base in Irish drama and theatre, we must look to what was lost, what was silenced in our aesthetic traditions. The beginning of the conversation must be a questioning of whether a private, literary, anglophone theatre can be representative in a place where an oral, communal Gaelic performative tradition held sway for so long.

This is not an historical conversation, but the beginnings of a probing contemporary socio-cultural one. It is not so much a hard look back but a look forward informed by a critical understanding of what has been selectively omitted. The paper seeks a better understanding of what aesthetic and cultural considerations are at play in how we conceptualise drama, theatre and performance in this post-Empire place, and at a time of both a pressing need to find the utopian in performance (Dolan 2005) and a social turn in the arts (Bishop 2006).  

References:

Bishop, Claire. 2006. The social turn: Collaboration and its discontents. Artforum International 44: 178-183.

Dolan, Jill. 2005. Utopia in performance : finding hope at the theater. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.

Rosa, Hartmut. 2013. Social acceleration: a new theory of modernity. New York: Columbia University Press.  

Williams, Raymond. 1961. The long revolution. Oxford: Chatto & Windus.