Tamara Radak is a postdoctoral researcher in the field of Anglophone cultures and literatures at the Department of English and American Studies, University of Vienna. Her publications include articles in Theatre Research International, Journal of Contemporary Drama in English, James Joyce Quarterly and RISE: The Review of Irish Studies In Europe. She has co-edited the Special Issue Presence and Precarity in (Post-)Pandemic Theatre and Performance (Theatre Research International 48.1, with Monika Pietrzak-Franger and Heidi Lucja Liedke) and the collection Irish Modernisms: Gaps, Conjectures, Possibilities (with Paul Fagan and John Greaney, Bloomsbury 2021). urrently, Tamara Radak is preparing a monograph entitled Networked Activist Media Practices in Feminist Protest Movements in Ireland and the United Kingdom, 1970-2020.

Focussing on ANU Productions’ The Party to End All Parties (2020) as a digitally mediated form of site-specific pandemic theatre set in lockdown Dublin, this paper takes up Joanne Tompkins’s call to investigate how the host/ghost relationship central to this form of theatre “can be rethought for twenty-first-century versions of the form” (9). Originally developed as an in-person site-specific performance as part of Dublin Theatre Festival 2020, Party was reconfigured for a virtual audience owing to COVID-19- related restrictions and livestreamed via Facebook Live and YouTube. It follows three characters, played by actors Nandi Bhebhe, Niamh McCann, and Robbie O’Connor on their journeys around O’Connell Bridge and environs during Level-3 lockdown.

The proposed paper addresses the intersections of place, politics, and performance by focusing on Party’s setting on the historical landmark of O’Connell Bridge and environs as a site inextricably linked to the celebrations and 21-gun salutes taking place at this location on the eve of the Republic of Ireland Act in April 1949. It investigates this significant cultural moment as a ghostly presence that seeps into the present-day performance, as 2020’s lockdown Dublin is audio-visually infused with reverberations of the past through recordings of radio broadcasts from April 1949, highlighting the complex entanglements between politics of presence and absence, visibility and Invisibility in this pandemic performance.

Works Cited:

Tompkins, Joanne. “The ‘Place’ and Practice of Site-Specific Theatre and Performance.” Performing Site-Specific Theatre: Politics, Place, Practice. Performance Interventions. Eds. Anna Birch and Joanne Tompkins. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012. 1–17.