Masculinities and the Contemporary Irish Theatre (Performance Interventions)

Performance Interventions Series Editors: Elaine Aston, University of Lancaster, and Bryan Reynolds, University of California, Irvine Performance Interventions is a series of monographs and essay collections on theatre, performance, and visual culture that share an underlying commitment to the radical and political potential of the arts in our contemporary moment, or give consideration to performance and to visual culture from the past deemed crucial to a social and political present. Performance Interventions moves transversally across artistic and ideological boundaries to publish work that promotes dialogue between practitioners and academics, and interactions between performance communities, educational institutions, and academic disciplines. Titles include: Alan Ackerman and Martin Puchner (editors) AGAINST THEATRE Creative Destructions on the Modernist Stage Elaine Aston and Geraldine Harris (editors) FEMINIST FUTURES? Theatre, Performance, Theory Maaike Bleeker VISUALITY IN THE THEATRE The Locus of Looking James Frieze NAMING THEATRE Demonstrative Diagnosis in Performance Lynette Goddard STAGING BLACK FEMINISMS Identity, Politics, Performance Alison Forsyth and Chris Megson (editors) GET REAL: DOCUMENTARY THEATRE PAST AND PRESENT Leslie Hill and Helen Paris (editors) PERFORMANCE AND PLACE D. J. Hopkins, Shelley Orr and Kim Solga PEFORMANCE AND THE CITY Amelia Howe Kritzer POLITICAL THEATRE IN POST-THATCHER BRITAIN New Writing: 1995–2005 Marcela Kostihová SHAKESPEARE IN TRANSITION Political Appropriations in the Post-Communist Czech Republic

Jon McKenzie, Heike Roms and C. J. W.-L. Wee (editors) CONTESTING PERFORMANCE Emerging Sites of Research Ramón H. Rivera-Servera and Harvey Young PERFORMANCE IN THE BORDERLANDS Mike Sell (editor) AVANT-GARDE PERFORMANCE AND MATERIAL EXCHANGE Vectors of the Radical Melissa Sihra (editor) WOMEN IN IRISH DRAMA A Century of Authorship and Representation Brian Singleton MASCULINITIES AND THE CONTEMPORARY IRISH THEATRE

Performance Interventions Series Standing Order ISBN 978–1–4039–4443–6 Hardback 978–1–4039–4444–3 Paperback (outside North America only) You can receive future titles in this series as they are published by placing a standing order. Please contact your bookseller or, in case of difficulty, write to us at the address below with your name and address, the title of the series and the ISBN quoted above. Customer Services Department, Macmillan Distribution Ltd, Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS, England

Masculinities and the Contemporary Irish Theatre Brian Singleton

© Brian Singleton 2011 All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be made without written permission. No portion of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted save with written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, or under the terms of any licence permitting limited copying issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency, Saffron House, 6–10 Kirby Street, London EC1N 8TS. Any person who does any unauthorized act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages. The author has asserted his right to be identified as the author of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. First published 2011 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN Palgrave Macmillan in the UK is an imprint of Macmillan Publishers Limited, registered in England, company number 785998, of Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS. Palgrave Macmillan in the US is a division of St Martin’s Press LLC, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010. Palgrave Macmillan is the global academic imprint of the above companies and has companies and representatives throughout the world. Palgrave® and Macmillan® are registered trademarks in the United States, the United Kingdom, Europe and other countries. ISBN 978–0–230–22280–9

hardback

This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fully managed and sustained forest sources. Logging, pulping and manufacturing processes are expected to conform to the environmental regulations of the country of origin. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress. 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 20 19 18 17 16 15 14 13 12 11 Printed and bound in Great Britain by CPI Antony Rowe, Chippenham and Eastbourne

Contents List of Illustrations

vi

Acknowledgements

viii

1

Introduction

2

Contesting Canons

22

1

3

Performing Patriarchy

44

4

Monologies and Masculinities

70

5

Quare Fellas

96

6

Male Races

127

7

Protestant Boys

156

8

After Words

191

Notes

201

Select Bibliography

213

Index

223

v

List of Illustrations Figure 1

Brendan Gleeson as Fluther Good in Sean O’Casey’s The Plough and the Stars, Abbey Theatre, 1991, directed by Garry Hynes. Photograph by kind permission of Abbey Theatre Archive.

30

Giles Terera as Christopher Malomo in Bisi Adigun and Roddy Doyle’s version of J. M. Synge’s The Playboy of the Western World, Abbey Theatre, 2007. Photograph: ROS KAVANAGH PHOTOGRAPHER.

40

Figure 3

Denis Conway as Dinnie (seated) and Garrett Lombard as Blake in Enda Walsh’s The Walworth Farce, 2006. Photograph by Keith Pattison, courtesy of Druid Theatre Company.

59

Figure 4

Karl Shiels as the Howie Lee and Aidan Kelly as the Rookie Lee, Peacock Theatre, 2006. Photograph: ROS KAVANAGH PHOTOGRAPHER.

79

Figure 2

Figure 5

Figure 6

Michael Roberts and Des Keogh in Druid Theatre Company’s production of The Stanley Parkers by Geraldine Aron. Photograph by kind permission of Amelia Stein, courtesy of the James Hardiman Library Special Collections, NUIG.

110

Michael Colgan as Justin (seated left in Irish Army uniform), Dolly West’s Kitchen by Frank McGuinness, Abbey Theatre, 1999. Photograph by kind permission of Abbey Theatre Archive.

119

Figure 7

David Fishley as Joseph Omara being interrogated by David Herlihy playing Leo Gaughran in Donal O’Kelly’s Asylum! Asylum!, Peacock Theatre, 1994. Photograph by kind permission of Abbey Theatre Archive. 142

Figure 8

Publicity image of the cast of Charlie O’Neill’s Hurl, Barabbas the Company, 2003. Photograph: ROS KAVANAGH PHOTOGRAPHER.

144

Cast of Jimmy Murphy’s The Kings of the Kilburn High Road, Arambe Productions, 2006. Photograph: John Nelson.

149

Figure 9

vi

List of Illustrations vii

Figure 10

George Seremba in rehearsal for Come Good Rain at the Samuel Beckett Theatre Dublin, 2005. Photograph: Paul Farren.

Figure 11

Gordon (Sean Kearns) confronts Ray (Stuart Graham) while young brother Richard (Marc O’Shea) covers his ears, in Gary Mitchell’s In a Little World of Our Own, Peacock Theatre, 1997. Photograph courtesy of Abbey Theatre Archive. 183

Figure 12

Freddie (Patrick O’Kane) undergoing interrogation in Gary Mitchell’s As the Beast Sleeps, Peacock Theatre, 1998. Photograph courtesy of Abbey Theatre Archive. 184

Figure 13

Paul Hickey in Protestants by Robert Welch. Ransom Productions, Old Museum Arts Centre, Belfast, 2004. Image courtesy of Ransom Productions.

188

Schoolboys learning to dance in Thomas Kilroy’s Christ Deliver Us! Abbey Theatre, 2010. Photograph: ROS KAVANAGH PHOTOGRAPHER.

199

Figure 14

152

Acknowledgements I would like to thank the Series Editors, Elaine Aston and Bryan Reynolds, for commissioning this book, and for guiding it (and me) through the editing and production process. I am indebted first and foremost to Melissa Sihra for inspiring me to write the book. All of the productions that feature in this book I witnessed first hand and many of them I reviewed for Irish Theatre Magazine. Thus, I would like to thank the successive Editors of ITM, Karen Fricker and Helen Meany for helping me bring my ideas to print. Further, the producers of the various Arts shows (Art Zone, The Eleventh Hour, The Arts Show) on RTE Radio One enabled me to articulate my views on these productions to a wide public, for which I am extremely grateful. Though first-hand witnessing is invaluable, I also benefited substantially from archives; I would like to thank Mairéad Delaney of the Abbey Theatre Archive, Vera Orschel of the Special Collections Department of the James Hardiman Library of NUI Galway, Sinéad McPhilips of Druid, and all the librarians who went out of their way to help me in the Department of Manuscripts of the National Library of Ireland. Further, many of the practitioners featured in the book donated either time, memorabilia, collections, or recollections; in particular, I would like to thank Bisi Adigun, David Grant, Raymond Keane, George Seremba, and Neil Watkins. I am forever grateful to my colleagues at Trinity College Dublin who covered my teaching during a leave of absence to help me write this book. Finally I am indebted to the many theatre artists in Ireland who have not only entertained me vastly but also have sought to contest normativity and give voice to those on the margins.

viii

1 Introduction

The origin of this book lies in the publication of Melissa Sihra’s edited collection Women in Irish Drama: A Century of Authorship and Representation.1 At the launch in 2007 in the bar of the Abbey Theatre Dublin a copy of the book was presented to actress Phyllis Ryan whose image appears on the front cover in a photograph taken from a 1937 Abbey Theatre production of Sean O’Casey’s play The Shadow of a Gunman. Responding to the gift, Ryan noted how important this book was in its ‘recovery’ of women’s contribution to the Irish theatre in a century dominated in historical reconstructions of the ‘canon’ by male playwrights. Jokingly, she surmised how interesting it would be to read a book on ‘men and the Irish theatre’. Most people laughed at this in the knowledge that twentieth-century Irish theatre practice is remembered almost exclusively for its contributions and interventions by men. For me, though, it was not another book about Irish men that was needed, but one that asked new questions. What kind of men and their representations precisely have been canonized? And what have been the challenges to those hegemonic representations at the latter end of the twentieth century, and in the twenty-first? And so, the premise of this book is to deconstruct both the representations and interventions of masculinities on the Irish stage, and to expose how particular masculinities also succumb to the oppressive drives of hegemonic forms of masculinity performed as patriarchy. Irish theatre has always been gendered since it was first imagined at the end of the nineteenth century when the heroes of a mythical past were used as icons for both an emerging nation and a national culture. As Anthony Bradley and Maryann Gialanella Valiulis point out in their book Gender and Sexuality in Modern Ireland, Ireland has been gendered ‘by the political nationalist metanarrative and the cultural nationalism 1

2

Masculinities and the Contemporary Irish Theatre

of traditional culture and literature – as a woman victimized by the colonizing English male’.2 In some respects this could be read as a reappropriation of the gender binary between colonizer and colonized as in colonial discourse (and popular cultural representation) the subjects of the British Empire were usually caricatured as being either infantilized or feminized. Subsequently the nation’s Constitution (in both versions of 1922 and 1937) defined the parameters for the operation of gender and its specific contributions to Irish society; in particular the role of woman was given an unequivocal definition as mother. This project of the nation imagined through theatre and through gender, however, is only recently receiving critical attention, prompted in large part by the radical social, cultural and political shifts in Ireland in the past twenty years. Bradley and Valiulis point out that these challenges in many spheres of public life in Ireland are the direct result of ‘challenges to the status quo by women’s groups, gay and lesbian groups and dissenters from the Catholic ethos of the state, as well as a self-awareness prompted in part by affiliation with other European countries, and a crisis of identity of what it means to be Irish at the end of the twentieth century’.3 But that crisis of identity was caused in large part by Ireland’s positioning of itself, not against the colonizer, but between the diasporic hinterland of the USA and the economic fraternity of the European Union. None of the changes of legislation that have taken place would have been achieved so quite so easily had it not been for the rulings of the European Court of Human Rights in respect of the decriminalization of homosexuality on both sides of the Irish border, and the pressure it brought to bear on the Irish government on its constitutional ban on women travelling to seek, or even to seek information on abortion. For the most part, this book will focus on social, cultural and performative interventions on gender construction in the Republic of Ireland, but necessarily it will wander back and forth across the border to critique the representation of masculinities in Northern Ireland by way of comparison, contrast, and also by uniqueness of example. The impact of the recent social and political sea-change in the Republic has been to permit a space for the interrogation of the use of gender in not only metanarratives of the national but also in the almost exclusively male-authored and centred historiographical construction of Irish theatre. It is only in the past few years that Irish theatre historians and literary critics have begun to question their obsession with Ireland’s post-colonial status and its marginalization (if not annihilation) of discourses that challenge the assumptions of the historical metanarrative. Theorizing gender

Introduction 3

of course has been hugely problematic for that post-colonial analysis as the colonizer/colonized and male/female binaries are taken to task and problematized. Theorizing gender as a cultural construction also brings into question other identities, such as sexuality, as well as nationality, and thus the historiographical project of the post-colonial analyst is also destabilized. Ireland’s most significant ‘other’ need not necessarily be England in this new formation. Any analysis of gender in a national context will inevitably permit the articulation of alternative voices to male discourses of nation. Women’s political and cultural interventions in the creation and formation of the Irish state have only recently been recovered and restored to the central narrative. The focus of this book, however, is to tear apart the notion that masculinity is a pre-ordained fixed identity and to pluralize the construction of that identity, exposing the numerous masculinities at play in contemporary Irish society, and not all of them dominant, hegemonic, or upholders of the national and nationalist metanarrative. Further, the book seeks to disentangle gender and sexuality, and read sexualities alongside masculinities. Thus there is a double project at play here in the uncovering of voices and lives that have not heretofore been represented by literary and theatre critics, or historians of Irish theatre, despite the fact that throughout the period under scrutiny multiple and alternative masculinities have permeated the Irish stage. The intended span of stage representation under scrutiny will be from the early 1990s to the present, situating them within their social, political and cultural contexts, and organizing them according to sociologist R. W. Connell’s useful categorizations in his book Masculinities, that begin with the hegemonic but focus on the protest, toxic, queer and the strategic masculinities that contest hegemonic representation. The aim is to analyse texts, performances and cultural moments that mark key shifts in Irish social formation, including legislation, that interrogate the nation through gender but in respect of class, race and sexuality. The primary aim is to demonstrate how, in the latter part of the nation’s first century, Irish theatre’s representation of masculinities contests the legislative hegemonies and national imaginaries of the state. The early 1990s is used as a rough historical marker as it was the period in which Ireland transformed its economic performance, overhauled some key components in its colonial legislation, and fuelled an unprecedented growth in theatrical activity. The first woman and first socialist President, Mary Robinson, was elected in 1990 and although her office holds no state power, Robinson refashioned the role that in the past had been reserved for retiring and benign politicians. The Irish media were enamoured with her style and performance on the world

4

Masculinities and the Contemporary Irish Theatre

stage and her policy of inclusiveness of the most marginal sections of the population and the nation’s diaspora was thrust to media prominence. She (and her successor Mary McAleese) welcomed representatives of heretofore peripheral peoples in the imaginary of the nation state: lesbian and gay activists, women’s groups, Orangemen from the North, Travellers, and refugees and asylum-seekers. Indeed, for many Mary Robinson was the champion of the very people who had been marginalized by the state’s draconian social policies. At the time of her election, divorce was illegal, homosexuality criminalized, contraception strictly controlled, and abortion outlawed except when the life of the mother was under threat. Travellers were subject to successive sedentarist policies of the state by which halting sites were encased and imprisoned by walls of concrete with little or no access to sanitation in some cases. The first asylum-seekers had arrived on Irish shores and no clear policy on their treatment and admission meant that they were more often than not imprisoned. Homophobia in all aspects of Irish life was endemic and sanctioned by the repressive Victorian legislation that underpinned it; gay bashing was frequent and the courts’ lenient response to the perpetrators only fuelled the practice. The Protestant population had dwindled in the Republic since Partition (1922) and the Orangemen in the North who pledged allegiance to the Queen of England were excluded from narrative possibilities for the future of the island. Mary Robinson, of course, as President, did not alter the oppression in any direct way, although she was involved in the processes and legal challenges that led to the decriminalization of homosexuality. Instead, she used her iconic position to lead, by example, a march towards social inclusiveness and the disaggregation of a singular and hegemonic vision of the Irish state as white, Catholic, patriarchal, and compulsorily heterosexual. Writing in 1998 about the last years of the twentieth century Paul Sweeney observed that Ireland had ‘the fastest growing economy in the world’.4 Economist Kevin Gardiner christened it in 1994 the Celtic Tiger, a name to reflect the tiger economies of Asia that had preceded it. It is clear in Sweeney’s assessment that the ‘miracle’ was state-engineered as huge tax concessions attracted largely US multinationals to locate factories in Ireland where a young and educated workforce could sustain the information technology sector. By the end of the decade Ireland was the second largest producer of software in the world, after the USA. Later, though, it would be revealed that the main driver of the economy was in property development that meant existing home owners were sitting on potential fortunes. The new prosperity had been unprecedented and unimaginable since the nation was created. And the new wealth eventually

Introduction 5

translated into a younger workforce and a more localized entertainment sector. It also meant that the tide of emigration for the nation’s youth could be stemmed and eventually reversed. For theatre, this meant that a new avant-garde emerged, connected to the world through the Internet primarily rather than through family connections in the diaspora. World travel for the young rapidly became a choice rather than a necessity given their new economically empowered status. Ireland’s early economic success ran concomitantly with successes on the international stages of popular culture. Only reaching the quarterfinals of the soccer World Cup might be disastrous for many countries, but for Ireland the performance was hailed as a triumph. Post-colonial prejudices were set aside for the ‘triumph’ as the team that scored so well in Italia 90 was composed of many second- and third-generation players born in England, and the manager was the legendary English soccer hero, Jack Charlton. A succession of Irish victories in the early stages of the competition saw the Irish flag raised with pride all over the country during the most popular television programme in the world. Similarly, in the television competition with the second highest viewing public in the world (of over 300 million), Ireland did not only do well, it scored an unprecedented hat trick of wins in the Eurovision Song Contest (ESC). To this day Ireland still maintains the record for the most wins (seven) in the competition. Though lampooned nowadays by Irish critics for being kitsch, the ESC holds a particular place in the construction of Irish national pride in the 1990s. Winning the competition offers the national broadcaster the opportunity to stage the event the following year and doing this three years in a row, Irish broadcaster Radio Telefís Eireann was able to showcase Ireland as a tourist destination being both a crucible of European culture and a still unspoilt pre-modern idyll. The 1994 staging of the Contest’s interval act also brought about one of the most significant phenomena in contemporary Irish culture. The interval act of the Contest is designed to cover the period when the whole of Europe votes for their favourite song. In 1994 a fourteenminute sequence of music and dancing featured the new-wave Celtic sounds of Anúna while Irish-American traditional dancers Jean Butler and Michael Flatley led a troupe of twenty-four dancers. Now known by the name Riverdance the act quickly grew into an internationally touring show. Like the tourist board postcards between each of the contestant’s songs, Riverdance updated the traditional, permitting the dancers to use their arms for the first time while retaining the traditional steps. Added to this was a click-track (a tape) that augmented the sounds of the feet. The music built to a resounding climax as the troupe performed

