According to the Oxford English Dictionary, a body is the singular “physical form of a person, animal or plant” but it is also “the complete physical form, or assemblage of parts of a plant” [emphasis mine] (2023). This chapter explores how bodies work and signify as individuals but also as stand-ins for a greater whole (both materially and representationally) within the contemporary Irish theatre and by extension, Irish society. As the previous chapter demonstrates, bodies have been repetitively enlisted as performers, artists and audience members to agitate for, reproduce or contest the Irish “nation” as a shared but often divergent project in the contemporary Irish theatre throughout the period covered in this book and preceding it. However, this chapter now shifts focus to the multivalent work bodies performing individually and as collective representations of wider publics within contemporary Irish theatre onstage, behind the scenes and in the audience.

The participation and presence of bodies in theatrical and extra-theatrical events connected to the contemporary Irish theatre as a network of individuals, practices and institutions indexes not only the aesthetic but the political and social status of the body within Irish society at any given time. Understanding the limits of theatrical representation and participation by individuals and/or communities as artists in the Irish theatre gives us deeper insight into the rights accorded to individual bodies and/or those grouped according to a shared identity such as gender, sexuality, religion, class, race/ethnicity and/or disability, as well as drawing attention to how theatre and performance as live and embodied art forms can sometimes push productively at the limits of what is legally or socially possible at the scale of the body.

As Simon Shepherd puts it: “[t]heater is a practice in which societies negotiate around what the body is and what it means” (2006, 1). There has been a particularly intense and ongoing regulation of bodily rights and autonomy over the twentieth and twenty-first centuries across the island of Ireland since the foundation of the Irish state in the Republic in 1922 due to the legacy of British colonialism, the close association between the Catholic Church and the state in the Republic, and as a result of the Troubles and its still-unfolding legacy in the North. Matters such as sexual orientation, access to abortion and birth control, the right to divorce, the rights of minority religious or other communities (particularly in Northern Ireland), as well as the rights of other marginalised communities including people with disabilities and transgender individuals have been extremely public and contentious. These matters also persistently have been played out, contested and most importantly embodied on and beyond Irish theatrical stages as the performing body has been called upon again and again as the vehicle for what Jill Dolan terms utopian performatives which in their enactment: “persuade us that beyond this ‘now’ of material oppression and unequal power relations lives a future that might be different, one whose potential we can feel as we’re seared by the promise of a present that gestures towards a better later” (2015, 7). This chapter proposes the following frameworks for studying the body as a key vehicle towards utopian performatives in contemporary Irish theatre:

  • Acting Bodies: Acting and the role of the actor working within and across multiple influences and lineages of theatrical practice is key to an understanding the function of the body in contemporary Irish theatre but the role of the Irish actor in terms of craft and individual and collective contribution to theatre and performance histories remains in our opinion seriously underresearched. This is curious considering that as Bernadette Sweeney notes that “[m]any prominent” early-late twentieth-century “Irish theatre companies were founded or co-founded by actors,” including for example, “the Fay brothers at the Abbey; Micheál mac Liammóir at the Gate and An Taibhdhearc; Marie Mullen and Mick Lally at the Druid; Stephen Rea at Field Day so on” (2018, 376). We consider here the major currents that influence and shape perceptions of the Irish actor at home and abroad between the modern and contemporary period, in terms of what constitutes a particularly Irish acting virtuosity, as well as how the shifts in form, aesthetics and collaborative theatre practices since 1957 have altered the boundaries of what can be considered the job or responsibility of the individual actor in a theatrical process. These transformations have necessarily changed and challenged how we think about the expansiveness of the role of the “actor” in contemporary Irish theatre. We also consider the opportunities and the challenges the live acting body can pose to theatre historians in terms of capturing and understanding the contributions of not only individual performers, but the interlinked influence of multiple theatrical movements, ideas and aesthetics on that single performer or even within the context of their work in a single production.

  • Bodies as Tools: While the previous chapter explored in the first section how theatre as an artistic genre and the artist-activists who work in the field of theatre can be enlisted at the scale of production or performance to do the political work of nation building, this section focuses more specifically on the strategic use of the body itself as a unique embodied tool which can act in politicised and other ways within contemporary Irish theatre. In this section and throughout this chapter in particular, we pay attention to not only the performances going on inside Irish theatres and how bodies are represented onstage as political tools in dramatic contexts, but how bodies who work in the theatre (i.e. the people) frequently use publicity or other opportunities to make use of bodies as strategic tools which can bridge gaps between overtly political and theatrical contexts to amplify a cause, message or political campaign. We argue that we cannot understand how the body works in contemporary Irish theatre representationally or even in terms of the performing body onstage without tracking how the body in Irish theatre history never stays exclusively confined within dramatic fiction or the theatrical space. We suggest that this is one of the unique and defining aspects of both modern and contemporary Irish theatre as a field of practice over time.

  • Intersectional Bodies: This book has explored at length so far the underrepresentation (or at least persistent non-canonisation) of women in Irish theatre as playwrights, performers and collaborators as well as the ways in which gendered and sexual norms have frequently constrained the representation of cisgender women onstage or resulted in a sidelining or erasure of their work. However, we consider here the other ways in which bodies perform their own intersectionality within the contemporary Irish theatre and why the Irish theatre is a main site through which to access and understand the operation of intersectionality in diverse lived experiences in Ireland today. Kimberlé Crenshaw’s highly influential work on intersectionality over the last 30 plus years has transformed both critical theorists’ and popular culture’s ability to speak clearly about the differential privileges and/or disadvantages individuals may experience based on the competing axes of their identities, necessitating recognition that “identity politics take place at the site where categories” of identity “intersect” (Crenshaw 1990, 1299). We argue that we simply cannot progress meaningfully now towards the multiplication of utopian performatives in the contemporary Irish theatre unless we meaningfully commit to ongoing and embedded intersectional critical perspectives within this subfield. We take our lead here from contemporary Irish theatre practitioners as we reflect on how they again use theatre and performance’s liveness to explicitly confront the multiple othering of bodies on grounds in addition to gender including sexuality, disability, age, race/ethnicity/nationality, minority or oppositional religious identity and/or class. As with Irish feminist theatre concerned with cisgender women’s stories specifically, there is a vibrant if not always critically mainstream history and field of contemporary practice particularly in terms of queer performance over the last 30 years, but also an emergent field of disability arts practices including theatre which this section introduces in part.

These three foundational frameworks are accompanied by brief case studies that model the application of these critical lenses to landmark theatre productions or movements, or as in the case of this chapter, landmark individuals and/or moments:

  • Acting Bodies (Olwen Fouréré)

  • Bodies as Tools (Panti Bliss/Rory O’Neill and the “Noble Call”)

  • Intersectional Bodies (Christian O’Reilly’s Sanctuary with Blue Teapot and No Magic Pill)

In moving between considerations of the body as it functions individually and collectively through theatrical performance in Ireland and beyond, this chapter encourages study of the body within contemporary Irish theatre as it functions across multiple levels of action and critical intelligibility. We conclude with a final reflection on labouring bodies as terminology which can link across these frameworks of analysis.

Acting Bodies

A focus on the acting body in contemporary Irish theatre insists on recognition of the actor’s craft and technique as utilised in the service of an individual production’s collective vision but also recognises actors as key co-creators of theatrical meaning regardless of the theatrical work’s form or genre as recent work by Ciara Conway (2016) and Elizabeth Brewer Redwine (2021) on the artistic vision and pivotal contributions of Abbey Theatre actresses including Laura Armstrong, Maud Gonne, Sara Allgood, Eileen Crowe, May Craig, Aideen O’Connor, Frolie Mulhern and Ria Mooney has conclusively demonstrated from a modern Irish theatre historiography perspective. As Aoife McGrath writes from the perspective of dance theatre, “focus on the authority of the word” within Irish theatre and performance histories “routinely confined the body to a function of interpretation rather than creative articulation” (2013, 1) in its own—a prejudice rooted in the persistent reputation of not only modern but contemporary Irish theatre as a playwright’s theatre generally rooted within realism and naturalism as major acting vocabularies.

But what is a contemporary Irish acting aesthetic? What does a contemporary Irish actor do or do differently with their bodies that makes their technique recognisably Irish? This key question is inseparable from the trailing impact of the known and celebrated signature styles of internationally acclaimed Irish actors in the twentieth-twenty-first centuries including but not limited to Sara Allgood, Siobhán McKenna, Stephen Rea, Liam Neeson, Brendan Gleeson, Cillian Murphy and Ruth Negga as well as Paul Mescal more recently among others who achieved worldwide fame after beginning their careers in theatre in the global film and television industries which are dominated by psychologically rooted approaches to storytelling. The route from the theatre to film and television even today for Irish actors who are successful on a global scale perhaps continues to link perception of a signature Irish acting style to text-driven understatement with less of an emphasis on the total body as an expressive instrument. However, this is an Irish acting cliché that does have some historiographical basis in the original acclaimed house style of the Irish National Theatre Society/early Abbey actors under the direction of brothers Frank and W.G. Fay as well as later Samuel Beckett’s frequent immobilisation or obscuring of the total body across his dramatic works as a key element of his signature theatricality.

