Part I: Historical Overview

Economic instability in the 1980s halted the accelerated societal change of the 1960s and 1970s in the Republic of Ireland ushering in a period of renewed Catholic conservatism, political uncertainty, moral hypocrisy and corruption. The growth of Irish business and manufacturing that had begun in the 1960s had slowed by the mid-70s and continued to stall due to the effects of several international oil crises; by the 1980s it had all but come to a stop. The strategy of generating wealth through foreign investment with multinationals establishing factories and offices in Ireland had not paid off, with only a limited number of companies instituted. With modernisation many traditional jobs in areas such as docking and clothing manufacturing were lost to machines. Successive governments had to increase borrowing just to maintain current spending with little or no budget for economic stimulus initiatives. They also had to make severe cuts to spending which included making thousands of public servants redundant. All of this inevitably led to mass unemployment and emigration, with figures returning to those recorded in the 1950s. In 1988–1989 alone, 70,600 people left the country—2% of the entire population. Most of these were young—those aged between fifteen and twenty-four made up 69% of the total (Fitzgerald and Lambkin 2008, 246–247). Many who could not leave suffered an increase in extreme poverty which in turn gave rise to criminality. Muggings, housebreaking and petty larceny became commonplace in cities such as Dublin and Limerick with many afraid to walk the city streets at night. Much of this criminal activity was fuelled by a desperate need for heroin which was flooded into the cities’ poorest areas by new organised crime gangs.

Many commentators blamed the financial crisis on a “lack of a satisfactory, workable, self -image after the economic and social change of the 1960s and ’70s had destroyed a serviceable version of the national identity as Gaelic, Catholic and republican” (Brown 2004, 319). This then led to a rise in a new conservatism as a means of maintaining a separate Irish identity. Few in the country had sufficient fluency in Gaelic, and support of republicanism was perceived to run counter to the modern rise of economic globalisation while also being too connected with the violent atrocities of the provisional IRA. So, it was in a renewed commitment to the Catholic Church that a distinctive Irish identity could be most easily reclaimed. In this spirit, Catholic lay groups came together in 1981 to form the Pro-Life Amendment Campaign (PLAC) to outlaw abortion in Ireland. The practice of abortion was already illegal in Ireland by law but fearing how laws could be challenged or overturned by the courts PLAC sought an amendment to the constitution which would only be changed by a referendum of the people. In September 1983 a referendum on the issue was conducted and carried leading to an eighth amendment to the constitution of Ireland which recognised the equal right to life of the mother and the unborn. Earlier that year in April an appeal to the High Court made by plaintiff (and later senator) David Norris to the illegality of two laws made under British rule that made homosexual acts and conduct illegal was rejected by the Supreme Court. Norris would bring his case to the European Court of Human Rights and successfully argue how Ireland was in breach of Article 8 of the European Convention of Human Rights in its criminalising of homosexuality. The European court judged in favour of his position in 1988 and the Irish laws impugned by the judgement were repealed five years later in 1993.But before that Catholic conservatives would have another victory with the defeat of an amendment to the constitution to remove the prohibition of divorce proposed by the government in 1986.

However, despite such retrograde steps, the economic and social changes of the previous decades could not be fully reversed. The Republic of Ireland was now part of a global liberal market connected by mass media; it provided free state education and was no longer subject to the strict censorship of the early decades of independence. This created appetites for the freedoms of liberal democracies that conflicted with the strict mores of the Catholic Church. This clash of values did not, however, lead to revolutionary action but a stalemate between both positions sustained by a discerning hypocrisy, what Fintan O’Toole has described as “the culture of deliberate unknowing” that involved a mindset of “don’t ask, don’t see and don’t say” (2021, 28). This was particularly apparent in the public moral policing of sexuality, marriage and control of women’s bodies that existed alongside a private world of pregnancy outside of marriage, affairs, clandestine gay sex, imported contraception and travel en masse to the UK for abortions.

The violence in the North of Ireland and sectarian divisions further deepened in the 1980s exacerbated by the hunger strikes of republican prisoners at the beginning of the decade. These strikes were the culmination of years of protests by inmates who demanded recognition as political prisoners and to be given Special Category Status rather than treated as criminal offenders. They first refused to wear prison uniforms, choosing to go naked or wear blankets, this was called the “blanket protest.” Then after attacks by prison guards they refused to leave their cells. This became known as the “Dirty protest” as unable to leave their cells the prisoners could not wash and as guards refused to go in to clean the cells, there was no disposal of the prisoner’s excrement, so they smeared it on the walls in defiance of their conditions. Women prisoners who would later join the protest would also smear menstrual blood on the walls. In October 1980 with their demands still not met it was decided that some prisoners would go on hunger strike together. This strike would last for 53 days until the British government proposed a settlement. However, unhappy with the conditions of the settlement a further strike began in March 1981 with prisoners joining the strike one at a time in staggered intervals. Bobby Sands, who led the action and was the first to refuse food, was elected to the British House of Commons as a Sinn Fein representative while on hunger strike. It was thought that if elected to this position the British government would be forced to concede their position rather than let an elected member of parliament die. However, Margaret Thatcher the British Prime Minister refused to give in and Sands died after 66 days on strike. Thousands lined the streets of Belfast for his funeral which was conducted with IRA military honours. Ten other prisoners would die on hunger strike before the efforts of their families to medically intervene and the British government’s partial concession to demands ended the strikes. In nationalist republican communities the strikers were portrayed as martyrs and as such served to give legitimacy to the IRA’s violent campaign. For historian Diarmuid Ferriter, “the deaths and election victories by hunger strike candidates…can be said to have altered the political environment in which the IRA operated” (2004, 640). It forced the IRA to engage with democratic institutions and participate in political debate via the nationalist political party Sinn Féin. Atrocities would continue throughout the decade from both sides but the IRA bombing at a Remembrance Day memorial in November 1987 where 10 civilians and a police officer were killed and 63 injured was a turning point for many to finally end the violence. Gerry Adams, the Leader of Sinn Féin, would move the IRA towards peace talks by the end of the 1980s which would eventually lead to a ceasefire in 1994. Another significant movement towards peace were the negotiations between the then Taoiseach Garret FitzGerald and Margaret Thatcher that resulted in the signing of the Anglo-Irish Agreement in 1985 which gave the Irish government a consultative role in the governance of Northern Ireland. It also crucially declared that Britain would no longer oppose a united Ireland if a majority in Northern Ireland were to desire this. With Unionists and Republicans both refusing to be part of the negotiation the agreement did not bring peace in the short term but it signalled publicly for the first time that Britain “was essentially neutral in the Irish quarrel, a change in policy which could be built on over time” (Brown 2004, 333).

As already outlined, the 1980s was a turbulent time politically where the urgency of the economic crisis and the continuing horror of the Northern conflict created instability politically with power shifting continually throughout the decade between the two largest political parties Fianna Fail and Fine Gael as both were forced to make unpopular decisions. Indeed, between 1981 and 1982 the Irish electorate would vote in three general elections where a Fine Gael-Labour coalition would see Fianna Fail gain a majority government after a forced election, followed by Fianna Fail losing power to Fine Gael and Labour after another forced election.