6

Masculinities and the Contemporary Irish Theatre

in a line representing a tumultuous and extensive corporate body of Ireland: proud, defiant, and culturally competent. ‘Culture Ireland plc’ then invaded the world. With all that success on the biggest and most popular of international stages, and with an unrivalled economy at home, as Diarmaid Ferriter points out, ‘the middle classes had earned the right to be absolved’5 from decades of high taxation, political corruption, sexual abuse scandals, rampant alcoholism, shameful public services, and some of the worst forms of draconian legislation against the most vulnerable citizens of any state in the European Union. Theatrical activity of the period was also part of that success story and public funding of theatre through the Arts Council rose by 300 per cent during the decade. Matching this, the number of funded companies rose from eleven in 1991 to over forty in 2001. The two major producing houses, the Abbey and Gate theatres of Dublin, targeted largely middleclass and middle-aged audiences in their productions of national and international classics with a text-based approach to new writing at the Abbey in its drive for the discovery of new material to enter the canon of theatrical literature. Two companies that had been founded in previous decades, Galway’s Druid and Dublin’s Rough Magic, flourished during the decade and in many respects emulated and, some might argue, overtook the role and function of a national theatre. But the real story of theatrical innovation was to be found in the plethora of new companies that emerged in the early 1990s, formed by practitioners (many of whom had trained abroad) and in forms that were non-realistic, and often highly physical, and approached texts with a corporeal irreverence. For instance, Barabbas the Company was launched in 1993 with a production of Irish life in red nose clowning (Come Down from the Mountain, John Clown, John Clown), Blue Raincoat set up shop in Sligo with their Etienne Decroux-styled performance, and visits from practitioners such as Anne Bogart and Romeo Castellucci inspired the nation’s young practitioners in a very direct way. The Project Arts Centre had been the crucible of innovation since it was established in 1967 and it continued to give shelter to new forms and new practices. Graduates of the first University Drama Department at Trinity College Dublin burst onto the scene with their new theatre companies (Pigsback/Fishamble, Pan Pan, Randolf SD) and an appetite for innovation. Perhaps the most significant contestation to the dominant realism of Irish theatre was the corporeal challenge to storytelling that these companies innovated. Political performance, though, was a rare commodity and theatre tended to shy away from national political debates for the most part, preferring instead allegory, or the revival of the politics of the struggle for the nation that

Introduction 7

accompanied the Irish Revival in theatre and culture. Irish theatre, and particularly the Abbey Theatre, had an ignominious history of attempting to eliminate from its stages challenges to the hegemonic vision of the state. It was the arrival of Brian Friel’s voice in 1964 with his Dublin Theatre Festival production of Philadelphia, Here I Come! that represented the failure of De Valera’s Ireland to contain the aspirations of the country’s youth and highlighted the blight of emigration. The staged split subjectivity of the central character was also a revolutionary act in Irish theatre. By the 1990s Friel’s work had been canonized given the extent of the social realities of modern Ireland that he was critiquing. But a largely realistic form and rural subjects did not reflect the experience of the young people coming of age in the 1990s. And just as the economy was fuelled by tax concessions to foreign investors in contrast to decades of isolationist policies that crippled the country, Irish theatre began to look outwards and to experiment with new forms. Of course, experimentation was the central dominant concern of practitioners in the 1990s and the products of the period certainly professed few political credentials in performance practice. Productions representing exclusively issues of class, race, ethnicity, or sexuality were rare. A new dominant form of monologue drama emerged, largely from young male playwrights, who had been influenced less by Irish theatrical heritage and more by Hollywood cinema. But those dramas, featuring mostly men, and exposing the unsavoury underbelly of Irish society, gave voice to a new masculinity on the Irish stage, protesting, through self-abjection, against its exclusion from the central success narrative propagated by the state. Representing issues of class as an identity marker in Irish society after Partition was a clear challenge to the narrative of nationalism that blocked out identity politics. Marina Carr was the one ‘woman’ playwright (and I use that marker with caution) who emerged from the decade with plays that proffered searing attacks on prejudice, featuring marginalized central characters, strong defiant women, and often either abject male partners or repugnant patriarchs tied hegemonically to land or politics. Gay men emerged too from their pre-1990s depiction as victims of homophobia or sufferers of HIV/AIDS, reaching their apotheosis after the decriminalization of homosexuality in 1993. Frank McGuinness’s work embraced some truly queer characters and contested the right to represent or defend the nation in compulsorily heterosexual terms. But, as you will read later in the book, Irish theatre criticism at the time failed to seriously address sexuality as a central issue of his work focusing instead on nationalism and theatre, and thus neutralizing his contestation of national narratives. Race and nation achieved much greater prominence at the end of the millennium

8

Masculinities and the Contemporary Irish Theatre

both in political debates and media representation, although race was still largely configured as a problem to the nation and the primary focus was on the legality of the so-called ‘non-national’. Báirbre Ní Caoimh, director of Calypso theatre company led the way in a challenge to this representation accompanied by political theatre activist and actor/playwright Donal O’Kelly whose work tackled issues of racism and prejudice endemic in Irish society that the national trope of Irish theatre would prefer to ignore. It is through these subjectivities that this book aims to chart an assessment of how masculinities are conceived, not simply in terms of symbolic identity but also as socially relational. A gender politics within a spectrum of masculinities will be revealed pulling against and often contesting the centrifugal force of a desired and fostered hegemonic masculinity. These subordinated masculinities will constitute the main focus of the book as will their challenge to the forces of patriarchy, at play in the performance of the hegemonic on the Irish stage.

Irish men and masculinities What exactly constitutes masculinities in an Irish context at the turn of the millennium? It would be too easy to construct an identity for the Irish male in psychoanalytic terms and across the binaries of men/ women and sex/gender. The Irish male, let alone his masculinity, is very difficult to determine in a post-colonial context given his feminization in the colonial period, subordinated to the hegemonic forces of British law, custom, and practice. Post-colonially the subordination has been used as a contrapuntal narrative in the construction of masculine identity. Whereas women have been used iconically in popular verse and song, and subsequently to embody Ireland either as Róisín Dubh (Dark Rosaleen) or the Aisling figure in the Irish theatre, men and their masculinities have had no such role. History presents masculine identity in Ireland with a succession of martyrs, heroic, defiant, subversive, but ultimately vanquished by colonial forces. Martyrdom to some extent has fostered a spirit of abjection in the representation of Irish masculinity and the ongoing failure to achieve the ultimate nationalist game plan of a united Ireland has continued to foster such abjection in cultural representation. In counterpoint to the revolutionary narrative stand the heroes of mythology, with Cúchullain at the helm, pointing to an idealized past though with an impossible present for the Irish male. In the post-colonial context the Irish male has been a paradox: agricultural rather than industrial, militarily defensive and neutral rather than imperial and proactive, the martyr rather than the victor. All of these

Introduction 9

markers were by necessity a post-colonial construction to delineate the difference between England’s representations of the Irish as being resistant to an imposed modernity. The cultural confidence that accompanied the economic boom of the 1990s then stood to test that particular paradox as the present realities in the economic, social, and cultural realms clearly configured the Irish male as heroic and hegemonic. The patrilinear succession of presidents ended in 1990 and successes in sporting and cultural spheres were achieved as much by women as men: Sonia O’Sullivan in athletics, (the now discredited) Michelle Smith in swimming, and a triumvirate of Eurovision Song Contest winners (Linda Martin, Niamh Kavanagh, and Eimear Quinn). Legislative changes to the Constitution in the late 1980s and early 1990s were very much driven by politicians such as Máire Geoghegan-Quinn and Mary Robinson. Clearly, the national imaginary was not a uniquely masculine construction. In terms of gender and identity, Ireland proved the point made by many theorists of gender that a simple analysis of gender in terms of symbolical relationships from a psychoanalytic perspective is insufficient. A specific and particular approach to the examination of Irish masculinities is called for in socially relational terms. R. W. Connell in his groundbreaking book Masculinities makes the point that even within masculinities there operates a gender politics that subordinates and heralds certain practices and achievements as well as validates the status of specific forms of masculinity.6 Connell begins his categories with the hegemonic but is clear to outline the slipperiness of categorizations. The hegemonic, he opines, ‘is not automatic, and may be disrupted’.7 This is a crucial point to grasp at the outset since part of the project of every historical version of hegemonic masculinity has been a determination to present itself as a process of some natural order. As Michael Mangan points out, hegemonic masculinity relies for its maintenance and continuance on the assumption that there has always been ‘one unitary and (probably) transhistorical gender state called masculinity’, and ‘that certain social activities inherently reinforced the achievement and maintenance of masculinity, while others challenged, hindered or problematized it’,8 and by extension these latter were ignored, silenced, or ultimately outlawed by the hegemonic form of the gender order. Judith Butler’s seminal book Gender Trouble in 1990 placed the focus of gender not on some pre-existing reality but on the notion that gender is actually a performance itself: ‘Gender ought not to be constructed as a stable identity or locus of agency from which various acts follow; rather gender is an identity tenuously constituted in time, instituted in an exterior space through a stylized repetition of acts.’9 So if gender is already a performance and not an innate reality, where

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Masculinities and the Contemporary Irish Theatre

does this leave notions of state-sanctioned dominant forms of masculinity propagated by the authorities such as the Constitution, divorce and property laws, Old Testament teachings, laws on sexuality and the age of consent, and the constitutional definition of an Irish citizen? All of the legal and constitutional constructions of gender until the early 1990s supported the myth of a gender order based on the notion of the hegemonic dominance of a particular form of masculinity. And that masculinity not only lorded itself over women, but also subjected subordinated groups of men to its authority and control. Hegemonic masculinity, then, operated through a performance of patriarchy. But how do we determine the hegemonic in a contemporary Irish context, given the history of the subordinated subject of the Irish male in colonial history? Most contemporary historians agree that certain specific practices of the colonizers were retained after independence in an effort to prove native worth in the game of control and subordination. Many of the private, fee-paying schools in Ireland run by religious orders replicate the British public-school system in their valorization of competitive sport as a model of hegemonic masculinity. Paradoxically the sport they valorize in the boys’ schools is not the national game of hurling or any other form of Gaelic Games, as one might expect in a Catholic nationalist new Ireland. On the contrary, rugby is the sport of choice and to this day infers economic status and confers social position on the player. Rugby in particular played an important role in the formation of the subject in and of the British Empire. As Michael A. Messner points out in Power at Play: Sports and the Problem of Masculinity, ‘the British consciously developed sport in their public schools as a means of preparing boys to one day administer the Empire. Team sports, based as they were on the twin values of dominance over others and deference to the authority of leaders, were valued as a means to inculcate “initiative and self-reliance”, along with “loyalty and obedience”.’10 The purpose of school sport was a socialization of boys into accepting an innate superiority and destiny to dominate while maintaining a rigid class structure that contained hierarchies of dominance of males over other males, such as in the class system that permeated the military. Thus the hegemonic masculinity espoused by such schooling in an Irish context is a replica of the English class system that in nationalist terms may be a sell-out but in social terms is a triumph. Soccer, as in England, is seen as an urban and working-class pursuit, and in Ireland as a ‘foreign’ game, and thus not at all hegemonic in a national context given the low and semi-professional status of the game. Gaelic Games (football and hurling), on the other hand, fostered as part of the

Introduction 11

revivalist and nationalist agenda at the end of the nineteenth century is constructed around parish/county tribal affiliations and has huge economic clout given its endemic popularity at all levels of competition. In its successive media campaigns in the past two decades (most notably by its sponsors, Guinness and the Allied Irish Bank) the Gaelic Athletic Association (GAA) marketed male Gaelic Games (football and hurling) as being pre-colonial and mythological warrior sports closely linked to the Cúchullain myth. Gaelic Games stand in counterpoint to rugby in their island-insularity. In many respects the emergence of the practice and popularity of Gaelic Games is concomitant with a wider political struggle for independence and of resistance to colonial rule. As Messner articulates: ‘Subordinated groups of men often used sport to resist racist, colonial, and class domination, and their resistance often took the form of a claim to “manhood”.’11 Thus the male warrior on the sports field in GAA terms was, and to some extent still is, symbolic of an armed struggle. The national permeation of the GAA in each of the thirty-two counties in Ireland gives a locus for an anti-colonial battle in rural culture beyond urban colonial control, latterly conceived as modernity. And it is between these two sporting traditions and cultures that the new modern Ireland stands, configured in terms of its masculinities, and divided along class lines. Thus Irish hegemonic masculinity in sporting terms is one that fluctuates and is not necessarily fixed by a singular centrifugal force. Only a small section of the population is privileged enough to attend a feepaying school and thus be exposed to rugby as a sport, while Gaelic Games are free to all in school, in the parish, or for the most proficient, at county level. Gaelic football though is an amateur sport, unlike rugby nowadays. However, some county players are often considered economic assets by their employers and are given special privileges (such as time off work) to permit them to train at the highest professional level. These two team sports then, desired and fostered by society along class lines, enact a performance of dominance both on and off the sports field. Women’s rugby is virtually non-existent while Gaelic Games for women are significantly more organized along the same club and county lines as the men’s games. Notably the GAA still retains its nineteenth-century terminology from the women’s game (Ladies Football) and the intercounty national final attracts only a tiny fraction of that for the men’s game. In effect, the cultural and financial capital of the men’s games in Ireland (GAA, soccer, rugby) permits a socialized form of male bonding that ensures a hegemonic dominance in the gender order, irrespective of the foreign or national origins of the games themselves.

12

Masculinities and the Contemporary Irish Theatre

By the turn of the millennium the social roles played by a very small fraction of men in Ireland had specifically economic determinants, configured in sport across a spectrum of team games. And therein lies the first paradox of the hegemonic power of the national imaginary, since the national game at all levels observes no class lines. While one set of hegemonic society figures court rugby (accountants, bankers, lawyers, CEOs), another set risen from the ranks supports Gaelic Games (construction industry bosses and politicians). The two sports thus converge in the performance of a hegemonic masculinity that erases colonial histories on the one hand and celebrates the ur-warrior of the Celt within the contemporary Irish male. Of course, this division along class lines converging in a performance of hegemony is not unique to an Irish context. However, in few other nations is there a uniquely national sport with nationalist pretensions on the wrong side of a class/economic hegemony. The two games, though, are similar in their construction of a hard-body image for the Irish male as a marker of hegemony. And their supporters also converge to conspire in this construction. On the one hand we see the working-class Dublin male (and often manual worker) thronging the terraces of Hill 16 at the GAA’s national stadium, Croke Park in Dublin, while across the city in Lansdowne Road (now the Aviva stadium) the often gym-enhanced bodies of the office bosses roar on provincial or national teams in rugby. Both conspire to construct the myth of masculinity residing in aggression, speed, and the infallible hard-body of the male. And both enable hegemonic masculinity to defend its position of power within society through ideological (GAA) and economic (rugby) dominance. Through sport, the state subsidizes literally and figuratively a performance of ‘competitive and dominance-oriented masculinity’.12 But what of those masculinities that do not form part of, or are excluded from, or simply refuse to participate in this dominance orientation of hegemonic masculinity, and what cultural forms enable those voices to emerge? Historiographically, it would appear that Irish theatre is not necessarily the place where this might happen. Histories of theatre until the early 1990s have conspired with the project of nationbuilding to construct a similar form of dominance orientation selecting the great male producers of theatre configured as literature. Of course there are many great male Irish authors of the twentieth century, from W. B. Yeats, J. M. Synge, Sean O’Casey, and Samuel Beckett, through to Brian Friel, Tom Murphy, and Frank McGuinness. But constructing histories centring almost exclusively on the literary production of these authors is an exclusionary tactic to construct a male canon. The process of leaving out the processes whereby those authors were canonized,

Introduction 13

the actresses that starred in their plays, and the many works by authors whose literary merits have been put to the sword of modernity has led to a hegemonically masculine history of Irish theatre. The process whereby the Irish canon has been formed historiographically and through literary criticism emulates what Jill Dolan terms a patriarchal/ canonical authority that ‘has determined the canon’s selection and then mystified its terms, so that this reified body of work seems always to have been in place’.13 Perhaps ‘mystified’ needs further reflection in the Irish context as the motivation for the construction of a canonical authority as patriarchal has consistently been justified as a post-colonial project of resistance to colonial representation. Nevertheless the mystification occurs because of a century’s common-sense criticism that has permitted the canon formation to go unchallenged. Just as Article 41.2 of the 1937 Constitution essentializes the definition of woman in Ireland as that of mother, so too does the patriarchal authority of the cultural construction of Irishness render dominant a singular hegemonic masculinity. Often the justification for canon formation is determined by the literary quality of the playtext all the while ignoring completely the extent and significance of the cultural and sometimes political intervention an actual performance might have generated in a particular historical moment. Popular and community theatres are barely afforded a mention in most histories, and paratheatrical performances are completely excluded. Subjectivities such as race, ethnicity, sexuality, and class have also been subject to erasure or silence. Of course those histories have been products of social and political imperatives of their time, but the relative lateness of a challenge to them (in the 1990s) is testament to the dominance of the organizing structure of Church values and state laws, as well as to the policies of isolationism (that led to the social dominance of a singular patriarchal class, economic stagnation, and large-scale emigration) through most of the century. To give voice to alternative subjectivities would have incited the wrath of conservative forces that viewed those challenges as anti-patriotic. Thus, it was not until the 1990s that truly positive representations of what it means to be Irish could be permitted in terms other than male, white, Catholic, settled, and heterosexual. From the late 1980s onwards revisions of Irish cultural and theatrical history have begun to emerge. David Cairns and Shaun Richards’s book Writing Ireland: Colonialism, Nationalism and Culture subjected the hegemonic mythology of Irishness to deconstruction, followed by Adrian Frazier’s Behind the Scenes: Yeats, Horniman, and the Struggle for the Abbey Theatre and Lionel Pilkington’s Theatre and State in Twentieth-Century

