Abstract
This chapter explores three plays by Abbey Theatre playwrights; Grania by Augusta Gregory (variously dated 1910 or 19121), The Woman by Margaret O’Leary (first staged in September 1929) and The King of Spain’s Daughter by Teresa Deevy (premiered in April 1935). These plays were written during those decades of the twentieth century when Ireland’s political status as an independent nation, and the gender relationships legislated by the new state, were still in flux. All three plays have central female protagonists who seek adventure and who spin new identities and wondrous worlds from their speech; ultimately, however, none of the three is fated to go ‘romancing through a romping lifetime’ like Christy Mahon, the playboy of the Western world.2 Inspired by Christopher Murray’s and Lionel Pilkington’s readings of the Irish theatre as a ‘mirror up to nation’, and as a public forum for the representation and exploration of key issues for the new administration, this chapter will explore whether these three plays similarly reflect the status of women in the decades following 1916.3
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Notes
John Millington Synge, The Playboy of the Western World, The Complete Plays (New York: Vintage Books, 1935), p. 80.
Robert Welch, The Abbey Theatre: 1899–1999 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), p. 16.
Antoinette Quinn, ‘Ireland/Herland: Women and Literary Nationalism, 1845–1916’, in Angela Bourke, Siobhán Kilfeather, Maria Luddy, Margaret MacCurtain, Gerardine Meaney, Máirín Ní Dhonnchadha, Mary O’Dowd and Clair Wills (eds), The Field Day Anthology of Irish Women’s Writing and Traditions Vol. V (Cork: Cork University Press in association with Field Day, 2002), p. 899.
Rosemary Cullen Owens, A Social History of Women in Ireland (Dublin: Gill & Macmillan, 2005), pp. 251–79.
Kathleen O’Callaghan, Prison Bars, July 1937, quoted in Margaret Ward, In Their Own Voice: Irish Women and Nationalism (Dublin: Attic Press, 1995), pp. 164–8.
Judy Friel, ‘Rehearsing Katie Roche’, Irish University Review, Vol. 25, No. 1, Spring/Summer 1995, pp. 117–25.
Teresa Deevy, Katie Roche, Three Plays (London: Macmillan, 1939), p. 111.
Joseph Holloway, Joseph Holloway’s Irish Theatre, Vol. 2, 1932–1936, ed. Robert Hogan and Michael J. O’Neill (Dixon, CA: Proscenium Press, 1968), p. 59.
Catherine Belsey, The Subject of Tragedy (London and New York: Routledge, 1985), pp. 5–6.
Valerie Traub, M. Lindsay Kaplan and Dympna Callaghan, Feminist Readings of Early Modern Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), pp. 1–2.
Joseph Holloway, Joseph Holloway’s Irish Theatre, Vol. 1, ed. Robert Hogan and Michael J. O’Neill (Dixon, CA: Proscenium Press, 1968), p. 52.
Julia Kristeva, ‘Powers of Horror’, in The Portable Kristeva, ed., K. Oliver (New York: Columbia University Press, 2002), p. 229.
A. E. Malone, The Irish Drama, (London: Constable, 1929), p. 160.
Margaret O’Leary, Lightning Flash (London: Jonathan Cape, 1939).
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© 2007 Lisa Fitzpatrick
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Fitzpatrick, L. (2007). Taking their Own Road: The Female Protagonists in Three Irish Plays by Women. In: Sihra, M. (eds) Women in Irish Drama. Performance Interventions. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230801455_5
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230801455_5
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, London
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