Adrian Frazier describes the signature acting style of the original Irish National Theatre Society (INTS) company under the direction of the Fay brothers and featuring Maud Gonne, Maire Quinn and Dudley Diggis among others as “codified” by the values of “fine speech, teamwork, and restraint”—values referred to in short-hand as the “Abbey style” at that time (2016, 237). W.B. Yeats in commenting on this original cohort’s signature style in 1908 observed:

In rehearsing our plays, we have tried to give the words great importance, to make speech, whether it be the beautiful and rhythmical delivery of verse or the accurate speaking of a rhythmical dialect, our supreme end…We believe that words are more important than gesture, that voice is the principal power an actor possesses, and that nothing may distract from the actor and what he says. (Quoted in Frazier 2016, 237–238)

Yet, Frazier demonstrates perceptively how the acting style and physical playfulness of famed Abbey actors of the 1920s like Barry Fitzgerald, F. J. McCormick and May Craig, expanded the parameters of the national theatre’s house acting style quite quickly even in those early years as those performers engaged in practices like introducing “subtextual or extratextual business of their own invention to the characters written” (2016, 241). Furthermore, Ian R. Walsh argues that a central focus on the body by Irish directors and actors can in fact be traced back through an “alternative Irish tradition that links the experimentations of the early Irish theatre movement with the innovations of contemporary Irish and international drama” (Walsh 2012, 5). He illustrates this in his study of Jack Yeats, Elizabeth Connor, Donagh McDonagh and Maurice Meldon between 1939 and 1953, demonstrating a sustained move “away from mimetic drama towards a stylised theatre in the twentieth century” (2012, 5) that consistently drew on a range of expressive theatrical vocabularies centralising the actor’s body during this period. Similarly, Lionel Pilkington has recently drawn attention to the cacophony of “national and international influences” of Ireland’s Dublin-based Little Theatre Movement of the 1950s which were characterised by “modernist experimentation” and an “anti-authoritarian avant-garde” focus, combining “an eclectic mix of cultural activities and social engagement” united by “defiant and exuberant bohemianism,” and which was constantly pushing the actors/performers who took part in this work to cross styles and forms, with the work of the Dublin Dance Theatre Club as discussed by Pilkington particularly illustrative here. However, this later and more varied work from the Abbey in particular and the smaller-scale experiments of Dublin’s Little Theatre Movement and other experimental theatre work happening at the edges across the island was not internationally disseminated as the Abbey’s famous early international tours which cemented core aspects of the reputation of Irish modern drama for global audiences. This explains in part why the stylistic characterisations of the Abbey’s house acting style have continued to run as an undercurrent beneath expectations of what constitutes an Irish acting aesthetic, nationally and internationally, in addition to the ongoing emergence and prowess of Irish television and film stars evidenced most recently by the 2023 Oscar nomination for An Cailin Ciuin (The Quiet Girl), directed by Colm Bairead, Ireland’s first-ever international feature Oscar nomination.

In addition, Druid Theatre’s current status as arguably the most internationally successful, mobile and acclaimed contemporary Irish theatre company and their signature focus on playwright-driven textually rich work also might contribute to the reinforcing of this dynamic, despite the depth, nuance and variety of the Druid Ensemble member’s and other collaborators’ individual acting performances across Druid’s body of work. As one representative comment indicating the ongoing and habitual international reception of Druid’s style in terms of acting, Charles Isherwood remarked in the New York Times following their DruidMurphy cycle on tour in 2012 that:

As always with this remarkable company, the acting is of a quality to leave you dumbstruck with admiration: visceral, precise and saturated with raw wit and honest feeling, it represents ensemble work of the highest order. (2012)

The actors’ bodies underlies and drives these effects of the ensemble performance for Isherwood as the literally visceral vehicle through which feeling can even be communicated, but the review as a whole repeatedly focuses on the themes, plots and nuances of Murphy’s plays as texts, arguably sublimating the actors’ roles to being in effective delivery of that vision as a group orchestrated by Garry Hynes’ direction.

But in fact, Druid has recently doubled down on its commitment to acting and actors at the centre of the company’s vision and artistic direction, creating the Druid Ensemble in 2013, “a core group of some of Ireland’s leading actors who work closely with Druid to shape the future direction of the company’s work,” which at the time of writing includes long-time Druid collaborators including Marie Mullen (one of the company founders), Derbhle Crotty, Garrett Lombard, Aaron Monaghan, Rory Nolan, Aisling O’Sullivan and Marty Rea (2023). Their work involves not only acting in Druid’s productions, but contributing to “research and development of potential projects, and ensuring continuity across future programming” (Druid Theatre, 2023). This shift in creative direction towards the actor-led perhaps directly contributed to their acclaimed 2016 production of Waiting for Godot which was described by Peter Crawley in the Irish Times as “the freshest, funniest and most affecting production of the play in at least a quarter of a century” (2016). Tellingly, Crawley’s review digs deep into the specificity of the acting craft of Druid Ensemble members Aaron Monaghan (Gogo) and Marty Rea (Didi) as driving the success of the production’s overall effect, linking the actor’s deep study of the text with their physical precision and choices with their body and gesture in the production:

If you haven’t laughed this hard at Beckett in years, or felt as moved, it’s because Rea and Monaghan show every thought process, finding a rooted reason for every line. Just look at the sly long-arc game Rea plays with his hat (2016).

However, even in the case of Druid and their Druid Ensemble which has such a recognisable house acting style in production, the training and further production history of individual actors will always yield more complicated and competing influences, which is true of those working with Druid today, and is true of all actors who have contributed to the ongoing development of modern and contemporary Irish theatre.

Rhona Trench’s recent work on actor training and education in Ireland since 1965 has outlined the diverse influences that individuals, companies and/or training institutions like the Focus Theatre’s Stanislavski Acting Studio (1967–2012), the Gaiety School of Acting (1986–present) and the national network of third-level institutions that teach Drama and Theatre have drawn on in preparing emerging Irish theatre professionals or working with those continuing to hone their professional skills. She argues that recurrent influences include “Stanislavksi, Bertolt Brecht, Antonin Artaud, Jerzy Grotowski, Michael Chekhov, Jacques Lecoq and Étienne Decroux” (Trench 2018, 334). Trench also identifies a trend in theatre companies founded post-1990 linking ongoing performer training and development to the development and maintenance of their company styles, citing the work of Blue Raincoat, Barabbas, Loose Cannon and The Corn Exchange among others to which we would also add the seminal contributions of Pan Pan Theatre. Noelia Ruiz argues that this particular cohort’s collective mass despite differences in form, approach and aesthetic initiated a concerted “turn towards physicality” in Irish theatre at this time, “conceiving the actor’s body and presence as theatricality’s main vehicle” (2018, 297–298). Ruiz also connects this stylistic shift for individuals and companies and an explosion in interest in ongoing training and international exchange to the larger context of the “establishment of the establishment of the European Union as an economic power in the 1980s” which led to “European and national public funding” providing “new opportunities for the arts” including for example a “rise in international arts festivals” and eventually, the onboarding of programmes like Creative Europe and nationally, Culture Ireland, whose foundation in 2005 has been transformational in the greater circulation of contemporary Irish theatre work like that of Pan Pan Theatre and Brokentalkers (see Chapters 5 and 6). These programmes’ funding for international circulation of more contemporary Irish theatre work will continue to contribute to the complication of more narrow understandings of the expanse and layering capacity required of an Irish acting body today.

Pan Pan’s own signature house acting style across their hugely varied and constantly evolving body of work (see Chapter 5) also exemplifies how much has changed about what now might more credibly constitute an “Irish” acting aesthetic, or at least the skills and knowledges that Irish actors may be asked to call upon in their training/education and professional careers. The nuance of Pan Pan’s house acting style can be best grasped by tracing the performances of frequent collaborating actors over time including Gina Moxley, Andrew Bennett, Judith Roddy and Dylan Tighe among others in landmark Pan Pan productions including Oedipus Loves You, Mac-Beth 7, All That Fall, Embers, Everyone is King Lear in Their Own Home, and The Seagull and Other Birds—all adaptations or strategic revisitings of canonical theatre works but married with Pan Pan’s hallmark visual, conceptual, intermedial and non-linear aesthetic. The Pan Pan house acting style evidenced by these performers can be characterised by the conscious psychological distancing of the individual from the “character,” frequent blurring of the lines between the identity of the individual actor and the character/persona they are portraying, a deadpan and/or matter of fact use of vocal delivery and tone, and ongoing acknowledgement and engagement with the audience (i.e. frequent breaking of the fourth wall). Ultimately, the individual actor and the actor’s body’s function in a Pan Pan production as curated by co-artistic directors Gavin Quinn and Aédin Cosgrove who occupy the roles of director and scenographer on most of the company’s productions in Pan Pan’s history is as one shifting tool, image and/or locus of meaning who engages in an interplay with all the theatrical elements of Pan Pan’s work from scenography to sound, lighting and costume design. For example in their reimagining of Samuel Beckett’s radio play All That Fall, the actors do not perform as part of the live performance experience but rather “perform” as pre-recorded soundscape. Yet, this does mean that actors are expendable and sublimated to Quinn and Cosgrove’s ultimate conceptual vision for any given production. Rather, in addition to the technique and/or training they bring themselves as “actors” into the room, the inextricability of an individual actor’s identity and persona and their direct role in building the performance text in the rehearsal process with Quinn and Cosgove regardless of the Pan Pan production approach (working from a concept versus a canonical theatre text) arguably multiplies rather than minimises the levels of input and collaborative gravity an individual actor may contribute to the development of a new Pan Pan work. And this shift is not only significant in understanding Pan Pan’s body of work within contemporary Irish theatre. While Pan Pan’s signature house acting style underpinned by their collaborative co-creation process of original performance texts might be identifiable as theirs, it has also now influenced several generations of actors and more broadly identified theatremakers coming of age in Ireland and echoes of their acting aesthetic can be observed across the work of themselves now influential companies and artists who have emerged in the last 20 years including but not limited to Dead Centre, ANU Productions, Brokentalkers and THEATREclub.

Ultimately, understanding the role and function of the acting body in contemporary Irish theatre often now involves thinking across and through multiple styles, genres and theatrical vocabularies simultaneously and being able to switch between them fluently as a performer, particularly if one aims to work across companies nationally and internationally which most well-established Irish actors do. Rather than Irish acting technique being as limited technically to realism as mainstream representations particularly of Irish theatre actors who’ve transitioned to film and/or television might sometimes suggest, the contemporary Irish actor (if they are to be successful) should be more accurately understood as an experimental shapeshifter who is capable of holding multiple roles and/or functions within a collaborative process and is as adept often with writing and/or improvisation, the handling of text as well as physicality (and likely trained in one of many specific techniques), and comfortable with the intersection of artistic genres (dance + theatre, visual art + theatre) and/or intermedial modes of performance. We turn now to Olwen Fouréré whose powerhouse presence and career range exemplify how the job description and limits of imagination for the Irish actor have expanded over the period covered by this book.

  • Case Study One: Olwen Fouréré

  • Premiere: Her “first professional performance, in a five minute play, occurred in June 1976” (Fouréré 2023).

Olwen Fouréré’s individual career trajectory as an actor and multidisciplinary collaborative artist is particularly instructive in mapping the range of contemporary Irish acting practices that can be employed within the arc of a single actor’s career in contemporary Irish theatre and the proliferation of influences and movements that now constitute a contemporary Irish theatre acting repertoire and aesthetic. Bernadette Sweeney observes that “[i]n many ways, she” has been “an actor before her time, as interdisciplinary work became the norm only relatively recently in the Irish tradition” (2018, 383). Fouréré’s career allows us to trace that lineage of practice backwards in dizzying complexity while gaining access to some of the most memorable acting performances in contemporary Irish theatre in the last two decades of the twentieth century and first two and a half decades of the twenty-first.