14

Masculinities and the Contemporary Irish Theatre

Ireland that challenged the construction of the Irish Revival. Cairns and Richards were the first to point out how Irish playwrights of the modern era were seeking to assert their ‘manliness’ in direct opposition to their colonial construction, but in doing so of course they were replicating already replicated versions of the drives of patriarchy.14 Other challenges to hegemonic and dominance-oriented histories of theatre in Ireland include Mary Trotter’s re-situation of Yeats’s national project within the context of competing amateur groups for national status in Ireland’s National Theaters: Political Performance and the Origins of the Irish Dramatic Movement. Paul Murphy’s Hegemony and Fantasy in Irish Drama, 1899–1949 further challenges the myth-making that occurred, laying down a challenge to both the authenticity and the class-ridden project of the national imaginary conceived through culture. Patrick Lonergan’s Theatre and Globalization: Irish Drama in the Celtic Tiger Era explores how the national imaginary is contested by its performance in a globalized world. Further, Anna McMullan, Cathy Leeney, and Melissa Sihra have all forged new ground in their recovery and analysis of the many women who have contributed so much to the success of Irish theatre. All these authors and their works force us to re-examine precisely what we have valorized in the past. For this project, then, it is important to recover and reconfigure all those masculinities that have been subordinated by the dominance orientation of the national project. The hegemonic clearly takes its own cue from its social and economic power in Irish society, but blue-collar physical strength (as has been exposed in Gaelic Games) emulates and often replaces that hegemonic position in Irish society since it constructs for itself its own version of the hunter-hero of national culture that has nothing to do literally with the pen-pushing bosses emulating the practices of their former colonial masters. And yet within that bluecollar construction there is excluded a raft of experiences that could in no way be described as hegemonic. Novelist and playwright Colm Toibín writing in 1987 did much to recover the almost lost work of playwright Tom Murphy whose 1961 play of emigration Whistle in the Dark had been rejected by the Abbey Theatre because it was deemed not to be a ‘true’ depiction of Irish experience, but was instead a depiction of those who were ‘unfree in a free Ireland, full of resentment, bewilderment and pain, not sharing any of the beliefs in nationalism, religion or social progress with the rest of the country, nor themselves attaining any class solidarity’.15 The evacuation of huge swathes of the working classes from Ireland because of a poor economic situation fuelled the myth that in the post-colonial Ireland, unlike in the past, there was

Introduction 15

no class system in operation. But the policy of self-determination configured as economic isolation was not just a nationalist project; it was also in large part a cartel of the new ruling middle class to control the wealth of the country. The ‘G’ symbol on Irish products as markers of ‘Guaranteed Irish goods’ fostered national pride in the early 1970s when it was first promoted by government but in reality it helped to line the pockets of Ireland’s small and powerful elite. Protectionism in all areas under state control was further boosted by strict laws on foreign investment that helped to further the cause of private Irish profiteers at the expense of ordinary people who were forced by these anti-competitive practices to pay a premium for even the most essential of services. But all that changed in the late 1980s and early 1990s with the invitation to foreign investors to set up shop in Ireland. The result was a new economic miracle that did not divide the wealth more fairly but simply increased the number of the privileged who had access to the increased influx of capital. The percentages and margins of the ownership of wealth remained fairly stable despite the change. The state-subsidized theatres up until the 1990s largely conspired in that myth-making by exclusion, silence, and enforced absence of authors and themes that did not endorse the nationalist ideology of a free state. In 1990s Ireland and beyond 10 per cent of the population owned half the wealth of the country, and as the economic boom exploded and new overnight dot.com millionaires were created, it only served to expose that for the vast majority of the population the Celtic Tiger economy was a complete myth. Forced out into sprawling suburban housing schemes with few or no amenities and not possessing the skills for this new so-called knowledge economy, a growing population of disconnected and disaffected youth was spawned and fuelled by a violent drink and drugs culture. Growing up in the 1990s for this section of the population the national imaginary did not exist and the myth-making of the economists for them was not reality. The Irish male particularly was the subject of scrutiny by the emerging playwrights of the 1990s who configured abject males surfing on the social margins but in a personal and spiritual wasteland, protesting against hegemonic ideals to which they could never hope to aspire. In popular culture, such as sport, masculinities participated in a form of buddy culture with a county, province, or national imaginary. But in the theatre the subordinated masculinities through economic isolation were situated in the form of a monologue or monodrama, standing alone, in a spotlight on the stage, isolated, adrift of a team or another buddy, recounting their mock-heroic tales of their own self-destruction. Unaware of their own

16

Masculinities and the Contemporary Irish Theatre

abjection and subjection by hegemonic forces they enact before us, they tell of their often pitiful encounters with violent others, rejection by women, and their inevitable refuge and solace in vast quantities of alcohol. In the post-colonial context these are the new subalterns, feminized and emasculated not by a colonial other but by the centrifugal drives of a hegemonic masculinity at the very heart of the Celtic Tiger Irish economy and social order. In the North of Ireland (or Northern Ireland – depending on your political affiliation), the economic boom in the Republic took many Unionists by surprise, especially given that it was predicated on the end of isolationist nationalism. Brought up in true Empire fashion to believe in their own innate supremacy and trapped in the partition myth that independence from the Union had brought about the economic degradation that the new Republic deserved, Unionists had to radically rethink their position in relation to both countries. Trapped in a mire of political stagnation and ruled colonially from London, Northern Ireland as a state was for the first time being left behind economically. The ‘peace process’ from 1994 and beyond was engineered partly by means of a revised strategy of the nationalist Sinn Féin party and the IRA, and by a barefaced and exasperated strategy by both the UK and US governments of dangling carrots of large-scale economic investment to secure political progress. Unionists, though, being increasingly disaffected and internally polarized, were forced to the negotiating table to bargain for their survival. Throughout the history of the euphemistic ‘Troubles’ (effectively a civil war) since the late 1960s theatre in Northern Ireland had not shied away from representing present realities despite the fact that most of the real drama was taking place in the streets of Armagh, Belfast, and Derry in the form of riots, explosions, murders, and protests. The work of communitybased theatre groups such as Charabanc exposed the lives of women battling to hold families together while a civil war raged around them. Authors Christina Reid and Ann Devlin writing from their separate traditions also exposed the exclusionary practices of both Unionism and Nationalism as regards the struggle for supremacy constructed in masculinist terms. But the theatre also charted the shift in the balance of power and political influence over the last four decades from Unionists to Nationalists, helped by demographic shifts, rising and falling birth rates within communities, and emigration. Playwright Gary Mitchell who was living and writing at the time in a sprawling Unionist workingclass housing estate outside Belfast, exposed the working-class Unionist male mired in criminality with paramilitary gangs, involved in feuds,

Introduction 17

racketeering, and drug dealing. This representation was a far cry from the mythological land-owning Protestant settler who fought for Queen and country. This was a picture of the result of colonialism in which the working classes were divided and the one group (Unionists) were led to believe that they were the privileged that had first call on jobs and housing. Jobless, and with little or no economic power, and now in relative peace-time without any social agency or a clearly defined paramilitary enemy, the new working-class Protestant male could only exist by creating the conditions of furthering the patriarchal project by the subordination of women and other males. In 1996 a new Women’s Coalition emerged as a fledgling political party intent on fighting for equality rights regardless of unionist or nationalist divisions. The political impetus for change culminated to some degree in what was known as the Good Friday Agreement that was endorsed overwhelmingly by the electorate on both sides of the political divide and both sides of the border in 1998. What became clear throughout the decade was an awareness that, as Diarmaid Ferriter points out, ‘it was often poverty rather than violence or sectarianism which made change in Northern Ireland difficult’.16 And it was also fear not only of the ‘other’ side or political affiliation, but fear of the other within one’s own community, a fear that there might be more than one singular narrative, and in this context, more than one masculinity. The struggle for the decriminalization of homosexuality in the Republic will be charted in a subsequent chapter but for the moment suffice it to say that the centrifugal force of a dominant masculinity also meant that there was a dominant sexuality that ruled by the criminalization and thus complete rejection of any possible alternative. In Northern Ireland there was a clear project of sexuality cleansing as the leader of the ultra-right Democratic Unionist Party began his campaign in the 1970s not only against Catholics for their so-called heretical beliefs but also against those he considered a danger to the compulsory and ‘native’ heterosexuality of the settler society of Unionists. His ‘Save Ulster from Sodomy’ campaign held rallies across Ulster and sought signatures to contest the threat of the possible decriminalization of homosexuality, as at the time Northern Ireland had successfully argued itself out of changes to British laws on sexuality. Like many Unionists trapped in the Victorian mentality of their predecessors that had engineered an economic boom for the Northern region, and trapped in the marriage of religion and politics, Ian Paisley’s party led the vanguard against any change to repressive Victorian laws, change which he believed ironically was a nationalist conspiracy to bring down the edifice of the

18

Masculinities and the Contemporary Irish Theatre

Northern state. His alignment of homosexuality with Catholic nationalism was simply an up-take of British colonial effeminization of Ireland and the irony is that the nationalist struggle in the North at that time was derided by women’s groups because of their exclusion. Gay liberation was not on the agenda of nationalists at the time since the primary equality issue was one of religion and national allegiance. Subsequently in the new political configuration since the Good Friday Agreement and since the establishment of a self-governing power-sharing assembly the politics of the social emerged in political narratives with Sinn Féin leading the way in the promotion of equality issues, while the DUP continued to propagate inflammatory nineteenth-century medicalized constructions of alternative sexualities. In the Republic, following on from the North’s legal change in 1982, the celebratory apotheosis of the decriminalization of homosexuality in 1993 had little sustainable impact on theatrical representation. Revivals of Frank McGuinness’s play Observe the Sons of Ulster Marching Toward the Somme hinted that the homosocial bonding in the play might actually be homosexual. Interestingly, a Lyric Theatre Belfast production of the same play in 2003 also played up this reading much to the dismay and anger of some Unionist ex-servicemen. The Abbey Theatre presented the first part of Tony Kushner’s Angels in America in 1995 but to near empty houses. Lesbian representation almost reached the point of erasure, from admittedly a virtually non-existent position in the first place with the emigration of the lone voice of Emma Donoghue, though the late ’noughties saw the emergence of new lesbian voices and representations. And the gay male was returned, after a few significant and positive representations, such as in Gerry Stembridge’s The Gay Detective (1993) and Frank McGuinness’s Dolly West’s Kitchen (1999), to being emasculated by an obsession with gay theatrical figures of the past, most particularly with Oscar Wilde, his works, and re-imaginings. Thus despite decriminalization theatrical representation returned to a practice of compulsory heterosexuality by default. Irish television was a little less reticent after decriminalization, using a popular drag queen from the gay club circuit Shirley Temple Bar to call its regular bingo game.17 Soap operas such as the Irish language Ros Na Rún and the Dublin urban soap Fair City used the new status of the gay man in society to write fairly positive characters not blighted by hatred or illness. But same-sex intimacy in these programmes could be contextualized within globalized popular culture since similar narratives on British television had already occurred and been transmitted into Irish homes at least a decade earlier. Ten years later, though, the annual Dublin Gay

Introduction 19

Theatre Festival expanded with increased visibility in the wider public sphere.18 One of the new subjectivities to emerge in the period in question was the non-Irish. As an isolationist country with a poor economy since its establishment and also because of the political upheaval in the North, Ireland was not the place of desire for migrants. In fact the opposite was the case as the narrative of emigration has always dominated Irish history. But the new economic boom reversed the trend and threw up another section of society for the dominant to marginalize. As Diarmaid Ferriter points out, ‘between 1995 and 2000, about 10,000 people sought asylum in Ireland, a development unprecedented in the twentieth century’.19 European laws permitted free travel within the Union to seek employment and the new member states of the EU in the former Eastern Europe fled their depressed economies in search of the rich pickings of the Celtic Tiger. The whole of Ireland altered demographically and very swiftly. The entry of Ireland economically onto the world stage meant the country was subjected to the forces of globalization. The myth-making that surrounded the Celtic Tiger economic miracle centred on Ireland’s exports (in terms of both trade and culture). The other side of the story is that Ireland became a place of desire for many people seeking to escape either economic stagnation in a post-communist context or those caught up in the maelstrom of conflict migration. While both stories dominated media representation the two were not necessarily connected as consequences of globalization. The exportation of culture, for instance, was seen as a success story, but immigration was depicted journalistically as a problem Ireland had not actually sought out for itself. While the economic migrants were white Caucasian, many of the asylum-seekers and conflict migrants came from the African continent. On top of that Ireland was suffering from a severe shortage in key service industries and the government actively sought out target employment groups in specific countries such as India and the Philippines for nursing, while at the same time permitting thousands of Chinese students to enter Ireland to study English in full knowledge that their visas entitled them to take up service jobs in shops, pubs, and restaurants that had fallen out of favour with the highly expectant Irish youth. Intolerance of the marginalized that had been suppressed by changes to legislation and by the media demolition of the Catholic Church through a succession of abuse scandals found a new outlet in the arriving migrants who had no political and little economic capital. Politicians hungry for votes in marginal seats too frequently condoned racism, and this was abetted by a lack of a clear

20

Masculinities and the Contemporary Irish Theatre

strategy to deal with integration of the new arrivals. Media obsession with the new immigrants simply fuelled the anger of the ‘underclass’ in a so-called classless society who had been left behind by the new economic miracle. The white European economic migrants also did not escape the racist taunts as their willingness to work for minimum wages meant that employers could reduce wages legitimately and still recruit staff. While Calypso and Donal O’Kelly were at the forefront of exposing the racist underbelly of Irish society, there have been few representations of other races in mainstream theatre. The white Catholic nation with its twentieth-century repertoire was not constructed for the new races and the notion of colour-blind casting remains an alien practice. Jason King points out that hardly any space in contemporary criticism has been devoted to the impact of the new arrivals on social and cultural life in Ireland, and particularly in theatre. He picks up on Patrick Lonergan’s contention that there has been little or no ‘sense of responsibility to represent the adverse effects of globalizing social processes on those who have felt them most directly, such as asylum seekers and refugees. And yet, their arrival in Ireland represents a more obvious face of globalization than the peregrinations of the Irish theatre diaspora, and should occupy a more prominent place in the emergent critique of globalization and Irish theatre that is too often preoccupied with the reception of Irish plays abroad.’20 Up until the 1990s non-white immigrants to Ireland were from the professional classes who had come on scholarships to study mostly sciences and medicine, and their integration into the Irish middle classes was assured as a result of their economic and social status. Many of the new arrivals, however, who had come from middle-class backgrounds in their home countries, were hurtled to the bottom of the class pile upon arrival and doubly marginalized because of their race. An African theatre group emerged in 2003, Arambe Productions, which began to foster the talents of young Africans in Ireland. But social activists working on race relations are swift to point out that their integration into society would take a generation or more to achieve and it is by no means certain that the theatre will be an attractive medium for the cultural expression of the new immigrants and their children. Meanwhile, on a more positive note, there has been one TD (member of parliament) of Indian origin and one African mayor of a provincial Irish town, while the Abbey Theatre presented an Arambe-commissioned idea for a reimagining of the Irish classic revival play The Playboy of the Western World by J. M. Synge in 2007, updated to contemporary Dublin with a Nigerian immigrant in the title role. This production, which

Introduction 21

will be analysed in Chapter 2, is an example of how the Irish canon can be contested in a spirit of social change and where Ireland’s own colonial missionary legacy in Africa might begin to take responsibility for the geopolitical changes in the world out of which Ireland emerged as ‘refuge’. Nevertheless, that particular production will be problematized in its inherent fetishization of its hero for his ‘manly’ qualities of strength and courage on the sports field and the battlefield. The hegemonic masculinity that is at the very heart of the Revivalist canon of the early twentieth century still gives cause for concern when contemporary productions attempt to deconstruct it by means of alternative subjectivities. The possibility of the embodiment of an Irish masculinity in anything other than white terms, set against a contemporary urban Irish white underclass shrouded in criminality, is an intervention in the genealogical construction of a national and normative masculinity. The aim of this book, then, is to recover those practices that have been left out of previous narratives, and to look beyond the middle-class preserve of the theatre for examples of positive practice and representation of masculinities that have been subordinated by hegemonic drives of dominance and by centrifugal forces within masculinities. It will, by necessity, valorize performances (both inside and outside conventional theatre) as well as performative acts in the political and wider social spheres that will inevitably have had an impact on the representation of canonical works. The historiographical time marker must also be kept porous, as processes of change socially, culturally, politically and theatrically of course are not subject to units of time. A large part of this book covers the so-called ‘Celtic Tiger era’ from 1994 to 2007 but the challenges to masculinities and their representation before, during, and after that economic marker are complex. In many ways this book is a challenge to canon formation in Ireland and it attempts to give voice and render apparent practices that have already been written out of contemporary histories. The focus on masculinities is not exclusively a study of the one gender and the pluralizing of identity is a deliberate attempt to expose how theatrical representation can challenge and contest the widely held belief of a unitary power player in the gender order. This examination of masculinities in the Irish theatre will seek to analyse the subjection of both men and women to hegemonic social, cultural, and political forces, but it will also attempt to uncover how one might resist performatively the power of patriarchy.

