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Dr. Marie Kelly speaks at Women, Place and Space

16 Nov 2017

Dr. Marie Kelly (School of Music and Theatre) will present a paper on Gender, representation and the Irish stage:  theatre casting, space and object at the CACSSS masterclass series on Women, Place and Space on Friday 17thNovember. 

See https://www.ucc.ie/en/cacsss/grads/current_pastgrads/trainingmodules/pg7004/ 

Dr Marie Kelly(School of Music and Theatre) also recently delivered a talk on casting in Irish theatre to the Federation of Drama Schools (UK) at the Abbey Theatre on November 13th. Afterwards she attended the Federation’s 2017 showcase and met professionals in the industry from across Ireland and the UK.

 

Venue for the CACSSS master class is CACSSS Seminar Room, G27, O'Rahilly Building.

Abstract: As Patrice Pavis’s Dictionary of the Theatre describes it, casting marks ‘a crucial moment, the “most irremediable, and therefore the most serious” choice’ which ‘“involves the whole meaning of the play”’(Lasalle and Vitez, quoted in Pavis, 1998, p. 44). The actor brings human dynamics to the material properties of the stage and casting choices determine the politics of identity surrounding the entire mise en scène. What happens, however, when a character or role is deliberately cast as a material object? In Tom Mac Intyre’s version of Patrick Kavanagh’s The Great Hunger, the mother of the central male character (Patrick Maguire) was cast as a wooden effigy. This paper explores the casting of Mac Intyre’s play in tandem with an analysis of its mise en scène as directed by Patrick Mason and designed by Brownen Casson for the Peacock Theatre, Dublin in the 1980s. In the context of gender, identity, and Ireland, as this presentation argues, the performance of this play radically challenged but at the same time perpetuated the objectification and silencing of the woman within the domestic sphere.

 

For more on this story contact:

Dr. Marie Kelly 

Lecturer

Drama and Theatre Studies

School of Music and Theatre

University College Cork

Tel | 021-4904360

E | kelly.marie@ucc.ie

Department of Theatre

Roinn na hAmharclannaíochta

Muskerry Villas, Western Road, Cork City T12 AW97

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