All this uncertainty and doubleness would lead to a sense of unreality in Irish life, a sense of emptiness and deadly performativity. In the summer of 1985 Irish Catholics would flock to parishes in Kerry to pray in the hope of witnessing holy statues move, as they were purported to have miraculously come to life. O’Toole writes,

Nothing was incredible, nothing was neatly contained within the bounds of likelihood. The unbelievable was entirely possible; the real was hard to believe. Events that looked like conspiracies might turn out to be mere accidents, while surface normalities might conceal the most convoluted political machinations. When the state was enveloped in this cloud of unknowing, it was not surprising that society at large was struggling not to lose its reason. It became easier to accept fantastical explanations than to settle for plain facts. (2021, 356)

However, the fantastical show of the 1980s would come to an end with the arrival of the new decade as political and church scandals broke and the Irish people began to no longer wish to maintain the charade. The beginning of this change could be viewed to have been ushered in by the election of Mary Robinson as the first woman to be president of Ireland in 1990. Robinson was a Labour party candidate, who in addition to being a senator and councillor had been an outspoken barrister who had fought for women’s rights, opposing the 1983 abortion referendum, and advocating for gay liberation, heading the legal team for David Norris in his case on the decriminalisation of homosexuality at the European Court for Human Rights. The presidential role had largely been ceremonial in Ireland but Robinson used her position to influence thought by speaking out on issues, presenting a liberal contemporary vision of Ireland for the 1990s that was in opposition to the conservatism of the previous decade.

Robinson had been aided in her election victory by a disastrous Fianna Fail campaign which collapsed in scandal as their candidate Brian Linehan was caught in a lie about an incident in the past and a senior Fianna Fail government minister, Pádraig Flynn, in a radio interview, misogynistically attacked Robinson for being a bad mother and wife. This was to be the beginning of the end for Haughey’s political dominance as party colleagues plotted to oust him and he lost the leadership in 1992. Over the following years revelations about payments to him from prominent business men and his involvement in tax evasion schemes would lead to a lengthy tribunal of inquiry into his finances in 1997 with a final report released in 2012, six years after his death.

The moral authority of the Catholic Church which had resurged in the 1980s was to collapse in the 1990s. It began with the resignation of Bishop Eamonn Casey, a highly visible member of the Irish clergy who stepped down after it was revealed by the Irish Times in 1992 that he had fathered a child with a woman from Connecticut, Annie Murphy, in the 1970s and had recently given her a large financial settlement using church funds for her son’s college fees. Casey fled the country and a year later Murphy published a book which detailed the affair with the Bishop and his hedonistic life of pleasure and privilege. Bishop Casey’s hypocrisy and conduct damaged the Church’s standing in Ireland but the scandals that would follow in subsequent years, the horrific exposure of its systemic cover-up and protection of paedophile priests who had abused children for decades, was to forever end its formidable influence on Irish society. This saw the end of Catholicism as a core marker of Irish identity just as Ireland entered into a new globalised era of financial prosperity and inward migration.

Part II: Theatre and Performance Practices

Genres, Methods and Approaches

The 1980s and early 1990s saw a massive rise in theatrical activity across the island. New companies were founded North and South offering more diverse perspectives while the established theatres staged radical revivals of Irish classics alongside challenging new plays by well-known authors. There was a huge increase in touring of productions at home and abroad with many of these achieving significant critical and commercial success. All this activity was due to and in reaction to the circumstance of the time. With more university graduates than in earlier periods but less prospects for employment a generation of artists emerged that had to create their own opportunities. Many companies were thus formed following the earlier model set by Druid such as Rough Magic (Dublin, 1984), Pigsback (Dublin, 1988–1996), Gallowglass (Clonmel, 1990), Island (Limerick, 1988–2008), Meridian (Cork, 1991–2009), Corcadorca (Cork, 1991), Punchbag (Galway, 1989–1997) and Blue Raincoat, (Sligo, 1991). Victor Merriman points out:

Unlike Druid, however, and with the exception of Blue Raincoat, none of these companies developed as a venue-based theatre ensemble, relying instead on seasons presented at established or emerging local venues and on access to touring – a central plank of Arts Council policy toward “regional development” almost since its inception, and which was funded between 1982 and 1990 by direct grant aid to companies. (2016, 395)

Other companies were set up because of inequalities or to confront contemporary issues. Charabanc (Belfast, 1983–1995) was started by a group of unemployed actresses, who produced their own work, as there were so few roles for women in the plays being produced at the time. They also felt that the roles that were available were limited in their representation, reducing women to types rather than portraying any reality. Glasshouse (Dublin, 1990–1996), a company also run by female theatremakers, later followed the example of Charabanc but they set out to deliberately produce new and neglected writing by women, frustrated that such work was not being staged at the larger theatres. Over the entire decade of the 1980s only one female authored play would be produced on the main Abbey stage: Jean Binnie’s Colours—Jane Barry Esq (1988).

Passion Machine (Dublin, 1984–2008) furthered the work done by the Sheridan’s at the Project in the late 1970s in representing working-class urban identities and issues in being “committed to a wholly indigenous populist theatre that depicted, challenged and celebrated the contemporary Irish experience” (Irish Theatre Playography, n.d.). Field Day Theatre Company (Derry) was also established by Brian Friel and Stephen Rea in 1980 with a view to making theatre more accessible to new audiences by committing to touring its productions around the entire island to small towns often ignored on traditional touring circuits. Touring for Field Day (as it was also for Charabanc) was also a means to artistically address the ongoing sectarian violence as it sought to unite communities through performance and offer varied perspectives through staging historical dramas such as Friel’s Translations (1980), Thomas Kilroy’s Double Cross (1986) and Stewart Parker’s Pentecost (1987) and new adaptations of classics like Tom Paulin’s The Riot Act (1984), a version of Antigone by Sophocles and Seamus Heaney’s The Cure at Troy (1990), after Philoctetes by Sophocles.

Nicholas Grene writes how in this period “Many others adopted the same strategy of recreating the past in order to find a means of better understanding the troubled issues of the contemporary period” (1999, 235–236). A prominent example being Frank McGuinness’s Observe the Sons of Ulster Marching towards the Somme (1985) which is discussed in Chapter 7.

The distancing of a historical narrative was not for everyone with other companies such as Rough Magic in their production of Declan Hughes’s Digging for Fire (1991), Pigsback’s staging of Joseph O’Connor’s Red Roses and Petrol (1995) and Passion Machine’s many productions of the plays of Paul Mercier and Roddy Doyle, confronting audiences with a dynamic urgent contemporary realism. Playwright Clare Dowling writes:

In the late Eighties and early Nineties, modern urban Dublin finally booted boggy bits of land off the Irish stage, page and screen. Suddenly people were writing about dole queues and housing estates and southside dinner parties. The characters in these new fictional urban communities seemed very immediate and young and empathetic. Humour was rampant, sentiment gleefully absent. The language would strip paint. (Williams et al. 2001, 133)

Contemporary rural Ireland was also given unsentimental realistic treatment in many dramas of this time, most notably Tom Murphy’s landmark Bailegangaire (1985) that came from his fruitful collaboration with Druid during this period, famously starring Siobhan McKenna in her final legendary performance as Mammo; and Billy Roche’s Wexford Trilogy that included A Handful of Stars (1988) Poor Beast in the Rain (1989) and Belfry (1991). Roche’s plays explore the gritty working-class world of men in Wexford town in order to reveal “the dignity of small lives” (Merriman 2022, 133). The plays of the Wexford Trilogy were first produced by the Bush theatre in London before being staged in Ireland. Roche here followed a practice that would become increasingly common in the 1990s and 2000s with Irish playwrights including Marina Carr, Mark O’Rowe, Enda Walsh, Frank McGuinness and Conor McPherson often being commissioned by producing houses in the UK to premiere new work.

