There is a pattern to how pregnancy is theatrically represented in Ireland: It is a taboo, a silence, an open secret. This is symptomatic of the Irish social and cultural stigmatization of women’s bodies and part of a larger discourse in which women’s bodies are carefully policed to be visible but inarticulate and assumed to be usable but unintelligible. This chapter considers new performances of pregnancy, maternity, and non-maternity on the Irish stage as a way of troubling the assumption that women’s bodies are invisible or inappropriate in contemporary theatre, in plays by ANU Productions, Bump & Grind, Stacey Gregg, Elaine Murphy, Frank McGuinness, Christian O’Reilly, and THEATREClub.

With reference to current developments in memory studies, this chapter examines the role and status of Irish theatre in relation to debates about history, memory, and protest in the 1960s and 1970s. Reading the plays of Brian Friel, Hugh Leonard, Thomas Kilroy, Tom Murphy, Richard Johnson and Máiréad ní Ghráda, the chapter argues that memory performed a crucial function in response to the particular social and cultural transitions in these decades. In the light of the culture of commemoration that emerged in and around 1966, writers confronted the difficulties of responding artistically to the violent history of the island of Ireland. Although different methods are adopted in these plays – Friel’s realism, Kilroy’s experimentalism, Leonard’s satire – they are unified by a common concern with memory, and the ways in which the past becomes material for present-day agendas. Beyond this probing of the historical record, there is an exposure of contemporary Ireland, with dramas staging a scathing view of the current moment. Murphy and Friel’s plays express the dissatisfactions of the young male generation with the possibilities for freedom in the Irish Republic, whereas ní Ghráda and Johnson critique the impact of Ireland’s oppressive social rules on women and children.

For most of the twentieth century, Ireland had a system of residential institutions – known as Industrial Schools – for children. These institutions were funded and overseen by the Irish state, and run by the religious orders of the Catholic Church. Though the institutions were intended to provide children with vocational education for industrial employment and to respond to perceived problems of poverty and anti-social behaviour, in reality children were incarcerated in these residential institutions and physically, emotionally, and sexually abused. This chapter traces how Irish culture has galvanised official state responses to this history, and how contemporary narrative practices and technologies, in particular digital humanities, can facilitate greater understanding of Ireland’s difficult past.

Anu Productions is a site-specific Dublin theatre company run by director Louise Lowe and visual artist Owen Boss. Founded in 2009, Anu explores the history of particular sites in economically deprived inner-city locations, with an inside-out approach, prioritizing local memory and experience over grand historical, or literary, narratives. The work the company is best known for is its Monto tetralogy of plays set in north inner-city Dublin and named for the area around the former Montgomery Street (now called Foley Street). The Monto tetralogy includes: World's End Lane (2010), Laundry (2011), The Boys of Foley Street (2012) and Vardo Corner (2014). As a company, Anu is dedicated to developing work that is highly collaborative, interdisciplinary and provocative, both theatrically and politically. Although predominantly identified with inner- city Dublin, Anu has also made work in the city of Limerick and in the United Kingdom. By using formal strategies and emphasizing the power of affect, both aimed at increasing audience participation and questioning agency, Anu forces an interrogation of positions of ‘self ’ and ‘other’ and, the company hopes, makes visible people who otherwise are ‘invisible to the world [they] live in’. An encounter with Anu's work does not immediately suggest modernism as an interpretive framework, particularly given the ways in which the company's work consistently violates the critical distance, or detachment, often associated with modernist work. Yet, equally, this juxtaposition newly demonstrates the strong resonances of contemporary avant-garde drama with the modernist engagement with form as meaning, as a mode of expressing and understanding trauma.

Anu's tetralogy is set in the ‘Monto’, an area of Dublin that Joyceans are familiar with from the ‘Circe’ episode of Ulysses. One way of approaching the Monto trilogy is thus as a theatrical reimagining of ‘Circe’ for a twenty-first-century audience. Certainly Anu is very aware of Joyce, viewing its work as building on, as well as rebutting, a literary and social tradition, reflected in his novel, of viewing the Monto area as a chaotic and ‘other’ space of sexual and moral deviance. The formal difficulty of the ‘Circe’ episode is mirrored in Anu's approach, while the company's combination of affecting and disorienting spectators mirrors and extends Bloom's encounter with the Monto.