Fouréré describes her drive in her early career in the theatre “to dissolve disciplinary boundaries and articulate a performance-based theatrical language… in resistance to the inherent traditions of a predominantly literary Irish theatre” (2009, 115). As such, Fouréré identifies the performing body as her primary conduit of expression as an artist, an embodied focus that she would continue to develop across multiple roles working in theatre and film over now more than four decades. She currently describes herself as “an actor, director, and creative artist whose extensive practice navigates theatre, film, the visual arts, music, dance theatre and literature” (Fouréré 2023). While her work extends to direction, artistic direction (Operating Theatre, 1980–2008), adaptation, translation and writing and many other permutations of collaborative practice in theatre, film and visual arts, we will focus here primarily on her acting work and style for theatre.

Although now one of the most recognisable faces in Irish theatre, film and television particularly for those living on the island with her signature long white hair, razor sharp cheekbones and lucid piercing green eyes, Fouréré did not initially intend to focus her career on theatre and/or acting. As she recently reflected on with Lionel Pilkington:

I think I came to theatre through sculpture and through the visual arts. I used to explain my need to stretch forms in terms of having come through the visual arts and ending up in performance, but I think that there are possibly other explanations as well. Perhaps in my DNA there is a more European sensibility in thinking about form. (Pilkington 2022)

After growing up “on the west coast of Ireland” with “Breton parents,” Fouréré initially struggled with choosing between a career in medicine or the arts after finishing secondary school early at sixteen (Fouréré 2023). After moving away from medicine, Fouréré first thought about pursuing theatre design not acting given her deep interest in visual arts. However, after taking classes at the Focus Theatre referenced above, she got a “job as an actor with the Project Arts Centre in Dublin’s Temple Bar, which was then under the directorship of Jim Sheridan” (Arts Interview: French Fouréré Tale).

The rest is history as Fouréré never looked back but rather then proceeded to continually explode the boundaries of what was possible for an actor to achieve within the Irish theatre industry and beyond as she rejected early on the sidelining of the actor within production processes. She reflected in 2008:

A lot of actors are beaten into submission-they are made to believe that they are there to fit into a process, to do what they’re told- but theatre is primarily a collective art form. An actor should act as a creative force. It is important to me that I take an active part in the creation of a piece of theatre (Arts Interview: French Fouréré Tale).

Only a few years into her professional theatre career, she co-founded the groundbreaking multidisciplinary performance company Operating Theatre in 1980 with composer Roger Doyle, serving as artistic director as well as driving the concept and scripting of many of their landmark works including 1999’s Angel/Babel. Conceived and scripted by Fouréré, she was “attached to custom-made sensory software” for this performance “that responded to the kinaesthetic impulses of the actor, and reproduced those impulses through computer-generated sound, challenging notions of character, and the dramatic” (Singleton 2016, 562).

Fouréré’s extension and expansion of the performing body through experimentation with technology in live theatre performance was groundbreaking in an Irish theatre context, but her own continuous pursuit of the limits of theatrical and collaborative practice through the performing body did not mean that she rejected the canonical or mainstream Irish (literary/text-based) theatre scene as mutually exclusive. She commented recently that her relationship to realistic Stanislavski-based acting technique remains important building on her foundational early training with Focus Theatre:

there was stuff around the Stanislavsky approach that I needed to get rid of. But the tiny bit of training that I did do made me understand that you have to “be” in order to experience and communicate. You can’t just pretend to be and pretend to communicate. In terms of “building a character” and other aspects of the Stanislavsky method, it’s not that I never felt they were useful. Probably I do use them but I use them very much for my own ends. (Pilkington 2022)

Indeed, Fouréré has premiered many of the landmark plays referenced throughout this book including work by Marina Carr, Enda Walsh, Mark O’Rowe, Tom MacIntyre and Tom Murphy, all of which are largely although not totally based within theatrical realism. She also premiered Samuel Beckett’s Not I in Ireland with Focus Theatre and would go on to perform Beckett's work extensively and has worked consistently with the Abbey Theatre and the Gate over many cycles of artistic directors, playing across the canonical repertoire of modern Irish drama in the works of John Millington Synge, W. B. Yeats, Oscar Wilde and Séan O’Casey. In addition, she has performed in the work of William Shakespeare across a range of Irish and English companies including the Abbey Theatre, Second Age Theatre, Siren Productions and the Royal National Theatre. She has also been a long-term creative partner of playwright Marina Carr, originating the role of Hester Swayne in 1997’s landmark premiere of By the Bog of Cats (directed by Patrick Mason, Abbey Theatre) as well as Tilly in 1991’s Ullaloo (directed by David Byrne, Abbey Theatre, Peacock stage), the Mai in Carr’s 1994 The Mai (directed by Brian Brady, Abbey Theatre), Woman in Carr’s 2007 Woman and Scarecow (directed by Selina Cartmell, Abbey Theatre, Peacock Stage) and going on to perform in Carr’s 2021’s iGirl (directed by Caitríona McLaughlin, Abbey Theatre). Sara Keating’s Irish Times review of iGirl clearly articulates the now well-established inextricability between Carr’s evolving dramatic vision and Fouréré’s distinctive virtuosity as a performer, as she bluntly states: “It is Fouréré’s performance, of course, that creates the grounded reality of this deeply collaborative, multidimensional piece of theatre…She lets Carr’s words pour through her like nectar through a rare and precious chalice, brimful with ancient stories” (2021).

In addition to being the founder and artistic director of Operating Theatre and creating TheEmergencyRoom “(a necessary space)” in 2009 for her own projects as “a virtual holding space for the development of art-based ideas, relationships and performance contexts” (TheEmergencyRoom 2023), she has also worked with some of the most vanguard and influential theatre and dance theatre directors of the last forty years in a sustained way on a project-by-project basis such as with Fabulous Beast Dance Theatre (now Teac Damsa’s) Michael Keegan-Dolan (see Chapter 11 for a full case study of his production of The Bull starring Fouréré) and Director Selina Cartmell (who recently finished her tenure as the first female artistic director in the Gate Theatre’s history) who worked with Fouréré through Operating Theatre as well as Cartmell’s own former company Siren Production. Through her connection with these and other theatre artists over time, Fouréré has undeniably become a common denominator across contemporary Irish theatre practice centred on performer-focused formal innovation in theatrical stagecraft and dramaturgy, unsurprisingly also collaborating with Pan Pan Theatre on their celebrated audience participation-focused adaption of Hamlet, The Rehearsal- Playing the Dane (2017). As a performer, Fouréré both melds herself into the theatrical world and dramaturgy of each project she appears in whether it is based in realism or absurdism or postdramatic style while bringing her own distinctive energy, presence and visceral often wraith-like physicality that transforms each work beyond what genre(s) it is associated with as well as often toying with, commenting and subverting on gender as expressed in, with and through the body onstage. As Shonagh Hill puts it, “her distinctive and vigorous physical performance style underscores the way in which limiting myths of femininity are inscribed on, and resisted by, the embodied experiences of women” (2019, 214). Hill argues that Fouréré’s body of acting work shifts” the emphasis from the” cisgender female “body as bearer of meaning to maker of meaning” [emphasis ours] enabling a rewriting of “the corporeal realm which woman has traditionally been aligned with” through intervention of her corpus of work (2019, 220).

Yet, we would argue that Fouréré’s redefinitional power regarding gender and performance extends even further than exploding femininity. While Fouréré identifies as cisgender female and indeed has played and even originated some of the most iconic modern and contemporary Irish theatre heroines from John Millington Synge’s Pegeen Mike to Marina Carra’s Hester Swane, she has also consistently stretched the limits of gender across her body of acting work performing as female, male and/or androgynous or shifting between or among the three within single works. In Here Lies (2005–2007), Fouréré created a number of performance installations with Selina Cartmell and Paul Keogan as part of Operating Theatre in which she performed as seminal modernist French theatre director and theorist Antonin Artaud in Galway, Paris and Dublin, later adapting this project as a theatrical film with cinematographer Christopher Doyle Here Lies in Film…for Dublin Theatre Festival in 2008. She also played Roy Maunsen in the television adaptation of Pat McCabe’s play If These Lips for RTÉ’s television series, Play Next Door, in 2014 (Wallace 2014). A landmark performance in which she again toyed with and exploded gender even more totally was her solo monologue adaptation of James Joyce’s Finnegan’s Wake, 2013’s riverrun co-directed by Kellie Hughes and produced by TheEmergencyRoom, in which she performs the voice of the river Anna Livia Plurabelle. Her performance as the river is described by The Guardian’s Maev Kennedy as “androgynous and shimmering” (2014) while Fouréré herself says of gender within her riverrun performance that:

The river's voice changes constantly, often unidentifiable as male or female, an ever-changing force of onward motion, recycling the past into the present. Towards the end the river's voice becomes clearly that of a woman letting go of the past and sensing the future following behind her. (Kennedy 2014)

Fouréré’s shifting and fluid (gender) consciousness in role as the river in this internationally acclaimed adaptation of Joyce’s work not only demonstrates once again her singular virtuosity as an individual performer whose unique body and presence is her primary instrument of expression. Rather, Fouréré’s performance also once again looks to the past (Joyce) in the present to remind us of the future of not only Irish acting technique and the agentic possibilities of the actor as an individual making their mark within theatre as a collaborative art form. She also makes theatrically manifest what can be gained when gender itself is deconstructed and reimagined using live performance as a portal to other even non-human possibilities of the acting body’s range as through her personification of the gender-fluid river in riverrun. As Fouréré puts it herself, theatre can and should be about “carving the space for other dimensions of reality to become evident” (RTÉ 2014) and this is precisely what she herself has made possible repeatedly for audiences through her acting body as a tool of expression and communication. Fouréré’s body of work as a performer and theatremaker ultimately makes co-present the past, present and future of not only Irish acting technique as understood from a contemporary vantage point, while also making available wider understandings of reality and identity more broadly by as enabled by her boundary-exploding performances within the theatrical event. As such, her work takes us right to the dividing line and grey area between the body as a tool of artistic expression and the body as a tool of consciousness change and/or expansion through politics or other means, as we will now explore at length in the next section.

