Queer Notions: New Plays and Performances from Ireland

(hardback 8 October 2010 - 2010)

Fintan Walsh
Trinity College, Dublin

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Queer Notions is a seminal anthology of new plays and performance documentation from Ireland.


Foreword by Frank McGuinness


This collection is a record of some of the most important performative ideas and embodied interventions that have shaped queer culture and theatre and performance practice in Ireland
in recent times, principally in the years following the decriminalization of homosexuality in
1993, up to and including the present. The anthology includes plays, experimental performance documentation, and a visual essay that reveal the impassioned creativity that illuminates and invigorates the margins of culture.

Introduction: The Flaming Archive by Fintan Walsh
The Queen & Peacock (2000) by Loughlin Deegan
Passage (2001) by Deirdre Kinahan
A Cure for Homosexuality (2005) by Neil Watkins
The Drowning Room (2006) by Verity-Alicia Mavenawitz
Danny and Chantelle (Still Here) (2006) by Phillip McMahon
The Ecstasy of Tomorrow (Visual Essay, 1987-2010), by Niall Sweeney
Victor and Gord, Ali and Michael (2009) by Úna McKevitt, with cast
A Woman in Progress (2009) by Panti

Fintan Walsh is IRCHSS Government of Ireland Post-doctoral Research Fellow in Drama at
the School of Drama, Film and Music, Trinity College, Dublin.

hardback 8 October 2010: 2010
Printed Pages: 276
Size: 234 x 156mm
ISBN: 9781859184691

Book Reviews

Charlotte McIvor, Theatre Survey

November 22, 2011, 15:58 pm

Fintan Walsh’s Queer Notions: New Plays and Performances from Ireland serves as a critical intervention and unique resource for researchers and artists alike [...]Walsh’s Queer Notions creates space in Irish archives for queer stories and lives, and provides an important text for queer theatre and performance studies at large [...] By centralizing (queer) Irish histories embodied and transmitted through performance, Walsh’s book expands the canon of Irish dramatic literature and makes a powerful and urgent case for the necessary analysis of queer transnational flows vis-à-vis performance historie

Patrick Lonergan teaches at NUI Galway. Irish Theatre Magazine

February 3, 2011, 12:48 pm

Queer Notions, then, is more than just an anthology. It is an archive of ten years’ worth of performances, a collection of work that tells us something about a specific time and place, but which also has bigger and broader resonances. In its variety – its internal contradictions, its discordances, its contrasts – it challenges us to think and re-think what we know: about sexuality, about our theatre, about Ireland itself. It’s an urgent and important book: inspiring as it is challenging, informative as it surprising – and one that deserves the widest possible audience

Ivana Bacik, Senator and Reid Professor of Law, Trinity College, Dublin

July 14, 2010, 12:26 pm

This is a very exciting collection which will make a vital contribution to literature on Irish theatre and drama studies. It will also greatly help in documenting the rich, challenging and vibrant nature of LGBTQ culture in Ireland. Perhaps most importantly, it should provoke and entertain a wide audience

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