University of Southern California Dissertations and Theses

Theatre, culture and performance: contemporary Irish drama and the Celtic Tiger

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Theatre, culture and performance: contemporary Irish drama and the Celtic Tiger

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THEATRE, CULTURE AND PERFORMANCE: CONTEMPORARY IRISH DRAMA
AND THE CELTIC TIGER

by

Domino Torres

A Dissertation Presented to the
FACULTY OF THE USC GRADUATE SCHOOL
UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA
In Partial Fulfillment of the
Requirements for the Degree
DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY
(ENGLISH)

May 2013

Copyright 2013 Domino Torres
ii

iii
Table of Contents

Acknowledgements…………………………………………………………………..……iv

Abstract..................................................................................................................................v

Introduction……………………………………………………………………………….. .1

Chapter One

Ireland’s Magdalen Asylums and the Celtic Tiger..……………….………………36

Chapter Two

The Children of the Celtic Tiger:
Theatrical Representations of Contemporary Irish Adolescence…………………..83

Chapter Three

Representation, Identity and Celtic Tiger Drama………………………………...122

Chapter Four

The Theatre of Martin McDonagh and Marina Carr……………………………..177

Conclusion……………………………………………………………………………….235

Bibliography……………………………………………………………………………..250
iv
Acknowledgements

In the process of researching, writing and completing this dissertation, I benefited
tremendously from the support of the following people and organizations, which I
gratefully acknowledge here:

With much gratitude to my advisor Professor David Lloyd for his sustained support of this
project, the valuable feedback he provided at each stage of the process, and his helpful
guidance throughout graduate school. Many thanks to Professor John Carlos Rowe for his
support and knowledgeable advice, for reading multiple drafts and providing extensive
remarks on the work. Many thanks also to Professor William Deverell for his support and
helpful comments. With much appreciation to Professor Rick Berg for the many valuable
discussions, for reading and commenting on earlier drafts, and for his continued support
and encouragement from the very beginning of this project.

Thanks to the Irish and Irish Studies professors, friends and colleagues for the insightful
discussions and feedback on work in development over the years.

With thanks to USC and the USC English Department for providing funding support that
allowed for dissertation writing time as well as conference travel grants and awards like the
International Field Research Award that enabled archival research.

With deep gratitude for the unwavering support and enthusiastic encouragement from my
fiancé; my family, especially my parents and siblings; my friends; and my canine pal—
many thanks and with much appreciation.

v
Abstract
This dissertation examines the relation between theatre, culture and performance in
contemporary Ireland and researches the role of Irish drama in the transformative time
known as the Celtic Tiger, a critical era that drastically shifted the economic and cultural
landscape of the nation as it experienced profound increases in wealth and prosperity. The
chapters offer close readings of key dramas and major themes that emerged during this
time, presenting the critical background to situate the plays within a larger social-historical
context. The dissertation researches primary theatre texts and critical works on gender and
identity as well as studies on space and geography, and examines plays by writers such as
Marina Carr, Patricia Burke Brogan, Gina Moxley, Stella Feehily, and Martin McDonagh,
amongst others. Utilizing studies on space and demography, the work takes particular
focus on the construction of place in contemporary dramas, especially those set in liminal
or border regions, noting how the plays that emerge from Celtic Tiger Ireland grapple in
some capacity or another with issues of dislocation. It contemplates questions of economic
and social mobility by examining representations of youth and violence in plays by Enda
Walsh and Mark O’Rowe, and in selected Irish films, demonstrating how these writers each
construct complicated portraits of contemporary Irish adolescence in their works as they
reimagine the bonds and limitations of friendship. It also examines issues of representation
and diversity in contemporary Ireland, paying particular attention to the 2007 adaptation of
Synge’s The Playboy of the Western World. The dissertation argues that many of the
dramas emerging in Celtic Tiger Ireland function on a survivalist imperative where
characters employ strategies of endurance to resist displacement as they navigate violent
landscapes and confront the complicated matrix of power relations in an increasingly
cosmopolitan world.
1
Introduction
The last decade of the millennium presented a time of transformation in Ireland.
The forces of late capital with its varied and complicated manifestations in combination
with a critical cultural response catapulted the small island nation on the edge of Europe
from what had been referred to as a “sleepy bogland” with a long legacy of emigration,
economic downturns and social conservatism to a magnetic space of international
cosmopolitanism with sudden wealth and prosperity. From about 1994 to 2004,
1
Ireland
experienced profound changes that altered the course of its economic, social and political
landscape. This phenomenon was dubbed the “Celtic Tiger.” As Denis O’Hearn identified
early on, low corporate taxes, social partnerships with labor, a highly-educated English
speaking workforce and a US economic boom all contributed to Ireland’s much-lauded
triumph (“Macroeconomic Policy” 37-38). Other critics also pointed to a country just
“ready” to finally partake in the allure of a sophisticated globalized modernity. These
elements in combination with Ireland’s numerous successful cultural exports—from
Riverdance to widely recognized Irish rock and film stars to the Abbey Theatre’s multiple
successful New York runs—redefined the meaning and possibilities of Irish cultural
capital, leading critics to note that “[o]ver the last decade or so, it has become
commonplace for cultural commentators to pronounce that is has never been more
fashionable to be Irish” (Coulter 2). Irishness, as Colin Coulter states, suddenly became
“shorthand for cool” (2).

1
There is some elasticity to these dates. While most critics point to less than a decade of
sustained economic growth, the implications of the Celtic Tiger extend well beyond the
initial stages of an economic boom. The Celtic Tiger also has roots in policies
implemented years before: “The dramatic progress assumed to have been made during the
1990s has typically been attributed to a series of astute policy decisions implemented in
earlier decades” (Coulter 10-11).
2
For academics and cultural commentators alike, this sudden metamorphosis
requires critical analyses and time for reflection in order to make sense of the profound
changes occurring simultaneously in Ireland, a point made by Irish scholar Clare
Wallace:
The process of social and economic transformation in Ireland obviously bears
implications for culture and the arts which go beyond the financial. The narratives
of progress, success and inflation apparently structuring the ‘New Ireland’ of the
1990s and beyond are powerful but equivocal, and have frequently been
accompanied by calls for reassessment and reconsideration (“Versions” 112).

The work presented in the following chapters participates in this call by scholars for critical
discourse and offers an assessment of Irish theatre at this juncture in history, asserting that
Irish drama during the Celtic Tiger represents a vibrant cultural force that seeks
representation for marginalized populations. While the international community celebrated
the financial successes of the neoliberal model that seemed to signal an end to economic
depression and emigration, the dramas that emerged during this time often focused on the
fates of an entire set of people surviving at the mercy of late capital.
The chapters herein offer close readings of these dramas and present the critical
historical background to situate the plays within a larger sociopolitical context. Ultimately,
by researching primary theatre texts and critical works on space and geography, performance
practices, as well as gender and identity studies, the dissertation examines some of the major
themes that emerged during the Celtic Tiger and argues that many of these Irish dramas
function on a survivalist imperative where characters employ strategies of endurance to resist
displacement as they navigate violent landscapes and confront the complicated matrix of
power relations in an increasingly cosmopolitan world.

3
The Origins of the Celtic Tiger
In the introduction to The End of Irish History? (2003) Colin Coulter traces the
genesis of the now-famous “Celtic Tiger” moniker to Morgan Stanley investment banker
Kevin Gardiner who, while trying to account for the rapid growth of Ireland’s wealth,
formulated a comparison to Asia’s tiger economies (3). The term stuck and in time has
come to signify a range of discourses that includes not only economic considerations but
also interrogations into the byproducts of a globalized modernity.
2
/
3
Denis O’Hearn cites
four main factors for the emergence of the Celtic Tiger: foreign investment lured to Ireland
by the lowest taxes in the EU (10% versus on average 30-40% elsewhere); a highly skilled
English-speaking IT labour force; “social partnerships” with labour that assured flexibility
and restricted wages; and, above all else, the economic boom in the U.S. during the 1990s
that created the need to search for new markets (“Macroeconomic Policy” 37-38). Yet for
all the prosperity created, O’Hearn argues that social welfare suffered the most at a time
when Ireland could have made critical interventions to transform the model for a more even
distribution of wealth. As the rich achieved greater prosperity, the gap between rich and
poor increased exponentially, leading to a wide divide between social classes. O’Hearn
notes that, “By the end of the century, according to the United Nations’ Human
Development Report, the Irish poverty rate as measured by its Human Poverty index, was
the highest in the EU” (“Macroeconomic Policy” 48). He points to a 23% illiteracy rate—
also the highest in the EU—and argues that ultimately Ireland’s neoliberal model failed to

2
The moniker often stands in for the phenomenon throughout all the country though it
could certainly be argued that these changes are more closely reflected in urban centers,
and specifically Dublin, and do not necessarily affect smaller rural communities with the
same force.
3
For more on the Celtic Tiger see Reinventing Ireland: Culture Society and the Global
Economy (2002).
4
usher in an era of progressive social policy. For the disenfranchised and disempowered,
the economic disparity and the resultant social fractures signaled the onslaught of a new
type of diaspora: those left behind by the Tiger’s heft. What of those who did not invest,
could not move up, were not able to adapt?
Previously, emigration to foreign countries characterized the experience of
dislocation for many Irish people. During the Celtic Tiger however, as property in the city-
centres was reconfigured as prime real estate and as the housing market established clear
trends in upward mobility, the price to remain in newly revitalized urban areas increased
dramatically. As Corcoran et. al argue, “The evolution of housing and the housing market
in Ireland reflects the dramatic transformations in economy and demography that have
occurred in Ireland in recent years” (249). They point out that, “In recent years suburban
estates have spread to quiet rural locations while peripheral towns and villages have grown
from an influx of long-distance commuters” (252), noting also the rise of housing estates
on the fringes of urban centers.
4
For Irish citizens, lack of opportunities for those not
engaged in sectors of Tiger success meant communities with disenfranchised individuals.
A. Jamie Saris and Brendan Bartely trace an example of this in Cherry Orchard, a
Dublin housing estate five miles outside the city centre. They note that Cherry Orchard is
essentially an ‘underclass’ community plagued with problems of unemployment and bored
youth with violent tendencies who have a contentious relationship with the authority of the
state. Here, the Celtic Tiger has served to only heighten economic and social disparities
where “better-off segments of society have gained more in both relative and absolute terms

4
See “Transformations in Housing” by Mary P. Corcoran, Karen Keaveney and Patrick J.
Duffy in Understanding Contemporary Ireland (2007) for a discussion on trends in the
housing market during this time.
5
than poorer ones” (14). Perhaps more insidious, they argue, Cherry Orchard is indicative
of a recent Irish trend that seeks to construct geographical boundaries based not on
religious or political difference—a familiar discourse in the national narrative—but instead
focused on class: “As these problems have been developing, much of Irish society has also
moved away from the notion that ‘We as a society have poor members’ to the idea that
‘There are poor communities in our environment’” (14-15). While it can be argued that the
Celtic Tiger did not create the material conditions of poverty, it appeared to aggravate
existing disparities and create a hyper-awareness of the potential for upward mobility,
accentuating the anxiety of not “making it” in a new world order that increasingly
championed commodity consumption as indicative of material success. The cityscape
reflected this change in consumer patterns as Ireland’s increasing prestige also attracted
greater flocks of tourists. This, in combination with the influx of wealth, resulted in several
projects of urban transformation as part of Ireland’s upward mobility make-over.
These points are not lost on many contemporary Irish plays and the implications of
this are only now beginning to emerge. For most of the plays presented in the following
chapters, location and identity are closely bound, ideologically charged and inextricable
from the drama unfolding within the family unit or larger social collective. Any attempt to
unravel the complexities of current Irish theatre must therefore consider the importance of
landscapes and established spatial constructions—usually related to discourses of
authenticity in rural spaces versus the evolving topography of urban locations—since, as
research for this dissertation has revealed, space and geography are in many ways a central
and defining feature of Irish drama.
6
Space, Demography and Irish Drama
As occurred roughly a century ago, there is currently a complex and conflictful
dialectic developing between urgent social-economic modernization sparked by the
system-wide crises affecting contemporary capitalist societies; and a responsive
cultural and political modernism aimed at making sense of the material changes
taking place in the world and gaining control over their future directions. (Soja 26)

In “Ireland and Irishness: Place, Culture and Identity,” Brian Graham points out that
“social power requires space” (4). Foucault also reminds us that “[s]pace is fundamental in
any form of communal life; space is fundamental in any exercise of power” (Foucault
quoted in Soja 19). The endeavor to interrogate the relationship between space and power
in a postcolonial nation thus requires a nuanced understanding of the forces of history and
its particular connection to landscapes in contention, including the complicated processes
related to language and identity, such as naming and memory.
5
It must also consider the
effects of modernization, especially the relationship between geography and sociopolitical
mobility since, for a nation undergoing a rapid economic overhaul, space and power are
often bound with logistical demands of infrastructure and processes of gentrification.
6

This phenomenon and its relevance to the study of contemporary theatre soon
became clear in the course of this research as many of the dramas emerging from Celtic
Tiger Ireland grapple with the issue of dislocation in some capacity or another and present
characters who manifest their frustration in violent outbursts as they are pushed to the
outskirts of respectable society when they are unable to keep apace with the economic
demands or social graces required for inclusion. These dramas interrogate the politics of

5
See Catherine Nash, “Irish Placenames: Post-Colonial Locations.” Transactions of the
Institute of British Geographers. New Series, 24.4 (1999): 457-480.
6
See “Part I: Planning and Development” in Understanding Contemporary Ireland (2007)
where contributors address issues such as property development and transportation
systems.
7
disillusionment for segments of society and examine the critical assumptions made about
disenfranchised people. The results appear to signal a dramaturgy filled with violent
encounters, dangerously unstable characters and an overall pessimism with ‘high street’
capitalism. At the core there also appears an attempt to reconcile why the cultural and
economic logic does not seem to add up: why are so many people disenfranchised when the
golden promises of the Celtic Tiger, in a nod to American boot-strap capitalism, seem to
apply democratically to all?
7

Some critics have taken exception to theatrical representations of Irish life at this
time, arguing that popular theatre of the Celtic Tiger era centers on dramas that lack a sense
of morality and champion excessive violence while offering a grossly “dystopic” vision of
contemporary Ireland (Merriman 2004, 2001); still others have asserted that Celtic Tiger
theatre has done little to engage with the middle class (Buchanan 2009), opting instead for
a romanticized portrayal of the lowest echelon of society. While some of these criticisms
are valid—as the exaggerated depictions of and references to multiple forms of violence by
thugs and misfits in some of the most-lauded plays would seem to bear out—the research
herein offers counterpoints to some of the implications of these assessments and posits that
the changing economic and social landscape informs both the content and intent of
emerging dramas, requiring an examination of the role of globalization on the processes of
production and performance.

7
In a move that aligns Ireland and the US, G. Honor Fagan points to James Dunkerely’s
assertion that ‘Ireland is really an American country located in the wrong continent.’ She
notes he argues that mass migration, cultural myth and eventual citizenship all contributed
to what Fagan, drawing on O’Hearn’s argument, terms “Ireland as an ‘outpost’ of Silicon
Valley” (112).

8
Globally, tracing the materialization of the Celtic Tiger and its effect on Irish life
means also placing Ireland on a world stage and requires a consideration of the overall
implications of globalization, a topic taken up recently by Irish academics in books that
wrestle with the larger implications of this transformative moment from a critical
perspective such as Theatre and Globalization (2009), Cosmopolitan Ireland (2007),
Performing Global Networks (2007), Ireland and the Global Question (2006), and Global
Ireland (2005). In Theatre and Globalization, Patrick Lonergan argues that
globalization—a term he notes is difficult to define though frequently used across
disciplines
8
—is a central component for considering the new discourse of theatre
production, and asserts that globalization “is now the dominant paradigm in Irish theatre”
(27). He asserts that contemporary theatre has become a multinational business that
utilizes many of the same principles followed by successful companies throughout the
world: they must effectively present an “event” which means selling an “experience” while
following through on the promise of presenting an “authentic” representation of culture.
When combined, these components create a brand, much like Nike or Starbucks (9-30).
For the Irish brand to succeed, it must offer an authentic Irish experience to its expectant
audience.
The study of the global also highlights the importance of studying the local. As
Helen Lojek notes, “An irony of the contemporary world is that even as globalization and
multinational franchises diminish regional particularities, the study of space is gaining
increased attention” (Spaces 4). The following chapters take as a departure point both the

8
Lonergan points to Goran Therborn’s assertion that there are at least five discourses that
attempt to deal with globalization: global capitalism, social criticism, discussions on nation
state and its future, the spread of global culture and discourses related to ecology.
Therborn, he states, argues there is little overlap between these discourses (Theatre 18).
9
centrality of cultural geography to the study of theatre and the assertion that the Celtic
Tiger is a social force that, in addition to massive economic ramifications, also ushers in
questions of identity and gender politics that challenge long-held beliefs and policies about
citizenship, family structures and the role of women inside and outside the domestic sphere.
This is reflected in the dramaturgy of the Celtic Tiger as it presents a complex engagement
with culture, globalization and identity politics, in the process offering a critical perspective
into the seismic and far-reaching changes brought about in Ireland in a very short period of
time.
The dissertation will analyze several plays dealing with these topics such as Patricia
Burke Brogan’s Eclipsed (1994); Mannix Flynn’s James X (2003); Stella Feehily’s Duck
(2003); Gina Moxley’s Danti-Dan (1995); Enda Walsh’s Disco Pigs (1997); Mark
O’Rowe’s Howie the Rookie (1999); Jim O’Hanlon’s The Buddhist of Castleknock (2002);
Ken Harmon’s Done Up Like a Kipper (2002); Roddy Doyle and Bisi Adigun’s 2007
remake of The Playboy of the Western World; Martin McDonagh’s Leenane Trilogy (1996,
1997) and Marina Carr’s Portia Coughlan (2003) and By the Bog of Cats… (1998).
Perhaps more critically useful are the plays where several of these themes intersect, such as
in Brogan’s representation of young women confined in an Irish Magdalen asylum, or in
Feehily’s Duck that deals with working-class teenage girls mired in a world of violence, or
O’Hanlon’s The Buddhist of Castleknock where issues of race and gender overlap. Each of
the plays presented herein also place a particular focus on location as characters
demonstrate various strategies of survival in these narratives. With these points in mind,
the research centers on answering the following questions:

10
• How are questions of gender politics presented and how do playwrights engage
these issues?
• What does it mean to be Irish at the start of the millennium and how are the recent
changes to Irish citizenship laws reflected, if at all, on the Irish stage?
• How is the intersection between memory, trauma and historical legacy portrayed?
• What performance forms dominate Celtic Tiger theatre and what forms have been
displaced?
• What is the role of space and cultural geography and how does place determine the
narrative arc?
• What do these plays reveal about Ireland at this time in history?

These questions provide a framework that guides the analysis of both primary texts and
performance practices including staging strategies, and brings together the various
methodological and thematic stands traced throughout the dissertation, such as studies on
space and geography, the exploration of cultural histories and the potential for establishing
transnational connections outside of Ireland.
In addition to the compilations already listed, the following selected anthologies
and theatre studies texts provide a historical and critical background to the field and help
inform this work: Helen Lojek’s The Spaces of Irish Drama (2011); Anthony’s Roche’s
Contemporary Irish Drama (2009); Mary Trotter’s Modern Irish Theatre (2008); Margaret
Llewellyn-Jones’s Contemporary Irish Drama and Cultural Identity (2002); Women in
Irish Drama (2007) edited by Melissa Sihra; The Cambridge Companion to Twentieth
Century Irish Drama (2004) edited by Shaun Richards; Druids, Dudes and Beauty
Queens—The Changing Face of Irish Theatre (2001) edited by Dermot Bolger; A Century
11
of Irish Drama: Widening the Stage edited by Stephen Watt et al.; critical texts that trace
the history and impact of the Celtic Tiger such as Kuhling and Keohane’s Cosmopolitan
Ireland (2007) and The End of Irish History? (2003) edited by Colin Coulter and Steve
Coleman; works on global patterns of immigration such as Facing the Other:
Interdisciplinary Studies on Race, Gender and Social Justice in Ireland (2008) edited by
Borbála Faragó and Moynagh Sullivan; books on gender politics such as Gerardine
Meaney’s Gender, Ireland, and Cultural Change (2010) and Brian Singleton’s
Masculinities and the Contemporary Irish Theatre (2011); and studies on space and
geography such as Yvonne Whelan’s Reinventing Modern Dublin (2003), Gerry Smyth’s
Space and the Irish Cultural Imaginary (2001), Scott Brewster et al.’s Ireland in
Proximity: History, Gender, Space (1999) and Brian Graham’s edited collection In Search
of Ireland: A Cultural Geography (1997). Anthologies on the social-cultural history of
Ireland as well as research conducted in the Abbey Theatre archives in Dublin also inform
this work and provide a critical basis for this scholarly contribution. In order to properly
situate Irish drama within the canon of Western theatre, the second part of the introduction
begins by tracing the lineage and influence of modern European theatre, particularly the
critical significance of Chekhov and Ibsen to contemporary Irish drama.

Irish Theatre and its European Legacy
Whoever it was said that houses are dangerous places for women must have heard
Ibsen’s Nora slamming the front door behind her at the end of A Doll’s House.
(Introduction, The Theatre of Marina Carr” before rules were made” xvii)
9

9
Introduction and edited by Cathy Leeney and Anna McMullan (2003).

12
Many assume that given Ireland’s renowned literary past and its celebrated dramatic
legacy, its theatre history must have deep, if not ancient, roots. Yet, as Irish theatre
historian Christopher Morash notes, theatre in Ireland has a relatively short history:
Unlike poetry and music, theatre has no ancient Irish prehistory. The chieftains of
pre-conquest Ireland did maintain an entourage of performers, ranging from the
Ollamh (professor of poetry) to the cleasamhnach (trickster). However, there is
little to suggest that early Irish performances employed the definitive theatrical
element of personification, where the performer adopts a role, as opposed to
narrating a story. (1042)

In fact, Morash notes, it would not be until 1635 that the first Irish theatre was built in
Dublin and it would not be until 1904 that the Irish National Theatre Society established
itself at the Abbey.
10
Founded in 1904 by W.B. Yeats and Lady Gregory with the financial
help of Annie E. F. Horniman who hired the Mechanic’s Theatre on Abbey Street, the
opening of Abbey Theatre was the “culmination of seven years of activity” that began with
a “mythic tea-party in the summer of 1897 [that] resulted in the formation of the Irish
Literary Theatre” (Fitz-Simon 17). Fitz-Simon notes the importance of this meeting
between Yeats, Edward Martyn and Lady Gregory where they spoke about the need for a
national theatre. E.H. Mikhail also points out that William George Fay and his brother
Frank “joined Yeats and Lady Gregory in founding the Abbey Theatre and evolved the
style of acting identified with it” until the Fay brothers left the Abbey in 1908 for United
States (17).
Histories of both the Abbey and Irish drama in general have noted the centrality of a
European tradition of realist theatre influenced by and rooted firmly to both Chekhov and

10
For an extensive list of books chronicling the first eight decades of the Abbey, see the
Introduction, pages xiv-xv, in The Abbey Theatre: Interviews and Recollections (1988)
edited by E.H. Mikhail.

13
Ibsen. Irish drama’s reliance on realist theatre establishes a line of continuity with these
two giants of Western European theatre, and the influence and reach of both continue to
pervade much of contemporary Irish drama in aesthetic sensibility and content, as well as
through dramatic adaptation of their work as evidenced by the number of versions written
in the last twenty years by playwrights such as Frank McGuinness and Brian Friel. In fact,
Friel has often been called the Irish Chekhov, and other Irish playwrights have frequently
noted the influence of one or both on their work, producing various translations and
reinterpretations of their work.
When Friel is linked with Chekhov, critics tend to refer to one of two things—either
a similarity in approaches to style or content with a prolific output of material that elevates
them both to the position of cultural spokesmen or, more basically, to Friel’s adaptations of
Chekhov’s work for the Irish stage, notably The Three Sisters (1981) for Field Day.
Marilynn Richtarik also points to the similarities between Chekhov’s The Cherry Orchard
(1904) and Friel’s Aristocrats (1980). Richtarik notes that Friel and Chekhov shared a
similar philosophy when it came to the role of the artist: “With Field Day he was trying,
like Chekhov, to accomplish something in the world outside the theatre, and the example of
the Russian was proof that a writer could be socially committed without losing his artistic
integrity” (“Talking” 114). The notion of the socially committed artist was central to Field
Day’s ethos, constructing as it did a team of playwrights, poets, academics and cultural
critics to fulfill its mission.
11

11
For more on Field Day and their history, see Carmen Szabo’s “Clearing the Ground”:
The Field Day Theatre Company and the Construction of Irish Identities” (2007) and
Marilyn Richtarik’s Acting Between the Lines: The Field Day Theatre Company and Irish
Cultural Politics 1980-1984 (1994) and “The Field Day Theater Company” in The
Cambridge Companion to Twentieth–Century Irish Drama (2004).
14
Playwrights for both Field Day and the Abbey have a long history of adapting
European plays for the Irish stage. Writing for Field Day, Friel and McGuinness both
adapted works by Chekhov,
12
/
13
while some of the earliest plays presented at the Abbey
were adaptations of already established European classics beyond Chekhov and Ibsen. In
The Abbey Theatre (2003), Christopher Fitz-Simon compiled a list of first productions at
both the Abbey and Peacock Theatres that includes adaptations by Irish writers of major
European plays. According to the list, Lady Gregory adapted plays by Molière (more
recently, Bernard Farrell and Declan Hughes also adapted his work, in 1983 and 2000
respectively); Thomas Kilroy adapted Ibsen (1989) and Pirandello (1996); and Sebastian
Barry adapted Lorca in 2003. Frank McGuinness, who garnered wide acclaim for his own
adaptation of Chekhov for Field Day, has also adapted works by Lorca (1987) and Ibsen
(2003) for the Abbey and Peacock stage. This output is significant because it suggests a
long-standing commitment by different playwrights and theatre companies to bring classic
European works to the Irish stage, both north and south of the border.
As Szabo points out, this is consistent with Friel’s artistic vision and reasoning for
adapting Chekhov for Field Day: “The play [Three Sisters] represented the aesthetic
manifestation of Friel’s firm belief that the European classics should be made available to
Irish audiences in a recognizably Irish voice” (204). This notion of adapting classic
European plays and making them accessible to Irish audiences becomes a central tenet in
both the writing and performance process, yielding works that reach out to current
audiences and find contemporary relevance within new geographical spaces. Richtarik

12
McGuinness’ adaptation of Uncle Vanya for Field Day was staged in 1995 (Szabo 207).

13
Szabo also notes that Thomas Kilroy adapted Chekhov’s The Seagull in 1981 and was
staged at the Royal Court Theatre in London (204).
15
notes the connections between Chekhov’s Three Sisters and Northern Ireland
14
and Szabo
argues that in adapting works from these European writers Friel was able to establish a
trajectory that connected Ireland with nations beyond its borders. Nicholas Grene points
out that Friel also engaged the works of Russian poet Turgenev in 1987. This connection
between Russia and Ireland opens up the question of other potential transnational
influences on Irish playwrights. Grene notes Chekhov and Turgenev were not the only
authors Friel adapted—he also adapted the work of Norwegian playwright Ibsen in 2008
(90-91).
Ibsen’s presence particularly looms large over Irish theatre where his work has
served as a constant source of inspiration to modern and contemporary Irish writers. Given
how many Irish playwrights have adapted Ibsen’s work, and the recent success in 2010 of
John Gabriel Borkman at the Abbey Theatre—a play about a ruined banker and the
aftermath of his actions on his family and community
15
—his oeuvre continues to resonate
with contemporary Irish playwrights. It also had a profound effect on some of the most
famous modernist writers who followed his work.

14
Richtarik also notes similarities between the two places: “There are other parallels to be
made between the Russian and the Irish situations. Both countries had largely peasant
economies (over 81 per cent of the Russian population at the end of the nineteenth century
belonged to the peasant class) with a gentry whose cultural importance was out of
proportion to their numbers. Both were on the edge of Western Europe, late to develop
industrially, and conscious of their backwardness. The two countries were overwhelmingly
rural, with few large towns” (“Talking” 116).

15
See the conclusion for a detailed discussion on Ibsen’s John Gabriel Borkman (1896)
and the Abbey’s production in 2010 including its critical reception.

16
In fact, James Joyce’s first published article “Ibsen’s New Drama” focused on the
Norwegian playwright’s work. Published in Fortnightly Review in April 1900,
16
Joyce’s
enthusiasm for Ibsen is evident: “It may be questioned whether a man has held so firm an
empire over the thinking world in modern times. Not Rousseau; not Emerson; not Carlyle;
not any of those giants of whom almost all have passed out of human ken” (385). Joyce
also cautions the critic as he exalts not only Ibsen’s work but the man himself:

Henrik Ibsen is one of the world’s great men before whom criticism can make but a
feeble show. Appreciation, hearkening is the only true criticism. Further, that
species of criticism which calls itself dramatic criticism is a needless adjunct to his
plays. When the art of a dramatist is perfect the critic is superfluous. Life is not to
be criticized, but to be faced and lived. Again, if any plays demand a stage they are
the plays of Ibsen. (390)

His admiration is clear, and the influence of Ibsen’s When We Dead Awaken (1899) on
Joyce’s only play, Exiles (1918), remains an under-explored topic.
17
Ibsen’s work was also
of particular relevance to early Irish feminists, as Paige Reynolds points out in
“Subnational sentiment: Dublin Suffrage Week and the uses of Ibsen,”
18
a connection made
clear when they selected Rosmersholm (1891)—a play about self-sacrifice and duty—to
headline Dublin Suffrage Week in the winter of December 1913.

16
The article was reprinted in a collection of essays entitled Henrik Ibsen (1997), edited by
Michael Egan. The page numbers reflect those in Egan’s book.

17
The play was written in 1914. In The Portable James Joyce (1947) Harry Levin points
out that, “It was published without much difficulty in 1918, and has on occasion been acted
without much success” (527).

18
See Modernism, Drama, and the Audience for Irish Spectacle. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2007. 76-115
17
Ibsen, Suffragists and Staging the Modern Woman
The play is the thing. By the force of his genius, and the indisputable skill which he
brings to all his efforts, Ibsen has, for many years, engrossed the attention of the
civilised world.
(James Joyce on Ibsen in “Ibsen’s New Drama”, 387)
19

In “Subnational sentiment: Dublin Suffrage Week and the uses of Ibsen” Paige
Reynolds recounts a little known event in Irish history that brings together the suffragist
movement, anxieties surrounding the emergence of women into the political sphere and the
different tactics employed by the suffragists to mobilize support for their cause. She traces
the challenges facing early suffragists, including the public scrutiny they faced for their
political activism and their exclusion from the popular trope of sacrifice in the national
narrative. Susan Cannon Harris notes the vital importance of this gendered motif both in
Irish dramas and history.
20
Dublin Suffrage Week in 1913 was an attempt on behalf of
Irish feminists to transcend some of these limitations and consolidate support for the right
to vote while simultaneously dismissing misrepresentations in the media about the modern
woman.
Reynolds notes the event presented multiple avenues for mobilizing different
aspects of the suffragist movement publicly, from speeches rallying support for the right to
vote, to the “Great Christmas Fair” that promoted a model of consumer culture where Irish
women were encouraged to actively support the Irish nation by purchasing home goods.

19
Ibsen was also an important influence on Shaw. See “George Bernard Shaw on the
quintessence of Ibsenism and its resemblance to Shavianism” also in Henrik Ibsen (1997),
edited by Michael Egan, for an excerpt from Shaw’s book on Ibsen, The Quintessence of
Ibsenism (1891).

20
For more on this trope see Harris’s book, Gender and Modern Irish Drama (2002).
18
They also partook in the IWFL
21
Tea-Rooms where suffragists could exhibit “civility” and
respect for domesticity by participating in classic feminine rituals since “[t]he performance
of bourgeois respectability promised to render the suffragists more palatable to
conservative audiences” (Reynolds 95). Print culture had perpetuated a radical image of
Irish feminists, consolidating fears of the “modern woman” as a public figure with interests
outside the home and invested in non-domestic issues. These anxieties manifested
themselves in multiple ways. Reynolds writes, “Dublin Suffrage Week was not simply a
spectacle staged on behalf of women’s suffrage, but a device offering Irish women a
feminist model of citizenship in a culture suffused with masculine political, religious, and
social ideologies” (85). The challenge for the suffragists was to deliver a “palatable”
message in a proper medium and assure outside forces of their collective commitment to
both the nation and the domestic sphere. While the suffragists employed public speaking
as a means to consolidate popular support, they had to strike a delicate balance in the
presentation of their public personas:
During these speeches, they appealed to popular national feeling by dressing and
behaving in accord with versions of essential femininity sanctioned by nationalist
politics, ecclesiastical ideals, and bourgeois codes of conduct. As well, they
emphasized their sufferings due to political oppression; like all citizens laboring
under colonial rule, the suffragists were deprived of their proper political rights.
(Reynolds 80)

As Reynolds notes, the suffragists attempted to align their plight with the Irish nationalist
movement and international causes that rallied against political injustices, and this aim was
particularly evident when they chose Rosmersholm, a play by Ibsen to headline the event’s
artistic offering. Ibsen, she points out “had long been at the center of the debate in Ireland

21
Irish Women’s Franchise League was founded in 1908.
19
about the relationship between art and politics” (97). This connection made Ibsen a solid
choice to headline the festival even though Irish feminist writers she notes were themselves
penning dramas about issues they were personally invested in. Ibsen’s internationalist
appeal and the fact his dramas offered multiple potential interpretations—as James Joyce
himself pointed out in “Ibsen’s New Drama” where he wrote, “To begin an account of a
play of Ibsen’s is surely no easy matter” (386)—worked well with their political and social
agenda, and offered a compelling narrative with its varied themes that could accommodate
their central message and other concerns of the time:

This realist drama offered Dublin audiences Ibsen’s prototypical critique of social
norms, and introduced them to another ‘new woman.’ In its Irish context,
Rosmersholm addressed not only the question of women’s rights, but also concerns
about separate sphere ideology, the political press, tradition and modernity, and
even the Ascendancy ‘big house.’ (Reynolds 96)

These were some of the major issues Irish suffragists hoped to address not just during the
week but also as part of their overall mission. However, as history would soon reveal, it
was an inconvenient time to rally support for women’s rights. 1913 was a critical year—
not only because of the Dublin Lockout of 1913 and the impending start of World War I
but it was a period that helped launch into motion several key events in Irish history: the
1916 Easter Rising, the 1919 War of Independence, the 1921 Partition, and the 1922 Irish
Civil War that divided the nation. The decade following Dublin Suffrage Week turned out
to be a critical juncture that would alter the course of Irish history and set the stage for the
foundation of the Irish Free State and later the Irish Republic. Irish feminists and their
political agendas, it seemed, would have to wait at this time.
20
The Founding of the Irish State, Gender Politics and the Representation of Women

The complex relationship between gender, violence and Irish theater must be
considered in the context of the turbulent political atmosphere in Ireland during the early
twentieth century. The years following the founding of the Abbey Theater in Dublin in
1904 saw the partial overthrow of empire beginning with the 1916 Easter Rising and the
ensuing War of Independence as well as the bitter Civil War that occurred as a result of
partition. Politically fractured and socially divided as modernity’s reign began to take hold
in urban centers, Ireland was mired in an economy of violence that registered the national
struggle above issues like gender equality. This resulted in the foreclosure of women’s
rights that progressive groups like Cumann na mBan sought to highlight by throwing their
collective support behind the Easter Rising rebels, believing that eventually their concerns
would be addressed. That hope did not materialize as expected as Lisa Fitzpatrick points
out:
The Proclamation of 1916 and the Constitution of the Free State of 1922 had
guaranteed certain equalities of treatment and status to both sexes before the law,
identifying equal rights and duties of citizenship. But the following years saw the
introduction of legislation that increasingly limited women’s participation in public
life. (70)

These acts included the 1924 and 1927 Juries Bills that sought to initially limit and then
outright exclude women’s service on juries and the 1932 public service marriage ban that
“prevented the employment of women civil servants and later national school teachers after
marriage” (Beaumont 98). Meanwhile, the passage of Article 41.1 of the Irish Constitution
in 1937 seemed to solidify her place in the home: “by her life within the home, woman
gives to the State a support without which the common good cannot be achieved.”
21
Some academics such as Mary Daly write that in fact the Constitution served to
legitimize and empower the role of women within the home and argues for the
consideration of historical circumstance over current feminist ideology, stating that, “…the
Constitution can be viewed as acknowledging the importance of women’s lives and work
within the home, giving status to many members of Irish society who were otherwise
ignored” (Daly quoted in Becket 87). But while some suggest the language of the
Constitution appears to celebrate women’s role in the home, feminist critics have argued
that it functioned as a way to not only limit women’s civic participation, but restrict
autonomy outside of the home. As Clair Wills points out, “The ideological construction of
the familial sphere was intimately bound up with the public image of Ireland as a
traditional society” (37) and that meant the value of women and their citizenship rested on
their ability to nurture the nation. Beaumont notes that, “As a result the definition of
citizenship for Irish women became closely identified with their duties in the home and the
care of their husbands and children” (100). While the drafting and subsequent passage of
the Constitution may have officially codified these aims, the project of defining and
constructing gender roles had begun much earlier as modernity began to change the
dynamics of the domestic sphere.
This discourse is reflected in the dramas coming out of the Abbey Theater in the
first half of the century where women are defined in dichotomous terms: as Yeatsian
abstractions alá Cathleen ni Houlihan (1904) or as characters that need to be stabilized and
ultimately made to conform through social, if not also physical, coercion such as Teresa
Deevy’s Katie in Katie Roche (1936) or her Annie Kinsella in The King of Spain’s
Daughter (1935). These women need to be managed because, as Beaumont argues, “…any
22
attempt for women to assert their right to equality and a life outside the home was regarded
as a threat to the status quo by the dominant male political elite and something that needed
to be legislated against” (100). The National Theater became a site that registered the
social and political landscape, though as Shaun Richards argues, there was not much room
for critique:

The dominant play style at the Abbey Theater was the ‘peasant play’. However,
although the sets were accurate with regard to physical dimensions, and often
stocked with genuine artefacts, this was far from gritty realism. Rather it was an
idealized representation of the life felt to be expressive of the very core of the
nation; a connection between the present and a precolonial authenticity which could
not be severed (or mocked) without, by implication, polluting the fountain source of
the nation itself. (“Plays” 5)

This meant that the possibility for radical social critiques may not have been an open
avenue for most playwrights, especially not women who were not often presented with the
opportunity to get a play produced on the national stage.
22
Melissa Sihra points out how
Lisa Fitzpatrick suggests representations of gender were tightly managed, and how female
playwrights dealt with a type of management themselves that their male counterparts did
not face (“Introduction” 15). This calls into question the gender politics at play behind the
scenes of the Abbey Theater: how much artistic freedom did female playwrights have in
comparison to their male counterparts? On stage some of these playwrights explored
questions about traditional constructions of masculinity and femininity, and upon closer
inspection of both texts and archives, it is clear Irish modernist theatre served to catalog the
changing contours and evolving complexities of gender relations brought about as a result

22
In the introduction to Women Playwrights at the Abbey 1904-2004 (2009) Colette
Connor points out that, “It is erroneous to suggest that women are not writing plays.
Women are very definitely writing plays—the problem is those plays are not being
produced” (31).
23
of the various conflicts Ireland endured in first half of the twentieth century. While
modernist dramas written by men dealt with the national question to some degree, women’s
dramas tended to present a different discourse that located the root of disenfranchisement
outside of the national struggle, though violent nonetheless. As Fitzpatrick points out,
“Many of the realistic dramas by women of the 1920s and 1930s quite clearly engage with
and represent the dearth of choices facing women…” (“Taking” 84). Playwright Teresa
Deevy took on some of these issues as she wrestled with gender politics in her dramaturgy.
Born in Waterford in 1894, Deevy was one of the few better-known female
playwrights whose work was performed at the Abbey during her lifetime.
23
For Deevy’s
heroines, the relationship between gender and violence manifests itself in varied ways: as
the physical force imposed upon them by controlling fathers, as the intellectual realization
of the lack of options available outside of the domestic sphere, and in the compromises that
must be reached in order to avoid complete destitution and societal banishment. While
some argue that Deevy failed to mobilize the national theater as a space for political and
artistic opposition to the prevailing ideology of domesticity manifested in cultural norms,
24

Deevy’s work in fact disrupts Yeats and DeValera’s vision of Irish femininity by refusing

23
Connor notes that Lady Gregory and Teresa Deevy are among the better-known female
playwrights and that “the rest are hardly ever mentioned” (1). See Connor’s Women
Playwrights at The Abbey 1904-2004 (2009) for a list of other female playwrights who
contributed works to Irish theatre.

24
Shaun Richards in the foreword to Selected Plays of Irish Playwright Teresa Deevy,
1894-1963 (2003) notes that “While Deevy might be seen as a propagandist of conformity,
who, in often having her heroines finally accept the inevitability of hearth and home,
subscribes to ‘the dominant political, ideological and cultural consensus of the early years
of independence’ (Ireland: A Social and Cultural History 102), this is to ignore the sheer
charge of frustrated energy which she gives her protagonists” [emphasis and citation in
original (vi)].
24
to present Irish womanhood as a sisterhood of “comely maidens”
25
happily confined to the
Irish kitchen. The impulse to break out of the prescribed paradigms is reflected not in the
endings of her plays—which critics point to as proof of her adherence to a conservative and
Catholic-inspired ideology—but rather in the expression of the struggle by her heroines
manifested in vocal expressions of dissatisfaction with the limited range of options
available to women and, as Richards points out, in the stage directions that indicate these
articulations (“Foreword” vi). This is where Deevy’s subversive power lies—in the public
contradiction on the national stage of official and cultural narratives that dictated avenues
open for women.
Deevy offers an exploration of the inherent violence that lingers in a system of
patriarchal control, even though, as Cathy Leeney points out, “Death as event forms no part
of Deevy’s dramaturgy, in contrast with Yeats or Synge…” (“Ireland’s exiled” 156).
26

Deevy’s characters do not lash out in violence, though violence is committed upon then,
nor does Deevy kill off her heroines. She works in a subtler manner, and as her oeuvre
experiences a much-deserved revival, critics have begun to note her contribution to the
canon of Irish drama.
27
Deevy’s rebellious heroines also set the groundwork for some of
the most compelling characters discussed in the chapters herein and offer a view of the
power structures these marginalized characters—and, by extension, larger disenfranchised

25
DeValera’s 1943 radio speech famously enshrined that image when he “spoke of a land
of ‘cosy homesteads…sturdy children…and the laughter of comely maidens’” (radio
broadcast, 17 March 1943) [qtd. in Beaumont 103].
26
For a discussion on the dramaturgy of Teresa Deevy and Marina Carr, whose plays
feature the deaths of female protagonists, see Leeney’s “Ireland’s ‘exiled’ women
playwrights: Teresa Deevy and Marina Carr” in The Cambridge Companion to Twentieth–
Century Irish Drama. Ed. Shaun Richards. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
2004. 150-163.
27
Deevy’s work was recently staged in New York and in 2011 the Mint Theatre Company
published Teresa Deevy Reclaimed: Volume One.
25
communities—continue to struggle against as they attempt to carve out space for
themselves on the national stage.
Scholars typically point out that the decades following Deevy witnessed a period of
relative quiet in the Irish theatre scene, noting specifically the low profile of the Abbey
during the 1940s and 50s.
28
In 1951 the Abbey burned to the ground
29
and relocated to the
Queen’s Theatre—a larger venue that was difficult to fill—from 1951 to 1966, until the
opening of the new Abbey at its old location (Connor 12). Fitz-Simon writes that, “The list
of titles shows that fewer and fewer new plays of substance were performed during the
company’s tenure from 1951 to 1966” (102). Lionel Pilkington points out the focus of the
theatre at this time: “The repertoire of plays performed at the Abbey from 1949 to the mid-
to late 1950s suggest a period of self-conscious renewal with a strong thematic emphasis on
national self-examination in the light of new (post-war) economic exigencies” (145).
30

Looking beyond the Abbey to other theatres venues, Eamonn Jordan notes the vibrancy of
Irish drama at this time:
…[C]urrent research on this earlier period argues that this was not necessarily an
era of stagnation and traditionalism, but rather one of vitality and experimentalism,
if one looks beyond the activities of the more conservative producing houses. The
plays of the new era from the late 1950s forward were cognizant of developments in
Europe and America, were intent on addressing subjects that were under-discussed,
and were focused on confronting repression, injustice and the historical and
contemporaneous implications of imperialism and colonization. (Dissident 5)

28
Roche points out that, “By the outbreak of World War II, both Yeats and Lady Gregory
were dead” (Contemporary 15).
29
Fitz-Simon notes, “On the night of 17-18 July 1951, the Abbey Theatre was accidentally
destroyed by fire…Almost all of the (by now) historic art collection was saved, but
hundreds of playscripts were destroyed—a merciful end for some of them, it was
suggested” (101).
30
See “Irish Theatre and Modernization 1948-68” in Theatre and the State in Twentieth-
Century Ireland (2001) by Pilkington for an overview of staged works and their reception
during this time.
26
Scholars have more recently recovered additional histories of Irish dramas at other venues
during this time and also highlight the work of Brendan Behan at the Pike Theatre.
31
Other
scholars have focused on the emergence and celebrated international rise of Beckett whose
influence continues to pervade contemporary Irish theatre.
32
/
33
Nevertheless, Stephen Watt
suggests that “the post-war Irish theatre at mid-century generates considerably less
enthusiasm” (131) at either the start or end of the century from critics and points out that
with few exceptions,
[T]here seems to exist a kind of critical lacuna smack-dab in the middle of the
century. Or, rather, the gap appears in our collective interest in the period between,
say, Denis Johnston’s Moon in the Yellow River (1931) and the rise of that great
wave of writers in the 1960s: Brian Friel, Tom Murphy, Thomas Kilroy, John B.
Keane, and Hugh Leonard. Murray describes the 1960s as bringing with them a
‘second renaissance’ of Irish drama (Twentieth-Century Irish Drama 162), and
there is little doubt that this is so. This second renaissance has given way to what
Fintan O’Toole calls a ‘third wave in 20th-century Irish theatre’ (“Shadows” 17):
namely, the recent successes of Martin McDonagh, Conor McPherson, Carr, Barry,
and other playwrights, who have been coming into their own as the millennium
draws to a close. (131)

This “third wave” is the focus of this dissertation as it centers on plays that emerge during
the Celtic Tiger—a time that witnesses a revival in Irish drama—and examines the
prevalent themes and concepts that keep demanding critical attention at this time in Irish
history: the exploration of trauma narratives; assessments of the social repercussions of

31
Founded in 1953, Pilkington notes that, “the Pike belonged to the ‘new wave’ of
theatrical experimentation that was then taking place in London and Paris” and points out
that “the Pike was self-consciously avant-garde” with a members-only policy (152).
32
Marina Carr, who wrote her thesis on Beckett, notes his influence on her work and critics
have pointed out that both Low in the Dark (1989) and Ullaloo (1991) are “influenced by
her academic interest in Samuel Beckett” (Harris 218).
33
Roche notes that both the world premiere of Behan’s The Quare Fellow in 1954 and the
Irish premiere of Beckett’s Waiting for Godot in 1955 occurred at the Pike Theatre
(Contemporary 17). See his “Beckett and Behan” in Contemporary Irish Drama (2009) for
other connections between the two writers.
27
rapid economic change including the reconstitutions of landscapes; the examination of
issues related to identity and cultural belonging; and the role(s) of globalization and
cosmopolitanism in contemporary Ireland. And while the dissertation does not present a
comprehensive survey of all theatre works or theatre practices during the Celtic Tiger, the
chapters offer both a social and cultural framework for situating the selected plays and
present close textual readings of these particular works during this time in Irish history.
Several critics point to the Celtic Tiger as a time of transformation with important
ramifications for understanding contemporary Ireland. Writing on the plays that emerged
since the 1990s, Mary Trotter notes:
These plays in fact represent personal responses to a new understanding of Ireland
as a rapidly changing social and economic entity, defined not only by geographic
boundaries, but also by its relationship among its own diaspora communities, rates
of export and import, cultural influence, and policies of migration. (177)

The theatre becomes a site where the varied manifestations of the Celtic Tiger are refracted,
often times revealing that seemingly disparate histories in Ireland actually—upon closer
inspection—share similar trajectories, in the process reinforcing the ability of theatre to
offer what Jason King, referencing Mary Louise Pratt’s ‘contact zone,’ calls “an
imaginative space of sympathetic engagement” (“Interculturalism”).