2 Contesting Canons

Long before the creation of the nation state of Ireland, there has been a symbolic use of masculinity both in the military contestation of colonialism as well as in the construction of a nativist cultural capital, no more so than in the theatre. The theatrical canon that emerged later at the beginning of the twentieth century has a very contested history, however. The Yeats–Gregory project of a national theatre in revisionist terms was an attempt by an Anglo-cultural elite to carve out a position for itself in an emerging national and nationalist culture. Their legacy perhaps is summed up specifically in the work of two of their popular playwrights, J. M. Synge and Sean O’Casey, both of them Protestant, though from contrasting positions on the economic and social scales. Synge offered slices of peasant cultural life in an imagined rural idyll marred by immorality, gender conflict, attempted parricide, and greed. And yet those themes that incurred the wrath of those competing for the mantel of national cultural iconicity were influenced heavily by both naturalist and symbolist concerns that carved a modernist agenda onto an emerging national theatre. Similarly O’Casey’s Dublin trilogy bowed to the influences of naturalist/symbolist Henrik Ibsen and expressionist Ernst Toller. From Synge’s The Playboy of the Western World to O’Casey’s The Plough and the Stars these now canonical plays both worked against a nationalist agenda for an unqualified and rose-tinted republican cause for blameless nativist traditions and cultures, and yet conversely, because of their modernist credentials, came to be extolled as canonical literary masterpieces. And despite the riots and protests that marred their initial reception they have enjoyed an uninterrupted theatrical shelf-life. For what characterized their performance until the early 1990s were representations that supressed their national implications in favour of their more than protean gender politics. 22

Contesting Canons 23

The Plough and the Stars’ domestic inner-city Dublin tenement and pub settings configure gender politics into binaries of hunter-hero revolutionary male fighter versus an apparently selfish female desire for self-preservation. The very public revolution is the backdrop for a very personal struggle of one woman, Nora Clitheroe, to keep her relationship and her sense of family together. Meanwhile the public sphere is littered with the pompous rhetoric of political leaders and the swaggering bravado of bar-stool revolutionaries, while around them circulates a prostitute plying her trade. And throughout the century there emerged a tradition of representation that reinforced this binary of jolly (male) drunks and happy (female) whores. The violence of the former was tempered by an innate good humour played to the gallery for a laugh, and the profession of the latter anodynely was configured as healthy and hearty, rather than the result of poverty and destitution. Playing the ‘comedy’ of male violence and female prostitution rendered the Plough harmless politically and as the century wore on it became a theatrical sign of why the country needed a revolution in the first place. Further, such performance could infer that alcoholism and prostitution were the direct result of colonial rule. Never was Fluther Good really taken to be a violent alcoholic, and the consumptive Mollser was often regarded as the weakling of a litter rather than the victim of some of the most appalling social housing conditions in Europe. It also had become common practice to completely eliminate a short scene of the play in which an unnamed Lady from Rathmines (from the then fashionable southside of the city) becomes caught up in a scene of selfish looting (hardly role-model behaviour for the otherwise ardent supporters of Irish revolutionaries). And so as the play became enshrined in the Irish theatrical canon, a parallel canonization of the representation of gender in the play became enshrined as standard practice. Looking back now with a post-sructuralist view of gender, it is hard to determine what precisely was hegemonic about the masculinities represented in the Irish theatrical canon. Synge’s stages were littered with wandering tramps while O’Casey’s urban communities were full of often ne’er-do-well and workshy men at the bottom of the social heap. Part of the make-up of the hegemonic is the social position that confers a status within competing masculinities. In Synge’s In the Shadow of the Glen, for instance, Patrick Burke is an ageing small-holder who attempts to trick his young wife into betraying her philandering and wayward desires. But while her ultimate door-slamming rejection of her husband might echo an earlier Ibsenite heroine, the final image is one of masculine solidarity as two men of differing generations ‘celebrate’ the expulsion of their fear

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Masculinities and the Contemporary Irish Theatre

of infidelity, while we are left to imagine what precisely will be the lot of Nora condemned to wandering the roads as a tramp. The premise for The Playboy of the Western World, similarly, is ineffectual parricide that fails ultimately to win out as the celebrity of the violent ‘hero’ is based on a myth; when reality returns to destroy the myth, father and son are reunited in soldarity against the fickleness of a woman’s world that attempts to tame the hero. In many senses, then, these canonical plays that feature far from hegemonic masculinities in the social sense actually strive to reassert a hegemonic position for masculinity in which the gender order is continuously asserted through land and financial captital by means often of violent enforcement. Both plays begin with apparently irrational acts that are unseen and unstaged, such as Patrick Burke pretending to be dead in order to trap his wife whom he suspects of having a young lover, and by young Christy Mahon who flees his home for striking his father and leaving him for dead in a ditch. But as the plays progress the hegemonic drives of masculinity reassert themselves through rational action and violence. For instance, Nora leaves to join a tramp who is landless, penniless, and thus the very antithesis of hegemonic. Young Christy is roped and tied by a gang of men more affronted by his bravura and lies than by him having attempted to commit murder. The reassertion of patriarchy here is presented as inevitably violent yet potentially benevolent as Christy is spared and restored to his position as son and thus to a subordinated masculinity.

Hynes’s Plough Contesting canons, as Jill Dolan reminds us, not only opens up spaces for new voices to emerge, but in theatre it permits new audiences and their voices to be heard as well: ‘A useful byproduct of the dismembering of traditional canons will be the dismembering of the generic spectator whom the dramatic canons once addressed.’1 But what happened in Irish theatre was a dismembering of the anodyne effect of ‘jog-trot naturalism’2 on audiences in the late nineteenth century by an anniversary staging of an iconic moment in Irish nationalism. The insurrection of Easter 1916 by the principal revolutionary figures, though a failure ultimately, is remembered as the moment when the nation of Ireland was proclaimed, and thus enshrined in Republican mythology. The year 1991 marked the seventy-fifth anniversary of the event and the newly appointed director of the Abbey Theatre Garry Hynes used the occasion to stamp her directorial mark on the national stage with her version of a sublime nationalist moment. The play most closely associated with the

Contesting Canons 25

actual revolutionary moment, Sean O’Casey’s The Plough and the Stars (1926), was also celebrating an anniversary of its own: its sixty-fifth year. Garry Hynes’s elevation to lead the Abbey Theatre was itself also a momentous occasion, since she was the first woman to lead the theatre since its co-founder Lady Augusta Gregory. Hynes had an admirable track record before her having founded the by-now internationally renowned Druid theatre company in Galway in 1975. Her characteristic directing style was an uncompromising and unsentimental depiction of Irish life, customs, and values that found its home in the revival of plays by J. M. Synge and the new writing of Tom Murphy. Garry Hynes’s place as director of the national theatre came swiftly on the heels of a famous political victory by an Irish woman, Mary Robinson, who was swept to the presidency of Ireland on a tidal wave of hope from the political left, women collectively, and a host of marginalized social groups. Although the position of President offered no political power, Robinson’s election was seen by many in the establishment as a direct challenge to a patrilinear succession of retiring male politicians. Despite attempts to thwart her high-visibility approach to the presidency by the incumbent government, she carved out for herself a role as champion of the marginalized, welcoming them to her official residence, and celebrating the very heterogeneity of a nation that had all but wiped out huge swathes of the non-hegemonic from the national narrative. Garry Hynes similarly met with huge resistance from a patriarchal elite both within the Abbey Theatre establishment as well as in the wider cultural sphere of critics and commentators. Her choice of debut production (The Plough and the Stars) was a marketing dream, given the anniversary politics of both the play and its featured content. But in that wider cultural sphere, revisionist critical voices were beginning to emerge that contested Sean O’Casey’s place in the contribution to the national cultural effort. Both Seamus Deane and Declan Kiberd read O’Casey’s 1916 play as a contribution to the stage Irish buffoonery that the Irish national theatre project was supposed to be contesting. Although stoutly defended by Nicholas Grene, a new generation of scholars, led by Lionel Pilkington3 and Paul Murphy,4 continue the revisionist narrative of the early canon as being an attempt to secure a prominent cultural significance for an already ruling social elite (the Ascendancy class of Yeats and Gregory). O’Casey, though, was from an altogether different social milieu than the idealist founders of the Abbey, from an impoverished lower middle class in the north Dublin inner city. But he did not live in a tenement, was not destitute, and was a self-fashioned manual worker in an attempt to authenticate working-class credentials.

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While critics and historians, whether revisionist or not, obsess on O’Casey’s questionable contribution to the nationalist agenda, Hynes’s first Abbey production of The Plough and the Stars presented an excoriating attack on social and gender politics. Rather than focusing on purely nationalist issues, she stripped the play of its sixty-five years of stereotypically comic representation that had largely saved it from the revisionists, and instead of exposing the play to further attacks from those revisionists, actually released a new and potent significance for the play in terms of the politics of gender. While Hynes’s feminist approach held up to scrutiny the motivations of the men involved in armed struggle, the vacuous rhetoric of the stage politician rang hollow in a society wracked by the social injustices of poverty and its terrible consequences, particularly on women’s health. Irish Times critic and political commentator Fintan O’Toole joined Hynes at the Abbey as her literary adviser and thus began an era of production at the national theatre of socialist and feminist revision of the Irish theatrical canon. Together with her designer Frank Conway, Hynes removed from the Abbey stage and the production history of the Plough all the comfortable familiarity that naturalism offers. Revisionists had exposed O’Casey as scopically portraying Dublin’s tenement working classes, and the Hynes/Conway matrix did not even attempt to perpetuate the myth. Instead the production opened to reveal a completely white box on top of whose proscenium was inscribed the motto of the Free State Army: ‘WE SERVE NEITHER KING NOR COUNTRY BUT IRELAND’. In addition the entire floor area of the stage was covered in a large and extremely washed-out Union Jack. The impression of the initial iconography of the first moments of the production clearly lulled nationalist opinion into a false sense of security. For, as the Union Jack receded the audience was then exposed to a representation of a far from heroic nationalist struggle. The surviving rose-tinted mythology of the historical event was here challenged by a brutal and scathing portrayal of a fractured society in which men are drunk on alcohol, violence, or their own warped sense of heroism, and Irish women are subjected to that violence as well as to the violence of the poverty (in the form of terminal illness and prostitution) that a patriarchal society has imposed upon them and for which the male revolutionaries offer no hope of change. And thus the inscription on the proscenium sat as an ironic counterpoint throughout the whole production. Much has been made by revisionist critics of O’Casey’s displacement of the central political figures in the historical event (such as Pearse and Connolly), no more so than in the second act pub scene in which the

Contesting Canons 27

locals assuage their thirst for revolution in alcohol and in the company of a prostitute. The heady mixture of alcohol and prostitution form the context within which revolutionary political rhetoric is expounded by the one iconic and unnamed figure of The Speaker. Of course, O’Casey’s context disrupts the spectacle of heroism but his Speaker is normally portrayed in shadow against the pub window thus firmly separating him from the on-stage ne’er-do-wells. Hynes, though, decided to have The Speaker embodied and placed in the middle of the audience in a contemporary suit like a modern-day Fianna Fáil politician whose image was reflected large on a drop-down on-stage mirror, overshadowing the pub scene and uncomfortably reminding us that seventy-five years on from this revolutionary moment, both the political rhetoric and the appalling social conditions of Ireland’s under-classes have barely changed. By contemporizing and embodying The Speaker, Hynes did not permit the audience to bask in the comfortable familiarity of a distanced revolution to which rose-tinted nationalist sentiment paid perennial lip-service. Instead she forced them to watch one man who looked like the rest of them narrate a political rhetoric that was ill-fitting and totally vacuous for a contemporary context. This contemporary male politician calling the men of Ireland to arms had resonances of the then Taoiseach Charles Haughey who had been implicated in gun-running activities for the IRA in defence of Northern Catholics in the late 1960s. This one directorial choice, which was uncomfortable for some in the audience, was far from being a simple comment on the vacuity of the revolutionary politics of nationalism in a contemporary context; it was a strong indictment of the failure of post-revolutionary politics to fundamendally alter the living conditions of Ireland’s most vulnerable. Hynes, thus, did not only follow O’Casey’s line and displace the central male figures of the historical event, onto which so much nationalist mythology has been hung, she also refocused audience attention on the politics of gender within armed struggle. Costume designer Consolata Boyle dressed O’Casey’s women in russet-coloured rags and shaved their heads, in an act that both marked and unmarked their gender. The semiotic reading of a shaved head in 1991 was as a marker of a violent gang culture together with resonances of the Holocaust. Caught between these signifiers Hynes’s women were anything but domestic slaves to a surrounding male-dominated revolution. One of the central relationships in the play is between Nora and Jack Clitheroe, a lower middle-class couple fallen on hard times. Jack is part of the armed struggle while Nora does everything in her power to prevent him from leaving her and risking his life. Some critics have described Nora’s pleadings

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to her husband not to fight as a ‘hysterical’5 reaction to a man’s heroic choice. Hynes, however, directed the relationship as intensely physical with both husband and wife being an equal match for the other, and directing Nora’s plea for her husband to stay as a rational argument to the point that Jack’s determination to leave for the mean streets of revolutionary Dublin appeared totally unreasonable. Similarly, Jack’s return in Act Three, wounded and shocked at the sight of his own blood, was presented as the less than heroic ideal reaction to blood sacrifice, a stark counterpoint to the rhetoric of The Speaker in the previous act. Nora’s reaction to his return similarly has been interpreted according to the on-stage male reading of it by her husband. Her pseudo-biblical reaction was played by Ingrid Craigie without any irony: ‘My Jack, my own Jack, that I thought was lost is found, that I thought was dead is alive again.’6 Set against the non-hysterical delivery by Nora, Jack’s reaction, ‘for God’s sake, Nora, don’t make a scene’, could only come across as particularly heartless, since she clearly was not making a scene. And this is one of many examples in the production where Hynes directed the politics of gender against received type, challenging sixty-five years of performance and critical tradition. Another notable example of Hynes’s challenge to received notions of gender order were to be found first and foremost in the casting of prostitute Rosie Redmond and the consumptive Mollser. The former had a performance tradition of being cast as a buxom, healthy and extremely jolly participant in her occupation. The latter has often been played by a healthy actress in no danger of imminent death. Hynes reversed all that: Rosie, played by Lorraine Pilkington, clearly was not happy with her life as a prostitute and she delivered her lines to undercut any comic reading of them. It was clear that she actually was in desperate need of the money and would have done anything other than her enforced profession, if she had had a choice. Similarly Mollser, played by Ruth O’Briain, could hardly speak her lines, given the extent of her illness and Hynes did not allow for the expediency of eliminating dead time on stage by glossing over the actual effect of her tuberculosis. The audience had to sit through the very painful attempts by Mollser to speak and be confronted very directly with the reality of poverty in a material and embodied sense. Although I am focusing on Hynes’s direction of two female characters in a book on masculinities and the Irish theatre, these two representations need to be highlighted in order to show how canonical representation of a canonical play about a revolution constructed historically in terms of the male figures of heroic action, are contested by Hynes’s representation of women. The actresses’ refusal to

Contesting Canons 29

deliver their lines as comic foil to male wit, particularly in the case of Rosie Redmond, also stands as a challenge to patriarchal stereotyping. Of all the men in the play posturing to fashion a nation through paramilitary action, Jack Clitheroe stands at the helm. He is the only one configured both in the public sphere of revolutionary action as well as in the private domestic sphere as husband to Nora. But he is also a real live man of action as opposed to the political figure (The Speaker) who calls the men of Ireland to a blood sacrifice. In Jack is compounded all the conflicting impulses of the revolutionary male caught not simply between private and public duty but also in what turns out to be a class war. As a member of the paramilitary workers’ militia, Jack has ostensibly one aim in his rifle sights: the British army occupying Ireland. But the Revolution also throws up new enemies for the militia in the form of their own people. Many of the inner city poor use the opportunity of the chaos provided by the cover of military action to go on a looting spree, setting aside the national objective for the sake of their own personal imperative: survival. This is a far cry from the heroic ideal of blood sacrifice mythologized in the words of The Speaker, and borrowed from the real-life revolutionary Proclamation of the Republic. It is also a far cry from the call to arms of the young men of Ireland by the Old Woman in Yeats’s 1902 play Kathleen Ní Houlihan. Jack Clitheroe, far from being the hard-body hero of the Revolution, refuses to kill his looting compatriots but opts to fire warning shots over their heads: ‘… bad as they are they’re Irish men an’ women’. His superior, Captain Bill Brennan retorts: ‘Irish be damned! Attackin’ and mobbin’ th’ men that are riskin’ their lives for them. If these slum lice gather at our heels again, plug one o’them, or I’ll soon shock them with a shot or two meself.’7 Here we find an example of how the self-fashioned new hegemonic masculinity of the revolutionary heroes begins to fragment before our eyes, as the patriarchal drives of hegemony seek out new subordinates not only in the form of the underclass described here as ‘slum lice’ but also in terms of Jack’s sparing of their lives. Jack is reminded by his superior of the hegemonic masculinity that is conferred on him by his status within the Citizen Army. But it is a hegemonic status with which he is not at all comfortable, especially since it demands that he subordinate other inferior masculinities to his own ‘pure’ revolutionary action. When he returns to his domestic setting this conflicted masculinity is all too patent and it is translated into the violence of inarticulacy as he struggles to make sense of a revolutionary patriarchy that demands the subordination of other masculinities including his own as husband and lover. Played by a young Patrick O’Kane in Hynes’s production, Jack was the physical epitome of

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his hegemonic fighting status but Hynes brought that fighting zeal back into the domestic setting to ensure that the relationship between him and Nora was an intensely physical one and one in which Nora, too, physically asserted her humanist values on the need to protect life, and particularly that of her husband first and foremost. Thus her violent and intensely physical treatment of Jack, ‘a hair-pulling fingernail clawing fight’,8 was one motivated by her desire to drag her husband back from the clutches of imminent death, rather than one based on a simple selfish and pathetic need, a manner in which she is so often portrayed. One of the most loved and remembered characters in the play, the drunkard Fluther Good, is worthy of mention. The character is one of the ‘slum lice’ to whom Captain Brennan might have been referring in

Figure 1 Brendan Gleeson as Fluther Good in Sean O’Casey’s The Plough and the Stars, Abbey Theatre, 1991, directed by Garry Hynes. Photograph by kind permission of Abbey Theatre Archive.

