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Throwing Theory at Ireland? The Field Day Theatre Company and Postcolonial Theatre Criticism SHAUN RICHARDS Writing in 2000, the literary critic Richard Kirkland noted, "[Ilt is clear that most considerations of theory and Ireland are now roughly reducible to postcolonial theory - a transition which would have been unthinkable ten years ago" (10, emphasis in original). A range of recent work demonstrates the extent to which critics of Irish drama have embraced "postcolonial" analysis. I However, in drama criticism specifically, and literary criticism more widely, a considered analysis of the adequacy of the term is frequently as absent as its application is ubiquitous. This essay is an examination of the development of postcolonial readings of Irish drama through the lens of the Field Day Theatre Company, tracing its progression as a mode of analysis and, crucially, its perceived and actual limitations. In particular it looks to extend the critique of the company beyond the exhausted framework of Anglo-Irish relations and locate it within the dynamic definition of the postcolonial developed by critics such as Robert Young, for whom the "economic dominance" of one part of the world over another is the fundamental "assumption of postcolonial studies" (Postcolonialism 6). His observation that "postcolonial theory's intellectual commitment will always be to seek to develop new forms of engaged theoretical work" (II ) informs the present analysis, in which Translations, described by Seamus Deane as Field Day's "central text" (qtd. in Gray 8), is read in a creative transcendence of the condemnations of its critics. In Young's tenns, a progressive postcolonial analysis mllst ensure that "[i]nterest in oppression of the past will always be guided by the relation of that history to the present" (Postcolonialism II), and it is the precise nature of the global "present" to which the argument is particularly directed. In Irish Studies the "postcolonial" is the cause of vigorous debate, but its legitimacy is generally not denied. In the wider field ofliterary and cultural criticism , however, Ireland is oftenmarginaiised orexcluded from the mainstream of postcolonial criticism. For Elleke Boehmer, while Ireland was taken as "talModern Drama, 47:4 (Winter 2004) 607 608 SHAUN RICHARDS ismanic by nationalistmovements" and so merits "occasional references" in her 1995 study, the fact that "its history has been so closely and so long linked to that of Britain" means that it is U a different case" (4) from that of other colonised countries and so its presence is reduced to a mere seven indexed references . Ireland is included in the five hundred- plus pages of Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths, and Helen Tiffm's The Post-Colonial Studies Reader by virtue of three pages from Writing Ireland: Colonialism, Nationalism and Culture (1988) dealing with MacMorris in Shakespeare's Henry V; however, the fact that this is owing to the exlract's focus on Shakespeare is evidenced in that he, rather than Ireland, is referenced in the index. The pattern of exclusion is summed up in Robert Young's review of Patrick Williams and Laura Chrisman 's Colonial Discourse and Post Colonial TheOlY: "Ireland, which from Edmund Spenser to the present has generated the most sustained corpus ofcolonial discourse in existence, does not even feature in the index" ("Reviews" 78), A similar pattern is found in what remains the most significant introduction to postcolonial drama, Helen Gilbert and Joanne Tompkins' Post-Colonial Drama: TheOly, Practice, Politics. While they acknowledge that Ireland "fits well within the post-colonial paradigm" (7), its presence in their otherwise wide-ranging study is limited to three separate references to Brian Friel, J. M. Synge, and Christina Reid - a total of less than two pages. In monographs focusing exclusively on Irish drama, however, Ireland and postcoloniality are increasingly inseparable, with the last few years seeing Dawn Duncan's Postcolonial TheOlY in Irish Drama/rom r 800-2000, Margaret Llewellyn-Janes's COlllemporary Irish Drama and Cu/turalldentity, and F. C. McGrath's Brian Friel's (Post)Colonial Drama. Additionally, Richard Pine's revised edition of his Brian Friel and Ireland's Drama (1990) follows Kirkland in acknowledging that "there have [...] been significant advances [in post-colonial studies] since 1990" as a result of which he has extended "the consideration...

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