The Continuing Relevance of Irish Theatre
In a theatre review in the Irish Times of No Escape, the Abbey’s 2010 offering
written by Mary Raftery and based on the findings of the Ryan Report,
34
noted Irish critic
Fintan O’Toole argued that the role of theatre is to elucidate, in a way that transcends the
limitations of television and other cultural mediums, the relationship between an event and

34
The Ryan Report was issued in May 2010 and dealt with widespread reports of child
abuse in Ireland’s industrial schools and residential facilities for children.
28
the cultural understanding of it. It must, in his words, “add something to the existing public
record” (“No Escape”). He points to both the confrontation and confinement that occurs in
a theatre space and the importance of its communal experience as central to its continued
influence:
Its essence is public presence—both of the members of the audience and of the
actors…In the darkened theatre, confronting this devastating story that we cannot
turn off with the flick of a switch, we experience on our own the sense of
inescapable confinement. (“No Escape”)

While not all dramas make such intense emotional demands on the audience, the main and
defining feature of theatre is its ability to give bodily form to narrative, and whether it is
categorized as solitary or communal, according to O’Toole, “[w]hat theatre does to
experience is, quite simply, to embody it” (“No Escape”). It is in the possibility of
embodying experience—whether the narrative testifies to new or old stories and
interpretations—and sharing it communally that continues to make theatre relevant despite
all the other competing forms of modern cultural representations, many of which are
experienced alone or require no interaction with the larger community. Tracing modernist
analyses on theatre, Clare Wallace points out:
For Benjamin, the distinction between theatre and film lies in the notion that, while
in film the actors plays for the camera, in theatre the actor plays for an audience.
Compared to the assemblage strategies of film, theatre is more limited being
confined to real time and space where an individual performance takes place. It is
in this immediacy that theatre may stake its claim in the commercial age of
mechanical/technological reproduction. Theatre affords the possibility of direct
contact with an audience. The fourth wall of that space is assumed, rather than
absolute, and may be broken through. Consequently, modern theatre might be
thought of as a nexus of presence, representation and simulation which can differ
radically from other media. (“Versions” 114)

The “nexus of presence, representation and simulation” offers a unique experience for the
audience and, for a place like Ireland that has experienced seismic changes in its economic
29
and social landscape, the transformative repercussions of a globalized modernity are
marked on the Irish stage where many of the predominant themes presented during the
Celtic Tiger intersect, illustrating currents of solidarity between marginalized communities.
James M. Smith, writing on the Magdalen laundry memorial, notes how,
…attempts at containing the past, specifically by repeating historical forgetfulness,
help contemporary Irish society to contain the present by forgetting today’s
outcasts, those newly marginalized communities excluded from and exploited by
the Celtic Tiger phenomenon. (Ireland’s 167)

Smith’s prescient observation invites scholars and artists working in the contemporary
moment to establish lines of solidarity with other disenfranchised groups so as to not forget
these histories during times of prosperity. This directive is reflected in the work of scholars
such as Jason King and Loredana Salis who trace connections between Ireland’s migrant
communities and histories of the Irish diaspora in the theatre;
35
in the work of playwrights
such as Jimmy Murphy whose plays such as A Picture of Paradise (1996) deal with
displacement and homelessness during the Celtic Tiger; in the work of Colleen Hynes
whose research on marginalized Irish figures also includes chapters on representations of
Magdalen laundries and asylum seekers and refugees.
36
Gavin Titley
37
articulates a clear
connection between the confinement and treatment of the Magdalens and asylum-seekers in
Ireland, making an argument for considering the experiences of these groups together: “At
present, approximately 6,000 people live in direct provision accommodation centres in

35
See “Interculturalism and Irish Theater: The Portrayal of Immigrants on the Irish
Stage.” Irish Review 33 (Spring 2005) by King. See Stage Migrants: Representations of
the Migrant Other in Modern Irish Drama (2010) by Salis.
36
Hynes’s dissertation, “Strangers in the House: Twentieth Century Revisions of Irish
Literary and Cultural Identity” (2007) was found after this dissertation was in the final
stages of completion. In addition to Smith and Finnegan, see for further reading on the
Magdalens; see also for further reading on sports and immigration along with Salis.
37
See “Asylum seekers in Ireland languish in the Magdalen laundries of our time” in The
Guardian. 03 Oct. 2012.
30
Ireland while their asylum claims are processed” where he explains they wait sometimes
for years for their claims to be processed, and points out how like the Magdalens they too
are “corralled and controlled.” He suggests that while the comparison should not submerge
specific histories, “the parallels are politically important” (The Guardian 03 Oct. 2012).
Scholars continue to explore these and other parallels by examining the dominant forces
that prevail during this critical time and look to the theatre as a space at the forefront of
telling these narratives.
Since the founding of the National Theatre, the role of Irish drama has continued to
flourish as both a catalogue of national identity and as a vehicle for self-conscious cultural
critique while in the process also establishing its international reputation as a theatre
powerhouse producing works on par with London’s West End or New York’s Broadway.
Yet the Abbey is only one compelling chapter in a history that includes independent
theatres, traveling caravans and other alternative venues and philosophies of performance.
The intersection between theatre, culture and performance becomes more apparent when
examined together. Helen Lojek notes the long-standing dominance of text in theatre
practices and argues for “a hybrid awareness of text and performance”:
The centrality of performance—including the utilization of space under
consideration here—must be recognized. Text is the most constant element in any
dramatic production, and text begets text (through stage directions and dialogue) the
creation of space by particular productions and the reactions to space by particular
audiences. Text-based theatre dominates Western dramatic traditions. Textual
analysis, though, ought not to dominate discussion of a cultural form that relies on
convergence between the text and numerous other elements. A hybrid awareness of
text and performance clarifies drama’s essentials, and the application of
understandings culled from geographers facilitates an awareness that understanding
issues of space enriches enjoyment and comprehension both of drama and of the
wide world we inhabit. Noting how characters in these plays relate to space
illuminates our relationship to space as well as theirs. (Spaces 4)

31
Both modern and contemporary Irish drama indeed lends itself to textual analysis. Writing
on the dramaturgy of McDonagh, Carr, McPherson and O’Rowe, Clare Wallace notes,
“With remarkable consistency and regularity, the centrality of story, story telling and
language is affirmed” (“Versions” 116). Theatre scholars recognize the dominance of this
over other forms and yet, while textual analysis has tended to historically pervade the study
of theatre, increasing a shift towards both performance and spatial studies reveals a
departure from this focus. This is due in part to the rise in innovative performance
practices by cutting-edge theatre companies in Ireland that incorporate elements requiring
other modes of analysis as well as works by both cultural geographers that affirm the key
importance of the “relationship between space, time, memory and ideology” (Whelan and
Harte 179), and theatre scholars who are increasingly recording these intersections.
A central thematic strand throughout this dissertation focuses on the relationship
between space, demography and Irish drama. The chapters center mostly on text-based
scripts and the analysis of performance is rooted not only in the presentation of the script
by actors and directors on stage, but in an examination of these plays as both text and
performance that transcend theatre space and contemplate what recurrent motifs reveal,
how identity is performed on the Irish stage and abroad, and the function and relevance of
performing particular landscapes on stage. By considering the performance beyond the
stage and bridging these multiple fields—studies on space and demography, performance
practices, works on gender and identity, and theatre criticism—in conjunction with analysis
of primary texts, the goal is to examine the continuing critical significance of Irish theatre
in a global world.
32
The Dissertation Chapters
Chapter One, “Ireland’s Magdalen Asylums and the Celtic Tiger” presents a history
of the church-run and state-supported residential institutions where young women were
incarcerated for reasons such as out-of-wedlock pregnancies and perceived departures from
established codes of conduct. In tracing the genesis of these places from the Victorian
rescue movement to institutions run by the Catholic Church, the chapter shows how these
places flourished throughout Ireland during the twentieth century and examines the rituals
of daily life within the walls, including the practice of washing laundry for the local church
and community by hand. The chapter begins by situating the historical trajectory of
Magdalen asylums in the mid 1800s to their modern incarnation as places of labor and
confinement for young women. It then presents an analysis of artistic representations of
Magdalen asylums grounded in theatre but extending to film and music that appear during
the Celtic Tiger, paying particular attention to Patricia Burke Brogan’s Eclipsed (1994), a
realist drama about life in a residential laundry, and establishes connections with works
dealing the industrial schools, such as Mannix Flynn’s James X (2003) a long monologue
about the experience and after–effects of living in such a place as a child. As these
narratives begin to more fully emerge so too does the fact these institutions do not belong
to a historical episode of a far distant past: the last Magdalen asylum closed in Dublin at
recently as 1996.
Chapter Two, “The Children of the Celtic Tiger—Theatrical Representations of
Contemporary Irish Adolescence” examines literary and filmic representations of
contemporary Irish childhood and adolescence during the Celtic Tiger. Depictions of
adolescence and marginality are beginning to appear more on the Irish stage, offering a
33
new perspective on issues directly related to the material conditions facing Irish youth at
the start of the millennium as a result of the Celtic Tiger such as the sudden influx of
wealth that changes power differentials and reconfigures, among other things, issues of
space and geography. The adolescents in these plays also encounter questions of cultural
and national identity as the definitions of Irishness changes in the face of new legislation.
In short, the youth of the Celtic Tiger are dealing with the aftereffects of a rapid and
consuming globalization that alters traditional identity politics. Playwrights Stella Feehily,
Gina Moxley, Enda Walsh, Mark O’Rowe and filmmaker Lance Daly in his much-lauded
film Kisses (2008) each construct complicated portraits of contemporary Irish adolescence
in their works as they reimagine the bonds and limitations of friendship. As they navigate
throughout the city or rural landscapes, their characters at times resort to the creation of
new languages and methods of expression in order to articulate their experiences as they
attempt to survive amongst urban violence, class tensions and societal expectations.
Chapter Three, “Representation, Identity and Celtic Tiger Drama,” focuses on
Ireland’s changing demographics, the effects of multiculturalism, and representations of
race on the Irish stage during the Celtic Tiger. Using Foucault’s ideas on biopolitics as a
starting point, the chapter examines the 2004 Citizenship Referendum that altered the
requirements for citizenship in Ireland, breaking links with birthright citizenship as
enshrined in the Constitution, and researches the major arguments and critical responses to
this law. The chapter then presents readings of Irish dramas that engage these topics, such
as Jim O’Hanlon’s The Buddhist of Castleknock (2002) that introduces an “interloper”—a
classic Irish trope—into an upper middle class family in Dublin and who disrupts a sense of
familial stability at Christmas time with her religious and racial difference. Ken Harmon’s
34
Done Up Like a Kipper (2002) also offers a portrait of contemporary Ireland that centers on
a middle class family who, caught up in the financial and social demands of the Celtic
Tiger, now find themselves struggling to keep up. The play focuses one of its storylines on
race and belonging when one of the characters is challenged to prove his “Irishness.”
Roddy Doyle and Bisi Adigun’s remake of J.M. Synge’s classic play, The Playboy of the
Western World (1907) in 2007 also engages the topics of race and representation,
particularly in the decision to change the lead character from Christy Mahon to Christopher
Malomo, a Nigerian man who flees his homeland and arrives in a West Dublin pub
shrouded in mystery. Utilizing research conducted in the Abbey Theatre archives, this
section presents a detailed review of the play’s critical reception and the challenges facing
contemporary adaptations of classic works.
Chapter Four, “The Theatre of Martin McDonagh and Marina Carr” researches the
recent success of both these internationally recognized playwrights against the backdrop of
the Celtic Tiger and traces the trajectory of violence in their most acclaimed plays. It offers
first a reading of McDonagh’s Leenane Trilogy (1996, 1997), and argues that McDonagh’s
plays enact a survivalist ethos as he clears the stage of the deformed and grotesque, making
room to alleviate the claustrophobia represented in the iconic kitchen setting. The second
part of the chapter presents an examination of two of Carr’s most acclaimed plays, Portia
Coughlan (2003) and By the Bog of Cats…(1998). The analysis of Bog moves the
protagonist Hester away from typical comparisons to the European Medea storyline by
situating her more closely in relation to La Llorona (the “Crying Woman”), a ghost figure
in Mexican/Mexican-American folk stories who wanders near bodies of waters, wailing as
she searches for her missing children. By researching the role of religious iconography in
35
relation to cultural identity, this analysis presents the possibility of locating Hester in a
different context and offers a cross-cultural reading that establishes transnational
connections across borders.
36
Chapter One
Ireland’s Magdalen Asylums and the Celtic Tiger

It is ritual and Bible-based—the scapegoat
made to disappear
in the obscurity of a wild wood
bearing all the iniquities of the people
on its nubby, emblematic head.
(Rachel Dilworth, from “Fragments of the Shattering Glass” in
The Wild Rose Asylum: Poems of the Magdalene Laundries of
Ireland [2010], 52)

If, after all, our Government can’t face up to the obvious injustice of locking up
women for life and using them as forced labourers simply because they were judged
to present a moral danger to society, how will it ever face up to bigger and more
complex issues of responsibility and accountability?
(Fintan O’Toole, The Irish Times, 15 June 2010)

Mother Victoria:
Remember the Garden! Eve started it all!
(Patricia Burke Brogan from Eclipsed, Act 2, Scene 1)

In 1996, the last of Ireland’s Magdalen asylums finally closed its doors, ending a
century and a half of imprisoned servitude for “penitent” women admitted for reasons
ranging from out-of-wedlock pregnancy to accusations of prostitution to charges of mental
instability. Francis Finnegan’s Do Penance of Perish (2001), the first comprehensive study
of these institutions, documents how even women considered too attractive or likely to
become a “problem” were also admitted to these asylums, all in the name of upholding a
certain moral code that at the time was heavily influenced by Ireland’s close connection to
the Catholic Church and policies of social conservatism. Though their crime may not have
been apparent, for the women carted off to these asylums by their families or placed there
37
by state agencies, the dominant mantra of these establishments was clear: through relentless
hard work and solid religious instruction, including strict adherence to a code of silence,
repentance for their wayward ways was paramount and atonement for sin was possible.
As Finnegan notes, a typical penitent’s day consisted of rising before dawn for ten
or more hours of work in the asylum’s laundry where the nuns took in the washing from the
local community. This served as the institution’s main source of revenue and though the
resident penitents did all the work, they were never paid for their labor. In fact, she argues,
many of the women were essentially life-long indentured servants, often remaining in these
institutions until they died, having been cut off from family and exiled from the outer
community. As Edward Said points out, “Exile originated in the age-old practice of
banishment. Once banished, the exile lives an anomalous and miserable life, with the
stigma of being an outsider” (181). Said likens the experience to orphanhood and stresses
that exile “is a fundamentally discontinuous state of being. Exiles are cut off from their
roots, their land, their past…” (177). Having been removed to these institutions and away
from the community of family and friends, the inmates of the asylums would bear the mark
of the outsider long after their period of incarceration ended, if they ever left. In Ireland’s
Magdalen Laundries and the Nation’s Architecture of Containment (2007) James M. Smith
traces both the existence of the ten Magdalen asylums in Ireland and contemporary cultural
representations of them, pointing out many women remained in these institutions for life:
According to survival testimony, women were still entering Magdalen laundries in
the 1980s. By the turn of the twentieth century, however, the Irish institutions were
functioning less and less as rehabilitative short-term refuges. Fewer women entered
these asylums voluntarily, as they did in the nineteenth century, and women were
detained for longer periods, many for life. (xv)

38
He notes that, “With no official sentence, and thus no mandated release, some of these
women lived and died behind the Magdalen’s walls” (“The Magdalene Sisters”).
Once they entered the asylums, the women were expected to adhere to the idealized
version of womanhood promulgated by the church. In Catholic Ireland, the Virgin Mary
provided the model image of femininity whose grace provided ultimate path to salvation.
The church actively promoted Marian worship by cultivating Mary iconography
38
in both
performance ritual during devotional services and within the local community through
statues and emblems.
39
The nuns, meanwhile, provided the human embodiment of purity
and femininity that penitents could aspire towards. As Maria Luddy explains, “The nuns’
own ideal of austerity and holiness was offered as the ideal for the rescued penitents” (76).
Having faltered at either version of idealized womanhood, the young women in the
asylums were directed towards the image of Mary Magdalen who was exalted as the
ultimate example of possible reformation. The asylums were in fact named after Mary
Magdalen in the Bible, the reformed prostitute who finds salvation through renunciation of
her past. As Smith notes, “The name appropriates Mary Magdalen as a role model for
repentance and spiritual regeneration” (Ireland’s 25). In this way, she served as the model
for the penitents and embodied the mission of the asylums that through work and
repentance, salvation was indeed possible.

38
See “Irish Feminism” by Siobhán Kilfeather in The Cambridge Companion to Modern
Irish Culture. Eds. Joe Cleary and Claire Connolly. Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 2005. 96-116.
39
Marian worship and moving statues have been the subject of much cultural dialogue in
Ireland. In the introduction to Seeing is Believing: Moving Statues in Ireland, Colm Tóibín
notes that “…in the spring and summer of 1985 in the Republic of Ireland, thousands of
people have been going to Marian shrines, some later claming that they saw statues move,
or visions, or lights in the sky” (7). The impression of a moving Virgin Mary statue is
revisited in the 1989 film about a pregnant Irish teen, Hush-a-Bye Baby.
39
In recent years however, there has been a move by feminist academics to recuperate
the image of the Mary Magdalen from fallen woman to powerful feminine force.
40
In her
assessment of Eclipsed (1994), the first play to deal with Irish Magdalen asylums
(discussed in more detail later), Anne F. O’Reilly notes this dialectal move:
From a feminist point of view the whole role of Mary Magdalen—traditionally
depicted as sinner and prostitute—has been revisited. While traditional patriarchal
interpretations of her have tended to stress the quality of her repentance and the
forgiveness of her sins, feminist hermeneutics has called attention to her role as
apostle in ministry. (61)

The Catholic reading of these figures dominated both the community and life within the
asylum walls. Since the religious and ideological frameworks were basically the same in
the asylums, the daily rituals and models of belief did not particularly differ from one
location to another in Ireland, though tangible changes were made in similar institutions
outside of Ireland. Smith notes that, “Magdalen asylums were a common feature in many
societies outside Ireland in the nineteenth and early twentieth century; by 1900 there were
over three hundred such institutions in Victorian England and at least twenty north of the
border in Scotland (Finnegan 2001, Mahood 1990)” (Ireland’s xiv-xv).
Historically, Magdalen asylums existed not only in Ireland and western Europe but
in the United States too, specifically in Philadelphia
41
, New York City
42
and San

40
Chicana feminists have contributed extensively to this recuperation. Cullingford notes
the ‘cult of the Virgin of Guadalupe among Chicana women in Texas, who erect domestic
shrines that are both monuments of kitsch and sources of power and consolation’ (“Seamus
and Sinéad” 252), though that assessment can be extended beyond Texas to other locations
and rationales. Chicana scholars have revisited and challenged the popular narrative of
both the Virgin Mary and Mary Magdalene in critical and creative texts. Like Irish women,
Chicanas face the cultural omnipresence of the Virgin Mary. See Chapter Four for a more
detailed discussion of these connections.
41
Smith notes that the Magdalen Society of Philadelphia was “[t]he first asylum for fallen
women in the United States” and was “founded in 1800 and closed its doors in 1916”
(Ireland’s xv).
40
Francisco.
43
While there are several transnational links between the Irish and American
Magdalen asylums and though the American institutions adopted the same basic framework
and ideology for dealing with “wayward”
44
women—Smith notes that, “Many of these
institutions shared overriding characteristics, including a regime of prayer, silence, work in
a laundry and a preference for permanent inmates” (Ireland’s xv)— the practical
implementation of this philosophy was highly determined by prevailing cultural and
political standards in the US. Even though there is evidence to suggest that some American
asylums insisted on uniformity and demanded that each inmate, for example, cut her hair
and prohibited any mention of her prior life, the American inmates did not appear to endure
the same types of physical and psychological trauma experience in Irish institutions. The
distinct political, social and religious climate of America offered mediation for these
women, and though the documented evidence suggests their lives within the walls of these
asylums were not easy, their Irish counterparts bore the brunt of a system that placed
vulnerable women already in desperate situations into tough institutions that isolated them
further from the outside world. In the end, progressive, feminist-based initiatives and
cultural movements away from custodial institutions proved key in ending the reign of

42
An article in the New York Times dated May 7, 1869 notes the gathering that took place
on the thirty-sixth anniversary of New York’s Magdalen Asylum where those in charge
proposed opening a laundry: “Cooking, washing and domestic duties generally were taught
to the girls. It was proposed to open a laundry, and the public were invited to send their
clothing by express, under the assurance that, express charges included, the expense would
be no greater than incurred with any washerwoman.”
43
See Lu Ann De Cunzo, Reform, Respite, Ritual: An Archaeology of Institutions; The
Magdalene Society of Philadelphia 1800-1850 and Steve Ruggles “Fallen Women: The
Inmates of the Magdalen Society Asylum of Philadelphia 1836-1908.” Smith also adds
Chicago and Toronto to the list of asylums in North America (xv).
44
It became apparent in the course of research that the word “wayward” came to have a
variety of different meanings. The spectrum was purposely broad and meant to include a
wide demographic.
41
Magdalen asylums in the United States much earlier than in Ireland.
45
Since rescue
movements were not abandoned in America when the asylums closed, the fact that Irish
Magdalen institutions lasted longer than their American counterparts indicates that the
institutions in the United States, as the women’s rights movement gained momentum,
embraced other methodologies for dealing with the women served by these places and
consequently many less women were institutionalized. In Ireland, these asylums continued
in operation well into the twentieth century.

The Genesis of Irish Magdalen Asylums
In Do Penance or Perish: Magdalen Asylums in Ireland (2001) Francis Finnegan
traces the origins of these institutions to rescue work aimed at reforming prostitutes in
England. She writes:
The first Refuge in England for the reception of the penitent ‘fallen’ was the
Magdalen Hospital, opened in Whitechapel in 1758, and later transferred to
Streatham. This institution admitted females aged between fifteen and twenty, and
could eventually house about 140 inmates desirous of reform. Its success
encouraged the establishment of a similar institution in Ireland, and in 1767,
46
a
twenty-four page pamphlet in the form of a letter was addressed to the public on:
‘The Important Subject of Establishing a Magdalen Asylum in Dublin’

(8).

Despite its religious name, the Dublin Magdalen Asylum was not initially run by the
Church but instead established by Lady Arbella Denny, who as Maria Luddy notes,
“had become interested in rescue work while involved in the reform of the Dublin
Foundling Hospital. There she came across unmarried mothers who had been abandoned
by their families and were forced to give up their children”

(61-62). Denny’s observation

45
It is not entirely clear when the last Magdalen asylum in the US closed its doors since
some organizations changed names at times, though by the early twentieth century they
seem to have stopped working under the name “Magdalen Asylum.” In Ireland they
continued in operation for about another 80 years.
46
Maria Luddy cites the founding date at 1766.
42
that a segment of society—poor, disenfranchised women—were ostracized and isolated
prefigures the evolution of Magdalen asylums from places of refuge to religious and
custodial institutions designed to house and redeem ‘wayward’ girls.
Initially, the need for these types of institutions stemmed from a Victorian response
to the rise of prostitution in urban centers. Maria Luddy’s study of prostitution in Dublin
during the middle of the nineteenth century considers both the typical woman at risk and
the statistical data that illustrates the increasing social and criminal effects of prostitution,
47

providing a portrait of the “fallen” woman and the urban conditions that characterized her
existence. Finnegan examines the typical rescue worker and the social circumstances that
motivated their efforts. She points out that rescue work was primarily a “middle and upper
class pursuit, centered on the reform of females drawn almost exclusively from the ranks of
the poor”

(14). These middle class women, she suggests, formed coalitions that offered
both volunteer and paid positions and allowed for the exchange of ideas. Finnegan notes
that, “No doubt that for many educated women, the work was both exciting and a
challenge, its pathos and urgency stimulating their reforming zeal” (14). In this way, the
enterprise was based on a mutually beneficial, symbiotic relationship: the fallen prostitutes
find refuge from their life of vice and the workers find personal satisfaction in aiding less
fortunate women in need.
Both Finnegan and Luddy assert that the primary requisite for admission into the
asylums was foremost the goal of repentance: “The only requirement common to all these
institutions in allowing entry was the expressed desire on the part of the ‘penitent’ to

47
For a detailed discussion on this topic, see Luddy’s study “Prostitution and Rescue Work
in Nineteenth-Century Ireland” in Women Surviving: Studies on Irish Women’s History in
the 19
th
and 20
th
Centuries (1990).
43
reform” (Luddy 63). With limited space and resources, the asylums could afford to be
selective. Not only was a commitment to reformation important, but age appeared to be as
well. Asylums preferred young, recently fallen girls that could easily be controlled into
following protocol. As Luddy notes, “The policies of some of the lay Magdalen
philanthropists seem to have excluded the admission of hardened prostitutes” (62).
48
They
were turned away for two reasons: they were seen as more difficult to reform and rescue
workers feared they would negatively influence the younger inmates. Since the initial goal
of these institutions had been to provide a haven for penitent women while attempting to
find or prepare for suitable employment, any potential distraction needed to be eliminated.
This policy of selective admission also allowed rescue institutions more “success” stories
since younger women were more likely to get off the streets and potentially even marry.
As the institutions spread throughout Ireland, the Catholic Church soon began
taking over the asylums, replacing the rescue workers with specially designated orders of
nuns, such as the Good Shepherd Sisters and the Sisters of Mercy. However, by the late
nineteenth century, it was clear that the typical inmate no longer fit the original prototype
envisioned by early rescue workers. Instead, as the Catholic Church began to take over the
asylums, the term ‘fallen women’ was redefined to include a broader demographic. This
meant that anyone from a prostitute in need of shelter to a young unwed mother or even
mentally ill women whose families could not keep them qualified under ‘fallen’. Smith
notes that, “Institutions founded with a philanthropic mission became, by the close of the

48
The selectivity of admission is a major topic of discussion in Steven Ruggles’ report
“Fallen Women: The Inmates of the Magdalen Society Asylum of Philadelphia 1836-
1908.”

44
nineteenth century, more carceral than rehabilitative in nature” (Ireland’s 25). Writes
Finnegan:
[M]any of the women consigned to these Homes were not of the prostitute class.
Some were ‘first fall’ cases, or unmarried mothers whose families (especially in
Ireland) wanted them out of the way. Others were feeble-minded, requiring
protection; and many were young girls alarmingly classified as ‘in need of restrain.’
(17)

This shift in the targeted demographic suggests the increasing number of rescue
organizations meant there were more spaces to fill, and this required a new approach to
saving ‘wayward’ women. This redefinition of the ‘fallen’ woman meant thousands more
potential Magdalens, and in a very real way recuperated the rescue movement in Ireland.
Finnegan points out that, “With the multiplication of Homes, however, and the dramatic
rise in the number of places available, the task of filling the institutions and staffing the
laundries so vital to their existence became increasingly urgent” (11). This change in
direction provided the impetus for not only a more expansive vision of the female penitent,
but that modification provided a larger workforce to draw from. Finnegan argues that,
combined with the general notion that rescue work was a noble and moral mission, the
value of the work these women produced in the laundries presented a real financial
incentive to continue the pursuit of rescue work since the more expansive definition created
a larger pool of unpaid labor for the laundries throughout Ireland.

Life Inside the Walls
Once admitted, Magdalens could be expected to follow a stern regimen of work,
prayer and silence as they strove for atonement. The Magdalen asylums, as scholars note,
functioned on an ethic of cleanliness based on religious rhetoric rooted in the expiation of
sin: by washing the local laundry and church linen clean, the girls could visibly enact the
45
redemption of sin by obliterating the stain of their offenses through the offering of penance
in daily religious instruction and complete obedience to a rigorous work ethic that
demanded ten or more hours a day of washing laundry from the local community. The
fixation on cleanliness and atonement dictated the pattern of daily living while the act of
washing and cleaning signaled a rebirth for the girls, an opportunity for renewal through
the purifying agents of soap and water.
Inside the asylums, strict adherence to the rules was demanded. Finnegan points
out that as late as the 1950s the nuns in the Good Shepherd home in Limerick would shave
girls’ heads to keep them from running away (26). Other methods of social control were
also instituted in the asylums, such as the practice of referring to the penitents as children
and forcing them to address all nuns as “Mother” (Finnegan 42). The women were also
expected to follow a code of silence and were not allowed to speak of their prior lives. All
of these rules were part of a grander scheme of control:
The Rules of Silence was a major feature of the women’s lives and continued well
into the second half of the twentieth century…The real purpose of Silence…was to
ensure quick discipline and order, and to subject the women intermittently, to
greater measures of control. (Finnegan 24)

Another symbolic gesture of control involved the regulation of clothes and the elimination
of any personal choice in regards to style. Each Magdalen was issued the same uniform in
an attempt to desexualize the women:
To discourage vanity and improper thoughts, uniforms were drab and shapeless, and
in most Refuges women had their hair cropped, in hideous contrast to the fashion of
the time. Such disfigurement—part punishment and part penance—was particularly
approved for that class of women, who, it was constantly alleged, had initially
‘fallen’ through pride in appearance and ‘love of dress.’
49
(Finnegan 26)

49
In the New York Times article dated May 7, 1869 about the New York Magdalen asylum,
it was noted that, “dress was the chief cause of the downfall of women.”
46
The final step of disciplining the penitents occurred when many of the Magdalens received
new names upon entrance to the asylum. The taking on of a new name, often times a
saint’s name, denoted a baptismal of sorts and symbolically signaled a new start for the
women. While it would later be noted that this was an attempt to protect the privacy of the
penitents, the complete disregard for individuality and the forced forsaking of identity had
devastating effects for women already victimized either by economic conditions, familial
and social alienation or in some cases, sexual abuse. When added to the total lack of
privacy, the constant surveillance by the nuns and the uncertainty of release for some
inmates as Smith notes, the picture that emerges of these institutions is one of “dumping
grounds” as Tom Dunne states:
Magdalen Asylums (like mental hospitals) were dumping grounds for the
unwanted and rejected; their brutal commercial laundries, where the women
symbolically washed away their sins, reflected the mores of the community
outside, and their distortion of Christianity and horror of sexuality mirrored the
wider culture. (75)

Many were introduced to Magdalen laundries by Peter Mullan’s 2002 film The Magdalene
Sisters, which depicts life inside one of these institutions. The film follows four young
women admitted to the laundry for different reasons: Margaret is raped by her cousin at a
family wedding; Bernadette is a pretty girl whose beauty may eventually cause her
problems; Rose became pregnant out of wedlock and Crispina, who has learning
disabilities, also had a child out of wedlock. Smith notes the film was based in part on a
1998 documentary of the asylums called Witness: Sex in a Cold Climate by Steve
Humphries and Mullan’s fictional drama is based in part on survivor testimony by women
47
who lived in a Magdalen asylum in Ireland.
50
The film featured scenes of humiliation by
nuns, violent head shavings and an oppressive work environment where the young
penitents were forced to continually wash laundry while the nuns collected money. Girls
who tried to run away were punished and faced severe sanctions.
The film prompted a wide divide between critics who saw it as either exposing a
dark chapter that needed dialogue, and those who argued the film exploited a macabre
gothic Catholic sensibility that, absent actual historical records, served to only fuel
sensationalism in the media. One of the major challenges facing scholars and artists
working on histories and artistic representations of Magdalen asylums has been the lack of
access to archives needed to construct a fuller picture of these institutions, especially in the
twentieth century as Smith notes:
Indeed, the historical record comes to an abrupt end with the advent of the twentieth
century. Because the religious congregations that operated these laundry
institutions continue to deny access to records for women entering the asylums after
1900s, historians are constrained in what they can say, with authority, about
Magdalen laundries as they developed and continued to operate throughout the past
century. (Ireland’s 24)

The lack of records means that scholars working in the field are generally left to analyze
the limited information and few artistic representations, such as Mullan’s film or Burke
Brogan’s play Eclipsed. Writing on the film, Smith argues that this lack of access has
definitive consequences for how the story of the laundries exist:
We have no official history for the Magdalen asylums in twentieth-century Ireland.
Indeed, as historians Maria Luddy (1995) and Frances Finnegan (2001) suggest, the
official record of the laundries will never be complete until the religious orders
make their archival records available. Moreover, this historical vacuum largely
explains why Ireland’s Magdalen laundries exist in the public mind at the level of

50
According to Dunne, Francis Finnegan served as a historical consultant on the
documentary (75).

48
story (survivor testimony and cultural representation) rather than history (archival
records and documentation. (“The Magdalene Sisters”)

The film sparked a vocal debate not only about the existence of these institutions in Ireland,
but about the responsibility of artistic works to accurate depict history. The critical reviews
also focused on the role of both the Catholic Church and collective community in assessing
responsibility for the lives of the young women sent to and confined in these laundries. In
a review of The Magdalene Sisters for the Dublin Review, Tom Dunne points out that:
An increasingly secular Ireland is comfortable with clerical villains, and in a mood
to make them pay, but the deeper question the film asks…is whether our anger
should not be directed also at those who gave them such license: at Irish society as a
whole. (75)

Leanne McCormick in “Sinister Sisters? The Portrayal of Ireland’s Magdalene Asylums in
Popular Culture” agrees with Dunne’s assertion about community responsibility for the
existence and maintenance of the asylums but suggests the Church “cannot be held entirely
accountable” (377). She argues that, “the story of these institutions is wider than the image
and narrative generated by the Magdalene Sisters, and it may be argued that films such as
this have a damaging effect on the research of academic historians of the subject” (373).
She criticizes what she considers the over-stylized aesthetic of the film
51
and argues that,
“The characters associated with the Catholic Church are portrayed as uniformly
unsympathetic. The nuns are presented as evil, money grabbing and malicious…The lack
of character depth and the uninterrupted cruelty unfortunately descends into caricature”
(376). Dunne agrees on this point, noting:

51
She notes: “The use of lighting is over-simplistic and obvious, with all the scenes in the
asylum shot in dim light with dark colours, in stark contrast to the blue skies and green
fields outside the convent walls” (376).
49
Surely, a crucial aspect of this abuse was that it was committed by one group of
Irish women against another. In the absence of any effort to understand the nuns’
perspective, some of the deeper questions are left unexplored. This is a story of
well-attested cruelty; pantomime villains are a distraction. (80)

Smith also notes how the portrait of the nuns “reduces most of the nuns on the screen to
mere stereotypes”, pointing out the implications of such a move: “Such a characterization
encourages contemporary audiences to evade a systemic critique of Magdalen institutions,
one that makes evident the range of social, political, and cultural forces implicated in the
abuse of the penitents” (“The Magdalene Sisters”). McCormick also points to the
collective responsibility of the local community:
They were kept open by the support of the general public, who placed their
daughters in them, sent their laundry to them and donated funds when
required…While the power exerted by the Catholic Church in the Republic of
Ireland over social and moral behaviour is undeniable, if women did not enter
homes voluntarily, in many cases it was parents who made the decision to have
their daughters placed in them. The asylums offered an alternative for families who
felt ashamed by their daughters’ behaviour. However, as many parents in the same
position made the decision not to place their daughters in homes, the Catholic
Church cannot be held entirely accountable or held responsible for forcing parents
to utilize the institutions. (377)

However, Francis Finnegan would disagree with such an assessment, pointing blame
towards both the church and the community:
Nevertheless, the idea that society was blameless—that Magdalen Asylums were so
shrouded in secrecy that the public was unaware of what was taking place—is a
myth. These institutions, though forbidding and inaccessible, were part of the
community from which they emerged. They were founded in response to local
conditions and demands for reform; and the success with which funds were raised
and laundry orders received reveals a system both supported and approved. A
conspiracy of silence may have marked the disappearance of individual women; and
the fact that others were permanently lost sight of, may have been attributed to
‘emigration’, for example, by relatives resolved to hide their shame. (46-47)

Elizabeth Butler Cullingford argues in “‘Our Nuns are not a Nation’: Politicizing the

Convent in Irish Literature and Film” that a certain “sexualized anti-Catholic Gothic” (59)
50
pervades the look and feel of the film, and also seeks to reassess the current trend of nun-
bashing prevalent in the culture: “I was once a convent girl myself, and as a feminist I
would like to recuperate the ethical and social value of these communities of women, even
as I confront their past corruption and their probable disappearance” (55). She argues that
the nunnery provided a powerful alternative to women with few options.
52

Finnegan, however, notes that although the nuns were also confined within the
walls of these institutions, they had the force of religion, support and reverence from the
community on their side:

Also confined for life, the nuns too, of course, were institutionalised; but these
women, command little sympathy. Theirs was a self-imposed exile, from a world
which revered, rather than rejected them—they were exalted, rather than despised.
These were not grieving, post-natal mothers, frantic for their babies and made
cruelly conscious of their shame. Nor were they made to feel self-loathing and
disgust. On the contrary, they were ‘angelic’—‘perpetual virgins’, whose salvation
was secure. (48)

These differing perspectives on the role of communal responsibility reflects an important
component in the Irish debate over the culture that allowed young women to be carted off
and seen as individually responsible for their incarceration. Jenny Beale in the introduction
to Women in Ireland: Voices of Change (1987) points out that the relationship between
Irish politics and women’s issues have continually been underscored and undermined by
Catholicism:

52
Cullingford points to Mary Magray’s The Transforming Power of the Nuns where
“Magray defines the Irish convent not merely as an economic refuge for surplus females,
but as a privileged space where women could reject marriage and childbirth, choosing to
live, work and love within a traditional community that offered them more cultural power
and self-determination, and possibly more sensual satisfaction than was to be found in the
home” (56).
51
The traditional Catholic view of morality, and the one which had influenced the
1937 Constitution, was based on the notion of ‘natural law.’ This assumes that
there are basic moral principles which are unconditional and absolute, and which
can be applied to specific moral issues to determine what is right and wrong.
Natural law is frequently invoked in support of Catholic teaching on the family and
on sexual morality. (11-12)

The irony is that women were heavily involved in the project of Irish nationalism at the
start of the twentieth century as Ireland fought to institute its own government. Societies
such as Cumann na mBan testify to female involvement in both the 1916 Easter Rising and
the 1919 War of Independence. Llewellyn-Jones also points to the connection between
Catholicism and Nationalism, noting how female iconography becomes embedded in the
Irish cultural landscape (67).
53
/
54
Kilfeather notes the justification and extent of the
Catholic church’s grip on Irish society, pointing out its control in aspects of Irish life from
secular concerns to the domestic home to the regulation of censorship boards,
55
writing
“the leaders of the Catholic church in Ireland repeatedly entwined discourses of racial
purity, national pride and patriarchal authority” (106).
Ultimately, the girls who were sent to the asylums as punishment were the ones
who paid the price for these dogmatic philosophies. Ironically, as Finnegan points out, it

53
For a discussion on this trope see Catherine Nash, “Embodied Irishness: Gender,
sexuality and Irish identities.” In Search of Ireland: A Cultural Geography. Ed. Brian
Graham. London: Routledge, 1997. 108-127.
54
See also Meaney’s “Virgin Mother Ireland” in Gender, Ireland, and Cultural Change.
New York: Routledge, 2010. 3-20.
55
For a comprehensive study of the Irish Censorship Board and its effect on Ireland
(including book smuggling across the border) see “‘The best banned in the land’:
Censorship and Irish Writing since 1950” by Donal Ó Drisceoil who notes that “The
passage of the Censorship of Publications Act, 1929 had been the result of a sustained
campaign by Catholic Action groups after independence, part of a general process of
‘Catholicization’ that became the primary element in the forging of a separate Irish
identity” (146). Interestingly, he points out that, “The list of banned Irish authors in the
1930s and 1940s reads like a ‘Who’s Who’ of Irish literature” and includes, among others,
“James Joyce, Samuel Beckett, George Bernard Shaw, Sean O’Casey, Liam O’Flaherty,
Sean O’Faolain, Frank O’Connor…” (148).
52
was the implementation of new technologies—the washing machine—that actually
engineered the end of unpaid female labor in these institutions, eventually alleviating both
the workload and collective suffering of many young women. Yet, without access to the
archives, it is not possible to know with certainly how many women passed through these
institutions. Smith notes that, “Unlike those who entered before 1900, we still do not know
how many women resided in the Magdalen institutions thereafter” (Ireland’s 42). Dilworth
also points out that, “To date, historians have not been given access to the twentieth century
records of the convent laundries. The number of Irish women who passed through the
institutions therefore remains unknown” (viii). In the end, she notes it is estimated that
over the course of their operation 30,000 women lived in Magdalen asylums throughout
Ireland.
56

Contemporary Responses to the Legacy of the Magdalen Asylums

I was an unmarried girl
I’d just turned twenty-seven
When they sent me to the sisters
For the way men looked at me
Branded a jezebel
I knew I was not bound for Heaven
I’d be cast in shame
Into the Magdalene laundries
(“The Magdalene Laundries” by The Chieftains featuring Joni Mitchell)
57

56
In February 2013, after the completion of this chapter, the results of an eighteen-month
inquiry into the state’s involvement in Magdalen laundries was released. As the Irish
Times notes: “Some 10,000 women and girls entered Magdalene laundries since 1922 with
more than a quarter of referrals made or facilitated by the State” (Carbery), substantiating
links scholars such as Smith had long stated. The report included survivor testimony and
called for financial compensation for the women. It also revised the commonly used figure
of Magdalens who entered these institutions over the course of their history from 30,000 to
10,000. The Irish Times carried extensive coverage of the report and public reaction.
57
Other popular singers and artists have also included songs about Magdalen Asylums on
albums. In fact, Sinéad O’Connor revealed that as a child she was sent away for 18 months
for shoplifting to An Grianán Training Centre in Dublin, a Magdalen Asylum where she
received no wages for her labor (“To Sinéad O’Connor”).
53
Though the last Magdalen Asylum in Ireland closed in 1996,
58
public outrage over
their two hundred year existence began in earnest in 1993 when upon the sale of High Park
Convent in Drumcondra Dublin dozens of bodily remains were exhumed on the property
site:
The owners of the convent, the Sisters of Our Lady of Charity, had ordered the
mass exhumation of 133 bodies of Magdalen laundry women buried in a section of
the convent grounds. The reason? They had sold the 12-acre section to developers
for around one million pounds…Despite the publicity which accompanied the 1993
exhumation, the question still lingers: who are the Magdalen women, that they can
be so easily discarded, without explanation and in such numbers? (Gallagher)

Gallagher’s inquiry contemplates the politics of commemoration, raising questions about
how history is constructed and remembered in particular spaces
59
as he reflects on the small
public memorial—a metal plaque on a bench in St. Stephen’s Green—dedicated in 1996 to
the women of the asylums: “To the women who worked in the Magdalen laundry
institutions and to the children born to some members of those communities—reflect here
upon their lives” (Gallagher). Smith notes the plaque was dedicated on April 20, 1996:
Finally, in a 1990s Celtic Tiger Ireland bubbling with newfound economic
prosperity and cultural confidence, the nation’s Magdalen women were accorded a
public, if still not personal, memorial. The plaque and park bench, itself dating
from the late Victorian era, now serves as the only national monument to this
community of women and their place in the nation’s history. (160)

58
In September of 1996, the Irish Times commemorated the imminent closure of Ireland’s
last Magdalen Asylum: “A controversial chapter of Dublin life will end next month with
the closure of what’s believed to be the last of the capital’s convent laundries, that
belonging to the Convent of the Sisters of Our Lady of Charity in Sean Mac Dermott
Street. At the height of its productivity 150 women worked in this laundry. Today 40
women are in residence at the convent, the eldest of them 79, the youngest in her 40s, all of
whom will remain living there after the laundry closes on October 25
th
” (Culliton).

59
For a detailed discussion on landscapes and commemoration, see Ailbhe Smyth’s “The
Floozie in the Jacuzzi” in Feminist Studies 17.1 (Spring, 1991): 7-28.

54
To commemorate is to remember and acknowledge, and functions on both the private and
public level, serving to create and unify community. If commemoration functions to
establish a common, shared narrative amongst its citizens, it also bolsters tourism by
presenting a sense of cultural history.
60
The person or event lives on and is embodied in
the statue or parade; the narrative does not end upon a linear time scale but carries on after
death. But the inevitable question of history prevails: what events and what people get
commemorated and who chooses?
As Culliton notes, the bodies of the women found on the property were “disinterred,
cremated and reburied in Glasnevin cemetery”

(Culliton). This incited both public outrage
and curiosity: as Gallagher wonders, just who were these women? The answer, as it
pertains to those specific 133 bodies, is that no one can really be sure. Some were reburied
in the mass gave without names. It is unclear even how or when some of them died.
Accounts even differ as to the actual number of bodies discovered on the premises, with
some arguing that it was closer to 150 remains. Here, the anonymity of these women runs
counter to the cult of commemoration on display in Dublin. Smith notes that the
presentation of the plaque is significant for the prominence of its location in Dublin and the
inclusion of the Magdalens with monuments commemorating political and cultural leaders
of Ireland: “Theobald Wolfe Tone, Robert Emmet, Constance Markievicz, James Clarence
Mangan, William Butler Yeats and James Joyce” (162). In fact, Dublin is replete with
multiple statues, icons and plaques all over the city that celebrate the achievements of

60
For a discussion on Irish tourism, memory and the construction of cultural heritage, see
Irish Tourism: Image, Culture and Identity (ed. Michael Cronin and Barbara O’Connor,
2003). See also Heritage, Memory and the Politics of Identity: New Perspectives on the
Cultural Landscape (ed. Niamh Moore and Yvonne Whelan, 2007) and Ireland’s Heritage:
Critical Perspectives on Memory and Identity (ed. Mark McCarthy, 2005).
55
significant these figures who brought the nation into being.
61
Larkin, Parnell, Collins,
Joyce, Wilde, and Kavanagh all have statues dedicated to them in prominent spots
throughout the city; Beckett and O’Casey had new bridges recently named after them;
Connolly and Heuston boast train stations with their names. Daniel O’Connell has a
central bridge, a tower in Glasnevin Cemetery, a main thoroughfare and a monument along
that main thoroughfare named after him. Despite the abundance of commemorated male
figures, women are not similarly represented in the urban landscape, even though they
contributed significantly to the Irish cultural and political scene, and in large numbers. The
question then remains: where are the spaces named for and commemorating the lives and
work of women? On the emergence of the bodies on the Magdalen grounds, Smith notes:
“The women’s bodies, interred anonymously between 1866 and 1984, were to be exhumed
and cremated and the ashes reburied, again anonymously, in small individual urns stacked
on top of each other in a double plot at Glasnevin Cemetery” (162). Yet the 1993
exhumation signaled a call of attention to the circumstances of their lives. In time, and as
women came forward to reveal their experiences in these institutions, a stark portrait of life
inside Ireland’s Magdalen asylums emerged publicly in different forums.
In 1994, Patricia Burke Brogan brought the story of the asylums to the theatre stage
with her realist play, Eclipsed. In 1999 The Chieftains released “The Magdalene
Laundries” featuring Joni Mitchell on their Tears of Stone album. Documentaries such as
Witness: Sex in a Cold Climate (1998) and The Forgotten Maggies (2009), and films such
as Peter Mullan’s The Magdalene Sisters (2002) offered a vivid, if controversial, cinematic

61
For an extensively detailed examination on this topic, see Yvonne Whelan’s Reinventing
Modern Dublin: Streetscape, Iconography and the Politics of Identity (University College
Dublin Press, 2003.)
56
take on the subject, while in the same year The Magdalen Whitewash (2002), a play by
Valerie Goodwin, appeared on stage in Dublin. More recently, a cavalcade of theatre plays
based on the Magdalens have emerged in the wake of stark revelations, such as Conspiracy
of Silence: The Magdalene Laundries (2009) by Scottish writer Anne V. McGravie, as well
as site-specific works such as Louise Lowe’s Laundry (2011) and The Lost Story of the
Magdalen Asylum (2010), set in Australia, by Kylie Trounson. Also in 2010, the
University of Akron Press published Rachel Dilworth’s collection of poetry entitled The
Wild Rose Asylum: Poems of the Magdalen Laundries of Ireland to critical acclaim. Other
theatre works such as The Quane’s Laundry, a five-act historical fiction play set in 1900
Dublin by Imelda Murphy and Magdalene, a solo show with eight characters set in 1985
Dublin by Erin Layton, also deal with depictions of Ireland’s Magdalene asylums and are
currently works in progress awaiting full productions.

Patricia Burke Brogan’s Eclipsed
Everyone blamed the sisters, but the State did nothing to intervene.
(Patricia Burke Brogan, Galway Independent 22 Oct. 2008)

Though the later part of the Celtic Tiger witnesses a flourishing theatrical
engagement with the Magdalen asylums it was actually a little known play by a former nun
that initiated theatre audiences with the story of life inside an Irish laundry and would later
receive revived attention both at home and aboard.
62
Published in 1994 by Galway-based
Salmon Publishing, Patricia Burke Brogan’s Eclipsed takes place inside a ‘Convent-
Laundry’ and is divided into two acts framed by two time periods: the first and last scene of

62
There have been productions in Ireland, Scotland and the US, including New York, Los
Angeles and San Francisco.
57
the play take place in 1992 while the rest of the action is set in 1963. The play continues to
resonate because, as Smith notes, “More than any other contemporary representation,
Eclipsed narrates a story that liberates these women from derisory discourses of criminality
and mental instability while manifesting the results of institutionalization on their daily
lives and consciousness” (92). A “former novice who spent some time working in an
institutional laundry” (Eclipsed cover), Burke Brogan tells the story of a group of girls
incarcerated in a Magdalen asylum in the early 1960s and one woman’s return to the
grounds thirty years later to discover the truth about her birth mother. When Rosa, an
adoptee raised by American parents, returns to the site in 1992 looking for any information
about her biological mother Brigit, she is met by Nellie-Nora, a former resident
incarcerated with Brigit in the 1960s and now the current groundskeeper of the defunct
laundry:
Nellie-Nora: I hope you find something to help you.
I hope you find what you’re looking for.

Rosa: I hope so, Nellie-Nora! When I found her
name, Brigit Murphy, and this address in
my adoption papers, I had to come!

Nellie-Nora: Anything that’s left from those times is in
this basket! (5)

In the basket, Rosa uncovers faded pictures of infants and an old ledger detailing the
inmates of St. Paul’s Laundry in Killmacha 1963 including the names of the children they
bore. She locates her mother’s entry and finds her own name listed there:
Rosa: (puzzled) Brigit Murphy—a girl, Rosa?—
My mother!—Penitent? (7)

The play fades into 1963 and depicts the stories of Cathy, Nellie-Nora, Mandy and Brigit as
young girls in the laundry, fond of Elvis and gossip, attempting to follow the rigid demands
58
and Spartan conditions of life inside the asylum. Burke Brogan’s stage directions reveal
the austerity in the girls’ clothes: “The penitents are dressed in shapeless worn-out overalls
with white aprons, black laced-up shoes and thick black stockings” (3). Inside the laundry,
the domineering Mother Victoria oversees their daily lives while the sympathetic younger
Sister Virginia attempts to proffer some measure of compassion with her interventions on
their behalf. The girls talk of the children they were forced to give up and occasionally
dream of romance and escape, at times even amusing themselves with the found remnants
of life outside: lipstick tubes, old photographs and the remains of old cigarettes stuck inside
laundry pockets, while they wash the community’s clothes and religious frocks and linen.
As Smith notes, “Eclipsed emphasizes communal friendship rather than individual isolation
among the Magdalen women” (96).
Cathy is the first to broach the subject of escape when she discovers that Father
Durcan left the front door open and forgot to close the main gate as he left in his car. She
made it out to the main road:
Mandy: Outside? Oh, Cathy! Outside!

Cathy: Yes! Outside on the road! But I was like this!
No coat! As I walked up the hill, I could
smell the sea! The sun was shining on me at
last! –A fella passed on a bike—whistling! (14)

When the girls ask her what happened next, Cathy reveals a few important facts:
Cathy: No smashers, Mandy No! A few children
pointed at me, laughed and called me
names. A laundry van passed, turned around
and came at me. I fought, I bit them. I
screamed. –But they brought me back.—
Mother Victoria gave me a mug of strong
tea and the usual sermon! (She rubs her head.)
–But I’m getting out! I’ll keep trying! I’m
getting out! (14)
59
Cathy’s assertion that children laughed at her reveals that the community at large is aware
of the laundry girls and sees them fit for public humiliation. Her response also indicates
that she has tried to run away before (receiving the “usual” sermon) and reveals her fervent
intent to get out to see the children taken from her. Later, when Sister Virginia distributes
the mail, Cathy receives a birthday card from her twins and wonders “Am I ever going to
be a mother to them?” (16). The text, at this point, does not reveal their location or the
conditions of their lives (though later it is revealed they live in a nearby orphanage) but this
brief contact with Cathy reminds the reader of the different types of fates these women
encountered. Some were forced to give up their children to orphanages, to the church, or to
wealthy Irish or American families; often the children were adopted and the birth mothers
were never allowed any further contact.
In an effort to lift Cathy’s mood after she was returned to the laundry, the other girls
throw her a modest birthday party with tea and bread and offer small gifts they made from
scraps. They imagine a lavish party with Elvis:
Brigit: Elvis drops in! Sees our Mandy in her long
lacy dress and falls madly in love with her!

Nellie-Nora: They dance all the way to the airport and
fly off to Hollywood! (17)

The girls sing songs by Elvis and imagine eating delicious food and indulging in decadent
deserts. Mandy encourages them to surrender to their imagination and simply make
believe: “Close you eyes and pretend! It’ll be true if you pretend!” (18). The recourse to
the realm of the imaginary and sensual reveals both an adolescent sensibility and a
desperate escapist mentality throughout their incarceration. Anne F. O’Reilly argues that
“This element of play pushes the parameters of Eclipsed beyond the narrow confines of a
60
realist frame, as the world of what if intermittently breaks through the prison of their lives,
and questions all received interpretations” (63).
When a new girl, Juliet, arrives from an orphanage, she is bombarded with
questions from a desperate Cathy (“Do you know my Michele and Emily? My twins?
They’re six years old. Do you know them?” (21) and when she discovers they will make
their First Holy Communion soon, this only strengthens her resolve to escape. Juliet
meanwhile has lived in institutions all her life, just like her mother, and cannot imagine life
on the outside:
Juliet: No, Sister! I don’t want to live out there!

Sister Virginia: Why, Juliet? Your life’s ahead of you!

Juliet: My Mammy lived here until she died.
I want to stay in here! (22)

Juliet represents a key figure in the Magdalen Asylum narrative: the product of life-long
institutionalization and inculcated fear, the children of inmates (like long-term Magdalens)
were often unable to live on the outside after years in the system. Juliet expresses a deep
terror of both men—“But look at what happened to Mammy!” (22) she cries to Sister
Virginia—and the city—“But, Sister, I was never on a bus or a train! I’d be afraid!” (23)—
a natural consequence of her sheltered life. After revealing a frightening encounter with
the vegetable man who threatened to kill her at the orphanage, and after Mother Joachim
accuses her of leading him on, Sister Virginia advises Juliet that not all men attack women
and she must get out and live:
Sister Virginia: He was just one man, Juliet!
You mustn’t stay in here! Take a job outside!
Go away and see new places! Read the great
books! Earn your own money. We’re on an
island here! (23)
61
The irony of Sister Virginia’s idealistic sermon is that she is literally carries the keys to the
doors that would allow the girls to escape but she cannot let them leave. Brigit, whose
baby’s father is set to marry in a week and does not yet know about baby Rosa whom she
had to give up, keeps insisting she hand the keys over but Sister Virginia will not yield: “I
can’t, Brigit! I’m not in charge!—I’m sorry!” (25). Like Juliet, Sister Virginia also
represents a seminal figure in the Magdalen narrative. She is typified as the young Sister
following orders and caught in a difficult binary: while she sympathizes with the girls’
plight and even intervenes on their behalf to Mother Victoria, she nonetheless refuses to
hand over the keys to the front door that would allow the girls to escape and thus, as a
woman actively participates in the subjugation of other women.
Meanwhile, while Cathy remembers her twins and Brigit ponders her lost love and
child, Mandy imagines a romance with Elvis and insists on writing him letters. The girls
join in her romantic fantasy and suggest silly refrains to include in her letters, until reality
intrudes: how will he find her? Brigit offers a rough dose of reality:

Brigit: Saint Paul’s Home for Penitent Women!
Home for the unwanted. The outcasts! Saint
Paul’s Home for the women nobody wants!

(Brigit and Mandy push one another. Mandy falls to the floor.)

Brigit: How do you think that sounds? What’ll he
think? Ha? You’d be finished with him!
Finished forever and ever!

Mandy: (sobbing) No, Brigit! No address! Elvis will
find me! Elvis will find his Mandy!

