Re -staging the past: Contemporary Irish drama and the question of history

This dissertation argues that the incorporation of historical material into Irish drama written between 1968 and 1998 opens the way for new understandings of Irishness in both the Irish Republic and the Northern Ireland province. The renewal of sectarian violence in Northern Ireland in 1968 signaled a crisis in the formulation of Irish identities on both sides of the border. The continuing conflicts between Republicans and Unionists originated out of these groups' oppositional identities; and, as each group cemented an identity around ties to their pasts and traditions, history in Ireland arose as a much-contested site of identity formation. Realizing the importance of transcending old identities in effecting a lasting peace, a number of Irish playwrights---particularly those living and working near the two governments' border---have begun to challenge the Irish histories responsible for these identities. This study of the re-stagings of history in the plays of Tom Paulin, Brian Friel, Frank McGuinness, Seamus Heaney, Tom Murphy, Sebastian Barry, Christina Reid, Anne Devlin, David Rudkin, Tom Mac Intyre, and Stewart Parker examines the nature of these challenges to the primacy of sectarian histories and defines the hybridized Irish identities that arise out of these playwrights' re-stagings of the island's past. By examining the thematic and formal experimentation these authors use to trouble Irish history, a trend of aesthetic resistance to the authority of sectarian historical narratives also becomes clear.