Throwing Theory at Ireland? The Field Day Theatre Company and Postcolonial Theatre Criticism
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Writing in 2000, the literary critic Richard Kirkland noted, "[I]t is clear that most considerations of theory and Ireland are now roughly reducible to postcolonial theory — a transition which would have been unthinkable ten years ago". A range of recent work demonstrates the extent to which critics of Irish drama have embraced "postcolonial" analysis. I However, in drama criticism specifically, and literary criticism more widely, a considered analysis of the adequacy of the term is frequently as absent as its application is ubiquitous. This essay is an examination of the development of postcolonial readings of Irish drama through the lens of the Field Day Theatre Company, tracing its progression as a mode of analysis and, crucially, its perceived and actual limitations. In particular it looks to extend the critique of the company beyond the exhausted framework of Anglo-Irish relations and locate it within the dynamic definition of the postcolonial developed by critics such as Robert Young, for whom the "economic dominance" of one part of the world over another is the fundamental "assumption of postcolonial studies". His observation that "postcolonial theory's intellectual commitment will always be to seek to develop new forms of engaged theoretical work" informs the present analysis, in which Translations, described by Seamus Deane as Field Day's "central text" is read in a creative transcendence of the condemnations of its critics. In Young's terms, a progressive postcolonial analysis must ensure that "[i]nterest in oppression of the past will always be guided by the relation of that history to the present", and it is the precise nature of the global "present" to which the argument is particularly directed.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".