Brigit: Nobody wants you! Nobody wants any of us! (35)

62
Brigit soon apologizes for hurting Mandy but the truth of her statement is clear.
Attempting to ease the pain and alleviate the tense atmosphere, Juliet volunteers to help:

Juliet: I’ll write the address for you, Mandy.
(Juliet writes)

Juliet: Ireland! (35)

Juliet’s act locates the girls geographically, reminding the reader that these girls, and
countless like them, are locked up indefinitely in Ireland. As a peace offering, Brigit offers
to hide Mandy away in the clean laundry basket that will be shipped off outside later:
“Hop in, Mandy! Now’s your chance! Off to Hollywood! Come, Cathy! We’ll pack her
off to the U.S.A.!” (36). The girls giggle and construct an Elvis-husband out of the priest’s
clean linen and dress up Mandy for her “wedding,” draping her apron over her head and
creating a veil and train from a sheet.
Juliet: You look gorgeous, Mandy!

Mandy: I am! I’m gorgeous!

Brigit: Remember! I’m the Bishop! I’ll do this
important wedding! (39)

Brigit, impersonating the Bishop, performs the “wedding”, following the customary
observance of ceremony and pronounces Mandy and the fake Elvis “man and wife” to
which Nellie-Nora says, “Have as many babies as you want now, Mandy!” (40). This
symbolic acting out of ritual functions on multiple levels. Brigit’s assumption of a male
identity to perform this rite reminds the reader that only male power has the ability to grant
both the freedom and happiness the marriage scene suggests. It also offers a reading of
Brigit’s rebelliousness as a marker of masculine energy; she wants to inhabit the domain of
63
men and partake in their autonomy and power, an avenue foreclosed to these women as
Anna McMullan notes: “The surveillance of the women is contrasted with the freedom and
travel of the priests whose laundry the women take care of” (78-79). Nellie-Nora’s
directive to “[h]ave as many babies as you want now, Mandy!” reminds the audience that if
these women had been married, even at this young age, the occasion of their pregnancies
would have been cause for celebration not incarceration and further asserts the supremacy
of marriage as the only suitable circumstance for bearing and raising children. Every
aspect of their lives is essentially staked on the construct of marriage; in the absence of it,
they are vilified as fallen women and their children taken away.
Perhaps one of the most complicated scenes of the play occurs between Mother
Victoria and Sister Virginia when Virginia attempts to intercede behalf of the girls,
explaining she finds them “sad”:

Sister Virginia Yes, Mother! The women need their
children! –Is it really necessary to keep
them locked away?

Mother Victoria Those women can’t be trusted! They’re
weak, Sister! No control! They’ve broken
the sixth and ninth Commandments!

Sister Virginia But isn’t our God a Loving Father, a
Forgiving Father? The men, who made
them pregnant, broke the same
Commandments!

Mother Victoria Men? You don’t understand, Sister! No one
wants those women! We protect them from
their passions! We given them food, shelter
and clothing! We look after their spiritual
needs! (44)

64
In the end Mother Victoria reminds her that, “Eve started it all!” (45). Like Sister Virginia,
the older Mother Victoria actively participates in the subjugation of these young women,
tracing the lineage of female disobedience and the fall from grace to the Biblical Eve while
claiming to offer security and refuge from the outside world that has forsaken the girls.
Though not outwardly violent towards the girls, Mother Victoria symbolizes the stern,
cold-hearted religious matron who lords over laundry girls in other Magdalen narratives.
However, Burke Brogan forgoes the typically sadistic persona of this figure (represented
vividly in other forums such as Peter Mullan’s The Magdalene Sisters and Anne
McGravie’s Brogie in Conspiracy of Silence: The Magdalene Laundries who, while not a
nun, nonetheless is in charge of the laundry) offering instead a more complicated portrait of
female power dynamics and struggles within a religious, all-women community. Mother
Victoria, though not necessarily a sympathetic character, is also not presented as simply a
cruel villain bent on revenge and impervious to emotion. She is following the letter of her
training and belief, and if she finds anything irreconcilable between the two, like Sister
Virginia, she does not reveal them. Torn between her religious instruction and her personal
observations, Sister Virginia, however, is unable to find coherence or consistency in the
punishment these girls face.
Meanwhile, in a fit of rage, Brigit confronts Sister Virginia and demands the keys
again: “You think if you keep us locked up, that we’ll forget about living! About being
alive!” (59). Having found a lipstick in the laundry, Brigit holds it out threateningly like a
weapon at Sister Virginia, pins her to the wall and throws her in the soiled linen. When
Sister Virginia insists she is on her side, Brigit renounces her: “No! You’re not! I’d kill
you but you’re not worth it!” (60) before aggressively throwing the lipstick at her. Brigit
65
transforms herself into a menacing thug in this scene, resorting to physical violence and
intimidation with the only weapon at hand.
63
The absurdity of the lipstick-as-weapon is
undercut when Sister Virginia expresses genuine fear at the exchange when it becomes
clear Brigit intends to mark her. The lipstick, an implement of vanity and commercialized
beauty in the secular world is anathema to the nun and runs counter to her vows of
modesty. Brigit’s brazen display of defiance against authority, her irreverence towards a
religious figure, and her recourse to street violence mark her as the type of “wayward girl”
Mother Victoria insists they are protecting. In essence, she metamorphosis into the very
image of the wayward girl both church and state have constructed for her. The irony of her
name, then, also offers another avenue for reading the rebellious Brigit since Brigid is one
of the three patron saints of Ireland. Here, she thoroughly disassociates herself from Saint
Brigid, (who, incidentally, is also the patron saint of children born out of wedlock) and the
version of idealized femininity she offers.
After the confrontation Brigit insists on hiding away in the basket of laundry that
will be sent out so she can find her baby Rosa but when Brigit is caught by Mother
Victoria, Cathy sees an opportunity to escape and with the help of the remaining girls is
hidden away in the basket during the commotion. O’Reilly notes the importance of the
laundry basket:
While it is obviously associated with kind of work the women do…it also becomes
a container for play. In place of the humiliation of laundering other people’s
undergarments it becomes a space in which they can parody their situation and
imagine alternative realities. (65)

63
The depiction of the relationship between violence and teenage girls is explored in more
depth in Chapter Two and focuses on plays such as Duck (2003) by Stella Feehily and
Danti-Dan (1995) by Gina Moxley.
66
Both Brigit and Sister Virginia face punishment as Mother Victoria asserts that “Blind
Obedience” is necessary. Cathy meanwhile slips out in the laundry in the basket unnoticed.
The next afternoon, an announcement is made that Cathy has suffocated to death during her
escape out of the laundry; she was found in Galway, dead amongst the shipped-out clean
clothes. When Mother Victoria suggests they pray for her, Brigit once more demands the
keys from Sister Virginia, and in a final gesture Sister Virginia hands them over to her.
The last scene of the play moves into 1992 and resumes with the returned daughter
Rosa sifting through the remains of the laundry basket, trying to find any remnants of her
mother’s life and her own existence. Nellie-Nora reveals to Rosa that Brigit disappeared
after Cathy’s death and was never heard from again. There are multiple ways to read
Brigit’s escape from the Magdalene laundry. McMullan points out that “Brigit does
escape, and the laundry is closed down after the events of the play, so resistance is shown
finally to have some impact on the system” (81). While her escape can be read the ultimate
enactment of defiance, it is worth remembering that Nellie-Nora reveals she was never
heard from again. Irish narratives often gesture towards the image of the disappeared
woman (who often ends up homeless at some stage)—from the sisters in Brian Friel’s
Dancing at Lughnasa (1990) to William Trevor’s female protagonists in Felicia’s Journey
(1994) to Marina Carr’s By the Bog of Cats… (1998). Here Brigit, like her literary
predecessors, is woman who disappears and is never heard from again.
At the end of the play, a voice-over by Sister Virginia is heard:
Voice over: (Sister Virginia)
In 1992, to make place for a building
development at St. Paul’s Home, the
remains of Mary Kate Dempsey, Mary Jane

67
O’Sullivan, Kitty O’Hara, Julia Mannion,
Betty and Annie Gormley, Ellen McAuley,
Cathy McNamara and three hundred other
unnamed penitents were exhumed
cremated and reburied outside in Killmacha
Cemetery. Mandy Prenderville has not left
the local Mental Institution since 1963. (76-77)

Smith notes that, “Some eighteen months before the actual exhumation of 155 sets of
human remains from the Hyde Park Magdalen asylum in Drumcondra and their reburial at
Glasnevin Cemetery in Dublin, Eclipsed made manifest to their audiences the ultimate
danger of sitting in the dark (O’Kane 1993; O’Toole 1993; O’Loughlin 1993; Raftery
2003; Humphreys 2003)” (Ireland’s 105). The final monologue of the play, in poem
fashion, recalls the act of naming in Yeats’ “Easter, 1916” where he lists the names of the
Easter Rising casualties. Yet whereas Yeats methodically memorializes the names
belonging to fallen heroes of the new Irish state, Burke Brogan’s women are officially
unacknowledged even though the disinterred remains were later reburied in Glasnevin
Cemetery, where many Easter 1916 rebels are buried. As scholars have pointed out, the
incident in Drumcondra sparked public rage. It is significant to note that the sale of the
property in 1993 and the subsequent disinterment of remains occurred during the upswing
of the Celtic Tiger, at the start of the economic upswing, and helped bring the stories of the
Magdalens to light, and the subsequent publication and staging of theatre plays in
conjunction with other artistic works at last demanded civic, political and juridical
recognition for these women.

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Magdalen Asylums, Commemoration and Markers of Memory
In Gender, Ireland and Cultural Change, Geraldine Meaney writes about Mannix
Flynn’s artistic tribute to the unnamed women whose bodies were exhumed upon the sale
of a piece of land belonging to a Magdalen asylum in Dublin. His project combined both
commemoration strategies and the use of urban geography to consider the relationship
between the spectator and art:
It differentiated itself from ‘installation’ art by mapping that which was hidden and
buried onto public exterior space. In a conjunction of text and monument, Call Me
By My Name ruptured the boundaries between public and private; past and present;
art, trial and politics. The extallation was far more than a memorial. It was in many
ways the apotheosis of the immensely strong current in contemporary Irish culture,
which is concerned to uncover the past and reshape what is understand by Irish
history. It also resisted and exposed the equally strong desire to draw a sharp
dividing line between that past and the present. (Meaney 64)

While Flynn’s novel Nothing to Say (1983) and play James X (2003)
64
center on the
industrial schools, he recognizes a similar trajectory for the girls and women confined in
Ireland’s Magdalen asylums in his other works, particularly in his public art piece entitled
“Call Me By My Name.” As Meaney and Smith both note, the location of this artwork is
significant: Flynn’s project, situated in the heart of Dublin’s city centre generated a lot of
attention and established a thread of traumatic identification between the children who
suffered in the industrial schools and the young women incarcerated in the laundries.
Melissa Sihra echoes the close association between the two institutions:
The laundries and state-run orphanages, ‘industrial schools’, form the backbone of
the hidden Ireland that was enabled by a culture of silence and denial. What
emerges from the stories of these single mothers is the sense of penance and

64
The evolution of Nothing to Say into James X after its debut as a novel follows the
pattern of another famous Irish story of youth and imprisonment—Brendan Behan’s novel
The Borstal Boy and its subsequent theatre play The Hostage. This historical lineage offers
one model for reading Irish narratives of youthful incarceration.

69
stigmatization which they had to endure on a daily basis, whether in the constant
arduous, unpaid task of cleaning dirty laundry, or by not being administered pain
relief during childbirth, as part of their moral ‘atonement.’ (“Interchapter II” 94)

Oftentimes, young women were transferred from an industrial school into a Magdalene
laundry, or the children of Magdalene inmates were placed in industrial schools, usually
while the mother was herself incarcerated in a laundry, and sometimes mother and child
were in close proximity without knowing the whereabouts of each other. Smith notes it
was possible, given the layout of the institutions, that “both resided within the same
religious compound but in different buildings” (Ireland’s 131).
In 1993, upon the discovery of the bodies buried on the grounds of the Dublin
laundry, a scandal finally erupted over the lives and identities of these women. But as
Meaney points out, there was a sense that “this story was already known”:
The accumulating evidence over the last decade of the scale of the
institutionalization, degradation and casual torture of children by religious orders
acting with the active collusion and support of the state in Ireland between 1930 and
1980 culminated in the publication of the Ryan Report in 2009. The terrible
seeping sense of horror with which many in Ireland responded to revelations of the
systematic nature of the physical, emotion and sexual abuse and economic
exploitation of children in “care” and of women unfortunate enough to be caught in
the Magdalene laundry system has been deepened by the uncanny sense that this
story was already known. (xv)

In the fall of 2010, Mannix Flynn’s production company, Far Cry Productions, presented
Loss, an exhibition that featured “Padded Cell and Other Stories” and a reading of James X
(2003). “Padded Cell and Other Stories”, an installation piece, centers on the
decommissioning of the padded cell by the Irish prison authorities. Flynn offers a special
dedication of his combined project: “This work is dedicated to the women who were
incarcerated in the Magdalene laundries, Mother and Baby homes and other such
institutions. Women who after death still await the justice denied to them in life”
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(“Performance James X”). His dedication here links the suffering of the Magdalens with
the suffering of the industrial school children—a connection Smith points out is made vivid
in documentaries about the Magdalens (Ireland’s 130)
65
—and continues his mission to
provoke cultural dialogue by engaging the public with artistic responses to these legacies,
such as provocative theatrical pieces and art project installations on street corners like Far
Cry Productions’ “Culture of Child Abuse”, a large display of both the Ryan and Murphy
reports on a public wall on the corner of Essex Street West and Exchange Street in city
centre Dublin at a time when neither report had yet been made public.
This work, like Far Cry Productions’ other work,
66
bears witness through art
grounded in an ethics of resistance and utilizes the cityscape as part of that process. These
projects are guerrilla warfare art from the trenches—previously unavailable and shameful
information plastered in bright colors and big letters all over a public street, unavoidable
and demanding personal engagement, communal acknowledgment and civic space, just like
Flynn’s public memorial to the women of the Ireland’s Magdalen asylums. Flynn’s
extallation, like Brogan’s play, publicly honors the Magdalens by articulating a hidden
history of these women and demanding civic recognition of their existence, despite efforts
to relegate them to the fringes. His own literary works, including his critically acclaimed
theatrical play James X, attempt to dismantle the culture of silence surrounding childhood

65
Smith notes four documentaries about the Magdalens: Washing Away the Stain (1993),
Sex in a Cold Climate (1998), Les Blanchisseuses de Magdalen (1998) and “The Magdalen
Laundries” (1999).
66
In April 2007, Far Cry Productions teamed up with Irish artist Maedhbh McMahon to
present “Amygdalae” at the Kevin Kavanagh Gallery in Dublin. The exhibition featured
miniature handmade dresses inspired by the women of the Magdalene Laundries who
labored over cloth for long hours every day and seeks to remember the women by
emphasizing the individuality of each piece and the space of trauma it represents. The
exhibition was re-presented in 2010 as “Procession.”
71
abuse in Ireland’s industrial schools, another system of residential institutions for Irish
children.
Gerald Mannix Flynn’s James X (2003) premiered in Dublin to widespread critical
acclaim. The fifty-four page monologue is an account of “James X’s” criminal youth,
beginning with his reluctant birth and unstable home life, and his early incarceration at the
age of ten at Letterfrack, a Christian Brothers facility in Galway where he was violently
assaulted on multiple occasions. The one-man show, performed by the author, reveals how
he suffered through multiple episodes of physical and sexual violence, degradation and
emotional neglect, and recounts the survival mechanisms he employed throughout the
length of his imprisonment. He tells how he navigated the multiple state agencies—courts,
detention centers, mental institutions—and reveals how his criminalized youth in the
industrial school clashes with idealized Ireland: “A billion miles from Tara, Land of the
Leprechaun, the street urchin, the rainbow, the orphan, the die-hard, eleven-year-old future
public enemy number one” (27).
In an interesting discursive move, in the last two pages of James X Flynn reveals his
survival strategy: he confesses that the story he has told the audience is “the same story I
told myself all my life. That’s the grandiose story, my euphoric recalling of the events of
my life” (52). Patrick Lonergan notes that, “As he continues to narrate the story, we slowly
learn that his monologue is an expression of truth but a shield from it—it is the story that
his character has devised over the years to control his sense of guilt and shame for the
abuse he suffered” (Theatre 167). The narrative strategy he employed in telling his story
mirrors his survival strategy: he created a screen to disguise the horror of his lived reality in
72
the first part of the play. In fact, the abuse he suffers is much worse than he initially
reveals and he “gives back” the file:
This is what was done to me when I was helpless, when I had no voice, no one to
turn to. When I was a child. This is not my shame anymore, it never was. I’ve
carried it long enough. It is yours and today I am giving it back. So here’s your
file, File No. 195702, your words, property of the State, the Church, their servants
and agents and you the citizens. And this statement, this is your shame. There is no
care in this file, no love. (54)

As a performance piece, Mannix Flynn’s James X transcends the stage and engages the
spectators on a personal level: when audience members arrive at the show, they are handed
a file that contains nearly 30 pages of state documents that include everything from court
papers to medical diagnosis to reports from children services that outline the problems of
James X and the state sanctioned solutions for dealing with him, namely periods of medical
internment and incarceration. The combination of the narrative told on stage and the file
papers presented to the audience offer an in-depth examination of what happens when a
young life is labeled disposable.
James X evolved from Mannix Flynn’s 1983 autobiographical memoir entitled
Nothing to Say (recently re-released in 2003). In the foreword to James X, Flynn discloses
some of the issues he faced with the publication of his novel twenty years earlier:
In 1983 my novel Nothing to Say was published. The story dealt with a child who
had been sent away by the courts to an industrial school in the West of Ireland.
Even at that time, these industrial schools and reform schools were places that sent
a shudder of fear through Irish society. They were situated in the heart of Irish
towns and villages and many people must have known what went on there, yet
nobody openly talked about it. Nobody talked about it at all. (5)

Flynn’s novel, play and subsequent aesthetic representations of trauma chronicle both
collective suffering and a personal history of loss; they are also an articulation of an early
awareness of class-consciousness and dispossession.
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Narratives of the violent incarceration of youth in Ireland have, in recent years,
emerged more frequently as abuse scandals have dominated the news both at home and
aboard. Ireland’s industrial schools scandal hit fever pitch in 2009 with the publication of
the Ryan Report, the decade-long 2000 page investigation by the Commission to Inquire
into Child Abuse (CICA)
67
that substantiated shocking accusations about systemic
physical, sexual and emotional abuse in Ireland’s industrial schools, revealing a profoundly
disturbing portrait of life for thousands of children who lived in these institutions. The
National Theatre offered its own artistic response to the disturbing findings of the Ryan
Report by staging a season of provocative theatrical interventions in 2010.

Performing a Response—The National Theatre Presents “The Darkest Corner”
Since we got a national theatre a century ago, there have been hundreds of plays
about the nation and none about the state. Gerald Mannix Flynn’s searing James X
makes up for that neglect. (O’Toole, 2009).

In the spring of 2010, the Director of the Abbey Theatre Fiach Mac Conghail staged
a compilation of theatrical works on the Peacock Stage in response to the momentum of
current events in Ireland: “In April we present The Darkest Corner, a series of
presentations which aim to shine a light into what An Taoiseach Brian Cowen called ‘the
darkest corner of the history of the State’” (Mac Conghail). Designed to interrogate the
concept behind this evocative image, “The Darkest Corner” showcased journalist Mary

67
Designed to investigate the treatment of inmate children in residential schools operated
by the Catholic Church in Ireland, the CICA’s executive summary makes it clear that
assembling victim impact statements and survivor testimony were at the heart of its charge:
“The Commission to Inquire into Child Abuse was established in 2000 with functions
including the investigation of abuse of children in institutions in the State. It was
dependent on people giving evidence which they did in large numbers.” (Exec. Sum. 1)

74
Raftery’s documentary theatre piece based on the Ryan Report called No Escape and
Richard Johnson’s The Evidence I Shall Give (which first premiered at the Abbey in 1961)
and concluded with Mannix Flynn’s James X.
68

Unlike the child narrator in Flynn’s novel Nothing to Say, James X is written from
the perspective of a man in his forties. While the style of the play is theatrically
conventional—a lengthy monologue addressed to the audience in a theatre—the language
of the monologue occasionally takes a turn for the abstract as James attempts to make sense
of what happened to him as a young child. Moving between staid realism and a Joycean
stream of consciousness, James X, as he is known in the play, is awaiting his turn to testify
before the Dublin High Court on his abuse case. He paces the waiting area outside the
courtroom as he addresses the audience. In the foreword Flynn notes that James X is James
O’Neill from the novel Nothing to Say. The intersection of autobiography and collective
representation collide here: though Flynn uses the persona of James X in this theatre
piece—James O’Neill from his novel—he is essentially retelling his own traumatic
experience at Letterfrack at the same age. The name James X itself, with the missing last
name, suggests an inclusive anonymity and the willingness to take even his name away as
James notes: “They have taken everything away, even my name. Today, for confidentiality
reasons, I am to be known only as James X. I’m taking a case against them. Looking back,

68
Though not part of the official offering of The Darkest Corner, Michael F. Kennedy’s
Skinners premiered the same week in February 2010 at the Teachers Club Theatre in
Parnell Square in Dublin. Like James X, Kennedy’s play is “‘one man’s story of child
abuse in Ireland’s Industrial School system, one man’s struggle for justice’” and features
the story of one man as he prepares to confront the redress board, at times presenting
flashbacks as a nine year old boy. The set was decorated with “black and white reprints of
national daily front pages from May 2009, the day after the release of the Ryan Report,
documenting the damning findings of systemic abuse, hardship, rape and violence against
children” (Rev. of Skinners).
75
recalling to recover” (14). The name also suggests that this is not James’s story alone, a
point Flynn concedes in the introduction: “it is the story of all the children that went
through to rooms of hell and horror in institutions run by congregations of religious
Brothers and Nuns, under the license of the State” (6). This anticipates an important
official conclusion by the state: published six years before the publication of the Ryan
Report which substantiates survivors’ testimony and personal histories of loss and abuse,
Flynn’s James X presents a vivid account of his own experiences and survival techniques in
an Irish industrial school.
James X takes place literally on the threshold of presenting formal testimony—
James is about to enter the High Court while the audience witnesses his pre-court jitters as
he paces and recounts his version of events before the court opens its proceedings. The
audience then, serves both as a type of oratory practice before he enters the courtroom and
faces the actual arm of state power, and as a type of judge and jury that will inevitably pass
judgment on the events he depicts. The audience’s presence bears resemblance to the silent
community that Flynn also indicts in his play, making for an uncomfortable interchange
between performer and spectator. The fact that he is about to enter the courtroom, also a
space of performance and spectatorship, to reenact the trauma he faced thirty years earlier
marks this text as both confessional and confrontational. This was, after all, the same court
that sentenced the young James three decades earlier to Letterfrack and to the traumas he
faced as a result. James X returns to the same courthouse twenty years later and, facing a
much different Ireland, demands an accounting for what happened in these institutions and
for the personal suffering he endured.
76
Fintan O’Toole’s astute comment on the lack of theatre dealing with the state as
opposed to the nation (of which the Abbey repertoire has many) registers this important
aspect of Flynn’s critique. In the end, James refuses to take part in the proceedings and
leaves the theatre:
They are calling my name now to take the stand. Funny, it is just the same way
they called it out back at the children’s court in Dublin Castle all those years ago. If
I walk into that courtroom now I’ll never again walk back into my own life. They’ll
give me a few bob, their financial redress, and push me back out on to the street.
Plead Guilt and Sons want me to take a no-fault settlement—that’s like pleading
guilty to something I didn’t do—right up their street! (54)

Lonergan notes the theatrical effect of that moment: “It is precisely because this play is not
a series of written words, but is instead a physical performance, that is has such power”
(167). He points out that Flynn’s play “can be seen as a rejection of certain forms of
narrative” and uses “monologue as a way of reclaiming agency” (167). It can also read as a
rejection of versions of “closure” and a critique of systems designed to neatly pay for that
closure, like the redress board set up pay him. Flynn’s work then, is an embodiment of
defiance, an exploration of alternative networks of power designed to destabilize
mechanisms of control that dictate identity. James refuses to accept the identity church and
state insist on imposing upon him as a child. James X raises the stakes to the next level—
something the child narrator in Nothing to Say could not do—when James demands
collective responsibility for the traumas he suffered by involving the audience members; as
such, they too are implicated as witnesses in his narrative of loss and suffering in his
testimony to the High Court of Dublin, and in the published pages of his works.

The Politics of Reconciliation
If the function of therapeutic modernity is to have us lose our loss in order to
become good subjects, then the very process of mourning the dead is at once their
77
condemnation, their devaluation—perhaps not explicitly but effectively a judgment
of their inadequacy as subjects and the inadequacy of their cultural formations to
modernity. (Lloyd 222)

In “Colonial Trauma/Postcolonial Recovery” David Lloyd, writing on trauma,
colonialism and the Famine, argues for “a non-therapeutic relation to the past, structured
around the notion of survival or living on rather than recovery” (220). The construction of
a survivalist ethos grounded in living on rather than moving on decenters popular versions
of cultural and political movements geared towards a politics of forgiving and forgetting, a
nod to a variant of bootstrap curative rhetoric championing “get over it” because “time
heals all wounds.” Even the particular terminology of healing and recovery is embedded in
the vernacular of popular culture: you move on from a painful situation—as though time
stopped for a brief moment when a terrible event occurred—then you are instructed to
proceed forward and march onward with a stiff upper lip and with the assured expectation
of closure. The very language and process follows the linear logic and movement of
Western historiography. Smith points to what Lloyd identifies as the “distinctly
developmental narrative: if we could leave our dead and their suffering behind and
overcome our melancholy, we could at last shake off the burden of the past and enter
modernity as fully formed subjects” (Lloyd 221; quoted in Smith 166).
Yet, as survivor testimony and trauma studies reveal, this neat packaging of
bereavement and recuperation does not necessarily follow such efficient terms or
articulations. In recent years, a public discourse of trauma and healing has entered the
cultural lexicon. The movement towards ritualized processes of therapeutic confrontation
and recovery raises several questions of ethical concern and while their historical scope,
problematics and potential recuperative value have been extensively documented
78
elsewhere, questions about memory, commemoration and the aestheticization of trauma
dominate if not the core then certainly the spirit of the theatre plays presented in this
chapter. As Smith notes,
Contemporary stories representing Ireland’s Magdalen laundries emerged in a
decade that witnessed a distinct shift in the nation’s willingness to confront its
recent past. Although traditionally silent when challenged with controversial social
subjects, Ireland began to ‘speak out’ in the 1990s with a new openness most
evident in controversies generated in the media—particularly in those focusing
attention on the suffering of women, children, and other marginalized citizens
(O’Toole 1994c; 1997, 156-59). [Ireland’s 87]

This willingness to confront difficult legacies signals an important change by counteracting
the silence of trauma. Lloyd summarizes Herman’s description of trauma:
Herman describes in some detail the various symptoms of trauma: the will-to-forget
or amnesia of the victim in relation to the terror of the occasion; the consequent
dissociation and dislocation of the person which generally induces a sense of
fragmentation, and, above all, the ‘unspeakableness’ of the trauma itself. This
unspeakableness is in part a function of the initiating terrorization of the person, the
need to black out in face of a pain that would obliterate the subject as such: the
deliberate infliction of pain demands not just an amnesic response but actually
denies the very existence of a subject that could remember. What this means,
however, is that the trauma persists in and as a differential relation of power
between the perpetrator and the victim. The perpetrator, no less than the victim,
insists on the condition of silence. This can occur both through the coercive
exercise of power, physically or discursively, and through the more intricate and
‘hegemonic’ use of power that occludes from public space the social logics within
which the victim could ‘make sense.’ (214)

Flynn consistently points out that in trying to make sense of his trauma, he tried speaking
out but “no one wanted to know what happened to me and to other people sent to those
places” (53). How does a victim then, make sense of trauma when it is often silenced and
can commemoration function on some therapeutic level? Arguing that, “we can map the
psychological effects of trauma on to the cultures that undergo colonization” (212) Lloyd
explains how the power of colonialism is multifaceted and monitors not “only the control
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of the technological apparatus of coercion but the control of the means of making sense that
perpetually reproduces the symptoms of traumatization” (215). This raises the question of
controlling meaning: how do we make sense of traumatic incidents and who controls the
discourse that surrounds it?
In a civic forum, perhaps redress boards and other public forums of
acknowledgment represent powerful mediums to take back control of the discourse. Yet,
redress boards have yet to be set up for the surviving Magdalens. Then there are those who
would decline such a move if offered anyway: Flynn’s James rejects the idea that a redress
board can buy him out of his pain and offer money for crimes against his humanity:
“They’ll give me the few bob, their financial redress, and push me back out on to the
street” (54). He also ridicules therapy’s notion of recovery and its ultimate basis in money:
You know something, my therapist doesn’t do inner child looking out, she only
does trauma and aftershock. It took her an hour to tell me that and then she
unburdened me of my last 65 euro. I must be the healthiest poorest bastard in this
court today. (38)

Flynn seems to suggest that either method of recovery is not apt for him; instead, he turns
to the theatre as a live space of confrontation to tell his story—both the narrative he
constructed in his head to survive and the truth of his experiences. Flynn and Burke
Brogan who was a novice in a Magdalen asylum turn to their lives for the story that needs
telling. In doing so, they employ a crucial method of witnessing.
In Women Witnessing Terror, Anne Cubilie’s project centers on the problematics of
witnessing and the inherent aspect of performativity contained within the concept of
testimony. For Cubilie, the relationship between witness, survivor and testimony is an
ongoing challenge and asserts that, “Witnessing must be an engaged performative act,
rather than a relationship between spectator and object” (202). For Cubilie, aesthetics
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provide one realm for mediating the inherent limitations of traditional notions of testimony
and cites its potential to work as an act of resistance:
Language, performances of contiguous identity, and modes of resistance are central
foci of these accounts of survival and witnessing. To be one’s own witness is an
important site of resistance and is fundamental in perceiving oneself as an subject
within the juridical fields. (78)

This concept of witnessing calls into question the role of art and the aestheticization of
pain. Is art merely a gesture, an empty provocation in the face of this kind of bone-felt
pain, or can it present a viable counterpoint to abuses of power? What are appropriate
spaces for mourning? In this vein, what is the appropriate avenue for venting this kind of
loss and what does it look like?
Smith, writing on works by Flynn and Diane Fenster, suggests that, “The challenge,
identified by both artists, seems to be how to commemorate without closure, how to effect
a monument without fetishization, how to represent artistically without aestheticization”
(Ireland’s 182). Here artists tread on tricky ground: they open themselves up to charges of
aestheticizing or capitalizing on lived pain, or disrupting deeply entrenched and culturally
sacred narratives. If, as Lloyd suggest, “Trauma entails violent intrusion and a sense of
utter objectification that annihilates the person as subject or agent” (214), then, in many
ways, the artists herein are charged with trying to not only capture the essence of that
violent intrusion but the aftermath of it. The annihilation of subjectivity and agency that
occurs in trauma against both the person and the physical body suffers them through a
metamorphosis not of their choosing. A new being emerges from the encounter with the
traumatic event. Lloyd notes how, “We might say, invoking some apt Irish expressions,
that to pass on is to be changed, and the changed live on in strange ways” (227).
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Flynn recounts the survival strategies of his changed self that came out of those
violent institutions and the strange ways he employed to live on: self-medication, self-
destructiveness, self-loathing, noting “I never spoke those words till now, never had the
voice, only the fear. I thought it was all my fault” (53-54). Flynn’s refusal to submit to the
redress board for validation is key here; rather than surrender to the officially sanctioned
script (appeal to the court, testify before a committee, collect the monetary amount deemed
adequate and then be dismissed) he will write his own script and perform it himself. For
the young women confined in Magdalen asylums and many of the children who endured
different forms of abuse in the industrial schools, the traumas they suffered on a personal
level also raises the notion of collective grief and communal sharing: just who does this
pain belong to? Does the process and legacy of trauma, loss and dislocation belong to the
collective and not just the individual? Events like the Famine and the Easter Rising have
been memorialized in both concrete and abstract ways. The question then arises of how the
nation will later confront the legacy presented by both the Magdalene asylums and
industrial schools.
In his article on the Famine, Lloyd critiques the notion that “the overcoming of loss
is achieved by the direction of the subject towards identification with the state (or with the
aesthetic disposition that prefigures it) as the representation of a restored wholeness and
harmony” (218). In contemplating the meaning of mourning, Lloyd asks what are we
mourning, positing rage as perhaps a “more proper response”:
The function of a public period of commemoration becomes that of letting the dead
slip away without the trace of a wake behind them. This is all the more so where,
as in so much public commentary throughout the last years from Sinead O’Connor
to government ministers, the function of that mourning as socially healing for the
present was constantly emphasized. (221)

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Tom Dunne also suggests a politics of rage and wonders “whether our anger should not be
directed also at those who gave them such license: at Irish society as a whole” (75). Lloyd
critiques the notion that is often eventually floated to survivors—if only you could move
on—an idea that seems to imply that the paralysis and stultification that occurs as a result
of trauma is somehow the fault of the victim, slowing down progress of the nation. If only
you could move on from history, if only you could move on from the wound, you can begin
to heal. Flynn resisting notions of closure and offers his art piece “Padded Cell” as a
testimonial of collective examination: “This work seeks to be open and transparent and
holistic. It is not about closure, it is about a shared exploration” (“Padded Cell”).
Burke Brogan’s Eclipsed and Flynn’s James X challenges hegemonic constructions
of power and insist on the recognition of the individual and by extension, the communities
of young women in the Magdalen asylums and the children in industrial schools who
suffered in silence. The question of aestheticizing pain and trauma lingers and this of
course, is a challenge inherent in art. Yet, Lloyd points to a potentially therapeutic
possibility; writing on scenes of eviction during the Famine, he notes:
[h]ow in catastrophe, the orientation towards the futures that we will call living on
emerges quite simply in the actions of the people…in these apparently futile
gestures the narrative seems to allegorize the most intimate, even minimal acts that
remake the terms for collective survival. (227)

Like the plays explored in ensuing chapters, “…Eclipsed dramatizes the strategies
employed by these women to resist and survive their incarceration, to become active agents
in their destiny” (Smith 93), a process James X also enacts. Irish theatre at the end of the
Celtic Tiger age functions as a space to explore these acts of survival by demanding
accountability, in the process presenting both a site of cultural resistance and a civic forum
for commemorating acts of living on.
83
Chapter Two
The Children of the Celtic Tiger—Theatrical Representations of
Contemporary Irish Adolescence

This chapter examines literary and filmic representations of contemporary Irish
childhood and adolescence in relation to the celebrated economic successes and the
attendant social repercussions of the Celtic Tiger, the phenomenon credited with situating
Ireland on the world financial stage. The chapter will focus on theatrical works by
critically acclaimed playwrights such as Stella Feehily, Gina Moxley, Enda Walsh and
Mark O’Rowe, along with selected filmic representations such as Kisses (2008) by
writer/director Lance Daly to examine how the politics of space along with the narrative of
globalization registers questions of place and identity for Irish youth. These writers have
each constructed complicated portraits of contemporary Irish adolescence in their works,
utilizing the cityscape as part of the storytelling process as they reconfigure modes of urban
survival, oftentimes reimagining the bonds and limitations of friendship in an increasingly
cosmopolitan world. In an attempt to forge these connections as they navigate throughout
the city, their characters at times resort to the creation of new languages and methods of
expression in order to articulate their experiences. In contemplating the overall effects of
the Celtic Tiger on Irish youth, this chapter will consider studies on space and geography,
questions of economic and social mobility, and the role of language in these literary and
filmic representations to demonstrate that, in short, the youth of the Celtic Tiger are dealing
with the aftereffects of a rapid and consuming globalization that alters not only traditional
identity politics but aggressively confronts the byproducts of that global economy.

84
The Celtic Tiger dramas examined here focus on representations of Irish
adolescents and explore issues of social marginality, parental rejection and class mobility.
Recent criticism of contemporary Irish drama has centered on the presentation of excessive
violence and crude depictions of questionable characters that, some critics argue, result in a
romanticized vision of the underground. And though several Celtic Tiger dramas do in fact
feature moments of extreme violence,
69
perhaps most poignant in contemporary Irish
theatre are the representations of adolescents as they negotiate intersections of authority
and marginality where survival is dependent upon overcoming the brutalities and
humiliations of powerlessness. The young characters in these theatre plays must face the
effects of physical violence and communal exile in a rapidly changing Ireland as they
struggle with one another for small claims of power, each ultimately engaging in acts of
violence as a means to gain control, while in the film Kisses the children escape from
violence in the home only to confront these and other dangerous forces in the city.
The chapter ultimately argues that the characters—whether working-class teenage
girls in Feehily’ Duck (2003); marginalized outcasts in Moxley’s Danti-Dan (1995);
aspiring juvenile hooligans in O’Rowe’s Howie the Rookie (1999); codependent adolescent
couples in Walsh’s Disco Pigs (1995); or runaway kids in Kisses (2008)—each utilize
various strategies of survival as they navigate the space between home and exile. Often
times, they discover they are essentially alone in the world. In the process, these works
present a portrait of Irish adolescence at the start of the millennium that reveals no one has
less power or more aggression than a kid living in the golden age of the Celtic Tiger.

69
See the Introduction for an overview of some critical responses to Celtic Tiger dramas
and their use of violence, and Chapter Four that covers the criticism of violence in the
dramaturgy of Martin McDonagh and Marina Carr.
85
Adolescence, Space and the City
The totalizing effects of the Celtic Tiger and its multiple manifestations have
affected Irish youth in distinct ways from other social groups in Ireland. Recently, these
narratives have appeared more frequently on the Irish stage and while it can be argued that
representations of confused, violent and angry adolescents have a long history in both
theater and film, these Irish plays and the characters they present engage with issues
directly related to the Celtic Tiger and its public and private ramifications, such as
questions about social mobility, cultural identity and class privilege. These plays also
explore the relationship between urban geographies and spaces available for youths, a
critical focal point during the Celtic Tiger, as the expansion of city-centres requires the
reconstitution of open civic spaces.
As developers raced to overhaul parts of Dublin in the 1990s—all as a means to
accommodate the influx of eager tourists, a rising urban professional workforce and new
immigrant communities along with the general logistical demands for Dublin’s evolving
cosmopolitan identity—the sudden infusion of wealth into the city provided a visible
marker of Ireland’s upstart economy. In “Valorizing Urban Culture? Redevelopment in a
Changing City” Niamh M. Moore points out that, “In recent years, the city has undergone a
dramatic transformation as entire areas have been demolished and reconstructed in a bid to
rid the city of dereliction and decay and develop a new, vibrant profile on the back of
significant tertiary sector development” (95).
70
For urban planners in Dublin, this meant
renewal and reclamation projects aimed at several parts of the city. As Andrew Kincaid
points out:

70
For more on urban renovation and commemoration projects in Ireland during the Celtic
Tiger, see Heritage, Memory and the Politics of Identity (2007).
86
As the global economic forces and changing national priorities transform the
cultural landscape of Irishness, Dublin’s planners and architects have, with a new
intensification, been busy preparing the kind of urban space required to maintain
Dublin’s role as an up-and-coming Euro city. (“Memory” 16-17)

The renovation of the Temple Bar area in Dublin’s city centre presents an immediate and
compelling example of the social and economic forces behind the management of urban
geography in the Celtic Tiger age. Once a derelict part of town, the city-centre’s
renovation was implemented with the full force of government funding, artistic design
resources and regional support behind it:
Over the last ten years, Temple Bar has gone from being a shabby, run-down
forgotten part of Dublin to an area packed with restaurants, art galleries, boutiques,
cinemas, nightclubs, and crowds. The narrow streets of the area have been re-
cobbled, and fake reproduction Victorian lamps erected. Older pubs, such as ‘The
Norseman’ and the ‘Auld Dubliner’ have been renovated, enlarged, and re-themed,
so that they, along with newer establishment with medieval sounding names like
‘The Turk’s Head’ or ‘St. Isolde’s Tower,’ can cater to the influx of tourists,
English ‘stag parties,’ and indigenous revelers seeking beer, music, and dancing.
(Kincaid, “Memory” 26)

The project of renaming indicates an attempt to capitalize on Ireland’s heritage, catering to
particular demographics looking for Irish authenticity amidst urban space. Kincaid
concludes that Temple Bar is “at once a geographically demarcated entity, a tax designated
entity, an archaeological site, a center for culture and arts, a tourist attraction, and a
building site” (“Memory” 27). Gerry Smyth notes:
[A]fter years of neglect [it] was transformed into a centre of cultural and
commercial activity during the 1990s…During this period, Temple Bar was
converted from a series of run-down backstreets into a bustling commercial and
cultural zone. Also during this time, the area became one of Dublin’s major tourist
attractions. (82-83)

The conversion from dilapidated inner-city alleyways and rundown streets into pedestrian-
only zones that function as a major tourist hub of the city, he argues, also signals other
87
powers at play, noting that social critics were quick to point out that for all the rhetoric of
urban renewal and contemporary regeneration, the renovation “‘reveals an inextricable
linkage between culture and commerce played out in a discourse which privileges the
powerful and marginalizes the vernacular in human terms, and in terms of the landscape’”
(Corcoran quoted in Smyth 84). This is often the case with gentrification which, as Moore
points out, requires that “place and place history” be “radically sanitized” (106). She
argues that the process of urban reconstruction often requires the displacement of memory
in favor of promoting the “ideal post-industrial city, replete with museums, art galleries,
theaters, festival retailing and high-income housing” (Moore 98).
Located in the heart of the city centre and engineered to attract major demographics
with money, this transformation is a prime case of how the apportionment of city space and
the politics of globalization affect the local citizenry. Writing about the “marketing of
place,” Moore notes that,
It could easily be argued that understanding city-image building or ‘re-imaging’ is
the key to comprehending the dynamics of city development and management in
the 21st century, as the city is now, like any other commodity, being marketed and
sold. (98)

As a commodity, Temple Bar represents an integral part of Dublin’s global brand—a place
that seamlessly blends the old with the new: “authentic” pubs alongside tea shops and
cafés; local chippers situated next to trendy restaurants; quaint cobblestone streets tucked
off of main roads; and local record and clothing shops alongside major centers of the
culture industry like the Irish Film Centre (IFC) and Project Arts Centre. While Temple
Bar represents an open space designed to build on Ireland’s evolving global identity, a
study of economic and cultural forces must consider which demographic it best serves.
88
Gerry Smyth notes that “Some critics have characterised the Temple Bar project as
a typical example of ‘gentrification’, however—that is, the conversion of dilapidated
vernacular cityscapes into playgrounds for professional urban elites” (83). The use of the
term “playground” is key here as it refers to the “urban elites”— not a space for youth.
While studies on the relationship between space, cultural landscape and political identity
have continued to emerge in Irish studies,
71
few social theorists or cultural geographers
have examined the effects of these findings on Irish youth. If, as been suggested, these
changes have been implemented to cater to specific groups—typically demographics with
disposable income—an important inquiry might consider what spaces are ultimately
available for Irish youth and, in the face of gentrification, where and how they are allowed
to participate in the civic sphere. Many of the dramas examined herein contemplate these
questions to some degree, often focusing on the physical displacement or feelings of
dislocation the young characters must endure as they search for a safe place to call their
own in Celtic Tiger Ireland.
In addition to the politics of space, Irish adolescents also face questions of cultural
and national identity as recent legislation articulated new parameters for Irish citizenship.
72

71
See Ireland Beyond Boundaries: Mapping Irish Studies in the Twenty-first Century (ed.
Liam Harte and Yvonne Whelan, 2007); Ireland, Space, Text (ed. Liam Harte, et.al., 2005);
Reinventing Modern Ireland: Streetscapes, iconography and the politics of identity
(Yvonne Whelan, 2003); Space and the Irish Cultural Imagination (Gerry Smyth, 2001);
Ireland in Proximity: History, Gender, Space (ed. Scott Brewster et.al., 1999); In Search of
Ireland: A Cultural Geography (ed. Brian Graham, 1997) for a partial list.
72
In 2004 an Irish referendum changed the Irish Constitution and revoked birthright
citizenship. In order to claim Irish citizenship at birth today, a child must have at least one
blood Irish parent. The referendum was passed with an overwhelming majority: “Over 80
percent of the Irish electorate voted to revoke the automatic right of citizenship on the basis
of kinship and ethnicity” (xv) writes Gerardine Meaney in Gender, Ireland, and Cultural
Change (2010). She concludes that, “This massive majority was at radical odds with the
artistic celebration and external perception of Ireland’s vibrant new multiculturalism” (xv).
89
They also face the evolving expectations of a new globalized work force with increasing
demands for social networking.
73
And while Ireland experienced unprecedented financial
growth, other social markers indicate the price of that economic and cultural transformation
has been quite high for young Irish people and other segments of society.
74
Houlihan et.
al’s study in 1994 researched levels of psychological distress in Irish adolescents from
urban and rural locations and made a startling revelation: “The females from the rural
setting were found to suffer significantly more depressive symptomatology (22%) and poor
self-esteem (68%) than the remaining sample” (565). They concluded that, “No clear
explanation for this is known” (574). While researchers found that girls from rural
locations tended to be more self-critical, boys from both groups exhibited high degrees of
hostility, manifested in an “extrapunitive manner demonstrating higher degrees of criticism
of others and stronger urges to act out this hostility” (565). Ten years later, in Lynch et
al.’s study of psychiatric disorders in 2004—“the first large-scale study in Ireland that set
out to identify young people at risk of psychiatric disorders, including depressive disorders,
and suicidal ideation” (Lynch et al.) —Irish researchers learned that “suicide is now the
leading cause of death in Irish males in this age range [15-24], having surpassed road
traffic accidents” (Lynch et al.). These studies point out startling trends in adolescents at a
time of heightened economic prosperity and usher in important inquires about the kinds of
issues facing Irish youth at this time in history.
Contemporary Irish drama has attempted to highlight some of these subjects by
considering, among other topics, the connections between urban spaces and adolescence as

73
For example, reports cite Ireland as “the most talkative nation on Earth” (Lentin 2005).
74
See “Part 3: Globalisation and Quality of Life in Ireland” (107-150) in Kuhling and
Keohane’s Cosmopolitan Ireland: Globalisation and Quality of Life (2007) which notes
higher rates of depression, binge drinking and overeating in the population.
90
characters traverse dangerous geographies, examining the concept of welcoming or safe
space and what the absence of such spaces yields. In this vein, this chapter will focus on
representations of angry, violent youths who attempt to transcend class or social limitations
as they navigate dangerous urban spaces in Stella Feehily’s Duck (2003), Mark O’Rowe’s
Howie the Rookie (1999) and Enda Walsh’s Disco Pigs (1995). In Gina Moxely’s Danti-
Dan (1995) similar issues arise, including an examination of gender politics, but in a rural
context. Examining these plays brings together the various stands presented here so far:
studies on space and geography, representations of youth and violence, and reactions to
social marginality and alienation. The promise to “cherish all the children of the nation
equally” as presented in the 1916 Proclamation of the Irish Republic
75
strikes a particularly
poignant note as these adolescents struggle to survive in Celtic Tiger Ireland.

Violence, Desecration and Rebellion in Celtic Tiger Drama
Contemporary Irish drama has articulated a range of responses to the Celtic Tiger
through text, performance and criticism. The result appears to showcase a violent—
though highly popular—dramaturgy filled with savage characters living in claustrophobic
conditions and insufferable situations that inevitably manifest into explosive situations with
extreme outcomes. Works by some of the most celebrated playwrights of this era such as
Martin McDonagh and Marina Carr feature violent acts including matricide,
76
patricide,
77

75
This point appears in the Proclamation of the Irish Republic, the document read from the
General Post Office in Dublin on the Easter Rising in 1916 and not in the Irish
Constitution, as is sometimes assumed.
76
See McDonagh’s The Beauty Queen of Leenane (1996).
77
See McDonagh’s The Lonesome West (1997).
91
infanticide,
78
incest,
79
and suicide.
80
The problematics of performing violence onstage, and
the ethics surrounding it, have long plagued playwrights and their production team,
illustrating a predicament unique to theatre. Since violence represents a marked departure
from the civility associated with bourgeoisie theatre-going, a crucial dilemma emerges in
the intersection between written text, live performance and critical theory. Lisa Fitzpatrick
points out this trajectory in the introduction to Performing Violence in Contemporary
Ireland (2009):
The performance of violence on stage has concerned theatre practitioners and
theorists since Aristotle, with the concept of decorum, borrowed from his Poetics
and developed later by Horace and by Renaissance scholars like Castelvetro,
Scaliger and Robertello, still often referenced in contemporary scholarship. (1)

From Aristotle to Shakespeare to Yeats and on forward, the particular challenge of staging
violence has presented both practical and ethical considerations. Since many contemporary
Irish dramas feature scenes of extreme physical violence, theatre practitioners are forced to
confront the old question of how to portray these actions onstage. One theatrical strategy
aims to presents it offstage while referencing it onstage, thereby following old protocol.
Other writers employ a different tactic and present violence through description via
monologue and let the audience experience it as auditory, which was stylistically in vogue
during the late 1990s, á la Conor McPherson’s Rum and Vodka (1996) and The Good Thief
(1996). This style reaches an apex in Mark O’Rowe’s The Terminus (2007). The rhythmic
assault of poetic meter, excessive profanity and vivid description of bodily harm also
registers on the level of the psyche; what catches one person’s ear and settles in their

78
See Carr’s By the Bog of Cats…(1998).
79
See Carr’s On Raftery’s Hills (2000).
80
See Carr’s Portia Coughlin (2003).
92
imagination will vary and thus individualizes the theatre experience, a departure from what
the third option—presenting physical violence onstage—offers to the audience. By
stylizing acts of brutality onstage, a natural consequence from blocking and rehearsal, the
production aims to communalize the experience for the audience by tapping into a
collective act of witnessing. Presenting staged violence as opposed to letting the audience
imagine it offstage or in their heads attempts to always make it the same for everyone. The
effect of staging the action this way risks appearing over-rehearsed or contrived, even
caricatured (as some critics of Martin McDonagh’s work, for example, have noted) and
moves away from the possibility of eliciting a cathartic response from the audience if the
production slips into the realm of caricature or the absurd. The line between presenting
violence in a believable way that is relevant to the narrative and effective on stage while
avoiding gratuitous spectacle is challenging and may rest on the purpose of the violence in
the first place, how it is mobilized, and whether it is simply a recourse to the demands of a
popular culture saturated in wanton violence seeking to push at the borders of the profane.
81

While playwrights such as McDonagh and Carr have directed violence towards
children in some of their works—McDonagh’s The Pillowman (2003) presents a
crucifixion scene featuring a little girl and Carr’s Hester Swane in By the Bog of Cats…
(1998) slits the throat of her young daughter while in Ariel (2002) the father kills his
teenage daughter
82
—others playwrights have instead focused on the violent actions
committed by adolescents and their own potential for brutality and acts of self-destruction.
In works by Feehily, Moxley, Walsh and O’Rowe the dramatic action is centered on young

81
For more on the problematics of staging violence in the theatre, see Performing Violence
in Contemporary Ireland. Ed. Lisa Fitzpatrick. Dublin: Carysfort Press, 2009.
82
See the Conclusion for a detailed discussion of the recurrent trope of dead or missing
children in Irish theatre.
93
characters who find themselves removed from adult supervision and who engage in violent
acts as they test the limits of social convention and friendship. Whether rebelling against
cruel mothers, financial frustrations, limited educational possibilities, complacent fathers,
abusive boyfriends or a general lack of space or sympathy, these characters push at social
boundaries of propriety, often times challenging gender expectations as a means to assert
autonomy.

