Nicholas Grene

Biographic Data

ID957658
NAMENicholas Grene
GIVEN NAMESNicholas
FAMILY NAMEGrene
SIGNATUREGRENE N
AFFILIATIONSTrinity College Dublin
ORCID0000-0002-4275-5538
VERIFIEDYes
TOTAL WORKS56
TOTAL CITATIONS8
AUTHOR COUNT23
EDITOR COUNT33
FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR1980
LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR2016
H-INDEX1

  • Shakespeare's Tragic Imagination

    Nicholas GreneBOOKShakespeare's Tragic Imagination2016

  • Twisting in the Wind

    Brian O'Conchubhair, Nicholas Grene et al.BOOKOxford Handbook of Modern Irish…2016

    Without a strong native tradition of drama, theatre in the Irish language, initially associated with the Gaelic League, has been slow to develop and has suffered from many frustrations and setbacks. One of the landmark early productions was Casadh an tSúgáin by the League’s founder Douglas Hyde (1901). The Abbey did not do much initially to foster Irish-language theatre, which has functioned intermittently in Dublin, with An Comhar Drámaíochta in…

  • Urban and Rural Theatre Cultures

    Lisa Coen, Nicholas Grene et al.BOOKOxford Handbook of Modern Irish…2016

    By the 1950s, distinct strands of rural and urban Irish theatre were prompted by the clash of traditional mores with major social and political changes in Ireland. Three playwrights, M. J. Molloy, John B. Keane, and Hugh Leonard, came to represent the rural and urban sensibility of theatre at that time. All three were interested in how traditional Irish values and practices fitted in with the Ireland emerging around them. The ways in which the th…

  • The Abbey and the Idea of a Theatre

    Ben Levitas, Nicholas Grene et al.BOOKOxford Handbook of Modern Irish…2016

    The Irish national theatre movement developed in the ferment of cultural nationalism at the turn of the century, but it was not at all clear what form a national theatre should take: an Ibsenian model of critical realism, favoured by Edward Martyn, George Moore, and John Eglinton, the mythological poetic drama of Yeats, or the peasant plays that came to be written by Yeats and Gregory. Apart from the playwrights, the company of actors formed arou…

  • Irish Theatre Devised

    Brian Singleton, Nicholas Grene et al.BOOKOxford Handbook of Modern Irish…2016

    Since the early 1980s, a considerable debate has grown up around the centrality of the written script in Irish theatre. While the major artist in many other European theatre cultures was the director or the scenographer, Irish theatre remained dominated by the writer. However, with an expansion in the number of theatre companies, an increasingly globalized culture, and new forms of Irish actor training, companies began to emerge whose work did no…

  • Imagining the Rising

    Nancy Allen, Nicholas Allen et al.BOOKOxford Handbook of Modern Irish…2016

    Several of the leaders of the Rising—Patrick Pearse, Thomas McDonagh, and James Connolly—wrote plays, and many were closely engaged in theatrical enterprises (often conceived as alternatives to the Abbey Theatre) in the years leading up to the Easter Rising in 1916. Indeed, there is an argument that Easter 1916 itself was conceived as a public performance, albeit a performance with life-and-death consequences. This chapter considers the theatrica…

  • ‘We Were Very Young and We Shrank From Nothing’

    Shaun Richards, Nicholas Grene et al.BOOKOxford Handbook of Modern Irish…2016

    In the first debates over the form the national theatre movement should take, it would seem as if the Ibsenites, George Moore and Edward Martyn, lost out to Yeats with his emphasis on a mythico-poetic theatre. However, a realist model of theatre, introduced first by the Fays influenced by Antoine, took root and was to become the Abbey’s dominant form, so much so that Yeats would admit in 1919 that the dominance of realism in the Irish theatre had…

  • Negotiating Differences in the Plays of Frank McGuinness

    Helen Lojek, Helen Heusner Lojek et al.BOOKOxford Handbook of Modern Irish…2016

    The career of the playwright Frank McGuinness encapsulates the trajectory of identity politics in Ireland since the mid-1980s. McGuiness first achieved major recognition for Observe the Sons of Ulster in 1985, a play by a Catholic playwright exploring the Ulster Unionist psyche and a continuum of male relationships from the homosexual to the homosocial. This play set the template for McGuinness’ future work, in which characters cross the expected…

