Collins, Christopher. Theatre and Residual Culture: J. M. Synge and Pre-Christian Ireland. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016. 301 pages. Hb. ISBN 978-1-349-94871-0. €106.99.
Haughton, Miriam, and Mária Kurdi, eds. Radical Contemporary Theatre Practices by Women in Ireland. Dublin: Carysfort Press, 2015. 251 pages. ISBN 978-1-909325-75-3. Pbk. €20.
Chris Lee’s The Map Maker’s Sorrow (1999), produced at the Abbey Theatre only six years after Ireland decriminalized suicide, proved prescient in focusing on this national health problem among the young. The very structure of the play mirrors the fragmentation and messy aftermath that suicide almost inevitably produces. The abrupt
...beginning, where a character that the audience does not know and cannot know kills himself, leaves the audience in a position similar to that of survivors who find a suicide. Drawing on the work of Ludwig Binswanger, Kay Renfield Jamison, and national studies of suicide the essay argues that young Jason’s suicide represents a direct challenge to life understood as an orderly progression from birth to death and as an attempt to deny the very premise of lived life itself. (DEM)
Csikai, Zsuzsa, and Rouse, Andrew C., eds. Critical Essays in Honour of Mária Kurdi. Tanulmányok Kurdi Mária tiszteletére. Martonfa: SPECHEL e-editions, 2017. 243 pages. ISBN 978-963-12-9291-6. E-book. 747 HUF.