Gender, Violence and Performativity: Staging Stella Feehily’s Duck
Stella Feehily’s Duck (2003) offers a glimpse into the world of two working-class
girls living in the shadow of Celtic Tiger Dublin. Duck, Feehily’s first full-length play,
premiered at the Theatre Royal Bury St Edmunds in July 2003 before touring the UK and
later moving to the Peacock Theatre in Dublin from September to November 2003 before
ending its run in London in 2004 (Duck cover). Feehily herself was born in London but
grew up in Donegal and later trained at the Gaiety School of Acting in Dublin where she
acted at both the Abbey and the Gate Theatres.
83

Duck showcases Feehily’s dramatic technique, a semi-realist theatrical construction
reminiscent of Beckett’s work with brisk character interaction, no interior dialogue and
sparse set requirements. But whereas violence in Beckett tends towards the restrained and
repressed, Feehily’s characters actively engage in and pursue brutal acts of physical and
emotional aggression. The play traces the journey of her two main characters—Cat, in her
late teens, and Sophie, also in her late teens though perhaps early twenties—throughout
Dublin as they struggle to survive in a world with little parental support or guidance,
limited financial resources and constant threats to their physical well-being from a cast of

83
Listed in the script liner notes for Duck.
94
sordid characters. Cat and Sophie run around drunk for much of the play, engaging in
violent acts of rebellion and profanity-laced exchanges with the characters they encounter,
blowing up a Jeep and narrowly escaping great physical harm from destructive forces.
Feehily’s portrait of female adolescence in Celtic Tiger Dublin disrupts traditional
narratives that dictate appropriate patterns of behavior for young women and challenges
culturally entrenched representations of femininity. Feehily takes on the typically male
domain of violence, criminality and vulgarity, but from the perspective of late female
adolescence. If women’s narratives have often been marginalized, then the stories of
teenage girls appear even less frequently on the stage and this, along with a Beckett-
inspired sensibility and a focus on two teenage girls in the city, makes Duck a compelling
and unique theatre piece. Unlike traditional Irish plays that tended to locate the long-
suffering females within the home and specifically within the kitchen,
84
such as J.M.
Synge’s Riders to the Sea (1903) and The Shadow of the Glen (1904) or Brian Friel’s
Dancing at Lughnasa (1990), Feehily takes her girls outside and into the city where Dublin
is Nighttown from a teenage girl’s perspective, where survival is determined by personal
moxie and the ability to outmaneuver exploitative powers. Cat and Sophie are essentially
alone in the city and unable to rely on a benevolent guide to help them navigate dangerous
geographies or toxic forces. And though other playwrights have presented teenage boys
and their relationship to violence and dangerous boredom such as O’Rowe’s Howie the
Rookie (1999) or young couples immersed in violent codependent relationships as in
Walsh’s Disco Pigs (1995) few writers have focused on the relationship between girls,
violence and the city.

84
For a detailed discussion on the importance of “kitchen dramas” in modern Irish drama,
and recent subversions of this trope, see Chapter Four.
95
Cat—nicknamed Duck by her boyfriend because of her large feet— works in a
nightclub, while her best friend Sophie attends University College Dublin sporadically.
Both have unstable homes that reflect the economic tensions and frustrations of those
unable for different reasons to keep up with the frenetic pace the Celtic Tiger demands.
From the beginning it is clear Cat has a deeply contentious relationship with her mother
who is less interested in Cat as a person than as another mouth to feed who takes up space
in the family home. With limited parental intervention, no apparent way to ascend in an
increasingly class-conscious culture and with a growing sense of desperation that manifests
itself in drunken fits of self-sabotage and physical violence, Cat and Sophie find
themselves continually negotiating their existence and managing their teenage angst alone
in Celtic Tiger Dublin, a fact the stage directions reveal from the beginning of the play:
Late night. A deserted side street illuminated by a street lamp.
A huge explosion. Sounds of running. Car alarms. Sirens in the distance.

CAT (late teens) runs on. She is wearing a very short skirt
and has a sparkly handbag slung over her shoulder She has
a bottle of Bacardi Breezer in one hand and a car-wing-mirror
in the other.

She is very drunk. Her face is streaked with mascara. She has
stopped to catch her breath and have a drink.

From offstage SOPHIE (late teens) is shouting. (3)

The play starts with a car blast and two visibly drunk teenage girls.
85
The description of
Cat’s attire and accessories—“a very short skirt” and “sparkly handbag”—raises the

85
The initial description of the girls conjures a public service announcement on binge
drinking that aired on Irish television in the summer of 2008 where a young woman
prepares for an evening out. She smears her makeup, tears up her stockings and rubs vomit
in her hair. At the end of the commercial, the words “You wouldn’t start a night like this
so why end it that way?” appear on the screen. (PSA)
96
question of how fashion is read and utilized both in the text and on stage in performance.
86

The outfits are meant to indicate the girls have been out on the town but as the audience
later learns, Cat uses strips of her ripped sweater—a gift from her abusive boyfriend—to
set the car on fire, illustrating how she utilizes scraps available to her as a means to power.
The explosive beginning then, perpetrated by an unlikely villain, immediately
subverts the audience’s expectations about the behavior of a normal teenage girl. From the
start, Cat establishes herself as a type of bad boy in heels and smeared mascara, a volatile
character capable of frightening acts of aggression. Since it is not clear who the Jeep
belongs to or why Cat would blow up a car in the first place, this act appears to be a
random display of violence perpetrated in a drunken fit of mischief, the kind of behavior
typically reserved for a “bad” boy. Yet while Cat’s act can be read as a self-centered act of
personal vengeance directed at an abusive boyfriend, it can also be understood as an
attempt to reclaim power by the only means available to her. Tired of his abuse, and with
no money of her own or matching physical strength, Cat lashes out using the purple
sweater her boyfriend Mark bought her and stuffs it down the gas tank before setting fire to
the torn rag. Young, drunk, angry and dangerous, Cat is unlike any female imagined as
part of Ireland’s theatre tradition by canonical Irish writers such as Yeats, Murphy or Friel.

86
The relation between Irish girls, fashion and the city is explored in Pyjama Girls (2010),
a documentary about the recent phenomenon of Dublin teenage girls who wear pajamas
around town all day. The writer of the documentary talks about the inspiration for the film
(which, like Duck, also features two girls in urban Dublin): “Shortly afterwards I went to
see a contemporary retelling of ‘Playboy of the Western World’ by Bisi Adigun and Roddy
Doyle at the Abbey Theatre in which all the controversial tastes of today (like pyjama girls)
were represented. I was thinking that it would be a great subject for a documentary. I was
so curious where the trend might have come from and what (if anything) the girls were
trying to say. Were they somehow demonstrating against the world or was it just fashion?”
(“The Story of Pyjama Girls”)
97
After the Jeep explodes, Cat and Sophie are confronted by two teenage boys who
accuse them of being lesbians and attempt to rape them until Sophie breaks the Bacardi
Breezer bottle and holds it under one boy’s throat, shouting threatening obscenities. The
boy eventually punches her in the face and knocks her to the ground before running off.
Sophie is left with a black eye and later her mother Val
87
accuses her of engaging in self-
destructive behavior:

VAL. Self infliction then.
Destroying yourself.

SOPHIE. I don’t feel well.
I’m going back to bed.

VAL. First there was the laxatives.
Then the bottles of Benylin.
Now you’re falling over drunk.
You had better pull yourself together my Gull.

SOPHIE. There’s nothing wrong mum, I just fell. (12)

Revealing Sophie’s history of bodily desecration and the resultant trauma of self-
destruction, Val’s mother performs a perfunctory parental duty here, cataloguing her
daughter’s actions but not extending any genuine sympathy or real guidance. As has been
often noted in studies of adolescence and psychology, self-destructive behavior directed
towards the body such as extreme dieting, cutting and binge drinking are often attempts to
seek and maintain control in the face of powerlessness. While the laxatives Val references
could reveal an eating disorder, and the ingestion of Benylin suggests drug use, the roots of
Sophie’s issues may actually extend much deeper. What is clear from this interaction is

87
Playwright Gina Moxley played Val in the Out of Joint tour of Duck. Moxley wrote
Danti-Dan (1995), the next play discussed in this chapter.
98
that Sophie is on her own; though Val issues a decree that Sophie had better get it together
“my Gull”, she does not offer to help or ask what led to this type of behavior, issuing an
accusation instead: “Self affliction./That’s all it ever is with you” (13). Sophie, unwilling
to engage her mother further, agrees (“Yes mum, self affliction”) and consults a dictionary
in search of gull’s official definition:

SOPHIE. Gull
Any aquatic bird of the genus
Such as L canus (Common Gull or Mew) (46)

Val constantly refers to Sophie as gull. Cat is also attached to a bird: she is nicknamed
Duck by her boyfriend because of her big feet. Feehily’s bird motif is significant and while
bird is common Dublin slang for a girl, its use here recalls a long legacy of bird references
in Irish literature, particularly swan imagery. Swans have tended to be the bird of choice in
Irish literature, from the ancient Irish text “The Children of Lír” to Yeats’s collection The
Wild Swans at Coole (1919) to Oliver St. Gogarty’s An Offering of Swans (1924) to more
recently Marina Carr’s dead black swan in the first scene of By the Bog of Cats… (1998).
Swans hold protected status in the national imaginary, recently even appearing on an Irish
commemorative coin, and it has generally been considered bad luck to kill a swan, as
several characters in Irish literature learned when they suffered terrible fates for not
heeding the mythic warning. Swans are also linked with the childhood fable of the Ugly
Ducking whose eventual transformation functions on multiple literal and symbolic levels.
There is a strong implication that Cat and Sophie are ugly ducklings unable to
metamorphose into the proverbial graceful swans; the forces working against them impose
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a type of paralysis that keeps either one from achieving that final transformation. The
subtext of the play suggests they are damaged creatures, waddling from one place to
another, in search of the transformative energy that will allow them to eventually grow out
of this phase (or this place) and move on. For now, they girls are trapped in Dublin where
the threat of violence pervades every aspect of their lives, from the distorted bonds they
form with people to the unresolved conclusion of the play. The initial explosion, then, only
underscores the oncoming physical, emotional and linguistic violence that Cat, who works
in a nightclub with her live-in abusive boyfriend Mark, will endure as an endless parade of
humiliation marks her daily existence.
The play’s focus on multiple levels of violence—physical, emotional, linguistic—
gestures towards the style of the In-Yer-Face playwrights emerging from the UK in the
nineties. In Political Theatre in Post-Thatcher Britain, New Writing: 1995-2005 (2008)
Amelia Howe Kritzer describes the aesthetic of the “In-Yer-Face” playwrights:
In the mid-1990s, a new impulse shook up British theatre and altered its direction.
Young and unknown playwrights working in small-scale venues associated with
new writing confronted audiences with amoral characters, shocking scenes of
violence, and crudely explicit language…[The term in-yer-face] evokes the
immediacy and the confrontational quality that breaks boundaries, arousing a sense
of uncertainty and risk. Many, if not most, of the in-yer-face plays—even those
written by women—employ a pugnacious tone that has been referred to as
‘laddish’; this characteristic evokes Margaret Thatcher’s culture of toughness and
confrontational style. Finally, the in-yer-face plays seem motivated by a spirit of
impatience—a demand that they be seen and heard now—that is quintessentially
youthful. (28)

Kritzer’s timeline matches up roughly with Celtic Tiger dates and her definition of in-yer-
face theatre fits several Celtic Tiger plays—violent, confrontational and laced with a type
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of edginess that gestures towards the impatience Kritzer notes. She also appropriates Duck
into the canon of In-Yer-Face dramatists:
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Set in Dublin, it pits the high-level energy of two young women against the stodgy
confinement of their lower-middle-class environment. Both young women want to
escape the unsatisfying lives they see their parents leading, and the desire to escape
drives them to take risks. (57)

These risks include setting a Jeep on fire. Musing on Cat’s risky fire-bombing act while
researching a school paper on the origins and dangers of arson, Sophie points out to Cat:
“Arson was a common means of revenge” (57). Eamonn Jordan suggests that “Sophie’s
college essay on women using arson historically as an act of revenge is another attempt to
mythologize defiance” (“Urban Myth” 15). Sophie cautions Cat to consider the reasons for
her act, insisting that it must be some kind of protest:
SOPHIE. It’s not your condition is hopeless, but more like an act of
aggression against some perceived injustice. I just wanted you to
think about it.

CAT. What’s to think about?
Nothing’s forever.
No job.
No life.
I could easily get blown up
Getting a prawn sandwich in Marks and Spencer’s. (59)

Cat’s nihilism can be dismissed as an extension of her teen angst but can also be
understood as a reference to the violent forces of history. Cat’s remark about the prawn
sandwich points to the seeming randomness of daily life in the face of violence. Cat insists

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While Feehily has noted British playwright Caryl Churchill’s influence on her work and
style, and though Duck premiered in the UK before Ireland and bears many of the same
markers used to describe In-Yer-School works, Feehily’s Irish background and Dublin-
based play would seem to exclude her from the canon of other In-Yer-Face playwrights
like Sarah Kane, Mark Ravenhill and Judy Upton. The play is rooted in a Celtic and post-
Celtic Tiger sensibility, making multiple references to Dublin, and reflects on the economic
and social phenomenon that transformed Ireland at this time.
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that it is pointless to worry about college or a job merely to buy a place somewhere when
she is thirty. She tells Sophie “I’d rather slit my wrists” (59). Rather than ascribing her
comment to reductive nihilism or the product of an acute historical consciousness, her
remark can also be read as a working-class awareness that she will not easily transcend the
barriers to financial security and partake in the prosperity the Celtic Tiger appears to offer.
Her refusal to buy into a material consumerism that she equates with just another
oppressive force and her disdain for middle class aspirations marks her as an outsider in the
new Ireland by forces that have constructed a very particular image:
In the popular press, the acclaim emerges from a cursory reading of the recent
consumer habits of Ireland’s middle and upper class. As a lead article in Fortune
magazine reported recently: ‘Striding through the streets of Dublin these days is an
entirely new species of Irishman and Irishwoman: educated, optimistic, and
affluent—unaffected by the twin demons of poverty and despair that hounded their
ancestors for several hundred years.’ (Norton 1999, 194). (Kincaid, “Memory” 17)

Cat is neither educated, optimistic nor affluent and she does not embrace any illusions of
claiming those bourgeois markers of identity. She might, according to this description,
even represent a regressive character, still affected by “the twin demons of poverty and
despair.” Why has she not transcended those limitations to transform herself into the smart
image, into the graceful swan, painted above? Val in fact warns Sophie about Cat, telling
her that, “she’s wasting her young life” (10).
At the root of the girls’ shiftless existence is a lack of space to call their own;
though Sophie attends college, she is forced to live at home with her cruel mother while
Cat temporarily lives in Mark’s apartment. Neither arrangement presents a stable or
suitable home. In fact, Mark offers Cat to his sleazy friend Eddie in exchange for his help
in extracting revenge against the person he thinks blew up his Jeep. When he discovers the
truth, Mark attempts to drown Cat in the bathtub after he lures her in with kind words and
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affection, “ducking” her in the tub. He goes on to humiliate her while she is naked,
threatening to kill her. Searching for safety, she flees his apartment and returns to her
mother’s home only to be told she cannot stay there long—the family has gotten used to the
extra space—and she must move on. Eventually, she finds refuge in the arms of Jack, an
aging writer with a large apartment who lavishes attention on her and calls her Gina
Lollobrigida. Cat continues to stay with Jack until one night when Mark and Eddie,
disguised in balaclavas, break into his house and accost the sleeping couple in bed,
threatening to kill them both.
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When a masked and armed Mark asks Jack if he loves her,
all Jack can do is stutter nervously “Well, I, I mean, I hadn’t thought. Been thinking that
far ahead” (103). And later when Cat presses Jack to tell Mark he loves her, he mutters:
Jack. It was fun.
Really it was.
Do you understand?
But this is…this is crazy. (106)

And with that, Cat is once again cast out homeless into the street. On a basic level, the play
continually contemplates the terror of homelessness and its ever-encroaching reality, a
topic also taken up in Jimmy Murphy’s A Picture of Paradise (1996) about a family forced
to squat in run-down, empty houses in Dublin after losing their home. Homelessness,
particularly at a time of overwhelming prosperity, reveals the underside of material success
and raises questions about the ability to protect vulnerable members of a community. It
also juxtaposes the mechanics of a modern society steeped in the wealth and privilege of
successful late capital against the social reality of young women who lack resources and

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Here the script recalls a scene out of Mark O’Rowe’s 2003 film Intermission where a
disgruntled boyfriend and two friends break into his ex-girlfriend’s older partner’s home
and hold both of them hostage with a gun. O’Rowe’s Howie the Rookie (1999) will be
discussed in more detail in this chapter.

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disappear. Llewellyn-Jones, writing about Frank McGuinness’s Baglady (1988),
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a long
monologue by a homeless woman who has faced extraordinary tragedy in her life, notes
that the concept of homelessness in this work gestures towards the two sisters in Brian
Friel’s Dancing at Lughnasa (1990) who end up homeless in the streets of London and
points to references in McGuinness’s text that allude to “…the church’s role in confining
unmarried girls and hushing up incest…” (90). Read against the narratives of the women
confined in Magdalen asylums, taking to the road—as Cat and Sophie do in the end—can
function as an act of subversion since rootlessness is in direct opposition to the construction
of idealized womanhood.
If notions of traditional femininity are subverted in Feehily’s play, then
representations of masculinity hinge on either an exaggerated show of hyper-maleness,
such as in Mark or Eddie who both employ acts of physical aggression to assert their
power, or in a loss of masculinity such as the aging playboy Jack or the defeated Frankie,
Cat’s father who works all day only to come home and sit comatose on the couch in front
of a silent television, emotionally unavailable to his wife or kids. In this way, Duck
presents a link to the long-standing tradition in both modernist and contemporary Irish
works of presenting unreliable fathers who often appear as either drunk, emotionally
blunted, somehow otherwise incapacitated, or physically violent. Fintan O’Toole points to
several examples of this noting Joyce’s Ulysses, Synge’s The Playboy of the Western
World, O’Casey’s Juno and the Paycock, Murphy’s A Whistle in the Dark, Friel’s
Philadelphia, Here I Come!, and Leoard’s Da (Critical Moments 277).

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In a 1985 review of Baglady Fintan O’Toole calls it “an important addition to the
development of a fine playwright” and notes that the play “emphasizes the poetic nature of
McGuinness’s writing” (Critical Moments 36).
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For Cat, her father is no exception to this rule and her search for a stable father-
figure she can rely on leads her to Jack Mullen, a famous writer in his sixties who the girls
studied in school. (His book—Letters To The Dead—offers a possibly sly reference to
Joyce.) Jack, a patron at the nightclub where Cat works, propositions Cat and invites her to
his home where he lavishes her with compliments and adoration. The weary Cat eventually
gives in to his advances, finding refuge in his protection and comfort in his kind demeanor,
in time even proclaiming her love for him. While both are momentarily benefiting from
the arrangement, it is clear that Jack has the upper hand in the power dynamics of the
relationship since he has money, a place to live and the ability to walk away emotionally
unscathed from the encounter. Cat needs him more than he needs her, and this will
ultimately dictate the terms of their relationship.
The theme of older guide/younger student is obviously not new. One of the most
famous depictions of this dynamic occurs in Ulysses between Stephen and Bloom. Bloom
takes Stephen under his wing and offers him guidance and advice, even inviting him into
his home to offer a place of respite from the dangers of the city at night. For all his faults,
Bloom sees himself as a surrogate father-figure for the young artist. Cat’s father, unable to
fill his role, shrinks back into verbal incoherence, offering her instead small amounts of
money and cryptic advice, in the process revealing his own inability to be a truly useful
father. Here, Feehily’s Duck offers a thematic connection to not only Joyce but Ibsen’s The
Wild Duck (1884). With no place to call her own, Cat is effectually banished from any
place resembling a home.
Duck is therefore also thematically connected to the recurring Irish motif of exile.
Cat, like her literary predecessors, is a type of exile too, a refugee with no fixed abode and
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no idea where she might end up. She spends the entire play moving between unwelcoming
spaces where she sacrifices comfort, safety and self-worth. By the end, in search of a home
or at least a space to call their own, she and Sophie decide to leave the city and as the two
girls wait on the side of the road for a lift, it becomes clear the car may never arrive:
A roadside.
A pile of bags and boxes.

SOPHIE is sitting on the Space Hopper. She has a bandage on her arm. CAT is
sitting on a suitcase. She is idly throwing stones across the road.

CAT. The Great Escape this ain’t.
SOPHIE. It can’t be much longer.
CAT. I don’t think it’s coming.
SOPHIE. I can’t believe your phone is out of credit.
CAT. I can’t believe the taxi you rang hasn’t showed. (109)

The girls wait by the side of the road. This final scene then, can be read as an homage to
Beckett’s Waiting for Godot (1954) and the futility, if not absurdity, of the modern escape
narrative. Scathed from multiple traumas—including the numerous humiliations of living
in the shadows during the golden promises of the Celtic Tiger—the last scene nonetheless
shows Cat and Sophie sitting on their luggage on the side of the road, laughing and
chirping like birds at the thought of taking flight, a return to the avian theme. Jordan notes
that:
Both respond with ‘chirp chirp’, in an attempt to be playful but also out of a need to
emphasize the symbolism of the piece. Duck and Gull flee the nest. Myth is absent
and symbolism is a burden, unlike say Henrik Ibsen’s The Wild Duck (1884).
(“Urban Myth” 15)

Their chuckles though raise the possibility of reading laughter as a counterpoint to
powerlessness, the only response left to a history of marginalization, physical abuse and
emotional trauma. The bandage on Sophie’s arm suggests the violence of her story has
now been etched in her skin. Like Lucky and Pozzo, the two girls are trapped in a barren
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landscape and face a potentially endless wait and an unknown future. The image of the two
girls hopelessly awaiting their lift out of town recalls the ambiguous ending of Godot:

Vladimir: Well? Shall we go?
Estragon: Yes, let’s go.
They do not move.
Curtain (61)

In the end, it is not clear whether the girls will make it out of Dublin but the gesture of
leaving and the will it implies offers the possibility of reading the end as a narrative of
empowerment, reminding the reader that this is a play not about two girls who disappear
into silence but about young women who survive on the road. Read this way, the ending
allows for the possibility of an exit strategy. The drive to leave reveals that Cat and Sophie
could therefore be understood as survivors of the impulse to be written out of history,
establishing a line of continuity back to Beckett: “The triumph of the survivor is what
Beckett in his postwar plays manages to avoid. His are ‘survival stories’ which inhabit a
zone light-years away from the ‘American dream’… (Blackman 78). Like Beckett’s plays,
Duck offers another possibility for reading “survivor” not necessarily as celebratory, but
instead as emblematic of strategic mechanisms mobilized by marginalized characters in the
face of paralyzing limitations.

Staging Violence in Gina Moxley’s Danti-Dan

Directed by Rough Magic’s Lynne Parker, Gina Moxley’s Danti-Dan was
performed at the Project Arts Centre in Dublin on 1995. Set in Cork, the play examines the
lives of five interconnected adolescents living on the cusp of catastrophe in early days of
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summer in 1970.
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Fourteen-year-old Dan, who the stage directions indicate has “a
functioning age of eight” (3), spends his days playing rodeo, riding an imaginary horse and
recording the license plate numbers of all the cars that go down the road. He keeps all of
his information in a collection of notebooks that amount to his prized possessions. Sixteen-
year-old Ber works in a nearby shop and is involved with eighteen-year-old Noel, a foul-
mouthed unemployed “waster” who treats her with disdain, only occasionally romancing
her so she will give in to his advances. Ber’s little sister, Dolores, is a fourteen-year-old
girl who has befriended thirteen-year-old Cactus, a precocious local girl from the
neighborhood whose mother has died and who spends her days spying on the others and
finding new methods of manipulation to surreptitiously control the people around her.
Cactus clings to Dolores as her only friend and while it is clear she craves a sisterly
connections others around her have, she manipulates Dolores and uses her as a weaker
version of herself, forcing her to play kissing games while reenacting scenes from trashy
romance novels, a game she will later play with the unsuspecting Dan. She also instigates
an angry encounter between Ber and Noel that leads to their breakup when Cactus reveals
Ber is pregnant with his child. Cactus purposely embarrasses Ber by making her admit to
Noel that she has been telling the girls they are engaged, even showing them a ring he
allegedly bought her. When he confronts her in front of Cactus and Dolores, the humiliated
Ber is forced to admit she lied to the girls and bought the ring herself. As a consequence of
Cactus’s intrusion, Ber is left embarrassed, pregnant and alone.

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Though the play is set in 1970, it was written in 1995 and the inclusion of Danti-Dan in
this chapter is reflective of the play’s thematic subject matter and its publication date
during the Celtic Tiger.
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Perhaps most disturbing however is how Cactus befriends Dan only to take
advantage of him emotionally and sexually, putting in motion a series of events that lead to
his death when she pushes him off a wall after he threatens to reveal what she has done to
him. The play ends a month after Dan’s death and funeral, and with the impending
wedding of Ber and Noel who have reunited. When Dolores asks Cactus why she did not
attend the funeral, she laughs: “They wouldn’t let me. Sure everyone’s saying I did it on
purpose. I suppose you are too” (70). Cactus insists that Dan’s death was not her fault and
refuses to take responsibility: “It’s the County Council’s fault. That thing was broken for
ages. Something was bound to happen” (70). The last encounter of the play shows Cactus
calling Dolores back to her as Dolores walks away. In a power play designed to see if she
is still under her control, Cactus makes her walk all the way back to her before muttering
an indifferent “See you” (71). In this final scene, Cactus tests how far she can push
Dolores and in the end, Dolores proves still prone to her manipulation as the two girls stand
facing each other as two versions of competing female adolescence are presented on the
stage.
The decision to stage complicated versions of female adolescence and friendship
was deliberate on the part of playwright Gina Moxley who was interested in exploring the
intersection between societal perceptions and the actions of youthful female characters. In
The Dazzling Dark (1996), a compilation of new Irish plays edited by Frank McGuinness,
Moxley writes about the genesis of the play:
It’s difficult to remember what came first. Once I’d decided to deal with teenagers
and sexuality, the characters of Cactus and Dan formed quickly. Girls of that age
are very often presented as passive victims of men’s behaviour towards them and I
wanted to see what happened if the reverse was the case. I’d never bought into all
of that sugar and spice stuff and was interested in having a female character with an
unnervingly steady gaze and who appears remorseless. (73)
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In staging Cactus as a girl “with an unnervingly steady gaze and who appears remorseless,”
Moxley constructs a complex portrait of female adolescence that challenges patriarchal
constructions of power and simultaneously demystifies the cult of idealized femininity.
Cactus, like her name implies, is stoic and thorny, and like her namesake plant, she
survives through difficult conditions and offers the reader a different register for reading
young girls. Cactus is a provocative character because even as a young girl she refuses to
fit the model of femininity demanded of her: she is a calculating and manipulating
character whose lack of a mother is at the center of her life narrative.
What the text seems to suggest is that the absence of Cactus’s mother is more
significant than the vague presence of her father. The dead mother figure is crucial here—
Cactus is motherless and this is a major point of differentiation in the rural community. It
is generally understood that if she had a mother, she would not behave as she does. Her
identity then, is tied to the death and absence of her mother, and her “unnatural” existence
is predicated on the fact she is essentially on her own both in the community and the world,
a point contrasted by the seeming omnipresence of other mothers in their daily roles.
The absence of a reliable maternal figure establishes a line of continuity with other
modern and contemporary Irish plays.
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While Ber and Dolores’ mother looms large in the
background of the play—they are constantly rushing home for their tea to appease her or
relaying a story about her wrath for something they did—the conspicuous absence of
Cactus mother’s offers the possibility of reading Cactus as an uncanny figure who poses a
threat to normative patterns of behavior delineated by the community. She is seen as
unnatural and therefore prone to impulses that put her at odds with respectable society and,

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See Chapter Four part two for a discussion of this trope and its implications in
contemporary Irish drama.
110
like Feehily’s girls, she can be read as a cautionary tale about “reckless” girls roaming
alone unguarded who need to be corralled. Irish dramaturgy is filled with female castoffs
who have been disciplined into submission by the community, such as Teresa Deevy’s
heroines Katie Roche and Annie Kinsella, who are punished when they are perceived as
threats to the status quo or viewed as “unnatural” for their actions.
The importance of naturalizing gender roles becomes a key component in setting up
ideological constructions tied to discourses on land and space as well. As a resident of
rural Ireland, Cactus is doubly bound to that imperative:
The importance of the rural in Irish culture intersects with the gendering of nature,
and through the sovereignty goddess, the land itself, as female…Suggestions that
women are essentially close to nature through the reproductive functions of their
bodies can be enlisted to constrain women’s opportunities and define womanhood.
(Nash, “Embodied” 120)

The notion of woman-as-land has long roots in Irish discourse and serves to naturalize
gender relations. Catherine Nash writes that, “…the gendering of Ireland and the
construction of Irish femininity have been supported by the traditional associations between
nature, land, fertility and femininity” (“Embodied” 110). She argues that the feminizing of
Ireland—the insistence on identifying the land as Mother Ireland—“has been used to
define the cultural identity and political status of the society and the identities and roles of
men and women in Ireland” (“Embodied” 111). Tracing the history of the gendering of
Ireland all the way from the “Gaelic traditions of pre-Christian Ireland” where “both the
idea of sovereignty and the land of the kingdom was represented as a woman” (112), Nash
argues that from its use as a tool of colonial imperialism to the time of the Irish Literary
Revival, whether appearing feminized in poetry or strengthened by the emergence of the
cult of Marion worship, the concept of portraying Ireland as a woman is rooted in a project
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of naturalizing patriarchal control: “These representations of Ireland as female have been
predominately produced by men in order to stablise versions of masculinity and naturalise
their power over women” (“Embodied” 116).
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Unlike Ber who fulfills her “natural” destiny by reproducing and marrying, Cactus
essentially cannibalizes Dan and does not embody an idealized Mary-figure or a model
Mother Ireland; she is a motherless threat, an unnatural presence who kills a boy more
helpless than her. This raises the question of the female as predator: is Cactus a predator
feeding off of others’ weakness and acting out of a sinister need for control and power?
For Cactus, her motherless upbringing, her predatory inclinations and threat they pose
make her a viable candidate for detention in a Magdalen asylum, or incarceration in a state
institution for her actions. However, her narrative does not end with confinement but with
a sojourn out of the rural setting and into city space.
Like Feehily’s Duck, Moxley’s play ends with two girls on an empty stage and an
impending trip on the road out of the present location. And while a move to Limerick with
her father who has received a job transfer is anticipated, it is unclear whether this next
move will yield an escape or reenactment of past actions. Like Cat and Sophie who take to
the road at the end of Duck, the journey-quest trope frames the ending of Moxely’s play.
Margaret Llewellyn-Jones notes that Danti-Dan “explores adolescent sexuality in a rural
context within a realist form, merging aspects of the ‘Dream of the West’ and the ‘Dream
of America’” (130) and in his review for the Irish Times, Fintan O’Toole notes, “The
originality of Gina Moxley’s first play Danti-Dan…is that in it we approach the wild
borderlands almost entirely from the point of view of the child” (135). Cactus will leave

93
See section two in Chapter Four for a detailed discussion of this trope in Irish history.
112
the boundaries of this rural community that has labeled her an outcast and will go off into
the city, inverting the usual narrative of the dangerous interloper that arrives from the
outside, usually from an urban setting, and somehow threatens the local community with
foreign knowledge and influences.
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The idea that she will be let loose in the big city
somehow suggests an anonymity that will foster her destructive inclinations and move her
away from the disapproving locals. It is better to move her out of their space and, if not
locked away, then at least away in the city and far from impressionable girls, vulnerable
boys and disapproving mothers. In the end, Cactus, like the girls in Duck, is also
essentially homeless and heading out of town where the urban space presents new
possibilities in the anonymous matrix of the cityscape.

Bored, Belligerent and Brutal: Depictions of Irish Adolescent Boys in Celtic Tiger
Theatre

The well-founded or indeed neurotic feeling of powerlessness is intimately bound
up with boredom: boredom is objective desperation. (Adorno 192)

Representations of Irish adolescent boys in Celtic Tiger drama often center on
depictions of dangerous boredom that manifest in occasional bursts of violent rage directed
at those around them, and the dramas appear to suggest that the material conditions of the
Celtic Tiger are at least partly to blame for a lack of opportunities for working-class boys,
leading to a preoccupation with a life of violence and criminality. Works by Mark O’Rowe
and Enda Walsh each feature young male characters who participate in acts of brutality as
they navigate urban spaces. Romanticized images of the thug underworld perpetuated by

94
See Chapter Three for a detailed discussion of this trope in modern and contemporary
Irish drama.

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Hollywood also add currency to representations of the gangster urban narrative in the age
of the Celtic Tiger.
95

Four of the most acclaimed contemporary Irish playwrights—Martin McDonagh,
Mark O’Rowe, Enda Walsh and Conor McPherson—have each successfully ventured into
film, writing and directing major motion pictures that received critical attention both in
Ireland and abroad. Most of the films feature violent gangsters who engage in criminal
activity. McDonagh’s Seven Psychopaths (2012), In Bruges (2006), and Six Shooter
(2005)
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; O’Rowe’s Perrier’s Bounty (2010) and Intermission (2003); and Walsh’s Disco
Pigs (2001) and Hunger (2008)
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each present explicit moments of extreme violence and
physical degradation and both McDonagh’s and O’Rowe’s films specifically feature urban
gangster motifs typically focused on narratives about men.
98
Writing on O’Rowe, Mary
Trotter notes:
While O’Casey may have turned to the tropes of melodrama and the music hall to
paint his pictures of Dublin’s underclass, O’Rowe, like other playwrights of his
generation, turns to the cinema, the popular mode of expression for his postmodern
protagonists. (183)

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For example, critics have often noted the influence of Quentin Tarantino on Martin
McDonagh. See Mary Trotter, “A New Sense of Place: Irish Theatre since the 1990s”
(190); Patrick Lonergan, “Globalizing Authorship: Martin McDonagh, 1996/2003” where
he also suggest Mark O’Rowe’s Made in China and Howie the Rookie was influenced by
Asian cinema (Theatre 107); several articles in Martin McDonagh: A Casebook (2007) also
point to the influence of film and soap operas on McDonagh. See Chapter Four for a more
detailed analysis of this point and other works by McDonagh.

96
This film won McDonagh the Academy Award for Best Short Film in 2006.

97
This film won Walsh the Caméra d’Or (Best First Film) at the Cannes Film Festival in
2008.

98
McPherson’s films have adopted a different focus. While his dramas feature some of
these characters, his most recent film, The Eclipse (2009) is a ghost story about a widower
in a seaside Irish town.
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Mic Moroney also points out Hollywood’s influence on Irish playwrights like O’Rowe:
But while Dublin has been enjoying a certain gangland-glamour on the silver
screen, from the regrettable Courier in the 1980s to The General and the Veronica
Guerin movie Though the Sky Falls, a more curious twist on the hard-man Dub-noir
genre has emerged in Mark O’Rowe’s idiosyncratic pieces... (267)

Dublin noir films have emerged in the wake of the Celtic Tiger
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and while these movies
by Irish playwrights have helped establish the Irish capital as a cinematic urban landscape
(in distinction to portrayals of rural Ireland) some of their earlier dramas explored the
relationship between adolescent boys, violence and the city.
As O’Rowe’s portrayal of Dublin and Walsh’s depiction of Cork reveal, landscape
is another integral character in works that also explore gender constructions. Here,
criminality, space, and constructions of masculinity are carefully intertwined. Llewellyn-
Jones notes that,
Even those plays that explore the urban scene’s underbelly—the downside of the
‘Celtic tiger’ economy such as drug-taking, unemployment and unscrupulous
building and so on—can be related to the construction of masculinity as well as
location. (94)

On stage, both O’Rowe and Walsh distinguished themselves immediately with the frenetic
use of language and profanity-laced exchanges in their dramas. On the surface, O’Rowe
dramaturgy can be said to defy categorization. Though clearly not realist dramas in the
traditional sense, his characters are nonetheless rooted in a reality that firmly dictates
power relations and gender dynamics. Unable to reconcile the gap between the world they
inhabit in their minds and the space they are forced to occupy, the characters resort to a
language of abstraction where incoherence and vulgarities often dominate the narrative and

99
See Andrew Kincaid, “‘Down These Mean Streets’: The City and Critique in
Contemporary Irish Noir” in Éire-Ireland 45:1& 2 for more on the rise of the Irish noir
novel during and after the Celtic Tiger.
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where absurdity ultimately dictates their course of action. The characters in O’Rowe’s
early dramaturgy recount brutal interactions as they attempt to survive in a world filled
with casual violence.
In O’Rowe’s Howie the Rookie (1999), a two-man show told in two parts—first
The Howie’s version of events, then The Rookie’s—The Howie Lee seeks out his nemesis
The Rookie Lee for leaving scabies on his friend Ollie’s mattress, which he now watches
him burn:
Field, the back of the flats there, back of Ollie’s flat me mate
Ollie’s an’, Jesus, it is Ollie, little fire built, he’s standin’ there,
watchin’ it, one hand in his pocket, now an’ again, stick prods
the burnin’…whatsit? (7)

Howie sets out to find The Rookie Lee, but not before his mother corners him and requests
he babysit his younger brother Mousy:
Mind your brother. Mind Mousy.
I’m busy.
Me and your oul’fella’s goin’ to the fort.
I’m busy, get out of me face. (10)

He refuses her request and insists he will not watch his brother:

I won’t get out of your face.
Leave me alone.
No, I won’t. You mind The Mousey Lee.
No. I won’t. (10)

The Howie Lee takes off into the Dublin night and encounters a bizarre cast of characters
whose bodily descriptions he presents with unforgiving details—fat women, stinking
men—and chronicles the pervasive threat of violence that seems to underpin the actions of
the play. Meanwhile, his rival The Rookie Lee is also caught in the current of violence:
having accidentally killed a gangster’s fish, he must produce “seven hundred quid” if he
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does not want his “kneecaps gone” (39). Trying to come up with the money, he too
interacts with a host of sordid characters and engages in violent fights and verbal spars until
The Howie Lee, an unlikely ally, comes to his rescue, only to suffer an excruciating death
when he ends up impaled on a fence.
With nowhere to go and nothing to do, O’Rowe’s characters display a restlessness
that manifests itself in forms of verbal and physical brutality. As Eamonn Jordan points
out, the text is peppered with references to Bruce Lee: “The link is the dead, mythologized
film actor Bruce Lee, star of martial arts movies—‘You me an’ The Bruce Lee’ (p.18), as
The Howie remarks to The Rookie” (Dissident 169). These characters are not the poster
children of the Celtic Tiger—they are, in fact, the opposite: they are fundamentally tragic
characters. In fact, it is soon revealed that rather than watch his younger brother as his
mother requested, The Howie Lee paid an acquaintance to babysit, but she fell asleep and
the little boy wandered out into the street and straight to his violent death:
Mousey went out, let himself out, saw money at the edge of the road.
Oh, no.
Saw money, wanted it. Coins.
Silver an’ copper. (31-32)

His mother reveals that Mousey Lee had the money clenched in hands as he spoke his last
words: “How much is that?” (32). His mother tells him, “Then he dropped the money ’cos
he was crushed” (32). This final image of the dead child,
100
crushed to death and clutching
the glorified spoils of Tiger triumph, signals the figurative bankruptcy that over-emphasis
on material success produces. The Howie Lee stands there, in disbelief at the news and
utters, “That can’t be…Hang on…” (32) as his mother blames him for the death, though

100
See the Conclusion for a discussion of this trope in modern and contemporary Irish
drama.
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soon enough he too will end up dead, impaled on a fence, ironically after intervening to
stop a fight. As Jordan notes,
In Howie the Rookie myths of sacrifice are offered not so much by Christian
iconography, but by popular culture in the form of Kung Fu movies. The notion of
sacrifice and bloodshed leading to renewal is challenged, as there is no formal
renewal but paralysis and numbness towards the end of the play. (Dissident 178)

In the end, there is no redemption on the horizon and this futility is mirrored in the vulgar,
often cryptic language the characters employ and in the violent deaths they ultimately
endure.
Like Howie the Rookie, Enda Walsh’s Disco Pigs (1995)
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relies heavily upon the
motif of teen angst and isolation. Llewellyn-Jones notes that, “Walsh’s Disco Pigs shows a
friendship between two urban adolescents, bonded by their use of a private language” (42).
The story revolves around Runt and Pig, two disenfranchised teenagers who share a
corrosive bond based on a mutual obsession with each other. Runt, a girl, and Pig, a boy,
find refuge from the world’s rejection in their friendship by sharing a bizarre language.
Together since they were infants, they can often anticipate what the other will say and on
their seventeenth birthday they take a trip together throughout Cork City. But when Runt
no longer needs Pig and begins to grow out of their bond, he becomes distraught and in an
attempt to hold on to her and to his sense of self, he engages in violent behavior, viciously
beating up another boy at the disco. By the end of the play, it is clear Runt wants to break
free and move on, alone. Their last exchange reveals the changing dynamics between
them:

101
Walsh wrote the screenplay for Disco Pigs (2001), directed by Kristen Sheridan.
Sheridan also directed Dollhouse, a film about a group of violent kids who break into and
trash a lavish home near the seaside in Dublin. It premiered at the Irish Film Festival in
Los Angeles in September 2012.
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RUNT. Cherrio. So-long pal.
PIG. Wat? Stay! (Overlapping.) STAY STAY STAY STAY
STAY STAY STAY!!!! (71)
Runt replies that she “Mus ged away! No mo all dis play an pain! So so-long to all dat
pox! Go girl! Leave!” (71). Llewellyn-Jones points out that at the end, “her speech
gradually transmutes from Pigtalk to calmer, normal language” (42). Pig begs her to stay
but Runt, resolute in her decision to leave, is empowered by the notion of freedom as
revealed by her final words of the play: “Where to?” Like Cat and Sophie in Feehily’s
Duck and Cactus in Moxley’s Danti-Dan, Runt prepares for a voyage out of her present
location and into a new place. Again, the journey-quest trope frames this narrative and acts
as a way to empower the young female protagonist.
By the conclusion of the play, the stage directions reveal the course of their separate
directions:
Lights slowly fade down on PIG until out.
The lights slowly fades down on RUNT.
Blackout.
The End. (72).
Pig, who begged Runt to stay, is left alone with an uncertain future. Walsh seems to
suggest a fragility in masculine identity here and both a confusion at the state of gender
relations at the beginning of the millennium and an overwhelming fear of isolation. In the
introduction to The Tiger in Winter: Six Contemporary Irish Plays (2006), a collection that
features only male playwrights, editor John Fairleigh muses on the emergence of male
playwrights exploring the “malaise” of young Irish men:
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Irish girls outperform Irish boys on almost every measure of social focus and
academic achievement, and it is surely only a matter of time before the generation
of newly confident women pushes its way through the dominating male hierarchies.
And the traditionally female qualities of work ethic, self-knowledge and articulacy,
so readily garnered into the management of the Celtic tiger, are also becoming the
defining elements of Irishwomen’s expectations of Irishmen. The resulting
challenge for the threatened sex is how far, and how fast, they can move on from
entrenched and dysfunctional behaviour. Such unresolved tensions are of course
the stuff of drama, and it is no surprise that younger Irish writers should be picking
up on this evolving tussle. (iv-x)

This construction of contemporary Irish masculinity offers a reading of Pig as a young man
who does not have the assurances of the Celtic Tiger to provide his ego with confidence.
He is, in short, just a kid with no promising offers on the horizon but a real sense of rage.
Here, Pig recalls the violent and schizophrenic tendencies of Francie in Pat McCabe’s The
Butcher Boy (1992), who in fact calls himself Pig as his grip on reality begins to fade. Pig
and Runt’s frenetic world might also be said to resemble the disco-glitter atmosphere in
McCabe’s Breakfast on Pluto (1998), another tour of disenfranchised characters, violent
encounters and discarded relationships. Ultimately, both O’Rowe and Walsh create
characters that engage in violent behavior in an attempt to assert their masculinity in the
face of growing powerlessness, presenting young male characters who are unable to
transcend the tragic circumstances of their young lives.

Escaping into the City: Lance Daly’s film Kisses
Perhaps Lance Daly’s film Kisses can be read as a counterpoint to these depictions
of violent youth and recuperate the image of lost adolescence in an age of globalization by
offering an alternative, redemptive narrative that presents the story of two hopeful young
kids living in Dublin during the Celtic Tiger. The film centers on Dylan and Kylie who,
following a violent attack on Dylan by his father, set out into the Dublin night in search of
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his brother who ran away from home a few years earlier. Dylan and Kylie run off together
in search of his brother, and in the tradition of escapist adventure narratives including
Joyce’s story “An Encounter” in Dubliners (where the two kids set off on a similar
adventure, riding into the city along the river as well) they meet a cast of eccentric
characters who shepherd them along their journey in the city.
The color spectrum is key in the film: when Daly shows the children arriving into
the lights of the city, the colors turn bright and intensify. The hyper glow of Dublin’s
night-lights and the buzz of the cityscape illuminate the kids’ journey as they buy candy,
wear roller skates around town and enjoy their first bout of freedom away from adult
supervision.
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And like other Celtic Tiger dramas, the film offers representations of
disenfranchised members of society, highlighting the interactions between the children and
the cast of minorities they meet as key to their survival. This meeting of different racial
and ethnic groups and various socio-economic circumstances illustrates the fact that the
children are not the only ones struggling to carve out a safe existence on the streets of
Dublin as they navigate the cityscape and create community. This humble offering of
solidarity between marginalized characters presents the possibility of presenting some type
of redemptive utopian gesture in the face of globalization’s mass alienation.
By the evening though, the children begin to realize that the city also poses the
potential for great danger. Alone and with rapidly diminishing funds, the two adolescents
encounter moments of cold and hunger, exploitation, and physical abuse as the night begins
to fall around them. They end up sleeping on a street and in the light of the morning they
realize they have been sleeping near the body of dead boy. The nameless child, the victim

102
This recalls Edna O’Brien description of the “country girl’s delight in the ‘neon
fairlyland of Dublin’” (qtd. in Duffy 80).
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of unknown circumstances, died alone on the street and the discovery suggests that the
corpse they find is a stand-in for any of the missing children in the city, including Dylan’s
brother. It turns out not to be his brother, but it might as well be as the two kids begin to
realize the grim reality of their adventure—with nowhere to go and no money left, their
options are entirely limited. In the dawn of day, the children are returned home to their
respective families by the guards. For Dylan, this means certain violence at the hands of
his father while Kylie suffers the threat of continued molestation by her uncle. Sitting
sullenly in the back of the police car, Dylan is taken to the front of the house where he
takes one final look at Kylie. Staring silently at one another, the kids slowly break into a
shared smile. Their spirit has not been broken.
For the young characters in this film and in these plays, learning to steer through
dangerous geographies and the dark side of the city where violence in its many forms
haunts their every move, requires a negotiation of power struggles, familial relationships
and community expectations. They struggle with others for small claims and power and
keep moving from place to place in search of safe places as they utilize various strategies
of survival, whether in fleeing the city as the girls do in Duck, breaking free from corrosive
bonds as in Disco Pigs or in the sojourn into urban space as in Kisses. As these and other
representations of adolescents during the Celtic Tiger demonstrate, when faced with the
frenetic pace of globalization and all of its manifestations, including violent confrontations
with those in positions of authority and the humiliations they must endure as a result of
their own powerlessness, the young characters adopt new methods of expression and
mechanisms of coping as they lose themselves in the maze of the city.
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Chapter Three

Representation, Identity and Celtic Tiger Drama

W.B. Yeats…was fond of quoting Turgenev in defence of his artistic role: ‘The
cosmopolitan is a nonentity—worse than a nonentity; without nationality is no art,
nor truth, nor life, nor anything.’ (Duffy 65)

The metaphor of the ‘end of history’ entails the most unabashed declaration
imaginable of the superiority of the values and institutions of western bourgeois
society…The devastating reforms imposed upon large swathes of the planet have
been guided by the imperative that goods, services and finance—but not people—
should be allowed to flow freely across international boundaries. (Coulter 8)

More than anything else, globalization is characterized by mobility. Where once
there was talk of ‘end of history’, these days ‘the end of geography’ seems more
appropriate. For cosmopolitans who can move freely, neither distance nor borders
matter… (Lentin 3)

The emergence of the Celtic Tiger and its reliance on the fluidity of certain
economic markers, such as commodities and labour, produces the trajectory between
Yeats’s declaration, borrowed from Russian poet Turgenev, and Lentin’s postmodern
assertion and works to disrupt the foundational claims of an insular Irish cultural
nationalism, offering in its place an alternative discourse that takes into account emerging
narratives by new members of the state. It also foregrounds an essential postcolonial
inquiry as articulated by Homi Bhabha when he asks, “What kind of a cultural space is the
nation with its transgressive boundaries and its ‘interruptive’ interiority?” (5). The
question can be read as a critical interrogation into what human geography reveals about
the nation and how borders are configured in “new” space. If the postmodern aesthetic can
be said to work towards the transcendence of borders and difference, and the ramifications
of successful free-market capitalism include, by its very nature, an influx of people into a
new spaces, then how does the postcolonial nation negotiate and reimagine national
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coherence? How does it articulate its own borders, both imagined, as Benedict Anderson
theorizes, and geopolitically constructed, as made visible by markers of the state, when so
much cultural capital has already been invested in both delineating a national narrative and
effecting boundaries in its space?
In the Irish context, this means a reconsideration of what constitutes “Irishness” in
globalized Ireland. Yeats’s insistence on the centrality of a defined nationality reveals his
commitment to the development of the Irish state he and other Irish Modernists writers and
artists, political thinkers and social philosophers helped construct at the beginning of the
twentieth century. Their involvement in the national project helped establish the Irish Free
State as a place where the struggle for independence and sovereignty were closely bound
with an Irish cultural renaissance rooted in the theatre and committed to the possibility of
reimagining the state with utopian aspirations.
The creation of an Irish national mythos, complete with deeply embedded symbols
indicative of an ancient past connected to the land, formed the foundation of the new Free
State and the basis for Declan Kiberd’s assertion that Ireland was invented by the Irish
(Inventing Ireland 1). The process of creating a national space then, requires the
implementation of a recognizable iconography that ultimately animates the cultural
landscape with meaning. Brian Graham argues that the “relationship between politico-
cultural institutions and territoriality suggests that a representation of place is a key
component in communal identity” (“Ireland and Irishness” 6). The project of nation-
building then, mobilizes these representations as it attempts to establish an identity that
binds people together with mutual cultural, religious and political connections in order to
create a shared community.
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As free market capital dictates and as the Celtic Tiger visibly enacts, part of
globalization’s narrative includes migration and the strategic mobilization of peoples across
borders and into national spaces. Ronit Lentin notes that “between 1995 and 2000 there
were some 250,000 immigrants to Ireland” (2), a large figure considering that the whole
population of Ireland is about 4.5 million, and observes that “[t]here are no parallels in
other EU states” (2). As Ireland faces an influx of new people into old spaces in a
relatively short amount of time, the Celtic Tiger raises questions of Irish identity. What
does it mean to be Irish and who gets to enjoy the rights, privileges and obligations
citizenship offers? Lentin points out that in 2004 the Citizenship Referendum led to
dismantling “the historical link between birth and nation” (7) requiring instead the
establishment of Irish bloodlines in order to claim citizenship. This had major implications
for understanding the role of citizenship and requires a nuanced examination into how Irish
identity is represented culturally. Migration also ushers in questions regarding the politics
of space as well by reconfiguring how land is reapportioned to accommodate new
populations; postcolonial geopolitics would focus upon representations of the subaltern in
this case. For a nation used to legacy of emigration, dislocation takes on a new cultural
context at the beginning of the twenty-first century in Ireland.
In “Interculturalism and Irish Theatre: The Portrayal of Immigrants on the Irish
Stage” Jason King suggests that, “the theatre itself is nevertheless at the forefront of
defining Ireland’s intercultural ideals” (2005). Irish theatre has led the way over other art
forms in recognizing and confronting these issues, engaging with terms such as “hybridity”
and “difference” as borders become more fluid and migration reconfigures identity politics
in Ireland during the Celtic Tiger. This chapter researches recent Irish plays and some
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selected films, and examines the current frameworks employed by critics for analyzing
Irish theatre works that pitch contemporary works dealing with race and representation into
two categories: critical failures that employ a didactic approach aimed at educating the
public on the benign nature of the newly-arrived (which essentially belies the complexity of
the migrant narrative) and champions the visibility of the racial “Other” on stage as a
winning first step; and critical successes that, given box office revenue, the presentation of
a diverse cast and an apparent commitment away from deliberate moral preaching, appear
to offer a more nuanced portrait of Ireland by suggesting that race does not matter. The
chapter begins by offering an overview of Foucault’s work on biopolitics and researches
emerging work in race and gender studies. It presents a historical overview of the
economic and social conditions that materialized in Ireland as a result of the Celtic Tiger,
focusing specifically on the rise of immigration and the subsequent 2004 legislation that
altered birthright citizenship, restricting it for the first time in Irish history from birthplace
to bloodlines. It traces the critical reception of this legislation from its genesis to it
aftermath and contemplates the long-term effects of the referendum. The chapter then
moves to an examination of three specific Irish plays—The Buddhist of Castleknock (2002)
by Jim O’Hanlon, Done Up Like a Kipper (2002) by Ken Harmon, and the collaborative
effort by Bisi Adigun and Roddy Doyle to stage a modern adaptation of J.M. Synge’s
iconic work, The Playboy of the Western World (2007)—and argues that these plays, to
varying degrees, present works that, while some have suggested they can be read as overtly
didactic or reductive, contribute to an emerging discourse on race, identity and cultural
belonging by offering competing versions of representation and diversity on the Irish stage
at the start of the millennium.
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Biopolitics, Cosmopolitanism and Globalization in Ireland

Migration is an investment; the migrant is an investor.
(Michel Foucault, The Birth of Biopolitics, 230)

So there are two strands that intertwine in the notion of cosmopolitanism. One is
the idea that we have obligations to others, obligations that stretch beyond those to
whom we are related by the ties of kith and kind, or even the more formal ties of a
shared citizenship. The other is that we take seriously the value not just of human
life but of particular human lives, which means taking an interest in the practices
and beliefs that lend them significance. People are different, the cosmopolitan
knows, and there is much to learn from our differences.
(Kwame Appiah, Cosmopolitanism, xv)

In The Birth of Biopolitics (2008), a collection of transcribed lectures presented in
1979 at the Collége de France, Foucault traces the history of European and American
liberalism in an attempt to arrive at the social and economic significance of biopolitics, a
body of principles and policies which he defines as “the attempt, starting from the
eighteenth century, to rationalize the problems posed to governmental practice by
phenomena characteristic of a set of living beings forming a population: health, hygiene,
birthrate, life expectancy, race…” (317). He argues that an examination into an
understanding of populations must first be based on a nuanced historical interrogation of
“economic truth” (21-22). Most of the twelve lectures are spent developing a working
trajectory towards a critical understanding of biopolitics by first outlining a history and
philosophical evolution of liberalism as a viable body of thought. By the end of the
lectures, it is clear Foucault runs out of time, noting in the course summary, “This year’s
course ended up being devoted entirely to what should have been only its introduction”
(317). This limitation means that a fuller discussion on biopolitics does not emerge here,
with Foucault only hinting at connections between the line of argumentation he presents
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and the internal machinations of what he sees as the biopolitical state, such as in his tenth
lecture where he begins to dissect American neo-liberalism and its focus on human capital,
concluding that, given the rhetoric of its discourse, economic factors are directly tied to
human capital and issues of maternity, child rearing and marriage (243-246). He also hints
at the relationship between human capital and migration in lecture nine, noting that, “In the
elements making up human capital we should also include mobility, that is to say, an
individual’s ability to move around, and migration in particular” (230). Here Foucault
notes the “material” and “psychological” price of migrancy, concluding that, “migration
has a cost” (230) that can be analyzed on the basis of an investment strategy:
What is the function of this cost? It is to obtain an improvement of status, of
remuneration, and so on, that is to say, it is an investment. Migration is an
investment; the migrant is an investor. He is an entrepreneur himself who incurs
expenses by investing to obtain some kind of improvement. The mobility of a
population and its ability to make choices of mobility as investment choices for
improving income enable the phenomena of migration to be brought back into
economic analysis, not as pure and simple effects of economics mechanisms which
extend beyond individuals and which, as it were, bind them to an immense machine
which they do not control, but as behavior in terms [of] individual enterprise, of
enterprise of oneself with investments and incomes. (230)

Foucault explains here that migrancy and the set of decisions and ramifications that it is
bound up with extends beyond the simple economic realm and contemplates individual
behavior, arguing that the migrant is a type of personal investor in their own life. With the
focus on the individual and on the basis of the inability to control the “immense machine”
they find themselves part of, this analysis focuses on the economics of mobility while
assuming the facility for that movement in the first place and does not differentiate the role
of gender in contemplating global migrancy, a key omission as recent social critics have
argued that migration has become a much more gendered phenomenon as the forces of
globalization call for more “social reproductive labor” (quoted in Hu-Dehart 250).
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Since Foucault only briefly alludes to some of these issues as he notes, a nuanced
discussion that elaborates on these topics does not fully materialize in Biopolitics, but his
prescient recognition of the importance of population studies and geopolitical mobility
reveals an important aspect of social and political theory while also raising questions of
cultural representation. Working with Agamben’s formulation of biopolitics and the notion
of “bare life”, Matthew Causey examines performances of Irishness, noting that, “The
struggle exists at the level of personal and cultural identity, but spreads out to economic
concerns of cultural tourism, which markets an authentic branding of Irishness” (153), and
points to the citizenship referendum in 2004 which he argues “represents a switch from a
territorial politics of geography (of place) to a biopolitics (of life)” (153). Kuhling and
Keohane in Cosmopolitan Ireland (2007) articulate some of the anxieties inherent in these
issues and the global labor market:
Globalisation increasingly demands the circulation of labour around the globe. But
labour, conceived of abstractly as a ‘factor of production’, a commodity, is a
commodity unique amongst commodities, as it comes encumbered with its families,
bodies, needs and wants beyond their labour power. Global capitalism demands the
commodity, but it is perturbed by its ‘surplus packaging’ (Gillian, 2006: 50). [62]

The implications of this ‘surplus packaging’ require a nuanced engagement with the
politics of populations as both theoretical groups in movement and as people with
immediate requirements for survival. Given these realities and the different classifications
of human movement in an increasing globalized world order, the issue of representation
also arises as collective groups require more than food, shelter, medical care and work.
While some have suggested that how people do these things is as much a function of
cultural expression as recognized artistic forms, the imperative to publicly perform and
represent difference and diversity contemplates the question of who can embody the
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experience of migrancy and what mediums have been most receptive to those complex
representations.