Bodies as Tools

There is a well-documented and defining fine line between the body as a tool of artistic expression and the body as a tool of political agitation on the island of Ireland in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. This lineage arguably begins with the diverse activities of early twentieth-century nationalist artist-activists including Alice Milligan, Maud Gonne, Máire Nic Shiubhlaigh and Padraig Pearse that explicitly blended artistic expression with political agitation. As Nic Shiubhlaigh recollected:

Many young nationalists appeared as players with amateur companies, and a lot of the political clubs led by Arthur Griffith’s Cumman-na-nGaedheal, had dramatic societies attached, either as a means of gathering funds or disseminating propaganda. (1955, 141)

The work of Susan Cannon Harris (2017), Catherine Morris (2012), Lionel Pilkington (2010), Paige Reynolds (2007) and Mary Trotter (2001, 2008) and others on regional, activist and tellingly feminist performance practices (including but not limited to theatre) that were contemporaneous with the founding of the Abbey establish the performing body as a major tool of political agitation. These early twentieth-century practices frequently necessitated subversive uses of the (gendered) body in public space in ways that blurred the boundaries between performance and activism, such as through Inghinidhe na h-Eireann members’ distribution of nationalist leaflets on Dublin’s O’Connell Street (with some women even leafleting in male-only saloons) (Trotter 2001, 88–89) alongside the staging of their popular tableaux-vivants. We see this dynamic also enacted in poet/playwright/activist (and Inghinidhe na h-Eireann member) Alice Milligan’s early twentieth-century work making use of magic lantern and tableaux shows co-created with local communities as a consciousness-raising tool in her work as a travelling lecturer for the Gaelic League. As Catherine Morris details, she:

...began to journey across Ireland with her own portable lantern and a camera that she used to collect pictures for slides…Milligan worked with local communities to re-embody the pictures as theatre and devise new scenes for the stage from local folklore, the cultural life of the community and from Irish songs and legends. (2012, 257)

In the work of Milligan specifically and Inghinidhe na h-Eireann more broadly, we can also see the political (and nationalist) roots of community-engaged theatre practices in Ireland which have become increasingly influential in the early twenty-first century within professional mainstream Irish theatre practice.

Both then and now, Milligan and contemporary theatremakers and companies like ANU, Brokentalkers, Teya Sepinuck’s Theatre of Witness (see Chapter 6) and others make use of the realness of non-professional performing bodies as a tool to further their artistic and/or political vision, through creating work using participants’ direct experiences that may also have these individuals performing in the work. Others such as Kabosh and Dubbeljoint Productions, THEATREclub, the Abbey Theatre and individual artists including Colin Murphy and Mary Raftery draw on documentary and/or verbatim interview materials but use professional actors. This range of work evidences a proliferation in contemporary Irish theatre of what Carol Martin groups as “theatre of the real,” a category that encompasses “documentary theatre, verbatim theatre, reality-based theatre, theatre of fact, theatre of witness, tribunal theatre, nonfiction theatre, restored village performances, war and battle re-enactments, and autobiographical theatre” but is unified by all these approaches “claim[ing] a relationship to reality, a relationship that has generated both textual and performance innovations” (2013, 5) and that depends on the live and/or mediated body as a medium of expression and communication onstage.

This proliferation of an Irish theatre of the real over the last fifteen years which recognises “real” bodies and “real” testimony as a powerful theatrical and political tool is due in large part to the recent release of multiple state inquiries into systemic institutional and/or gender-based abuses committed in frequent collusion between the Church and State(s) as well as the living legacies still being debated in “post-conflict” Northern Ireland as detailed in Chapter 6. As Tina O’Toole summarises: “…both twentieth-century Irish states perpetrated and/or actively condoned the violent subjugation of human bodies, whether those of women incarcerated in Magdalene Laundries, children abused in industrial schools, or prisoners on hunger strike in Long Kesh or Armagh Women’s Prison” (2017, 177). The Irish theatre of the real hones in on explicitly dramatising this “violent subjugation of human bodies” across Republic and/or Northern Irish contexts by returning voice and/or expression to those directly involved in or impacted by these events and systems whether through voicing their testimonies or allowing their experiences to be partially communicated through some other kind of performance approach (such as Brokentalkers and Junk Ensemble’s use of dance in The Blue Boy for example, see Chapter 6).

Some key categories of the Irish theatre of the real to date include the curated re-staging of sections of landmark reports (as in Mary Raftery’s No Escape which excerpted the Ryan Report staged at the Abbey in 2010 as part of their “Darkest Corner” series or the Abbey’s more recent 2021 response to the report release of the Commission of Investigation into Mother and Baby Homes briefly discussed in Chapter 7), reconstructions of major landmark Irish historical events or controversies (as in Colin Murphy’s Guaranteed! and Bail Out! which deal with the 2008 economic crash and its aftermath or Jimmy Murphy’s Of This Brave Time which used published testimonies of those involved with Easter Rising), or formally experimental and community-led/co-created works which may combine artistic forms and showcase minoritarian and/or disenfranchised perspectives as in Kabosh and Dubbeljoint Productions’ vast catalogue of work led by Marie Jones, Pam Brighton, Paula McFetridge and others over time which experiments with different aspects of community stories and experiences over the last 20 years in Northern Ireland or more recently, the work of Republic-based work of Grace Dyas with THEATREclub and as a solo artist tackling themes such as the inner-city Dublin histories including that of the ongoing heroin epidemic in 2012’s Heroin and women’s travels to obtain abortions with Emma Fraser in 2017’s installation Not At Home).

In Irish theatre, performance and activist history therefore, bodies are often called on to use performance as a tool in ways that other mediums of communication or art simply cannot on their own, and this remains a defining feature of contemporary Irish theatre and performance history. Dublin’s Project Arts Centre (see Chapter 3) for example was inaugurated by an event in 1967 where performers gathered to read aloud banned literary texts including the work of Edna O’Brien, because as Project co-founder and theatre director/author Peter Sheridan, puts it: “it was within the law to read from such material in a theatre, where censorship did not apply” (2006, 7). Here again, the performing body operates as a tool in the Irish theatre in ways that the printed page could not as a medium of legal communication at the time. Project’s origin story which actively enlists the performing body as a tool of breaking through censorship powerfully exposes again how the inventiveness of how Irish performers and theatre artists repeatedly make explicit central use of the body in battles for political rights and liberties across the island of Ireland.

This power of the Irish body as political tool however must also be understood in the context of its use as a deliberate weapon in military and/or paramilitary campaigns as in the Irish Republican Army’s late 1970s-early 1980s extended use of body-focused protest strategies to achieve political goals particularly after the removal of special category (i.e. political prisoner) status for paramilitaries. This wave of protests making use of the body included the 1976 “blanket protest” (in which prisoners refused to wear prison uniforms and/or fashioned clothing from prison blankets only), the 1978 “dirty protest” (in which prisoners refused to wash and smeared excrement and/or menstrual blood on prison walls) and two waves of hunger strikes in 1980 and 1981, the latter of which saw Bobby Sands elected to British parliament while in prison on hunger strike, before his death and that of nine others before the hunger strike was eventually concluded on 3rd October. Other men who died in the hunger strike included (in order of death) Francis Hughes, Raymond McCreesh, Patsy O’Hara, Joe McDonnell, Martin Hurston, Kevin Lynch, Kieran Doherty, Thomas McElwee and Michael Devine. Emma Creedon links this spectacularised use of the body as a political tool by IRA paramilitaries to postcolonial histories noting:

Images of an ‘anamolous’ physicality can be traced back to the Irish famine where the aesthetics of starvation and bodily degeneration contributed to the colonial politicization of the Irish body as inferior. Over a century later, the Irish Republican hunger strikers in Northern Ireland in the 1980s capitalized on this association between the abject body and recalcitrance, which had been exploited by colonial propaganda to further promote the Irish body as insufficient and insubordinate. (2020, 59)

The political legacy of the hunger strikes for the IRA and Margaret Thatcher’s British government which reacted to the events in real time remains debated among historians and political commentators, but its symbolic legacy as an extension of the histories cited by Creedon remains extremely potent (particularly through the continuing circulation of images of Bobby Sands and other strikers as well as repeated adaptations of their stories in multiple mediums including theatre and film) and is vital to understanding the true weight of the body as tool in the contemporary Irish imaginary (Hennessey 2014; Duggan, 2017). As another key link between political and theatrical Irish histories mediated at the level of bodies, former hunger striker Laurence McKeown who was taken off of the 1981 hunger strike by his family before its official conclusion went on to become a prolific playwright frequently collaborating with Kabosh and Dubbeljoint Productions as well as founding the Belfast Film Festival and obtaining a PhD in sociology with a thesis entitled “Unrepentant Fenian Bastards.” In addition to McKeown’s plays which address the period of the Troubles as well as post-conflict Northern Ireland, he also co-wrote a film H3 about the 1981 Hunger Strikes with fellow former prisoner Brian Campbell, who also co-wrote McKeown’s first two plays with him, The Laughter of Our Children (2001) and A Cold House (2003). In turning to the theatre (and film) following his internment, McKeown continues to deploy his body and that of others who perform in his work as a tool of ongoing political dialogue. His efforts are now directed more towards gradual and nuanced post-conflict reconciliation vis-à-vis performance as opposed to more immediate political goals as during his participation in the 1981 Hunger Strikes. He shared with the Irish Times that while he “believes telling and hearing other stories can be cathartic and reconciling” (as in 2003’s A Cold House which was based partially on interviews and featured the perspectives of an IRA ex-prisoner and a former RUC officer) nevertheless “he wishes more unionists would meet republicans halfway” (Moriarty 2016). Nevertheless, McKeown continues to test the contemporary Irish theatre as a meeting place for this imagined coming together of competing political perspectives and agendas.

Bodies as a tool of performative communication that deliberately link the theatre industry with direct political action continue to characterise key moments of the early twenty-first century. Members of ANU Productions for example consulted with laundry survivors involved with the group Justice for Magdalenes on the creation of their production Laundry, and some ANU company members stood with survivors the day that Enda Kenny made his official state apology. In addition to Panti Bliss/Rory’s O’Neill viral Noble Call speech addressing homophobia and public speech delivered as part of the Abbey Theatre’s production of James Plunkett’s The Risen People covered in our case study below, Hot for Theatre’s production of Amy Conroy’s I Heart Alice Heart I began as a faux documentary theatre play about the love story of two older women but eventually toured in direct support of the Marriage Equality Campaign (Halferty 2022, 175–178). Finally, #WakingtheFeminists campaign subtly linked their work for gender parity in the Irish theatre to the Repeal the Eighth campaign that was ongoing at the time at a key moment. In the autumn 2016 publicity photos and video released for #WakingTheFeminists’s autumn announcement of the conclusion of the official public one-year campaign, the women gathered are all wearing black, but a woman positioned prominently at the bottom right corner of the photograph wears a “Repeal” jumper, with others wearing the same iconic jumper able to be seen in the video footage from the day (Keating 2016). This iconic recent photo and all the recent and historical examples covered in this section consistently and powerfully reveal the use of the body as a tool in the Irish theatre capable of connecting onstage action with offstage struggles for political freedoms and rights.

