This chapter explores the history of representations of race in the Irish theatre, with a particular focus on blackface and minstrelsy – a discussion which uses at is focal point the pre-histories and afterlives of Dion Boucicault’s 1859 play The Octoroon. That melodrama is resituated within an Irish performance tradition (one that Boucicault himself would have encountered as a young man in Dublin) that stretches from the late nineteenth century, and which involved the performance on Irish stages of African-American characters – whose identity was often juxtaposed with that of stage Irish characters, and often performed by white Irish actors. In such a context, The Octoroon represents a form of continuity with what came before – and must therefore be seen in Irish as well as American contexts. Its impact on subsequent performance histories is also considered, up to and including the staging on the Abbey Theatre stage of An Octoroon – an adaptation of the original play – in 2022.

This chapter demonstrates how many Irish migrants in nineteenth-century colonial Australia met with overt discrimination, underpinned by a widespread circulation of racialized stereotypes of Irishness in popular culture, including in images in the mainstream media as well as in fiction. These racialized images of Irishness depended on widespread cultural knowledge of Irish stereotypes, such as stereotypes of Irish speech patterns, facial characteristics, and dress. At the same time, stereotypes of First Nations people and Chinese were also circulating in popular culture, often in the same frame or act as Irish stereotypes. While today many Australians of Irish descent pride themselves on the fact that their ancestors were less culpable in the racist policies and practices of colonisation in Australia, the reality is more complex as Michael D. Higgins, President of Ireland, recognised this is one of his first speeches on an official tour of Australia in 2017. This chapter analyses one element of that complexity by examining how Irish Australians have been represented in popular media and culture when in the same frame as two other racialized groups, First Nations people and Chinese Australians.

One of the works of the 1764 season at Covent Garden was a new burletta called Midas. Midas was, though, not ‘new’; it was only new to London: an early version of the work had its first staging privately in 1760 in Lurgan near Belfast, and the first professional version was at Dublin’s Crow Street Theatre in 1762. The professional version was prepared in response to the appearance in Dublin of an Italian burletta company, a company that had previously performed in London and would do so again after its Dublin engagement. This interplay of repertory between the two cities - of which Midas was the most obvious product - resulted both in a new genre and a tangling with Italian opera troupes. Midas was the product of a group of Irishmen, of whom Kane O’Hara, the librettist, was the most important and the most enigmatic; this chapter explores his role in the cross-currents of drama between the two cities. In so doing, Burden’s chapter re-contextualises the history of the burletta and offers a powerful demonstration that theatre historians cannot and should not write about London’s theatre in isolation: regional influences were important tributaries to the Georgian capital’s culture.

This chapter explores performances of Irish femininity in London and Dublin following the Act of Union, sketching a literary relationship between writers Sydney Owenson and Alicia Sheridan Le Fanu and between the two cities. Although Sydney Owenson is usually thought of as a novelist, Taylor shows how her play The First Attempt (Dublin 1807) and the author’s own public performances drew on tropes employed by earlier male playwrights in order to (re)stage Anglo-Irish relations in feminine terms. At a special performance of The First Attempt, and in later social gatherings in London, Owenson, dressed in her “wild Irish girl’s” red silk mantle, strategically feminizes and civilizes an earlier Irish character type, such as John Henry Johnstone’s Teague from The Faithful Irishman. Similarly, Alicia Sheridan Le Fanu’s comedy The Sons of Erin (1812) restages and feminizes her brother’s earlier play, Richard Brinsley Sheridan’s St. Patrick’s Day (1775), asserting that Enlightened, politicized Irish women hold the power to influence the Union beyond the stage doors.

The chapter argues that Owenson and Le Fanu’s feminized rewritings of male Irish playwrights chime with London’s desire for feminized pacifications of Irish characters following 1798. At the same time, Owenson and Le Fanu also offer a subversive message about women’s place in Anglo-Irish politics and Ireland’s place in the Union. Both women used the domestic English setting to stage Irish grievances right at the heart of the empire.