Analysis: the process of forgetting women playwrights has resulted in a male-dominated literary canon of Irish theatre
By Shonagh Hill, Queen's University Belfast
The 1937 Constitution endorsed an idealised Irish femininity: a woman was defined by 'her life within the home' (Article 41.2). Their exclusion from the public sphere was enacted through a raft of legislation, including the 'marriage bar’ which imposed compulsory retirement on women working as teachers and in the civil service. At the time, women were a vital part of cultural life, including theatre, but had to fight for their voices to be heard: the subsequent erasure of their work from the canon of Irish theatre has replicated these earlier efforts to silence them.
There is a long history of successful women playwrights in Ireland. To take one example from the Free State years, Mary Manning’s expressionist play Youth's the Season…? (1931) was a crucial source of box office revenue for the Gate Theatre in its early days. However, the traces of many of these plays have slipped away as unpublished scripts lie in archives, older anthologies have fallen out of print, and the plays have not received staged revivals. The process of forgetting women playwrights has resulted in a male-dominated literary canon of Irish theatre perpetuated through publications and programming.
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From RTÉ Radio 1's Liveline, women talk about how they were affected by the marriage bar, including Taoiseach Jack Lynch's secretary Aileen
In 2015, the Abbey Theatre announced its Waking the Nation programme which was intended as 'an exciting roll call of new Irish voices and major revivals of some of the great plays from the Abbey Theatre repertoire’. However, just a single female playwright was included and the gender imbalance of the programme prompted an outcry which gave rise to #WakingTheFeminists.
This grassroots campaign commissioned research into the gender balance of publicly funded theatre. The Gender Count Report analysed 1,155 productions between 2006 and 2015 and found only 28% of these had women authors. The campaign focussed attention on whose stories get told and by whom; prompting us to consider how marginalisation is further reinforced by exclusion from our cultural spaces and histories. #WakingTheFeminists effected change, including reassessment of the repertoire, and in 2017 the Abbey staged a revival of Teresa Deevey's 1936 play, Katie Roche but there are many more women playwrights whose work deserves attention.
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From RTÉ's Six One News, a look at the legacy of the 'Waking the Feminists' movement
In the centenary year of the establishment of the Free State, Dr Lisa Fitzpatrick and myself have anthologised five plays by women in Ireland, published or performed between 1926 - 1933. The collection celebrates the theatrical voices of Kate O'Brien, Margaret O'Leary, Mary Manning, Dorothy Macardle and Mary Devenport O'Neill. Through the act of making theatre, they refused to be confined to the private sphere and to conform to idealised models of femininity as wife and mother. They refused to be restrained by dominant theatrical forms in their endeavour to highlight the misogyny of the Church-State. Against the conservatism of the period, a counterculture was evolving.
The Irish Free State was built on a highly gendered citizenship and we are still reckoning with the legacy of the issues addressed in these plays. The impact of restrictive notions of gender and sexual identity is palpable: claustrophobia and confinement permeate the plays. This is made brutally explicit in Mary Devenport O'Neill’s Bluebeard: A Ballet Poem (1933) which adapts the traditional folktale to explore the violent containment of women in Bluebeard’s bloody chamber.
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From RTÉ Archives, campaign for Kate O'Brien to be given the honour of the Freedom of Limerick (first broadcast 1967)
Death and suicide are a feature of many of the works: young men commit suicide in Mary Manning's Youth's the Season…? and Kate O'Brien’s Distinguished Villa. In Margaret O’Leary’s The Woman, the eponymous Ellen initially chooses emigration to America as a means of escape but then turns to the 'dark embrace’ of mythic landscapes, anticipating Marina Carr’s work.
Woman's bodies as a battleground is an enduring Irish cultural text which we see enacted in Dorothy Macardle’s Witch's Brew. The conflicting forces of the pagan Gods and a Christian God clash over Una, who is lying unconscious in the opening of the play. Women’s resistance to suppression of their sexual agency is threaded through the plays.
Interestingly, theatre wasn't officially censored in Ireland at the time, as it was in England. Kate O’Brien’s Distinguished Villa (1926) premiered in London and so was subject to the approval of the Lord Chamberlain’s Office. O’Brien had to remove references to Gwen’s short relationship which results in her pregnancy outside of marriage, as being only for 'fun’.
During the conservative Free State years, many women encountered obstacles to cultural participation. Historian Leeann Lane notes that for a small minority of women, such as Dorothy Macardle, class background and educational achievements mitigated these effects. Women-authored plays of the period speak to the complexity of their experiences: making them accessible through publication and staged revival enriches our cultural memory. Moreover, it resists the reimposition of silence on women's voices and experiences through neglect: a passive, yet complicit, form of censorship.
Plays by Women in Ireland (1926-33): Feminist Theatres of Freedom and Resistance edited by Lisa Fitzpatrick and Shonagh Hill is published by Bloomsbury. The book will be launched at the Abbey Theatre, Dublin on Friday September 30th at 2.30pm and all are welcome
Dr Shonagh Hill is a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Reseach Fellow at the School Of Arts, English And Languages at Queen's University Belfast
The views expressed here are those of the author and do not represent or reflect the views of RTÉ