  • Irish Theatre in Europe

    Ondřej Pilný, Nicholas Grene et al.BOOKOxford Handbook of Modern Irish…2016

    While Irish drama has achieved a distinctive reputation within the Anglophone world, the situation in continental Europe has been much more complex. Wilde and Shaw continue to be widely revived but are rarely identified as Irish. Even more strikingly, contemporary Irish playwrights such as Martin McDonagh and Enda Walsh, both extremely popular in Europe, are assimilated within a general category of British theatre, while Brian Friel’s work is muc…

  • Brian Friel and Tom Murphy

    Anthony Roche, Nicholas Grene et al.BOOKOxford Handbook of Modern Irish…2016

    Irish theatre since 1960 has been dominated by the work of major playwrights, above all Brian Friel and Tom Murphy. The changing social context of Ireland in the early 1960s out of which both writers emerged within a few years of one another is evident in their breakthrough plays, Murphy’s A Whistle in the Dark (1961) and Friel’s Philadelphia, Here I Come! (1964). In these plays, as in The Loves of Cass Maguire (1966) and A Crucial Week in the Li…

  • Directors and Designers since 1960

    Ian Walsh, Ian R Walsh et al.BOOKOxford Handbook of Modern Irish…2016

    Although Irish theatre is often considered to be primarily a writer’s theatre, with its roots in a realist tradition, Irish theatre since 1960 has consistently challenged this definition through the work of its directors and designer. Whether in the case of Tomás Mac Anna’s work at the Abbey in the mid-1960s, Joe Dowling’s production of Juno and the Paycock , or the collaborative work of Patrick Mason with writer Tom MacIntyre and actor Tom Hicke…

  • Brian Friel and Field Day

    Marilynn Richtarik, Nicholas Grene et al.BOOKOxford Handbook of Modern Irish…2016

    When Brian Friel and actor Stephen Rea formed the Field Day Theatre Company to stage Friel’s Translations in 1980, they created a company arguably more conscious of its own symbolic value, and its own place in history, than any since the Abbey. Field Day soon developed into a wider cultural enterprise, playing a significant role in setting the terms of cultural debate in the 1980s, for which it was both vigorously supported and sharply criticized…

  • Irish Acting in the Early Twentieth Century

    Adrian Frazier, Nicholas Grene et al.BOOKOxford Handbook of Modern Irish…2016

    Frank Fay, with his brother William Fay, were primarily responsible for the development of what became known as the Abbey style of acting, Frank drawing upon his study of the French actor Coquelin and the director André Antoine, William with his experience of acting in fit-up touring companies. This style, conditioned by the limited playing resources available to them, centred on fine speech, teamwork, and restraint. In a later period, after the …

  • Women and Irish Theatre before 1960

    Cathy Leeney, Nicholas Grene et al.BOOKOxford Handbook of Modern Irish…2016

    Although Lady Gregory was one of the first directors of the Abbey and one of its most popular and prolific playwrights, Irish theatre in the popular perception has been seen as dominated by men. Taking the disputed authorship of the pivotal play, Cathleen ni Houlihan (co-authored by Gregory and Yeats, but long attributed to Yeats), as an emblem of this eclipse of women in Irish theatre, this chapter addresses the important part played by actors s…

  • Reinscribing the Classics, Ancient and Modern

    Christina Hunt Mahony, Nicholas Grene et al.BOOKOxford Handbook of Modern Irish…2016

    Translation and adaptation have long had a distinctive visibility on the Irish stage, with the translator as much to the fore as the original playwright in the ascription of authorship. Two contemporary Irish playwrights have had careers to some extent defined by their sustained engagement with non-English-language writers: Friel with Chekhov, and McGuinness with Ibsen. As Friel does not know Russian, nor McGuinness Norwegian, what is being done …

  • Modernism and Irish Theatre 1900–1940

    R Cavé, Nicholas Grene et al.BOOKOxford Handbook of Modern Irish…2016

    Modernism, defined here initially in its key features across the art forms, was a strong countercurrent to the dominant style of realism in Irish theatre in the first decades of the twentieth century. This is particularly evident in the dance dramas of W. B. Yeats and his other experiments with non-realist dramatic forms. Séan O’Casey, in his controversial play The Silver Tassie and later works, drew on the bold techniques of expressionism. Denis…

