The body sonic : performance of the voice in Paula Meehan's lyrical theatre

Abstract

The thesis investigates the dramatic repertoire of contemporary Irish poet and playwright, Paula Meehan (b. 1955). The five chapters explore Paula Meehan’s eight original plays and her theatre collaborations. To explore the dramatic lyricism of Meehan’s texts, the thesis develops the concept of the "body sonic" as a critical methodology to analyse the relationships between the text, the perfonnance of the text, and the performance of the voice. My analysis of Meehan’s critical engagement with theatre follows three principal axes to explore: 1) the lyrical tension created by the juxtaposition of the colloquial and prosodic, that produces a text of voice; 2) how Meehan’s texts reconfigure roles of authority and empowerment by endowing the main roles to women enabling them to become the new authors of their stories, and how their reinvented storytelling challenges archetypal roles and symbolism in myths and tales; and 3) how her theatre subjugates the linearity of history to a multi-temporality to recover alienated identities and silenced stories.