Synge, with his “fully-flavoured” Hiberno-English established a tradition of Irish theatrical eloquence that has come down into the contemporary period in the lyrical fluencies of Brian Friel, the vatic speech of Frank McGuinness and the Midlands poeticism of Marina Carr. Tom Murphy, however, set a different sort of precedent, resistant to such eloquence, forging a stage speech instead from the broken language of the inarticulate. The aim of this paper is to explore the rejection of ‘poetry talk’ in contemporary Irish drama, and the various ideolects created by Billy Roche, Conor McPherson, Martin McDonagh, Mark O’Rowe and Enda Walsh.
Often regarded as purely utilitarian messages with no artistic value in themselves, stage directions are a neglected aspect of theatre studies. This paper seeks to answer the questions “Who speaks in stage directions? How? To whom?”. Looby examines the nature of the speaker, the addressee and their relationship by examining the evolution of stage directions through Shaw, O’Casey and Beckett. However, the paper concentrates primarily on stage directions in Brian Friel’s Translations, arguing that they have an artistic form and function related to the theme of the play and going beyond mere technical instructions to the production crew.
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