Abstrakt
This paper considers ecologies of agonistic encounter in Irish theatre. It will treat three recent theatrical works: This Beautiful Village / This Beautiful Virtual Village by Lisa Tierney-Keogh (2019, 2020), Home: Part One collectively created at the Abbey Theatre (2021) and The Saviour by Deirdre Kinahan (2021) as striking examples of the diverse ways current Irish theatre performs dissensual speech.
Each of these performances orbits questions of ethical impasse, intolerance, and inaction, tracing multiple lines of intersectional inequalities. In using the word ecology here, I aim to highlight these works as embedded in and speaking to the socio-political environment of contemporary Ireland, while at the same time acknowledging the ways their reach was extended by their availability in online formats.
My discussion will draw on Jacques Rancière’s notion of dissensus as “a division inserted in ‘common sense’: a dispute over what is given and about the frame within which we see something as given” alongside reflections on agonism in performance from Tony Fisher and Eve Katsouraki’s 2017 edited volume, Performing Antagonism: Theatre, Performance and Radical Democracy. In a twenty-first century moment marked by the emancipatory promises of the exposure of past wrongs and openness to social transformation, these works, I will argue, suggest the complex contours not only of Irish public discourse, but also of the role of theatre as a space of critically meaningful agonism.