This renewed appetite for Irish plays in the UK and worldwide could be said to have originated with the recognition of international touring productions in the 1980s and early 1990s. Chief among these were Field Day’s tours of its productions outside of Ireland; Druid’s award-winning revival of Synge’s The Playboy of the Western World that toured repeatedly throughout the 1980s from Edinburgh to Perth, Australia; and the Gate Theatre’s revival of O’Casey’s Juno and the Paycock directed by Joe Dowling that earned plaudits on Broadway in 1988. However, the biggest Irish hit worldwide was the Abbey Theatre’s production of Brian Friel’s Dancing at Lughnasa. First staged at the Abbey in 1990 under the direction of Patrick Mason, this production would tour internationally for the next three years winning Best Play at the Tony awards in 1992. Dancing at Lughnasa is representative of many of the plays of this era in not only being a history play but also in its emphasis on movement and the body in performance. The most famous aspect of this production is the wild dance by the Mundy sisters that marks a moment of cathartic release for these women from their harsh tense reality. Indeed, in his closing monologue the character of Michael speaks of the memories of his childhood as coming to him in the form of dancing, as the entire cast sway slowly in a tableaux vivant:

Dancing as if language had surrendered to movement – as if this ritual, this wordless ceremony, was now the way to speak, to whisper private and sacred things, to be in touch with some otherness. Dancing as if the very heart of life and all its hopes might be found in those assuaging notes and those hushed rhythms and in those silent and hypnotic movements. Dancing as if language no longer existed because words were no longer necessary…. (Friel 1999, 108)

Michael’s articulation of “words surrendering to movement” could be used to describe the theatrical output of the 1980s and early 1990s as Irish theatre was dominated by a new physicality in its presentation. This was most evident in Tom MacIntyre’s stage adaptation of Patrick Kavanagh’s poem The Great Hunger in 1983 where he collaborated with designer Bronwen Casson, director Patrick Masson and an ensemble of actors to create a physical theatre that emphasised movement and design for its effects rather than language which was a radical departure at the time for the Abbey Theatre, that had built its reputation on the literary quality of its productions. The revivals of Irish classics in this era were also characterised by physical and visceral effects. Druid in several productions gave Synge’s The Playboy of the Western World a new raw vitality in an unsentimental presentation where impoverished crazed characters caked in dirt, passionately loved and violently raged on a sparse stage. Joe Dowling similarly would give Sean O’Casey’s Juno and the Paycock at the Gate Theatre in 1986 a stark treatment that emphasised the poverty of the Dublin tenement dwellers but also stressed the knock-about music hall aspects of the play. Garry Hynes would also radically reimagine O’Casey’s The Plough and the Stars in a controversial production at the Abbey in 1991 with the cast of Dublin tenement dwellers appearing with heads shaved on a blood-stained stage. W.B Yeats’s rarely performed plays that are full of dance, music and movement were produced at the Abbey in a dedicated annual festival from 1989 to 1993. Theatre in the Irish language would also see productions that combined dance, masks and mime not so much in the output of the Abbey Theatre or An Taibhdhearc, the National Irish language theatre, but in the exciting work of an unfortunately short-lived company: Na Fánaithe (1987–1993). A production highlight of this company was Bullaí Mhártain (1989), a co-production of Na Fánaithe and the Dublin-based, Irish-language theatre company, Deilt that would tour to Sligo, Dublin and Cork. The play consisted of a series of poetic episodes based on Seán McCarthy’s adaptation of Síle Ní Chéileachair and Donncha Ó Céileachair’s 1955 collection of short stories. According to Lionel Pilkington “With its extensive use of dolls and mannequins, and the confident and well-executed theatricality of its performers, Bullaí Mhártain had an extraordinary effect” (2023, 333).

This turn towards the physical and the body on stage could be said to reflect the historical context of the era which was dominated by the violence in the North and a renewed commitment to the tenets of Catholicism which was then followed by faith-shattering revelations about politicians and priests. All of these contexts manifested in representation of and debate concerning the body. Republican prisoners used the body as a weapon through the blanket and dirty protests followed by the hunger strikes. Irish Catholicism’s power was renewed in the 1980s through its victory in controlling the female body in referendums that would prevent abortion and divorce in Ireland. A distrust of words would manifest at the beginning of the following decade with the hypocrisy of priests that preached chastity and charity exposed as decadent philanders or paedophiles, and some politicians revealed as dishonest self-servers that asked people to endure economic hardship while they abused their position to gain wealth.

Key Practitioners and Companies

Field Day Theatre Company

Despite its future success and enormous influence on Irish theatre and the study of Irish literature, Aidan O’Malley, in his book length study of Field Day, points out that “There was no master-plan behind the creation of the company; rather it was an essentially improvised occurrence” (2011, 5). Field Day originated when the actor, Stephen Rea approached playwright, Brian Friel about the possibility of them working together to produce and tour a play in Ireland after hearing of potential Arts Council funding for such a venture. Friel accepted Rea’s proposal as he had already been working on a new play and was intrigued with the idea of touring it both north and south of the border to regions outside of the metropolitan centres of Dublin, Belfast and London. Field Day was chosen as a name for the new company as “a rhyming amalgam” (2011, 5) of the co-founders surnames: Friel and Rea.

The play Friel had been working on was Translations and it would be the first play staged by Field Day at the Guildhall, Derry in 1980. The play considers the cultural impact of the loss of the Irish language due to the colonial occupation of Ireland by Britain. It does this by telling the story of how a hedge-school teacher, his two sons and small group of locals in Baile Beag, Donegal are affected by the arrival of British troops engaged in the Royal Ordnance Survey of Ireland where they are in the process of translating the local Gaelic place names into English. The play was a response to the political violence in the North that sought to understand the conflict in terms of the legacies of British colonialism in Ireland.

This production not only launched the company but set its agenda in its interrogation of language, identity and postcolonialism. The venue of the Guildhall, Derry for the play’s premiere was also significant as it was the building for the local seat of government and had been the site of multiple attacks since the outbreak of the Troubles. The production of Translations there in 1980, in front of an audience composed of both prominent loyalists and republicans, aimed to transform the space into a shared site of empathy for the suffering and loss caused by colonialism and a cultural enquiry into the complexities of language and identity. This aim was later identified by Friel as the creation of a “Fifth Province” and became a leading concept that initially energised Field Day. Ireland is divided into four provinces but in the Irish language the word for province is cúige, which translates as fifth since there were once five provinces in ancient Ireland. Stirred by how the language still retains the memory of this lost fifth province Friel wished through the work of Field Day to create “a fifth province ‘of the mind’” in which to “devise another way of looking at Ireland, or another possible Ireland.” He borrowed this concept from the editors of Crane Bag, a cultural journal of Irish Studies who had first written of this in 1976.

After the success of Translations Friel and Rea committed to producing and touring a play together annually. This meant they had to register as a formal company with a Board of Directors. By 1981 four of their friends would come to serve on the board: Poets, Seamus Heaney and Tom Paulin, academic Seamus Deane and musicologist David Hammond. Along with its co-founders the board consisted of a balanced mix of Protestants and Catholics but did not include any women. Thomas Kilroy would also be invited to join the board in 1986 shortly after his play Double Cross was produced. Kilroy would be the only board member from the Republic of Ireland. With such an illustrious gathering of cultural figures soon the board began to involve the company in activities outside of theatre production producing pamphlets, magazine articles, academic monographs, collections of essays, an annual review and a five-volume anthology of Irish literature. As O’Malley puts it “In short, the company has been, and continues to be, a banner under which a wide array of voices have found expression in a variety of forms to generate debates about the histories of Irish cultural identities and their significance on the cusp of the twenty-first century” (2011, 1).

