The Theatre of Marie Jones: Telling Stories from the Ground Up

Marie Jones is one of the most prolific and popular writers working in Northern Irish theatre today. Her work has achieved local relevance and international recognition. In the course of a remarkable career now spanning five decades, Jones has been an actor, playwright, and screenwriter; she also helped establish two major Irish theatre companies (Charabanc and DubbelJoint) as well as playing a major role in theatre-in-education through her plays for Replay Productions. From her earliest work with Charabanc in the early 1980s to the present day, Jones’s work has engaged with Irish (and, more often than not, specifically Northern Irish) experience in ways that reveal the ways in which the personal is political in a distinctive form of popular theatre. This volume of essays engages critically with Jones’s oeuvre, her reception in Ireland and beyond, and her position in the canon of contemporary drama.