  • The Abbey Theatre and the Irish State

    Lauren Arrington, Nicholas Grene et al.BOOKOxford Handbook of Modern Irish…2016

    The aesthetic principles of education and representation that Yeats and Gregory set out at the founding of the Abbey Theatre enabled the directorate to cultivate a relationship with the state that ensured the theatre’s place as the Irish National Theatre. Yet this was a relationship that demanded compromises on both sides—in the negotiation for a state subsidy, finally granted in 1925, in issues of censorship over controversial plays such as The …

  • The Importance of Staging Oscar

    Éibhear Walshe, Nicholas Grene et al.BOOKOxford Handbook of Modern Irish…2016

    Oscar Wilde was adopted as something like a posthumous writer in residence at the Gate Theatre in the 1930s, where all of his plays including the controversial Salomé were produced. The identification between the theatre and the playwright was further strengthened by Micheál Mac Liammóir’s hugely successful one-man show The Importance of Being Oscar in the 1960s, and again in the 1980s, under the directorship of Michael Colgan. This chapter consi…

  • O’Casey and the City

    Christopher Murray, Nicholas Grene et al.BOOKOxford Handbook of Modern Irish…2016

    Seán O’Casey’s first three produced plays are often referred to as the ‘Dublin Trilogy’. They were not conceived as a trilogy but they are centrally concerned with representing the city, a relatively new departure in Irish theatre at the time. This chapter draws on theories of the city to analyse some of the ways in which tenement life and the urban society around it are dramatized in the first Dublin plays, before moving on to consider how O’Cas…

  • Shadow and Substance

    Melissa Sihra, Nicholas Grene et al.BOOKOxford Handbook of Modern Irish…2016

    In spite of the very important role of women in the development of Irish theatre through the twentieth century, their contribution has continued to be marginalized, with ‘women’s drama’ set off against an implicit male norm. This was still obvious in the Abbey Theatre’s centenary programme, in which no play by a woman featured on the theatre’s main stage. The work of Charabanc Theatre Company, a women’s collective, and the highly successful plays…

  • Thomas Kilroy and the Idea of a Theatre

    José Lanters, Nicholas Grene et al.BOOKOxford Handbook of Modern Irish…2016

    In the late 1950s Thomas Kilroy wrote a series of formative articles, which collectively form something like a manifesto for Irish theatre since 1960. ‘In the past twenty years,’ Kilroy wrote in ‘Groundwork for an Irish Theatre’, ‘few Irish dramatists have been in any way exciting technically.’ Responding to Hugh Leonard’s scenographically original Stephen D (1962) and Brian Friel’s experiments with memory and subjectivity in Philadelphia, Here I…

  • Drama since the 1990s

    Emilie Pine, Nicholas Grene et al.BOOKOxford Handbook of Modern Irish…2016

    Ireland in the early 1990s began to undergo social changes at an unprecedented rate. Friel and Murphy, the two playwrights who had established themselves as the leading figures in Irish theatre over the previous three decades, responded to this social change by producing a series of plays that were memory-based (such as Friel’s Dancing at Lughnasa ), or which traced the continuing role of a past that seemed forgotten in the present (notably in Mu…

  • Irish Theatre and Historiography

    Eamonn Jordan, Nicholas Grene et al.BOOKOxford Handbook of Modern Irish…2016

    Irish theatre history, like Irish theatre, has for many years orbited around two centres: the writer and the Abbey Theatre. To some extent this continues to be both true, and for good reason. At the same time as Irish theatre culture has diversified, so too has scholarly writing about Irish theatre. There has been a distinct turn towards the study of performance in the twenty-first century, which is notable in an area that for so long had been do…

  • Design and Direction to 1960

    Paige Reynolds, Nicholas Grene et al.BOOKOxford Handbook of Modern Irish…2016

    Early Abbey staging and design was extremely simple, partly enforced by the limitations of their resources. Yeats’s ambitious experiments with the screens of Gordon Craig came to nothing. Initially, the Gate Theatre was established self-consciously as a theatrical alternative to the Abbey, open to European aesthetics, and concentrated on stage production and design, ideas articulated and exemplified by Micheál Mac Liammóir and Hilton Edwards in t…

  • Theatre and Activism 1900–1916

    Patricia Mathews, P J Mathews et al.BOOKOxford Handbook of Modern Irish…2016

    Whereas previous scholarship has concentrated on the political struggle for Irish independence leading to the Easter Rising of 1916, new critical attention to the diverse range of groups, movements, and societies dedicated to multiple forms of political action has revealed a more complex picture of activism during the period 1900–1916. Of particular importance is the role that theatre-making played in binding together a multiplicity of fringe pol…