Representing Celtic Tiger Ireland On Screen

I have no doubt that the immigrant will become a vital theme in, and feature of,
Irish literature in the next few years. I have a feeling that many Irish writers have
been away for a while, looking at other worlds, in order to come back home and tell
the story properly.
(Colum McCann, 23 May 2007, Irish Times)

Irish novelist Colum McCann’s statement to the Irish Times on the novel’s relation
to Ireland’s changing social and ethnic landscape ties directly into discussions of race,
identity and the ability of literary art forms to accurately capture the experience of
immigrant dislocation. As a novelist, McCann is one of the few Irish writers to engage
these issues in fiction. His own work reveals a border-crossing sensibility that interrogates
the role of the cultural outsider, such as in Songdogs (1995) where an Irish-Mexican son in
search of answers about his identity wanders from his mother’s homeland in Mexico where
his parents married to his father’s homeland in the west of Ireland where they lived until
she one day disappears.
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McCann’s comment about expat Irish writers returning home to
write novels about the experience of migrancy contemplates the role of agency in relation
to the immigrant narrative (who tells the story and what stories get told) and notes that Irish
novelists will have the opportunity to tell these stories when they return home. His
response also raises the question about the newly arrived and what stories their experience
of dislocation offer to the collective canon of contemporary Irish literary forms. Here, the
Irish Times suggests that, “There is a need for greater input from migrants themselves, not

103
In Songdogs, McCann contemplates the challenges and isolation of the outsider from
different perspectives and offers a meditation on border crossing and the fluidity of the
borderlands by presenting the family’s narrative in multiple places.
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only through existing institutions and pre-determined roles but in new forms, new
practices, and the effects would surely be liberating” (“Signs of new vitality”).
For now however, as a genre, contemporary Irish fiction has not engaged storylines
about the recent rise of immigration in Ireland on a large scale. This may be due to a
variety of reasons. Some critics, such as José Lanters, have argued that Ireland was not a
diverse society until recently; others, such as the May 2007 Irish Times article noted above
argue that other genres have been more willing to engage the topic, suggesting that,
“Theatre and film have been most receptive to the experiences of immigrants and it is there
that the themes broached from the early 1990s by writers such as Donal O’Kelly
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and
Roddy Doyle recur” (23 May 2007). This observation, given the apparent dearth of Irish
novels that deal with the Celtic Tiger and its effects,
105
gives credit to both these mediums
for more readily addressing these themes and yielding in recent years provocative works
that acknowledge the dynamics of a changing demographic as populations move across
borders and shift the collective understanding of Irish identity.

104
See Jason King (2005) for a discussion of O’Kelly’s Farawayan (1998) and Asylum!
Asylum! (1994).
105
Eilis Ni Dhuibhne, in a letter to the editor of the Irish Times on 11 March 2010, refuted
the idea that novels about the Celtic Tiger are rare. She pointed out Nuala O’Faolain’s
Almost There, Mary Rose Callaghan’s Billy Come Home, Lia Mills’s Nothing Simple,
Catherine Dunne’s Set in Stone, Jennifer Johnston’s Truth or Fiction, and Clare Kilroy’s
Only the Names Have Been Changed. Anne Enright’s Booker Prize winner The Gathering
(2007) where Celtic Tiger Dublin serves as a cosmopolitan setting to the novel and where
some of its most recognizable elements frame the narrative, could also be added to her list.
The novel centers around a family who gathers in Dublin to bury a brother who drowned at
sea, a popular motif in Irish narratives. See J.M. Synge’s play Riders to the Sea (1904) or
William Trevor’s novel The Story of Lucy Gault (2002) where he subverts this tradition by
letting it appear a death at sea has occurred only to reveal a misunderstanding that leads to
strange and tragic consequences. Little Lucy becomes a reviled outsider in her own town,
treated—interestingly—like an interloper whose uncanny presence disrupts the harmonious
balance of not only her parents’ lives but that of the small Irish village. A discussion on the
Irish tradition of the interloper, and its recent subversion to focus on race, follows later in
this chapter.
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Irish cinema has portrayed some of these issues in recent years and has enjoyed a
renaissance of sorts, with an array of critically acclaimed films and visible Irish actors
promoting the industry with the support of festival circuits such as the Irish Film Festivals
in Los Angeles and New York. Film, with its capacity to reach more people quickly and
travel more easily than live theatre, presents an engagement with these topics and while
films about Celtic Tiger Ireland have varied in the capacity and in their strategies for
presenting Ireland’s diversity and cultural transformation, several films have capitalized on
Ireland’s newfound cosmopolitanism while also presenting long-established Hollywood
depictions of the ‘Emerald Isle.’ This trading means that recent films have opted either to
highlight Ireland’s new identity or downplay stereotyped Irishness for a more global
“fitting in.” As critics have noted, films like About Adam (2001), for example,
deemphasize the specificity of Dublin city and its internationally recognized geographical
landmarks and cultural symbols for a type of European cosmopolitan “anywhere” space,
highlighting chic cafés and trendy bars along meticulously designed avenues that could
take place in any European city with sleek urban landscapes. There is nothing particularly
Irish about the film’s setting, with only the actors’ accents revealing the location,
subordinating the importance of place as a culturally necessary marker in the age of global
geopolitical movement and focusing instead on trendy if not geographically ambiguous
spots that work to reconfigure traditional depictions of Ireland.
In “Celluloid Cityscapes: Filming Urban Ireland” Katie Moylan argues that About
Adam director Gerry Stembridge “created a new aesthetic of colour and prosperity in his
depiction of Celtic Tiger Dublin, deliberately renouncing previous representations of the
city” (128). However, she points out that this attempt at dis-locating Dublin for a Euro-
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anywhere city robs the potential to engage with the particularities of place: “Yet Dublin’s
very specificity may also be lost in this transition from singular, localized aesthetic to
internationally palatable metropolis” (129). Moylan ties the shift towards a celebrated
globalized cosmopolitanism to an isolationist ethic that may retreat from acceptance rather
than embrace the people that helped usher in an era of visible diversity:
Dublin, so rhetoric goes, is striving towards recognition as a ‘truly’ global city at
last. However, the ideal city of the tiger, no matter how glossy, may end up more of
a diminished space than the ‘dirty old town’...As Dublin moves toward this
millennial dream of, as Paul Smith puts it, consumer paradise of global scale, its
capacity to become global on a human scale, and therefore accepting of its newly-
arrived others, appears to be receding. (129)

Michael Patrick Gillespie in the New Hibernia Review agrees, noting that Stembridge
“turns Dublin into an indistinguishable metropolitan area as chameleon-like and value-free
as its title character” (44). This move to highlight an idealistic cosmopolitan identity
attempts to move Ireland away from a long cinematic history of green fields and thatch
cottages and into a new age of global modernity.
Other filmmakers, however, have employed a different technique, opting to feature
recognizable Irish urban landscapes and a dark criminal underbelly as the centerpiece of the
film while also presenting images of Ireland’s racial diversity. Lance Daly’s film Kisses
106

(2008) fully embraces Dublin city as its background and situates the narrative around both
identifiable and obscure parts of town, presenting a hyperglow aesthetic that frames images
of the urban landscape at night as two young kids escape into the city-centre in search of
the boy’s missing brother. Reminiscent of hyperactive and ultra-modern metropolises, the
cityscape is brightly lit, flamboyantly aglow with signs advertising shops, restaurants and,
as night approaches, clubs and bars along the street. Along their journey the kids encounter

106
See Chapter Two for a detailed discussion of youth and representation in Kisses.
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a cast of possible immigrants who usher them throughout the city, offering help and
guidance as they too navigate the dangers of the nighttime streets. The film presents each
of these individuals as benevolent characters who offer assistance and frames these
interactions as beneficial to the kids who rely upon their acts of generosity for survival,
suggesting that these strangers exist to shepherd the lost Irish children and must appear
non-threatening to them. These brief representations could deemphasize the complexity of
their narrative by subordinating their life story to small acts of kindness meant to ensure
their benign status. This move is reminiscent of other recent works, as Maureen Reddy
points out in her analysis of Roddy Doyle’s “Guess Who’s Coming for the Dinner” in The
Deportees and Other Stories (2007), (discussed in more detail later in the chapter) where
she critiques the simplistic ending of the story that reveals Ben, the Nigerian man presented
to the family at the dinner table, is merely a friend of Stephanie, the Irish daughter, and not
a romantic suitor.
107
In Kisses, the immigrants also present a friendly force, offering
portraits of three helpful characters essential for the children’s survival while enacting a
type of “Three Wise Men” motif who guide the children along their journey. This narrative
arc, the relative locations they inhabit in the film and the help they offer illustrate how they
perform benign acts of generosity while in the margins of society.
Other recent Irish films contemplate diversity by introducing a racial outsider
whose presence disrupts the community like the comedy Irish Jam (2006) where in an
effort to raise money to save their local pub, the residents of a small Irish town advertise a
poetry contest in the US. The film cover aptly explains the Hollywood storyline:

107
See Reddy, “Reading and Writing Race in Ireland: Roddy Doyle and Metro Eireann.”
Irish Postmodernisms and Popular Culture. Eds. Wanda Balzano, Anne Mulhall and
Moynagh Sullivan. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007. 15-25.

134
The town of Ballywood, Ireland has a cash flow problem. To avert foreclosure, the
townspeople devise a poetry contest in hopes of collecting enough entry fees. Con-
artist Jimmy of South Central L.A. (Eddie Griffin), on the run from bill collectors
and a jilted lover (Mo’Nique), is the lucky winner. What follows is a hilarious,
fish-out-of-water comedy with romance, heart, and a great message about
community and acceptance. (DVD)

The fact that the film takes place in the fictional town of “Ballywood”, an obvious
reference to Hollywood with an Irish prefix, sets it apart from a real geography and creates
a meta-space for the narrative. Locating it outside of real space heightens the fictional
aspect of the plot while capitalizing on traditionally recognizable aspects of Ireland: green
landscapes, quaint pubs, small town living with “authentic” folks. Yet, by refusing to
commit to a specific location, the film transforms Irish space into an interchangeable
anywhereland where the particulars are not important; its general “essence of place” trumps
actual location.
When African-American Jimmy—dressed in brightly colored sports gear and whose
arrival in Ireland is much anticipated like the prodigal son or savior hero—finally arrives
on a boat at the village, he shocks the local residents. The community is barely able to
conceal their surprise and initially disperse into two groups: those who tolerate him and
those who loudly vow to make him leave. Faced with pervasive social rejection, Jimmy’s
character encounters a double-bind: on the one hand, he represents economic salvation for
the locals who want to keep the pub and on the other hand, he is rejected upon his arrival
for being and looking different. Jimmy is the racial and cultural outsider, initially rejected
but eventually, as the town folk begin to appropriate his fashion sense or linguistic slang,
they overcome their initial prejudices to embrace and protect him against the roving band
of locals who intimidate him into leaving. Jimmy is stereotyped, physically fetishized,
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racially profiled and ostracized by all except the most decent of characters. In a clear
didactical move, the film casts a series of physically ugly characters as the ignorant citizens
of the town, setting up a dichotomy between the fundamentally good people who embrace
Jimmy and the unattractive villagers who resort to acts of violence and hatred, and who are
eventually expelled for their repulsive behavior, suggesting that racism is not only the
preserve of the dumb, but the ugly too. And though he was initially constructed as the
interloper present in much of Irish literature,
108
Jimmy is eventually celebrated in the
community, especially when the beautiful Irish female character (British actress Anna
Friel) falls in love with him and begs him to stay, with the locals rejoicing and finally
welcoming him. In many ways, the film so thoroughly highlights its didactic approach in
relation to difference that it clearly emphasizes what it calls on the DVD cover its “message
about community and acceptance”—those who are open to difference are smart, attractive
and find love or redemption.
One film hailed as more nuanced in dealing with these topics is Once (2007), a film
that some critics argue was able to successfully bridge the gap between representing a
diverse Ireland without offering the reductive didacticism of a Hollywood love story. The
film features the story of a Czech singer and an Irish busker who form a friendship that
transcends the traditional romance narrative and actually attempts to engage some of these
complex issues. For now however, most of Irish cinema continues to trade on its
recognizable images while embracing either a chic cosmopolitanism or championing a
violent urban sensibility like Perrier’s Bounty (2010), Intermission (2003) or Adam and
Paul (2006) that promotes a popular if rough hipster image; or, on the other hand entirely,

108
A detailed discussion on this trope follows later in the chapter.
136
focuses on the small-village-and-sheep motif it has cultivated so well, as in Waking Ned
Devine (1999). As Debbie Ging argues in “Screening the Green: Cinema under the Celtic
Tiger” in Reinventing Ireland (2002), the inability to imagine difference on the screen in a
vital way does not provoke a sense of confidence in the Irish film industry’s ability to
represent Ireland’s changing cultural landscape:
If we can no longer speak as ourselves but rather adopt the increasingly
homogeneous language and visual styles of the metropolitan centre, it is equally
unlikely that Ireland’s immigrants, Travellers, homeless and diaspora will find a
voice (or voices) through the medium of film. Looking at the cinema of the Celtic
Tiger to date, there is little evidence to suggest that postmodernism heralds a
plurality of marginalised voices. (193)

Since popular avenues of representation such as novels and film have not, for the most part,
provided the type of nuanced engagement critics seek, subaltern narratives remain largely
unexplored or relegated to the periphery of cultural expression. And while some argue that
these films present at least some form of engagement with minority storylines or offer
some level of representation, more complex narratives would explore the life stories of
these characters.
While some of these films engage issues surrounding the complicated matrix of
power relations inherent in the economic and social realities of contemporary Ireland, some
cultural critics also focus on issues of representations for Irish citizens who are living in the
margins of the Celtic Tiger. As Brian Singleton points out in Masculinities and the
Contemporary Irish Theatre (2011), “Media obsession with the new immigrants simply
fueled the anger of the ‘underclass’ in a so-called classless society who had been left
behind by the new economic miracle” (20). Filmmaker Irvine Welsh’s 18 minute short
Nuts (2007) explores racism but focuses on the Irish middle class. He states that, “It
[racism] doesn’t manifest itself in the same way as in a working-class area, where you’ll
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get graffiti and abuse on the street” (Coyle). Instead, Welsh’s film features the story of
Dominic, a middle class “Celtic tiger professional” who finds himself having to compete
with immigrants for health care when he discovers he has testicular cancer:
Dominic, the main character, is an urban D4
109
professional who thinks racism is
only an issue for poor people on the northside (of Dublin)…To Dominic,
multiculturalism is about what ethnic restaurant to eat in. But when he has to
engage with the health system and compete for services with immigrants, his inner
racist emerges. (Coyle)

New Dublin is central to the premise of the film, as producer and novelist Emer Martin
notes: “We shot a lot of it in the docklands, juxtaposing the bright, shiny new office
buildings with the urban dereliction nearby” (Coyle).
In Dublin, urban remapping programs serve as a focal point of Tiger renewal.
110

Part of reconstructing the city included the redevelopment of dilapidated parts of town, an
interesting counterpoint to the continuous project of ruin renewal all throughout Ireland
where old castles, towers and abbeys endure constant structural rejuvenation as part of the
tourism industry’s plans. The docklands, for example, had been an eyesore for years,
casting a sad shadow over the River Liffey and standing in opposition to the materializing
wealth of Dublin’s southside. Part of the urban revitalization process of the docklands
included the cultivation of the area along the northside of the Liffey and east of O’Connell
Street that catered to the booming demand for new high-rise office space and trendy lofts,
and the building of the Grand Canal Theatre, a state-of-art theatrical venue replete with
cafes, shops and hipster bars for Dublin’s upwardly mobile, further down the Liffey. The
construction of these sites marked a clear and defining point in the urban redevelopment of

109
D4 or ‘Dublin 4’ is “geographical shorthand for a mind-set that epitomizes the image of
middle-class, liberal, urban society” (Duffy 77).
110
See Chapter Two for a detailed discussion of some of these projects.
138
Dublin city as a European city of culture, visually announcing its arrival on the
international scene as a site ready and able to handle the material demands of its financial
success.
With the southside of Dublin city also undergoing rapid gentrification and urban
revitalization by the middle of the Celtic Tiger years, the northside of the city experienced
changes in its neighborhoods as the influx of newly arrived immigrants sought places to
settle down. With the economic success of the Celtic Tiger, immigrants arrived to fill jobs
while others applied for asylum status and began the complicated process of navigating
Ireland’s residency policies. The visibility of seemingly new multicultural markers such as
the changing demographics of certain neighborhoods in urban centers like the northside of
the city where large communities of Polish, Chinese and Nigerian nationals settled and the
emergence of new ethnic shops and restaurants catering to these communities appeared to
signal Ireland’s transformation from a mono-cultural society to one that now hosted a
variety of people.
And while there are critics who would challenge identifying these visual changes as
the markers of an emergent diversity resulting directly from Irish multiculturalism, arguing
instead they represent a natural consequence of a successful economy, others such as
Chinedu Onyejelem argue that diversity is not entirely new to Ireland and point to histories
of Traveller communities throughout the countryside
111
and Jewish settlements in Dublin,
while Carla de Tona notes the history of Italian migration
112
into Ireland. Onyejelem,

111
See Mary Burke’s ‘Tinkers’: Synge and the Cultural History of the Irish Traveller
(2009) on the Travellers.
112
See Carla de Tona, “Gente di Passaggio: Liminality and Representation of Italianness in
Ireland” in Facing the Other: Interdisciplinary Studies on Race, Gender and Social Justice
in Ireland, (2008). Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 93-107.
139
writing about the growth that occurred as a result of the Celtic Tiger, argues for the
recognition of this diversity in “Multiculturalism in Ireland”:
That development culminated in Ireland being currently host to nationals from over
190 countries. The dominant Irish culture added to the long established cultures of
the Travelling people and Jewish community, those different traditions and cultures
brought by men and women who have arrived in Ireland seeking a better future,
representing the birth of the current Irish multiculturalism—the existence of new
people, new lifestyles, new languages and new cultures alongside an existing
dominant society. (71)

Reconciling the divergence in perspective is key in contemplating cultural and legal
responses to recent immigration in Ireland and how Irish society understands its own
history of emigration and dislocation. As Pilny and Wallace point out in Global Ireland
(2005):
Clearly due to a long history of emigration and exile, Irish culture is familiar with
deterritorialisation, displacement and the reproduction of local communities far
from a territorial homeland. What has changed in the contemporary equation is the
direction of such migration and the issue at stake now is of how a globalised Ireland
can reconcile itself to a new role as host to some its ‘postnational Others.’ (3)

As the Celtic Tiger ushered in an era of extreme prosperity and the exploration of open
markets, the movement toward open borders also meant the influx of asylum seekers
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into
the nation. To illustrate, while there were 39 applications for asylum in 1992, by 2001 that
number soared to 10,325 (Loyal 77). As Loyal points out, though they receive housing and
food benefits, asylum seekers are not allowed to leave the state or work in Ireland until they
are conferred different status (78). As critics have noted, this inability to work has fostered

113
Loyal notes that “According to the 1996 Refugee Act, an asylum seeker is a ‘person
who, owing to a well founded fear of being persecuted for reasons of race, religion,
nationality, membership of a particular social group or political opinion, is outside the
country of his or her nationality, or owning to such a fear, is unwilling to avail himself or
herself of the protection of that country’. By contrast, refugees are asylum seekers who
have successfully fulfilled these requirements as stipulated by the 1951 United Nations
convention and are thereby (usually) entitled to full citizenship rights” (91).

140
negative public perceptions, perpetuating harmful stereotypes. Kuhling and Keohane argue
that Ireland’s response to migrants actually reveals what they call an “anti-cosmopolitan
attitude.”
Some critics also point out that despite similar diasporic histories of migrancy and
border crossing, immigrants have not experienced mutual sympathy and understanding in
Ireland. In chapter one of Gender, Ireland, and Cultural Change (2010), Gerardine
Meaney argues that the rallying call for sympathetic identification with immigrants failed
on account of how race is internalized and understood (5). While some have argued that
collective folk memory should have manifested some type of cross-cultural solidarity,
critics point out no such idealistic identification surfaced. In “Interculturalism and Irish
Theatre: The Portrayal of Irish Immigrants on the Irish Stage” Jason King argues that while
a culturally shared history of emigration would seem to engender sympathetic feelings of
identification amongst the native Irish and newly arrived immigrants, in fact, “many Irish
people have greeted immigrants with a sense of indifference” (2005). Though King,
writing on Irish plays that deal with immigrants, concludes that “[t]he vision of Ireland that
emerges within these plays is by and large an urban inhospitable one” (2005).
In the introduction to The End of Irish History? (2003) Colin Coulter notes, “While
some recent immigrants have encountered warmth and opportunity, a great many others
have been met by suspicion and hostility” (27). King notes how this blocks the possibility
for a “sympathetic engagement” with people facing plights familiar to Irish émigrés:
According to both Gibbons and Maher, it is in the very act of remembering that an
imaginative space of sympathetic engagement is created for the expression of cross-
cultural solidarity between newly arrived immigrants and former Irish emigrants.
The very act of remembrance is invested with an ethical significance…for both
groups begin to resemble one another within the recesses of Irish historical
memory. By contrast, it is the erasure of historical memory and the act of forgetting
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that breaks the bond of sympathy and sense of sense of global solidarity established
between these two groups, whose experiences might otherwise seem quite similar.
(2005)

The act of forgetting emigration histories and diasporic legacies forecloses the possibility
of establishing cross-cultural connections between communities with similar trajectories.
Some critics even question the need for sympathy as part of this equation, arguing that
terminology such as this creates an unequal interplay of power relations whereby one group
reigns over the other as the final arbiter of authenticity or acceptance. The question
remains how to establish meaningful cross-cultural engagements that at once acknowledge
a shared historical imperative and offer a viable expression of what Appiah recognizes as
the cosmopolitan’s basic axiom: “People are different, the cosmopolitan knows, and there
is much to learn from our differences” (xv). Referencing Mary Louise Pratt’s concept,
King contends that the theatre becomes “a kind of neo-colonial ‘contact zone’” that offers
“the imaginative space of sympathetic engagement” (2005) and facilitates the possibility to
bridge the divide between the native Irish and newly arrived immigrants, concluding, as
mentioned earlier, that “the theatre itself is nevertheless at the forefront of defining
Ireland’s intercultural ideals” (2005). King’s hopeful vision is instructive, as the theatre
indeed provides the creative potential and the transcendent energy to harvest some of the
most insightful and provocative engagements with immigration, representation and
cosmopolitics by also offering alternative avenues for understanding histories of border
crossing, such as narratives about women’s experiences.
Ronit Lentin argues that, “the migration of women, also produced by globalization,
offers an alternative narrative of globalization” (2). In chapter one of Gender, Ireland, and
Cultural Change (2010), Meaney points out the “popular hysteria about pregnant migrants
142
‘flooding’ Irish maternity hospitals” (4), a rhetoric also common in other parts of the world
such as Los Angeles, where large immigrant populations, particularly of Hispanic descent,
face similar perceptions. There has been a comparable push in the US to revoke birthright
citizenship—a move that connects Ireland, the US and Mexico—by mobilizing similar
sentiments. In Ireland, Lentin notes, “the Irish state categorizes children born to migrant
parents as ‘Irish born children, differentiating them from children born in Ireland to Irish
nationals…” (5). Both Lentin and Meaney also point to the effect of these policies on
immigrant women and children and Lentin ultimately argues that Ireland appropriates the
most fashionable aspects of multiculturalism—international phone centers, shops—while
marginalizing the very population that afforded it cosmopolitan appeal.
Here Ireland faces a curious dilemma: the Ireland of old, with its celebrated close
communal culture and seemingly established monolithic population, now finds itself
having to embrace late capital’s relation to neoliberalism’s logic which dictates that a
strong economy will inevitably present an influx of workers following the work trail who
will require the care and services of established populations: housing, health care, and
social support in the form of community services, eventually also requiring political
representation and other rights and privileges bestowed by access to national citizenship.
As Lentin, Causey, and Meaney note, in 2004 a citizenship referendum passed by 80%,
overturning birthright citizenship. Before then, Ireland offered birthright citizenship to all
people born on the island. The language of the Constitution enshrined this right as Lentin
writes:
143
Birth-right citizenship, in existence since the establishment of the Irish state in
1922, was upheld by the 1956 and 1986 Nationality and Citizenship Acts.
114
This
right was inserted into the Constitution with the amended Article 2 as part of the
1998 Belfast Agreement, which did not change existing legislation but rather
entitled ‘every person born in the island of Ireland […] to be part of the Irish
nation.’ (5)

By the time the birth-right citizenship referendum appeared on the ballot in June 2004,
Lentin notes that migrant women were highlighted as a reason to officially limit Irish
society by privileging an Irish identity that originates through blood lines even though
“[t]he modern nation-state is a state that makes nativity (naschita) the foundation of its
sovereignty” (7). By restricting citizenship along bloodlines instead of birth nation (a
movement from jus soli to jus sanguine as she points out), Lentin argues the state “breaks
the historical link between birth and nation” (7) undermining previous legal and
philosophical understanding of the rights and privileges attached to citizenship. The denial
of birth-right citizenship in Ireland has been examined and critiqued from different angles,
from gender politics focusing on maternity and the body (Meaney 2010) to critiques based
on the implications of restricting these kinds of rights (Lentin 2005) to arguments that note
the disjunction between it and the spirit inherent in international committees set up to
combat racism in the European nations (Onyejelem 2005). It has also been critiqued in
relation to labor (Mancini and Finlay 2).
In the wake of legislation defining the parameters of Irishness, avenues of cultural
expression also offer their assessment for contemplating the complexities of identity.

114
In “‘Citizenship Matters’: Lessons from the Irish Citizenship Referendum” (2008)
Mancini and Finlay add the Nationality and Citizenship Act of 1935 to this list as well.
They also assert that the 2004 Referendum “marked a radical departure from the shared
history” with the US, while at the same it “highlighted both continued and new
interconnections between the two nations.”

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While novels and films have offered some preliminary engagement with these concepts,
Irish theatre, both in national and local venues, has presented a compelling engagement
with these questions. As King argues, “More than any other literary or performing art
form, the Irish theatre has proven highly receptive to the experiences of immigrants in
Ireland” (2005). With varying degrees of success and using different artistic strategies,
Irish theatre has attempted to take on the issue of Irish identity and cultural representation
in Celtic Tiger Ireland, presenting complex and at times purposefully provocative
depictions of race and diversity that offer competing narratives about minority cultures and
disenfranchised communities. And while some critics argue that representations dealing
with these topics tend to be reductive, or criticize the artistic decisions inherent in a
production dealing with these issues, the three plays explored below nonetheless offer an
incisive starting point to engage issues of race and identity in recent Irish theatre.

Staging Diversity: Representation, Multiculturalism and the Theatre

As far as representing, let alone celebrating, diversity is concerned, Irish theatre has
not been very successful, probably for the simple reason that, until very recently,
Ireland was not a very diverse society.
(José Lanters, “‘Cobwebs on your Walls’: The State of the Debate
about Globalisation & Irish Drama”, Global Ireland 34, emphasis
added.)

‘…Ireland itself was always multi-cultural, in the sense of being eclectic, open,
and assimilative,’ because ‘the history of the Irish, themselves dispossessed yet ever
more sure of their communal identity, seemed to bear out the idea of a nation open
to endless joiners.’
(Declan Kiberd qtd. in King, “Black Saint Patrick: Irish
Interculturalism in Theoretical Perspective & Theatre Practice” in
Global Ireland 50, emphasis added)

Public unease about immigration can be explained to some degree by the rapid pace
of social change, and by the fact that, until recently, Ireland was a relatively
monocultural society.
(Kuhling and Keohane in Cosmopolitan Ireland 51, emphasis added)
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The presence of Travellers and Protestants and Black-Irish people bears witness to
the fact that Irish society, although relatively homogenous in terms of whiteness and
Christianity, was always more diverse than it claimed to be.
(Steve Loyal, “Welcome to the Celtic Tiger: Racism, Immigration
and the State” in The End of Irish History? 75, emphasis added)

Which is it, one might ask: Ireland was never diverse or was always diverse or was
somewhat diverse, albeit in the margins? Certain Celtic Tiger theatre plays reflect upon
some of the complex issues posed by immigration, multiculturalism and cultural identity.
There are, however, critics who argue that Irish theatre has been less than effective at
dealing with these issues in a nuanced way, arguing that recent productions that deal with
race have proven, though well intentioned, ultimately reductive. Bisi Adigun, the founder
of Arambe Productions, Ireland’s first African theatre, notes that, “The question one is
tempted to raise to whether productions such as this are mere artistic knee-jerk reactions to
the sensitive issue of racism in Ireland, or as Jason King would like us to believe, they
really provide the impetus for an ‘expression of intercultural contact.’ (King 2005, 30)”
(Adigun 55). At this early stage of critical inquiry into the presentation of race and identity
on the Irish stage, these critiques appear at the heart of intellectual debate on the topic. The
question of whether Irish theatre offers a kind of ‘contact zone’ King mentions with the
potential for real cultural exchange without slipping into reactionary representations that
replicate reductive representations will be explored through the analysis of three
contemporary plays: The Buddhist of Castleknock (2002), Done Up Like a Kipper (2002)
and the new version of The Playboy of the Western World (2007).
Critical dilemmas arise when plays that attempt to do what King identifies as an
“expression of intercultural contact” are read as counter to their purpose and instead are
understood to present a didactic message. Or perhaps more problematically, the works may
146
more deeply inscribe stereotypes or assert one identity as dominant over the other, setting
up a binary between the “authentic” host and an entity looking for inclusion and subject to
assimilation on the basis of garnering social acceptance first. Plays with a didactic
approach run the risk of alienating audiences as Lanters notes:
Indeed, there are Irish plays that are more overtly and politically engaged with the
effects of globalization, but these have often received mixed reviews precisely
because of their activist focus, with audiences and critics expressing skepticism at
what they perceived as a one-dimensional message. (“Cobwebs” 39)

At the very core of the debate lies the question of how to approach notoriously difficult and
ambiguous terms such as multiculturalism that begin to offer critical frameworks for
assessing representation in contemporary Irish theatre. Like key terms that are often
bandied about, such as ‘globalization,’ ‘intercultural’ and ‘hybridity’, multiculturalism is a
slippery term, made to conform or stretched to fit a variety of discourses with multiple
connotations and politics attached to it. As Kuhling and Keohane note in Cosmopolitan
Ireland (2007):
Multiculturalism is a contested term, in that it presumes that integration can be
achieved by state policy. As well, there are various models of multiculturalism for
instance, an older model of assimilation, whereby the minority group adopts the
culture and values of the majority, has been replaced by a newer, more interactive
model in which the majority society absorbs some elements of the culture and
values of the minority, while the minority adapt to the majority society. Both are in
contrast to the model of cultural pluralism or multiculturalism whereby the minority
and majority maintain their own culture and values, distinct from each other. (Faist,
2003, Gilligan, 2006 qtd. in Kuhling and Keohane 64)

In Stage Migrants (2010) Loredana Salis cites Lo and Gilbert’s study “Cross Cultural
Theatre Praxis”
115
which makes a distinction between two types of multicultural theatre:
Broadly speaking, there are two types of multicultural theatre: small ‘m’
multicultural theatre and big ‘M’ multicultural theatre”. The former features

115
Salis provides the following citation: Jaqueline Lo and Helen Gilbert, “Towards a
Topography of Cross-cultural Theatre Praxis.” The Drama Review 46, no.3 (2002): 33.
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“a racially mixed cast that do not actively draw attention to cultural differences
amongst performers…it is a politically conservative practice that gives the
appearance of diversity without necessarily confronting the hegemony of the
dominant culture”. (Lo and Gilbert, qtd. in Salis 17)

Under this rubric, small ‘m’ theatre does not call attention to race or difference and
functions to merely perform diversity but not engage any of the issues that surround it.
Salis suggest that big ‘M’ theatre presents a better model for contemplating representation
and intercultural expression:
The big ‘M’ multicultural theatre is on the contrary ‘a counter-discursive practice
that aims to promote cultural diversity, access to cultural expression, and
participation in the symbolic space of the national narrative’. Theatre from the
South is clearly ‘Multicultural’, and in some instances (i.e. Arambe, below) it is
also intercultural in the sense that it is ‘a hybrid derived from an intentional
encounter between cultures and performing traditions’. This theatre also aims to be
‘collaborative’ since it ‘explores the fullness of cultural exchange in all its
contradictions and convergences for all parties. (18)

Both versions of multiculturalism—one that presents ‘diversity’ on stage but pretends it
does not exist or matter and one where an intentional engagement of race and difference is
collaborative and therefore ‘aware’—run the risk of offering reductive portraits that can be
read as didactic. Both models may also demand a critical aesthetic judgment on the
treatment of the concept. This framework requires the reader to render a simple
judgment—good or bad play—when dealing with the problematics of representation. This
clash limits the potential for harvesting other recuperative values they may offer. Each of
the three plays discussed in the next section raise questions about multiculturalism,
representation and identity as they offer varying narratives on Ireland’s changing cultural
and ethnic landscape and in the process face challenges in their ability to present a narrative
that is neither didactic nor plainly reductive. To varying degrees and in different
148
capacities, these plays confront these frameworks and begin the tenuous process of
navigating these complicated issues.

Arrivals and Departures: The Interloper and the Maternal Other in Jim O’Hanlon’s The
Buddhist of Castleknock

Sean It isn’t every day you come across the fella who tells his parents on
Christmas Eve that he’s become a Buddhist monk, d’you know.

John Not a monk. Just a Buddhist.

Sean All the same. It’d be a worry. To your mother especially. (127)

Jim O’Hanlon’s The Buddhist of Castleknock was presented by the Dublin-based
Fishamble Theatre Company in November 2002 in Draiocht and later transferred to the
Andrews Lane Theatre in Dublin city-centre in 2003 (Fishamble Firsts 66). The play
features a cast of nine and is set during Christmas-time, opening on Christmas Eve and
centering most of the action between Christmas Day and St. Stephen’s Day when a middle-
class Dublin family come together to celebrate the holiday season. Edie, the matriarch, is
intent on staging the perfect holiday for her family and this includes cooking a magnificent
feast, decorating the most festive tree and maintaining her cherished Catholic traditions that
have been passed down her family for generations. Her vision of a merry Christmas is
threatened when her son John arrives from London with his girlfriend Rai, described in the
play as “English, of African extraction” (81)—a surprise to the family who only knew he
was bringing someone named Rai home. John promptly announces he will not be
celebrating the Christian traditions anymore since he has recently converted to Buddhism,
his girlfriend’s religion. Intent on not ruining the family’s traditions, John partakes in most
of the evening’s festivities but when his girlfriend Rai declines to attend midnight mass,
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John also does not attend and this sets in motion recriminations and events that will
eventually culminate in Rai leaving the family home the next day, where she is brutally
attacked by a group of thugs, before returning to London.
In the beginning of the play, though Edie and her husband Sean attempt to make the
young couple feel welcome, Edie is concerned that John’s conversion is an indication of his
unhappiness in life and urges her husband to talk with him. Meanwhile, the family
struggles to find the appropriate response to their surprise about Rai’s race:
Sean Still, she’s certainly…how can I put it…she’s certainly
more…well…tanned than I expected.

Edie Sean!

Sean I’m not saying there’s anything wrong with that. On the contrary, I think
it’s quite…exciting. But there’s no point in pretending we haven’t noticed.
(102)

Though patriarch Sean attempts to articulate his ease with Rai’s difference, his phrase “I
think it’s quite…exciting” betrays this possibility as it labels her as the feminized racial
other, conforming to theories about how race and gender function in colonial discourse.
Sean’s seemingly innocuous statement attempting to reflect acceptance and nonchalance in
fact reveals established patterns of problematic characterizations and inscribes him within a
historical legacy of exploitation and exoticization. Gavin Titley notes how racialized
identity is often tied with difference and the “exotic other”:
Exotic others embodying excitement is a shorthand commentary on the ways in
which the differences recognized and celebrated on these partially coherent versions
of multiculturalism may accept and compound historically embedded and
frequently repressive ideas of difference. (19)

Here, Sean’s statement serves to not only racially identify Rai, but also functions as a
reminder that race and gender are markers of difference between them. Sean’s outburst is
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presented in conjunction with verbal abuse by John’s alcoholic older sister Tara. Tara, who
is not subtle about her disdain for Rai, is angry, volatile and outspoken and over the course
of the evening as she becomes more intoxicated reveals an ugly belligerence and
intolerance towards her that escalates into a heated confrontation, leading a calm Rai to
leave the home for the evening. Meanwhile, John’s two brothers—older brother Edward
and young brother DJ—enter in and out of the action as buffers to the unfolding drama
with teenage DJ engaging in self-centered adolescent behavior such as insisting on
watching the Only Fools and Horses special during the family’s Christmas dinner or
demanding they open presents immediately. They are not particularly focused on the
drama at hand, though in time, and in order to hide his theft, DJ will accuse Rai of stealing
his mother’s valuable Christmas angel, an attack that registers her outsider status. The
accusation is further promulgated by Tara:
Someone we know almost nothing about who came into the house for two days,
admired the angel, and then disappeared without a trace into the night…Who
coveted everything this family had because she was jealous and her own family
were gone off to Kenya for Christmas? (179)

This conflation of race, outsider status and the implication of theft all mark Rai as an
unwanted intruder and consolidate the family’s opinion against her, revealing the artifice of
their carefully constructed polite behavior and middle-class manners.
In the meantime, long-held family resentments fester as the holiday progresses.
Though in the beginning the family made every effort to appear festive on the surface, they
suffer from bouts of anger and bitter accusations—brother against brother, brother against
sister, son against mother. Between John’s religious conversion and the tension it appears
to have caused in the house, Tara’s alcoholism, DJ’s rebellious behavior and Edward’s
inability to take anything too seriously, matriarch Edie is overrun emotionally and when the
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upstairs bathtub floods, the roof literally caves in on the family. The stage directions
provide a clear visual on this moment:
The Christmas tree falls over with a crash. Almost at the same moment, there is
another creaking sound from above and the ceiling gives way under the weight of
the flooding in the bathroom, sending a cascade of plaster and water onto the
middle of the dinner table. The whole thing is over in a couple of seconds, leaving
them all drenched and covered in plaster from the ceiling. A beat as they all sit in
horrified silence. (151)

While this event presents staging and performance challenges, the slow drip of the leaky
bathtub and the pressure it eventually puts on the bathroom floor serves as an obvious
metaphor for the fallout of family unit. In an attempt to quell some of the tension
following the roof’s demise and Tara’s crude comments, Rai leaves the family home for the
rest of the evening and sets out for a stroll in the neighborhood. John objects, but Rai
recognizes that there is an unspoken reality beyond Tara’s drunken comments, a reality he
does not want to acknowledge as he shifts the blame to his sister’s drinking. Rai points out
that it goes beyond the bottle: “No, John. It’s not just Tara. Open your eyes and look at
what’s staring you in the face” (165). Rai’s comment to John indicates both an
understanding on her part of the forces of racism that circulate in the home and a
simultaneous recognition of its denial on the part of John. John is unable to see what is
staring him “in the face” unlike Rai whose face is the center of attention and who
internalizes the interplay between the family members and her.
The next day, after she fails to return from her evening walk, John is overcome with
worry, though the rest of the family and particularly Tara, appear dismissive and chastise
him for being overly dramatic to which John responds:
She’s a woman, Da. A black woman. Out on her own on Christmas night.
Anything could have happened. (168)
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It is only after the police notify John that Rai has been assaulted, by a gang of “young
fellas” as it is later revealed, do they realize the severity of the situation: Rai has been
attacked on Christmas Eve by a roving band of thugs and ends up severely beaten and
unconscious in the hospital. Upon her return to the family home three days after her attack,
Tara—having undergone a sudden remorseful transformation—apologizes for her behavior
and Rai accepts her apology before leaving with John and Edward back to London.
In the vein of classic modernist Irish dramas such as Synge’s The Playboy of the
Western World (1907) and Deevy’s The King of Spain’s Daughter (1935), O’Hanlon’s The
Buddhist of Castleknock and Harmon’s Done Up Like a Kipper (which will be discussed
next) continue the tradition of introducing an interloper who appears suddenly out of
nowhere and causes trouble within the family or communal unit by offering a vital piece of
information that changes the course of the play, usually resulting in some violent response
or reception (consider the burning of Christy Mahon in Synge’s play when he is revealed as
a fraud or the father’s brutal attack on his daughter in Deevy’s play when he discloses his
identity to her and asserts his power over her by disciplining her into submission). The
Celtic Tiger plays, however, subvert that tradition by focusing on the relevance of the
interloper’s race as paramount to the storyline. The introduction of Rai into the family unit
and the tension it causes serves to reveal the artifice of their carefully constructed image.
Here, O’Hanlon presents a common theatrical device found in modernist Irish
theatre by presenting Rai as the interloper whose racialized presence divides a middle class
Irish family, but subverts the traditional by focusing both on her race (and by extension her
body) and on the violent reaction it causes. He complicates this formulation by offering
even more components to the equation. Rai is presented in the play as the intruding
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outsider whose different race, nationality, religion and gender challenge the family’s
fundamental sense of identity and security. And while she is marked as the ultimate
outsider (African, British, Buddhist and female) she is likely attacked primarily on the basis
of the visible markers of her identity, suggesting that tensions over nationality and religion
have been supplanted by a racialized, gendered violence.
These plays redirect the violent energies inherent in the Irish trope of the interloper
towards the racially identified character as a direct consequence of race rather than outsider
status. Whereas Christy is attacked on the basis of his lies, Rai is assaulted—on Christmas
no less—by a roving band of thugs who identify her, and her body, as a target of hate.
While the attack takes place off stage and is not seen or heard by the audience, and only
revealed by John who receives a call from the police, it highlights the different levels of
fear, hatred and unease that circulate throughout the play, and ultimately enacted upon
Rai’s body. By presenting a nice middle class Irish family gathered at home during
Christmas—a time of heightened family cohesiveness and holiday cheer— O’Hanlon
offers a portrait of a family mired with anxiety over difference as they self-consciously
perform polite manners and appropriate responses, attentive to what they should say and
should do, but also aware they are inclined at times to feel or say differently, except for
Tara’s whose deviation from these polite manners and middle class performance is blamed
on alcoholism. Rather than focus on her daughter’s outbursts, Edie zeros in on Rai and
identifies her as the center of the problem, noting: “We always had perfectly peaceful
Christmases before she appeared” (175). The tension of trying to maintain this delicate
balance on a holiday already under strain eventually causes the whole event to collapse in
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failure as literally the center cannot hold and the roof caves in when the bathtub upstairs
leaks beyond the breaking point—yet another metaphor for the contents under pressure.
The fact Rai is attacked by an anonymous roving band of thugs on the street marks
a key distinction in the text: this gang is different from John’s family who adhere to
convention and who are gathered together in their home as a family on the holy holiday of
the year. They function as a civilized family unit that does not resort to physical violence
or acts of criminal vulgarity in their expression of disapproval or fear; those are the sorts of
things that you “read in the paper”:
Sean Well, you read in the paper about…you know…people being
attacked and that. Mugged, or…or…raped. You know—because
of…

Edie Because of the colour of their skin?

Sean It happens, you know? (175)

These distinctions remove the family from the violent thugs and absolve the family of gross
and vicious racism. The family enact this by trying to transform Rai into “one of them” in
an attempt to mitigate her difference. Edie assures her early on before the attack that,
“We’ll have you turned into a nice Irish colleen soon enough, Rai, don’t you worry” (82).
Here, Edie reveals a deep-rooted anxiety when she suggests that they will translate her into
something familiar, a crucial necessity for Edie as Rai represents a potential maternal
figure for her family.
By having the son bring home a girlfriend instead of the daughter bringing home a
potential boyfriend, O’Hanlon inverts the dynamics of Roddy Doyle’s “Guess Who’s
Coming for the Dinner” in The Deportees and Other Stories (2007) and explores the
politics of fear surrounding the maternal other, positing Rai as not only a social outsider but
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as a possible maternal “intruder” into the domestic unit that could disrupt the family. Rai
potentially represents a non-Irish mother as her relationship with John raises the prospect of
bearing children. At the very beginning of the play, before her race is revealed, Edie and
Sean toy with the possibility John’s new girlfriend may in fact be pregnant:
Edie Ach, don’t be ridiculous, Sean—sure, they only know each other a
couple of months. Anyway, the only reason she’s coming here is
that her family have gone away to Kenya for the Christmas.

Sean Kenya? They must be gone on a safari or something. Jays, they
can’t be short of a few bob to be going on safari in Kenya. I don’t
see the attraction myself. What would anyone want to spend
Christmas in Kenya for?

Edie I’ve no idea. They must like the sun, I suppose. Some people do,
apparently.

Sean I could never go away for Christmas. I’d miss my turkey and ham
sandwiches and my bottle of Guinness with Jimmy and Kathleen on
St. Stephen’s Day. (75-76)

Here, once the anxiety of out-of-wedlock pregnancy is quelled, O’Hanlon gives a clue
about Rai’s ethnic background, but against the Celtic Tiger background, John’s family
reads it as an extravagant family trip away from Ireland. O’Hanlon posits their apparent
cosmopolitanism against Sean’s provincialism, who declares that he could never go away
for Christmas because he would miss his Irish comforts too much. Here, the notion of
home works to articulate a clear counterpoint to dislocation by underscoring the fact that
Rai lives in London, travels to Ireland on holiday but whose parents are in Kenya.
Here, O’Hanlon’s play offers a portrait of an ordinary Irish family mired in anxiety
over difference and aggravated by what they interpret as an intrusion into what, according
to Edie, had always been a peaceful holiday, though as Sean points out, her memory is
selective as she appears to have forgotten all the problems they had in the past amongst
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their own children. Rai took the blame for all ills the family could articulate. John
properly assesses the situation with his reading of the family’s treatment of Rai:
John But worse—she had turned the head of one of the family’s favoured
sons and brainwashed him into an almost cavalier casting off of God
and country—

Edward God bless Ireland!

John Of nationhood and religion, of tradition and customs which so
enraged the Castles from Castleknock that they turned on the devil
incarnate, and froze her out, and took every opportunity to point out
that she was, as she knew herself to be deep down, an outsider, an
interloper, a queer and dangerous influence— (199)

John identifies the sources of his family’s fear and its displacement upon Rai, the “devil
incarnate”, the “outsider”, the “interloper”, whose “queer” presence wielded a “dangerous
influence” and who elicits empathy only when she has been physically assaulted.
In this scene, John’s language is instructive as his description of Rai from his
family’s perspective reflects the common Irish interloper trope that presents an outsider
who wreaks havoc on the community before departing back home, a move, as Adigun
notes, that is a cornerstone of recent plays dealing with race: “The most unsettling thing
however is that by the end of most of these productions the black characters have to be
returned to wherever they flee from before things return to ‘normal’” (54). Adigun points
out that in a review of The Cambria, Patrick Lonergan notes the tendency of Irish drama to
employ simplistic frameworks: “[t]he genuinely racist are punished, the ignorant learn a
lesson, and order restored” (Lonergan qtd. in Adigun, 55). Order is reestablished and
normality continues without the burden of having to really resolve any complicated issues.
In the end, O’Hanlon’s play could be read as a didactic or reductive text that
reinforces the existing racial and cultural structures already in place. However, because the
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play works to reveal the artifice of the nice family as a benign unit with no ties to or
responsibility for the acts of violence it depicts and works to deconstructs the myth of
racism as the preserve of those on the outside, it also presents the possibility of
interrogating the very mechanisms it seeks to expose, revealing the cost of seemingly
innocuous acts of intolerance and fear at the micro level from apparently unthreatening
familiar (and familial) sources—mothers who decorate their prejudices as concern for their
children, fathers who appear to embrace diversity at the price of exoticizing racial
difference. In doing so, Buddhist presents a portrait of the family and the home, and not
just outside forces, as the breeding center for intolerance and fear, establishing it as a
counterpoint to the hopeful politics of a global cosmopolitanism.

