Overview
Seamus Heaney once described the 'sense of place' generated by the early
Abbey theatre as the 'imaginative protein' of later Irish writing.
Drawing on theorists of space such as Henri Lefebvre and Yi-Fu Tuan,
Mapping Irish Theatre argues that theatre is 'a machine for making place
from space'. Concentrating on Irish theatre, the book investigates how
this Irish 'sense of place' was both produced by, and produced, the
remarkable work of the Irish Revival, before considering what happens
when this spatial formation begins to fade. Exploring more recent
site-specific and place-specific theatre alongside canonical works of
Irish theatre by playwrights including J. M. Synge, Samuel Beckett and
Brian Friel, the study proposes an original theory of theatrical space
and theatrical identification, whose application extends beyond Irish
theatre, and will be useful for all theatre scholars.