Professor Anna McMullan

My main research area is the drama of Samuel Beckett, including performance histories of his stage plays and stage adaptations from prose, television and radio texts. I have published on Irish theatre and performance, including the work of Brian Friel, Thomas Kilroy and Marina Carr as well as contemporary Irish theatre companies such as Company SJ and Gare St Lazare Players Ireland. My published work engages with theories of intermediality, as well as performance studies, gender and postcolonialism.

Publications include: Samuel Beckett’s Intermedial Eco-Systems (2021), Performing Embodiment in Samuel Beckett’s Drama (2010) and Theatre on Trial: The Later Drama of Samuel Beckett (1993). I was co-editor of Beckett’s Afterlives: Adaptation, Remediation, Appropriation (2023) with Jonathan Bignell and Pim Verhulst, and of Reflections on Beckett (2009) with Steve Wilmer. I co-edited with David Pattie an issue of Samuel Beckett Today / Aujourd’hui on Staging Beckett at the Margins (29.2, 2017) and, with Graham Saunders, an issue of Contemporary Theatre Review on Staging Beckett and contemporary theatre and performance cultures (28.1, 2018). With Cathy Leeney I co-edited The Theatre of Marina Carr: ‘before rules was made’ (2003); a special issue of Australasian Drama Studies with Brian Singleton (2003) on ‘Performing Ireland’; and the ‘Contemporary Playwrights’ section of the Field Day Anthology of Irish Writing, Vol 5 (2002) with Caroline Williams, dedicated to female writers.

From 2012-15, I was Principal Investigator on the AHRC-funded research project, Staging Beckett: The Impact of Productions of Samuel Beckett’s Drama on Theatre Practice and Cultures in the United Kingdom and Ireland: see https://research.reading.ac.uk/staging-beckett/about/