1980–1991 marks the most fruitful period of production for the company. In addition to Translations Friel would go on to write The Communication Cord (1982), Making History (1988) and an adaptation of Chekov’s Three Sisters for Field Day. His fellow board members Tom Paulin and Seamus Heaney would both write new versions of Greek classics by Sophocles, Paulin adapted Antigone in his The Riot Act (1984) and Heaney reimagined the Philoctetes as The Cure at Troy (1990). Derek Mahon’s High Time (1984), an adaptation of Moliere’s The School for Husbands was also staged as a double bill with Paulin’s play. Field Day produced significant original plays including two by Kilroy, Double Cross (1986) and The Madame MacAdam Travelling Theatre (1991), Stewart Parker’s Pentecost (1987) and Terry Eagleton’s Saint Oscar (1997). All these plays and adaptations are unique theatrically exciting examinations of the complexities of an Irish identity from fascinating historical or imaginatively mythical perspectives, but they are united, according to Murray, in their insistence “that the problem of identity is best understood theatrically, involving audiences in the process of redefinition” (Murray 1997, 222).

With the poor reception of Kilroy’s second play for the company, The Madame MacAdam Travelling Theatre (1991), Friel’s decision to give Dancing at Lughnasa (1990) to the Abbey, which became an international hit, and Rea’s film career beginning to take off after a nomination for an Academy Award for The Crying Game (1992) the frequency of productions slowed in the 1990s with only two further productions after Kilroy’s play, Frank McGuinness’s adaptation of Chekhov’s Uncle Vanya in 1995 and a revival of Parker’s Northern Star (1984) in 1998. The controversy that arose following the publication of three volumes of The Field Day Anthology of Irish Writing, edited by Seamus Deane in 1990 may also have contributed to the winding down of theatrical activity. The anthology had included little writing by women, something that had gone unnoticed by the all-male editorial board. Although Friel and Rea were not directly part of this enterprise, they were still implicated as board members of the company. Kilroy resigned from the Board in 1992 and Friel followed in 1994. Two further volumes of the anthology that concentrated on Irish women’s writing were published in 2002 to address the imbalance. The company returned in 2012 to produce new plays in Derry by David Ireland and Clare Dwyer Hogg starring and directed by Rea. The production of Hogg’s Farewell marked the first play written by a woman to be produced by the company. In 2013 as part of the Londonderry/Derry City of Culture celebrations, Field Day staged the premiere of A Particle of Dread: Oedipus Variations, a new play by American playwright, Sam Shepard, which then travelled to New York, in 2014–2015.

Charabanc Theatre Company

Frustrated with a lack of theatre work for women, a group of five Belfast-based actresses, Marie Jones, Brenda Winter, Maureen McCauley, Eleanor Methven and Carol Scanlon (Moore) decided to form their own company in 1983. They named their company Charabanc, after an “open-top, day-trip bus” (Sihra 2016, 550). The company was made up of women from both Protestant and Catholic backgrounds “creating a unique model for an integrated, non-sectarian theatre group” (Coleman Coffey 2016, 85). They made work for all communities, deliberately staging their productions in both loyalist and republican areas as well as in neutral venues. Charabanc would also tour shows over the border to the south of Ireland and internationally to the United States and Russia, producing twenty-four shows over twelve years (1985–1995), nineteen of which were new works.

As the five members of the company were all actresses, they created work collaboratively examining working-class women’s lives and experiences that were side-lined or ignored by much of the drama and writing about the North, which took a male perspective in narratives often dominated by “the Troubles.” Charabanc’s process was “to collect ideas, interviews, and research, shaping and reshaping material that engaged with the women’s identities and with the diverse social histories of their mothers and grandmothers” (Sihra 2016, 551). They did not wish to make the immediate violence of the sectarian conflict their subject but instead aimed to tell the hidden stories of Northern Irish women from different communities united by the everyday struggles of the working class. For example, Lay Up Your Ends (1983) devised with help from the playwright Martin Lynch, told of the strike of linen mill workers in 1911, while The Girls in the Big Picture (1986) follows the impact of cinema on the lives of three women in rural Ulster in the 1960s and Gold in the Streets (1985) charts the effects of emigration on women at the beginning, the middle and towards the end of the twentieth century. In presenting these stories Charabanc offered audiences a deeper understanding of the histories of class, gender and ethnicity that had led to the contemporary violence of their own time.

Productions had a minimal aesthetic with sets sometimes consisting of simple platforms or crates and modest costumes that hinted at time periods while props were used judiciously to denote a variety of characters. This aesthetic was born of financial necessity, but it also served to make the work versatile and mobile, enabling the company to bring their shows to working-class communities. Fiona Coleman Coffey’s points out:

For working-class audiences of the North, theatre was considered the purview of an educated elite that could afford to attend performances and who could also travel to the city at night in safety. Charabanc made theatre accessible financially and physically by travelling to community neighbourhoods and performing in safe spaces where families could go without fear of violence. (2016, 88)

Another aspect of the work that came from circumstance but had ideological implications was all the members of the company playing multiple characters in the productions, including those of the male roles. This signalled to audiences that it was a female perspective that was being presented and embodied countering the “long tradition of male-constructed portrayals of women” (Coleman Coffey 2016, 86). It also drew attention to the performativity of identity itself. This could be viewed as a radical political act in a place and time where violent atrocities were being carried out in the name of people’s identities as Irish or British, Catholic or Protestant. However, the work did not wish to produce superficial distanced presentations typical of confrontational agitprop theatre but performances that would still move audiences, through sensitive portrayals of characters, often creating “compassion and empathy for those identified as the adversary” (Coleman Coffey 2016, 86).

Although they wound up operations in 1995 the legacy of the company was to be lasting. Coffey states that Charabanc “helped establish an independent theatre sector for the first time in the North, and it secured an international reputation for Northern Ireland as the progenitor of significant and high-quality theatre” (2016, 84). It was also through her work with Charabanc that Marie Jones developed as a playwright, often taking on the role of the writer-in-residence for the collaborative shows and eventually having her own single-authored plays produced by the company. Jones has gone on as a playwright to win international renown with plays such as A Night in November (1994), Women on the Verge of HRT (1995) and Stones in His Pockets (1996).

Rough Magic

On graduating from Trinity College, Dublin, where they had been directing productions for the university drama society, Declan Hughes and Belfast-born Lynn Parker wanted to continue to work in theatre and asked if some other graduates would join them. In 1984 four actors, Stanley Townsend, Helene Montague, Arthur Riordan, Anne Byrne and a producer/general manager, Siobhán Bourke along with Parker and Hughes, would thus come to found a new company: Rough Magic. As “kids of the television and film age” Parker has said that they “didn’t want to look back to the rural Ireland that was staged in so many of the Abbey’s plays. We wanted to reflect our own culture, the culture of our generation” (O’Rourke 2018). The company thus deliberately set out to produce work by international writers such as David Mamet, Caryl Churchill and David Hare which were rarely produced at the time in Ireland. They were lucky early on to have support in this enterprise from the Project Arts Centre which allowed them to develop into a flagship company for the centre. With Ireland in a deep recession they also found cheap rehearsal space in abandoned buildings in Dublin. Arthur Riordan remembers, “In our first 12 months we mounted 13 productions. Back then we rehearsed in a decrepit old building on Temple Lane with mostly broken windows and a view of the sky through the roof” (Tipton 2019). The company soon formed a regular ensemble of actors which included Pauline McGlynn, who would later win fame on television for her portrayal of Mrs. Doyle in Channel Four’s Father Ted, and Anne Enright, a future Booker Prize winning author. As Rough Magic advanced they began to ambitiously stage classic works by John Webster, Bertolt Brecht and George Farquhar alongside contemporary plays, offering their young actors opportunities to play famous roles that would have been unavailable to them at the more established theatres. Four years into their existence they began to produce new Irish work starting with Donal O’Kelly’s Bat the Father, Rabbit the Son (1988). But it was a new Irish drama Digging for Fire by one of the co-founders of the company, Declan Hughes that would bring Rough Magic significant recognition not only in Ireland but also in London, where the play was staged at the Bush theatre. This would create a reputation for the company as a producing house for new Irish plays with a more cosmopolitan sensibility that did not shy away from discussions of sex, popular culture, urban life and global as well as local political concerns. Over the next three decades Rough Magic would premiere work by Gina Moxley, Arthur Riordan and Pom Boyd (who were all in the original cast of Digging for Fire) as well as Paula Meehan, Christian O’Reilly, Rosemary Jenkinson, Elizabeth Kuti, Hillary Fanin, Sonya Kelly and further works by Hughes and O’Kelly. Two collections of new plays produced by Rough Magic have been published evidencing the considerable impact the company has had on new writing for the stage. For Patrick Lonergan “All of these plays are different from each other in tone, form and content, but they share a determination to break away from any sense of Irish exceptionalism…[They] show that Irishness comes most clearly into focus when placed in an international context…That is what makes them typical Rough Magic plays” (2019, 97). The playwright Stewart Parker was Lynn Parker’s uncle and it is important to also recognise that Rough Magic have staged several productions of his works including a landmark revival of Pentecost for the Dublin Theatre Festival in 1995 which then toured Ireland and the UK in 1996. Many of the founders went on to pursue other projects, often returning for single shows or projects. However, Parker has remained as artistic director of the company and acted as the director of the majority of Rough Magic’s shows. It is her dynamism and vision that drives the company. Her directing has garnered Parker many awards and she has worked freelance outside of Ireland at the Almeida, the Bush, Old Vic in London and the Traverse, Edinburgh. Her style of direction has been characterised by its emphasis on ensemble playing, its “playful theatricality” (Walsh 2016, 458) and “an exceptional sensitivity to music on stage” (Lonergan 2019, 96). A signature production that showcased this style was Rough Magic’s award-winning musical Improbable Frequency, written by Bell Helicopter and Arthur Riordan about historical figures in neutral Ireland during World War Two. This production premiered in the 2004 Dublin Theatre Festival and went on to enjoy several revivals and tours in the following years. As an artistic director, in addition to her influential choice of productions and commissions Parker should also be commended for how under her directorship Rough Magic has played a major role in mentoring new talent in Ireland.

