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The Crossing of Boundaries: Transgression Enacted

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  30 August 2011

SHONAGH HILL
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Extract

Feminist discourse has proven to be a vital component in the expanding field of Irish theatre studies owing to its exposure of elided work and the articulation of unrepresented voices. Irish women's participation in the public sphere and cultural fabric of society has been hindered in the course of the twentieth century and this is reflected in limiting representations of femininity as perpetuated by discourses of nationalism and Catholicism: the dominant imagery of the idealized mother which merges the feminized nation – Mother Ireland – and the Virgin Mary. In Hegemony and Fantasy in Irish Drama, 1899–1949, Paul Murphy highlights the ‘contradiction between the symbolic centrality of Woman as fantasy object and the social subordination of women as social subjects’. The incongruity between the shifting realities of Irish women's lives and the inflexible institutions that shape cultural representations is the focus of much feminist theatre research in Ireland. This research examines work which articulates the experience of estrangement from the dominant cultural imaginary and attends to the possibilities of staging more accommodating models through three interlinked strands: self-representation and the unhomely experience; constraint and freedom as explored through space and form; and a shift in focus to performance and the body.

Type
Publications Dossier: Changing the Landscape of Irish Theatre Studies
Information
Theatre Research International , Volume 36 , Issue 3 , October 2011 , pp. 278 - 282
Copyright
Copyright © International Federation for Theatre Research 2011

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References

NOTES

1 Idealized models of femininity, and the conflation of woman and nation, are examined in two seminal studies: Innes's, C. L.Woman and Nation in Irish Literature and Society, 1880–1935 (Athens: The University of Georgia Press, 1993)Google Scholar; and Clark's, RosalindThe Great Queens: Irish Goddesses from the Morrígan to Cathleen ni Houlihan (Gerrards Cross: Colin Smythe, 1991)Google Scholar.

2 Murphy, Paul, Hegemony and Fantasy in Irish Drama, 1899–1949 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), p. 117CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

3 Sihra, Melissa, ed., Women in Irish Drama: A Century of Authorship and Representation (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

4 Articles on Carr have been published in journals such as Modern Drama and Irish University Review and, notably, the first monograph on Carr was recently published: Trench's, RhonaBloody Living: The Loss of Selfhood in the Plays of Marina Carr (Bern: Peter Lang, 2010)CrossRefGoogle Scholar, which offers a Kristevan reading of Carr's work, including her most recent play Marble (2009).

5 See McMullan, Anna, ‘Gender, Authorship and Performance in Contemporary Irish Women Playwrights’, in Jordan, Eamonn, ed., Theatre Stuff: Critical Essays on Contemporary Irish Theatre (Dublin: Carysfort Press, 2000), pp. 34–46Google Scholar; and idem, ‘Unhomely Stages: Women Taking (a) Place in Irish Theatre’, in Dermot Bolger, ed., Druids, Dudes and Beauty Queens (Dublin: New Island, 2001), pp. 72–90. On Charabanc see Foley, Imelda, The Girls in the Big Picture: Gender in Contemporary Ulster Theatre (Belfast: The Blackstaff Press, 2003)Google Scholar; Trotter, Mary, Modern Irish Theatre (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2008)Google Scholar; and Lojek, Helen, ‘Playing Politics with Charabanc Theatre Company’, in Harrington, John P. and Mitchell, Elizabeth J., eds., Politics and Performance in Contemporary Northern Ireland (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1999)Google Scholar. The issue of accessibility and the circulation of work from the independent sector is key. The following publications have therefore made an important contribution: Cathy Leeney, ed., Women in Arms, in Seen and Heard: Six New Plays by Irish Women (Dublin: Carysfort Press, 2001); Lynch, Martin and the Charabanc Theatre Company, Lay up Your Ends: A Twenty-Fifth Anniversary Edition (Belfast: Lagan Press, 2008)Google Scholar; and Harris, Claudia, ed., The Charabanc Theatre Company: Four Plays (Gerrards Cross: Colin Smythe, 2006)Google Scholar.

6 Leeney, Cathy, ‘Ireland's “Exiled” Women Playwrights: Teresa Deevy and Marina Carr’, in Richards, Shaun, ed., The Cambridge Companion to Twentieth-Century Irish Drama (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), pp. 150–63CrossRefGoogle Scholar, here p. 150.

7 McMullan, Anna, ‘Unhomely Bodies and Dislocated Identities in the Drama of Frank McGuinness and Marina Carr’, in Cook, Roger, Segal, Naomi and Taylor, Lib, eds., Indeterminate Bodies (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003), pp. 181–91Google Scholar; idem, ‘Unhomely Stages’; idem, ‘Marina Carr's Unhomely Women’, Irish Theatre Magazine, 1, 1 (1998), pp. 14–16.

8 Leeney, ‘Ireland's “Exiled” Women Playwrights’, p. 161.

9 Leeney, Cathy, ‘The Space Outside: Images of Women in Plays by Eva Gore-Booth and Dorothy McArdle’, in Sihra, Melissa, ed., Women in Irish Drama: A Century of Authorship and Representation (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), pp. 55–68CrossRefGoogle Scholar, here p. 67.

10 McMullan, ‘Unhomely Stages’, p. 74.

11 ‘Anne Devlin in Conversation with Enrica Cerquoni’, in Chambers, Lilian, Fitzgibbon, Ger and Jordan, Eamonn, eds., Theatre Talk: Voices of Irish Theatre Practitioners (Dublin: Carysfort Press, 2001), pp. 107–23Google Scholar, here p. 108. Theatre Talk also includes interviews with other prominent women in Irish theatre: Garry Hynes, Marina Carr and Olwen Fouéré.

12 Sihra, Melissa, ‘The House of Woman and the Plays of Marina Carr’, in idem, ed., Irish Women in Drama: A Century of Authorship and Representation (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), pp. 201–18CrossRefGoogle Scholar, here p. 215.

13 Leeney, ‘Ireland's “Exiled” Women Playwrights’, p. 162.

14 McMullan, Anna, ‘Reclaiming Performance: The Contemporary Irish Independent Theatre Sector’, in Bort, Eberhard, ed., The State of Play: Irish Theatre in the ‘Nineties (Trier: Wissenschaftlicher Verlag Trier, 1996), pp. 29–38Google Scholar, here p. 30.

15 Leeney, Cathy and McMullan, Anna, eds., The Theatre of Marina Carr: ‘Before Rules Was Made’ (Dublin: Carysfort Press, 2003)Google Scholar.

16 Leeney, ‘Ireland's “Exiled” Women Playwrights’, p. 150.

17 Brady, Sara and Walsh, Fintan, eds., Crossroads: Performance Studies and Irish Culture (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

18 Sweeney, Bernadette, Performing the Body in Irish Theatre (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.