  • Case Study Two: Panti Bliss/Rory O’Neill’s “Noble Call” after the curtain call for the Abbey Theatre’s 2013–2014 production of James Plunkett’s The Risen People, directed by Jimmy Fay and adapted by Jimmy Fay from a version by Jim Sheridan (Abbey Theatre 2013).

  • Premiered: Bliss’s “Noble Call” happened on 1 February 2014, but this production of The Risen People had opened on 4 December 2013.

During the 2013–2014 run of their revival of James Plunkett’s The Risen People, the Abbey Theatre “used the device of the Noble Call, an old Irish tradition whereby after a performance, usually of music, the audience are invited to respond through word, song or poetry” (Burns 2014) as part of their framing of the production, which was being produced for the 100th anniversary of the Dublin Lockout, a 1913–1914 strike which began with Dublin United Tramway company workers in the Irish General Transport and Workers Union but spread wider to more than 20,000 workers across sectors. The Lockout (also discussed in Chapter 6 in relationship to ANU Productions’ work) served as a flashpoint not only between workers, union organisers and company owners but with the Catholic Church and various factions within Irish nationalists at the time. The six-month Lockout concluded in January 1914 unfortunately without achieving many of the workers’ and union organisers’ key demands, but the Irish Transport General and Workers’ Union did continue to grow in strength subsequently and it continues to be regarded as a landmark in Irish labour history and was one of the key events commemorated in the Republic’s Decade of Centenaries between 2012 and 2023 (Yeates 2001).

This was the Abbey’s third production of Plunkett’s play dramatising the events of the Lockout. The Risen People had begun life as a radio play before being produced as a full stage production by the Abbey in 1958 and 1963 respectively (Abbey Theatre 2013) and the 2013 production involved further adaptation by Jimmy Fay who also directed it and who was working from a version by Jim Sheridan. In all, the Abbey “invited over 60 people from all walks of contemporary Irish life, including poets, musicians, activists, journalists, historians and community workers, to give their responses each evening to the play” (Burns 2014) and Rory O’Neill as Panti Bliss took the stage for the Noble Call more than halfway through the production’s run.

Bliss was taking the stage having been embroiled at that point for three weeks in a public controversy following her appearance as both Rory O’Neill and Panti Bliss on RTÉ’s Saturday Night Show, hosted by Brendan O’Connor. Out of character and sitting for interview as Rory O’Neill, on the Saturday Night Show, O’Neill responded to a direction question from host O’Connor about where anti-gay attitudes were still being expressed in newspapers and he named the Irish Times columnists Breda O’Brien and John Waters and the right-wing Catholic conservative Iona Institute which “promotes the place of marriage and religion in society” (2023). Connor then responded: “I wouldn’t have though John Waters was homophobic” (Qtd. in O’Toole 2017a, 104) which led to an exchange between them with O’Neill speaking about the nuances of homophobia. This exchange led to O’Brien, Water and several members of the Iona Institute taking legal action against RTÉ and O’Neill. RTÉ would ultimately remove the episode, pay out €85,000 to the complainants and “two weeks after the original broadcast O’Connor issued a live statement distancing RTÉ from the content of the interview and apologizing for O’Neill’s behavior” (O’Toole 2017a, 106). After the removal of the episode online, there was a “media blackout among mainstream media in Ireland while support for Panti” grew “online” (Curtin 2014) but it would take the unexpected form of Bliss’s Noble Call in the theatre to break through to public awareness across all media.

The Abbey Theatre’s intention in programming the Noble Call as part of the Risen People production was not only to catalyse public figures but the audience as a whole to engage actively with overlaps between past and present activated by the production and look together towards the future in terms of not only reflective connections but also action. The occasion of the Lockout’s commemoration was not straightforwardly joyous but rather consciously quite fraught (as indeed would be most of the occasions celebrated in this decade), and other theatrical responses to this particular landmark such as ANU Productions’ Living the Lockout and Thirteen profiled in Chapter 6 too deliberately emphasised the unfinished business of these early twentieth-century events and the necessity to be active on the rights of workers and other related causes in the present. Bliss’s appearance then on 1 February 2014 in the midst of a seemingly irresolvable public standoff where she seemed to have been silenced so decisively at least in mainstream Irish media could not have been scripted better in terms of a relative underdog literally taking the stage to try to seize on another ambivalent political moment and make meaning for the contemporary out of her own personal reflection.

Bliss was already no stranger to the Abbey due to adaptation of her drag act and autobiography into stand-alone theatre pieces like In These Shoes? (2007), All Dolled Up (2007), A Woman in Progress (2009) and High Heels in Low Places (2014). These were created often in collaboration with THISISPOPBABY, “a theatre and events production company that rips up the space between popular culture, counter culture, queer culture and high art” (THISISPOPBABY 2023) and then subsequently mounted by the Abbey for short runs in the Peacock after premiering elsewhere. As Fintan Walsh summarises:

The creation of Rory O’Neill, Panti has been fundamental in mobilising performance as activism, social engagement and cultural critique, and in ushering queer performance from bars, clubs, social gatherings and street interventions to more conventional theatre contexts and spaces. (2015, 21)

Bliss’ Noble Call on 1 February 2014 therefore was not only about one moment of her body morphing into a consciously deployed political tool, but the outcome of decades of activity that had brought her closer and closer to mainstream theatre and the Abbey in particular which led up to this powerful catalytic moment.

When Bliss took the stage that night she was announced as “Ireland’s most fabulous drag queen and famous activist” but she described herself as “an accidental and occasional gay rights activist” (rory oneill 2014) despite decades of active engagement which preceded the RTÉ debacle. This was by no means the beginning of Bliss’s public activism and fight against controversy for that public activism (having been also involved in a lengthy public standoff with Sunday Times columnist Brenda Powers in 2009 over Pride in general and the right of queer couples to marry in particular) (See Walsh 2015, 36–40). She also immediately articulated her own class difference to the characters onstage in The Risen People describing herself as “painfully middle class” (rory oneill 2014) but soon pivoted to linking the characters’ class-based struggle to that of LGBTIQA+ people’s (and in particular cisgender gay men despite also explicitly describing herself as a gender discombobulationist in the speech) struggle against homophobia and the ways in which that struggle manifested itself.

Her main refrain of “it feels oppressive” or “that feels oppressive” recurred throughout her ten-minute speech parsing “oppression as something I can relate to,” which she paraphrased as feeling “put in your place” (rory oneill 2014). The experiences Bliss detailed were highly affective and embodied—having a milk carton thrown at her by a “bunch of lads” who shout “Fag!” or policing or wanting to police herself or her friends in the way that they “give the gay away” as well as the ongoing alienation of “the kind of people who make good neighbourly neighbours” having a “reasoned debate about you… and who you are and what rights you do or do not deserve” (rory oneill 2014). Bliss’s repeated rhetorical emphasis on the affective embodied impact of the myriad ways in which she and other LGBTIQA+ individuals are hailed daily in contemporary Ireland that “feel oppressive” and lead to daily repetition of checking herself are highly reminiscent of Frantz Fanon’s landmark account in his 1952 clinical and philosophical study Black Skin, White Masks where he speaks of coming to consciousness as being other as a result of being Black when a child hails him on the street as “Look! A Negro” (Fanon 2008, 82). Bliss’s own intersectional analysis of her experience situated within her relative class privilege and aware of being resident in a country with more expansive LGBTIQA+ rights but still having to live with the awareness of what atrocities are being experienced elsewhere builds viscerally on Fanon’s legacy and was received as a clarion call to justice and nuance for the Irish LGBTIQA+ and building Marriage Equality movement at the time.

At the speech’s climax, Bliss concluded that “ a jumped-up queer like me should know that the word ‘homophobia’ is no longer available to gay people which is a spectacular and neat Orwellian trick because it turns out that gay people are not the victims of homophobia, homophobes are” which prompted cheers and applause from the audience before building to the observation that the entire audience and Bliss herself are all homophobes as “to grow up in a society that is overwhelmingly and stifling homophobic and to escape unscathed would be miraculous” (rory oneill 2014). By implicating not only the “others” of the audience and by extension the heterosexist media establishment she was in conflict with, but herself in the social poison of homophobia as living and lived practice, Bliss broke down barriers between the individual and the collective, refused to relinquish her own and by extension the “gay”/LGBTIQA+ community’s right to the term, and made clear the work of political discernment and action that would be the legacy of her speech that night for herself in the audience.

Bliss’s electric and frequently breathless (such was its visceral urgency) Noble Call immediately went viral and ultimately transformed not only public sentiment regarding the case between herself, RTÉ and the complainants but the entire trajectory of the Marriage Equality campaign in the Republic. As Emer O’Toole narrates, Bliss’s Noble Call was:

… discussed in the Dáil, the Seanad, and the European Parliament—propelling Bliss into a global spotlight. Hundreds of thousands of people around the world listened to the speech; the Irish youth charity LGBT Noise printed “I’m on Team Panti” T-shirts; the story was sympathetically covered by global news outlets, including the BBC, CNN, Reuters, the Washington Post, the Guardian, and the New York Times; social media and online publications were flushed with support. (2017, 106)

Bliss’s bodily presence deployed as a tool onstage at the Abbey and through the dissemination of her theatrical oration online in full was able to generate results that rhetoric on social media, on-air on RTÉ, or indeed in legal communications between the parties could not and that had enduring and this performative intervention had extremely consequential ripple effects as following this night, Bliss “became a unifying figurehead for Ireland’s marriage-equality…whose efforts were crucial to securing a resounding 62 percent victory for the Yes Equality campaign in Ireland’s referendum on same sex marriage” (O’Toole 2017, 104). Bliss again proved that the Irish theatre as institutional space as well as repertoire of performative practices is a highly strategic site that continually breaks down boundaries between the private space of the theatre and the public space of politics through individuals’ potent use of the (performing) body as tool of not only artistic expression but political agitation.

