Eamonn Jordan - The Palgrave Handbook of Contemporary Irish Theatre and Performance

Cover illustration: The Seagull & Other Birds Robert Altman Photography

This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Limited

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A collection such as this, which attempts to assemble a wide range of original contributions, comes more and more to lean upon not only the expertise but the altruism of (1) scholars, subject in the current climate to third-level institutions insisting they produce research with a minimum of meaningful support (in terms of time and money), while in many cases minimizing the official worth of contributions to such collections; and (2) practitioners who have little, if anything, to gain professionally from such endeavours and who are all too accustomed to having their time and energy exploited. A massive amount of gratitude must therefore go to each and every one of our contributors for somehow carving out time and brain space in overstuffed, underpaid lives for the good of the project.

We owe particular thanks to Angie Butler who served as a first line of editorial organization for the manuscript. We also owe an extreme debt of thanks to Palgrave for its interest, support, co-operation and, inevitably, its understanding and patiencein particular, the people who have worked with us directly: Peter Cary, Jen McCall, Vicky Bates and Tomas Ren, as well as Dhana and her editorial team. We would like to put on record our thanks to Robert Altman for the use of his photograph in the cover design, and Pan Pan for facilitating such permission, also including the actors pictured; to the Irish Society for Theatre Research, at whose conferences some of these ideas were first aired and to which most of the contributors belong; and to our respective schools and departments for their support.