New Field Day Dawning

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Notes

 1. McCormack, The Battle of the Books, 55.

 2. Murray, Twentieth-century Irish Drama, 222.

 3. Seamus Deane, quoted by Gray, ‘Field Day Five Years On’, 8.

 4. Field Day Theatre Company, ‘Preface’ (1985), vii. A more substantial statement of Field Day's aims is offered by Deane in his ‘Introduction’ to Nationalism, Colonialism and Literature.

 5. See Shaun Richards’ critique of the Field Day production of Stewart Parker's Pentecost (1987), and its staging in Derry and Dublin: Richards, ‘To Bind the Northern to the Southern Stars’.

 6. Deane, ‘Introduction’, 15. Selected pamphlets appear in Field Day Theatre Company, Ireland's Field Day, and in Eagleton et al. Nationalism, Colonialism and Literature.

 7. Kennedy, Colonialism, Religion and Nationalism in Ireland, 179.

 8. See Kennedy, Colonialism, Religion and Nationalism in Ireland; Howe, Ireland and Empire; , ‘More Martyrs to Abstraction’, ‘Poetry and Politics in Northern Ireland’, and Review of Field Day Pamphlets. For accounts of Field Day's work and overviews of critical responses, see McCormack, The Battle of the Books; Hughes, ‘“To Define Your dissent’”; and Richtarik, Acting between the Lines. For a critical account of Field Day's relationship with postcolonial theory, see Richards, ‘Throwing Theory at Ireland’.

 9. See Richards, ‘Throwing Theory at Ireland’, 611.

10. Frank McGuinness, quoted by Richtarik, Acting between the Lines, 250.

11. See, for example, Kilfeather, ‘The Whole Bustle’; Longley, ‘Belfast Diary’; McCafferty, ‘Writen Out of History’; and Katie Donovan, ‘Absence Stirs Anger amongst Irish Women’, Irish Times, 27 February 1992. See also BBC TV's Rear Window: Bright Through the Tears (July 1992), which took the form of a panel discussion about the Anthology, involving Tariq Ali, Eavan Boland, Nell McCafferty, Frances Mulhern and Tom Paulin. Mulhern was also involved in a heated exchange with Luke Gibbons in Radical Philosophy. See , ‘A Nation, Yet Again’ and ‘Postcolonial Melancholy’; and Gibbons, ‘Dialogue without the Other’.

12. Seamus Deane, quoted by Mulhern, ‘A Nation, Yet Again’, 25.

13. Adrian Frazier, ‘In the Field of Vision’, Irish Times, 28 May 2005. The Field Day Anthology of Irish Writing, vols IV & V was published in 2002 (Cork University Press in association with Field Day), edited by a team including Angela Bourke, Mairín Ní Dhonnchadha, Siobhán Kilfeather, Maria Luddy, Margaret MacCurtain, Geraldine Meaney, Mary O'Dowd and Clair Wills.

14. A total of twelve plays were produced between 1983 and 1991, after which only two were forthcoming—Frank McGuinness's version of Chekhov's Uncle Vanya in 1995, and Stewart Parker's Northern Star, produced jointly with Belfast's Tinderbox Theatre Company in 1998.

15. Deane, ‘Introduction’, 9.