The historiography of Irish theatre has largely been dependent on in-depth studies of the play-text as the definitive primary source. This volume explores the processes of engaging with the documented and undocumented record of Irish theatre and broadens the concept of evidential study of performance through the use of increasingly diverse sources. The archive is regarded here as a broad repository of evidence including annotated scripts, photographs, correspondence, administrative documents, recordings and other remnants of the mechanics of producing theatre. It is an invaluable resource for scholars and artists in interrogating Irelands performance history. This collection brings together key thinkers, scholars and practitioners who engage with the archive of Irish theatre and performance in terms of its creation, management and scholarly as well as artistic interpretation. New technological advances and mass digitization allow for new interventions in this field. The essays gathered here present new critical thought and detailed case studies from archivists, theatre scholars, historians and artists, each working in different ways to uncover and reconstruct the past practice of Irish performance through new means.

CONTENTS: Barry Houlihan: Introduction: The Potential of the Archive – Cillian Joy/Tricia O’Beirne: The Abbey Theatre Minute Book Transcription Project: Digitally Reading the Administrative Record of Irish Theatre –Ciara Conway: Staging Absence for Digital Historiography: Feminist Irish Theatre – Martin Bradley/John Cox: The Abbey Theatre Archive Digitisation Project at NUI Galway: Delivering Mass Digitisation of a Multimedia Archive with Positive Academic and Library Impact – Freya Clare Smith/Hugh Denard: Digitally Re-envisioning Lost Theatre Spaces: Dublin’s Theatre Royal – Barry Houlihan: «Creatures of his Imagination»: The Becoming of Plays and the Archive of Thomas Kilroy – Emer McHugh: A Shared Language: Placing and Displacing Shakespeare in the Irish National Theatrical Repertoire – Ruud van den Beuken: «Three cheers for the Descendancy!»: Middle-Class Dreams and (Dis)illusions in Mary Manning’s (1934) – Brenda Donohue: Women and the Archive: What Vision of the Present Will Be Preserved for the Future? – Anne Etienne: «I Remember»; «I Forget»; «I Can’t Forget»: Oral History, the Archive and Remembering Corcadorca’s – Conor O’Malley: Performing the Troubles at the Lyric Theatre, Belfast, 1969–1981 – Kieran Cronin/Elizabeth Howard: Identity, Legacy and the Official: Power Relations of the Documented and Undocumented in the Red Kettle Theatre Company Archive – Colin Murphy: Sometimes the Archive Lies – David Clare: Compiling a New Composite Draft of J. M. Synge’s