Women as playwrights, directors, designers and actors have played an indisputably integral part in cultivating the theatrical landscapes of Ireland, but their work, however, has largely been overlooked. That said, this is not a new lament: the last twenty years of Irish theatre scholarship have sought to redress this gender imbalance by looking to women's involvement in the ‘imagining’ of the Irish nation. Colm Tóibín's Lady Gregory's Toothbrush (Lilliput Press, 2002) famously confirmed Augusta Gregory's co-authorship (with W. B. Yeats) of Kathleen ni Houlihan (1902). C. L. Innes's widely known Women and Nation in Irish Literature and Society, 1880–1935 (The University of Georgia Press, 1993), shed light on the ideologies behind the iconography of Mother Ireland, and Mary Trotter's Ireland's National Theaters: Political Performance and the Origins of the Irish Dramatic Movement (Syracuse University Press, 2001) revealed the impact of Maud Gonne and the all-women society the Inghinidhe na hÉireann (Daughters of Erin) on the development of the Irish National Theatre Society.

However, in spite of such important research, old gender perceptions still prevail. The ‘Great Irish Writers’ postcards and posters series that ‘wallpapers’ Ireland features twelve authors, all of whom are men. Hence the Field Day Anthology of Irish Writing: Irish Women's Writing and Traditions, Vols. IV and V (New York University Press, 2002) stands as an important gender corrective to the original three-volume Field Day Anthology of Irish Writing (W. W. Norton & Co., 1992). On the one hand, this evidences the sheer magnitude of female-authored work – it runs to two volumes. On the other hand, these ‘extra’ volumes reveal the inner workings of canonicity – women are, as it were, the appendices to the Irish literary canon.

In the 1990s, scholarship exemplified by Margaret Ward's The Missing Sex (Attic Press, 1991) was concerned, as Ward's subtitle suggests, with ‘Putting Irish Women into History’. Informed by these past discussions, more recent Irish theatre scholarship has looked to challenge the masculine hegemony of the Irish theatrical tradition. Cathy Leeney's Irish Women Playwrights 1900–1939: Gender and Violence (Peter Lang Publishing, 2010) recovers five Irish women playwrights’ writing during the turbulent years of Ireland's struggle for independence: Augusta Gregory, Eva Gore-Booth, Dorothy Macardle, Mary Manning and Teresa Deevy. Leeney maintains that it is not enough to merely ‘add women and stir’ the patriarchal–canonical pot. Rather her concern is with how those ‘tropes have taken life’ and ‘are determined to live’.Footnote ¹ Leeney's critical strategy is to draw on Victor Turner's thesis on violence to explore Irish theatre practices, underlining how violence, as a consequence of the dramatic ritual, allows the breaking down of hierarchies into a social temporality. It is this liminal condition that creates opportunities for women to challenge authoritative systems. At the core of Leeney's study is an interrogation of how each of the five women playwrights dramatized violence, and thus forced a deliberate and unapologetic promulgation for women within the patriarchal structure. In dialogue with Susan Cannon Harris's groundbreaking Gender and Modern Irish Drama (Indiana University Press, 2002), Leeney eschews themes of sacrificial violence and a gendered national identity, working towards a critical framing and contextualization of these playwrights within a gender/violence dialectic.

As co-founder of the Abbey Theatre, Augusta Gregory appropriately figures in many critical interventions into Irish theatre practices, as exemplified by Paul Murphy's ‘Woman as Fantasy Object in Lady Gregory's Historical Tragedies’, which opens Melissa Sihra's field-changing Women in Irish Drama: A Century of Authorship and Representation.Footnote ² This collection, contextualized by three interchapters and performance interventions, extends past a privileging of women's theatre (of course a necessary and valid aim) towards a remapping of the last hundred years of Irish theatre, integrating what playwright Marina Carr calls in her Foreword ‘vanished women’.Footnote ³ Employing frameworks of language, allegory, visuality and spatiality, the chapters in Women in Irish Drama render a more complete history of how women used theatre as an apparatus for challenging gender-normative constraints and received notions of femininity, to contest and shape the political and cultural trajectories of twentieth-century Ireland. Sihra innovatively includes chapters on male playwrights such a Rachel O'Riordan's contribution on woman's body as a contested site of war in Stewart Parker's Northern Star, as well as Eamonn Jordan's piece on Frank McGuinness's female characters, while Brian Singleton considers the ‘Evanescence of the Patriarchy in Contemporary Irish Women's Theatre’. Together these essays locate a discursive gendered relationship in Irish theatre practice, thus making way for a richer understanding of the pluralities of gendered representations on the stage – occurring in the past, the present and, it is to be hoped, the future.