“‘Where Are You Originally From…?’” Performance and Authenticity in Ken
Harmon’s Done Up Like a Kipper

Bugsy. Where are you originally from Nathan?...

Nathan. Killinarden….

Bugsy. Yeah, no, but I mean your parents? Where are your parents
from?

Nathan. Coolock.
Bugsy. Yeah, but obviously, like I mean, they’re not originally from
Coolock?

Gino. Would you ever leave off badgering the chap.
Bugsy. I’m interested in people. (83-84)

Unlike O’Hanlon’s The Buddhist of Castleknock where the racial outsider is a
woman, Ken Harmon’s Done Up Like a Kipper, which premiered in 2002 at the Peacock
Theatre—introduces Nathan, a black Irish man as a possible suitor for Gino’s daughter
Kim. Yet Harmon does not center the entire action of the play around the interracial
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romance, focusing on other dramas within the family as they struggle to carry on in Celtic
Tiger Ireland amid growing financial and personal worries in an increasing violent
environment that threatens to dismantle a carefully constructed middle class existence.
Featuring a cast of seven, Harmon’s play introduces Gino as a taxi driver struggling to keep
up with the economic demands of the Celtic Tiger. Gino meanwhile is besieged with a
terrible secret, having been violently attacked by two teenage girls in his cab who stabbed
him with a bloody syringe, a fact not revealed until the end of play but one that drives the
action of the drama as Gino’s fear and anxiety culminate in aggressive outbursts directed at
his family and specifically at his teenage son whom he insists on shaming and
embarrassing in fits of paternal ‘discipline’. The other storyline features the interracial
romance between his oldest daughter Kim (herself a victim of domestic abuse at the hands
of her ex-husband) and Nathan from Tallaght, a suburb in Dublin.
While both O’Hanlon and Harmon’s plays present a racial outsider who is invited
into the Dublin family home by one of the grown children, Harmon’s play is clear to note
that Nathan is in fact a Dubliner, unlike Rai who is from London. In the character
description, Nathan is described as “solid, black, with a strong Tallaght accent” (2).
Nathan is also presented linguistically as a Dubliner with his easy use of local slang. As
with race and nationality, language is another marker of identity that reveals insider status.
Unlike Rai, a racial, religious and cultural outsider, Nathan is from Ireland, and his parents
are from Ireland too even though Gino’s friend Bugsy insists on pinning down exactly
where they are from in order to establish their “real” identity. Bugsy adamantly attempts to
locate Nathan’s ancestry—and thereby identify Nathan’s “true” origins—by questioning
him on his family lineage vis à vis their homeland. He keeps pushing at the boundaries of
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geography and in doing so reveals his inability to contemplate Nathan as a real Irishman.
His racial difference marks him as an outsider as far as Bugsy is concerned, no matter how
locally (Killinarden and Coolock) he can identify himself, his parents or their home.
Meanwhile, the interracial romance subplot revolves about Kim, who has recently
left an abusive marriage, and her new relationship with Nathan. Kim’s unease about her
father’s potential reaction to Nathan leads her to avoid introducing him to the family.
Gino, as yet unaware Nathan is black, refers to him as the “Invisible Man” in the beginning
of the play—a reference to Ralph Ellison’s 1952 novel by the same name—since he has
never met him and has only heard about their relationship from Kim and his wife Dolores.
Eventually, in an effort to avoid a potential scene when she introduces him to the family,
Kim tells her father Nathan is black:
Gino. What’s that supposed to mean?

Kim. He’s black, daddy. Nathan is black.

Gino. He’s black? Fair play to him.

Kim. Yeah.

Gino. Yeah. And what’s your point? Ah, hold on. The hills are
alive with the sound of music. This is what this is about.
You think I’m a racist, don’t you.

Kim. I never said that.

Gino. Not in so many words. Why else would you be shy dragging
him over.

Kim. I know you are not a racist, daddy.

Dolores. She never said that. Did you, love?

Gino. This just gets better and better this does. (61)

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Gino reads Kim’s anxiety about introducing Nathan to him as an accusation of racism,
taking personal offense at her suggestion. The text here suggests that Gino is not so much
concerned with Kim’s boyfriend’s race and he is with being called a racist. Yet, the fact
that Kim is uneasy about her father’s reaction to the introduction indicates that at least one
character in the play is aware of the potential tension this moment may cause and suggests
that perhaps Kim is either projecting her own fears onto her father or Gino has given her
reason in the past to appear guarded in this interaction.
While Harmon’s play contemplates the politics of race and identity, it also
entertains other references to the Celtic Tiger and the problems associated with the sudden
materialization and expectation of wealth, such as the demand to keep up financially with
the neighbors and the social price of acquiring material goods. Harmon’s characters
purchase designer clothes (Kim), drive expensive cars (Gino), remodel homes (Vera),
invest in the latest technology (Bugsy), and indulge in expensive foreign trips to Mexico
(Vera and Bugsy). As Gavin Titley notes, “Consumerist cosmopolitanism presents cultural
differences as reified components of lifestyle bricolage, and as carriers of aesthetic
diversity and globalized taste” (21). These characters appear to anticipate this kind of
consumer existence where travel and commodities define the basic parameters and
expectations of their daily lives. While Gino and his wife Dolores and their long-time
friends Bugsy and Vera live a comfortable middle class existence, cracks are beginning to
show in a lifestyle that may not be sustainable in the long run, as Nathan points out to
Gino: “Work. You know yourself. This climate. You have to take all the hours you can
get” (38). Both men are taxi drivers and this shared connection offers the possibility of
reading these characters as mirrors of one another: two Irish men, both taxi drivers, both
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trying to keep apace with the demands of the runaway economy, yet only one is forced to
account for his true Irish identity before the end of the play.
Despite the impending certainty of the collapse of the Celtic Tiger, the play is
peppered with references to buying and spending, privileging a kind of consumer culture
that champions material wealth as the measure of success, a fact exemplified in the play by
the remodeling of Vera and Bugsy’s home:
Dolores. The new palace shaping well, Vera?

Vera. Compared with that place over there there’s just no
comparison.

Dolores. I suppose you don’t know yourself with all that space.

Vera. We don’t know ourselves with all the space.

Gino. And yis have your two toilets. One each.

Vera. I don’t know how we ever managed before. (14)

Vera’s statement here reveals how the newfound luxury of the middle class produces a type
personal and historical amnesia that fails to remember a long legacy of true deprivation.
She does not know “how we ever managed before.” Spoken without irony this statement
forgets the suffering of recent economic recessions and makes light of true scarcity, a
fundamental truth to much of Irish history barely one hundred and fifty years removed
from the Famine, and serves as a clear exhibition of the kind of privileged forgetfulness
that money and security affords the nouveau riche. Gino too exhibits signs of class
narcissism and expresses hostility for those who flaunt their money over his recently
acquired markers of wealth. Even though he drives a Mercedes, he takes exception to the
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yuppie who insist on parking his Mercedes outside his door, loudly bemoaning out his
window: “I don’t drive over to Dalkey
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and park outside your door” (17).
Harmon’s play also harvests the multiple violent energies that circulate in urban
streets, focusing on both the threat of violence, as presented by the bored boys in tracksuits
hassling Gino at home, and the actual manifestation of violence as depicted in the family
home when son Eugene, in a desperate fit of rage against his father’s personal attacks,
firebombs Gino’s Mercedes (a scene similar to Stella Feehily’s Duck [2003] where the Cat
firebombs her abusive boyfriend’s Jeep
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). Here, in blowing up his father’s car, a
luxurious European status symbol, Eugene rejects not only his father but the preoccupation
with material goods championed by the Celtic Tiger, choosing instead to wander the house
in a diaper since his father insists on calling him a baby on account of his bed wetting. The
father-son confrontations and the multiple versions of masculinities on display create a
violent tension in the home that is also alluded to in Kim’s history of domestic abuse at the
hands of her abusive husband, a concern of her parents when she starts to date again. Yet
the most extreme example of violence actually occurs before the play even begins—
though it haunts the duration of the action—when Gino is attacked one night by two girls
who hail his taxi and stab him in the neck with a syringe,
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sending him into a desperate
panic that he conceals from his family as he awaits news on his health. This incident, read
through the lens of Dublin’s history of drug problems particularly in the 1990s, presents the
image of a different kind of urban menace, moving away from the traditional focus on

116
Near the seaside, Dalkey is one the most affluent places to live in county Dublin.
117
See Chapter Two for a detailed discussion of Duck.
118
The threat of this type of attack also occurs in a scene in the Irish film Veronica Guerin
(2004) where Guerin, during her research on urban drug culture and youth, encounters a
teenage boy in a rundown housing estate who threatens her with a syringe.
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aggressive male youths to violent inner-city girls and their rejection of established social
norms.
Ultimately the action of the play is driven by both its focus on the different types of
violence that circulate in the home and street, and its insistence on race as a marker of
difference. Bugsy is particularly intrigued with Nathan’s declaration that he is Irish and
insists on pinpointing his origins, a move that compels Nathan, in a bid to assert his true
“Irishness”, to insist on his preference for trad music and Irish ballads, arguing he prefers
Luke Kelly over Marvin Gaye: “I’m more of a Luke Kelly kinda of guy, myself” (82) and
insists that “I’m a trad man, Gino. Traditional. One man one job” (82). When he’s
pressed, Nathan further asserts his ‘authentic’ Irish identity by claiming his preference for
both Irish music and food: “Ah, to be honest, I’m really only into ballads. Give us one of
them battered sausages” (82). The stage directions indicate that throughout the last page
and a half of dialogue, “Nathan sings “Dublin in the Rare Oul Times’ throughout the
following” (86). Here, like the demonstrations of race in the film Irish Jam, identity
becomes a performative matter as Nathan presents his preference for certain music and
food as markers of his authentic Irishness. The text appears to indicate that there are
certain identifiable markers of Irish identity that must be adhered to in order to claim
Irishness. Nathan prefers ‘trad’ music, recites Luke Kelly ballads and rejects Motown,
suggesting that cultural identity is not fluid but rather a stable and “identifiable” matter. In
the end, in order to “prove” his true loyalties, he sings “Dublin in the Rare Oul Times”, a
ballad meant to cement his true insider status and confirm his authentic Irish identity but
which ultimately puts him and his performance of Irishness on public display.
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Here, Nathan is forced to account for his claim of Irishness by people who face no
such inquiry and by extension, forced to account for his presence in the country and that of
his parents, and while it is all conducted in a light-hearted manner, the methodologies of
interrogation appear repeatedly throughout the play. Though his preference for Irish music
may well simply reveal his taste in music, it is perhaps problematic that he must somehow
prove his identity as an Irishman this way and legitimize his claim to Ireland through
cultural affinities. The text pushes hard for Nathan to prove his assimilation, attempting to
erase markers of difference by latching on to expressions of popular culture as the final
arbiter of belonging, a move suggested in the final scene of the play when, in what reads as
an attempt to be accepted as ‘authentic’, Nathan performs the song for the family, finally
winning laughter and apparent inclusion through quick-thinking wit when he responds to
an insider joke in Dublin slang.
Harmon’s play bears resemblance to Roddy Doyle’s short story “Guess Who’s
Coming for the Dinner” where Larry Linnane, a forty-five year old father, is forced to
confront his racist thoughts when his daughter Stephanie brings home a Nigerian man for
dinner. Larry is presented simultaneously as an overprotective father and a regular man
guilty of stereotyping Ben, more the result of media influence than of some deep-rooted
personal failure. Over dinner, Ben is presented as a regal and soft-spoken man; the family
becomes enamored with him, and even Larry is eventually won over, bonding with Ben
over his choice of cologne. Throughout the course of the meal, Larry comes to the
realization that he actually likes Ben and would offer his blessing to the union: “He was
happy enough. He wasn’t a racist. There was a black man sitting across from him and he
wanted to be his father-in-law. He wasn’t sure why but that didn’t matter. Larry was
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happy with himself” (Doyle 25). In the end, it turns out Stephanie and Ben are simply
friends and not romantically involved but Larry has already reached a “turning point” in his
initial prejudiced opinion. As Maureen Reddy points out:
The story is reassuring: African immigrants do not want to marry your daughters;
they just want to work and live in peace in Ireland. In this story, racism equates
with prejudice and is entirely personal, not systemic or social, not intimately
intertwined with all the basic conditions of daily life. (“Reading” 19)

The tidy ending raises questions about the possibility of the story to more fully engage the
issues of race relations in Ireland but does, nonetheless, offer a starting point for such a
dialogue to begin. As Reddy notes, “Doyle is the only well-known Irish writer trying to
reach a broad audience with fiction that focuses on the changing Irish racial context and
whose aim is to impact the developing racial discourse in Ireland” (“Reading” 25).
Doyle’s enormous popularity and his literary engagement with race and identity
politics helped form a partnership with Bisi Adigun, the founder of Arambe Theatre, the
first African theatre company in Ireland. Together, they crafted a modern and provocative
adaptation of J.M. Synge’s The Playboy of the Western World in 2007, transposing the
setting from the west of County Mayo to the west of Dublin, peppering in local slang and a
colloquial vernacular for a contemporary, urban feel while still retaining the basic premise
of the play. And while it do not cause riots in the streets of Dublin like the original, this
modern version divided critics and put the issue of race, representation and identity center
stage in Ireland exactly one hundred years after the original premiered at the Abbey
Theatre.

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From West to East—Reimagining The Playboy of the Western World in Global Ireland
Reviews of the 2007 version of The Playboy from the Abbey Archives:
Adigun and Doyle have transposed the action from the West of Ireland to a West
Dublin suburb, mixing the colloquial snap of Doyle’s language with the poetic
voice of Adigun. In this vivid retelling, Synge’s extraordinary play rediscovers its
ability to tell the truth of a contemporary Irish experience, and continues its legacy.
(Metro Èireann, 09 Aug. 2007)

Far from being a bold reimagining of a hardy perennial, the new version is
depressingly predictable: tired, tame populism masquerading as radical vision.
(Mick Heaney, Sunday Times, 14 Oct. 2007)

The play is a marvelous success on its own terms. The challenge was to take an
iconic, over-performed, antiquated play from 100 years ago and make it relevant
and engaging in a modern setting. It is played as a comedy, and it’s bloody funny.
(Abie Philbin Bowman, The Dubliner, 20 Nov. 2007)

In a play about the power of story, myth, fiction and fine words, it is a shame to lose
Synge’s wild poetry. This version—although a brave inversion of the original—
becomes another lesser drama altogether, one without the depth to move at all.
(Paula Shields, Irish Examiner, 05 Oct. 2007)

In 2007, the Abbey Theatre in Dublin staged a contemporary version of J.M.
Synge’s The Playboy of the Western World written by Roddy Doyle and Bisi Adigun. As
is clear from these selected reviews, critics differed wildly in their assessment of this
version of Synge’s play.
119
Brian Singleton describes the genesis of the project, noting
Adigun’s vision and the collaborative efforts between both writers that followed:

119
Here are three more reviews from the Abbey archives:
Per the Leinster Leader: “Brave in its attempt to revitalise a home-grown classic, side-
splitting in its celebration of urban humour and largely successful in its grappling with the
dark side of boom time Ireland.” (David Lynch,18 Oct. 2007).

Per the Irish Independent: “Stripped of all its complexities and subtleties, this ‘Playboy’
works best with Doyle’s keenly observational humour, such as when the girls appear in
their pyjamas clutching their mobile phones as if they’re lifelines. But, by holding a mirror
up to elements of Dublin life today, the conclusion becomes something of a damp squib
rather than the spear to the soul of Synge’s original.” (Sophie Gorman, 05 Oct. 2007)

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Right from the beginning of Arambe productions, Adigun expressed a desire to
rethink The Playboy of the Western World in the context of a globalized world,
immigration, and inter-cultural understanding and he approached Doyle to co-
author it with him. (Masculinities 37)

The production, called a “radical and controversial rethinking of the play” by Singleton
(Masculinities 36) reimagined Synge’s iconic work, moving its setting from “its original
County Mayo rural shebeen to a pub owned by a criminal gang master in one of West
Dublin’s sprawling housing estates that had become infamous for its gangland turf wars”
(Masculinities 38). Appearing on the centennial anniversary of its original debut on the
Irish stage, this new version altered more than just the setting of the play—it modernized
the dialect by using Dublin slang and profanity, and updated the fashion of the characters,
placing them in tracksuits and runners per the current style in contemporary Dublin. It also
incorporated technology such as cell phones into the production, with characters using
cameras to take pictures of the action on stage. Yet, as Singleton notes, the most “radical”
difference was the change of Christy Mahon to Christopher Malomo, a Nigerian national:
By far the most radical and challenging aspect of the new version was the
rethinking of the outsider who appears in this urban folkloric setting. Christy
Mahon in the original may not be part of the community he enters at the beginning
of the play but he is of the same class and race as the community that embraces
him. In the Adigun/Doyle version Christy Mahon has been renamed Christopher
Malomo who has escaped his native Nigeria via England and Northern Ireland and
has ended up by mistake in a West Dublin pub. The same premise as in the original
plays spurs him on…[y]et in this version he is a double outsider marked by his race
from the outset. (Masculinities 39)

Changing Christy’s race radically reconceptualizes Synge’s play by introducing the issue of
identity politics into the play and, combined with the other new changes, caused both

Per the Sunday Tribune: “Roddy Doyle and Bisi Adigun have given us a ‘Playboy’ for our
times. And in doing so, they have returned it to its comic roots.” (Colin Murphy, 07 Oct.
2007)
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fascination and disapproval in the Irish theater-going community, making it one of the most
provocative theatrical production the Abbey had staged in recent memory.
In Synge’s original version, outsider Christy Mahon appears on the doorstep of
Pegeen Mike’s father’s pub and proceeds to woo her and the community with his tales of
murder and intrigue as he recounts how he killed his father in a fight and fled his home.
His charm and story-telling prowess wins him admirers, from the betrothed Pegeen to the
Widow Quin to even the local men who becomes intrigued with the curious stranger.
When in the second act his father suddenly appears, contradicting his tall tale, Christy faces
social rejection from those who previously extolled his virtues, losing not only the
admiration of the community but the love of Pegeen Mike, who famously cries at the end
of the play, “Oh my grief, I’ve lost him surely. I’ve lost the only Playboy of Western
World” (121) after Christy and his father leave and take to the road once again.
Synge’s original text is with filled acts of brutality and fraught with a violent
history. In fact, both versions feature scenes of violence subject to scrutiny by critics.
Writing on the original version, Alison Smith notes, “With Christy in the last act of The
Playboy, it is as if the structure of the play will not be able to hold him any longer, straining
to the point of explosion of wild comedy and violent savagery” (xxiii). Smith also notes its
historical trajectory and the critical reception of its violent scenes:
At the time of The Playboy writers sympathetic to Synge, such as Padraic Colum
and George Moore, were confused by the bitter violence and the uneasy end in what
was supposed to be a ‘comedy’. George Moore wrote to Synge about it, pointing
out where he had gone ‘wrong’. ‘Your play does not end, to my thinking,
satisfactorily. Your end is not comedy, it ends on a disagreeable note…The burning
of Christy’s legs with the coal is quite intolerable and wouldn’t be acceptable to any
audience.’ (xxiii)

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Adigun and Doyle maintain these acts of violence in the play but further complicate the
storyline by adding the issue of race to the narrative. While this new version has been
critiqued on several levels, the most consistent critique revolves around the choice Adigun
and Doyle made in rewriting Christy Mahon’s character as Christopher Malomo and the
potential for “heavy-handed” preaching this change presents as Colin Murphy notes:
The play could have gone badly wrong here: the announcement that this new
playboy was going to be about a Nigerian asylum seeker suggested woolly ideas of
social inclusion and [a] heavy-handed comment on racism [and] the lack of justice
in our asylum system. But there is none of that. (“The Big Issues”)

Murphy’s statement reveals an awareness on the part of cultural critics of the potential for
pointed didacticism in the play and the possibility it could over-indulge such sensibilities,
seizing upon the opportunity to preach to the captive audience.
Reviews from the Abbey archives reveal that the 2007 version received radically
mixed reviews from one end of the spectrum to the other, with some hailing the production
as genuinely relevant and socially significant to others who found it lacking in both depth
and humor. The Sunday Times anticipated a heated reception one month before its Dublin
premiere, noting, “While it may not see rioting on the scale of the original 1907 production,
the Abbey nevertheless expects some irate theatre-lovers when a modern version of The
Playboy of the Western World is staged next month” (Shortall). This prescient prediction
proved true, with critics divided in their final estimation of the production.
When it premiered in 1907, Synge’s play caused riots in Dublin, sending a crowd
into the streets at the mention of women’s undergarments: “The line from the play that
triggered the most protest and clamour occurs when Christy declares that he has found
Pegeen Mike the only suitable woman, and would not be attracted to ‘a drift of chosen
females, standing in their shifts itself’” (McCourt 799). The following night, the play was
170
again marred with controversy when loud crowds caused several interruptions throughout
the production, promptly earning its place in theatre lore when W.B. Yeats himself
intervened: “The play had to be stopped several times to restore order, and Yeats himself
addressed the crowd, imploring them not to interfere with the production” (McCourt 800).
Over the years, the play has been revived multiple times by Irish theatre companies,
including Galway’s famous Druid, which toured the US in 2008 with Synge’s original
version.

The 2007 adaptation, however, was radically altered in a substantial way
120
and
while it did not cause riots in the streets, the production’s reception was mixed, dividing
critics typically along two lines: those who welcomed a daring remake that illustrated the
play’s contemporary relevance and those who saw this radically reworking as akin to
theatrical blasphemy. There was also the question of adaptation and translation that often
haunt reworkings of original texts. As Singleton notes, “…the production itself caused a
huge flurry of both critical and academic enquiry given the use of Synge’s title for what
was essentially a new play written with the original only as a premise” (Masculinities 37).
The question of whether or not the 2007 version was a new play utilizing the same title or
an adaptation of the original points to some of the problematics facing theatrical
adaptations. Here the new version was heavily invested in investigating issues of race and
representation, themes both writers had previously explored in their other work.

120
Though, as Salis notes, in 2006 the theatre company Pan Pan redid Synge’s play in
Mandarin at the Oriental Pioneer Theatre in Beijing with an all-Chinese cast: “It transposed
the original events to the contemporary setting of a beauty salon/brothel on the outskirts of
the Chinese capital called ‘Whore Dressers’ while using a modern and colloquial idiom”
(Salis 28).
171
The collaborative team behind the new production already had extensive experience
writing about these topics when they decided to take on Synge’s work. By that time,
Roddy Doyle was one of Ireland’s most famous living writers having achieved fame in the
early 1990s with the success of The Commitments (1987), which was made into a film in
1991, and included in the successful collection, The Barrytown Trilogy (1992). This was
followed by a series of well-received novels such as Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha (1993) which
won the Booker Prize, and The Woman Who Walked in Doors (1996). In 2000, he began
writing for Metro Èireann, which, as Maureen Reddy points out, “bills itself as ‘Ireland’s
Only Multicultural Newspaper’ and takes an anti-racist, pro-immigrant editorial position”
(“Reading” 15). The monthly newspaper, one of the early efforts in Ireland to promote a
cross-cultural dialogue on issues of race and diversity in Ireland, focused on stories and ads
relevant to immigrants and the immigrant community in Ireland, offering information on
pertinent services such as “money transfer services…international phone cards…legal
services for immigrants… organizations aiding immigrants…specialty retail” (Reddy,
“Reading” 18). Doyle began writing a series of short stories for the newspaper,
highlighting some of the recurring themes he saw emerging in contemporary Dublin.
In 2007, the same year as the debut of the new Playboy at the Abbey, Doyle’s
stories for Metro Èireann were compiled in book form under the title The Deportees and
Other Stories. Though criticized in some quarters as overly simplistic or reductive, these
stories represent a literary attempt to map the contours of a changing Irish identity and
engage with issues of race and belonging. Doyle’s title story, “The Deportees” picks up
five years after “The Commitments”—arguably Doyle’s most famous story about a Dublin
soul band who implode right before they hit stardom. Here, Jimmy Rabbitte is now a
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married father and despite his initial inclinations to the contrary, decides to form a band in
the “new Ireland.” This time, rather than soul music, he wants to feature multicultural
music as the basis for the new band’s repertoire. He creates a sign searching for members
of his new band:
Brothers and Sister, Welcome to Ireland. Do you want the Celtic Tiger to dance to
your music? If yes, The World’s Hardest-Working Band is looking for you….
White Irish need not apply. (36)

The last line is a nod to the sign for “The Commitments” that originally read “South Siders
need not apply.” The implication is clear: in the time spanning the stories, racial and
economic discourse has changed—whereas its connection to the north side gave The
Commitments its street credibility, now the mixed racial composition will make the new
band relevant in Dublin. Ultimately, Jimmy decides to delete the line, but the impulse is
clear. His group comes together from different parts of the city, comprising different
nationalities and claims to citizenship, making “The Deportees” an apt name for the band.
In an article for Irish Times Magazine, Doyle explained some of his own reasons for
redoing the Playboy, noting how his teaching background helped inform his creative
decisions on the play. Doyle also notes the potential of the original play to alienate people,
explaining he was aware of how the language in Synge’s play excluded some audiences, as
it did his students when he was a high school teacher:
At first the language of the Playboy was as far away from these Dublin kids as the
language of Chaucer and Shakespeare. Even the simple question “What kind was
he?” from the Widow Quin needed a good looking at before it became “What was
he like?” or something nearer their words. (“Synge”)

Doyle’s focus on making the play more accessible to a wider audience is key as it
highlights their intention to reimagine the Playboy in a realist theatrical framework. While
173
Jason King argues that the early dramas dealing with immigration tended to flout
naturalism for a more expressionist mode, the dramas emerging in the early part of the
millennium tended towards a more sustained form of realism than either a Brechtian or
Beckettian sensibility. Celtic Tiger plays like Jim O’Hanlon’s The Buddhist of Castleknock
(2002), Ken Harmon’s Done Up Like a Kipper (2002) and the 2007 version of The Playboy
of the Western World (2007) all offer contemporary versions of Dublin in a realist manner,
eschewing fancy theatrical conventions and avant-garde tendencies for more conventional
and accessible portrayals.
Bisi Adigun’s artistic work and background made for a successful collaborative
team with Doyle. Called “one of the most important presences in the rich and emerging
African theatre in Dublin” by The Dubliner, Adigun has been involved in various
productions dealing with issues of race and immigration throughout Ireland. In 2003 he
founded Arambe Productions with a designated mission “to afford member of Ireland’s
diverse African communities the unique opportunity to express themselves through the
arts” and “introduce Irish audiences to plays in the African tradition, and to reinterpret
relevant Irish plays” (Adigun 56-57). To this end, before adapting Synge’s play, Adigun
reworked The Kings of Kilburn Road (1999) by Jimmy Murphy,
121
a play about Irish
émigrés living in London who return to Ireland to bury one of their friends. Adigun’s
version recasts the play with Nigerian characters, and, like Synge’s Playboy, shows the
reach and versatility of Murphy’s original script by connecting the trajectory of the Irish
diaspora in Britain with Nigerian workers in Ireland. Adigun though, writes about his
skepticism of recent plays dealing with race and representation in Ireland, concluding that

121
Murphy’s play was later turned into a film, Kings (2007), starring Colm Meaney and
Donal O’Kelly.
174
often times though “well-intentioned” these plays offer reductive, if not limited, portrayals
where storylines often require the interloper to leave before normality is restored,
referencing plays such as Donal O’Kelly’s Asylum Asylum! and Jim O’Hanlon’s The
Buddhist of Castleknock among others (53-54). Instead of such limited roles, he welcomes
“a production that will highlight the fact that black people have been coming to Ireland
since the 18
th
century” (55).
For Adigun, Christy Mahon represents a refugee who must venture out on his own
in order to survive. In an interview with Colin Murphy he says:
Playboy stood out for me. It occurred to me that Christy Mahon (the eponymous
Playboy) is a refugee—a fugitive. The father is an oppressor. I look at the father,
Old Mahon, as the country, that doesn’t let you breathe, so you get out. Mahon has
been limited by his father. Society limits you. You have to rise above those limits.
What Christy is looking for is for people to look at him as a human being. (“A Man
Walks”)

Here, an interesting juxtaposition arises: like Old Mahon (Christy’s father), Ireland—
typically personified as Mother Ireland and the land of a hundred thousand welcomes—
also does not embrace Christy (or in this version Christopher). He must survive despite
both of these ‘parental’ rejections. As a refugee, he must keep going, stateless and rootless,
and suffer through experiences of humiliation and violence at the hands of the local
community. Narratives that deal with social exile often feature violent acts against the
body. Here, Foucault’s study of the body in Discipline and Punish is instructive:
But we can surely accept the general proposition that, in our societies, the systems
of punishment are to be situated in a certain ‘political economy’ of the body: even if
they do not make use of violent or bloody punishment, even when they use ‘lenient’
methods involving confinement or correction, it is always the body that is at issue—
the body and its forces, their utility and their docility, their distribution and their
submission. (25)

175
On stage, Singleton points out that when Christopher Malomo made his first entrance on
stage, the audience audibly gasped: “And so, unlike in the rural original, when Christy
walked onto the stage as a black man he was doubly othered and there were audible intakes
of breath in the audience” (39). Singleton notes the decision to cast a “supremely fit body”
(42) fuels the fetishisizing of certain forms of masculinity that occur on stage as the
audience reacts to the changes in the original script. This casting surprise sets up the
dramatic tension at the foundation of the new version.
In rewriting one of the most highly recognizable characters in Irish dramaturgy and
in changing Christy’s race, Adigun and Doyle also extend the reach of Synge’s original
script. Noting the lasting influence and contemporary relevance of Synge’s work, P.J.
Mathews writes:
Despite his rejection by the audience of the Abbey Theatre more than a century ago,
Synge’s appeal to Irish audiences has never been greater than at the present
moment. The enduring power of his work to address the Irish context was
illustrated by the popular success of Bisi Adigun and Roddy Doyle’s version of The
Playboy produced by the Abbey Theatre in 2007. It is significant in these
globalised times, therefore, that Synge’s rising international reputation has not been
achieved at the expense of local indifference. (14)

Adigun himself notes that their intent was to reimagine the kind of play Synge would do in
Dublin today: “What we have attempted to do, really, is to create what we believe The
Playboy would have been like if Synge had written and set it in Dublin in 2007” (White).
In “New Playboy in Town” written for the Sunday Tribune Murphy notes an interview with
Irish theatre scholar Anthony Roche where he discusses Synge and how he understood his
own play to be multidimensional, with a reach far beyond a particular performance or
production:
176
According to Anthony Roche, Synge himself was ‘very aware The Playboy would
look different to different generations’. In a letter to the Irish Times at the time of
the 1907 production, Synge wrote ‘there are many sides to the Playboy and you’ll
only be seeing one or two sides of it this week’, recalls Roche. (“New Playboy”)

This versatility of Synge’s play is presented not only in the 2007 version, but in another
adaptation by Adigun entitled The Playboy of the Sunny South East which received a
staged reading in California in October 2011. Recasting key elements in Synge’s script
while remaining in many ways true to the essence of its provocative first staging, its 2007
reception, while it did not cause riots, did succeed in igniting a flurry of debate and
dialogue, particularly about issues dealing with race and representation in Ireland during
the Celtic Tiger.
177
Chapter Four—The Theatre of Martin McDonagh and Marina Carr

Making Room: Space, Violence and Survival in Martin McDonagh’s Drama

Excerpt from a New York Times interview with Martin McDonagh about his new film Seven
Psychopaths (2012)—
122

Goldman: In the film, a character’s head explodes, there’s a decapitation and a
man’s hands are fastened to a table with knives and then he’s burned alive.

McDonagh: But there’s a rabbit in that scene. There’s a lovely rabbit. It’s not all
violent.

When Martin McDonagh first appeared on the Irish theatre scene, he caused a
spectacular display of critical reactions and responses. People loved his work; people
detested his work—there seemed to be very few critics with lukewarm sentiments towards
either him or his dramaturgy.
123
Critics were divided over whether the plays were patently
offensive and culturally insensitive, or genuinely self-aware and connected to an Irish
dramatic legacy that spanned decades. What was he doing with these works? Was he
making vulgar statements about the residents in the west of Ireland? Was he putting tiny
Irish villages on a global map for the world to discover and in the process establishing, as
some critics point out, a line of continuity with the work of playwrights such as J.M. Synge

122
Andrew Goldman, “Martin McDonagh is Glad He Swore at Sean Connery.” New York
Times, 12 Oct. 2012.
123
On his reception, John Waters notes, “There has been, without doubt, an enormous
over-the-top element to the reception accorded to Martin McDonagh. This is not to
disparage him, since it is impossible to conceive of anything, never mind a newly arrived
writer of theatre plays, which or who might conceivably deserve to be feted as he has. It
would seem over-the-top if even Shakespeare, arriving with complete canon, was to be the
recipient of such overwhelming praise and celebration. There is therefore a degree of
difficulty in deciding what is great about McDonagh and what is merely good” (32).
178
but on a much larger scale?
124
/
125
The fact that McDonagh’s work is distinctly located,
unapologetically violent and confidently staged only fueled both sides of the vocal critical
debate.

Staging the Trilogy: McDonagh, Druid, and the Critics
In 1996 Galway’s Druid Theatre Company in a joint production with the Royal
Court Theatre staged the world premiere of The Beauty Queen of Leenane, later followed in
1997 by A Skull in Connemara and The Lonesome West. These plays became known as
The Leenane Trilogy
126
and were staged in London in 1997 before transferring to
Broadway later that year. Called “McDonagh’s great Gothic soap opera” by Fintan
O’Toole (Critical 179), the plays received tremendous critical attention early on and, in a
very short time, McDonagh was catapulted to international fame, feted as a huge star of the
theatre for his provocative new works that drew inspiration from pop culture, local

124
Writing on The Beauty Queen of Leenane, Grene notes, “It is as though McDonagh has
to take up where Synge left off, outdo him in violence, destroy the parent that Christy so
repeatedly failed to kill. At the same time, there is strong sense of parody in his adoption
of the Syngean manner, particularly noticeable in the language. McDonagh claims, like
Synge to have based his style on the forms of Irish-English heard in the west” (“Ireland”
307). As Grene (“Ireland” 306) and others have pointed out though, McDonagh has
repeatedly denied reading Synge before undertaking the Leenane Trilogy. John Waters
sees McDonagh as “building on a style of Irish writing best represented in the works of
Synge and Yeats, which caricatured such perceptions of Ireland as an act of rebellion
against the externally imposed view” (39).

125
In another quirky connection between McDonagh and Synge, Anthony Roche notes,
“the young man who taught Synge Irish on the Aran Islands a century earlier was also
named Martin McDonagh” (Contemporary 236).

126
McDonagh’s Aran Trilogy consists of The Cripple of Inishmaan (1996), The Lieutenant
of Inishmore (2001) and Banshees of Inisheer which, as Sternlicht (159) notes, has not been
published or performed.
179
geography and Ireland’s celebrated playwrights.
127
Yet from the beginning, he faced critics
who took exception to his extraordinarily brutal and macabre depictions of rural Irish life.
Complicating the reception of his work was both McDonagh’s age (he was twenty-
five when Druid staged his first play) and background: born in London to Irish parents in
1970, he grew up in a working-class neighborhood where he left school at sixteen and, as
the McDonagh lore goes, spent his adolescence watching Australian soap operas and
Quentin Tarantino films.
128
The family returned to Ireland annually, taking summer trips to
his parents’ hometowns of Sligo and Galway in Connemara (Grene, “Ireland” 299) where
they would spend six weeks with family members who would leave a lasting impression on
the young McDonagh (Russell 2). Part of the Irish diaspora, McDonagh’s family would
serve as reference points for his creative process as he worked to reproduce language
cadences for the characters in his plays. Roche notes an interview McDonagh gave to
Fintan O’Toole where he spoke about the influence of Mamet, Pinter, and his uncles on his
writing:
I wanted to develop some kind of dialogue style as strange and heightened as those
two, but twisted in some way so the influence wasn’t as obvious. And then I sort of
remembered the way my uncles spoke back in Galway, the structure of their

127
Roche notes that the title for A Skull in Connemara comes from Beckett’s Waiting for
Godot (1954) and the title for The Lonesome West comes from Synge’s Playboy (1907)
(Contemporary 237).
128
Lonergan notes that “Much has been written of McDonagh’s interest in this form of
television. ‘We’d get up at 12:00, 1:00,’ John McDonagh told the American media in
1997, describing the lifestyle he shared with his brother in their London home in the early
1990s: ‘We’d have breakfast; we’d watch Australian soap operas on the television; and
then he’d go to his room, and I’d go to mine, and we’d twiddle our thumbs, and maybe
we’d write something, and then come back down and have something to eat at 6:00, and
start watching television again’ (Today Show). Comments like these have often been
quoted in discussion of McDonagh’s work and used as evidence to support the claim that
the playwright learned his craft not from the great authors of world theater but from
watching such Australian soap operas such as Neighbors and Home and Away” (“Never
mind” 158).
180
sentences. I didn’t think of it as structure, just as a kind of rhythm in the speech.
And that seemed an interesting way to go, to try to do something with that language
that wouldn’t be English or American. (quoted in Roche, Contemporary Irish
Drama 238)

From the start, critics had difficulty placing the young playwright. Did he consider
himself Irish or British? Some also focused on the tremendous critical attention he
received; even at such a young age, McDonagh’s immediate success prompted
comparisons to the most lauded writers in the world. Then there was the widely circulated
assertion that McDonagh was the only playwright since Shakespeare to have four plays
simultaneously in production in London, a point since refuted by Lonergan as Grene notes
(“Ireland” 298 fn1).
129
All of it happened very quickly, and the criticisms were as pointed
as the celebratory reviews. Regardless of which side critics embraced, it was clear that
with the Leenane Trilogy, Martin McDonagh the playwright and Irish expat had arrived
with panache on the international theatre scene.
McDonagh had a particularly prolific year in 1994 when he penned most of his
early dramas. In 1996 Garry Hynes, director of the Druid Theatre Company, decided to
stage The Beauty Queen of Leenane, a play about an insufferable mother and miserable
daughter living in a small village in Connemara and events that lead to bloody matricide.
The plays that followed, A Skull in Connemara, about a widower who once a year digs up
old graves to make room for new bodies and who may or may not have killed his wife, and

129
Lonergan notes how the story circulated: “…Mimi Kramer, writing for Time Magazine
in 1997, reported correctly that the performance in the West End of The Leenane Trilogy
and The Cripple of Inishmaan made McDonagh ‘the only writer this season, apart from
Shakespeare, to have four plays running concurrently in London’ (71). This report was
transformed quickly into the ludicrous assertion that McDonagh was the first playwright
since Shakespeare to have four of his plays running in London, a claim first made by Sean
O’Hagan which appeared subsequently in many venues (32)” (Lonergan, “Never mind”
152, emphasis in original).
181
The Lonesome West, the third installment in the trilogy about a pair of brothers living in a
claustrophobic cottage in the west who are both involved in the murder of their father,
collectively and individually offered critics a chance to weigh in on exactly what they
thought McDonagh was doing. That he populated his plays with a bizarre cast of leading
and supporting characters was not particularly in contention, nor the fact that the plays
depicted horrific acts of violence, but just how to classify these works appeared to be a
point of major critical focus: was it comedy? Was it farce? Was it horror? Was he
blending genres, offering American western and frontier cowboy stories laced with a
kitschy soap opera pastiche recognizable to international audiences? Or was it distinctly
Irish with its rural kitchen cottage setting and heavy emphasis on the rhythms of language?
And perhaps more importantly, what did they mean?
130
Were they meditations on violence
at the end of the millennium, artifacts of the collision between the forces of globalization
and indigenous culture? Or were they subverting old Irish dramatic traditions, presenting
reincarnations of classic tropes found in previous works—like Synge’s Playboy—but
amplified to fit postmodernity’s diet of the visually explicit and violently grotesque?
The Leenane Trilogy toured throughout Ireland, including the Aran Islands, and
brought together a mixture of violent storylines spoken with local expressions and
linguistic inflections that combined seemed to recall a distant past yet the plays were set in
the present day, a juxtaposition that fueled some of the most particular criticisms of his
work by those who argued that being an outsider he simply got the language wrong.
Summing up the overall critical divide on McDonagh, John Waters writes:

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Merriman, writing on both McDonagh and Carr’s dramaturgy writes, “What is at issue
here is the meaning of these representations as constitutory events in the evolution of civic
society. What is being played—about whom, to whom and in whose interests? What is
their meanings, and their consequences?” (“Settling” 61).
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Those who accuse McDonagh of showing disrespect for traditional Ireland and a
lack of sympathy for its inhabitants, albeit imagined one, are responding out of a
deep sense of reverence for the survival of a people and culture against
extraordinary odds. Those who rejoice in what they perceive to be the mockery of
McDonagh’s work are expressing their own sense of anger at a culture they have
felt oppressed by. (34)

He argues that in fact “both sides are saying the same thing” (34). José Lanters notes that,
“Martin McDonagh has been accused by his most hostile critics of writing shallow soap
operas and, in his ‘Irish’ plays, of trivializing Irish politics and perpetuating Irish
stereotypes” (“Identity” 9). One of the most vocal and oft-quoted critics of McDonagh’s
work, Vic Merriman, argues that the Leenane Trilogy and The Cripple of Inishmaan
[S]tage a sustained dystopic vision of a land of gratuitous violence, craven money-
grubbing and crass amorality. No loyalty, whether communal, personal or familial
can survive in this arid landscape. Death, affection, responsibility appear as
meaningless intrusions in the self-obsessed orbits of child-adults. (“Settling” 59)

He points out the implications of this kind of work: “The decision to populate the stage
with violent child-adults repeats the angriest colonial stereotypes as a form of communal
self-loathing” (“Settling” 60). Merriman’s assessment invites postcolonial readings of the
plays, a task taken up by some critics especially early on in McDonagh’s career who
debated whether his work in fact reproduced harmful stage-Irish typecasts on a global
level, or actually revealed a newfound confidence reflected in the ability to laugh at
particular representations as a result of Celtic Tiger success.
In the face of such criticism, McDonagh’s work has enjoyed continued success both
in and out of Ireland and across major theatre centers like New York and London.
Following his theatrical triumphs, he won acclaim in Hollywood for writing and directing
Six Shooter (2005), a film short that won him the Academy Award for Best Short Film, and
In Bruges (2008), his first feature-length film. In the fall of 2012, his latest release, Seven
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Psychopaths, a film about a motley collection of psychopaths, a dog-napping scheme and a
screen writer named Martin struggling with writer’s block, featured some of the most
famous actors in Hollywood and premiered to wide praise. All of the films, like his plays,
feature outlandish acts of violence that utilize torture and mayhem and function on the
intense energy of misfits and social outcasts. With his successful foray into film,
McDonagh’s aesthetic sensibilities and brand of humor reached a wider audience than
every before, a trajectory that began with the Leenane Trilogy in Galway sixteen years
earlier.
While much has been written on McDonagh, his plays, his theatrical aesthetic, his
influences (especially in relation to Australian soap operas and Quentin Tarantino films),
his upbringing, his repeated use of violence, his films and the controversies surrounding his
work, this chapter section focuses on the use and allocation of space both as presented in
the text of McDonagh’s scripts and as utilized onstage during performances of his work.
Studies on space and the theatre, such as Helen Lojek’s The Spaces of Irish Drama (2011)
articulate a vital engagement with the politics of space in contemporary Irish drama,
particularly at a time when several leading playwrights have made clear the relevance of
setting in their work, establishing the relationship between landscape and narrative as an
indispensable part of their oeuvre, much as Martin McDonagh and Marina Carr have both
done.

Earlier works on space and the cultural landscape like Gerry Smyth’s Space and the
Irish Cultural Imagination (2001), edited collections such Ireland in Proximity: History,
Gender and Space (1999) and In Search of Ireland: A Cultural Geography (1997) present a
significant assessment of critical geography, memory and representation, and works by
Catherine Nash and Ailbhe Smyth elaborate on the connection between landscape and
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gender politics, illuminating important marginalized histories in urban spaces. The
following section takes as a departure point the increasing critical importance of
interrogating the use and allocation of space and landscapes in establishing meaning in
contemporary theatre, and examines McDonagh’s use of domestic spaces, focusing on the
role of claustrophobia and the primal reaction it provokes in characters in his plays. While
some critical works have focused on McDonagh’s use of the Irish rural landscape and the
pastoral, the argument here centers on the assertion that the Leenane Trilogy functions on a
survivalist imperative, enacting a Darwinian ethos to make room, in the process literally or
figuratively clearing the landscape of the deformed and unfit, removing those who get in
the way of the primitive drive to secure space, emotional sustenance or material provisions
needed for survival.

Claustrophobia, Desecration and Survival: McDonagh’s Leenane Trilogy
The Beauty Queen of Leenane (1996) opens in a rural Irish kitchen in the west of
Ireland and introduces a mother and daughter living in a small claustrophobic cottage who
continually bicker with each other over the most banal points of the day: the rainy
weather,
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lumps in a digestive drink, petty gossip. Mag repeatedly uses guilt to
manipulate her forty-year-old daughter Maureen, a strategy Maureen has long since
become immune to after years of living with her demanding and deceitful mother. For
most of the play, the action centers on their isolated, oppressive existence which functions
on stifling daily ritual and mutual contempt. Neither of the women nor their interactions

131
In another connection with iconic Irish writers, Roche points out that “McDonagh, like
Synge and Beckett before him, avoids the summer as the seasonal setting for his drama,
preferring late autumn and the onset of winter, with things on the turn and the advent of
decay” (Contemporary Irish Drama 239).
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with each other prompt sympathy or approval from the audience, but when Mag interferes
with Maureen’s relationship and burns a letter from her suitor Pato—ostensibly ruining her
last chance at marriage and happiness—Maureen turns a corner psychologically and in one
of Irish theatre’s darkest scenes, slowly burns her mother’s hand with hot oil
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before
leaving for the train station to track down Pato.
In the next scene Maureen recounts to her mother, who sits in a rocking chair,
133

that despite her interferences she was able to find Pato and will emigrate to America
shortly, joining him in Boston. She describes how thrilled he was to see her and relays
their plans to live together, revealing how she told him she would make immediate
provisions for her mother. As she finishes her story, Mag’s body slowly lolls to the ground
from her rocking chair, exposing her bloody head and the stage directions indicate that, “A
red chunk of skull hangs from a string of skin at the side of her head” (51). Mag is dead
and Maureen, holding a poker, stands on body and says:

Maureen: ’Twas over the stile she did trip. Aye. And down the hill she did fall.
Aye. (Pause.) Aye. (51)

In the next scene, the full extent of Maureen’s self-delusions are revealed when Ray, Pato’s
brother, enters the cottage after Mag’s funeral and relays a final message from Pato. He

132
In Contemporary Irish Drama and Cultural Identity, Margaret Llewellyn-Jones notes
that this moment “provoked audible audience gasps on the three occasions I have seen the
play” (81).
133
Laura Eldred’s “Martin McDonagh and the contemporary gothic” in Martin McDonagh:
A Casebook (2007) includes an image of a production poster advertising the play that
featured only an empty rocking chair with the title of the play displayed over it. She
compares images from the play to Hitchcock’s Psycho: “The mother in a rocking chair, the
strange movement of that rocking chair, the horrifying moment of revelation that the
woman is dead—all these elements appear in Alfred Hitchcock’s masterpiece Psycho
(1960)” (111).
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tells Maureen Pato was disappointed she never showed up that night at the train station to
say goodbye and reveals Pato is marrying another woman. Maureen, perplexed at the
news, takes her mother’s place in the rocking chair and begins muttering to herself,
admitting confusion at the turn of events. She told her mother she met Pato at the train
station and they had plans to live in Boston. She told her he was delighted to see there and
would understand if she had to stay behind to care for her mother, a point that elicited
laughter on Maureen’s part. As Ray leaves, she sits listening to radio, rocking herself
slowly, and the lights fade.
McDonagh uses Mag’s body falling to the floor as a dramatic device designed to
unsettle the audience as it not only subverts their expectations, but marks the matricide at
the very end of the play as the central and defining feature of the drama. In the final
moments, it turns out the Beauty Queen will be about the bloody death of the mother and
the delusional, unstable daughter who takes her place in the rocking chair, an image that
comes to define not only the eerie tenor of the play by the end but, following the matricide,
can be read as an emblem of stunted and failed maternity. The rocking chair, which
becomes a focal point both during performances as it takes a prominent space on stage and
in advertising campaigns as Laura Eldred points out, serves as a poignant icon for a play
about the desecration of the maternal body, particularly in light of how often Ireland has
been deployed as a woman in the cultural imagination.
134

Keohane and Kuhling identity the rocking chair in relation to Ireland’s conflicted
relationship with progress: “The rocking chair is emblematic of Ireland’s paradoxical
experience of accelerated moderinisation and stasis — in motion, but going nowhere”

134
See Catherine Nash’s “Embodied Irishness: Gender, sexuality and Irish identities” in In
Search of Ireland: A Cultural Geography (1997) edited by Brian Graham.
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(Collision 188). It could also be read as a symbol of damaged motherhood: a rocking chair
is widely associated with maternity as a mother soothes an infant to sleep, and with elderly
women finally taking it easy and resting in old age after a lifetime of motherly duties.
Here, neither maternity nor old age is accomplished successful: Mag is dead at the hand of
her daughter who will likely not marry or bear children and instead takes her place in the
rocking chair. The cycle of life is done here: maternity is stunted, nothing fruitful will bear
forth from the claustrophobic cottage. In the end the rocking chair serves as an uncanny
symbol of the violence that lurks in this menacing place.
That intense violence is first made explicit in the hand-burning scene. Nicholas
Grene notes that, “Maureen’s torture of her mother with the boiling oil later on is a moment
of genuine horror in the theatre” (“Ireland” 301). It is in many ways the most shocking
moment in the play—arguably more so than Mag’s bloody death—not only in its overt
display of brutality, but because the violent scene abruptly changes the tenor of the play,
moving it from comedy to horror. The torture scene makes it clear to the audience they are
witnessing a different kind of drama now, and since there has been no confirmation of
violence onstage previously, the element of surprise functions to jolt the audience out of
complacency and forces them to reassess the entire play.
Some critics locate the moment of genre-shifting terror to the actual murder of Mag.
Eldred notes the importance of the moment when Mag falls dead on stage because it signals
that, “the genre has changed” (111). Noting the cinematic influence on the play, she writes,
“The intertextual use of Psycho in Beauty Queen provides audiences with a transition that
signals we are no longer in the realm of comedy and have moved into the blood-soaked
realm of horror and the gothic” (111). Maureen’s actions take Beauty Queen into another
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genre, in the process making apparent the threat of violence that had been slowly fomenting
all throughout the play. The audience suddenly realizes the jabs between mother and
daughter were not merely the stuff of daily familial annoyances and petty resentments
which they laugh along to, but the precursor to bloody matricide, and this realization on the
part of the audience is key to unraveling the dramatic tension of the play. If all along the
audience reads the mother/daughter interactions as symptomatic of normal bickering
relations, then they are forced at the very end to reevaluate the action on stage and
reexamine the last two hours for signs of the violent end that eventually arrives. Even
though midway through the play it is revealed Maureen spent time in a mental hospital in
England and Mag accuses her of having already burned her hand with oil—a point
Maureen denies when she says, “And, no, I didn’t scould her oul hand, no matter how
doolally I ever was. Trying to cook chips on her own, she was” (31-32)—the sudden
realization about the depths of violence underpinning each interaction between mother and
daughter emerges and casts a shadow over the stage in the final moments of the play. In
the end, the epic battle for survival is enacted in Mag’s death as Maureen kills off the
parasitic force holding her back.
Some academics view the play as a mediation on violence with a clear line of
continuity to Irish dramatic history: “It is an essay on the continuing strain of violence in
rural Irish culture as well as a love story with a sad ending for the heroine, as there is for
Synge’s Pegeen” (Sternlicht 159-160). Sternlicht’s reference to Pegeen, the woman who
ends up alone at the end of The Playboy of the Western World (1907) after Christy Mahon,
the playboy, reveals he did not kill his father as he had previously confessed, establishes a
connection between both plays that centers on the unmarried women left behind in the west
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of Ireland. Pegeen is left behind when Christy takes to the road with his father and
Maureen is left alone in the house and will not be reunited with Pato in England, a theme
that paints the west as a space of where the classic narrative of marriage and children does
not materialize.
Others note The Beauty Queen’s subversion of previous visions of the Irish west:
“Nicholas Grene has coined the term ‘black pastoral’ to describe plays like The Beauty
Queen of Leenane that self consciously invert the earlier idealization of life in the west of
Ireland by presenting it as violent and unidyllic” (Castleberry 44). As Patrick Duffy notes,
“The West was represented as containing the soul of Ireland—in Yeats’s construction, a
fairyland of mist, magic and legend, a repository of Celtic consciousness” (67). Here, the
mother falls dead on stage and the unstable daughter takes her place, and all this happens in
the west of Ireland, the cradle of Irish cultural authenticity. This subversion of the Irish
west is at the heart of much of critical discourse on McDonagh’s work as critics note the
departure from previous idealized portraits of rural western Ireland, connecting McDonagh
to Synge once again.
McDonagh traces some of these elements in A Skull in Connemara (1997) where he
once again returns to rural Galway as the setting of his next play in the Leenane Trilogy.
The narrative centers around Mick Dowd, a man in his fifties who once a year takes on the
ghoulish job of disinterring bodies in the local graveyard to make room for recently
deceased people in the parish, even as rumors continue to quietly circulate about his
involvement in the death of his wife seven years earlier under questionable circumstances.
When confronted, Mick insists he is innocent, that Oona’s death was due to drunk driving.
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This particular autumn the job takes a more personal note when Father Welsh/Walsh
135

tasks him with disinterring the remains of his wife along with the other bodies.
Accompanying him on this year’s work is Mairtin Hanlon, a young man with macabre
interests who is easily tricked. When they begin the dig, Mick holds off disinterring his
wife’s body but by the time he gets to her grave, Mick discovers to his horror his wife’s
bones are missing. Despite this, the pair finish disinterring the rest of the bodies and then
retreat to Mick’s cottage where they violently, and merrily, smash the skulls with mallets:

Mick starts smashing the skull into even smaller pieces and stamping on the bits
that have fallen on the floor. Mairtin stares at him dumbfounded. (43)

As they smash the skulls and drink to excess, Mairtin unwittingly reveals
information about the remains of Mick’s wife when he mentions her rose locket. He
obviously knows what happened to her body and as revenge, Mick continues to gets
Mairtin drunk until it is time to take the skulls to the lake and offer prayers over the bones
(as he said earlier he does) but before they leave he makes an ominous suggestion:

Mick With a string of prayers said over them. I’ll be getting me car out now,
unless I don’t suppose you’d want to be driving, Mairtin?