In 2001 the company launched Rough Magic Seeds, a structured development programme for emerging theatre practitioners across all theatre disciplines. As part of this initiative, participants worked on Rough Magic productions and developed their practice through mentoring and international research trips as well as work placements in London at the National Theatre, the Royal Court and the Southbank Centre, at the Traverse Theatre, Edinburgh and the Vígszínház, Budapest, working with internationally recognised theatre practitioners. This programme has helped develop the careers of many of the most prominent theatremakers in Ireland in recent years including playwrights Stacey Gregg and Lisa McGee, writer of Channel 4’s Derry Girls; directors, Tom Creed, Sophie Motley and Ronan Phelan; producers Cian O’Brien, artistic director of the Project Arts Centre and Matt Smyth, producer with ANU; lighting designer, Sara Jane Shiels and sound designer, Alma Kelliher.

Landmark Plays and Productions

Tea in a China Cup by Christina Reid (1983)

Women’s voices, actions and stories were absent from the histories, media analysis and dramas of the conflict in Northern Ireland. This was exacerbated in the early 1980s with the hunger strikes of republican prisoners which were depicted in religious and nationalist terms of male sacrifice, with the women prisoners’ strikes and protests given little attention in comparison. When women were represented it was in subordinate roles or as limited stereotypes. As Janet states in another of Christina Reid’s plays The Belle of the Belfast City: “there are no women in Ireland. Only mothers, sisters and wives” (Reid 1997, 210). Further to this the lives of working-class Protestants were also often ignored as a dominant narrative took hold that simplified the conflict in the North as that of a wealthy Protestant majority oppressing an impoverished Catholic minority. Tea in a China Cup addresses these issues by telling the story of three generations of a poor Protestant family, between 1939 and 1972, from the perspective of two women. Sarah is dying of cancer and is being cared for by her daughter Beth. We join these two in 1972 as they prepare for the coming of the annual Twelfth of July parade which sees loyalist’s known as Orangemen march through the streets of Belfast to celebrate the victory of William of Orange over the Catholic King James II in 1690 at the Battle of the Boyne. The parade prompts Sarah and Beth to remember previous year’s celebrations and functions as a device for them to step back into their past in a series of episodic scenes and remembrances directly addressed to the audience. From some of these scenes of the past we learn that a tradition of service in the British army by the men of Sarah’s family is considered a core part of their loyalist identity. However, Sarah decries the personal cost, pain and loss of this tradition towards the end of the play:

Three generations of my family have fought in your army, and for what? Tha’s my father, gassed in the First World War, that’s my brother killed in the second, and that’s my son, my only son, and he can’t even come home on leave any more in case he gets a bullet in the back. (Reid 1997, 55)

History here is depicted as an endless cycle and this is also supported in other scenes by the parallels drawn between Sarah’s and Beth’s marriages as they both wed self-serving drunkards. Women are made to suffer for the decisions of men in a male-dominated world of war and violence fought over to preserve identity and tradition. But they also perpetuate patriarchal control and sectarianism through their own emphasis on respectability and materialism. Lisa Fitzpatrick writes that:

The metaphor of the fine china cup represents respectability, cleanliness, and hard work; but also not “whining and complainin” and “putting” a poor mouth on yourself like the Catholics. Reid introduces this symbol of identity alongside the Sash, the Twelfth parades, banners and military service, so inserting women into the otherwise exclusively male set of signifiers. This also facilitates the recognition that this family stands metonymically for an entire community. (2022, 108)

Sarah in her endurance of the hardships of history is made sympathetic but she repeatedly refuses to stand up to her father, husband or grandfather and does not mix with Catholics as she wishes to maintain respectability and order. Beth, spurred on by her friendship with Theresa, a Catholic school friend who is living in London as a single mother, ultimately refuses to passively suffer the patriarchal culture of Northern Ireland, like her mother did for the sake of keeping up appearances. She ends the play selling the house and all its assets that she gained through her marriage, including an incomplete tea-set of Belleek china. We learn that she has kept one of the cups for herself and as a result deliberately devalued the set. In this final act of taking the cup, Beth brings some of the traditions forward with her into an uncertain future but she is also no longer a prisoner of them. Maria M. Delgado writes: “Reid’s work doesn’t provide happy endings or produce easy answers to the questions it poses. Rather, it seeks to interrogate the conflicting and disparate ways in which a certain political situation affects those who function within it” (1997, XXII). Tea in a China Cup was Reid’s first play to be professionally produced but she would go on to write seminal plays throughout the 1980s and 90s that would continue to reflect upon prejudice and patriarchy in Northern Ireland through increasingly theatricalised forms that would innovatively incorporate aspects of popular performance culture such as stand-up, cabaret and clowning.

Double Cross by Thomas Kilroy (1986)

In telling the story of Brendan Bracken and William Joyce, two Irishmen who denied their heritage in order to reinvent themselves and take different sides in World War Two, Thomas Kilroy in Double Cross draws attention to how identity is as much performed as it is given but also what dedication to such a performance can cost an individual, as these men betray and deceive to gain power.

Bracken was born in Tipperary, the son of a prosperous builder and strong supporter of the Republican Movement who reinvented himself as an English private-school-educated publisher and Tory MP that was appointed Minister for Information in Winston Churchill’s war-time government. Joyce was born in New York to an Irish Father and English Mother but grew up in Mayo and Galway. He turned informer for the Royal Irish Constabulary after the IRA burnt down his father’s property, then emigrated to England, joining Sir Oswald Mosely’s British Union of Fascists and eventually moved to Germany to broadcast Nazi propaganda during the war years, earning the nickname “Lord Haw Haw.”