Intersectional Bodies

By looking at the bodies of performers and/or the characters they represent onstage as well as examining who is actually employed in the Irish theatre industry overall as representative of one or several identity positions (male, female or non-binary, Catholic, Protestant or otherwise, LGBTIQ+ or straight and so on), we continually seek evidence as audience members and scholars for which bodies can access, participate in and/or are represented by not only contemporary Irish theatre, but society more broadly. The theatre’s demographics as a litmus test for the limits or possibilities of political inclusion animated our recent #WakingtheFeminists movement and its earlier antecedents such as “There Are No Women Playwrights” (see Chapters 4 and 6) both of which sought to call out and rectify a lack of gender parity in the Irish theatre industry arguing the female-identified bodies needed to be able to access and participate in theatre equally as 50% of the population as professionals as well as see themselves represented as characters/performers onstage. If we cannot see certain kinds of bodies in front of us regularly, there is presumably a problem with opportunities for access, participation and/or representation which likely reflects a broader political lack of rights/supports for that population. But how many levels of identity do we need to be assessing to make that call most comprehensively and helpfully for increasing equity in the contemporary Irish theatre most broadly and how can intersectionality help us as a critical strategy?

#WakingTheFeminist’s Gender Counts report emphasised the need for a more multiplied intersectional perspective on identity within their own identity-based but ultimately gender-focused campaign. Campaign Director Lian Bell argued that #WakingTheFeminists began with gender as a single focus of analysis because “we picked the battle that we knew best, and thought we had the best chance of winning” (Donohue et al. 2017, 6). But on the place of intersectionality within #WakingtheFeminists and its legacy, she reflects that “our hope and ambition was always that the organization and psychological changes wrought in the wake of the campaign could also be taken advantage of by those who continue to be sidelined in our culture; because they are poor, transgender, a member of the Traveller community or another minority” (Donohue et al. 2017, 6). Brenda Donohue et al. observe in the 2017 Gender Counts report that the representation of “transgender and non-binary individuals, as well as the depiction of race and foreignness on our stages, should be further studied” (Donohue et al. 2017, 61)—a pressure on both the theatre industry and scholarship that has only increased with the coming of age of an unprecedentedly diverse Irish population also influenced by global racial equity movements like #BlackLivesMatter (see Chapter 6). We also take up these strands around race, ethnicity and migration more explicitly in Chapter 11 through the keyword interculturalism.

Committing to an intersectional critical viewpoint within contemporary Irish theatre and performance studies means that we cannot position any single human body that appears onstage and/or works in the theatre and creative industries from the vantage point of only one of their identity positions, or the most dominant one (such as gender or in the case of Northern Ireland, religion/community/political belonging) if we are to truly excavate the nuance of how tracking bodies in contemporary Irish theatre grants us access to an index of the wider freedoms and inequalities in Irish society that the theatre industry attempts to hold a mirror up to. For example, cisgender (but frequently non-gender conforming) middle-class gay male Rory O’Neill’s presentation of himself as his alter ego Panti Bliss onstage at the Abbey on that night in February 2014 and the avowedly intersectional content of Bliss’s speech made a powerful and visceral statement about the ways in which gender (not only biological gender but an individual’s performance of masculinities and femininities and/or gender non-conformity), sexuality, class and national belonging are continually intersecting and interacting in individuals’ and group’s lived experiences and can be directly linked to the experience of greater or fewer freedoms for some as opposed to others, even in their own mind as Bliss’s speech so eloquently narrates. O’Neill/Bliss’s experience with homophobia could not actually be understood fully if viewed from the perspective of only one aspect of his identity (cisgender male and/or non-gender conforming when performing as Bliss, gay, middle-class or white Irish)—rather the co-mingling of these elements had to be not only named but embodied through Bliss/O’Neill’s live presentation of themselves at this event.

There has been some movement towards employing intersectionality as a theoretical framework within Irish theatre and performance studies. McIvor (2016) and Fiona Coffey (2016) both employ it as a central framework in their monographs on migration and interculturalism in contemporary Irish theatre and women in Northern Irish theatre respectively and others such as Brian Singleton (2011) make reference to it in their analyses of theatrical subjects with multiple identity positions that impact the meaning of their work. As Coffey outlines for a Northern Irish context:

In contrast to the essentialized identity politics of Northern Ireland, which requires individuals to view their experiences through a specific and limiting sectarian lens, intersectionality theory requires individuals to examine how their memberships in overlapping identity categories all contribute in a cumulative way towards oppression and marginalization. (2016, 29)

A shift towards intersectionality as a key critical framework is increasingly vital given the island of Ireland’s unprecedented demographic diversification over the last thirty years as discussed at length in Chapters 6 and 10 as well. We acknowledge that we are privileging a theoretical framework that has its origins within U.S. critical theory but would note the long-established relational critical genealogy between Irish (postcolonial) thought and African-American (feminist) and political thought particularly vis-à-vis performance as explored by Kathleen M. Gough in her 2014 Kinship and Performance in the Black and Green Atlantic: Haptic Allegories. But as Dawn Miranda Sheratt recently put it, we must work towards “a practicable intersectionalist version of Irish feminism that evaluates subjectivity along multiple axes of oppression as well as intercultural relation” (2017) if we are to keep pace with the lived experiences of the population currently resident in the Republic and Northern Ireland, as well as those whose more complex experiences and backgrounds had been omitted from the historical record until recently.

Intersectionality whether in the context of Irish theatre and performance studies or other fields can be challenging to practise critically as a consistently comprehensive aspiration although this does not mean that we should stop trying. We certainly fail frequently within these pages as we cannot say that we have fully considered every aspect of every artistic collaborator and/or characters’ multiple intersecting and even conflicting identities in terms of works’ meaning, critical reception and/or roadblocks to success or intelligibility. As Vivien May describes, intersectionality also asks critics to analyse “privilege and oppression as concurrent and relational and attends to within-group differences and inequities, not just between-group power asymmetries” (2015, 4)—a perhaps endlessly multiplying frontier of critical perspectives or angles we could commit to in trying to unpack the relationship between identities, power and theatrical legibility within Irish contemporary theatre. Of course, a comprehensive work though will not always be possible as many subjects and/or case studies in contemporary Irish theatre might actively prevent challenges to this kind of theoretical approach due to lack of information about a creator or character’s multiplicity of identity and/or clarity about how it is relevant to their work or its reception.

Nevertheless, intersectionality’s more expansive critical lens desperately needs more practice and mainstreaming within contemporary Irish theatre and performance studies. This section suggests that by thinking about intersectional bodies in relation to the triad of access, representation and participation specifically, we might be able to concretise the possibilities of intersectionality as a critical strategy and practise it more deeply and meaningfully moving forward within our field. To do this, we will first turn to recent Arts Council policy in Northern Ireland and the Republic which have become increasingly specific about the relationship between intersectional aspects of identity and access to and participation in the arts and by extension, representation. Following Arts Council terminology in both settings, we use “access” to refer to individuals’ opportunities to view theatre as audience members, “participation” to signify individual practice of theatre and the arts as non-professional, and “representation” to encompass an audit of those working in and/or participating in making theatre as well as characters depicted onstage.

Following the release of the Republic’s 2019 Arts Council policy and strategy, Equality, Human Rights & Diversity Policy & Strategy, it is current state policy at the time of writing that the Arts Council “as the agency tasked with the development of the arts in Ireland” must make sure “every person living in Ireland has the right to create, engage with, enjoy and participate in the arts” (Arts Council 2019). A right to engagement and enjoyment means accessing the arts (including theatre) as an audience member and a right to participation and creation means having access to taking part in the arts as a non-professional or professional across a range of artistic roles and/or mediums. Implied but not guaranteed within these rights is the right for minority and/or underrepresented communities to be represented (i.e. see themselves onstage) as a by-product of their own participation in the arts or that of someone like them. Similarly, the Arts Council of Northern Ireland currently identifies their research and evaluation programme goals as:

  1. 1.

    Build evidence-based knowledge and understanding of the role and impact of art on people’s lives;

  2. 2.

    Identify patterns of engagement and factors affecting engagement in the arts; and

  3. 3.

    Help create more diverse, equal and confident communities by addressing inequalities as they relate to race, disability and gender (2022).

The Arts Council of Northern Ireland therefore goes even further than the Republic’s Arts Council by claiming the capacity of arts access, participation and by extension representation, to catalyse more diversity, equality and confidence in communities if inequalities related to “race, disability and gender” can be ameliorated to allow access and participation. The Republic’s 2019 policy and strategy’s list of key barriers to participation and access for individuals and groups is even broader than those three grounds however, citing “gender, sexual orientation, civil or family status, religion, age, disability, race or membership of the Traveller community” (Arts Council 2019, 5), all areas covered under the Republic’s current equality legislation. Nevertheless, both Arts Councils on the island’s core policies currently lead from the perspective that individuals’ experiences of their intersectional identities impact on their access, participation and representation within the arts. Therefore, if attention is not paid by these agencies to ameliorating and/or addressing inequality as experienced across groups and individuals with intersectional identities, the two Arts Councils will not be able to fulfil their core missions as regards the arts in contemporary Irish society. This is enormously significant for how we practise contemporary Irish theatre and performance studies scholarship today and is also a pivot vantage point from which it is incredibly useful to analyse the past as we attempt to do throughout the book.

The mutual priorities of the Arts Councils in the Republic and Northern Ireland for individuals to access, participate and by extension be represented in the Irish arts (and theatre) are therefore a neatly defined scaffolding for us to lay out briefly here what the critical practice of attending to intersectional bodies in contemporary Irish theatre might look like. We however will dwell most at length on participation and representation in this brief section. Attention to equalising access to the arts as audiences in Ireland, the Republic and Northern Ireland, has indeed been a key focus of policy and practice in the period covered by this book, as evidenced by the expansion of regional arts centres in the Republic during the Celtic Tiger period covered in Chapter 5 as well as increasing audience demographic research by the Arts Councils in the Republic and Northern Ireland and through dedicated agencies like Thrive (formerly Audiences NI) (Thrive 2023) or short-term initiatives like Arts Audiences in the Republic which was a partnership between the Arts Council and Temple Bar Cultural Trust in the 2010s (Arts Audiences 2023). However, the story of Arts & Disability Ireland in the Republic is a very interesting case in point about how attention to participation of artists must overlap with consideration to participation by audiences, in this case, who have experiences of disability. Arts & Disability Ireland “grew out of Very Special Arts Ireland” (VSA Ireland), set up in 1985 and allied to the VSA network based in the US with a “main focus” on “artists with disabilities.” They changed their “name to Arts & Disability Ireland (ADI) in order to reflect contemporary thinking about disability inclusion” in 2001 and expanded their remit to include “audiences with disabilities” in 2005. After this expansion of focus, they “graduated from supporting just two Dublin-based drama and dance programmes to developing new partnerships in locations throughout Ireland in a range of artforms” (Arts & Disability Ireland 2023). Our double case study later in this section, Blue Teapot’s landmark 2012 production of Christian O’Reilly’s Sanctuary, directed by Petal Pilley, which was also adapted into a film, and then Christian O’Reilly’s 2022 play No Magic Pill, further develop our consideration of disability arts in Ireland as a key area for intersectional critical practices in Irish theatre and performance studies to be expanded.