Contesting Canons 31

that, despite his rhetoric, his action is far removed from any nationalist Republican ideal. Theo Dorgan, writing in the Irish Times in defence of the production clearly spelled out how Hynes offered a radical interpretation of the role within a panoply of staged masculinites that undercut the hegemonic ideal: ‘The conventional manner of presenting this play has hinged on a soft-centered sentimentality, one which depends for its force on showing Fluther, say, as a benign, shambling decent skin, with a penchant for the oul’ jar. […] By contrast Brendan Gleeson’s Fluther is frankly an alcoholic, with the alcoholic’s frightening capacity to shift mood with sudden and brutal force.’9 Dressed in Doc Marten boots and with a shaved head Brendan Gleeson played him ‘as a raging, inarticulate brute’.10 But this interpretation clearly was seen by first critics as a problem when his ‘bull-necked crew-cut Fluther […] needs to seem more tender than boorish’.11 The latter statement by the then lead Irish Times critic David Nowlan betrays a desire for convention in interpretation and for a sentimental approach to O’Casey’s less than sentimental version of a revolutionary moment. Gleeson’s interpretation of the role was unconventional as he did not invite the audience to soften towards him. He was a frightening alcoholic and an embodiment of another of Ireland’s social ills. Conventionally he has been received by audiences sympathetically as he provides some superb claptraps in his lines that appeal to naked nationalism. One such claptrap comes at the end of the play in the presence of two British soldiers in the tenement: ‘I’d beat the two o’yous without sweatin’.’ This was no lovable drunk in stout defence of his country but a man throughout the production who terrorized all by his fearful alcoholic mood-swings. The inference was that he might well have beaten the British soldiers but that his uncontrollable rage would be misplaced in a post-revolutionary society. By not permitting a sentimental reading of the character Hynes and Gleeson exposed how a masculinity as toxic as Fluther’s should not be inappropriately tolerated by armchair nationalists prepared to forgo basic decency in their desire for a heroically masculine nation in whatever form. The portrayal of Fluther (like that of Rosie Redmond) was a rejection of a comic reading and was a political contestation of the acceptability of poverty and all its concomitant ills as a consequence of post-revolutionary independence in which a new set of Republican elites had replaced the colonial administration allowing forces of patriarchy to trample over social justice and acceptable forms of male behaviour. The controversy that raged in the press and in the letters pages of the Irish Times throughout the production’s run was fuelled by the critical establishment’s attempt to reassert itself using gender and its

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representation as the principal yardstick by which to measure the production. Hynes had not set herself an easy task since preceding her production there was a much loved and highly popular production of the same play directed by former Abbey artistic director Joe Dowling that ran in the Gaiety Theatre and on tour and was reputed to have attracted over 100,000 spectators. Dowling’s production was realistic, conventional, and occasionally sentimental that appealed to a wide catholic taste and sported all the attributes of rose-tinted representations of gender in its most benign form that had allowed O’Casey’s troublesome and less than heroic version of the 1916 Rising to endure for the rest of the century. Pre-publicity for Hynes’s national theatre debut production included a puff-piece in the Irish Times constructed around an interview with the director. Hynes clearly used this to signal how revisionist she was intending this production to be and to signal that the revisionism was to come in the form of the representation of gender: ‘Rosie has usually been portrayed as an ageing whore with a heart of gold. This is inappropriate, as O’Casey clearly wanted her to be seen as a young woman who is desperate to get a customer so that she can eat and drink.’12 This emphasis was one that was picked up by first critics, none more so than David Nowlan who fell far short of criticizing the production as a whole, erroneously labelling it expressionist and resorting instead to picking out individual performances that contrasted with a conventional interpretation. Bessie Burgess, Nowlan opined, ‘comes across strongly as the harridan, but less effectively as the heroine’. He continued with a description of Rosie Redmond as ‘more pathetic than feisty’, and Mollser as ‘purely a cipher for sickness’.13 Clearly Nowlan’s wish was for all the characters to be more sentimentally portrayed, more stereotypically anodyne in performance, which belied Hynes’s intentions as clearly laid out in the programme note by Literary Adviser Fintan O’Toole that the marginalized characters of Dublin’s inner city tenement slums might not have been as contented with their lot as bourgeois critical opinion had led us to believe. Later in the Irish Times letters debate it was suggested by playwright Hugh Leonard, who loathed the production, that Nowlan was too afraid to criticize the production proper and resorted instead to criticizing individual performances. This is interesting because much had been made by journalists of the symbolism of the first woman director of the Abbey being appointed swiftly after the election of the first woman President. Although he never criticized Hynes directly Nowlan (perhaps unwittingly) used gender and its representation as a first line of attack. The idea that somehow there was in Nowlan’s belief system an acceptable form of realism in representing

Contesting Canons 33

O’Casey’s less than heroic revolutionaries is doubly ironic when one realizes how much under attack O’Casey’s vision was in its own time by survivors and relatives of the historical event, and by subsequent revisionist critics and historians. Nowlan began his critique by lamenting the production’s supposed humourlessness: ‘There is not so much as usual to like or enjoy. Laughter seems to be encouraged by a deliberately slow pace.’ At the end of the week the Arts Editor of the same newspaper Fergus Linehan picked up on Nowlan’s viewpoint and launched an attack on the production in a more direct fashion: ‘Stripped of all its humour and warmth, it becomes not some powerful parable of poverty but a bad tempered snarl which leaves us unenlightened and unstirred.’14 The occasion for Linehan’s intervention was a production of the play by Sam Mendes at the Young Vic in London that conformed more to the establishment’s expectations. The comparison served to provide examples of traditional representation so lacking for the critics in Hynes’s production. But the opening sentence of Linehan’s article is highly revealing in the extent of the effect of Hynes’s production on the performance of the establishment that had acted as guardian of the repertoire and its traditional representation in a postindependence Republic: ‘It was a brave decision to challenge the Irish theatre establishment on its home ground (you could chip ice cubes out of the atmosphere on Tuesday’s first night).’ This demonstrates clearly that Hynes was at the vanguard of a centrifugal force in Irish theatre, emerging as she did from the independent sector and from the regional cultural powerhouse that Galway was becoming, and attacking the urban middle-class obsession with peasant plays and cutesy tenement slums and wrapping them up in a bucolic sentimentality. By stripping her stage bare and shaving her actors’ heads, Hynes tore through tradition and even went as far as offering an alternative reading to revisionist critics of O’Casey to show how his socialist politics might have challenged myths but were not necessarily anti-nationalist. The combination of Hynes’s and O’Toole’s reading of O’Casey’s play firmly highlights the pursuit of social justice, configured in a performance of injustice that is highly gendered. And while we saw how injustice is meted out in the form of appalling social conditions and their effect on women’s health, we also saw how the monolithic narrative of nationalism is a patriarchal force for the oppression of men as well as women. R. W. Connell offers some useful definitions of the pursuit of social justice that help us read through Hynes’s direction: ‘Pursuing social justice does mean pursuing uniformity […] Pursuing social justice in power relations means contesting men’s dominance

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in the state, professions and management, and ending men’s violence against women. It also means changing the institutional structures that make elite power and body-to-body violence possible in the first place.’15 In terms of Hynes’s direction, the unsexing of characters by shaving their heads, and playing against the many famous lines that have been fondly remembered as claptraps, leads to a critique of the mythologizing of a historical moment and its theatrical embodiment. Hynes’s men were no folksy urban types; she presented them as masculinities that were conflicted by multiple imperatives, such as in Jack Clitheroe, the hunter-hero resisting colonial oppression and the refusnik in a classconscious Citizen Army unprepared to sacrifice his own people for the sake of a national ideal. Another conflicted masculinity was to be found in the representation of Fluther Good, willing to defend his territory from British soldiers in rhetoric only, while ominously capable of lashing out against his own people in an alcoholic rage. The production also exposed the national ideal as a class-ridden myth used to assert control by a new elite through the rhetoric of blood sacrifice. And all the while the seemingly benign Speaker located in the midst of the audience dressed in a lounge suit spouted the mythological rhetoric of 1916 confronting the audience with the fact that contemporary society in the new Republic was founded on inequality and patriarchal oppression of both men and women.

Urban Playboy The Playboy of the Western World by J. M. Synge has been a source of division amongst the theatrical establishment and competing audiences since its first performance at the Abbey Theatre in January 1907. The now infamous ‘Playboy riots’ that accompanied the first performances centred on what was condemned by some factions as a revivalist and neo-colonialist representation of the true native and rural peasant Irish. The linkage between theatrical representation and the realities of an emerging nation was hotly contested. Who was represented was not in doubt (namely the uncorrupted ur-peasant untainted and beyond the reach of colonial rule), but how that figure was represented was a sore point. Synge’s now mythic parable of the construction and constructedness of heroism might indeed be read as a revisionist attack on the overthrow of patriarchal colonialism configured theatrically as an act of parricide. But it has also been condemned by nativist nationalists for such an exposure in its form of an ungrateful son of Ireland, Christy Mahon, whose lies and deceit lead to the deception of countryfolk

Contesting Canons 35

whose own complicity in the deceit is just as shocking and whose violence and naked desire for vengeance is galling. It is a play that falls far short of a nationalist ideal and yet it has survived despite that for the entire twentieth century and beyond. The reason for its success lies in its comic portrayal of very strong women pitted against some very hapless and feckless men. Christy’s sudden appearance in the one-set shebeen provides the country women with an idealized action hero they so painfully lack in the surrounding male company and Christy is seduced by their desires so thoroughly that he temporarily performs the role of hero for them. Read solely through the lens of gender this play is an exposure of the fantasies and realities of competing masculinities. And it is only through fantasy and desire that the baseline subordinated masculinity of the peasant farmer can be transformed into the hegemonic masculinity of action. Further, the Playboy has survived in the canon for reasons beyond its dramaturgical structure and its literary qualities because of its provision as a vehicle for the comic turns so beloved of popular audiences. Its very clear division of gender roles and its inversion of them are also the source of much of its appeal. For instance, the two leading female characters are very much women of action. Pegeen Mike may indeed be subject to her father’s ultimate control but in stage time she is very much in control of the shebeen and of the fate of her less than glorious fiancé. On the other hand, the Widow Quinn is a woman of inherited wealth and status. She owns a small-holding and although desirous of a man for sexual gratification largely appears content with her role as widow and the financial and social independence that that title and status confer. And so when Christy, the wannabe hero, appears on the scene he is torn between the two women’s affections; while Pegeen desires Christy as a potential husband and thus the conferral on her of social status, the Widow Quinn as an independent woman of means has a very clear and simple use-value for him, and that is very much subordinate to her. Indeed the Widow Quinn could easily be mistaken for the one true hegemonic masculinity present on the stage in the play. Such a reading in terms of masculinity could be seen in the 2004 Abbey Theatre production,16 in which actress Olwen Fouéré who played the role was dressed in men’s clothes (those of her character’s deceased husband) and occasionally took on the vestiges of the male body in motion. A trawl through the production history of the play at the Abbey Theatre reveals an invariable approach in design as the country cottage trope for the nation has been maintained throughout the century. This single-set representation of the heart of the nation lying at the hearth

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of peasant culture is troubled somewhat by the pub setting of Playboy although the set itself is a transformable space doubling as Pegeen’s living room as well as a public space. The collapse of the public into the private also helps transform this woman’s place in peasant society, blurring her private domestic identity with an important and socially cohesive role that confers status on her in a masculine public sphere. When Christy appears at her doorstep he first enters her public sphere but as she settles him down by the fire and makes a bed for him she domestically transforms the role through the conversion of her space. The space thus becomes a metaphor for the dialectic throughout the play of woman’s private desires versus her public performance. Christy’s appeal is rooted in his ability to operate within that dialectic, successfully negotiating a space between the two performances. Ultimately, though, this is a rough and dark pastoral depiction of an imagined urIreland for a nation that had not yet come into being. A century on, its relevance lies not in its potential metaphor for nation or its role in the construction of a native theatrical canon, but in its representation of women’s construction of masculinities. In the early twenty-first century its performance has never been as popular. The above-mentioned Abbey centenary production had a direct rival in the form of a production by the Druid Theatre company from Galway, directed by Garry Hynes, who had returned to the company she had founded after her three-year Abbey directorship. Over the course of the following two years Druid were to stage the entire body of work by Synge including the unfinished Deirdre of the Sorrows in a marketing triumph entitled DruidSynge that was to tour internationally and be recorded on DVD. It many ways Druid had earned almost ownership rights of Synge’s work having made their name and reputation with a celebrated 1975 production of the Playboy. All of their re-stagings were tough, uncompromising, and often brutal retellings of the gender fable while the 2004 re-staging clearly dispelled the myth that the play ever was a representation of nation. However, all of their productions retained a rural setting. The 2007 Abbey Theatre production, in contrast, was a radical and controversial rethinking of the play, used as a textual premise for a relocation and rewriting of it by popular novelist and Booker prize-winner Roddy Doyle, and Nigerian performer and director Bisi Adigun. But the genesis of the play was not at all with the Abbey. Bisi Adigun by the Abbey centenary year had become a national figure and the anchor for a ‘multicultural’ magazine programme on national television RTE. During 2003 he set up Arambe Productions, an African theatre company based in

Contesting Canons 37

Dublin whose remit was not only to provide performance opportunities for Africans living in Ireland but also to produce African plays for audiences in an Irish context. Their official mission statement is to ‘afford members of Ireland’s African communities the unique opportunity to express themselves through the art of theatre’.17 The name is derived from the Yoruba saying ‘ara m be to mo fe da’ (there are wonders that I want to perform) and the Swahili word ‘harambee’ (work together). The following year Adigun incorporated the company and invited celebrated Dublin author Roddy Doyle to launch it. By far its biggest success has been in reimagining plays by Irish authors but using African actors. In a repertoire of nine productions to date, arguably their most famous production was a reworking of Jimmy Murphy’s 2000 play The Kings of the Kilburn High Road (to be discussed in Chapter 6) that features a collection of men who have left a poverty-stricken Ireland to work as labourers in London. The play centres on the wake of one of their number whose body is being returned home for burial. Essentially it explores the nostalgic yearning of Irish immigrants for a lost past, and for a country and society that no longer exists. Arambe’s recasting of the Irish roles with African actors exposed how the contemporary experience of migrants in the new Ireland has resonances with their Irish counterparts abroad and the principal aim of the production was to spark and foster cross-cultural understanding in a country riven by economic disparity and racism.18 Right from the beginning of Arambe productions Adigun expressed a desire to rethink The Playboy of the Western World in the context of a globalized world, immigration, and inter-cultural understanding and he approached Doyle to co-author it with him. The original contractual relationship was between Arambe and the two authors and it was only in early 2007 that the director of the Abbey Theatre, Fiach Mac Conghail offered to produce the play as an Abbey production. Although suppressed from the media for over a year, behind the scenes the contractual relationship between Arambe, the Abbey, and the authors had fallen apart and had become the subject of much legal wrangling that at the time of writing has still not been resolved. Sadly the project’s main drive to foster inter-cultural understanding was upstaged literally by an ownership disagreement that threatened to derail the whole project. Nevertheless the Abbey production was scheduled as its Dublin Theatre Festival contribution for 2007 with both authors playing a large part in the publicity drive for the production. But the production itself caused a huge flurry of both critical and academic enquiry given the use of Synge’s title for what was essentially a new play written with the original only as a premise. Adigun and Doyle had relocated

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the play from its original County Mayo rural shebeen to a pub owned by a criminal gang master in one of West Dublin’s sprawling housing estates that had become infamous for its gangland turf wars. Whereas The Plough and Stars used inner city Dublin as its social backdrop, this new version of Synge’s classic was situated in the very place to where the inner city population had been relocated in successive policies of social engineering since independence, swapping urban deprivation for suburban isolation. The new location effectively transformed the play into a sub/urban pastoral, and the principal dramaturgical premise of the folklore inherent in tales of violent criminality supported by a local community in defiance of any kind of law was to find a new home in the suburban sprawl and in a deprived community where evasion of the law is similarly condoned by the surrounding community. The fascination with the storytelling of folkore similarly slotted well into the contemporary fascination with tabloid journalism and the present-day aspiration for celebrity even through criminal activity. Synge’s original play thus held a fascination for Dublin middle-class audiences throughout the century because it was set in a rural community of others. They were not ostensibly the ur-Irish of a new nation, but exotic others in a land beyond the Pale but with recognizably dramatic traits in the play’s presentation of the hero’s Oedipal situation (attacking his father to escape an arranged marriage with one older woman only to be tempted by another who offers to protect him from his father), and a community’s love and need for celebrity heroes, however constructed. The play has the comfortable familiarity of its stock comic tropes along gender lines, as well as dramatic action that turns on the trials of a father–son relationship. And yet it also exudes a foreignness for the middle classes in its presentation of a shockingly naïve community that was taken in by an impostor, as well as its distasteful penchant for violence in the form of lynch-mob rule. The new version by Adigun and Doyle also offered to a contemporary middle-class audience a similar dialectic of the familiar and foreign; the West Dublin pub was a recognizable location and yet for most was still a world apart from their actual lived experience. The characterizations were versions of pub drunks, violent men of action, and an over-sexed woman familiar from some of the Abbey’s celebrated repertoire, none more so than the stock presentations of The Plough and the Stars before Garry Hynes wrested it from its anodyne comic tradition. There were actual place names mentioned (such as the Blanchardstown Shopping Centre) and an iconic picture of Irish football legend Roy Keane. Thus the new version traded on a familiarity that was quasi-folkloric. The new characters

Contesting Canons 39

all retained aspects of their original rural roots; Pegeen is still running the pub and running rings around her fiancé Sean with whom she is to enter an arranged marriage (for Sean is the hapless son of a Dublin criminal matriarch). Pegeen’s father (in this version Michael James) is a gangland criminal who uses the pub as a front for less salubrious activities. He refers to his two henchmen by the colloquial diminutive versions of their names, Philly and Jimmy, to confer a subordinated status on them which they live up to happily as they are men who prefer aclohol to fighting (and the one clearly prevents the other). Meanwhile the Widow Quinn is a glamorous older woman whom the press has reported as being a suspect in the murder of her husband (in an obvious reference to a real-life husband killer known in the popular press as the Black Widow). In sum, the new version uses contemporary folklore of a glamorized criminal type in much the same way that Synge had created an amalgam of actual parricides and the folkloric retelling of them. But for some critics ‘the production’s emphasis on the alien other and celebrity culture’19 was a familiarity too far since it had ostensibly eradicated the literariness or lyricism of the Synge original. In fact the new version had replaced an imagined Hiberno-English with a recognizable Dublin working-class slang, and thus the by now famous lines were reduced often to expletives although they provided another layer of humour. By far the most radical and challenging aspect of the new version was the rethinking of the outsider who appears in this urban folkloric setting. Christy Mahon in the original may not be part of the community he enters at the beginning of the play but he is of the same class and race as the community that embraces him. In the Adigun/Doyle version Christy Mahon has been renamed Christopher Malomo who has escaped his native Nigeria via England and Northern Ireland and has ended up by mistake in a West Dublin pub. The same premise as in the original play spurs him on, namely that he has killed his father who wanted to execute an arranged marriage for him to a woman who was far from his ideal. Yet in this version he is a double outsider marked by his race from the outset: he ‘is not a desperate member of the social underclass, but an affluent, educated young Nigerian’.20 And so, unlike in the rural original, when Christy walked onto the stage as a black man he was doubly othered and there were audible intakes of breath in the audience. The audience, though, were not necessarily reacting to the surprise of a black actor appearing on stage but were revealing an anxiety for him in the particular environment that had been set up on stage, an environment and social class not renowned for its inter-cultural understanding. And when Christy’s father appeared later in the play in traditional dress, the

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shock was even greater as both his clothing and his skin colour were markers of the outsider. However familiar the gangland stereotypes may have been for the middle-class audience the innate fear of that society was translated into a fear for the safety of the African migrants. The biggest surprise for most critics was the level of tolerance the gangland criminals expressed towards the outsiders, and there were few lines that referred to his skin colour. This tolerance for some was a mark of the failure of the version to confront the reality of racism, but the production’s glide over the issue of racism actually revealed a good deal about the presentation of race instead in a post-colonial society. The race rather than racism drive of the production also challenged and troubled the construction of masculinity in a post-colonial context. The fascination of Christy, particularly for the women in the play, takes on an added signficance in the Adigun/Doyle version because of the new character’s race. This fascination, when confronted by a black body, has the hue of colonial fetishization. The first remarks about Christy’s body

Figure 2 Giles Terera as Christopher Malomo in Bisi Adigun and Roddy Doyle’s version of J. M. Synge’s The Playboy of the Western World, Abbey Theatre, 2007. Photograph: ROS KAVANAGH PHOTOGRAPHER.

