ECODRAMATURGY AND THE COVID-19 PANDEMIC: The Abbey Theatre’s Adaptation of Patrick Kavanagh’s The Great Hunger (2020)

This chapter explores an Abbey Theatre adaptation of Patrick Kavanagh's 1942 poem, The Great Hunger, which was performed in October 2020. Staged outdoors in the grounds of the Royal Hospital Kilmainham in Dublin that production was presented at the height of the Covid-19 pandemic and several of its features were designed to respond to (and work within) the legal and public health restrictions that had been imposed upon Irish theatres in response to that crisis. Those restrictions led to the use of theatrical techniques that highlighted features of the poem that can be seen in ecological terms – including the presence of animals, flowers, trees and other living things; the importance of cyclical rather than linear representations of time; and the interpretation of human agency as operating with a multigenerational impact. Rather than interpreting those ecological features as arising coincidentally from the pandemic, the chapter argues that this overlap is evidence of an interconnection between the pandemic and the broader ecological crisis. It concludes with the suggestion that reading texts such as The Great Hunger in the Anthropocene requires new ways of thinking about authorial intention, ecological meaning and the purpose of theatrical adaptation.