The play shows the control these men exerted publicly in their professional roles and privately with their lovers, their insecurities and failings as well as how their lives intersected and overlapped. It is full of theatricality, duality and mirroring. The style of presentation is Brechtian with actors directly addressing the audience, telling them the fate of the two men at the beginning to place the spectator into a interrogative mode explaining how they will not “vouch for the accuracy of anything that is going to follow” (Kilroy 1994, 26–27) as the play has been instead “put together to make a point” (Kilroy 1994, 27). Double Cross is divided into two parts: “The Bracken Play: London”, followed by “The Joyce Play: Berlin” and the roles of Bracken and Joyce are played by the same actor with two other actors playing all the other parts. Anthony Roche comments that by denying their Irish past neither of the men gain freedom but instead become “the mirror-image of the oppressor” placing all their “faith in the symbols of the culturally dominant race” (Roche 1994, 146). Kilroy in his introduction to the play writes:

Oppression disables personality. The whole point of oppression is to reduce the person, to remove all potentiality so that control becomes easy. But oppression also profoundly diminishes the oppressor….There is nothing as calcified as the air of superiority and the ultimate of this is the baleful paralytic stare of the racist. (Kilroy 1994, 12)

The play is thus showing how national identities polarise people into entrenched positions that then reduce their individuality and humanity. Both oppressor and oppressed are doubles of each other. One person’s loyalty is another’s treason. The title of Double Cross thus refers not only to doubling and betrayal but as José Lanters has pointed out “the ‘cross’ stands for the dark and debilitating ideological burden each man carries” (Lanters 2022, 127).

As a history play Double Cross was looking to the past to understand the present but it was also using the safe distance of an earlier period as a means to address the then volatile contemporary situation of the Troubles in the 1980s, a violent conflict fought in terms of identity politics. The story of Bracken and Joyce highlights the corrosive consequences on the individual of nationalism in Northern Ireland where people often identify as British Protestant or Irish Catholic and are fully committed to perform those roles that reduce them into both oppressors and oppressed. As Double Cross was produced by Field Day Theatre Company, premiering in Derry with a legendary performance by actor Stephen Rea it is most often analysed and thought of in terms of its relevance to the North. However, as outlined in the Historical Overview section in this chapter, the performance of an Irish identity rooted in Catholicism, as it was in the 1980s in the Republic, was also a performance of deception, with a hypocritical clergy leading people that were caught between professing a strict adherence to Catholic moral standards in public and contradicting these same standards in private as they yearned for the freedoms of liberal democracy. Indeed, decades after the tour of Double Cross Kilroy would go on to more directly address the effects of Irish Catholic sexual hypocrisy in Christ Deliver Us! (2010) his adaptation of Wedekind’s Spring Awakening. In 2018 the Abbey Theatre revived Double Cross and its connections between nationalism, imperialism and fascism were felt to have a chilling immediacy and relevance to the contemporary rise of the performative populist politics of Donald Trump’s presidency and Brexit.

Digging for Fire by Declan Hughes (1991)

Declan Hughes recollects that when his play Digging for Fire, transferred from Dublin to London’s Bush Theatre in 1992 a member of the audience commented at the interval “I didn’t think they had people like that in Ireland” (1998, ix). Despite the majority of people who frequented the theatre, in the 1990s, being middle-class, educated and cosmopolitan these audiences rarely saw themselves represented on stage in Ireland. This class of person was even less visible in Irish work that toured internationally and so it is understandable that a London theatre-goer may have thought such people did not reside in Ireland. However, as this anecdote reveals Hughes’s play rectified this, presenting audiences with a story of a group of Dublin university friends who reunite for one last drunken night that leads to them all parting ways with damning secrets revealed as the party wears on.

Clare, a school teacher and frustrated writer, bored in her marriage to Brendan, an insipid doctor, has had an affair with Danny, her old writing partner from college. Danny is back from living in Manhattan and is found to have lied about successfully publishing a story in the New Yorker. Emily, a visual artist, reveals she is HIV positive and tells Breda, a radio producer that her advertising executive boyfriend Steve has been sleeping around. Rory, a solicitor and sometime Opera critic who is gay remembers that he does not like any of them.

Although the play is redolent of Murphy’s Conversations on a Homecoming (1985) the play is much closer to the cult film, The Big Chill (1983) and like the Lawrence Kasadan movie it features a soundtrack of international hits to score emotions, provide commentary and atmosphere including songs by the Sex Pistols, New Order and the Pixies, whose song gives the play its title.

Hughes presents a cynical generation that has come of age in the uncertain and hypocritical 1980s, who in the early 1990s witnessed political and church scandals. They were raised on Enid Blyton and BBC children’s television. The previous conception of “Ireland as a folksy little village” is only useful to sell commodities according to Steve, “all it is, is goods and services” (Hughes 1998, 39). While Danny claims there is “no great ‘shared vision’, no sense of solidarity or common purpose” (Hughes 1998, 36) and they are fools to “pretend there’s some unique sense of community, that Ireland’s a special little enclave – things are breaking down as fast here as anywhere else” (Hughes 1998, 37). At the same time Steve registers unease with his job in advertising left to think of himself as either Faust or Mephistopheles—he must sell his soul and also be the devil that tricks people. Danny is a liar and for all his speeches on wishing to be free of Ireland’s history and obsession with national identity, he admits that he had to come home “It’s all I ever thought about while I was away. I brought my village with me” (Hughes 1998, 74). Breda on the other hand tries to argue for the value of the radio show she is producing, as connecting people and creating what Marshall McCluhan famously termed a global village. She says “even if people feel isolated, lost in the suburbs or something, they can tune in and feel a part of what’s going on – it’s like they’re living in a village, and they want to keep up with the gossip” (Hughes 1998, 37).

All the characters yearn for belonging and community despite knowing it is out of their reach. The final scene of the play depicts Clare dancing defiantly to “True Faith” by New Order despite her uncertain future as her old life is now disintegrating with her husband gone and her friends lost. In her dance Clare embraces chaos rather than trying to reorder her life. The ending offers no solutions, no call to action, and no regrets. It is an image of individual acceptance, which could be interpreted as a privileged position without responsibility and/or a courageous act of resilience. For Patrick Lonergan, Digging for Fire in its representation of the suburban middle-classes and in its “integration of international culture” marks an “important departure for Irish drama” (Lonergan 2022, 143). It was also a significant critical and commercial success for Rough Magic Theatre Company who would continue to interrogate Hughes’s themes in the future through work by him and a host of new Irish voices that followed.

Eclipsed by Patricia Burke Brogan (1992)

Based on Brogan’s personal experiences as a former novitiate, Eclipsed is a play that was pivotal in breaking silences about the abuse of women and children in Magdalene Laundries. As Jessica Farley and Virginia Garnett argue, “Eclipsed was one of the very first writings about the Magdalene Laundries, published before the release of the documentary, Sex in a Cold Climate (1998) and Peter Mullen’s widely popular film The Magdalene Sisters (2002)” and the wave of state inquiries into industrial and reformatory schools, Magdalene Laundries and Mother and Baby Homes that have taken place in the 2000s and 2010s in the Republic and North (see Chapter 6).

Eclipsed’s premiere production toured to Edinburgh Fringe Festival where it received a Fringe First Award. Since its premiere, it has had more than 100 productions worldwide including Australia, Japan, Italy, Germany, Peru and Brazil and has been translated into multiple languages. The international reach of this play (despite it never having been produced by a major annually-funded Irish theatre company) signals its enduring importance as a key contemporary Irish theatre text and the important role it has played in spreading awareness about the issues highlighted in the play.

The play’s ensemble female cast, focus on multiple stories rather than a central protagonist and critical examination of systems of patriarchy and gender-based oppression structurally embodies feminist theatremaking values. In doing so, Eclipsed trains audiences’ focus onto the social relations and structures that maintained the Magdalene Laundries as a part of network of interrelated institutions in Irish society including the then-unquestioned power of the Catholic Church, lack of culpability for the babies’ fathers and the class dimensions of the priesthood’s elite status and the women’s own disenfranchised position.

