Feminist discourse has proven to be a vital component in the expanding field of Irish theatre studies owing to its exposure of elided work and the articulation of unrepresented voices. Irish women's participation in the public sphere and cultural fabric of society has been hindered in the course of the twentieth century and this is reflected in limiting representations of femininity as perpetuated by discourses of nationalism and Catholicism: the dominant imagery of the idealized mother which merges the feminized nation – Mother Ireland – and the Virgin Mary.Footnote 1 In Hegemony and Fantasy in Irish Drama, 1899–1949, Paul Murphy highlights the ‘contradiction between the symbolic centrality of Woman as fantasy object and the social subordination of women as social subjects’.Footnote 2 The incongruity between the shifting realities of Irish women's lives and the inflexible institutions that shape cultural representations is the focus of much feminist theatre research in Ireland. This research examines work which articulates the experience of estrangement from the dominant cultural imaginary and attends to the possibilities of staging more accommodating models through three interlinked strands: self-representation and the unhomely experience; constraint and freedom as explored through space and form; and a shift in focus to performance and the body.
Self-representation and the unhomely experience
The notion of self-representation, as signalled by the title of Melissa Sihra's edited collection Women in Irish Drama: A Century of Authorship and Representation, places women's voices centre stage.Footnote 3Women in Irish Drama offers a vital resource with its inclusion of an appendix which documents theatre by women in Ireland, thus acknowledging their overlooked historical presence. Marina Carr is one of the few Irish women playwrights whose work has been regularly produced by the National Theatre and has achieved international success, and this is reflected in the amount of critical work devoted to her theatre.Footnote 4 However, in recent decades women have been visible and successful in the independent sector: to take just two examples, the artistic directors Lynne Parker (Rough Magic) and Mary Elizabeth Burke-Kennedy (Storytellers Theatre Company). Feminist discussion of women's participation in the independent theatre sector can be found in work by Anna McMullan, as well as publications by several writers on the Northern all-female theatre group Charabanc,Footnote 5 although there is still room for further research in this regard.
The desire for self-representation is highlighted by the central motif of women's exile, noted by Cathy Leeney as ‘exile from self-expression, from self-determination’.Footnote 6 Anna McMullan defines this experience of dislocation as the unhomely, which she maps onto Luce Irigaray's term déréliction to mark woman's displacement outside culture and the symbolic. McMullan highlights how the struggle towards self-expression and cultural representation questions homely gender and national identities with reference to women playwrights including Carr, Máiréad Ní Ghráda and Edna O'Brien.Footnote 7 In order to address the question of how Irish women negotiate a place for themselves, Leeney describes Teresa Deevy's (1894–1963) and Marina Carr's ‘dramaturgy of alienation’ to argue that both playwrights ‘exploit the energy of the character in performance to resist images of defeat in surrender to the social norms of femininity, or in suicide’.Footnote 8 The focus is both on the articulation of an unhomely experience of exile and estrangement, and on resistance through performance.
Constraint and freedom: space and form
The articulation of unhomely voices and unrepresented lived realities depends upon their accommodation within a frame through which traditional forms can be explored and rejected to create a space for alternative discourses and theatrical strategies. In an article on the neglected work of Eva Gore-Booth (1870–1928), Cathy Leeney argues that Gore-Booth's dramaturgy utilizes the outside to create a space for the expression of female subjectivity. This eschewal of the restrictions of the domestic interior is contrasted with the use of the realist form in plays by Irish women in the middle of the twentieth century, as in this period ‘the earlier, spacious experiments of Gore-Booth are narrowed to images of confinement and alienation’.Footnote 9 Realism can explore the tensions between constraint and freedom, as McMullan argues with reference to work from the second half of the twentieth century:
While some of the . . . plays adapt elements of theatrical realism in order to critique the constraints of the society they represent, the traditional forms of realism are often at odds with the perspectives, identities and relationships they offer. Many go beyond realism in their staging of female dis-location.Footnote 10
Indeed, the Northern Irish playwright Anne Devlin, with reference to her play After Easter, has described ‘wanting to say goodbye to the room, because I see naturalism as contained in rooms’.Footnote 11 In ‘The House of Woman and the Plays of Marina Carr’, Melissa Sihra draws on the motif of the interior space to highlight the representational strategies utilized by Carr:
Through the privileging of sites of myth and imagination, of lyricism and ghosts, Carr's plays reject the aesthetic of ‘mimesis, [which] has maintained the hegemony of realism in representation’, and which, as Lynda Hart observes, ‘effectively masks the re-creational power of mimesis’.Footnote 12
Gore-Booth, Devlin and Carr utilize the recreational possibilities of alternative spaces and dramaturgical strategies to engage with and reject perpetuated models of femininity, as well as offering more accommodating models.
Performance and affect
Leeney stresses the role of performance in the process of self-representation whereby woman emerges as the icon-maker and not the icon.Footnote 13 Through performance, women intervene in the layers of inherited representations of femininity to corporeally challenge and remake them, to shift their role from object of desire to desiring subject as the female body is contested as a site of control and instead has the potential to modify and resist societal constraints. Anna McMullan notes the recent ‘emergence of theatre practices which foreground performance: the visual, kinesic and the corporeal as major means of expression and signification’.Footnote 14 The most exciting feminist critical interventions in Irish theatre studies have reflected this shift; for example, The Theatre of Marina Carr: ‘Before Rules Was Made’, includes programme notes and reviews as well as discussion of productions by a dramaturg, a director and actors.Footnote 15 Moreover, Leeney's aforementioned article on Deevy and Carr highlights the importance of theatrical values and the ‘energizing voltage of performance’ in facilitating the transgression of idealized myths of femininity: ‘The crossing of boundaries has a special power in the theatre, since the audience see the transgression enacted’.Footnote 16 This acknowledges the productive role of affect on redefinitions of gendered identities. The contribution of women in Irish theatre as directors, performers, lighting designers and set designers is an area that calls for further study, as is the interaction between performance and audience.
There has been a shift in focus, both in Irish theatre and in the study of it, from the literary to exploration of performance, as reflected in the recently published Crossroads: Performance Studies and Irish Culture.Footnote 17 In the section on ‘Gender, Feminism and Queer Performance’, performance paradigms are applied to enable discussion of the body as a means of inhabiting and modifying normative performances of female sexuality. With reference to genealogies of performance, Charlotte McIvor argues that Tom MacIntyre's 2005 play What Happened Bridgie Cleary, returns Bridget's voice and body to the centre of critical discourses. Gabriella Calchi Novati addresses Amanda Coogan's performance art, which focuses on the physical rather than sacred female body to challenge patriarchal imagery of Irish femininity. Furthermore, in Performing the Body in Irish Theatre, Bernadette Sweeney devotes a chapter to the performativity of gender in Marina Carr's Low in the Dark (1989).Footnote 18 Sweeney highlights the play's self-conscious theatricality and staging of the indeterminate body, which serve to question the reliability of representations of gender. Interrogation of the corporeal as an expressive means of resignification has the potential to expand feminist exploration of Irish theatre through attendance to a wide range of performance languages and unhomely voices.