Mairtin quickly embraces the idea, and though Mick asks him whether he has had too much
to drink—a point made clear when Mairtin is unable to catch the car keys—he sets out for
the car. Mick follows him out:

135
In a thematic line of continuity with The Beauty Queen of Leenane the parishioners are
unsure about the priest’s name and refer to him as Father Welsh and Father Walsh. He also
appears in The Lonesome West where, disillusioned about his ability to guide his
parishioners, he commits suicide in the end.
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He exits briskly, bringing the mallet with him and turning the lights off behind him,
as the sound of a car starting up is heard. (51)

The audience understands this action will likely lead to Mairtin’s death and the town will
believe he died in a drunk driving accident, just like Mick’s wife.
In the last scene, Mick emerges bloody from the wreck and is confronted by
Thomas Hanlon, Mairtin’s older brother, who holds Mick’s wife’s skull in his hands. The
skull bears a long crack in the front. Mick does not confess to her murder but does confess
to killing Mairtin. He writes down his confession and it is clear the town will now assume
he is responsible for both deaths. Yet, in a moment of startling surprise, Mairtin enters the
room, still drunk and now bloody, but very much alive and reveals that Thomas is
responsible for digging up his wife and making a hole in the skull, which leads Thomas to
savagely beat Mairtin with a mallet. Thomas tried to buy Mairtin’s silence by giving him
the locket to pawn, but the locket was not worth anything and in anger Mairtin now turns
against his brother and reveals the plot. As it turns out, Mick did not kill Mairtin and now
his role in his wife’s death is equally unclear, though Mary, the old woman who drops by
occasionally to drink with Mick, is still suspicious, telling him she must be mistaken about
what she saw on that fatal night. Mick continues to deny it and takes his wife’s skull from
her, gently kissing it:
He caresses the skull again, kisses the cranium gently, and slowly exits to his room
with it, still trying to remember. Lights fade to black as he goes. (66)

At this moment, Mick’s role in Oona’s death is unclear but like Mary, the audience has
grown suspicious about him and his actions. In the end, every character is implicated in
multiples offenses as the plot takes a comical, if macabre, turn at the end:
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Thomas Hanlon, the gung-ho Garda, desecrates a grave and fakes evidence in order
to prove a (true?) murder, almost commits a murder himself; Mick confesses to a
murder he has not committed and gets away with the murder he (very probably)
has. Far from representing realistic characters and realistic situations, McDonagh’s
hyperbolic farce reflects upon a world of paradox which buries the clear-cut
borderline between the lawful and the outlaw. (Middeke 217)

Like Mag’s falling body, Mairtin’s reappearance on stage after his presumed death toys
with the expectations of the audience. This dramatic device is a feature in other McDonagh
plays, most notable in The Lieutenant of Inishmore (2001) where after all the mayhem and
murder it turns out the beloved cat Wee Thomas is still alive and wanders onstage amid the
bloodshed in the final scene. It also parallels the action in Synge’s Playboy, as Karen
Vandevelde notes: “The unmistakable intertextual parallel with the faked murder in
Synge’s The Playboy of the Western World adds to the script’s humorous potential” (83).
Waters, noting the connection between the two plays, suggests Skull is a parody of Playboy
calling it “an absurdly comic flirtation with murder and mayhem, which peters out in the
banality of false assumptions and slapstick violence” (49).
While the action alternates between the front room of Mick’s cottage and the
graveyard, McDonagh is still striking at the domestic space of the home, destabilizing its
central, if not sacred, place in Irish narratives with both the implication of Mick’s
involvement in the murder of his wife—and thus enacting the literal and figurative
destruction of the family unit with the removal of the feminine—and the gleeful
pulverizing of human skulls in the kitchen, a macabre scene of desecration that borders on
the absurd and requires careful staging considerations. Doyle notes some of the staging
challenges facing this scene, pointing out that “all that bone smashing creates the potential
for debris” (102) and cites a review of the 2001 New York production where the reviewer
writes:
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When you give a couple of strong, drunken Irishmen a pair of mallets and a set of
skeletons to demolish, as only Mr. McDonagh would, it’s only natural that some of
those soiled white fragments would fly beyond the proscenium arch. Audience
members should be prepared to duck. (Brantley cited in Doyle 102-103)

There is literally not enough room on stage to accommodate the action and this means bits
of skull fly into the audience. Mick’s job to make room in the graveyard now involves
impinging upon the audience’s space. In the end, the foundational action of the play is as
much about reapportioning space as it is about the drama unfolding on stage. As the skull-
smashing scene demonstrates, even the stage space cannot contain the action on stage.
Meanwhile the small space of the cottage is represented in tandem with both the small
space of the graves and the lack of room for new bodies in the graveyard. There is literally
not enough space either on stage or in the graveyard—a function Mick is hired to
alleviate—though ironically Mick may also be the reason there is actually more room in his
home now following the ambiguous circumstances of his wife’s death.
In the final installment of the Leenane Trilogy, McDonagh actually creates more
space by blowing up the kitchen, a grand act of desecration since the kitchen bears heavy
symbolic importance in Irish drama. As Keohane and Kuhling note, the kitchen is “the
locus classicus of the Irish spirit in the symbolic order and imaginative structure of Irish
culture and identity” (Collision 186). By the time Valene, in utter desperation, takes a
knife to his brother Coleman’s throat in The Lonesome West (1997), the only surprise is
that the siblings have not managed to kill each other earlier in the narrative. In many ways,
the threat of violence that continually haunts the play (as becomes evident in the Beauty
Queen) overshadows the actual acts of physical aggression that take place in the end.
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The play opens with the burial of the brothers’ father and it is soon revealed that
Coleman accidentally shot him. Father Welsh, the parish priest, attempts to engage him in
a heartfelt conversation about the state of his life, but as soon as Valene enters it becomes
clear that the two brothers, who live together, are deeply embattled over seemingly trivial
disagreements and annoyances. Llewellyn-Jones notes the Beckettian overtones in
McDonagh’s play: “The claustrophobic sibling relationship within a confined community
echoes Beckett’s similar couples in its intensification of absurdity and vengeful
imagination” (97). Middeke also cites the connection between the brothers and Beckett’s
Vladimir/Estragon and Pozzo/Lucky in Waiting for Godot (217). Over the course of two
acts, the tension builds over stolen poteen and potato chips, past childhood wrongs and,
perhaps most shocking, over the revelation that in fact Coleman shot their father on
purpose and Valene conspired to hide the truth in exchange for Coleman’s half of the
inheritance. Unlike Synge’s The Playboy of the Western World (1907), where comedy
attempts to counteract the debate between the difference of telling a story and actually
committing a crime, here, Coleman casually confesses his sin to the priest and offers no
better reason than retaliation for an off-handed comment made by his father.
Sickened by his inability to help his flock, and disgusted by the acts of violence he
sees around him, Father Welsh commits suicide, but not before sending a letter to the
brothers that begs them to reconcile, if only for his doomed soul’s sake. Yet, as the
claustrophobia of living together in rural western Ireland builds, the violence between the
brothers escalates until they are quite literally ready to kill each other—one with a knife
and one with a gun in a showdown reminiscent of American cowboy westerns. Their
inability to reach any sort of authentic reconciliation signals the end of any type of civilized
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existence as they collapse into utter degeneracy, forsaking the dead priest’s final wish and
renouncing any possibility of moral redemption.
For Coleman, his act of patricide is justified in the name of self-respect, and his
ensuing small acts of passive-aggressiveness towards his brother, such as eating Valene’s
food or secretly drinking his liquor, are meant to underscore Valene’s miserly ways.
Valene, on the other hand, treats Coleman like a small child to be suffered and runs an
austere household in retaliation for his father’s murder. Sudden spurts of violence appear
to counterbalance the slow drudgery of daily existence. Their mutual loathing, and the
subsequent moments of bitter confessions, fuels the tension in the play that seemingly can
only find resolution through more physical and emotional terror. Yet McDonagh does not
end the play with the death of either brother, as is to be expected, but instead manages to
provide an even more horrific ending by allowing both men to reach a certain height of
violence before permitting it to taper off and continue for another day. The cyclical pattern
of violence that cannot be transcended but only barely tolerated marks both the terror
implicit in the play and the tragedy of modern living that offers no escape from acts of
brutality, both great and small.
Though the two brothers share the domestic space, it is Valene who occupies the
realm of the feminine as he runs the household and endures the gendered jokes Coleman
levies at him. Even the brothers’ names underscore these dynamics: Valene is short for
Valentine and denotes a more feminized name, while Coleman, with literally the word man
in his name, appears more masculine. Valene, in a bizarre move, begins to fetishize the
new stove that he buys (with the inheritance money he made Coleman sign over in
exchange for his silence about the murder) and refuses to let Coleman use it, even checking
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it periodically to ensure it has not been used. Here, the stove becomes a marker of
commodity fetishism, an emblem of modernity purchased with blood money, and the
simple fact that Valene comes home and caresses it daily—in fact providing the only
instance of affection in the play—indicates the privileging of material objects over the
bonds of family. He also makes it a habit of methodically marking all of his belongings
with a black V, carefully guarding and monitoring all the household possessions like a
miserly scrooge. Coleman on the other hand, parades around the house with his gun,
threatening Valene with both physical harm and constant acts of delinquency, ranging from
stealing food to eventually blowing up Valene’s beloved stove with his gun.
The very title The Lonesome West suggests a connection to the wild American west
and cowboys facing off against each other in a show of caricatured masculine bravado:
The title of the play, as has been pointed out by many critics, refers to a line in
Synge’s Playboy, and it also recalls Sam Shepard’s True West. As in Shepard the
myth of the American Dream of freedom and prosperity is shattered, McDonagh’s
The Lonesome West destroys anew both the idyllic pastoral of the West and the
hope of (transcendental) redemption. (Middeke 218)

In essence, McDonagh does pit one brother against the other, but neither is capable of
overcoming the paralysis of hatred to intervene against the moral bankruptcy and ethical
degeneracy that characterizes their lives. In fact, paradoxically, it is Father Welsh’s suicide
in the lake that provides the closest articulation of Hegel’s call for “ethical substance” in
the play. Father Welsh’s suicide provides the aesthetic solution to the dilemma but does
not offer a recuperative end. Instead it can be read as a moment of self-sacrifice used to
compel the brothers towards reconciliation even if the act puts him at religious odds with
the tenants of Catholicism.
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In the end, Valene and Coleman, still unable to break out of the cycle of violence
that defines their existence, put down their weapons and both exit, yet there is no sense that
either of them will forfeit their anger in an attempt at reconciliation with one another or
redemption for the greater good. As Keohane and Kuhling point out,
There is no transcendence, no redemption, no third moment of dialectical
reconciliation, movement or progress in any direction except eternal recurrence,
circularity, spiraling downwards into petty recrimination, pointless violence, and
meaningless catastrophe. (Collision 188)

Here, the Irish west, like the mythologized American west, is painted as a wild and
dangerous site of battle.
McDonagh may be destabilizing the west as an idyllic landscape, but he does it
specifically by employing the most iconic images of Irish drama in the service of this
subversion. By setting the action in a rural Irish kitchen McDonagh returns to one of the
most common motifs of modern Irish drama. Playwrights such as Tom Murphy and Brian
Friel immortalized the setting and turned it into a mainstay of many plays such as
Conversations on a Homecoming (1986), Bailegangaire (1986) and Dancing at Lughnasa
(1990).
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Christopher Morash notes that:
McDonagh’s plays create a theatrical world—each set in a farmhouse kitchen in the
west of Ireland—which looks like it might have come from any one of dozens of
Irish plays from the middle decades of the twentieth century (plays which
McDonagh claims never to have seen) or from a film like The Quiet Man.
(History 268)
137

136
Roche points to similarities between The Beauty Queen of Leenane and Murphy’s
Bailegangaire (Contemporary Irish Drama 237) and Lonergan states Beauty Queen
“shows traces of both Tom Murphy’s Bailegangaire (1985) and Beckett’s Endgame
(1956)” (“Never mind” 150).
137
Several critics point out that McDonagh insists he never read Synge before starting
work on the Leenane Trilogy, noting that he has admitted to a lack of interest in the theatre:

198
However, McDonagh’s decision to stage most of the Leenane Trilogy in cramped kitchens
quarters can be read as an attempt to subvert the tradition, given the acts of violence he
designs in that domestic space including bloody matricide in Beauty Queen, skull bashing
in A Skull in Connemara and the fierce firebombing of Valene’s beloved stove by his
brother in The Lonesome West. McDonagh finally blows up the kitchen in the last
installment, literally and symbolically destroying links with a celebrated theatrical lineage.
While in these iconic Irish plays the kitchen symbolizes the essence of home and
hearth that represents the locus of the stable family unit, McDonagh subverts this tradition
by focusing on the kind of contempt that undergirds the epicenter of society, highlighting
instead the claustrophobia of such enclosed spaces in the pockets of the deep west.
McDonagh’s use of both highly regarded domestic spaces and romanticized rural locations
toys with the theatrical conventions of both comedy and tragedy, blurring the line between
the two as characters engage humorously with mundane daily concerns in these spaces
while simultaneously participating in grotesque acts of violence that ultimately demystify
notions of the Irish west as a space of idyllic existence marked as the mainstay of cultural
authenticity. As Grene notes, “The cult of Connemara and the culture of weepy Irish
nostalgia are treated to a savagely sardonic iconoclasm” (“Ireland” 301). By presenting the
contemporary Irish west in direct contrast to the cultural mythology cultivated by not only

“McDonagh himself even denies much introspection in his writing, insisting at the
beginning of his fame that his influences were from film and television, and that he had
seen or read very few plays. Yet, thanks in no small part to the guiding hand of the Druid
Theatre Company’s director Garry Hynes, and some of the best actors in Ireland,
McDonagh’s Leenane Trilogy’s debut performance in the mid-1990s were hailed as
masterful postmodern re-evaluations of the rural Irish play, similar to the way Quentin
Tarantino’s United States gangster films have been honoured for toying with American
cinematic traditions” (Trotter 189-190). See also Roche (Contemporary Irish Drama 237,
238) and Lonergan (“Never mind” 150).
199
the great Irish writers of history but more recently by tourist and heritage boards that
continue to successfully champion Ireland as a dual entity where the undisturbed pre-
modern landscape of castle ruins and grazing sheep meets glitzy cosmopolitan café
society,
138
McDonagh offers a vision of the grotesque buried under layers of the so-called
modern, turning the space into a gothic
139
haven of the uncanny.
The present day setting is another reason the Leenane Trilogy is so jarring for
audiences. There is much about the plays that makes them appear to belong to another era,
yet as Grene writes, “Beauty Queen contains 1990s allusions that specify its period” but
also notes that “…the more you look at the plays, the more the security of period settings
unravels” (“Ireland” 305). The setting and overall tenor of the plays appear to have an
older quality about them, seemingly locatable to decades earlier, yet they are set in the
contemporary moment. Eamonn Jordan points out that, “Temporal cohesion and
specificity are denied across the Leenane Trilogy, because no specific time period can be
absolutely established from the facts of the play” (Dissident 134). This juxtaposition has a
grating effect on how meaning is processed—the characters and their actions cannot be

138
Patrick Duffy notes, that “…it might be suggested that that tourism industry, perhaps the
most rapidly expanding sector in Ireland’s contemporary economy, is one of the most
influential forces now shaping representations of identity, landscape and culture. Largely
based on an urban consumption of landscape and place, stereotypical constructions of
identity form the very stuff of tourism and these are well reflected in artistic representations
from paintings, photographic images and writing…—the myths of the West, the opposition
of rural and urban cultures, the Anglo-Irish legacy, even the northern landscape of conflict,
as well as the writers, their personalities and the landscapes they wrote about—have been
appropriated by the tourism industry” (Duffy 81). See also the introduction to Irish
Tourism (2003) by Cronin and O’Connor. See also Niamh M. Moore’s “Valorizing Urban
Heritage? Redevelopment in a Changing City” in Heritage, Memory and the Politics of
Identity (2007).
139
In The Novel and the Nation (1997) Gerry Smyth writes about the Irish Gothic, noting,
“Dissatisfaction with the present and obsession with the memory of the dead can
degenerate into psychosis. Insanity is never far away in the gothic novel, and as the form
mutated it brought this legacy of madness with it” (53).
200
dismissed as calcified relics of an antiquated past. They exist in the same moment of rapid
globalization and transformative change ushered in by the Celtic Tiger, yet they appear
paralyzed in these locations, unable to move forward as the linear model of modernist
progression demands. And while some dismiss these particular representations as the stuff
of “self-loathing” dramas (Merriman, “Settling” 60), other dramas continue to assert that in
these certain spaces, in particular pockets of the deep west and other rural locations, there
exist both viable undercurrents and actual manifestations of frustrated familial violence and
unspeakable violations that occur more frequently than acknowledged, haunting these
isolated landscapes that bear witness to horrifying incidents, as appear in Marina Carr’s On
Raftery’s Hill (2000), a drama about incest, violence and claustrophobia also set in a rural
Irish kitchen.
140

In the end, McDonagh’s representations of family in the Leenane Trilogy can
depend largely upon the reader’s interpretation of his artistic purpose and aesthetic
approach. Some argue that his work is deliberately provocative, infused with an element of
humor designed to register on the level of caricature and meant to offer a farcical jolt to
Irish theatre while others suggest his vision suffers from a lack of imagination that requires
a recourse to violence and indicates a particularly damaging disdain for both Irish customs
and tradition. Perhaps, when considering McDonagh’s work, it is most useful to
contemplate the questions his oeuvre provokes, especially in relation to the representation

140
Melissa Sihra writes, “Carr draws a complex web of collusion and delusion in this work,
where each character negotiates the suffering with which they are implicated behind close
doors, whether as perpetrator, victim or complicit bystander” (“House” 213). Like
McDonagh’s play, Carr sets the action in the kitchen: “The kitchen hearth, presented in
Gregory’s and Yeats’s play as the feminized core, the womb of Ireland, is now irrevocably
violated” (“House” 213). Sihra also calls On Rafferty’s Hill “a radical rewriting of
Gregory’s and Yeats’s Kathleen ni Houlihan (1902)” and traces connections between the
two plays (“House” 212).
201
of family in his plays since most of his works involve complicated relationships between
mothers and daughters, fathers and sons, brothers and brothers, as well as other
associations with members of the community that act as surrogate kin. Eamonn Jordan
argues that meaning in created both by the spectator and the plays themselves, noting that,
“It relies as much on what the spectator offloads as meaning, as on what the plays
themselves generate as meaning through performance. The spectator is very active in
projecting on to performance. It is about the prejudices of perception” (Dissident 146).
It is certainly a fair assessment that the dynamics between the nuclear family as
depicted on the stage reveal a type of deeply engrained antagonism that eventually erupts
into physical violence. Their long-held resentments fester in the claustrophobia of their
living conditions, usually represented by the small kitchen, but what is not typical of other
Irish dramas staged in kitchens or that revolve around dysfunctional familial relationships
is the extent to which that aggression is actually either written in the text as plot or stage
directions and then actually presented on the stage. In the end, McDonagh’s dramas enact
a survivalist imperative that functions on strategies of annihilation designed to clear the
stage and make room, getting rid of the deformed that ostensibly impinge upon limited
resources, only to reveal that what remains is even more grotesque than what was removed.

Marina Carr’s Theatre: Landscape, Mythic Spaces and Women
While modern Irish theater tended to depict women as either mythologized agents
or docile homemakers confined to the cottage kitchen, contemporary theater has attempted
to dismantle antiquated gender notions by providing alternative discourses of femininity.
Brian Singleton notes that:
202
The essentialized iconic and mythical women of the early nation’s male imagination
have been replaced by women who reject male authority, seek new lives beyond the
strictures of the family unit, and refuse to be haunted by the sick, dying and dead
patriarchs in their lives who left traumatized the women of the previous generation.
(“Sick” 186)

Marina Carr’s dramaturgy mobilizes female characters who resist social and critical
limitations by publicly renouncing prescribed patterns of feminine behavior. Carr’s
protagonists exhibit a dominating energy and a willingness to engage in violent acts of
resistance as they contest the material and ideological conditions that attempt to define their
lives. Her plays subvert traditional gender roles and explicitly renounce the myth of the
passive female agent, and while the women in her dramas spurn traditional gender
constructs, each must ultimately pay a hefty price for the choices they make.
Space is a key contested variable that is closely linked with feminine identity in
Carr’s theater. Contesting space, owning space, and claiming space become integral in
asserting personal autonomy, and it also stands diametrically opposed with the modernist
construction of place as woman. Ireland has historically been embodied as female,
141
with
women’s place in the nation firmly rooted in the home, usually owned by a father or
husband. Carr’s women, however, are active agents in the pursuit and de/construction of
their own specific spaces, such as Hester in By the Bog of Cats…(1998) who refuses to
leave the bog and insists on remaining connected to her caravan on the land even as she
burns down a house; the Mai in The Mai (2003) who builds her own house on Owl Lake;
and Portia in Portia Coughlan (2003) who forsakes the house her husband built to wander
near Belmont River where she feels a powerful connection to her dead brother. In these
dramas, the central women each identify themselves with the land somehow so that even

141
This trope will be discussed later in more detail in the section on By the Bog of Cats…
203
when regional territory or domestic space become contested, they are firmly rooted to the
land through ritual, familial connection or sacrificial offerings. They each inhabit liminal
spaces, fringe borderlands of mental and physical existence where they ultimately resort to
violence as the final marker of expression.

Portia Coughlin
The opening scene of Portia Coughlin (2003) introduces the audience to Portia on
her 30
th
birthday. The opening lines of the play, uttered by her husband Raphael, reveal her
current state: barefoot and disheveled, Portia is drinking and is deliberately shamed by her
husband who points out she is a bad housekeeper and a careless mother, hitting at the two
touchstones of successful domestic womanhood: effective housekeeping and effortless
motherhood. He says to her “…There’s dishes in the kitchen as hasn’t seen a drop of water
this week not more” (7) and “And the kids, ya didn’t drive them to school in that get-up I
hope” (8). Raphael undermines not only her housekeeping skills but also her appearance.
To the outside world, Portia has it all—a devoted if slightly crippled husband, three
healthy sons and a lovely house. Portia and Raphael are rich, demonstrated not only by the
expensive gaudy diamond bracelet he gives her that morning—(“Put that somewhere
safe—after settin’ me back five grand” [8])—but also by their elaborate home the
community admires. Portia, however, is haunted by the legacy of her dead twin Gabriel
whom she hears singing along the river on a daily basis. Gabriel drowned at 15 and she
still feels the depth of his absence in a way that continues to paralyze her. She later reveals
that they made a suicide pact together, but unable to go through with it, she backed out at
the last minute but in time to see Gabriel’s face as he made his way into the water. Unable
204
to let go and move on, Portia cannot love anyone in her life including her children, the
youngest who still cries for her and whom she rejects, insisting to Raphael:
Ya think I don’t wish I could be a natural mother, mindin’ me children, playin’ with
them, doin’ all the things a mother is supposed to do! When I look at me sons,
Raphael, I see knives and accidents and terrible mutilations. Their toys is a
weapons for me to hurt them with, givin’ them a bath is a place where I could
drown them. And I have to run from them and lock myself away for fear I cause
these terrible things to happen. (36)

The pressure to be a “natural” mother and her strained relationship with her entire family
appear to function as a driving force behind Portia’s suicide in Act II, after which her
family is forced to lift her out of the Belmont River with a pulley. At a deeper level,
though, it is her incessant longing for her dead twin and her inability to settle into domestic
life coupled with society’s expectation that she should embrace her seemingly perfect life
that leads her to drowns herself in the same river where her brother killed himself fifteen
years earlier.
In a move that subverts the traditional linear motion of the narrative, Portia returns
in Act III, the morning after her 30
th
birthday and before her suicide. This startling
juxtaposition of time purposely disrupts the flow of the play as it returns to the moments
directly preceding her death and heightens the dramatic tension by undermining the
expectations of the audience, a move that refuses closure and containment. The audience
knows Portia will die shortly—they have seen the future in Act II—and this dramatic
device functions to elevate the tragedy of her impending death. Could anything have
stopped the events set in motion? In essence, the audience is watching a ghost on stage
since they witnessed her dead body pulled from the lake earlier. From start to finish, the
play offers a portrait of the nuclear family in crisis, exemplified in a cast of equally
unstable and deformed characters that populate the narrative. As Roche notes, “With their
205
physical mutilations and their invective-fuelled encounters the characters in Portia
Coughlan are in many ways grotesque: Raphael walks with a limp; Stacia has lost an eye
and is referred to as the Cyclops of Coolinarney” (Contemporary 249).
At the heart of these troubled relationships lie several layers of family secrets that
disrupt the natural order of things and poison the possibility of civility between them.
While the hint of incest between Portia and Gabriel initially circulates in the accusations
her parents levy at her in a rage, Maggie May—Portia’s maternal aunt—reveals that in fact
Portia’s parents are half brother and sister, foreshadowing Portia’s revelation to Raphael
about her own incestuous relationship with Gabriel. Sly and Marianne, Portia’s parents,
are half brother and sister, siblings with the same father but different mothers. The issue of
bloodlines and generational inbreeding suddenly collide in the play and while Portia’s
suicide can be read as a rejection of the imposition of bourgeoisie domesticity and natural
maternity, the characters with knowledge about her family history read it as an instinctive
response driven by her blood. When Maggie May reveals the truth about Portia’s parents
to Portia’s friend Stacia, she asks her whether Portia knows about this. Maggie May
responds, “No, but her blood does” (44). The logic of nature dictates that Portia and her
brother should never have existed in the first place, and sensing the abnormal union of her
parents and her own unnatural existence, Portia kills herself and in doing so, ends a cycle
of incest and inbreeding.
When Portia is pulled out of the river in Act II, grandmother Blaizes reinvigorates
her hatred for Marianne and her Tinker blood, blaming her for Portia’s death as she blamed
her for Gabriel’s death fifteen years earlier. Blaizes, who is aware that her husband was
206
Marianne’s father and who unsuccessfully opposed the union between her son and his half
sister, recognizes that at the foundation of the tragedy, impure blood is to blame:
To Portia in the murky clay of Belmont graveyard where she was headin’ from the
day she was born, because when you breed animals with humans you can only bring
forth poor haunted monsters who’ve no sense of God or man. Portia and Gabriel.
Changelin’s. Sláinte. (32)

Aware of their unnatural conception, Blaizes recognizes that Portia and Gabriel are “poor
haunted monsters” and her invocation of the “Belmont graveyard”—the river where both
were pulled out dead—plant the audience in the supernatural world of ghosts that haunt the
living because of their own actions. These changelings, as Blaizes calls them, were part
ghost and human, and since they could not supercede the fate of their blood or biology, end
up dead in the river.
142
Changelings and trickster figures have a long history in the Irish
cultural landscape, appearing in literature and folk tales where the ability to cross over from
one region to another has been attributed to fairies, banshees and other ethereal creatures.
Given this interpretation, her unnatural blood may also be read as the reason for her
maternal rejection. No natural mother would reject her own children—to do so renders her
monstrous and places her in the pantheon of wicked mothers who can only be understood
as aberrations subject to the most fervent judgment and punishment. The threat of
monstrous maternity pervades the play beyond Portia’s rejection of her sons when her own
mother calls her an “evil goblin” (46) during a violent confrontation with Portia where she,
like Raphael earlier, shames her housekeeping and mothering skills:
Your home is a mess, your children is motherless. Raphael has to do it all. And
stop lookin’ at me like that! If I didn’t know you for me own daughter, I’d swear ya
were some evil goblin perched up there glowerin’ at me. (46)

142
See Chapter Three for an extensive footnote on the trope of drowning and death at sea in
Irish literature and drama.
207
By her mother’s estimation, Portia fails on both accounts of successful womanhood since
the inability to keep a clean home and take care of her children mark her as useless. Her
description of Portia as a perched monster serves to demonize her, conjuring images of
menacing gargoyles as Portia is transformed into a gothic fiend. Marianne’s statement “If I
didn’t know you for me own daughter” is telling in a play about uncertain bloodlines. She
may know she is her daughter, but even she may not be aware that her husband is also her
half brother. Not to be outdone by his wife/half sister, Sly calls Gabriel “that unnatural
child shamed me and your mother so” (21) and “some little outcast from hell” (32),
recounting his strange behavior as a child who preferred to sing to himself and not bond
with his father. The family tree is a collection of uncanny, unnatural characters whose
impulses ultimately lead to their destruction.
Like her other works such as The Mai (2003) and By the Bog of Cats… (1998),
which exhibit similar energies, Carr ties Portia to the haunted land, establishing a strong
relationship between the heroine and the territory she claims, even if its destructive pull
leads to her demise, and interrogates the cosmic forces that keep people rooted to one spot.
Here, Belmont Valley serves as the site of Portia’s domestic incarceration and yet when she
is given the chance to leave, she (like the Mai and Hester in Carr’s other plays) refuses,
insisting that she would always wonder what was happening on the land if she left.
By the end of Portia Coughlin, the nuclear family becomes more than the site of
battles about space, provisions and love. It is transformed into a site of monstrous
capability, unleashing unnatural forces that must be contained in order to ensure its own
survival and viability or face destructiveness as occurs in Carr’s On Rafferty’s Hill (2000),
a play also about incest and violence. Here, the death of Portia and Gabriel bring an end to
208
this troubled generation and since their parents are now beyond childbearing years, the
incestuous reproductions for this family are now over, ending the cycle of degeneration in
this narrative with ties to classical Greek tragedy, a topic Carr explored five years earlier in
By the Bog of Cats…(1998) where she revisits the mythic story of Medea.

From the Mexican Borderlands to the Irish Bogland: Atravesando Marina Carr’s By
the Bog of Cats…

Xavier You’re a dangerous witch, Swane.

Hester (laughs at him) You’re sweatin’. Always knew ya were yella to
the bone. Don’t worry, I’ll be lavin’ this place tonight, though not
the way you or anywan else expects. Ya call me a witch, Cassidy?
This is nothin’, you just wait and see the real—
(Carr, By the Bog of Cats…68)

In 1929, theatre scholar Lisa Fitzpatrick writes, W.B. Yeats wrote a letter to the
director of the Abbey Theatre in Dublin Ireland, suggesting an alternate conclusion to
Margaret O’Leary’s The Woman.
143
Yeats intervened to advise changing the ending of the
play, insisting that the heroine be killed off rather than allow her to ambiguously leave on
her own after the man she loves spurned her. Fitzpatrick writes:
According to a letter written by W.B. Yeats to Lennox Robinson in April 1929, the
original ending of the play had Ellen leaving to wander the roads. In his letter to
Robinson, Yeats insists that ‘the heroine must die and we must know she dies; all
that has been built up is scattered, and degraded, if she does not come to the
understanding that she seeks something life, or her life, can never give.’ (“Taking”
75)

143
Fitzpatrick notes that The Woman was never published. She refers to the manuscript
held at the National Library of Ireland. On the revised ending she notes: “Revisions to the
original draft include that the heroine is now clearly understood to kill herself by drowning.
However, this is never confirmed either mimetically or in the diegesis, and no body of the
dead woman appears on stage” (“Taking” 75). She adds that, “It is significant, however,
that O’Leary does not confirm the death of the protagonist: the audience is denied the final
satisfaction of the elimination of the threatening element and a safe conclusion” (“Taking”
77).
209
O’Leary changes the play to accommodate Yeats, a move Fitzpatrick critiques, arguing
that, “By changing the resolution, O’Leary allows her character to be safely contained
within the mythos of the woman who was beautiful and made, and tragically killed herself.
Ellen’s despair thus becomes an individual tragedy, rather than the tragedy of women as a
class” (“Taking” 77). This process singles out Ellen, and while Yeats’s letter may reveal
an astute understand of her predicament, it places her in the role of sacrificial victim to
personal circumstances and doomed by forces that eventually overwhelm her. This
direction by Yeats could also be read as indicative of an anxiety about wild women of
inauspicious parentage running around the Irish stage and, by extension, the national
landscape since, as Fitzpatrick points out, Ellen’s father might have been a Tinker.
144
Her
dual heritage, and especially the insinuation of her Traveller blood, marks her and her body
as a site of difference. She must be reigned in and accounted for; her irrefutable death, as
opposed to the open-ended final scene where she takes to the road (like Ibsen’s or Synge’s
Nora, she notes) offers stability for the nation while also revealing how representations of
women and, as some critics suggest, works by women, have been managed on the Irish
stage.
Nearly seventy years later, in 1998, the Abbey Theatre premiered Marina Carr’s By
the Bog of Cats…, a play about Hester Swane, an Irish Traveller also spurned by the man
she loves who is preparing to marry a younger woman from a wealthy, land-owning family
and who seeks to evict her from the land she has lived on her whole life. Forty-year old

144
In Tinkers, the first extensive academic study of the Irish Traveller community, Irish
scholar Mary Burke writes: “The Travellers, or to most Irish sedentary people before the
1960s, the ‘tinkers’, are members of a historically nomadic minority community defined by
anthropologists as an ethnic group that has existed on the margins of Irish society for
perhaps centuries” (2).
210
Hester lives in a caravan on the outskirts of the bog with her seven-year old daughter Josie,
her child with Carthage Kilbride who plans to take their daughter to live with him and his
new bride in a ‘proper’ home. The play opens on the snowy bogland with Hester dragging
a dead black swan
145
behind her when she encounters the Ghost Fancier, a merchant of
death who has mistaken the morning for sunset, the time set to claim her. Realizing the
error, the Ghost Fancier leaves but returns at the end of the play under gruesome
circumstances after Hester sets fire to the land, killing the livestock and slicing Josie’s
throat to spare her a lifetime of waiting for her mother to return, just as Hester awaits the
return of the mother who abandoned her on the Bog of Cats as a child. Wailing in agony,
Hester then cuts out her own heart and falls dead on stage.
With the introduction of Hester, Carr’s play pushes at the boundaries of identity and
belonging with its multiple layers of meaning and symbolic invocations, offering several
avenues for critical interpretation. Most immediately, as Irish theatre academics writing on
the play have noted,
146
Carr invokes a variation of the Medea legend by resurrecting a
similar premise for her heroine, suggesting a timelessness to Hester’s plight that situates
her within the pantheon of mythical feminine suffering and violent retribution for betrayal.
Other academics also draw parallels to Bog with culturally specific modern plays with a

145
Swans appear often in Irish cultural texts and have tended to be the bird of choice in
Irish literature, from the ancient Irish text “The Children of Lir” to Yeats’s collection The
Wild Swans at Coole (1919) to Oliver St. Gogarty’s An Offering of Swans (1924) to more
recently Marina Carr’s dead black swan in the first scene of By the Bog of Cats… (1998).
146
See Helen Heusner Lojek in The Spaces of Irish Drama: Stage and Place in
Contemporary Plays (2011); Mary Trotter in Modern Irish Theatre (2008); Melissa Sihra’s
‘The House of Woman and the Plays of Marina Carr’ where she refers to the play as “a

211
similar plot and cast of characters.
147
And while critics have noted the influence and
relevance of particular Greek plays to Irish playwrights—and Irish playwrights continue to
produce adaptations of Greek works—the reading here situates Hester away from classical
Greek mythology and presents her in a different framework. While the invocation of a
Greek cosmology connects Hester with the tradition of ancient tragedy readily accessible
through Euripides’s Medea, and in employing an iconic name in American literary history
Carr conjures Nathaniel Hawthorne’s Hester Prynne (whose relationship and out-of-
wedlock pregnancy also brand her an outsider in The Scarlet Letter as Lojek notes),
148
by
placing the discarded and tormented mother in a haunted, liminal space where she searches
nightly for her missing bloodlines,
149
Carr establishes a trajectory beyond Greek and
American literary traditions and moves into the realm of Mexican and Mexican-American
folk legend.
Extending the transnational reach of Carr’s play, Hester can be read as a counterpart
of the Mexican legend of La Llorona (the “Crying Woman”) who wanders near rivers and
small bodies of water—similarly liminal spaces to the bog—in search of her dead or

loose re-working of Medea” (212) and Cathy Leeney where she calls Hester a “quasi-
Medea figure” (160) in ‘Ireland’s exiled women playwrights: Teresa Deevy and Marina
Carr’ in The Cambridge Companion to Twentieth-Century Irish Drama (2004). See also
M.K. Martinovich’s ‘The Mythical and the Macabre: The Study of Greeks and Ghosts in
the Shaping of the American premiere of By the Bog of Cats…’ in The Theatre of Marina
Carr: “before rules was made” (2003).
147
See “Two Contemporary Medeas” by Zoraide Rodrigues Carrasco de Mesquita in Irish
Migration Studies in Latin America 7.2 (July 2009): 195-203.
148
Lojek notes that, “Carr’s use of Hawthorne’s novel has no other precedent in Irish
drama that I know of and adds additional layers to a remapping of Irish geography and
stage space” (Spaces 79). Clare Wallace also establishes a connection between the women,
making an observation about Carr’s protagonist: “Hester’s scarlet letter will ultimately take
the shape of her own heart, cut out of her chest in the play’s final scene” (“Authentic” 61).
149
Carr revisits this theme in Portia Coughlan when Portia wanders near the river where
her brother drowned.

212
missing children as she wails into the night with her haunting grief, inspiring deep-rooted
terror in the community as a deathly figure children learn to fear and whose tragic fate
women seek to avoid. In most versions, she drowns her children as an act of retribution
against her husband for betrayal before committing suicide and wandering as a ghost in
search of her children. Perhaps most frightening to patriarchal structures of power,
however, she stands as a model of lapsed maternity that haunts the future of men because
she “symbolically destroys the familial basis for patriarchy” (Limón 416). Elements of
class also haunt the foundation of her narrative since “she teaches people not to transgress
the limits of their social class, and keeps wayward husbands and children in their place”
(Oliver-Rotger 121). Read often as a Mexican Medea, she inspires descriptions such as
“ghostly,” “witchy,” “monstrous” and “savage” (all terms used to describe Hester) in both
the storytellers who pass on the local variations of the tale and the academics who study the
genealogy and cultural relevance of the narrative.
While some academics trace origin points of La Llorona’s narrative to the European
Medea legend,
150
like variations of the Greek story, La Llorona versions vary in detail and
scope
151
and, like most oral accounts, inevitably manifest traces of a gradual narrative

150
Limón quotes Américo Paredes who points out “that it is basically a European
narrative…emphasizing a Europeanized milieu and European values” (quoted in Limón
407).

151
Jacqueline Doyle notes: “A folktale told for centuries in Mexico and the Southwest, ‘La
Llorona’ survives today in many forms. In one common version, a proud young girl
marries above her station and is so enraged when her husband takes a mistress of his own
class that she drowns their children in the river. Stricken by grief when she is unable to
retrieve them, la Llorona dies on the river’s edge. But to this day the villagers hear a voice
in the wind and the water—‘Aaaaiiiii…my children. Where are my children?’—and see a
wailing apparition in white walking up and down the riverbank after dark” (56).

213
evolution.
152
For example, Sonia Saldivar-Hull points out the presence of water in the
stories she heard:
The variant of the Llorona legend I grew up with in Brownsville was emphatically
aimed at frightening boys and men. In the stories I heard from grandmothers and
the many women who crossed the bridge to Brownsville from Matamoros to labor
as domestics in Mexican American and Anglo homes, La Llorona’s appearances
were always near a body of water: a lake, an arroyo, the resacas of Brownsville, or
the levee on the banks of the Rio Grande. (119)

José Limón notes that “the indigenous peoples add an Indian woman, sometimes in a
flowing white dress, crying in the night, near a body of water (an important element in
Aztec mythology), and confronting people, mostly men who are terrified when they see
her” (408, italics in original). The appearance of water in these border-crossing versions
tailors the narrative to the local geography and signals a departure from the European
storyline, but in versions outlined in more detail later, the story of La Llorona returns to
Europe when the basic framework of the plot merges with the story of betrayal by La
Malinche, Cortés’s translator in some accounts and his slave in others, introducing
elements of colonialism, identity politics and cultural nationalism that complicate the
domestic storyline. Yet regardless of the account, most Mexican narratives typically
describe La Llorona as a grieving spirit force in search of her missing children, portrayed
sometimes as a desperate though benign mother-figure dressed in white with a solitary
purpose, or more often, as a vengeful phantom seeking retribution and, like the Irish
equivalent of the banshee, committed to screeching death’s call through the lonesome

152
Oliver-Rotger cites Limón on this: “La Llorona is a fluid tale with constant shifts and
changes depending on who tells it. Women cooperate to change this narrative, which
prevents it from becoming a bounded text and makes it liable to constant redefinition.
(Limón 78)” [quoted in Oliver-Rotger 122].
214
landscape. However, regardless of her intention, she is always depicted as a woman who,
in ghostly form, haunts the spectral of the borderlands between the living and the dead.
Against this backdrop, Hester Swane inhabits a similar subaltern position as La
Llorona. Her “unnatural” ways are read as symptomatic of her Traveller blood, manifested
both in her inclination to wander along the bog and her subsequent refusal to settle down in
a home, though she is semi-settled in a caravan, putting her at odds with fully transient
Travellers and highlighting the irony of her status as “a Traveller who does not travel”
(Lojek, Spaces 70). Her rage is understood not as a form of resistance to her
re/displacement, but as part of her genetic or biochemical makeup resulting from her mixed
parentage and questionable upbringing. It would be best for the community, those around
her argue, if she just quietly went away and allowed them to get on with their lives without
she nervous distraction she creates. She, like La Llorona, is relegated to borderland spaces
where she exists as a disposable relic that threatens hegemonic conditions of power with
her refusal to submit into oblivion and yield her man to another woman, instead foreclosing
the possibility of men’s blood legacy, interfering with the allocation of inheritance rights
including ancestral claims for land and, most importantly, assurances of ties to the future
that protect the continued distribution of familial power.
This chapter section will examine Carr’s play by using La Llorona’s story based on
cultural interpretations of her transmorphing into Malinche to refract how ethnic difference
and gender predetermine Hester’s narrative arc, illuminating transnational connections
between the two exiled, embattled figures and opening up both stories beyond the limiting
interpretations often imposed upon these complicated narratives. In using La Llorona to
read Hester, the intent is to move away from the usual center base of interpretation—
215
analyses of her rooted in relation to the classical Greek Medea myth—and offer an
alternative framework and interpretive model from where to read and understand her
narrative. And while Hester’s story bears resemblance to the similarly exiled La Llorona—
both suffering humiliations that dictate the forces they fight against—perhaps most
important for this study here is an examination of the influences that mark them as “other”
from the community they inhabit and how justifications of their initial banishment and
subsequent erasure is centered not on the violent acts they commit, but on the basis of their
difference.

Reading Hester in a Transnational Context

Soy hija de la mujer que transnocha
I am the daughter of La Llorona
and I am La Llorona herself,
I am the monster’s child and monstrous.
(Gloria Anzaldúa, excerpt from “Llorona Coyolxauhqui”)
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If La Llorona has been called the Mexican Medea, then La Malinche has been
labeled the Mexican Eve (Oliver-Rotger 113) and her story been read as a version of
downfall and betrayal against her people. The conquest of Mexico by Spanish forces led
by Cortés occurred in 1521 and the birth of a male child resulting from the union between
Cortés and the indigenous La Malinche is often located as the inaugural moment of
mestizaje in Mexican cultural history. The children of Mexico then, are mestizos, the
product of both European blood and indigenous Mexican ancestry. In Feminism on the

153
Two previously unpublished poems about La Llorona by Anzaldúa appeared in the
Anzaldúa Reader (2009). In the following excerpt from the same poem, she provides a
description on point for Hester when she writes about exile and loss, explaining how she
finds herself “…in a dark wood/between home and the world/I feel alienated, feel as
though I’m outside and apart from the world, homeless, lost/I’ve lost the sense of being
alive,/I have become a ghost,/set apart from other beings” (294).
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Border: Chicana Gender Politics and Literature, Sonia Saldivar-Hull notes how Américo
Paredes situates the story of La Llorona as an allegory for the conquest of Mexico and its
indigenous people: “The legend of La Llorona contains such a story of mestizaje, of
miscegenation, which Paredes locates within Hernán Cortés’s conquest of Mexico” (118).
Explaining the narratives she herself heard as a child, Saldivar-Hull points out that:
That history, I now understand, was the history of the conquest of Mexico by
Spanish forces. While I understand that, technically, these two legends are distinct,
in the variants I heard as a child, Llorona and La Malinche were the same figure.
La Malinche was the indigenous woman who was sold into slavery, and, as a slave,
was given to Hernán Cortés. Male historiography has it that she was Cortés’s
mistress. As his slave, she used her proficiency at languages and became his
translator and eventually bore him a child. As a result the woman popularly known
as Malinche, Malintzín Tenépal, has been blamed for the Spaniards’ conquest of
Mexico. To be a malinchista is to be a traitor to Mexico or to Mexican customs.
La Llorona murdered her children because she was betrayed by a Spanish
“gentleman”; La Malinche symbolically murdered her “children,” the Indian tribes
that Cortés and the Spanish conquistadores massacred. (120)

The notion of miscegenation figures largely in this reading of the story and serves as the
basis for the origin myth of non-indigenous Mexicans. While origin myths are often
mobilized as a form of cultural nationalism, especially against the backdrop of imperialism
as a nation forges its identity in contradistinction to colonial impositions of power, they
also serve as reference point of difference, marking the boundaries between insider and
outsider. These interpretations place heavy emphasis on the class distinctions between La
Malinche / La Llorona and the Spanish male in the narrative, locating power differentials
within an economy of race, class and gender.
In his study of La Llorona, José Limón traces the cultural and political significance
of her story and offers her as the “third legend of Greater Mexico” after La Virgen de
Guadalupe and Malinche (399-400). He argues that the first two symbols have been used
to establish a framework where power over women is naturalized and notes the limitations
217
these figures impose on modern women while also focusing on class as a central feature
embedded in the narrative. Limón is critical of writers like Octavio Paz and Carlos Fuentes
who do not “critically deconstruct the legend” (406). He offers his own reading that posits
La Llorona as a figure with the potential to transcend the limiting binary often imposed
upon Malinche and La Virgen:
Ironically, these two major female symbols do not clearly serve female interests.
Further, at another level they may ideologically ratify, not only the particular
domination of women, but also the continuing exploitation of the Greater Mexican
folk masses by a bi-national structure of power. Is there no major, popular female
symbolic discourse that clearly speaks to the interests of these folk masses at both
of these levels? I submit there is, and we may find it in the legend of the woman
whom we left cryingin (sic) the streets of Mexico City… (407)

Limón notes that while efforts by Mexican and Chicana writers to offer “revisionist
interpretations of Doña Marina’s
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biography to show she was a real, sensitive, intelligent
woman who had to deal with Cortés under specific personal and political constraints”
155

(404) exist, no such revisionist attempts appear in relation to La Virgen.
156
Limón
attributes this to her pervasive presence in the culture and the devotional reach she inspires.
Appearing ten years after the conquest of Mexico, La Virgen de Guadalupe materializes as
an indigenous woman to Juan Diego in 1531 and becomes an important symbol of Mexican
solidarity and cultural nationalism. Her emergence and subsequent prevalence in the
culture can also be read as an attempt to offer an alternative and “redemptive symbol for
both indigenous and mestizo Mexicans” (Limón 403) to the narrative of colonization and
imperial violence enabled a decade earlier. As Oliver-Rotger writes, “the symbolic figure

154
“Doña” is a feminine address of respect typically reserved for elders and precedes a
woman’s formal name. The male equivalent is “Don.”
155
Limón includes an endnote [16] here that appears on page 429.
156
This appears to have changed in the twenty-two years since the publication of Limón’s
article.
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of Guadalupe, the Mexican native version of the Virgin Mary, is identified with
transcendentalizing power, silence and maternal self-sacrifice” (113), characteristics of an
idealized femininity tied to nation-formation. Conquered lands are often configured as
feminine and in need of protection by strong male citizen-subjects; Catherine Nash traces
this trope in Ireland, noting that, “the gendering of Ireland has been used to define cultural
identity and political status of the society and the identities and roles of men and women in
Ireland (“Embodied” 111). She argues that “the gendering of Ireland and the construction
of Irish femininity have been supported by the traditional associations between nature,
land, fertility and femininity” (“Embodied” 110).
This move to connect the idealized female maternal body with nationalist discourse
in Ireland employs the concept of ‘woman as nation’ and supports a partnership with
Catholicism in the construction of the national mythos:
In the specific context of Irish cultural history, symbolic identification of women
has been intensified both by the influence of Catholicism and by association with
images of Nationalism. For examples, Yeats’ provocative play (1902) fuses such
images of Ireland as the beautiful, young Cathleen Ni Houlihan with the suffering
Poor Old Woman, the Sean Bhean Voch. (Llewellyn-Jones 67)

Yeats uses Cathleen Ni Houlihan—who appears as an old woman before turning into a
“young girl with the walk of a queen” (11) when young Michael follows her out to the
house and into the battlefield—as a way to represent Mother Ireland in the Irish cultural
imagination. As Fitzpatrick notes, “as the foundation stone of modern Irish theatre, this
dramatic representation of Woman-Nation might seem to reinforce the symbolic
consonance between woman and land in a public and definitive act of representation”
(“Taking” 69). In a strange coupling, this symbolic representation is particularly resonant
when examined as part of a discourse on sacrifice and devotion. Cathleen, as the old
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woman, bewitches men into service of the state, luring them onto the battlefield in her
name and transforming them into soldiers for the nation, reconfiguring their service as part
of their loyalty and dedication to the young beautiful Cathleen who emerges only when
they heed the call to action. Rewarded with Cathleen’s youthful beauty and approval, the
men risk death for following her out the door as they do. The Llorona/Malinche narrative
is also tied to feminine representations of land and death, but here, it functions as a
cautionary tale for men who are often warned about her power to kill. Against this
operational ethics of violence and destruction, the Virgin Mary becomes a redeeming force
of feminine devotion.
As in Mexican Catholicism where “Guadalupe has served as a rallying point for
Mexican nationalism” (Limón 405) the Virgin Mary provides the model image of
femininity in Irish religious worship and her grace provides a path to salvation. In the past,
the Catholic Church actively promoted Marian worship by cultivating Mary’s iconography
in both rituals during devotional services and within the local community through statues
and emblems.
157
/
158
In “Irish Feminism” Siobhán Kilfeather notes, “The cult of Mary had a
deep influence on the lives and imaginations of Catholic Irish women” (106). For
Chicanas, as Gloria Anzaldúa writes, La Virgen retains a vibrant and enduring presence
that continues to pervade the cultural landscape:

157
Kilfeather notes, “The cult of the Virgin Mary was reinvigorated in the late nineteenth
and early twentieth century by way of the Marian apparitions at Lourdes, Fatima and
Knock, Co. Mayo, and recruited to the church’s anti-communist crusade” (2005: 106).
Nash also mentions the role of the cult of the Virgin Mary in regulating gender relations.
(“Irish Feminism” 115).
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Cullingford writes: “In early 1985 statues of the Virgin in Kerry and elsewhere were
reported to be moving, and attracted enormous crowds of believers. Conservative religious
commentators argued that this phenomenon proved that Our Lady was grieved and angered
by the terrible events of 1984, as well she might have been, but on what score?” (“Seamus”
238-239).
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Today, la Virgen de Guadalupe is the single most potent religious, political and
cultural image of the Chicano / mexicano. She, like my race, is a synthesis of the
old world and the new, of the religion and culture of the two races in our psyche,
the conquerors and the conquered. She is the symbol of the mestiza true to his or
her Indian values. La cultura chicana identifies with the mother (Indian) rather
than with the father (Spanish). (Borderlands 30)

For Anzaldúa, La Virgen is a racialized hybrid figure and this identification with the
mother privileges the indigenous aspect of Chicana identity, while in Gender, Ireland and
Cultural Change (2010), Gerardine Meaney writes that in Ireland images of the Virgin
Mary have been mobilized as an emblem of “whiteness”:
The conflation of images of Mother Ireland and Virgin Mary in Irish populist
Catholic nationalism deployed the Virgin Mother’s status as epitome of whiteness
as a guarantee of Irish (racial) purity. This function could only be performed if the
maternal body was idealized out of existence, or at least out of representation. (7)

While the racial identification shifts, the importance of Guadalupe/Mary prevails in both
cultures. The conflation of Mother Ireland with the idealized maternity of the Virgin Mary
mirrors the attempt to redeem La Malinche’s narrative with the appearance of La Virgen a
decade after the conquest.
Viewed in this context, Hester the Traveller who births a hybrid child out of
wedlock and refuses eviction and exile in silence does not conform to idealized maternity
tied to either framework of nation building, racial purity or religious dictates on appropriate
forms of maternity. She—returning to Yeats’s letter to Lennox Robinson—“must die and
we must know she dies” because she actually does “come to the understanding that she
seeks something life, or her life, can never give” (quoted in Fitzpatrick, “Taking” 75).
Using Yeats’s framework, however, it is worth noting that both heroines—O’Leary’s Ellen
and Carr’s Hester—wind up dead in the end.
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By the Bog of Cats and Other Borderland Spaces

The Bog of Cats may lie geographically near the center of Ireland, but it represents
above all marginal territory, a border area determinedly beyond the confines of
‘rational’ control. (Lojek, Spaces 95)

Hester Ah, how can I lave the Bog of Cats, everythin’ I’m connected to is
here. I’d rather die. (11)

Marina Carr’s By the Bog of Cats… (1998) centers on Hester Swane as she reacts to
the bulk of devastating news she deals with over the course of Carthage’s wedding day,
including the community’s collective rejection of her lifestyle that does not cohere with
normative patterns of domesticity: she does not have a proper ‘home’, she wanders the bog
in search of her long-missing mother and she communes with nature on her walks at night.
Carr infuses the text with supernatural references and conjures a Celtic paganism that
aligns Hester with the land but also puts her at odds with the traditional settled society
around her, including the properly ritualized Catholicism of the community, represented in
the figure of eighty-year old Father Willow, a peculiar character busy flirting with the
Catwoman who eats mice and drinks milk from bowls. Here, Carr takes on sacred Irish
cultural iconography and contrasts them with blunt images of social decay and moral
degeneracy, from the dead swan in the first scene to the unapologetic departure from pious
representations of priests. Hester herself is ruled to varying degrees by cosmic and rural
inclinations that mediate her response to the community’s expectations of her behavior, and
whether she “feels” her missing mother’s presence or carefully articulates her connection to
the bog,
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she is constantly moving between the living and the dead. This mixing of
worlds is part of Carr’s aesthetic, as Melissa Sihra notes: “One of the defining

159
Carr’s play has inspired a burgeoning body of ecocriticism.
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characteristics of Carr’s dramaturgy is her evocative mingling of the everyday with the
other-worlds of myth, folk-tales, ghosts and fairies” (“Introduction” 19). The notion of
crossing over from the spirit to the “real” world is another form of border-crossing the play
embraces, moving from haunted liminal spaces and encounters with dead brothers to
communal public celebrations to private interactions with missing mothers. The
provocative juxtaposition of Hester’s “witchy” ways with the community’s fractured
attempts at a normalized bourgeoisie existence is rendered visible in the ways the
characters either actively distance themselves from her or attempt to describe the impulse
to do so when they encounter her, acting as though her presence itself is uncanny.
A public outcast, Hester’s only source of social currency comes from her child but
as Carthage prepares to take Josie away, Hester makes one final play for him. She shows
up on his wedding day in her own white bridal dress, accusing him of having made
promises back when he was in love with her and marrying Caroline as a selfish act of
greed. Carthage meanwhile aligns himself with a legacy of male privilege, social
entitlement and material success when, like Medea’s Jason, he seeks to marry Caroline for
both her youth, thus ensuring the possibility of producing future male heirs, and the
consolidation of wealth the match ensures, though he argues he is motivated by a desire to
protect his existing family. When this wedding scene ends in Hester’s complete rejection,
she sets the house on fire—and all the animals in the barn—before coming to terms with
the realization that her daughter would in fact be better off living with her father.
However, it is little Josie who begs her to not send her away:

Josie Mam, I’d be watchin’ for ya all the time ‘long the Bog of Cats. I’d
be hopin’ and waitin’ and prayin’ for ya to return” (59).

