In the Wake of Revival and Revolution, 1915-2005: Postcolonial Modernist Theatre and Performance in Ireland, Australia, and New Zealand

In the Wake of Revival and Revolution, 1915-2005 examines how politically and aesthetically radical modernisms are generated out of geohistorically specific modernities that are characterized by energies of cultural revival and socio-political revolution. By tracing the aftereffects of cultural, social, and political movements within postcolonial modernity as they intersect with theatre and performance practices in Ireland, Australia, and New Zealand, I offer an account of how postcolonial modernist theatre and performance becomes a simultaneously funereal and celebratory vigil over the vicissitudes of modern life in newly reconfigured postcolonial nation-states.

This comparative study of plays by Irish playwrights William Butler Yeats, Denis Johnston, Lennox Robinson, and Mary Manning; Australian playwrights Wesley Enoch, Deborah Mailman, Josephine Wilson, Erin Hefferon, John Romeril, and Andrew Bovell; and New Zealand playwrights Briar Grace-Smith, Apirana Taylor, Jacob Rajan, Justin Lewis, and Michelanne Forster, spans the twentieth century and reaches into the first decade of the twenty-first. I include Irish plays written from 1915-1935, and Australian and New Zealand plays from 1990-2005, demonstrating that playwrights and theatre practitioners respond acutely and in aesthetic ways to their respective modernities. I identify formal patterns of melancholic temporal impasses, surrealism, orientalism, and modes of futurity, demonstrating how postcolonial modernists engender artistic, political, and cultural utopias and affects of hope within the nation-state. They do this by sampling both the utopic and dystopic affective, social, cultural, and political energies of everyday life, containing and exploding them within the apparatus of the theatre.

The postcolonial modernisms I explore emerge in anticipation of and develop alongside the postcolonial modernities of newly reconfigured nation-states; as such, they are neither derivative nor belated instances of British or American modernism. My analysis of theatre, performance, drama, and modernity intervenes in recent debates in modernist studies by offering a new account of the commensurabilities between these three instances of modernism/modernity. By comparing the lived experiences of subjects within these postcolonial modernities as well as the dramatic forms which such a milieu produces in Ireland, Australia, and New Zealand, my work shows that while the narrative content of these modernisms differ, the various forms of aesthetic responses to these instances of postcolonial modernity have strong affinities which go beyond the particularities of each country’s geohistorical context.