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Abstract
This article examines the impact of the economic crisis on contemporary Irish theatre. More specifically, I contend that the legal controversy surrounding Bisi Adigun and Roddy Doyle’s second production of Playboy of the Western World: A New Version in 2008 provides a case study of how professional theatre productions that dramatised stories of immigrant empowerment during the Irish economic boom were profoundly inhibited by the bust that followed. Their collaborative version of the new Playboy was widely regarded as Ireland’s most successful intercultural play and a commercial success when it was first staged at the Abbey Theatre in 2007. The subsequent breakdown in their relationship and ensuing legal dispute is more symptomatic of Celtic Tiger Ireland in economic collapse, I suggest, than the content of the play itself, or most other productions mounted in the period. I argue that this dispute did not simply reflect but also reinforced the social effects of the economic crisis, through its prolonged litigation, enormous expense, and especially the missed opportunity that it represented to position the multicultural and migrant themed Playboy within the Irish theatrical mainstream. More broadly, I suggest that the economic crisis has been marked by the disappearance of immigrants from the professional Irish stage, a void which was only partially filled by community theatre productions. A case in point is Adigun and Arambe’s most recent adaptation of Jimmy Murphy’s The Kings of the Kilburn High Road in The Paddies of Parnell Street (2013), a play which I positively appraise as an example of successful “intercultural re-appropriation”.
Notes
1. Cited in King, “Irish Multicultural Fiction,” 171.
2. Gleeson, “Drumm Said he Would ‘Punch’ Lenihan.”
3. Keating, “Evolving Playboys,” 245.
4. Lonergan, “Introduction,” 4.
5. McGreevy, “Abbey ‘to Pay €600,000.’”
6. Knowles, Theatre and Interculturalism, 67.
7. Adigun, “Re-writing Synge’s Playboy,” 262.
8. Murray, “Beyond the Passion Machine,” 109.
9. Adigun, “Re-writing Synge’s Playboy,” 262.
10. Abbey Theatre Program, At the Abbey, 6.
11. Cited in King, “Irish Multicultural Fiction,” 169.
12. Gibbons, “Finding Integration.”
13. Synge, Playboy, 194.
14. Cited in King, “Irish Multicultural Fiction,” 170.
15. Adigun, “Re-writing Synge’s Playboy,” 261.
16. Ibid., 267.
17. O’Toole, “Rights of Representation,” 255.
18. Ibid., 217.
19. Ibid., 225.
20. Ibid., 226.
21. Ibid., 234, 308.
22. McIvor, “Staging the New Irish,” 319–20.
23. Ibid., 319.
24. O’Toole, “Rights of Representation,” 241.
25. Ibid., 319.
26. Ibid., 308.
27. Ibid., 236.
28. Ibid., 308.
29. Ibid., 319.
30. Ibid.
31. McGreevy, “Abbey ‘to Pay €600,000.’”
32. Healy, “Roddy Doyle Transfers Rights.”
33. Anon., “Doyle Ordered to Swear.”
34. McGreevy, “Abbey ‘to Pay €600,000.’”
35. Burns, “Abbey’s €500,000 Legal Drama.”
36. McGreevy, “Abbey ‘to Pay €600,000.’”
37. Healy, Crowley, Ahern. “Abbey Theatre in Dramatic Copyright Case.”
38. McGreevy, “Abbey ‘to Pay €600,000.’”
39. Myers, “Making Synge’s Great Comedy ‘Relevant.’”
40. Anon., “Review of Abbey Theatre’s Funding.”
41. Lonergan, “Introduction,” 3.
42. Jewesbury, Singh, and Tuck, Cultural Diversity in the Arts, 45.
43. Ibid., 58.
44. Murphy, “Our Stage Will be a Poorer Place.”
45. Adigun, “Arambe Productions,” 63–4.
46. McIvor, “Staging the New Irish,” 319.
47. Adigun, The Paddies, 57.
48. Ibid., 66.
49. McIvor and Spangler, Staging Intercultural Ireland, 345.
50. Adigun, The Paddies, 63.
51. McIvor and Spangler, Staging Intercultural Ireland, 2.
52. See McIvor, Towards a New Interculturalism, especially chapters 4 and 5.
53. http://micipnuigalway.weebly.com/resource-list-and-bibliography.html (accessed August 23, 2015).
54. Murray, “Beyond the Passion Machine,” 109.
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