Opinion: like the women in her plays, the playwright was also silenced and shunned by Irish society
By Madeleine Taylor, Mary Immaculate College Limerick
Teresa Deevy is overlooked in the discussion of great Irish playwrights and wrongly so. Born in Waterford in 1894, she never heard her own plays performed as she contracted Ménière's disease while in university and lost her hearing as a result. She learned to lip read in London and attended the theatre while her hearing was fading. There, she saw works by Chekhov, Shaw and Ibsen and her plays can be seen to be influenced greatly especially by Ibsen’s A Doll’s House.
While living in London in the late 1920s, Deevy began writing plays under the pseudonym D.V. Goode. This name was quickly shed when she returned to Ireland and the Abbey staged her play The Reapers in 1930. This was followed by five more plays spread over six years, which received excellent reviews, including a reference to "fascinating reading" and "a mark of genius" by one Waterford based newspaper in 1939.
She was known for dealing with deeper issues, another newspaper referring to it as a discussion of "the dream and the reality" which can be seen in various plays focusing on women. Deevy even tied first in the Abbey Theatre Contest with her play Temporal Powers after it was referred to as "strikingly original and of fine literary quality".
Backstage footage from rehearsals for Temporal Powers at the Mint Theater in New York in October 2011
Frank O'Connor, who was a director of the Abbey for a short period, was a supporter of Deevy. "Nothing since the "Playboy" has excited me so much", he told her in a letter. "It's a grand thing to think that Ireland is stepping into the limelight once more; we’ve had so many books, so many plays, and so little of Ireland in them. I congratulate you heartily and wish you all the success you deserve."
While her first play did receive mixed reviews, her career with the Abbey was going from strength to strength until abruptly ended by Ernest Blythe when he took over as director of the theatre. Deevy, who had then become an established and respected writer and a familiar face at the Abbey, wrote Wife to James Whelan and "felt the play was good and was confident of it". She wrote of her frustrations in a letter to her friend Florence Hackett, saying Blythe "showed clearly that he had no use for my work – never asked to see anymore"
Deevy was known for dealing with deeper issues which can be seen in various plays focusing on women
But it was not solely Blythe who did not approve of her work. O’Connor informed Deevy that "Yeats does not care at all for my plays", as she stated in another letter to Hackett and "that is the reason my work is not brought on at the Abbey more" due to Yeats being an extremely important figure behind the theatre. Deevy’s voice was ultimately silenced by these figures of the Abbey Theatre.
Her main topic of discourse was women in Irish society that were also silenced by cultural pressures at this time. Katie Roche, a play about the limitations that society confines women to, was onstage while the 1937 Constitution was being drafted and it was after this that Deevy was dismissed from the Abbey. This was an Ireland where the Constitution had it that women were not "obliged by economic necessity to engage in labour to the neglect of their duties at home".
Rehearsal footage of Katie Roche in the Abbey Theatre in August 2017
This Ireland was not ready for Deevy’s forward thinking. Her characters searched for the "dream" as they attempted to challenge the "reality": the prohibiting, patriarchal culture that confined these women to the norms. As a result of this, Deevy, like the women in her plays, was also silenced by society as she was shunned by the Abbey.
While Deevy has previously denied that her works are feminist, one would conclude after examining her work that they have an overtly feminist undertone. There are various reasons why Deevy may have felt it appropriate to deny feminism in her writing. She may have wished for her texts to stand alone, without the common prejudices that follow a feminist work or she may not have wanted for herself to be classified as a feminist writer, due to the difficulties for women writers at the time, even without the label of "feminist".
Deevy's forward thinking may have been the cause of her downfall due to the time in which she was writing
Deevy was a brave writer, discussing controversial topics in her works, but this forward thinking may have been the cause of her downfall due to the time in which she was writing. Many of her works have since been broadcast on radio and television and revived as plays, the most recent being Katie Roche that was performed in the Abbey Theatre in 2017.
Madeleine Taylor is a PhD student in English Language and Literature at Mary Immaculate College Limerick
The views expressed here are those of the author and do not represent or reflect the views of RTÉ
