This chapter addresses the ways through which performance can highlight the body as a site of memory, history and forgetting. Mary Devenport O’Neill’s Bluebeard (1933), Eva Gore-Booth’s The Buried Life of Deirdre (published 1930) and Marina Carr’s Portia Coughlan (1996), all offer ghostly performances which stage the unsettling effects of the past as it resurfaces in the present. The plays address both individual memory and the cultural memory of female experience as defined by limiting myths of an idealized and domesticated passive Irish femininity. The haunted body offers the means for an examination of the processes of memory and history as layers of somatic memories which are exposed and reperformed. The chapter draws on Joseph Roach’s concepts of surrogation and genealogies of performance to explore how the haunted bodies in these plays offer a genealogy of performance that exposes the body as the site which bears the consequences of the disavowal of violent pasts. The performing body engages with the resurfacing of that which has been repressed and forgotten, and this offers the means to address the potentially destabilizing and uncanny effects of performing elided pasts.

This chapter focuses on how the theatrical forms utilized in Paula Meehan’s Mrs Sweeney (1997) and Mary Elizabeth Burke-Kennedy’s Women in Arms (1984, 1988 and 2002) encapsulate the tension between the body and the space it inhabits, and how the process of their mutual reshaping negotiates the expression of women’s unhomely experience. The tension between body and space offers a node through which the unhomely experience emerges in these two plays through exploration of both the home and the landscape. Mrs Sweeney and Women in Arms adopt very different theatrical forms, including the carnivalesque and Brechtian theatre, to map the complex ways in which space and body intersect; yet both suggest that realism is inadequate to the task of expressing women’s desires and look to alternative forms to carve out new spaces of expression. Counter to the limits of realism, the energy of resistance together with the suggestion of transformation and change invigorates both Mrs Sweeney and Women in Arms.

The threat of death and femininity converges on the dead female body which is stabilized and symbolized through limiting myths of femininity that augment women’s unhomely sense of a lack of accommodation within the cultural imaginary. In order to examine the possibilities for resisting the enforcement of silence on women’s bodies and their experiences by tropes of death and femininity, this chapter explores staging the ritual of sacrifice in Marina Carr’s Ariel (2002) and Edna O’Brien’s Iphigenia (2003), and probes the performance of the ‘good death’ in Carr’s Woman and Scarecrow (2006). How might the beautiful feminine corpse be reappropriated in order to destabilize woman’s petrification as a monument to death and silence onstage? This chapter focuses on how the three plays render the uncanny and unhomely visible and disruptive in performance. Moreover, these myths of death and femininity still have currency and offer recognizable cultural forms; discussion of Ariel, Iphigenia and Woman and Scarecrow addresses the potency of these myths within Celtic Tiger Ireland, and within the context of postfeminist and neoliberal frameworks.