Fintan Walsh's Queer Notions: New Plays and Performances from Ireland serves as a critical intervention and unique resource for researchers and artists alike. The offerings range from full-length naturalistic plays, to solo performance pieces, to a photo-essay by graphic artist Niall Sweeney. While accomplished and frequently produced in Ireland, the artists and playwrights presented here do not enjoy the same national or international critical acclaim as popular playwrights Brian Friel and Conor McPherson, among others, and thus this collection seeks to broaden who is perceived among the cutting-edge Irish theatre artists of today.

The composition of this volume is critically inflected by Walsh's invaluable introduction, “The Flaming Archive,” which situates the emergence of queer politics and performance in Ireland and reflects on the broader state of Irish theatre. Thus, Queer Notions not only serves as an investigation into and indictment of Irish heteronormativity and queerphobia in social relations, but considers also the formal restraint and thematic narrowness of the Irish theatre at large, which has consistently depended on literary naturalism and themes of nationalism. Yet, while multiple Irish artists and theatre companies have pushed at these boundaries in the past twenty years, Walsh further insists that queer innovation should remain at the center of situating and documenting these artistic shifts.

The pieces in this volume are linked by an obsession with confronting history in the present as the volume offers itself as a “record of what was” with an eye toward inspiring “what might be” (14)—with the sole exception of Phillip McMahon's Danny and Chantelle (Still Here), which is rather focused on a relentless pursuit of future pleasure in the disposable present. This piece, along with Úna McKevitt and cast's Victor and Gord, Ali and Michael, pushes the envelope of what counts as Irish queer performance the furthest. Queer characters play marginal roles in the action, but the inclusion of these plays in this volume ultimately has most to do with their challenge to formal theatrical conventions and critical engagement with post–Celtic Tiger questions of identity.

Loughlin Deegan's The Queen & Peacock, Deirdre Kinahan's Passage, and Verity-Alicia Mavenawitz's The Drowning Room are by far the most formally and thematically conservative of the group, and center around the resolution of past trauma as the result of a recent or impending death. These plays borrow from key Irish dramatic tropes of emigration and alienation as well as the damaging legacy of Irish sexual conservativism. Deegan's play revises the genre of the Irish emigrant play in London into a narrative of queer abjection from Ireland and within London when a group of regulars at the Queen & Peacock bar in Brixton are forced to cope with the impending death of an estranged friend from AIDS. The generational clash played out through an ensuing series of events not only expresses shifts in queer Irish identity, but represents the persistent trauma of emigration as compounding queer alienation. Kinahan's Passage features a lesbian couple as its major protagonists and focuses on interrogating how Irish heteronormativity and Catholic sexual shame destroy the life of Kate's mother, who leaves Ireland never to return after becoming pregnant with the child of a married man, a fact revealed only after her death. Mavenawitz's The Drowning Room brings together a group of friends a year after their friend's tragic murder by a gang of lads. As in The Queen & Peacock, secret romantic entanglements surface, but the backdrop here is a cosmopolitan Dublin whose facade is shattered through this brutal act of queerphobic violence.

Neil Watkin's A Cure for Homosexuality and Panti's A Woman in Progress are solo performance pieces by key figures in the Irish bar and club performance scene. Watkin's A Cure for Homosexuality takes the audience on a ribald romp through the graphic intricacies of S/M and its necessary manners before taking an even darker turn into a tale of attempted queer annihilation when his character and his father are sent to a camp for reprogramming and rebuilding. Watkin's piece jumps through time and space, denying rules of logic and attacking his audience with graphic imagery. As he ends on an apocalyptic note after a deadly raid of the George, a gay bar, his last words are for his deceased father, his queer ancestor, but serve also as a lament for all those silenced, deceased, and reprogrammed. Panti's A Woman in Progress offers up not only the story of her life, but of a generation of Irish queers, interspersed by letters to herself as a young boy. From the pope's 1979 visit to Ireland, to London in the 1980s, to her extended sojourn in the Tokyo drag scene, to a mid-1990s Ireland that welcomed AIDS in addition to the decriminalization of homosexuality in 1993, Panti rails not only against homophobia but against queer normativity. As the piece incorporates not only a literal dialogue with Panti's past but footage of a controversial speech that she delivered at the 2009 Dublin Pride Festival, A Woman in Progress closes Walsh's volume by performing archives folded into archives as the pages are haunted by Panti's multiple past selves.

Walsh's Queer Notions creates space in Irish archives for queer stories and lives, and provides an important text for queer theatre and performance studies at large. While the interventions of the authors in this collection become most clear when assessed in terms of an Irish historical and political context, their work also embodies transnational flows of queer strategies and theories. Many artists in this volume explicitly address the globalization of queer identities and insist upon a contingent mode of queer analysis capable of sliding in and out of the Irish nation. By centralizing (queer) Irish histories embodied and transmitted through performance, Walsh's book expands the canon of Irish dramatic literature and makes a powerful and urgent case for the necessary analysis of queer transnational flows vis-à-vis performance histories.