Liminal Identities in Contemporary Irish Drama

Abstract

Since the period of the Celtic Renaissance and plays such as William Butler Yeats’s Cathleen ni Houlihan (1902), the debate of authentic and de-anglicized versus colonized and outerdirected Irish identities in Irish drama has long developed in new and different directions. In this process, the colonizing and alienating influence of Britain has been replaced by the United States as the dominant Other. Against this background, my paper will more specifically explore the portrayal, as well as the distortion, of Ireland and the Irish in film in two contemporary plays, Marie Jones’s Stones in His Pockets (1999) and Martin McDonagh’s The Cripple of Inishmaan (1998). Both plays focus on the intercultural representation of Ireland and the Irish in Hollywood movies. Both plays are intermedial or metadramas in the sense that they take film productions as their subject matter. Both plays will be analyzed against the background of Fredric Jameson’s theory of global commodification and Jean Baudrillard’s arguments on simulated realities.