‘At Me Too Someone Is Looking’: Staging Surveillance in Irish Theatre

doi:10.1017/9781009182881.018

Chapter 16 - ‘At Me Too Someone Is Looking’: Staging Surveillance in Irish Theatre

from Part IV - The Digital

Published online by Cambridge University Press: 19 January 2023

Victor Merriman

Edited by

Margaret Kelleher and

James O'Sullivan

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Margaret Kelleher: Affiliation:
University College Dublin
James O'Sullivan: Affiliation:
University College Cork

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Summary

This chapter argues that Samuel Beckett’s plays function as a kind of fulcrum in a theatrical history of staging and thematising surveillance, extending from Dion Boucicault’s The Octoroon (1859) through Augusta Gregory’s Spreading the News (1904), to Enda Walsh’s Arlington (2016) and David Lloyd’s The Press (2009) and The Pact (2021). Surveillance agencies rely heavily on technology to gather information, but depend on human beings to store, order, and interpret it, and dramatic narratives exploit inconsistencies and injustices arising from slippages between data and its application. Boucicault, Gregory, Walsh, and Lloyd are counterpointed to Beckett’s Waiting for Godot, Endgame, Catastrophe, and What Where, which theatricalise the structuring influence of monitoring and scrutiny on the texture of Irish social experience, personal and public. Once classified in an archive or record, or interpreted in policy and implemented in practice, ‘intelligence’ plays out less as a function of rigorous analysis than ideological determination.

Keywords

Abbey Theatre Samuel Beckett Empire ethics gaze Ireland intelligence power surveillance technologies

Type: Chapter
Information: Technology in Irish Literature and Culture , pp. 267 - 283

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/9781009182881.018 [Opens in a new window]

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Print publication year: 2023

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