Contesting Canons 41

refer momentarily to his skin colour but the women in turn (as in the original) desire to touch the body of an imagined hero. Particular emphasis is placed on what marks his body as different from the white male body, and thus his hair becomes the focus of attention. Of course Christy himself feeds into the myth of his body in both versions as he preens himself in front of a mirror, but here again he marks out his difference by referring specifically to how he maintains his hair and how he cleans his teeth. As the narrative reveals, the black male body has reached a point of crisis according to Christy as he laments the generalized perception of the ideal male body in Nigeria. Like in many traditional societies the economic and social status of the individual male uses the body as a marker so that the ideal becomes manifest in a corporeal corpulence. Christy adamantly rejects this ideal body, much preferring the slim Western model as epitomized by many highly successful African soccer stars. And here we see a clash of ideals being played out over the male body that constructs hegemonic masculinity in two contrasting forms. Of course the corpulent body need not be sexualized in a society where arranged marriages are the norm given that the attraction is economic and social, but in a Westernized society where sexuality is competitive in physical terms it is here that hard-body masculinity is prized. Christy Malomo’s body in the form of actor Giles Terera was supremely fit and slim and this provided the credibility factor for a story of parricide. It is as if only a hard-body masculinity could commit an act of murder. And in the new version he continues to fuel the hard-body myth, not in the sporting race of the original but in the beating up of a hard-man and gangland criminal who is a rival to his host’s dynasty. Thus in the original a criminal act may be the spur to the creation of a hero but that heroism is perpetuated by sporting and thus socially sanctioned prowess. In other words, the masculinity that Christy exemplifies as a runaway is a protest masculinity against the hegemonic patriarchy of economic status. But as he is lionized by his new-found community protest masculinity itself is refashioned as hegemonic not in economic but in social terms. Not so, however, in the Adigun/Doyle version, as this dialectic of masculinities is reversed. Christy starts out as hegemonic economically from the outset. Not only is his father a wealthy businessman but Christy himself has a Masters degree and is set to inherit his father’s wealth. The act of parricide that launches him into the criminal underworld is a defiant act that sets him spiralling into a form of protest masculinity. Although on-stage and in front of his new audience he is proud of his African culture, he is highly critical of the masculinity that his native culture valorizes both economically and socially. His act of protest then

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becomes the signifier of status in a Western underworld community that prizes protest masculinity configured in acts of violence.21 An alternative hegemony is established outside of the law which is premised on physical strength, the inculcation of fear in other rival masculinities, and in a series of performances by women who themselves have social status for similarly performing patriarchy. The emphasis on violence as a performance of hegemonic status is a language that Christy learns very quickly in his new-found Irish context. And this leads us back to the emplacement of this play in the canon which some read as a performance of anti-colonial resistance.22 Such a reading though, as Nicholas Grene highlights, can be over-stretched to imagine that audiences are taken through an experience of ‘heroised enthusiasm equivalent to romantic nationalism, towards the true liberation of independent self-making’.23 The represention of agrarian violence that was claimed as ‘symptomatic and generalised into a characterisation of the people as a whole’24 by the colonial administration and that was used as a charge against Synge’s representation by competing factions within nationalism is troubled by this new Nigerian Christy and by the urban professionalization of violence not for reasons of an aspirant nationalism but for personal greed and gain. The new play’s context of urban criminality that fuels the celebrity pop culture of Ireland stands opposed to claims of a nationalist narrative for the play. And the new men of a post-colonial society are exactly like the hard-body ur-Celt warriors of romantic nationalism, but with nothing to drive them but wealth and greed outside of lawful structures. These extra-legal acts of violence stand in protest against the narrative of nationalism while the nationalist Irish male retains the same hard-body signifier with a now new and anti-nationalist signified. The supremely fit body and its ability to fearlessly commit acts of violence become Christopher Malomo’s prime economic asset regardless of his race in the exclusively white society of the play. And while critics pointed out that the issue of his outsider race in this society was not addressed, the play continuously pointed out how a globalized culture of hard-body masculinity is an economic asset and prime signifier of social status in both legal contexts (such as is evidenced in the reverence shown to Roy Keane’s image as a sporting hero in institutionally sanctioned hard-body masculinity) as well as in the extra-legal context of this West Dublin criminal underworld. And so in many senses this new play does not fetishize the African body as other necessarily, but glorifies its similarity to Ireland’s own ideal image of the male body. The hard-body of the African is seamlessly embraced into this underworld’s performance of extra-legal hegemonic masculinity to the point, after some initial caution,

Contesting Canons 43

where he is allowed to entertain the notion of being suitor to Pegeen and thus an imminent relation. While this of course is highly fanciful in realistic terms, it does permit an examination of masculinity in an Irish context that is not exclusively marked by subjectivities and where we can see how competing masculinities (as embodied by Christy’s race, wealth, and physical status) are renegotiated in a new Irish context. But of course the original drive of the narrative is to expel the would-be interloper when it is discovered that his initial hard-body act is a lie. In the Adigun/Doyle version Christy’s attempt to escape his friends-turned-enemies relies on the original play in dressing him up as a woman. But in this new contemporary context the women’s clothes he puts on are highly significant: a pink velour pjyama-suit with the word ‘BITCH’ stencilled in silver on the backside. The image of the black man in pink with his new subordinated status emblazoned on his backside is a total feminization and subordination of this once hegemonic male. But in an Irish context where nationalism has configured itself within a colonial matrix, the representation of a black man feminized as well as roped and tied subsequently is a troubling representation of the Irish: no longer the feminized other, the white Irish are now configured as the patriarchal colonizers, all through the representation of the male body. At the end of the play when Christy’s father returns in traditional African dress, order is restored. As the two finally bond together in the face of being feminized and othered, they exit in a performance of their rejection of the white Western fetishization of the black male body which turns out to be a front for an innate desire to colonize it. The Irish as colonized turned colonizer is summed up in the rewriting of Pegeen’s celebrated last line from ‘Oh my grief, I’ve lost him surely. I’ve lost the only playboy of the western world’25 to a simple expletive: ‘Fuck!’ This rewriting can be read as a realization of what the new Irish have become, and at the same time a realization of how the performance of an idealized masculinity could lead them astray. In many senses this production was not such a radical departure from the traditional use of symbolic masculinity within the cultural representation of nationalism. Where this rewriting and its production differ is that it challenges the nativism inherent in nationalist discourse, presenting vestiges of hegemonic masculinity in a social class whose economic claim to it has been achieved in an illegal and thus antinational fashion. It also exposes how a globalized Ireland differs little in its construction of an idealized masculinity from its originary nativist impulse, and that invites us to suspend a rejection of racial difference and focus on a performance of sameness between black and white hardbodies and colonized/colonizer.26

3 Performing Patriarchy

As articulated previously, Ireland as a nation, like other post-colonial nations, was conceived through the metaphoric use of gender. In Ireland’s case it was conceived specifically through a series of female tropes, such as the Róisín Dubh (the Black Rose as metaphor for a nation for whom one would die), or the Aisling (a vision in the form of a woman). Both of these women-tropes were performed in popular and political song with romantic nationalist sentiment. Meanwhile in the theatre the concept of the Aisling figure indelibly linked the form to the nationalist project in Yeats’s and Lady Gregory’s 1902 play Kathleen Ní Houlihan. In the play she is embodied by a rootless Poor Old Woman who has been dispossessed of her four green fields (as an overt symbol of a colonized and specifically Irish nation with its four provinces). She appears onstage and asks the young male patriots of Ireland to forsake their families and to fight on her behalf. So if Ireland as nation was conceived as a woman metaphorically it was so in opposition to the patriarchal colonizer of Britain. The appeal to Mná na hÉireann (women of Ireland) by Mary Robinson as candidate for the presidency in 1990 was in part a call to an important constituency of voters in a historically male-dominated constitutional role and election but it was also a recognition of the role women played both metaphorically but more importantly actively in the birth and subsequent creation of the nation state. Nevertheless it was a deliberate call to replace the metaphorical in nationalist sentiment with an actual woman, and one who stood politically in support of the subjectivities that had been marginalized not by the colonizing British legislation, but by successive waves of post-colonial political administrations that had imagined a nation through policies of exclusion. Woman, for instance, as Melissa Sihra points out, was configured as indissociable from her use-value in the production of a male-dominated capitalist 44

Performing Patriarchy 45

economy (in other words as a mother of a future workforce): ‘From the 1930s on, women’s perceived primary social function as wife and mother, and the implementation of the draconian 1932 public service “marriage bar”, which prevented married women from being employed as civil servants and national school teachers, was used to limit their role and potential in public life.’1 What transpired then in effect was a new form of colonization in which, according to Anthony Bradley and Maryann Gialanella Valiulis, ‘the lives of actual Irish women were colonized by Irish men’.2 The project of constructing a nation in gendered terms meant that Ireland was already female in the cultural imaginary, in opposition to Britain as a colonizing male. But this role of woman was not an actual one, but rather a dream-vision (Aisling) of metaphor only. The reality was that the construction of the nation was in fact an overt performance of patriarchy that recolonized the people again in terms of gender and as a lived reality, not as metaphor. The principal architect of the nation who himself contributed to the armed struggle for liberation in the early part of the century, Eamon de Valera, ultimately of course performed the epitome of patriarchal roles in the political sphere. When he became Taoiseach in 1937, despite earlier assertions that everyone would be treated as equal in the new nation, he conspired with the Catholic Church hierarchy to replicate legislatively a Church-based division of social and economic roles along gendered lines that served to secure patriarchy as the ‘national’ ideology. Effectively this ideology constructed woman’s role in the state as one exclusively confined to motherhood, and made sure she was confined by legislating against divorce. His reign continued (with two interruptions) until 1959 during which time women were trapped in marriage and expected to contribute to the economy by giving birth with absolutely no right to work in the public sector or to escape when the marriage turned sour. Subsequently he was returned in two elections as Uachtaráin (President) until his retirement in 1973 but his spectre as austere patriarch haunted the country right up until the beginning of the economic boom in the 1990s. His successive economic isolationist policies based on a largely agrarian economy could not sustain its population and led to several generations being lost to emigration. When the economic boom emerged in the early to mid-1990s Ireland’s Constitution and legislation had already undergone a sea-change that was supported in the main by popular opinion. The altered demographic of Ireland as a result of the reversal of the tide of emigration among Ireland’s youth, coupled with pressure from the European Economic Community (and from 1993 the European Union) meant that the constitutional gender

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entrapment along with its premise of compulsory heterosexuality could be questioned and overturned. In 1993 after a long-running battle in the European Court of Human Rights and subsequent long-fingering of the ruling at home, the criminalization of homosexuality was repealed, and in 1996 the Family Law (Divorce) Act was passed permitting couples to divorce and remarry. In the political and social sphere of the new nation, despite a liberalization of legislation, successive generations of political leaders in the contemporary period have performed less than ideal models of patriarchy as was evidenced in the plethora of trials and tribunals exposing corruption at the highest level. This was particularly significant in the economic boom years of the 1990s when the general upbeat mood of a thriving society was able to condone tacitly much of the political scandal of personal gain. And this is one of the ironies of modern Ireland that personal profiteering by some politicians is not deemed to be anti-national despite its criminality and social immorality. This continues to be one aspect of the performance of patriarchy in its construction of the Irish male as eternally colonized so that his ability to buck legislation and get off scot-free is read as a righteous refusal to be colonized by authority. Ironic as it may be, this is a patriarchal practice that disguises itself as a colonized female other for its self-centred, goal-oriented phallocentric gain.

Offstage As far as the theatre was concerned, the problem of performing patriarchy was not without conflict as in a colonial society the arch-patriarch is a colonizer and must be demonized, whereas in a post-colonial society the patriarchal hue of the nation cannot be criticized explicitly. And this despite the aforementioned irony of performance in the political sphere that still persists in dressing itself up as a persecuted ‘female’. So the presentation of masculinity in the theatrical sphere eschewed for the most part the presentation of patriarchal masculinity as a metaphor for the nation. One of the reasons for this was the symbiosis of Catholic Church and state which created a patriarchally theocratic political system that enabled the Archbishop of Dublin, the most notorious patriarchal example being that of Archbishop John Charles McQuaid (who remained in post from 1940 to 1972), to command deference from political leaders and approval for social and constitutional issues that theatened that theocracy. And so the performance of patriarchy on a political level was played out in a competition between competing masculinities by the leaders of Church and state determining the path of a nation that had for the most part been forged through the blood sacrifice of many of the nation’s subordinated masculinities, that is

Performing Patriarchy 47

the working-class revolutionaries, despite the fact their middle-class leaders had usurped the iconic status of martyrs. The theatre never attempted to embody any of the political leaders of the new nation in any real or realistic sense. The Speaker in The Plough and the Stars is given a generic title to obviate a reading of him or a direct association of him with Pádraic Pearse. It is not surprising that that would be the case given the Abbey Theatre’s state funding and the draconian measures that were being taken by official censors of literature and the cinema. No such official censorship ever operated in Ireland, even before independence, because Ireland’s theatre never fell under the purview of the Lord Chamberlain, and in modern Ireland an official state censor of theatre was never created. However, censorship operated regardless, and usually through the Department of Justice reacting to objections from various conservative moral interest groups and embassy representatives who might object to stage interpretations of their subjects considered critical of their national (and usually foreign) policy. Censorship thus operated in a clandestine form with the film censor usually being consulted for advice. But the advice was generally taken and enormous pressure was brought to bear on theatre managements, including the leading theatres in Dublin such as the Gate and the Abbey. That pressure nearly always triumphed as the theatres did not want to run the risk of being accused of inciting a public order offence, since the Department of Justice was involved, and there is little doubt that the fear of an official and overt form of censorship might be introduced if theatre managements did not acquiesce on the occasions when pressure was brought to bear in private. The film censor during the Emergency (neutral Ireland’s term for the Second World War), Dr Richard Hayes, famously commented that there was no need for a theatre censor to operate officially as there was for cinema for reasons of age: ‘The Abbey audiences are 100 per cent adult and the cinema audiences may conceivably be as much as 80 per cent children.’ But as Donal O’Drisceoil points out, ‘class rather than age may have been the determining factor in Hayes’s differentiation’.3 Perhaps the lack of a perceived need for an official censor was based on the premise that live theatre by its very nature is home-produced and appeals to the more prosperous sections of society. With those givens, it would be perfectly reasonable to assume that the theatre producers would self-censor and that audiences would be educated enough and embraced enough in dominant ideologies that representations contesting the dominant would never be sanctioned let alone be acceptable to the theatregoing public. Not so the cinema with its imported and thus suspect ideologies that offered alternative images unfettered from the ideologies of Catholic conservatism. While theatre was seen to nurture dominant ideology, cinema was seen as a threat to it,

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in much the same way as De Valera’s economic policies had blockaded its commercial market from the corruption of global competition. A similar competitive situation was played out in the cultural sphere, notably in the theatre with Yeats struggling to assert his authority in the first decades of his national theatre project at the Abbey as witnessed in the organized disturbances in the theatre by factions of national opinion and self-interested others intent on claiming the title of national. His famous put-downs in which he declared that the Irish people had disgraced themselves again4 constituted a performance of a hegemonic masculinity that straddled Ascendancy authority in a still colonial situation and a nationalist authority in the emergent nation. Later when Yeats was courting public subsidy, political appointees to the Abbey board effectively acted as unofficial censors who could alert state authorities to upcoming productions likely to cause offence or scandal. But it was not just the Abbey that was under threat of unofficial censorship from conservative moral guardians. Those foreign influences that were being successfully suppressed in the cinema were threatening to corrupt the stages of Ireland in the 1950s. Ironically this came about as a direct result of a Tourist Board (Bord Fáilte) initiative to both celebrate Irish cultural life and to attract outside investment in the form of tourism. The project was called An Tóstal; it began in 1953 and as a national event with every conurbation from large city to tiny village expected to form An Tóstal councils to initiate a post-Easter celebratory pageant of parades, sporting, and arts events. In 1957 Brendan Smyth, an impresario who ran at the time an acting academy as well as owned the largest of Dublin’s theatres, the Olympia, proposed to Bord Fáilte a theatre festival for Dublin as part of the An Tóstal event. The very first festival featured an impressive lineup of international artists that belied any notion of an insular cultural life in Dublin at the time. Visiting companies ranged from Jean Vilar’s celebrated Théâtre National Populaire to the Royal Ballet, starring Margot Fonteyn. The Gate (with Denis Johnston’s The Old Lady Says No!) and the Abbey with Synge’s The Playboy of the Western World and O’Casey’s Juno and the Paycock, reliably produced the canon between them. But it was in a small private theatre club in Dublin’s fashionable southside and not far from the political establishment where a controversy erupted that was to have serious repercussions on theatrical life for years to come. The Pike Theatre had been established by Carolyn Swift and Alan Simpson as a cultural expression of a new modern elite, opposed to the national ideology that enshrined patriarchy as its modus vivendi. The repertoire of its tiny fifty-seat venue was a mixture of high modernism (premiering plays by Beckett and Ionesco) and a series of reviews making fun of the

