Intimate Passions: Thomas Kilroy’s The Death and Resurrection of Mr Roche and Talbot’s Box

Abstract

This chapter looks at two plays in which an individual performs his private life as a Passion play as a mode of resistance to dominant ideological constructs. In The Death and Resurrection of Mr Roche the Christ-figure is a “queer” whose Passion exposes the damage perpetrated, in the superficially modernised, liberal context of 1960s Dublin, by the prevailing demand for hypermasculinity and compulsory heterosexuality. Challenging the frequently asserted notion that it is really “a play about heterosexuality,” I show that the play, which merely parodies naturalism, encodes a clear fantasy of a male homosexual act in the texture of its signifying order and in its spatial dramaturgy, and read this as a means for Kilroy to challenge the heteronormative conception of the Irish nation and propose a more fluid alternative. Talbot’s Box, written a decade later, focuses on the Dublin working-man and mystic Matt Talbot who secretly performed his own version of the Passion on a daily basis. Using a grotesque, often farcical dramaturgy, the play displays the joint attempts of ecclesiastical and temporal powers to appropriate Matt Talbot’s performance of his faith, as well as the ways in which he resists instrumentalisation by submitting himself to a radical form of bodily exposure. The play thus invents its own version of a Theatre of Cruelty in order to accommodate a mystical experience beyond the reach of realistic representation. Both plays thus resort to the tropes of the Passion play to stage individual revolts against the normalising forces which uphold modern Ireland.