Meta-Physicality: Women Characters in the Plays of Frank McGuinness

Abstract

Patriarchy has both prescribed and fictionalized societal, gender, class and race relations, and it has also, to a considerable extent, fashioned and fabricated the dramaturgical practices of Irish theatre in terms of how plays are written, programmed, directed, produced, marketed and consumed. Moreover, the imaginations of Irish theatre practitioners, playwrights especially, have been seriously ideologically loaded, not only in the specific prioritization of primarily male values, references and aspirations, and in their general scrutiny of, and obsession with, masculinity, but also in their consistent subjugation, marginalization and objectification of the feminine.¹ Gendered relationships have been subjected to critical enquiry in terms of authority, agency, alienation, the body, space, transgression and execution of subjectivities, while post-colonial theory has expounded specific relationships between split subj ectivities, patterns of imperial oppression and the dynamics of play.²