Performing Patriarchy 49

shibboleths of the Irish state including the GAA, the Irish language policy of the Abbey Theatre under Ernest Blythe, as well as the more ludicrous pronouncements concerning decency by the Catholic Church elite. As Lionel Pilkington describes, ‘the Pike marked out the theatre as possessing transgressive power vital to Ireland’s modernization. Not only was the Pike unconcerned with representing national consensus, it was also opposed to it. This was an anti-national theatre with a mission.’5 With its deliberate anti-nationalist stance and liberal cultural agenda the theatre operated as a private club to secure its freedom from state intervention. However, its first contribution to the theatre festival in 1957, Tennessee Williams’s The Rose Tattoo, attracted the opprobrium of the state that effectively was to close down the theatre given the legal expenses incurred in defending the theatre’s director, Simpson. As Pilkington records from available evidence from the files of the Office of the Attorney-General, the production was targeted even before its opening by elements within the Department of Justice and advice was sought on the viability of bringing charges of indecency against the theatre. The Gardaí (police) arrived at the theatre well into the production’s run after warnings had been issued to the theatre to drop certain unspecified objectionable passages and when Simpson refused to do so he was arrested and charged with having ‘produced for gain an indecent and profane performance’.6 Many believed at the time that the profanity was the dropping of a condom (that was actually mimed in the production) since condoms were illegal. But Williams’s play that persists in its ‘comparisons between sexual orgasm and religious ecstasy’7 was wholly in the dock and not just because of the reputed appearance of a fictional condom. The case dragged on in the courts for over a year and even ended up in the Supreme Court because the Gardaí remained silent on the matter of whose instructions they were acting on when they arrested Simpson. For many this was a watershed moment in the cultural life of the new state as the patriarchal combination of Church and state were prepared to abuse their collective powers to limit legitimate cultural expression. When the case was finally dropped, Simpson’s theatre was close to collapse. His audience subscriptions dwindled tenfold and he had to resort to a fundraising appeal to pay off his debts as he had not been awarded legal costs. The Catholic hierarchy and their political puppets in government were triumphant as the closure of a theatre was a pallocentric marker of their own supremacy, but conversely the failure of the case and the embarrassment caused by the exposure of backroom machinations in the corridors of power and the political abuse of the role of the police meant that the Gardaí were reluctant to become embroiled in theatre censorship again.

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While the court case was still dragging on the Catholic authorities continued to perform their dominance and control over culture. Such was the alignment of Church and state at the time that cultural events such as An Tóstal were sanctioned by the Church in the form of an official blessing performed as a Mass. Emboldened by the closure of the Pike production the previous year, Archbishop John Charles McQuaid objected to the line-up of the 1958 Festival and refused permission for a special Votive Mass to mark the opening of the festival. The programme featured a play entitled Bloomsday which was an adaptation by Allan McClelland of James Joyce’s novel Ulysses, Sean O’Casey’s play The Drums of Father Ned, together with three of Beckett’s short plays and a reading of his radio drama All that Fall. McQuaid objected to both the Joyce and O’Casey plays (on the grounds of the blasphemous nature of their writing) and he stirred up public controversy that put enormous pressure on the An Tóstal authorities still reeling from the Pike Theatre débâcle. O’Casey would not consent to changes being made to his play and withdrew permission for it to be performed in Dublin. Three days later the An Tóstal council dropped the Ulysses adaptation and then Beckett withrew permission for his plays to be performed in protest. With all three cornerstones of the Festival now dropped the whole event had to be cancelled. The exercise of power and control by the Church was endemic in society but what was problematic for the liberal elite was that the state was so closely aligned to Church orthodoxy that cultural expression was determined by it. But in many ways the whole An Tóstal scandals of 1957 and 1958 served as a lesson to Irish theatre producers to set up shop outside of state-sanctioned structures. Brendan Smyth reinvented the festival the following year with a new name (Dublin International Theatre Festival), ditched its association with An Tóstal, moved it to the autumn, and invited Simpson and the Pike to participate. This whole experience served as a benchmark for successive generations of theatre practitioners that the role of theatre in the fabric of Irish society could well be a contestation of dominant ideologies through performance intervention, tackling patriarchal authorities of Church and state by performing outside their structures. What happened subsequently in Irish theatre can only be described as a slow sea-change, but one which led to a second revival. While the Church seemed to have held sway in Dublin, Brendan Behan was being lauded in London for his plays, The Quare Fellow and The Hostage, directed by Joan Littlewood for Theatre Workshop. The latter play was an irreverent farce on contemporary revolutionary politics and included a whole host of ‘whores and queers’ far removed from the nationalist

Performing Patriarchy 51

imaginary. Back home a new generation of playwrights emerged led by Brian Friel whose humanity and acute social conscience tackled modern Ireland’s endemic injustice on various fronts: the failure of governments to sustain a viable economy resulting in mass emigration (Philadelphia, Here I Come!, 1964), political corruption at the highest level of government (The Mundy Scheme, 1969), and the hypocrisy of society on matters of sexuality and sexual politics (The Gentle Island, 1971). While the first was a popular success in the form of social critique embedded in the internal struggle of a young man on the eve of his departure for America, the other two are much more forceful excoriating attacks on the political and moral quagmire the new Ireland had become. Friel was accompanied on this new path in writing for the stage by Tom Murphy who took much longer to be accepted as part of an emerging canon. His first play, premiered in London by Joan Littlewood in 1961, Whistle in the Dark, was a powerful examination of the self-destruction of subordinated Irish masculinities in the form of the Carney family, immigrant labourers in Coventry. It shows a violent tribal sub-culture relating to the world and to the family within by subordinating women and any masculinity conceived of as being weak. But it also clearly demonstrated how the fluidity of masculinities is socially relational and dependent on economic circumstances and social position. The historical sweep outlined in the preceding paragraphs was a performance of patriarchy that by and large kept at bay outside influences and representations that did not conform to the dominant and theocratic ideology of the state off the stage. And while the new generation of playwrights such as Friel and Murphy heralded the beginning of a new role for theatre in exposing the failure of Ireland post-colonially in a social sense, those same writers also suffered critical opprobrium for their plays that featured recognizable attacks on the state. The discourse of the critical opprobrium was realism that was used as a yardstick to measure ‘true’ representations of Ireland and the Irish people – truth, of course, being the preserve of the ideologically dominant. The extraordinary survival of the peasant myth of an idyllic ur-Ireland before colonization or resistant to colonization was one such realism that was the preserve of the first revival led by Yeats. In the latter half of the twentieth century those ‘plays peasant’ that had come under attack in their own time for being travesties of the real, were latterly being held up as examples of the real. The very fact that they belied reality made them even more convenient vessels in which to invest an imagined realism in the very beginnings of indigenous theatre. This imagined and desired ‘realism’ was nothing other than an attempt to

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assert authority over cultural representation. Given that the origins of the Revival were located firmly within representations of peasantry, it was a logical step for the successors of that representation to use it as a yardstick for a cultural ideal. And this is where and how a hegemony was established, namely in the confluence of the wide dissemination of a cultural ideal with the practices of the theatrical establishment. That there was not one single woman either writing for or directing on the stage to achieve any kind of status within the theatre in the post-1958 period (until effectively the 1970s and the emergence of the Druid Theatre Company) is testament to the patriarchal practices of a whole cultural establishment. What emerged in the 1960s was a new form of masculinity that challenged and eventually gained a hegemonic position but it was just as patriarchal as what came before. But let us not forget that the position of women in society as a whole and not just in the theatre was subject to legislative censure in a series of Acts in the 1930s that kept women out of the workplace and in the home subservient to her husband: ‘any attempt by Irish women to assert their right to equality and a life outside the home was regarded as a threat to the status quo by the dominant male political élite and something which needed to be legislated against’.8 It was only in 1973 that the public service marriage bar was repealed but it would take another generation and an economic boom that effected a labour shortage before women could achieve any kind of equality both as an economic reality and in the social imaginary. It is important to keep in mind, when reviewing some of the offstage controversies, how the theatrical establishment and inheritors of a canon and a dominant ideology performed their hegemonic status as patriarchal intervention. And thus it is worth at this point reviewing the controversy surrounding the first production by Garry Hynes at the Abbey in 1991. The early 1990s really did produce a political watershed in Ireland with the election of not only a woman as President for the first time but also a committed activist for social justice, women’s rights, and indeed human rights in general. She had also been involved closely in the campaign for the decriminalization of homosexuality that won its case at the European Court of Human Rights in 1988. The extent and significance of Mary Robinson’s victory must not be underestimated since it was a humiliating defeat for the party that had dominated Irish politics since 1932, Fianna Fáil. Media reporting of her early years as President divided very much along political lines. Some were hugely critical of her dismissal of office staff inherited from previous presidents, while others vilified the then Taoiseach Charles Haughey

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for attempting to limit her public appearances and international travel. But the international media interest in her held sway at home as she was quickly seen as a national asset in the creation of an international image of Ireland. And thus when Garry Hynes was appointed artistic director of the Abbey the politics of gender came to the fore as in no other moment in twentieth-century Irish theatre. It is rumoured that Hynes was embattled from the start in an institution run along state lines with inherited work practices that had no legitimacy in the modern theatre. It is even reported that at an early production meeting for her first show, The Plough and the Stars, a stage manager was reputed to have unearthed and supplied a bassinet from the original 1926 production. Hynes’s rejection of the bassinet of course could also be read as a rejection of a century’s tradition of performance in which the rose-tinted and anodyne representation of Irishness had become the dominant representational practice on the stage in response in part to the creation of a cultural ideal that could be endorsed by the political establishment. But Hynes’s response could also be read in gendered terms: rejecting a historical artefact as well as hegemonic representational practice was in turn a rejection of patriarchy. There is no doubt that the controversy was split along gender, age, and political lines, as is evidenced in the previous chapter. The critics of the production who voiced their opprobrium in the Irish Times were middle-aged men who were establishment icons of the arts world. For instance, Fergus Linehan in retrospect could be interpreted as having abused his position as Arts Editor to vilify Hynes’s first production. He held up an English production’s realism as a stick with which to beat Hynes, inferring that she had betrayed her nation. His reference to her taking on the ‘establishment’ on opening night at her peril was a clear shot across the bows that the rational realism of the dominant representational practice had to be preserved if she was to survive at the helm of the national theatre. Famously thereafter playwright Hugh Leonard weighed in with two letters that again used ‘rational realism’ as the yardstick with which to measure Hynes’s supposed failure. Looking back at the controversy that raged in the press it becomes abundantly clear that the attacks started with her representational practice, and widened to be an attack on her right to represent the nation culturally. In fact the rejection of both bassinet (tradition) and rational realism (hegemony) was constructed as an anti-patriotic rejection of nation. Linehan’s praise for Sam Mendes’s production in London clearly called into question Hynes’s national credentials. At no time did Linehan or Leonard refer to Hynes’s gender in their attacks but Linehan in particular clearly set her apart

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from the establishment, and this is despite the fact that she had been running an extremely successful independent theatre company since 1975 and had garnered an international reputation, as well as being the Artistic Director of the national theatre. We can clearly get a sense from these press articles that they were inferring hers was a representational practice that no man would have put on the stage. Hynes’s production was a challenge to normative traditions of representation as well as an assault on the patriarchal performance of the theatrical establishment. Throughout its history the Abbey Theatre has rarely been out of the news and in more recent times it has been the subject of another controversy concerning financial irregularites (and an enormous deficit) that was exposed during its centenary celebrations in 2004. Subsequently another controversy is worthy of note in terms of the performance of patriarchy. It occurred in 2008 during a successful artistic period for the theatre under the directorship of Fiach Mac Conghail and involved Garry Hynes again. Hynes launched an attack on the Abbey through an interview in the Irish Times for securing the rights to several of Sean O’Casey’s Dublin plays despite the fact that Hynes and her Druid theatre company had publicly declared that they were planning to mount a major retrospective of O’Casey’s work (four Dublin plays for the 1916 centenary), and in fact had approached Mac Conghail in 2006 about the possibility of presenting the four Dublin plays as a co-production. The story emerged in an interview in the Irish Times with cultural critic Fintan O’Toole who had been her literary adviser during her own tenure as Artistic Director of the Abbey. In the interview she made an attack on the privileging of the Abbey in terms of Arts Council funding despite the growth of the internationally renowned independent sector led by herself and Lynne Parker (of Rough Magic): ‘As in any other industry, anything that encourages monopoly practices is bad for the industry as a whole.’9 Despite rebuffs from Mac Conghail of the charges of gazumping Hynes, O’Toole’s follow-up article two days later more clearly charged the Abbey with patriarchal practice: ‘The Abbey has to see itself as part of a symbiotic network of relationships in which it gains from the ideas and energies of other companies and they gain from it muscle, prestige and national standing.’10 O’Toole clearly depicted the Abbey as representing a hegemonic masculinity that performs patriarchy through its refusal to engage with a much smaller independent theatre company from the country. Of course the whole purpose and raison d’être of hegemonic masculinity is not to recognize alternative masculinites as equals but to subordinate them. In the media representation of the incident, whatever the rights and wrongs of the Abbey’s position, the wider

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context of state funding of theatre provided a larger framework for the critique of the disproportionate funding of theatres run by men (Abbey and Gate) and by women (Druid and Rough Magic).

Onstage The political realities of hegemonic masculinity for the most part have been eschewed by contemporary Irish theatre in favour of performance of patriarchy configured in father–son relationships. Such has been the extent of these representations on stage that it led to critic and journalist Helen Meany famously opining: ‘I’ve seen so many father–son relationships in the Irish theatre that I think I might have had one myself.’11 The father–son relationship as metaphor for the colonial struggle in the first Revival of course was not without its problems. J. M. Synge’s representation of the phenomenon in The Playboy of the Western World (1907) features an attempted parricide while in Yeats’s Purgatory (1938) a father kills his son to prevent him succumbing to the filthy modern state that the nation had become and which fell far short of a previously constructed ideal. Yeats’s ideal Ireland was one in which a class structure of ascendancy and peasantry happily cohabit, but as Susan Shaw Sailer points out, ‘Yeats emblematized an Ireland become literally degenerate (in bloodline as well as in culture) because of the “pollution” of the state by the breakdown of class structure and the subsequent domination of the country by the Catholic peasantry and middle class.’12 Yeats was not only railing against a petit-bourgeois takeover of the country but also against a Catholic-configured modernity and thus killing the son of the play can be read as an attempt to arrest the march of the modern national. Father–son relationships permeate the stage from the second Revival onwards and form the premise of the plotlines of both Friel’s Philadelphia, Here I Come! and Murphy’s Whistle in the Dark but both embody characters who are justified dramatically and have a rationality all of their own. Further, both plays connect with the theme of emigration. Friel’s play was very much a marker for a new generation of Irish theatre in the 1960s that was hugely critical of the failure of post-colonial patriarchal society for the economic mess of the country and the failure to hold on to its youth. Murphy’s play showed the consequences of emigration on masculinity struggling to find a hegemonic status within a wider economic context that subordinated them. But later in the contemporary period something more interesting happened to the fathers as they began to dematerialize although they still haunted the stage. In Friel’s

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Chekhovian play Aristocrats, first produced at the Abbey Theatre in 1979, the patriarch is District Justice O’Donnell whose life is in decline but who never appears on stage. Set in his metaphorically decaying home (in a sense continuing Yeats’s decaying Big House in Purgatory), four of O’Donnell’s five children first congregate for the wedding of the youngest but end up staying for a funeral. First though, O’Donnell materializes as patriarch in the form of his voice that is relayed through an intercom. In many senses he has been reinfantilized as the family go about their business with the help of what is ostensibly a baby alarm to keep an ear on the father. But whenever his voice booms through the tannoy, his overly sensitive son disintegrates at the sound of his voice. In the 2004 Abbey Theatre revival (directed by Ben Barnes) Peter Hanly played O’Donnell’s son Casimir as a neurotic who performed a psychological breakdown on stage and was comforted in pietà-like pose by his sisters. Casimir is prone to false memory syndrome but largely in relation to the supposed literary luminaries who were reputed to have stayed in the house now abandoned socially and materially. But his false memory was clearly a symptom of the decay of the Catholic landed gentry and also a metaphor of the lifetime of psychological abuse he suffered at the hands of his father. It is clear through the reminiscences that Casimir O’Donnell’s psychological collapse is the end result of a family line of O’Donnells whose work and social status down the generations was in terminal decline. O’Donnell’s grandfather had been Lord Chief Justice, his father a Circuit Court judge, O’Donnell himself a District Court Judge, while Casimir is a failed solicitor now reportedly working in a sausage factory in Hamburg. If it were not for the staged trauma of the abuser and abused in this performance of patriarchy one could view it as a spectacular and comic collapse of patrilinear power. Casimir represents the end of the patriarchal line completely and Friel presents the collapse as both logical and necessary conclusion to dynastic and hereditary patriarchy. One contemporary male playwright more than any other has featured patriarchy as a major dramatic component in his plays. Stuart Carolan’s first play Defenders of the Faith, first performed in the Peacock Theatre (directed by Wilson Milam) in 2004,13 is set in a farmhouse on the South Armagh border and in IRA ‘bandit country’ in 1986, and crucially before the ‘peace process’. Carolan returns to the country cottage trope of the birth of the nation to explore patriotism in an exclusively masculine environment. The house is dominated by the loud, overbearing Father who abuses his sons with countless repeated expletives and performs a Republicanism that continues the nationalist trope of feminizing the