Eclipsed focuses on the relationships between a group of young women, Brigit, Mandy, Cathy and Nellie-Nora, who are “penitent women” incarcerated within a Magdalene Laundry in 1963. The play also explores their relationship with some of the nuns who run the institution—Mother Victoria and Sister Virginia. Through the character of Sister Virginia, Brogan represents her own experiences as a former novitiate, making visible through this character how individuals did try to challenge the systems they were part of. The play’s framing device is Brigit’s adult daughter returning from the United States to seek her mother. By using the device of Brigit’s daughter, Rosa, returning to the Laundry as an adult in 1992 to frame the play, Brogan reveals that Nellie-Nora has remained within the institution for her whole adult life while also highlighting ongoing questions about the barriers to reunion of adopted children with their birth mothers, an issue that unfortunately remains timely in Ireland today.

The female body is explicitly theatricalised throughout Eclipsed as the “penitent” women repeatedly use playacting with one another as a mode of fantasy and protest within the play. Their fantasies focus primarily around romance and food, with Elvis Presley and Frank Sinatra as the recurrent soundtrack voiced by the ensemble. Mandy tells the women: “Close your eyes and pretend! It’ll be true if you pretend!” (Burke Brogan 2014, 183) The women also repeatedly replay interactions with authority figures including the nuns and priests behind their backs, inhabiting and subverting these roles. Their pointed satire exposes and critiques the gendered and classed hierarchies they enact daily through their work and residence in the laundry:

Brigit::

Gawd bless you, my scrubbers! Don’t squint at me,

Nellie-Nora!

Stand up straight all of you! Knees together! Say,

‘Good afternoon, my lord!’

Nellie-Nora and Mandy::

‘Good afternoon, my Lord!

Brigit::

Will you forget your bog accents! Say ‘Good

awfternoon, my lord!’

(Burke Brogan 2014, 179)

Yet, playacting is not without risk and does not ultimately result in deliverance for the women, individually or collectively. Playing with a found lipstick triggers painful memories of sexual assault by her former employer for Nellie-Nora, and Cathy, the only character who fulfils their shared fantasy of escaping the laundry in one of the baskets, suffocates during her attempt due to untreated asthma—a strategy the women rehearse together onstage before her actual attempt.

Brogan’s Eclipsed dramatises the power of playacting as a tool of community building and resistance that can empower individual performing bodies with the temporary power to flip, transform and appropriate the scripts that they have been given to play. Nevertheless these characters’ embeddedness (both the penitent women and the nuns) in the institution of the laundry and the wider society which enabled its persistence limits the power of individual bodies to sustain these transformations beyond the moment of performance. Eclipsed ultimately is a powerful call for collective transformation that enables widespread acknowledgement of and restitution for the women and children abused and separated by those who ran these institutions beyond the theatre.

Seminal Revivals

O’Casey Revivals

Since their first productions O’Casey’s The Shadow of a Gunman (1923); Juno and the Paycock (1924) and The Plough and the Stars (1926), known as the Dublin plays, had become a mainstay in the Abbey repertoire. With repeated revival these once provocative and controversial plays had become safe and familiar with actors often overplaying the comedy and sentiment of the dramas in performance. The Gate, while under the direction of its founders Michael mac Liammóir and Hilton Edwards had never staged O’Casey, even his later expressionistic plays which would have suited their theatrical experimentalism. When Michael Colgan took over directorship of the Gate he did not programme O’Casey until 1986 when Joe Dowling approached him with a new staging of Juno and the Paycock. Dowling had planned to do a production of the play at the Abbey before he left the theatre after disagreements with the Board of Directors. The production of Juno at the Gate was thus landmark in being the first major staging of O’Casey at the theatre but it was also groundbreaking for the manner in which it was staged. Dowling directed it with a gritty realism that was complemented by Frank Halinan Flood’s squalid claustrophobic set and Consolata Boyle’s tattered costumes. Christopher Morash writes of how the Gate production divested O’Casey’s play of “every shred of sentimentality, turning the warm glow of Juno’s resigned, proud survival to the gnawing chill of poverty in the bones.” This production style executed with devastatingly convincing performances by a stellar cast that included Donal McCann, Geraldine Plunkett, John Kavanagh and Maureen Potter brought forward O’Casey’s disdain for nationalism which he viewed as dangerously distracting people from the plight of the vulnerable and impoverished in society. It also reinterpreted the character of Joxer in particular which had often been portrayed as a figure of fun. This was most evident in the ending of the play where John Kavanagh as Joxer “steals the Captain’s (Donal McCann) last sixpence as he collapses to the ground unconscious with drink. In this Joxer was revealed as a malevolent parasite rather than a broad figure of fun and the Captain’s desperate fate was sealed” (Walsh 2016, 453). The Gate production of Juno was well-received by the newspaper critics and proved popular with audiences leading to its revival twice in Dublin and a tour to Jerusalem, Edinburgh and New York where it earned many plaudits.

The 1991 radical restaging of O’Casey’s The Plough and the Stars at the Abbey directed by Garry Hynes and designed by Frank Conway was not received with as much universal favour, indeed, few contemporary revivals of classic Irish plays have caused as much controversy. The Plough and the Stars famously caused a riot when first produced at the Abbey in 1926 due to its critique of the 1916 rising. By that time the rising had already become mythologised as the sacred foundational event of the Irish Republic, and audiences’ protests were understandable considering they had just been through a violent struggle for independence and a subsequent brutal civil war in the years previous. However, in the years since its first production the play had lost its ability to provoke strong reactions, marred by familiarity through repeated, sometimes mawkish, performances. The 1991 revival of The Plough, like the Gate production of Juno in 1986, emphasised the politics of O’Casey’s play, his condemnation of poverty and violence, by stressing the deprivation of the Dublin tenement dwellers and how they suffered for a nationalist ideology. Hynes achieved this through a Brechtian staging of the piece that was much more radical than Dowlings approach to Juno. In the 1991 Plough designer Frank Conway abandoned the realist tenement set of O’Casey’s script and replaced it with a large raked platform with a “huge, white, false proscenium [surrounding] the action. Scrawled on it with black paint the rallying cry of the 1916 Uprising, ‘We serve neither King nor Kaiser, but Ireland’” (Griffith 1992, 97). The violent consequences of the slogan would be made viscerally apparent to the audience as the white of the stage became stained with trails of blood left by the dragged bodies of the dying rebel soldiers. All of the ensemble had shaved heads leading one of the reviewers to comment that “O’Casey’s creations are, apparently, being brought to life by inmates of an undefined institution” (Rushe 1991). This along with the stark set design served as distancing techniques from the naturalism of past productions while also functioning as a Brechtian social gestus where the inhumane wretchedness of the people’s poverty was palpable. Consistent with the Brechtian approach the characters were represented in extreme terms to emphasise how they were subject to their environment and emblematic of social conditions. Rosie Redmond, the prostitute we meet in Act 2 was played by Lorraine Pilkington who was still a teenager at the time. Her youthful appearance confronted the audience with the desperation of her situation. Fluther Goode, a character often played for laughs, was portrayed by Brendan Gleeson as a raging alcoholic and at the opening of Act III audiences had to endure a heartbreaking agonisingly slow walk across the stage by Ruth O’Brian as the consumptive child Mollser. The lengthy programme for the play which included a wealth of archival materials and short articles was keen to highlight the contemporary relevance of the play by drawing attention to the depressing statistics on unemployment, housing and education in “North Inner City of Dublin 75 years after the Rising” (Abbey Theatre 1991) (Fig. 4.1).

