Abstract
This chapter explores the tension between collective, embodied forms of remembering in both memorial performance and the traditional theatre, and the emergence of televisual representation in the postcolonial Irish Republic in the late 1960s and early 1970s. As Luke Gibbons’s work has shown,1 television had marked effects on Irish culture during this period of staggering modernization. One of the most profound results of this explosion was the startling influence television had on how events were remembered, and subsequently on how some of those events were represented artistically. Specifically, this involved the movement of a substantial portion of the populace away from live, participatory forms of collective memory towards a more private, confined form of viewing associated with the new media. The traditional theatre often followed suit, retreating even further into an already established Irish brand of naturalism, which the new framing mechanism of the television made all the more obvious.
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© 2014 Michael Jaros
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Jaros, M. (2014). Boxed Rituals: Eamon de Valera, Television and Talbot’s Box. In: Collins, C., Caulfield, M.P. (eds) Ireland, Memory and Performing the Historical Imagination. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137362186_11
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137362186_11
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, London
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