Arts & Disability Ireland’s as well as Blue Teapot’s work draws centrally from the history and ongoing practice of contemporary community arts/collaborative arts practices on the island of Ireland which over the last 50 years has radically expanded who can participate in the arts in Ireland, ultimately having a pivotal if frequently obscured impact on core professional practices in independent but now mainstream contemporary professional Irish theatre practices which now frequently utilise collaboration with non-professional community-based partners as detailed in the previous section. As McIvor argues elsewhere, “community arts as it operated in tandem with the experimental theatre sector in the 1970s–1990s was and continues to be a site where some of the most cutting edge developments in innovative theatrical strategies are being tested in Ireland” (2015, 53) including but not limited to the use of devising/collaborative creation, working with amateurism as aesthetic, and use of interdisciplinary arts practices. However, what is important to understand here is that as the history of the modern Irish theatre pre-1957 demonstrates, “non-professionals” (i.e. amateurs such as the Fay brothers or Maud Gonne herself in the early days of the Abbey) have always shaped not only the core aesthetic output of Irish theatre but its political potential. The main reason that non-professional participants have been able to do this uniquely is not only because of the political causes that they might have personally been involved in (as in the case of Gonne) but specifically because of the multiple and complex intersectional identities that they brought into the work and as a direct influence on the content, form and delivery of the work. McIvor details how the immediate context of community arts’ coalescence in the Republic and Northern Ireland from the late 1970s onwards included “sectarian conflict, poverty and drug issues” and responded by projects “serving divided communities, encouraging cross-community work and working in at-risk neighborhoods” (2015, 53). As she summarises:

Artists and groups working in the community saw the arts as a way to give a voice to those marginalized within the broader society. The arts could potentially give individuals or groups the opportunity to tell their story in various artistic mediums but could also provide training in practical work skills, or empower the process of community development through linking practical initiatives to community arts. (2015, 54)

Today’s Theatre of the Real (following Carol Martin referenced earlier in the chapter) in contemporary Irish theatre represents a multiplicity of intersectional perspectives according to gender, class, sexuality, disability and race/ethnicity/national origin/background of migration that builds tangibly on the legacy of the Irish community arts movement which from the late 1970s onward. Christopher Morash ultimately credits the Irish community arts movement with challenging “the idea that one theatre might represent the whole island, pushing the wider concept of representation to the breaking point by blurring the lines between artist and audience” (2002, 262). As Morash succinctly details, “Those who were represented were now the same people who were doing the representing (2002, 262).” Pioneering practitioners at the vanguard of this movement from the 1970s onward that we must continue to revisit as part of an intersectional contemporary Irish theatre critical practice include Peter Sheridan and Mick Egan (City Workshop, Dublin), Fiona Nolan (Balcony Belles, Dublin), Fr. Des Wilson and Michael Hilton (Belfast People’s Theatre, Belfast), Pam Brighton, Marie Jones, Jo Egan and Martin Lynch (variety of projects and companies, Belfast) and others too numerous to name or to fully honour here. Yet, despite this catalytic record of innovation, Brian Singleton identifies that “popular and community theatre are barely afforded a mention in most histories” (2011, 13), omissions linked inextricably to hierarchy and prejudice masked as quality control within scholarship and the theatre industry. As Singleton identifies, “Often the justification for canon formation is determined by the literary quality of the playtext all the while completely ignoring the extent and significance of the cultural and sometimes political intervention an actual performance might have generated in a particular historical moment” (2011, 13). We suggest that given the frequently diverse intersectional identities, of participants/professional artists working with and through community and/or participatory-based methods or who come to theatre first in this way, what is at stake here is not just omissions in canon formation, but equitable access, participation and representation within contemporary Irish theatre.

Indeed, while some leading Irish contemporary theatre companies such as ANU Productions and Brokentalkers who have become leading fully professional and consistently funded companies after working steadily with non-professionals and/or through community/participatory theatre-based methods of creating new work, there remains challenges particularly for migrant and/or minority ethnic artists in particular to break fully through as professional artists if they began their careers working in and through community and/or participatory arts contexts (McIvor 2016, 2020) and for companies working with minority artists that have identified themselves at the intersection of professional/participatory ways of making to keep and/or generate stable funding, including Calypso Productions and Outlandish Theatre Platform in the Republic, and Terra Nova Productions in the North (McIvor 2016, 2019, 2020). This repetitive disadvantage suggests that when projects or companies exploring intersectional aspects of identity specifically tie these endeavours to participatory methods in Irish theatremaking that this can end up becoming a barrier to ongoing or stable professionalisation of individuals and by extension, communities who begin their theatre journey with this work, and ultimately further perpetuate identity-linked inequities in access, representation and participation. However, it is for this very reason that we must pay particular attention to work in Irish theatre taking place at the intersection of professional and participatory theatre methods in terms of not only how it might increase access, participation and representation within Irish theatre but also how it might continue to diagnose structural inequalities in the profession and by extension Irish society through the particularities of professional routes available within contemporary Irish theatre. We turn now to Galway-based Blue Teapot’s ongoing collaboration with playwright Christian O’Reilly and this company’s evolution from a purely participation-based/community organisation to having a mixed profile as a professional and participatory arts company. They have navigated the mixed professional/participatory ecology of their company extremely well, yet notably are quite under-engaged within contemporary Irish theatre and performance studies scholarship which may hint yet again at the ways in which theatre work at the intersectional of professional and participatory illuminating complex intersectional identities remains difficult for many to critically engage or acknowledge.

  • Case Study Three: Blue Teapot Theatre’s production of Christian O’Reilly’s Sanctuary, directed by Petal Pilley and featuring Charlene Kelly, Kieran Coppinger, Robert Doherty, Patrick Becker, Michael Hayes, Emer Macken, Paul Connolly, Frank Butcher and Valerie Egan.

  • Christian O’Reilly’s No Magic Pill in association with Town Hall Theatre, Galway and Civic Theatre Dublin as part of Dublin Theatre Festival 2022, directed by Raymond Keane, dramaturg and disability consultant Peter Kearns, and featuring Sorcha Curley, Mark Fitzgerald, Peter Kearns, Ferdia MacAonghusa, Julie Sharkey, Paddy Slattery.

  • Premieres: 2012 and 2022.

We have elected to feature a double case study in this section due to two key landmarks of contemporary Irish theatre, Sanctuary and No Magic Pill, centring the stories of and starring performers/theatremakers with disabilities premiering exactly a decade apart authored by the same Galway-based non-disabled playwright Christian O’Reilly in collaboration with the companies and/or actors that he worked with on both projects. Sanctuary and No Magic Pill need to be considered in relationship to one another, not only because O’Reilly is a common denominator between the projects and they are the most acclaimed theatre projects tackling disability in contemporary Irish theatre in the last twenty years, but because the long pathway of each project to funding and acclaim is interdependent on the other and taken together, these production histories make clear the possibilities and barriers of bringing the stories of disabled people/those with disabilities to the Irish stage, especially when performed and/or advised primarily by disabled individuals.

Sanctuary was created and produced in collaboration with Galway’s Blue Teapot Theatre, founded in 1996. Blue Teapot “evolved from a community arts project within the Brothers of Charity Services Galway to become an award winning independent theatre company” (2023), professionalising in 2009 (Ojrzyńska 2017, 233). Blue Teapot describe themselves today as “theatre change makers” and now describe their mission as “work[ing] to radically transform theatre practices by telling stories through the lens of disability, paving the way for inclusive practices to become the norm.” More specifically, they use theatre to “challenge the narrative about intellectual disability” (Blue Teapot 2023) which is “a disability characterised by significant limitations in intellectual functioning and adaptive behaviour” that becomes apparent “during the developmental period” (Schalock 2011, 228). In contrast, No Magic Pill was a stand-alone professional theatre project which brought together a team of freelance professional artists and whose subject matter was more focused on the disability activism across a diverse community of disabled individuals, though with an emphasis on physical disability in terms of the stories centred by the play. Directed by Raymond Keane (Barabbas co-founder, see Chapter 5) and produced by Mitzi D’Alton and O’Reilly, No Magic Pill examines the work of groundbreaking activist Martin Naughton and his co-conspirators in the disability rights movement at a pivotal moment in the ongoing fight for adequate home care provision and other supports that facilitate independence for Irish disabled people.

Sanctuary and No Magic Pill both take on the fight of disabled individuals to gain bodily and personal autonomy on their own terms from the Irish state. Sanctuary examines desire, consent and sex between intellectually disabled partners as sex was illegal at the time of the play’s premiere under Irish law if the individuals were not married and was catalysed by Blue Teapot actors interested in exploring the topic of relationships within their community who commissioned O’Reilly to come in and write the play with them. This law was repealed in 2017 and instead the law now focuses on “whether a person who has an intellectual disability has the capacity to consent to a sexual relationship, rather than banning such relationships outright by reason of the person’s intellectual disability” (Irish Examiner 2017). Both productions featured disabled actors (although there are a few roles in No Magic Pill where actors play both characters with and without a disability), and in both productions, the actors shaped the writing of the scripts with O’Reilly as well as the overall staging of the works based on their own experiences. O’Reilly said of No Magic Pill in 2022 that he hopes it is a “line in the sand for Irish theatre, showing theatre companies that disabled Irish actors deserve to play disabled characters” (2022, n.p.), but indeed, that line in the sand was really already drawn with Sanctuary several years previously. Both plays are also irreverent in their humour and scathing in their criticism of non-disabled Irish peoples’ assumptions and limitations in imagination in fully comprehending the complex lives and desires of disabled people, working as Emma Creedon puts it, actively against the “longstanding literary tradition of identifying characters with disabilities solely by their physical impairment,” or in the case of Blue Teapot’s artists, their intellectual disability (2020, 56). Sanctuary and No Magic Pill are also both insistent that while the rights and freedoms of their characters’ bodies may be restricted through the structures and laws that govern their lived experiences day to day, their desires and dreams exceed these given circumstances and are not shaped ultimately only by the structural barriers that they face.

