Field Day and the Translation of Irish Identities: Performing Contradictions

Abstract

In the 1980s, Field Day brought together some of the most important names in Irish artistic life—Brian Friel, Stephen Rea, Seamus Deane, Seamus Heaney, Tom Paulin, David Hammond and Thomas Kilroy—to articulate a cultural intervention into the deadly stalemate of the Northern Irish ‘Troubles’. At the heart of the enterprise was an annual theatre tour around the island of Ireland that visited cities and small villages, playing in theatres and community venues. These plays did not tackle the ‘Troubles’ directly, but brought their audiences to places such as pre-Famine Ireland, the world of Greek tragedy, pre-Revolutionary Russian provinces and apartheid South Africa. Informed by poststructuralist thinking and archival materials, this book argues that the political and postcolonial salience of these dramas lies in the ways in which they foregrounded acts of cultural translation in order to disrupt disabling constructions of Irish identity that had contributed to engendering the ‘Troubles’.