The State of Play

Eberhard Bort (Ed.)

The State of Play. Irish Theatre in the Nineties

ISBN 978-3-88476-232-5, ISBN 3-88476-232-X, 202 S., kt., € 19,50 (1996)

(CDE-Studies, Bd. 1)

"... our theatre in the nineties is alive and well and in pursuit of new understanding, new images, fresh articulation of who we are as a people, what we are as individuals and where we are headed as a nation in the age of the Maastricht Treaty, the Common Agricultural Policy, and the Land of Heart's Desire, where the Deutschmark is re-writing all our histories. In high (or is it not low?) Germany we came to dig a little deeper into such questions and challenges as these histories continue to pose. Allthough our agenda was the contemporary theatre and drama, it was not forgotten that the battle standard followed was originally designed by Yeats, suitably mocked at by Shaw, and carried with pride and passion by Synge almost one hundred years ago."

Thus Christopher Murray in this introductory essay of this volume: a timely assessment of Irish drama and theatre in the 1990s, developed from the papers given at an international conference on contemporary Irish Theatre at the University of Tübingen, south Germany. Contributors to this volume include Ivy Bannister, Mary Cloake, Gerald Dawe, Robert F Garratt, Claudia W Harris, Cathy Leeney, Tom Magill, Stuart Marlow, Karin McCully, Brendan McGurk, Anna McMullan, Christopher Murray, Paul O´Hanrahan and Beate Richter. The conference marked the fifteenth anniversary of the Tübingen Anglo-Irish Theatre Group, a University-based company which has produced well over sixty Irish plays in Tübingen and beyond.