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Seeking to spare her child the pain of a lifetime of waiting—just as she has waited for her
own mother Big Josie to return for her—Hester slits Josie’s throat as she lies in her arms
after the wedding celebration and offers an explanation for her actions:

Hester Yees thought I was just goin’ to walk away and lave her at yeer
mercy. I almost did. But she’s mine and I wouldn’t have her waste
her life dreamin’ about me and yees thwartin’ her with black stories
against me.

Carthage You’re a savage! (76-77)

While mired in horror over the loss of his child, Carthage calls Hester a savage, reducing
her and her actions down to something he can name. It also functions as a reminder that
the community has already labeled her a savage, reinforcing the discourse of colonization,
domination and eviction that began long before her act of infanticide. Her blood origins,
her counter-hegemonic lifestyle and the disruption she poses for normative patterns of
domesticity marked her as an outsider from the beginning and form the basis of the
collective communal rejection she faces. She inhabits the space of those who must, to
quote Gloria Anzaldúa, “cross over, pass over or go through the confines of the ‘normal’”
(quoted in Saldivar-Hull 67). In Borderlands: La Frontera Chicana writer Anzaldúa
articulates a theoretical framework of the border/borderlands that transcends literal borders
and moves into the realm of other contested spaces. Saldivar-Hull summarizes Anzaldúa’s
ideology:
Anzaldúa’s feminism exists in a borderland grounded in but not limited to
geographic space; it resides in a space not acknowledged by dominant culture. She
uses the border as an organizing metaphor for Chicanas living in multiple worlds,
multiple cultures, and employs border discourse to describe the borderlands’
inhabitants: “Los atravesados live here: the squint-eyed, the perverse, the queer, the
troublesome, the mongrel, the mulatto, the half-breed, the half dead; in short, those
who cross over, pass over or go through the confines of the ‘normal’ (3). (67)
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Using Anzaldúa’s framework, Hester, La Llorona and Medea represent examples of “los
atravesados”—those who cross over—and who occupy borderland spaces. Oliver-Rotger
writes that, “Medea inhabits the realm of those qualified as the abject and the psychotic, the
other, those ‘atravesados’ whom Gloria Anzaldúa situates in the epistemological and
geographical terrain of the borderlands” (282). Here, the setting of the play, the Irish
Midlands, itself functions as a border space caught in a nexus of multiple meaning. Lojek
notes that Marina Carr “has repeatedly described the Midlands as a ‘crossroads’ and
landscape as ‘another character in the work’” (Spaces 68).
The notion of crossing and crossing over is key in Carr’s play where characters
inhabit liminal spaces and where Hester traverses several subject positions, but is always
ultimately relegated to the fringe. Hester atraviesa—crosses—several subject positions
and continually negotiates space and identity as she makes her way in the community. She
is also accused of being wicked and prone to misbehaving; she is in essence a traviesa—the
Spanish word that means mischievous—showing up in a white dress on Carthage’s
wedding day. And like Malinche and Medea, Hester also bears progeny with a foot in two
worlds: Little Josie Swane is a hybrid child, part Irish and part Traveller.
Hester is an Irish Traveller, a distinct non-settled ethnic group in Ireland. As Mary
Burke points out, Irish Travellers have their own cultural traditions and a distinct language,
Cant (or Shelta as it is also referred to) that mark them as outsiders to the settled Irish
225
community (2009).
160
She is clear, however, to note a distinction between Travellers and
Gypsies: “Despite apparent similarities to British Romanies, Irish Travellers do not
classify themselves as Gypsies, nor are they defined as such by anthropologists” (3). Lojek
notes that, “Long-standing conflicts between the Traveller settled communities have
regularly raised questions of rights and assimilation, of what it means to be ‘at home’ in
Ireland” (Spaces 93).
In an interview, Carr explained that she chose to make Hester a Traveller because
“travellers are our national outsiders, aren’t they?” (quoted in Cerquoni 178; Lojek, Spaces
69). This notion of national outsiders is a key component to Anzaldúa’s configuration of
the borderlands and one that demands a consideration of what exactly comprises a desirable
citizenry—who is an insider/outsider and on what basis—and who produces such a
population. This question haunts the core of the play as the locals use Hester’s Traveller
origins as reason to ostracize and cast aspersions upon her even though she (like Leopold
Bloom in Ulysses who faces similar treatment at times) has lived on the land her entire life
and has interacted with the people in the community on a daily basis. Carthage’s mother,
Mrs. Kilbride, is actively hostile towards Hester and her daughter over their lineage: “A
waste of time givin’ chances to a tinker. All tinkers understand is the open road and where

160
In the introduction to Tinkers Burke explains the origins and cultural traits of the
Traveller community: “Contemporary Travellers in Ireland share common descent and
history and possess discrete cultural practices: boundary rules against outsiders, rigid
gender roles, an aspiration to be mobile, an adaptive tradition of self-employment and
involvement in marginal trades, a preference for flexibility of occupation over job security,
a pattern of providing short-term labour in accordance with market demands, adherence to
Catholicism involving public displays of religiosity, early marriage and substantial dowry
payments when families are affluent, a unique material culture, and district ritual of death
and cleansing” (2).
226
the next bottle of whiskey is comin’ from” (51). Xavier even uses it as a license to molest
Hester on his daughter Caroline’s wedding day:
Hester …ya’ll take nothin’ from me I don’t choose to give ya.

Xavier (puts gun to her throat) Won’t I now? Think ya’ll outwit me with
your tinker ways and –

Hester Let go of me!

Xavier (a tighter grip) Now let’s see the leftovers of Carthage Kilbride.

Uses gun to look down her dress.

Hester I’m warnin’ ya, let go!
A struggle, a few blows, he wins this bout.

Xavier Now you are stronger than me? I could do what I wanted with you
right here and now and no wan would believe ya. Now what I’d
really like to know is when are ya plannin’ on lavin’? (67)

Xavier violates Hester on the basis of his ability to treat her as subhuman and further
isolates her from the community when he taunts her with the standard threat that “no wan
would believe ya”, consolidating his power over her silence too. Desperate and in face of
this abuse, Hester nonetheless bargains with Carthage for the opportunity to at least remain
on the land in the caravan:

Hester If ya just let me stay I’ll cause no more trouble. I’ll move into the
caravan with Josie. In time ya may be glad to have me around. I’ve
been your greatest friend around here, Carthage, doesn’t that count
for nothin’ now? (69)

Unlike Medea, who attempts to negotiate with Kreon for the opportunity to remain one
more day—ostensibly to more carefully plan the murders of Jason, his bride, Kreon and her
children—Hester wants only to remain on the land and raise her child. Carthage however
will not abide this, and offers her money to leave. Hester reminds him that the land he
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owns was purchased with blood money; he played a role in the murder of her brother
Joseph who Hester later reveals she killed not for money but over jealousy. Hester could
not deal with sharing her mother, even with her brother, and kills him, slicing his throat and
throwing his body overboard with Carthage’s help. Carthage rejects her version of events
and, unable to convince him, it becomes clear that while Hester’s child with Carthage
allows her entry into the community, it will never guarantee her social or cultural
acceptance. She will remain an outsider, and with Carthage’s refusal to marry her, any
chance she has for integration into bourgeoisie society is lost. And while little Josie is
partially accepted within the family unit, her grandmother insists on reminding her where
she came from:

Mrs. Kilbride Ya got some of it right. Ya got the ‘Josie’ part right, but
ya got the ‘Kilbride part wrong, because you’re not a
Kilbride. You’re a Swane. Can ya spell Swane? Of course
ya can’t. You’re Hester Swane’s little bastard. You’re not a
Kilbride and never will be.

Josie I’m tellin’ Daddy what ya said.

Mrs. Kilbride Tell him! Ya won’t be tellin’ him anythin’ I haven’t tould
him meself. He’s an eegit, your daddy. I warned him about
that wan, Hester Swane, that she’d get her claws in, and she
did, the tinker. That’s what yees are, tinkers. And your poor
daddy, all he’s had to put up with. Well, at least that’s all
changin’ now… (17)

Mrs. Kilbride’s comments to Josie point out that some members of the community are
viewed as more valuable than others. However, as Mrs. Kilbride reveals, perhaps that can
be remedied to some extent by altering the circumstances of little Josie’s life, and situating
her in opposition to her mother.
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Hester’s “wild” existence, meanwhile, is relegated to the absolute fringes of the
bogland. She resists this placement to the bitter end, yet cannot transcend the social
rejection that manifests itself in her current banishment from “proper” society, confronting
Caroline on her wedding day and issuing a warning:

Hester You’re takin’ me husband, you’re takin’ me house, ya even want me
daughter. Over my dead body. (21)

Functioning on an ethics of pure resistance, Hester refuses to internalize the public
criticism, opting instead to loudly proclaim her right to live where and how she chooses:

Hester I was born on the Bog of Cats and on the Bog of Cats I’ll end me
days. I’ve as much right to this place as any of yees, more for it
holds me to it in ways it has never held yees. And as for me tinker
blood, I’m proud of it. It gives me an edge over all of yees around
here, allows me see yees for the inbred, underbred, bog-brained
shower yees are. I’m warnin’ ya now, Carthage, you go through
with this sham weddin’ and you’ll never see Josie again. (27)

Hester is proud of her “tinker blood” and uses it as a badge of authenticity, insisting she has
access to a kind of truth unavailable to the rest. For Hester, being outside of the ‘normal’
means she must learn to strategically survive in a zone that does not want to acknowledge
her right to exist and this requires the mobilization of multiple mechanisms of survival.
Here, as an act of rebellion for her dis/replacement, she burns down the house. Yet, Hester
does not ascribe actual value to the house, demonstrated in the ruthless destruction of it:

Hester Would ya calm down, Monica, only an auld house, it should never
have been built in the first place. Let the bog have it back. Never
liked that house much anyway.

Monica That’s what the tinkers do, isn’t it, burn everythin’ after them? (59)

229
Monica reiterates the community’s prejudice against Travellers,
161
linking Hester with an
ethics of annihilation and waste, and later reveals that the community can only articulate
Hester’s rage in terms of “black-art”:

Monica Well, I don’t know how ya’ll swing to stay now, your house in
ashes, ya after appearin’ in that dress. They’re sayin’ it’s a black-art
thing ya picked up somewhere. (61)

Monica’s statement is key, linking her as it does with a legacy of dangerous wandering
witches—akin to descriptions of La Llorona—and attributes the damage she causes to
supernatural acts of magic and sorcery, not one rooted in resistance against displacement.
Xavier is quick to remind her of history’s treatment of “witchy” women: “A hundred years
we’d strap ya to a stake and roast ya till your guts exploded” (68). Painting Hester as a
witch is a convenient mechanism for Xavier, whose threats register as an attempt to assert
his control over her, and functions as a reminder that the community already believes she
possesses “black art” capabilities and as such poses a threat beyond the corporeal realm.
162

It also aligns Hester with La Llorona, whose metamorphosis from woman to ghost in the
cultural imaginary often involves painting her as a witch. Hester herself tells her dead
brother she thinks she is already a ghost:

Hester Oh I think I know, Joseph, for a long time now I been thinkin’ I’m
already a ghost. (58)

161
Lojek notes that “Though Hester’s community is now commonly termed the
‘Travelling’ community, other characters invariably refer to her as a ‘tinker,’ a term that is
generally regarded (and that these characters clearly regard) as pejorative and largely
dismissive of the value of Traveller culture” (Spaces 69).
162
In another connection to Hawthorne, Melissa Sihra notes that, “Similar to the plight of
Hester Prynne in Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter the accusations of black magic are based
on a distrust of the extra-ordinary” (“Cautionary” 583).
230
This assertion connects the two figures because though Hester is alive through most of the
narrative—unlike depictions of La Llorona—she is forced to nonetheless negotiate the
positions of witch and ghost. Here, Hester and La Llorona’s fate intersect in the collective
treatment they receive at the hands of those around them. Some read Hester as an icon of
feminine rage who is attempting to manage multiple rejections from several social forces—
much like the treatment La Llorona faces. Hester is continually angry throughout the play:
she is angry at Carthage for the betrayal on his part; she is angry at her absentee mother
who has never returned for her and for whom she nightly searches, enacting her own
Llorona performance; and she is angry at the intrusive members of the local community
who would deny her access to the community because of her “tinker blood.” And while
she is proud of her Traveller

origins and tied to the Bog of Cats by way of personal history
and affection, in fact she yearns for the convention of settled, domestic life and wants
Carthage to marry her so they can raise their child together on the bog.
Here the bog—like the bodies of water La Llorona wanders near—becomes
transformed into a mystical space with cosmic pull that lures people in and disappears them
from material existence, like Big Josie Swane who never returns for Hester, at once feeding
into notions of the Irish landscape as a supernatural force that traps and paralyzes
movement forward towards modernity while simultaneously mythologizing the bogland as
the final bastion of Irish authenticity working to impede the force of cultural erosion. The
bog then, a space of energy (peat) and labor also becomes a place that itself consumes and
cannibalizes, and is ultimately rendered complicit in the disappearance of Big Josie Swane
whose absence haunts Hester, “further compounding the association of woman with
displacement, exile and historical erasure” (Sihra, “House” 212). Hester however, does not
231
conform to the community’s demand that she “migrate,” challenging and resisting the push
into exile. In doing so, she refuses to partake in a narrative that moves certain women out
of view—like those in Magdalen Asylums or who emigrate for a variety of social or
economic reasons and are not heard from again. Hester does not leave, unlike the two
sisters in Friel’s Dancing at Lughnasa (1990), and sees it as an affirmation of her birthright
to remain. She tells her dead brother’s ghost she senses her mother nearby:

Joseph Death’s a big country, Hester. She could be anywhere in it.

Hester No, she’s alive. I can smell her. She’s comin’ towards me. I
know it. Why doesn’t she come and be done with it! If ya see her
tell her I won’t be hard on her, will ya? (55)

She also reveals to Monica that: “All them years I was in the Industrial School I swore to
meself that wan day I’m comin’ back to the Bog of Cats to wait for her and I’m never
lavin’ again” (61). After enduring separation from both her mother and the bog, Hester is
resolute in her conviction to stay and wait.
In a noteworthy departure from the La Llorona narrative, Hester searches for her
mother instead of her children. Leeney notes the importance of this point:
It is significant that Hester’s child is a girl, since this establishes the line of female
connection as the issue. In this way the play is radical in the Irish canon. It is an
enactment of mourning for the absent mother; this is not only Hester’s mother, but,
theatrically speaking, the mother absent from so many important Irish plays.
(“Ireland’s ‘exiled’” 160)

Hester’s search for the maternal then, is a search for the missing mothers Leeney identifies.
If modern and contemporary Irish drama is populated with ineffectual fathers, then mothers
232
or mother figures are virtually absent in most plays, with notable exceptions.
163
Here the
ghost of Hester’s mother continually drives the foundational energy of Bog and reminds the
spectator that the persistence of failed maternity and stunted reproduction haunt the core of
this play. The layering of past narratives place Hester in a long line of suffering, maligned
mothers whose actions leave her story in the hands of those who would deny her right to
remain on the land she is connected to through personal devotion and maternal history.
The question of who will tell her story emerges at this juncture. By reading Hester beyond
the Greek plotline and more closely aligning her with La Llorona, the focus shifts and
offers the possibility of situating her narrative not exclusively in relation to an established
classic about a princess with supernatural powers, but alongside a similarly marginalized
character whose folk story endures and belongs to those who retell it along the borderlands.
In the last twenty-five years, Chicana feminists have recuperated La Llorona
narratives with modern interpretations rooted in sympathetic and more expansive
readings,
164
as they have done with images of the Virgen de Guadalupe.
165
As Saldivar-

163
See, for example, the long-suffering Maurya in Synge’s Riders to the Sea (1904) or Tom
Murphy’s Bailegangaire (1985) where Mommo presents a forceful maternal presence,
though she is incomprehensible and in need of constant care. See also Marina Carr’s The
Mai (2003).
164
Sandra Cisneros, Maria Helena Viramontes and Cherrie Moraga have all written works
dealing with the story of La Llorona. Oliver-Rotger notes: “…the reference to other
popular figures like Malinche and La Llorona is also present in Cisneros’ and Viramontes’
fiction, as well as in Moraga’s drama and essays. These references have been viewed as a
return to the indigenous essentialism that prevailed during the Chicano movement and as a
romanticization of an unknown history” (Cooper Alacrón 6, 141) [Oliver-Rotger 2003:
57]. The title story in Cisneros’ Woman Hollering Creek (1991) reinterprets the legend and
offers its own contemporary retelling, as does Viramontes in her urban story “Tears on my
Pillow“ in the collection The Moths and Other Stories (1985). Oliver-Rotger writes that
Moraga’s “Hungry Woman is a dystopian tragedy that draws on the Mexican and European
legend and myth of La Llorona and Medea, both of which relate the tragic fate of women
who dare cross borders” (377). Also, many major Chicana/o academics have written
extensively on the subject.
233
Hull notes: “In border feminist art, the Llorona of Chicana feminists no longer figures as
enemy or as victim…Feminist writers on the border forge complex narratives that bring to
bear the nuances of the theories of intersectionality” (126). These theories of
intersectionality open up the possibility of reading Hester as a transnational, cross-cultural
border figure like La Llorona. These mothers represent the site of cultural collision and
challenge a designated identity. Their defiance also repudiates the kind of historical
erasure that Medea’s Jason promulgates: “We need another way to get us sons. No women
then—That way all human misery would end” (19). This desire to erase the female body
out of existence is rendered clear not only in Jason’s lament but in the ghostly form of La
Llorona’s body and in the physical banishment of Hester from the community in By the
Bog of Cats. Yet, Hester’s final words to Carthage reveal her strategy of resistance against
the demands she slip quietly into oblivion from communal memory:
Hester: Ya won’t forget me now, Carthage, and when all of this is over or
half remembered and you think you’ve almost forgotten me again,
take a walk along the Bog of Cats and wait for a purlin’ wind
through your hair or a soft breath be your ear or a rustle behind ya.
That’ll be me and Josie ghostin’ ya. (77)

Hester, like La Llorona, will not go away, “ghostin’” both the landscape she is
connected to and the community that banished her. The fact that these figures continue to
reappear in contemporary forums may reveal a deep anxiety their stories provoke in

165
Elizabeth Butler Cullingford links Irish singer Sinéad O’Connor’s move to recuperate
the image of the Virgin Mary with similar work by Chicana artists: “Instead of rejecting the
traditionally pure and submissive Virgin as an unrealistic and psychologically damaging
ideal, O’Connor resituates her in opposition to the patriarchy. This is not an original move
(it is more closely related to the ‘goddess’ feminism of the early eighties), but nor is it
necessarily ineffective. It may be compared to the cult of the Virgin of Guadalupe among
Chicana women in Texas, who erect domestic shrines that are both monuments of kitsch
and sources of power and consolation” (“Seamus” 251-252).
234
hegemonic structures of powers, and rather than follow Jason’s decree to alleviate that
tension, the continued persistence of their narratives can also be read as a powerful form of
resistance against these kinds of forces as they withstand dispossession by refusing
complete exile, ultimately returning to assert their presence.

235
Conclusion
In 2012, Jimmy Murphy debuted his latest play Perfidia, a riveting end-of-Celtic-
Tiger-days elegy about collapsed aspirations, ruined futures and dislocation. To date,
Murphy’s most critical success was Kings of the Kilburn Road (1999), a play about Irish
emigration to England.
166
Murphy’s other works have dealt with the damage left behind by
the Celtic Tiger such as A Picture of Paradise (1996), a play about eviction and
desperation, where, as Frank McGuinness writes, “Imagination has dwindled into the
excitement of buying a lottery ticket or backing a horse. They make a gamble with their
destiny and lose” (xi); and The Muesli Belt (2000) described as a play that “shouts out that
the human cost of change is great, and that change is not always progress. Forced
dislocation is more than experience of the body. It tears at the soul and destroys the spirit”
(Friel and Sternlicht xv). Perfidia continues on these themes and marks Murphy’s most
recent effort to calculate the toll the Celtic Tiger takes on certain populations unable to
keep up with its fierce economic and social demands.
Perfidia features a cast of two women: Niamh, on the verge of eviction from her
apartment by the guards, and Ciara, a single mom about to move into the same building
with her three children. Niamh is a middle class college-educated woman who has done
everything by the book: she went to college, saved money, opened up a café, purchased a
home with her boyfriend at the height of the Celtic Tiger boom and was planning her future
in golden Ireland. Then the collapse occurred and her life slowly unraveled as the
economy stalled and fewer people began to frequent her café, which soon led to its closure

166
The play was later turned into a film called Kings in 2006 staring Colm Meaney and
Donal O’Kelly. It was also staged with an all African cast in Dublin by Bisi Adigun in
2006.
236
and set in motion a series of tragic events that brought her to the present desperate moment:
she got behind on her mortgage which led to borrowing more money, which led to a bigger
financial hole, which led to her boyfriend leaving, which led to her carrying the burden on
her own, which led to losing her home, which led to the guards coming to evict her, which
led to her total emotional breakdown. This is where the play begins.
The first scene introduces Niamh as she gathers her belongings in the front lobby of
her apartment building where she is met by Ciara, a woman from the northside of Dublin.
Murphy quickly establishes a class-divide between the women, accentuating certain
affectations that reveal the two women come from different backgrounds. Ciara is
attempting to find her new home, an apartment house she has been granted by the Dublin
council after three years on a waiting list. She and her three children will move in shortly,
and Niamh listens as she disparages the “kip” the Council has given her. It is soon clear
that the two woman, though apparently close in age, have led very different lives, have
different expectations about the world around them, and have definite opinions about the
“kind” of woman they believe they have encountered. The tension builds and soon Niamh
rages at Ciara for her getting things for free, proclaiming how much she sacrificed to buy
this very apartment, listing what she gave up, how she invested everything in this one plot
of land and accuses Ciara of going to classes to learn all about her entitlements. Ciara
rebukes her for perpetuating such stereotypes, for allowing herself to foolishly be defined
by property, and argues that her children are entitled to good things too. In time, the two
women back off from their rage and begin to talk, revealing more about their lives, hopes
and expectations and how they have been actually been defined by the disappointments
they have faced. As the play moves on, it becomes clear to Ciara that Niamh is not actually
237
tired—she has in fact taken a bottle of sleeping pills in a suicide attempt and is quickly
fading. Despite her efforts to call an ambulance Niamh grows increasingly unresponsive as
Ciara tries to revive her, begging her to not leave her alone. Ciara cradles Niamh in her
arms. Will help ever arrive, or is it already too late?
Murphy’s play is a powerful indictment of the social, political and economic
structures that separate ordinary decent people and push them into desperate situations that
come to define not only individual narratives but also larger demographics at the end of the
Celtic Tiger. It is an indictment of the structures of class that turn people against each
other out of fear, rage and misunderstanding, and a condemnation of an economic system
that leaves casualties of all kinds in its wake, refusing to acknowledge the collateral
damage it leaves behind. It is also an astute reading of the fractured state of feminism at
this time—here the two women openly disparage each other, hurling ugly accusations at
one another as they purposely perpetuate barriers that prevent them from establishing any
sense of solidarity, until it is too late. The play is also a rarity in that even in cosmopolitan
Ireland plays about women or plays that exclusively feature women still remain relatively
rare.
167
Here Murphy takes narratives that have been missing from the national register—
stories about middle or working class women and the toll the promises of the Celtic Tiger
have on them—and focuses on what they reveal about Ireland at this juncture in history,
offering a meditation on collapsed aspirations for upward mobility, heightened class
tensions and the uncertainty of the future. Murphy’s play offers a compelling portrait of
the challenges facing people at this time of flux and transformation as it confronts and

167
See Chapter Two for a discussion of some of these plays such as Stella Feehily’s Duck
(2003) or Gina Moxley’s Danti-Dan (1995).
238
surveys the wreckage left behind in the days and weeks after the boom and simultaneously
asks—so now what?
In retrospect, this is a question that actually haunts much of contemporary Irish
theatre as faith in long-standing structures of power has weakened. As cultural
commentators have noted, Ireland finds itself in a period of great transition as it confronts a
host of issues that keep demanding attention, reminding the nation that beyond colonialism
and the legacy of the Famine, other histories are increasingly seeking recognition and, for
some, reconciliation. And while there is disagreement amongst critics about the role of the
theatre and its ability to accurately portray the transformations occurring within Irish
society—and whether it is even the job of playwrights to do this—contemporary Irish
theatre, supported by a founding legacy of artists like Yeats, Lady Gregory and J.M. Synge
who also devoted themselves to chronicling a time of great flux in Irish history, continues
to explore the pulse of the nation, serving as a vibrant vehicle for social and political
commentary during this time.
As people turn increasingly away from religion and demands for social and legal
accountability get louder, and as the economy following the collapse of the Tiger has led to
Irish mass emigration once again in history, Irish theatre as a cultural institution continues
to provide a venue for social dialogue, critical debate and the artistic exchange of ideas. In
the end, there is still faith in the theatre and a belief that despite letdowns by other major
ruling institutions, the arts have not let Ireland down. Theatre and its practitioners have
remained critical, self-aware and politically engaged during these times, demanding social
recognition and political change, whether through the creation of provocative new works
that explore and challenge the current state of the Irish social landscape, or through the
239
reimagining of old classics that speak truth to the day, such as the Abbey’s 2010 staging of
Ibsen’s John Gabriel Borkman, the story of ruined banker and the destructive course of
actions that ensue from his downfall.

Back to Ibsen: The Celtic Tiger and Ruined Bankers
Ibsen’s John Gabriel Borkman (1896) tells the story of John who, following five
years in prison for his role in the demise of the bank, continually paces alone upstairs in a
locked room on the family’s estate. Shunned by his wife, Borkman confines himself to the
room, unable to leave and paralyzed by his failures but nonetheless harbors illusions that
one day he will be asked back:
When that hour comes—when they realise they can’t do without me any longer—
when they come upstairs to me in this room and go down on their knees and beg me
to take up the reins at the bank again—the new bank—which they founded and
can’t manage—here I will stand and receive them. The whole country will listen
and learn of the conditions which John Gabriel Borkman will…You doubt that?
Perhaps you don’t think they will? Well, they have to—they must come to me.
Don’t you think so? (36)

He warns his destitute friend to “Keep a lookout. Every day, every hour that passes, I
expect them. And I am ready to receive them” (36). He laments his position, saying that
he “could have made millions” but instead he has to “sit here like a great, wounded bird
watching others get there first and take it all away from me—bit by bit” (36). He insists he
needed only eight more days and that “all the deposits would have been honoured. All the
money which I boldly made use of would have been back in its place” (36). Borkman
insists that “If others had the opportunity and the influence I had, wouldn’t they have acted
in exactly the same way?” (59).
240
Mrs. Borkman hopes their son Erhart will redeem his father and rebuild their good
name, and battles her sister Ella for control of the young man whom Ella insists take her
name. Erhart refuses to go back to his aunt but also rebels against his mother’s decree he
rehabilitate the family name, arguing “I am young! Mother! I can’t dedicate my life
atoning for somebody else. Whoever that might be” (64). He also rebuffs his father who
insists they can rebuild their empire from the ground up. Having rejected all three offers,
his mother asks him what he wants, to which he simply replies, “To be happy, Mother”
(66). In the end, patriarch Borkman also leaves into the snowy night, declaring, “It’s time.
Didn’t you know, I’ve become an outdoor person again, you see. Three years in custody,
five years in prison, and eight years upstairs in purgatory” (74). He persuades Ella to leave
with him, as they listen to the sounds of factories at work, what he calls the “outposts of my
kingdom” (81) they survey the landscape together.
168
Suddenly, the ruined banker clutches
his heart and dies in the snow.
Staged at the Abbey Theatre in the aftermath of the Celtic Tiger and the increasing
discourse on austerity, the play struck a nerve with critics and audiences. The star-studded
production, featuring acclaimed Irish actor Alan Rickman
169
as Borkman, brought Ibsen
back to center stage in Ireland during a time of flux and transformation. Rather than
turning to an Irish playwright as the center point of the 2010 theatre season the Abbey—

168
In his article on Ibsen, Joyce noted an important feature of his later work that emerges in
Borkman. He writes: “One cannot but observe in Ibsen’s later work a tendency to get out
of closed rooms. Since Hedda Gabler this tendency is most marked. The last act of The
Master Builder and the last act of John Gabriel Borkman take place in the open air”
(Joyce). The juxtaposition between the claustrophobia of Borkman’s room where he paced
furiously for years and the snowy night when he dies provides a heightened dramatic frame
for the play.
169
Among his many film credits, Rickman played Eamon de Valera in Neil Jordan’s
Michael Collins (1996).
241
like the suffragists during Dublin Suffrage Week in 1913
170
—looked to the Norwegian
playwright to capture the general disenchantment circulating in Ireland at the time. Ibsen’s
realism and timeless narrative proved transcendent and offered a complex meditation on
the price of hubris, greed and alienation on both the individual and the collective. For Irish
theatre practitioners, Ibsen, once again, was relevant beyond the grave.

Surveying the Landscape: Recurrent Motifs in Celtic Tiger Irish Drama
After an extensive review of Irish dramas presented during the Celtic and post-
Celtic Tiger period, key motifs emerged as particular themes and specifics forms appeared
to dominate the stage. For many of these dramas, space and landscape emerge as key
components to the text—in essence, another main character in the narrative—and whether
protagonists attempt to flee urban Dublin as in Duck (2003); or are confined in a fictional
Irish town (which can be read as a stand-in for any of cities where laundries existed) as in
Eclipsed (1994); or vehemently resist dislocation from the rural Midlands as in By the Bog
of Cats…(1998), the centrality of space and landscape is continually affirmed in Celtic
Tiger dramas as characters enact survivalist strategies designed to withstand erasure as they
struggle against forces of annihilation by demanding representation. McDonagh’s Leenane
Trilogy offers a particular engagement both with space—set as it is in west of Ireland—and
with the need to alleviate claustrophobia, moved by an imperative to make room and clear
the stage while also working to subvert the centrality of key Irish motifs like the “kitchen
drama” and romanticized notions of geography based on tropes of rural authenticity.

170
See the Introduction for a discussion of this topic.
242
Another clear motif that emerged in the course of this research is the prevalence of
missing or dead children in many contemporary Irish dramas. While some would argue
that the theme of dead children predates Celtic Tiger theatre—one has only to look at
Gracie’s stillborn son in Brian Friel’s Faith Healer (1980) or young Tom’s death in Tom
Murphy’s Bailegangaire (1985)—this absence becomes a definitive presence in
contemporary Irish plays and suffuses much of the text, if not subtext, of several recent
compelling works. And while the topic of disappearance and absence that pervades many
modern Irish plays is more thematically connected to emigration and the movement of
young Irish people overseas—and again Friel and Murphy’s narratives dominate this
arena—in contemporary Irish plays disappearance and absence are more closely related to
the fate of children. Plays like Sebastian Barry’s The Pride of Parnell Street (2007) and
Our Lady of Sligo (1998); Lisa McGee’s Girls and Dolls (2006); Marina Carr’s Ariel
(2002) and By the Bog of Cats…(1998); Mark O’Rowe’s Howie the Rookie (1999); Conor
McPherson’s The Weir (1998) and Patricia Burke-Brogan’s Eclipsed (1994) all feature
dead or missing children that not only haunt the characters in the plays but also serve as an
uncanny presence in Irish theatre.
171
It is imperative to note that these are not minor or
unknown works; each of these plays premiered or played in Dublin at either the Abbey,
Peacock or Gate Theatre; on Broadway in New York; or at the Bush or Tricycle Theatre in
London before transferring to Dublin during the Celtic Tiger era. Each of these plays faced
an extensive Irish audience and each was critically reviewed, pointing to a wide audience

171
Jordan’s list also includes Carr’s Portia Coughlan (1996) and On Raftery’s Hill, Barry’s
The Steward of Christendom (1995), McGuinness’s Baglady (1988), Friel’s Translations
(1980), Leonard’s Love in the Title (1999) and notes, “The list could go on and on”
(Dissident 82).
243
who either saw the plays or were made aware of them through reviews, social commentary
or advertising campaigns.
Helen Lojek, in examining Marina Carr’s By the Bog of Cats…(1998) takes the
death of Hester’s child as evidence of “another in the assemblage of dead children whose
fate suggests the difficulty with which Ireland is dealing with diversity and the steadily
accelerating changes in what has been a remarkably stable homeland” (Spaces 95), arguing
that little Josie’s death is indicative of a national anxiety over diversity and difference.
Eamonn Jordan notes that:
So many plays seem to use the specific absence/presence of a dead child to inform
both the atmosphere of a play, to shape the dynamics of relationships and as a way
of giving heightened expression to extreme and intense emotions of grief, loss and
permanence. (Dissident 82)

Lance Daly’s acclaimed film Kisses (2008) also takes up this topic as the two young
protagonists search for the young boy’s missing brother, eventually discovering a dead boy
who essentially stands in for any one of the lost youths on the streets, and Martin
McDonagh’s In Bruges (2006) while set outside of Ireland also features the violent death of
a child that haunts the lead Irish character throughout the film.
Representations of the fractured nuclear family also emerge in Celtic Tiger dramas,
marking the home as a site where many of these characters are forced to first learn
strategies of survival and resist dislocation before they employ those methods in the outside
world. That sense of displacement is often highlighted by the absence of the mother.
Leeney notes this absence in Irish plays in her discussion of Carr’s Bog (“Ireland’s exiled”
160). This trope looms large in Carr’s work in different capacities, either with the physical
absence of a mother that drives the foundational energy of a work as in Bog; in the kinds of
244
traumas that occur in the absence of a mother as in On Raftery’s Hill (2000); in the
rejection or inability to embrace conventional expectations for motherhood as in Portia
Coughlin (2003). These roles collide in The Mai (2003) where Carr stages competing
versions of motherhood with her intergenerational narrative and where once again, like
Bog, Raftery, and Portia, landscape is central to the storyline. Moxely’s Danti-Dan (1995)
also explores the poetics of opposing representations of motherhood, with the constant
(though invisible) gaze of neighborhood mothers contrasted with the absence of Cactus’s
mother, while in Eclipsed (1994) a young mother longs for reunification with her children
while she works in a laundry, and wonders whether and how her children register her
absence. Works like Duck (2003)—where Cat’s mother essentially casts her out of the
family home— and Howie the Rookie (1999)—where The Rookie Lee’s mother blames
him for the death of his little brother—do in fact show mothers, but they are only quasi-
present or preoccupied, indifferent or outright hostile. In McDonagh’s The Beauty Queen
of Leenane (1996) matriarch Mag is a monstrous relic who is ultimately killed by daughter
Maureen and whose death garners little or no sympathy from the audience. Meanwhile, as
critics have noted, Irish fathers and father-figures consistently turn up in Irish plays even
though they often appear emotionally absent, ineffectual or fall victim to violence as in The
Lonesome West (1997).
172

The portrait of family life that emerges in Celtic and post-Celtic Tiger dramas is
hardly idealized. Yet, the recent attempt to introduce more women in compelling and
complicated roles on stage and off stage as writers and directors may signal a departure
from traditional storylines that deal with the men, emigration and their role in the

172
See Chapter Two for a detailed discussion of this trope in Irish drama.

245
development of the Irish state. This transition may also be indicative of a bigger
phenomenon happening in Ireland at the moment—the celebrated emergence of more
female writers.

The Femininization of Irish Theatre
While the current general prognosis from Irish cultural critics seems to indicate a
nation in transition, this may in fact be a time period of the greatest creative possibility. As
Fintan O’Toole recently pointed out and as this dissertation has been tracing with the work
of Stella Feehily, Gina Moxley, Patricia Burke Brogan, and Marina Carr, the future will
usher in an era of feminization for Irish theatre. And with writers like Nancy Harris and
Carmel Winters securing commissions from the Abbey,
173
it is clear new female voices are
emerging in a field dominated in the last 50 years by a roster of impressive but typically
male playwrights such Brian Friel, Tom Murphy and Thomas Kilroy.
The feminization of Irish theatre may also represent a move away from the
monologue form that dominated much of Celtic Tiger theatre, a line of continuity with
Friel’s brilliant Faith Healer (1980),
174
a play with four monologues and as much about the
role of the artist, as Seamus Deane points out in the introduction,
175
as the violent death of
the traveling healer when he is unable to deliver a miracle for the crippled young man. The
years following Faith Healer saw a successive series of “kitchen dramas” on the Irish

173
Nancy Harris’s No Romance (2011) premiered on the Peacock Stage in March 2011;
Carmel Winter’s B for Baby (2010) premiered on the Peacock Stage in September 2010.
174
Patrick Lonergan notes Beckett’s influence on the monologue form: “The appearance of
monologue in Irish drama from the mid-1990s onwards was certainly not unprecedented.
Beckett used the form extensively, in such plays as Happy Days (1961), Play (1964), and
Not I (1972)” (Theatre 176). See chapter seven, “Globalizing Gender and Dramatic Form”
in Theatre and Globalization for a discussion of the monologue form.
175
See Brian Friel: Plays One. London: Faber and Faber, 1996. 11-22.
246
stage, from Murphy’s acclaimed Conversations on a Homecoming (1985) to Friel’s
Dancing at Lughnasa (1990)—narratives that largely centered around emigration and the
trauma of leaving home. Martin McDonagh’s deliberate decision to stage his Leenane
Trilogy not only in the west of Ireland but in Irish kitchens can be read as both a creative
critique of this theatrical tradition and a parody of it.
176

Moving away from the kitchen dramas, the monologue represents a departure from
both the emigrant storyline and traditional naturalist theatre, and flourished during the
Celtic Tiger as mostly male playwrights took up the form. As Jordan points out:
For a time in the 1990s, monologues became increasingly a staple of Irish drama, or
more accurately, monologues written mainly, but not all, by men, for male
characters, with female characters all to noticeable by their frequent absence with
some loose references to the feminine serving the type of symbolic function that
many commentators have traditionally resisted or found utterly distasteful and
prejudicial. (Dissident 218)
177

Brian Singleton notes that, “At the turn of the millennium a new breed of young male
authors invested heavily in the monologue and monodrama forms to such an extent that it
became a dominant theatrical trend” (70). This move can be partially understood as a
deliberate move away from traditional dramas by emerging male playwrights as they
carved their own space in the canon and told primarily male-centered stories.
178
Yet
playwrights, as Lonergan points out, used the form in different ways, defying easy
categorization: “To speak of the Irish monologue as a distinctive style or genre is

176
The Leenane Trilogy is comprised of The Beauty Queen of Leenane (1996), A Skull in
Connemara (1997) and The Lonesome West (1997). See Chapter Four for a detailed
discussion of these plays.
177
See Jordan’s chapter seven, “The Glut of Monologues: Look Who’s Talking, Too” in
Dissent Dramaturgies (2010) for a detailed discussion on the monologue form.
178
McGuinness’s Baglady (1988) is a monologue piece about a woman and O’Rowe’s
Crestfall (2003) features three monologues for women.

247
problematic, since the term encompasses a diversity of performance styles, modes of
representation, and formal approaches” (Theatre 176-177). He also notes the prevalence of
male writers who adopted the form.
Conor McPherson’s work
179
such as Port Authority (2002), St. Nicholas (1997),
Rum and Vodka (1996), This Lime Tree Bower (1996), The Good Thief (1996) and Mark
O’Rowe’s critically acclaimed Terminus (2007) and Howie the Rookie (1999) are all
monologue plays, and while critics point to the fact that much of modern Irish theatre relies
on this form for a variety of reasons—simplicity in staging and cultural preference to a
storytelling tradition as Lonergan points out
180
—Celtic Tiger theatre uses the form to work
through issues of masculinity and allows men to speak freely through this device, exposing
their failings, including the loss of power and their fear of death in a close exchange with
the audience that will never challenge or rebuke them. Noting the historical trajectory of
professions that demand speaking alone and the role of psychoanalysis, Singleton notes:
‘[S]peaking alone’ is a privilege of the dominant, of authority, of the
knowledgeable that subjects its subordinates to the passive role of listeners, who are
not permitted to challenge the authority of the monologue, to interrupt it, or to
subvert it authority. Speaking alone therefore is a professional performance of
hegemonic authority. (Masculinities 70)

In contemporary Irish drama, the monologue form explores multiple portraits of fractured
masculinity, yet in terms of performance it embraces a form where the focus remains
squarely on the individual, usually alone on stage as they recount their story, and functions

179
Grene points out McPherson’s success with the form and argues, “To Irish playwrights
it is permitted to trust the voice in the theatre, to depend, as McPherson does, on language
alone without the support of spectacle and action (“Ireland” 310).
180
Lonergan notes some of the reasons for the popularity of the form including “its use of
storytelling” (Theatre 180) and points out that, “…one of the reasons that monologue arises
during a period of increased globalization is simply because it allow authors to write plays
that can travel freely; all you need is an actor and an audience, and the play can begin”
(181).
248
as means to reclaim control. Representations of masculinity during the Celtic Tiger also
feature acts of hyper violence on stage that offer men a familiar formula for reclaiming
their sense of identity.
This blueprint has crossed over into film, with contemporary Irish cinema featuring
multiple versions of the same violent gangsters and inept male characters that appear in the
dramaturgy of McDonagh, O’Rowe, McPherson and Walsh. Films like The Guard (2011),
Perrier’s Bounty (2010), Adam and Paul (2006), and Intermission (2003) all feature, to
some capacity or another, the kind of men and adolescent boys that could have stepped out
of a contemporary Irish play. And one of the most anticipated films of the year—Martin
McDonagh’s Seven Psychopaths—brings this storyline to a mass market in October
2012.
181
While some of these films have also begun to tentatively engage the issue of
diversity and multiculturalism in Ireland, roles for women in these films remain largely
confined to small, supporting roles.
In many ways, these films emerge from a theatrical lineage and tradition that
nurtured young male playwrights and their work. Ireland’s theatre scene has in fact served
as the departure point for much of the most commercially successful, internationally-
recognized Irish theatre exports of the last fifteen years, whether through Martin
McDonagh’s partnership with Galway’s Druid Theatre in the 90s, or Enda Walsh’s theatre
connections to Cork, or the dark Dublin-based plays of Mark O’Rowe and Conor
McPherson. All four of these playwrights have now gone on to celebrated careers in
Hollywood with critically successful films such as In Bruges (2008), Hunger (2008),

181
Yet unlike the other films that utilize Irish urban spaces (except for The Guard which
takes place in the west of Ireland), Seven Psychopaths takes place in Los Angeles and
Colin Farrell is the only Irish character.
249
Intermission (2003) and The Eclipse (2009) to name a few, while lauded film stars have
also been linked to the work of Irish playwrights, such as Cillian Murphy and Michael
Fassbender with Enda Walsh, and Colin Farrell with Martin McDonagh.
Success in Hollywood and abroad has been key to the development of Irish cultural
capital. Despite cuts in funding, Irish theatre companies continue to tour internationally,
such as in New York where Galway’s famous theatre company Druid recently finished its
run in New York of DruidMurphy
182
in the summer of 2012, or in London as increasingly
more playwrights establish links with theatre houses and companies. These global stages—
Hollywood, New York, London—provide another venue for Irish dramatists to bring their
stories to an international audience, cultivating and consolidating Irish cultural capital
around the world. On the national stage, luminaries such as Marina Carr continue to write
complicated and eloquent works to produce compelling works for the theatre.
Against the backdrop of the Celtic Tiger, Irish drama engaged a wide variety of
topics, embraced different forms and explored complicated themes at an extraordinary time
in Irish history that witnessed unprecedented changes to the small island nation. With
particular focus on space and landscape, many of theatre plays that emerged at this time
feature characters attempting to survive in confining situations, employing strategies of
endurance and resistance to withstand displacement as they confront consuming forces. In
exploring the themes traced throughout the chapters of this work, Irish playwrights have
produced dramas during this time that solidify the continuing relevance of theatre at the
start of the new millennium.

182
Galway’s DruidMurphy featured Conversations on a Homecoming (1986), A Whistle in
the Dark (1961) and Famine (1977).
250
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Abstract (if available)

Abstract This dissertation examines the relation between theatre, culture and performance in contemporary Ireland and researches the role of Irish drama in the transformative time known as the Celtic Tiger, a critical era that drastically shifted the economic and cultural landscape of the nation as it experienced profound increases in wealth and prosperity. The chapters offer close readings of key dramas and major themes that emerged during this time, presenting the critical background to situate the plays within a larger social-historical context. The dissertation researches primary theatre texts and critical works on gender and identity as well as studies on space and geography, and examines plays by writers such as Marina Carr, Patricia Burke Brogan, Gina Moxley, Stella Feehily, and Martin McDonagh, amongst others. Utilizing studies on space and demography, the work takes particular focus on the construction of place in contemporary dramas, especially those set in liminal or border regions, noting how the plays that emerge from Celtic Tiger Ireland grapple in some capacity or another with issues of dislocation. It contemplates questions of economic and social mobility by examining representations of youth and violence in plays by Enda Walsh and Mark O’Rowe, and in selected Irish films, demonstrating how these writers each construct complicated portraits of contemporary Irish adolescence in their works as they reimagine the bonds and limitations of friendship. It also examines issues of representation and diversity in contemporary Ireland, paying particular attention to the 2007 adaptation of Synge’s The Playboy of the Western World. The dissertation argues that many of the dramas emerging in Celtic Tiger Ireland function on a survivalist imperative where characters employ strategies of endurance to resist displacement as they navigate violent landscapes and confront the complicated matrix of power relations in an increasingly cosmopolitan world.

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Asset Metadata

Creator Torres, Domino (author)

Core Title Theatre, culture and performance: contemporary Irish drama and the Celtic Tiger

School College of Letters, Arts and Sciences

Degree Doctor of Philosophy

Degree Program English

Publication Date 05/03/2015

Defense Date 03/07/2013

Publisher University of Southern California (original), University of Southern California. Libraries (digital)

Tag Cultural studies,Drama,OAI-PMH Harvest,transnational studies

Language English

Contributor Electronically uploaded by the author (provenance)

Advisor Lloyd, David C. (committee chair), Deverell, William F. (committee member), Rowe, John Carlos (committee member)

Creator Email datorres@usc.edu

Permanent Link (DOI) https://doi.org/10.25549/usctheses-c3-251071

Unique identifier UC11288013

Identifier etd-TorresDomi-1647.pdf (filename),usctheses-c3-251071 (legacy record id)

Legacy Identifier etd-TorresDomi-1647.pdf

Dmrecord 251071

Document Type Dissertation

Rights Torres, Domino

Type texts

Source University of Southern California (contributing entity), University of Southern California Dissertations and Theses (collection)

Access Conditions The author retains rights to his/her dissertation, thesis or other graduate work according to U.S. copyright law. Electronic access is being provided by the USC Libraries in agreement with the a...

Repository Name University of Southern California Digital Library

Repository Location USC Digital Library, University of Southern California, University Park Campus MC 2810, 3434 South Grand Avenue, 2nd Floor, Los Angeles, California 90089-2810, USA