Fig. 4.1
A photo of two actors performing on stage. One person on the left is slightly bent over, facing another person at a distance. The person at a distance holds a chair and looks at the bent-over person.

(Photo: Fergus Bourke. Courtesy of the Abbey Theatre Archive)

Scene from The Plough and the Stars, 1991

Full size image

This was Hynes inaugural show as artistic director of the Abbey and it announced her intention to pursue a bold new direction. Desmond Rushe in the Irish Independent in a review entitled “A mould breaking debut of courage”, gushed about Hynes’s achievement: “…she has torn conventions and traditions to shreds; tossed naturalism and realism out the window and come up with the most revolutionary and controversial presentation ever seen of the theatre’s most-performed masterpiece” (Rushe 1991). Others were less impressed or kind, particularly playwright Hugh Leonard who in his weekly column in The Sunday Independent objected to the stylised approach and heavy-handed message, renaming the production “The Plough and the Starved”; admitting he left the show at the interval out of boredom (Leonard 1991). The review in The Irish Times was also dismissive of the production. This then led to a series of counter reviews in the Irish Times’s Second Opinion and Letters pages. Even the president Mary Robinson was asked to comment on the production in a printed interview. She spoke of enjoying the show and parallels between her and Garry Hynes were made, characterising both as leaders who were challenging received staid notions of Irishness (Woodworth 1991).

The lasting legacy of both of these revived productions of O’Casey was their restoration of the bite and urgency the plays had possessed when first staged, making them once again fresh and relevant for contemporary audiences.

Spotlight on Institutions and Festivals

There Are No Irish Women Playwrights 1 (1992) and 2 (1993)

Glasshouse Productions

Inspired by the work of companies like Charabanc and Trouble and Strife in the UK, Glasshouse Productions was founded in 1990 by four Dublin-based female theatremakers to present and promote the work of women in the theatre. Siân Quill (actor), Clare Dowling (actor and playwright), Katy Hayes (director) and Caroline Williams, (producer) established the company as “a response to the fact that Irish theatre did not reflect their lives as women, due to the lack of plays by female playwrights produced at the time” (O’Beirne 2017, 270). Glasshouse produced ten shows over the six years it would operate, including premieres of Out of my Head (1991) by Trudy Hayes, nominated for a Stewart Parker Theatre Award, Burns Both Ends (1992) and Leapfrogging (1993) by Clare Dowling, and two new plays by Emma Donoghue, I Know My Own Heart (1993) and Ladies and Gentlemen (1996), landmark works in their representation of queer female characters on the Irish stage. Further to these dramas Glasshouse also produced two important festival events focused on women’s contributions to Irish theatre that would include hosted discussions and archival projects developed to identify new plays and celebrate older dramas written by women. These projects were entitled There are no Irish Women Playwrights 1 (1992) and There are no Irish Women Playwrights 2 (1993).

The ironic title for these events came from a story heard by the company wherein the academic Claudia Harris found herself in a Dublin bookshop looking for plays by Irish women. When she couldn’t find any on the shelves, she asked a shop assistant for help. He told her the reason that she could not find any scripts was because, “There are no Irish women playwrights.” Of course, there have always been Irish women playwrights but as few of their plays have been published or rarely revived this anecdote served to highlight the issue of the scarcity of scripts by women and the risk of a tradition of Irish women writing for the stage disappearing. This story spirited Glasshouse towards their intervention.

There are no Irish Women Playwrights 1 was a staged reading of extracts from plays by contemporary writers including Geraldine Aron, Emma Donoghue, Deirdre Hines, Anne Devlin, Marie Jones and Marina Carr. The event was first staged at the City Arts Centre and then at the Irish Writers Centre in June 1992. There are no Irish Women Playwrights 2 formed part of the 1993 Acts and Reacts Festival, which took place in two venues, Project Arts Centre and The Irish Writers’ Centre. The selection of extracts this time was from 1920 to 1970 including writers such as Mairéid Ni Ghráda, Teresa Deevy, Maura Laverty and Edna O’Brien. It ran for nearly two months, concluding with a ten-day run of Emma Donoghue’s I Know My Own Heart. The events had a mixed critical reception in the newspaper reviews. Treasa Brogan of the Evening Press was supportive of the first event and wrote, “Had the title been a debate they’d have proven their point” but a reviewer in the Sunday Tribune complained unfairly about the playwrights’ choice of themes, “wife-battering, alcoholism, babies and war”; he felt Irish women to be capable of “other sensibilities” (Quoted in Williams et al. 2001, 141). Male playwrights are never lambasted for their choice of appropriate subjects and such criticism revealed an ingrained misogyny in the reception of drama written by women. This bias was also evident in Gerry Colgan’s review of the second showcase for the Irish Times where he condescendingly described various excerpts as “a kind of jolly-hockeysticks non-romance” and “a wild piece of lusty nonsense” before finally dismissing the event as “pure transient entertainment” (Quoted in Clare et al. 2021, 3). However, Caroline Williams remembers how the event “got and extraordinarily good reaction” (Williams et al. 2001, 141) and Katy Hayes recollects that audiences were “constantly surprised at the wealth of material” (Williams et al. 2001, 141). Glasshouse Productions’ interventions did not have an immediate public impact in the way that #WakingtheFeminists movement would have more than two decades later, although it serves as an important precedent to this. The legacy of the festivals curated by Glasshouse is best summed up by the editors of the two volumes of The Golden Thread: Irish Women Playwrights a collection of essays that charts a tradition of Irish women dramatists from 1716 to 2016, published in 2021, when they write:

Glasshouse’s groundbreaking work spoke clearly to Irish women playwrights who might have felt like they were working without a tradition only to suddenly discover that they were actually, to quote Gilbert and Gubar, part of a “secret sisterhood” stretching back many years. (Clare et al. 2021, 4)

It should also be noted that in the period directly after Glasshouse’s There are No Women Playwrights 1 and 2 the Abbey Theatre under the directorship of Patrick Mason (1994–1999) would see sixteen plays by women produced at the National Theatre, including a seminal revival of Teresa Deevy’s Katie Roche and two new plays by Glasshouse founders, Katy Hayes and Clare Dowling.

Conclusion

The beginning of this period in the 1980s saw the country take a step backwards with economic instability, mass emigration, moral hypocrisy and hunger strikes but in the early 1990s with the revelation of church scandals, the collapse of the authority of the Catholic Church, decriminalisation of homosexuality and movements towards peace in Northern Ireland it was set to take great leaps forward. A cruel performativity characterised many people’s behaviours in this era where they voted against divorce and abortion and yet thousands would travel to England for terminations. While real life became a performance for many, theatrical activity was booming in this time with lots of new companies such as Charabanc, Rough Magic and Glasshouse Productions formed with young practitioners keen to embrace new collaborative modes of theatremaking, confront topical global issues and make sure women’s voices were heard in an industry that was still dominated by men. Field Day Theatre Company was also founded by more established cultural figures and it would have a lasting impact not only on theatre, through the production of seminal new work by Brian Friel, Thomas Kilroy and Seamus Heaney but on literature and cultural theory about Ireland. Dramatists like Christina Reid’s Tea in a China Cup (1983); Thomas Kilroy’s Double Cross (1986) looked towards the past in order to understand the stasis of the present in terms of the violence in the North while Patricia Burke Brogan would explore the history of systemic abuse in Catholic institutions in Eclipsed (1992). This period ends looking towards a more optimistic future for equality and peace with Ireland’s economic fortunes beginning to turn favourably bringing an inward migration to the country that had not been experienced before. But not all the change that was to come was to be welcomed as a new era of conspicuous consumption, and the creation of wealthy elites also further marginalised and excluded disadvantaged communities.