Output details

The Fear of Forgetting Who We Are: Masks, Identity and the New Era in the Plays of Kaite O`Reilly

Research Context: As with Our Lady of the Goldfinches the starting point was discussion between director/dramaturg and playwright: the play here was Henhouse. There is a tendency in the UK to see dramaturgical work with playwrights as somehow administrative rather than creative. This paper is a step towards a larger project exploring the substance of such discussions, balancing ‘withness’ against ‘aboutness’.

Research Question: This is an account of a creative process thinly disguised as an academic paper. Nevertheless it proposes a theatre metaphor for the post-1989 era where individual and collective identities and their tribal co-relates are in flux. In a number of her plays O’Reilly is concerned with a fundamental manipulation of Personae, in the Greek sense of ‘Masks’, as the site where our identities reside in performative terms. In their loss for whatever reason we experience a crisis manifesting itself in violence.

Methodology: Most recently O’Reilly’s adaptation of The Persians (2010) by Aeschylus has offered a postmodern aesthetic for current events. This most ancient of ‘war plays’ was staged in a Ministry of Defence training ‘village’ where urban warfare is more usually rehearsed. Henhouse (2004) is loosely set against the background of a civil conflict, O’Reilly defines her warring characters in terms of their conceptions of historical time: as a series of unconnected moments; as cyclical recurrence; as progress; and as the simultaneous co-existence of all the above; inspired by the poetics of the Mexican surrealist poet Octavio Paz. The personification of these temporal-spatial memes was a starting point for writer and dramaturg.

Outputs: The associated paper here should be seen in the context of the publication site, the material was offered as Conference paper and later as publication. The metaphor to be seen as having more than an academic interest in an Eastern European context.