O’Reilly and Peter Kearns, No Magic Pill’s Disability/Equality Dramaturg who also played Dermot in the production, are very explicit that No Magic Pill explicitly employs a dramaturgy rooted in the social model of disability which, in the words of Kearns, necessitates an understanding that:

…Disability is the barriers, physical and attitudinal, developed by society that stop or restrict people with impairments. So, disabled people are not labelled by their clinical condition, but are disabled by inaccessible busses, buildings, segregated education and negative media representations. (O’Reilly 2022, n.p.)

Sanctuary’s action too explicitly stages the experience of being disabled by circumstance and provision rather than imagination and/or desire as the characters in this play explore their relationships and their sexualities under an unusual set of circumstances where two of the group, Larry and Sophie (played by Kieron Coppinger and Charlene Kelly) convince their carer Tom (Robert Doherty) to book a hotel room for them to have some time alone together and as they reveal to him once the arrangement is made, have sex (Fig. 9.1).

Fig. 9.1
A photo of 2 actors performing on stage. The setting is a large bedroom with a pair of chairs and a tall coffee table. In the foreground, a man stands behind a small desk with a flask and a teacup put on a tray. He looks up into the distance. In the background a man in bathrobe sits with a bottle.

Charlene Kelly as Sophie and Kieran Coppinger as Larry in Blue Teapot Theatre Company’s Sanctuary by Christian O’Reilly, 2012. Photo: Reg Gordon

Full size image

As this scenario plays out, Larry and Sophie, the couple at the centre of the action, as well as other pairs and small groups, get opportunities to be alone together to test the boundaries of their knowledge as constrained by the limited circumstances of their living conditions and/or particular relationships with their carers. Larry presses Tom for a condom due to being unable to procure one himself. After successfully bargaining for it with Tom, Larry asks for instructions on how it works. When Tom asks Larry if he’s watched porn, his response is “I’m not let” (O’Reilly 2012, 27). This brief but telling exchange points towards the strict enforced limits that have curtailed Larry’s ability to explore his sexuality for himself despite understanding exactly what he is barred from learning about and what he wants to experiment with himself. As Katyrna Ojrzyńska summarises, Sanctuary “offers a critique of the social system which deprives those with learning disabilities of access to sexual experience, and by placing them under constant surveillance, increases their dependence and vulnerability” (2017, 235).

The stage play of Sanctuary was subsequently adapted as a 2016 film which was co-funded by the Irish Film Board, Broadcasting Authority of Ireland and RTÉ and won awards at the Dublin Film Festival, Galway Film Fleadh and Long Beach Film Festival (Brady 2017, 11). Tara Brady remarked in the Irish Times that:

In cinema, intellectual disability often translates into big, hammy performances (Radio, I Am Sam) or misunderstood superpowers (Rain Man, The Accountant). With a few exceptions…it remains unusual to see the intellectually disabled on film, so a film starring nine such actors is exceptional. (2017, 11)

Brady locates the power and significance of Sanctuary as film internationally in the skill and charisma of the Blue Teapot acting ensemble (Patrick Becker, Frank Butcher, Paul Connolly, Kieran Coppinger, Jennifer Cox, Valerie Egan, Michael Hayes, Charlene Kelly, Emer Macken and Robert Doherty), a powerhouse group of actors that form the heart of Blue Teapot’s professional theatre ensemble and whose skill has been honed and developed by many years of intensive work with and through the company. Helmed by Director Petal Pilley since 2006, Blue Teapot operates three key strands which combine to “offer a pathway to a fully realised creative life for people with intellectual disabilities” including the Blue Teapot Theatre Company, “professional, intellectually disabled acting ensemble that trains and performs at the highest level, on the main stages of Ireland’s leading arts venues and festivals,” the Performing Arts School and their Community Theatre Programme which includes a programme for adults (“Bright Soul”) and teenagers (“Sparkle”) (2021, 9). O’Reilly and Blue Teapot’s Sanctuary as play and film therefore did not come into being as a pair of phenomenon in a vacuum but were the outcome of almost twenty years of steady work by Blue Teapot members, Pilley and other Blue Teapot staff at the intersection of community work and participatory arts practice moving gradually towards professional theatre (and film).

And while No Magic Pill was fronted by many recognisable independent professional Irish theatre artists on the creative team also including lighting designer Sarah Jane Shiels, set designer Ger Clancy and composer and sound designer Trevor Knight among others, O’Reilly has been very open about No Magic Pill’s struggle to receive full Arts Council production funding. This includes being turned down twice after a long development process which had initially begun with O’Reilly’s attempt to tell Naughton’s story as a film which drew on his own experience working as Naughton’s “researcher/personal assistant/communications officer” (O’Reilly 2022, n.p.). This initial attempt resulted in the 2004 film Inside I’m Dancing but which O’Reilly felt “doesn’t tell the story I set out to tell” (2022, n.p.). Just like Sanctuary, No Magic Pill’s acclaim upon its premiere, winning the Irish Times Theatre Award’s 2022 Audience Choice Award (Johns 2023), actually conceals a longer and more effortful path to production complicated by the depth of collaboration and resourcing that O’Reilly and the team ultimately needed to realise their vision of a cast with disabled actors in starring roles, a script strong enough to have withstood heavy consultation and dialogue, and a fully accessible set designed which allowed actors who were wheelchair users to zoom on and offstage through a cross-cutting system of ramps with fluid dynamic movement director by Rachel Parry. No Magic Pill ultimately told the story not of Martin Naughton’s disability or those disabilities of his other comrades in the disability rights movement at the time, but rather No Magic Pill was a meditation on desire, joy within community and the cost of stubborn single-mindedness for a cause which may lead individuals to not process some of their own trauma or needs (regardless of whether not they are “special” needs). It was a production which depended on the lived experience of the actors/collaborators who formed most of the cast but was a play about much more than bodies, or specifically their own disabled bodies. No Magic Pill also offered no answers regarding love or how to maintain and build momentum in an activist movement without sacrificing the self or others in the process. As reviewer Dove Curpen observed of No Magic Pill:

This performance is an unfinished discussion…It is a call to action, an introspective experience calling for an examination of one’s dreams and hopes, its obstacles and the true reward of activism. (2022)

No Magic Pill’s dramaturg/equality consultant Peter Kearns articulates that the goal is for “disabled people” to “come together” onstage “not as the blind or the deaf or the epileptic, or the bipolars, or the spastic or the arthritic impairment-based groupings, but as disabled people and activists and body-owning corporal-cultural enablers who also have important stories of class, gender, ethnicity, sexual orientation, etc.” (O’Reilly 2022, n.p.). Creating these conditions for access, participation and representation by intersectional and in this case, disabled, bodies to tell layered stories like these requires investment in time, resources, individuals and relationships. Sanctuary and No Magic Pill achieved intersectionally deep access, participation and representation as well as critical acclaim upon their eventual premieres but their interlinked journey to full production dramatises the need not only for investment in intersectional critical strategies and access and participation policies but material infrastructural support and longitudinal effort in developing performers who may be disabled as one aspect of their identity as well as non-disabled collaborators like O’Reilly who have the experience and integrity gained from working alongside collaborators with different identities and/or needs than their own.

Conclusion

The body is never just individual in the contemporary Irish theatre; individuals are rather always interdependently linked to broader collectives and communities. The body is never just a tool for artistic expression or political agitation—these levels of resonance are always intertwined as this book argues throughout. Thinking at the level of individual and collective bodies within Irish theatre and performance history requires vigilant attention to the interplay of past, present and future as activated by the performing body or bodies in the present as well as attention to what other bodies’ labour contributions backstage or in the theatrical conception of the work contribute to what we see on stage, or may be blocking what we don’t see, or haven’t seen represented very often, or who we haven’t seen onstage or sitting beside us in the theatre. We therefore have to keep looking not only for the bodies we can see onstage or backstage or in the offices of the Irish theatre companies we examine, but we have to remain on the lookout for invisible bodies, absent bodies, ghostly bodies or imagined bodies such as those articulated by recent Arts Council policies in the Republic and the North which prioritise broader access, participation and representation for and within the arts including but not limited to theatre. We have tried throughout this chapter to push at and expand the lens through which we might consider the body in contemporary Irish theatre, but we still have more work to do, particularly when it comes to fully working through the idea of the labouring body in the contemporary Irish theatre and particularly post-COVID-19.

The Irish theatre sector is composed of many different types of companies, working structures and individual labouring bodies. Since the 1950s, funding models in the Republic and Northern Ireland have undergone multiple periods of change which have had profound effects on the number and composition of professional theatre companies in operation and their models of employment which are dependent year to year on both short- and long-term funding streams. The theatre as an institution (and entertainment industry more generally) is notorious for the precarious models of employment which characterise its work practices internationally. As Shannon Jackson notes, “the pervasive narrative of performance labor is one of temporary contracts and itinerancy” (2012, 23). As supply of theatremakers of all crafts always exceeds demand, the paucity and instability of arts funding coupled with short contracts (even if one is frequently employed) renders careers across the crafts of direction, writing, performance, design and technical/production management incredibly difficult for individuals to sustain economically, despite the Republic and Northern Ireland’s public healthcare and unemployment benefit structures.

More focus on the labouring body in future scholarship would open up consideration of the interdependence of the many workers who make a theatre production possible in Ireland and beyond—not only playwrights, directors, performers and designers but also stage management and administrative staff. As Christin Essin forcefully argues, “A production history that auguments performers’ experiences by recovering” for example “technicians’ backstage labor, therefore, potentially lays bare the collective labor necessary to deliver a long-running production night after night” (2015, 199). Sustaining this kind of perspective would immeasurably broaden our understanding of the body’s social, political and cultural function in Irish theatre history not just symbolically or formally, but as a collective of working bodies whose access, participation and representation is also shaped and/or limited by aspects of individuals’ multiple intersecting and sometimes conflicting identities. It might train more consistent focus on historiographically neglected areas of Irish theatre practice such as scenography, costume design, sound design and stage management as recent work by Siobhán O’Gorman on Irish designers and scenography (2018) and Eimer Murphy on prop making at the Abbey (2018) has begun to do through materialist theatre historiographical practices. Ultimately, accounting for the full ensemble of bodies that make a theatrical production in the contemporary Irish theatre and beyond possible will demand even more and deeper consideration of the work of all artistic stakeholders as contributing and vital bodies.