Performing the Body in Irish Theatre

'This book is at the forefront of the emerging field of Irish Performance Studies. While Sweeney offers original readings of some well known and several lesser known texts (such as Friel's Dancing at Lughnasa , Tom MacIntyre's The Great Hunger , David Rudkin's The Saxon Shore and Marina Carr's Low in the Dark ), she emphasizes the complex interweaving of text and performance in the emergence of new Irish theatre practices. She combines detailed analysis of texts and productions with a broad framework of twentieth- and twenty-first-century Irish theatre. Performing the Body in Irish Theatre re-visions Irish theatre history in its insistence on theatre as an embodied practice, whether in the work of W.B. Yeats or in the choreography of Michael Keegan Dolan.' - Anna McMullan, Chair in Drama, Queen's University Belfast, UK