From Kerry to Chiconcuac: Marie Jones’s Stones in His Pockets and Sabina Berman’s eXtras

This article focuses on the Mexican play, eXtras, Sabina Berman's translation and adaptation of the Irish hit play Stones in His Pockets by Marie Jones. Linda Hutcheon, Thomas Leitch, and other contributors to adaptation studies shed light on the process used by Berman to tradapt and glocalize Stones in His Pockets for the Mexican stage, where the combined forces of Hollywood and globalization have likewise ravaged the local economy and where Jones' tragicomic story of exploitation and anonymization played every bit as well as it did in Ireland.

Loyal Women? Marie Jones and Christina Reid

Marie Jones and Christina Reid earned critical and commercial success, with the former breaking through with the Charabanc Theatre Company ensemble in 1983 and Reid emerging via the Lyric Theatre contemporaneously. The latter’s plays reveal a far closer affinity with the traditions of her Orange-supporting family than she conveyed in interviews and has been reflected in scholarly literature. While both writers profess Irish identifications, both tend to emphasize and explore social class along with gender in their lives and work. Being from different but strongly Protestant backgrounds, both were also proximate with Loyalist paramilitaries, writing and interacting with them in some personal or critical capacity. Interviews with Reid, Jones, and the Charabanc women supplement the testimony and insights of female representatives and activists.

Introduction

This book is a synthesis of the political and the creative, telescoping modern history and politics with theatre and television drama. It centres on ten writers: St John Ervine (1883–1971), Thomas Carnduff (1886–1956), John Hewitt (1907–87), Sam Thompson (1916–65), Stewart Parker (1941–88), Graham Reid (1945–), Ron Hutchinson (1947–), Gary Mitchell (1965–), Christina Reid (1942–2015), and Marie Jones (1951–). While never intending to ghettoize Protestant writers, or indeed suggest that only those from this background can write illuminatingly about it, one of the reasons the book does not focus on the work of a playwright like Donegal-born Frank McGuinness—especially ...