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British. For instance, in the opening scene the youngest son Danny is playing under the table with a pitchfork head and pretending he is the Second World War comic-stip British airforceman Biggles. The Father is incandescent that his son’s hero is British: ‘He’s a pilot in a book. In the name of Jaysus? A fucking Brit pilot. (Sighs.) And you’re the mother’s son right enough.’14 The mother of the family is no longer in the house as she has had a nervous breakdown and now stays in a psychiatric hospital. The removal of the mother from the family home causes chaos in the all-male environment with a pitchfork in the kitchen and a spoon being found out in the yard. The work and domestic implements are all mixed up as the generically titled Father (although his name is Joe) tries to keep the domestic order for which his wife was once responsible. The entire dialogue is peppered with Joe’s foul-mouthed assaults on his sons but the plot twists reveal that his Republicanism was nothing but a performance and that he was secretly a tout and responsible both for the death of one of his sons and ultimately for the nervous breakdown of his wife. Thomas, another son, on discovering his father’s secrets, kills his father and longs for the return of his mother while talking to his dead brother Shamey: ‘The mother will be back. Back where she belongs. And we’ll all be together again.’15 The colloquial use of the definite article is not accidental as it encapsulates a woman’s life, place, and role in relation to these unreconstructed men. The trauma of both the husband and sons is blamed on the collapse of the mother but in fact it is the collapse of patriarchy, as exemplified by the act of parricide and the eldest son Thomas’s mental collapse into monologue at the end of the play, that really is being critiqued. But without the presence of the mother on stage the spectacle is one of masculinities in performance, struggling for supremacy in the constant subordination of one by another. And while woman’s absence is lamented it is patriarchal masculinity alone that is visible, that is in crisis, and that is visibly suffering. Carolan continued his theme of the collapse of patriarchy with an even greater phallocentric spectacle of it in his next play The Empress of India, first performed by the Druid Theatre Company, directed by Garry Hynes in Galway 2006. The play’s premise is the failure of Hollywood actor Seamus Lamb who has returned to his sickbed, and possibly deathbed, a ‘depressive Irish actor with a tendency toward over-poetic rants’.16 His wife’s death nine years previously is blamed as the cause of the failure of his career and meanwhile his daughter Kate commits suicide on the London Underground in stage time. This also causes one of the sons, journalist Martin, to rail against Woman in upper case. In one climactic scene he transfers his sense of betrayal by his mother for dying

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to a rage against the ur-Mother of Catholicism, the Virgin Mary, while straddling an oversized statue of the Virgin. But the play focuses largely on the Freudian collapse of the actor Seamus who is being tended by Nursey (a diminutive term he uses in order to reinfantilize himself). Seamus’s treatment of his second son Matty is a typical example of toxic masculinity performed as patriarchy. Matty has returned from a selfimposed exile in New York presumably after the death of his mother but also most likely to escape the abuse of his father. He is an albino with a suspect sexuality (played effeminately and thus quite obviously gay in the first production at Druid by Tadhg Murphy). Both of these physical signs are used as excuses for Seamus to launch a verbal attack on his son that is reminiscent in some respects of the treatment meted out to Casimir in Friel’s Aristocrats. One of the greatest ironies of the premiere production was that Seán McGinley who played Seamus sported a large mane of white hair and thus was a de facto albino himself. McGinley’s dominance of the stage (as his bedridden state is clearly arbitrary and selfishly self-imposed) was a spectacle of patriarchal power whose profane dialogue at times was a comic assault on that power, and yet simultaneously served to support it even more. The absence of women in both of these plays naturally led to spectacles of phallic masculinity that, in their worship of Woman, disavow their patriarchal status. One of the most successful plays in the contemporary period depicting a relationship between father and sons is Enda Walsh’s The Walworth Farce, directed by Mikel Murfi, that was first performed by the Druid Theatre Company in Galway in 2006 and subsequently in a re-staging the following year for the Edinburgh Festival that toured to London and New York over the course of eighteen months. Interestingly Walsh relocates his three men from their native Cork city to the Walworth Road in inner city south London. These are not the economic migrants of old, forced out of Ireland to find a job; they are fleeing from a violent past and a guilty secret of the father. The entire action takes place in a three-room flat in which their days are taken up almost exclusively by performing memories of their lives in Cork. These performances have a competitive edge as the father, Dinny (played by Denis Conway) will award a trophy to the best actor (either of his two sons Blake and Sean or himself) in their ‘performances’. The father not only performs, he controls the action from his chair as he has rewired the flat’s lighting system to a control board beside him. But at several intervals during the course of the action before each cycle of the re-enactment takes place he performs a limbering-up exercise that demonstrates his association of physical prowess with the performance

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Figure 3 Denis Conway as Dinnie (seated) and Garrett Lombard as Blake in Enda Walsh’s The Walworth Farce, 2006. Photograph by Keith Pattison, courtesy of Druid Theatre Company.

of power. But that power is suspect and self-consciously performative; at several other intervals during the course of the play he stops and rubs cream onto his head, neck, and face in manic and compulsive-obsessive gestures. These gestures reveal a body in decline, a scaling of the skin, an unhealthiness that no amount of physical exercise can help. His skin condition is an outward sign of an internal psychological problem. But the cream rejuvenates him each time as he comes out of these manic moments fighting fit. These momentary signs of weakness of course could be interpreted as gaps in the spectacle of his phallocentricity that permit him after a lapse to re-emerge resplendent and his power even greater. The lapses constitute relief that permit his powerful self to be even more awe-inspiring. Mastering the moments of weakness constitutes an even greater performance of phallic prowess. The re-enactments of father and sons involve scenes from the boy’s childhood and force the sons to dress up as other family members including uncles and aunts. Some of the tales told are of the boys’ cruelty to other children and to animals, but crucially the father Dinny only plays himself. The purpose of the retelling which takes up most of their waking hours is to preserve the memory of their lives in Cork, but also crucially to misremember and to use performance as a tool to

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rewrite history and to airbrush out of it the father’s violent relationship with his wife. And thus the absent wife and mother becomes enshrined in a bucolic memory of non-enactment and non-embodiment while the extraordinary feats by her male children in the multiple roles they have to play at top speed and the extraordinary skill they have to possess in order to do so, inevitably ends up as a spectacle of phallocentric power. Thus the heroine-worship of the mother turns out to be an excuse for the perpetuation of patriarchy. One of the sons, though, is permitted to go once a day to the outside world in order to buy provisions that are in fact props for the performances to be re-enacted when he returns. The day we encounter them the youngest Sean has returned from Tesco with someone else’s shopping bag and so has the wrong props for the performance. Thus much of the humour derives from Sean’s fear of the father finding out his ineptitude and also the use of the wrong props in the ensuing enactment. Crucially though, Sean’s mistake permits the appearance of another character, that of black check-out operator Hayley who restores the shopping bag to its proper owner but also reveals her daily infatuation with the strange Irish boy. Unwittingly she enters the flat and is imprisoned by the father who then forces her at first to watch and then to participate in the bizarre performance. The incongruity of the black character playing characters in an all-white Cork family drama is sinister in the extreme because of the abusive power the father Dinny has over her as well as her sons. What started out as a farce very suddenly becomes a threatening horror story. The only way out of this entrapment is to kill the father and break the cycle of the performance of entrapment. Before Dinny falls on his elder son Blake’s knife he is able to reveal precisely who these characters think they are and why they are trapped in this infernal cycle of re-enactment in an imaginary conversation with his absent wife, Maureen: ‘A day of twists and turns and ducks and dives and terrible shocks. A story to be told, no doubt, and cast in lore. For what are we, Maureen, if we’re not our stories?’17 The truth is that the sons do not have any meaningful life outside the father’s stories, and the more terrible truth is that his wife has no story to tell except the one told by her husband, and thus no real story at all. And it is perhaps her absence that tells the biggest story of them all as the performance of Dinny’s patriarchy subordinates his sons until the end and there is an inference that his wife may only be a memory in the sense that he might have killed her before fleeing from Cork. Though this is never stated, the more significant fact is the performance of patriarchal power that not only controls the present (and Dinny’s entrapment of his sons

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in a flat) but also controls memories of the past: ‘the farce structure itself is Dinny’s construct, a virtual universe that he has created for his sons in order to indoctrinate them and force their submission’.18 The arrival of a woman from outside their closed world, let alone her race that does not fit the Cork story, is the catalyst for the cycle to end and the tragedy to ensue. Blake kills his father and in turn Sean kills Blake, in order to save Hayley. Sean then allows Hayley to leave the flat and there is a very long and poignant moment when Sean stares at the gap in the door. His hesitation raises expectations of his salvation but Walsh does not allow him to leave: Sean swiftly closes the door and bolts it. Such is his indoctrination by patriarchal authority that he is unable to break out of it and the closing moments of the play in dumb show is a retelling of the same story with the character of Hayley incorporated into it (he blackens his face with shoe polish) and the strains of ‘An Irish Lullaby’ relocate him in the bucolic Ireland of his childhood. This reinfantilization of masculinity is wrapped up in a musical index to the patriarchal parent who never lets his sons grow up. The arrested development of the son is also a major feature of Sebastian Barry’s 2002 play Hinterland, first performed as a co-production by Out of Joint, the Abbey Theatre, and the Royal National Theatre (London).19 In the contemporary period, this play evoked an inordinate amount of media interest given the striking similarities of some of the main characters in the play (and especially the leading male Johnny Silvester) to the figures of real-life politics. Much of the hype was generated by the theatre’s publicity machine focused on the Abbey Theatre’s production of a play so close to current affairs. That media interest also fuelled speculation that the real-life people whom the play was supposedly representing would take out an injunction against the production. The play’s central character, Johnny Silvester, is a now disgraced politician and former Taoiseach, at home outside Dublin struggling to cope with an ongoing state tribunal on his involvement in political corruption in the form of bribes and misuse of public money. At the same time he is facing the prospect of a personal battle with cancer. Out of his cupboard where he keeps state papers comes the ghost of Cornelius, his former right-hand man whom he betrayed, and into the cupboard he hurriedly has to place his former mistress who had heard over the radio he was gravely ill. In many ways this is the material of a contemporary political farce were it not for the uncanny resemblance of Silvester to the real-life disgraced former Taoiseach Charles Haughey, and nowhere is the link more tangible than in his use of Haughey’s most famous phrases: ‘I did the state some service.’ Audiences flocked to the theatre

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to see what other media would not show, namely the private life of the man who had led and so vaingloriously misled the nation. What they witnessed though was no tragic hero, however much the character of Silvester attempted to portray himself as a statesman. His hubris knows no bounds: ‘We were the judges of ourselves, and anyone who wasn’t in the thick of battle, with a twopenny-halfpenny country to turn into a modern state, has no right to go back through all that and say this or that was wrong. […] I made this country, whether they like it or not. They all voted for me when they thought it was to their advantage.’20 And now the country has turned its back on him and left him to suffer. He paints for himself a picture of the tragic hero left to be disembowelled by the self-righteous new generation that he spawned, and this sense of betrayal he feels is constructed as an inter-generational conflict between a father and his sons. Meanwhile, his own flesh and blood son, Jack, appears to embody metaphorically the emasculation of the inheritors of Silvester’s patriarchy. Thirty-year-old Jack has given up his life and his place in the world of work (he was a vet), to return under the family roof and patriarchal control. He wanders about the house with a Walkman permanently attached to his ears. There are numerous references to his precarious mental state and in fact his botched suicide attempt bridges Acts One and Two. He has spent time in a psychiatric hospital and is on medication. His mother diagnoses his problem as having taken on the ills and travails of his father. Interestingly the arch-progenitor in the play (in the domestic and public sphere of political life) passes on his psychosis and not his political acumen and success narrative. For the nation that Silvester has helped to build is not one of mythic nationalist trope, but one of an Ireland globalized, as Lisa Fitzpatrick remarks: ‘In both nationalist and postcolonialist mythologizing, the masculine role has to be engaged in defence of the Motherland/bride. […] Stripped of a nation, or a coherent national identity, there is nothing to defend. Silvester leads the country into a prosperity of globalization that ironically creates his son’s crisis of identity and self-destruction.’21 The reallife Charles Haughey, of course, is celebrated as chief architect of the economic conditions that engineered the twelve-year economic boom from the mid-1990s, and so is Silvester in the play. But the entry of Ireland into modernity also comes at a price: it is the loss of nationalism and sense of self. In the play it is represented by the passing on from the father to the son of nothing but mental torture and a death-wish. The tragedy presented is that Silvester constructs himself as a hero in his political life but fails to see that his inability to manage the end of his life is uncharacteristic of the hero, and that the action of a hero is

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meaningless if that hero does not have a legacy to pass on. Patriarchy, thus, is performed within the canonized national trope but here interestingly it is portrayed as a performance of failure. The spectacle of patriarch as progenitor thus ultimately collapses into toxicity as his reproduction in the form of his son is nothing but a self-subordinated masculinity on a path to self-destruction, and further, his prostate cancer takes a grip on his reproductive organs, marking the ultimate physical collapse of phallic power. In the same year that Hinterland was produced by the Abbey another play featured a patriarchal politician who murders his own offspring as a sacrifice to ‘God’ in order that his own deeds in the political sphere might retain a sanctity all of their own. Marina Carr’s play Ariel, unlike Barry’s play, did not make any attempt at approaching the verisimilitude of a well-known and real-life politician. Hers was an invention of pure fiction though set very much in the everyday realities of contemporary Ireland with huge resonances and implications for the culture of greed and selfishness that had emerged as a by-product of the economic boom. Set in her favoured Midlands topography and dialect, wealthy businessman and politician Fermoy Fitzgerald is on the brink of achieveing his ultimate goal, namely his elevation to Taoiseach (Prime Minister) after the next election. The play begins with a birthday party for his daughter Ariel who has just turned sixteen, but centre stage in the domestic scene is her father, Fermoy, who performs his patriarchy without irony and with unselfconscious hubris. Early on in the play he reveals his self-fashioned status as an alpha male on the stage of world leaders through history: ‘Dreamt last nigh I was dinin wud Alexander the Greah, Napoleon and Caesar, and we all had tiger’s feeh under the whihe linen tablecloth. Ud was brillint. And ya know thah famous portrait a Napoleon, up on hees whihe horse, the fah legs of him diggin inta the flanks, off to distriy the world? Well, I can’t stop dramin about thah picture, ony I’m the wan on the whihe horse insteada Napoleon.’22 Napoleon’s desire to conquer is read by Fermoy as a wish to destroy the world and this ‘conquer and destroy’ philosophy drives him on to sacrifice his children for the greater good of his quasi-religious project as he believes that the sacrifice of his child is the price he has to pay to justify his worldly success, and this sacrifice must be made before the ultimate worldly goal can be achieved. The play has both resonances of Old Testament thought as well as references to Greek mythology, and has been compared most closely with Euripides’s Iphigenia at Aulis. At the end of Act One Fermoy murders Ariel. He is in turn murdered by his wife, Frances, at the end of the second act which takes place ten years after Ariel’s supposedly ‘accidental’ death. The

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third act is composed around the final dénouement when the youngest daughter takes revenge on her mother for the death of her father. In the context of Carr’s oeuvre this is a familiar depiction of how women struggle to ‘engage in a traumatic and vociferous resistance to stifling codes of patriarchal authority and confinement’, but with devasting costs. Melissa Sihra goes on to elucidate: ‘Carr’s tenacious refusal to romanticise the realities of patriarchal confinement in this country is powerful and opens up a dialogue that contests the systematic abjection of women of all economic backgrounds in Irish culture and history.’23 Carr’s play elevates contemporary characters to the level of Ancient Greek and biblical myth, transporting them beyond their social roles and into territories where the construction of the divine is portrayed as a patriarchal touchstone to justify its performance on a humanity that is gendered in its subjection. Fermoy’s plan for when he becomes Taoiseach is to destroy any notion of a social conscience: ‘I swear to God I’m goin to brin in a new religion, no more guilt, no more sorrow, no more good girls and good biys, just the unstoppable blood pah a the soul.’24 In many respects he is calling for a purification of politics, ridding the country of the hypocrisy of political leaders who ruthlessly pursue political pathways for their personal gain, as Barry exposed in Hinterland, while on the other professing to possess a social conscience. What Fermoy is offering Ireland is a break from patrilinearity, a natural order of the political world, espoused by his arch-opponent for the top job Hannafin: ‘You were forged in a bloodbah, Fitzgerald, and the son allas carries the father somewhere inside of him.’25 The political lineage forged in revolution is clearly exposed by Fermoy as corrupt and corrupting while he offers the survival of the fittest that is not dependent on the actions and authority of political forefathers: ‘Laineage manes natin anymore. You’re the auld generation thah’d like to kape us in our place forever. We new wans comin up judge a man for whah he is in heeself, noh where he came from.’26 And so, while performing patriarchal authority in his domestic sphere, Fermoy ultimately sacrifices that authority: by killing his child his role as pater familias is called into question. The father of the nation is the new patriarchy to which he aspires. But Carr does not leave us with the death of Fermoy at the hands of his wife as a positive outcome or an act of resistance, for like in The Oresteia, murder breeds murder and the cycle of revenge killings continues apace. One might be tempted to read revenge as the discourse of new authorities competing for control through rational killings rather than hysterical acts of rage. But Carr invites us to witness how the performance of patriarchy through acts of revenge entrap any possibilities of contestation. Younger daughter Elaine in the final act of revenge by killing her murdering

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mother proclaims her new identity in her embodiment of her long dead brother James and her father Fermoy. Speaking to her mother before she kills her, Elaine screams: ‘Ya say ya prayed for a son to make up for James. Well, I am James. I’m James returned. And I’m me father that ya butchered to hees eyeballs. And I’m Ariel.’27 The act of revenge here is one which is performed beyond gender to expose how patriarchy is not the preserve of patrilinearity per se, but is a performance of dominance that transgresses binaries of gender, constructed in cycles of revenge. The cycle of representing the nation as Mother Ireland turned full circle at the turn of the millennium with the Druid and Royal Court Theatre co-production of Marina Carr’s play On Raftery’s Hill in 2000. At first glance we have an exact replica of Lady Gregory and Yeats’s Kathleen Ní Houlihan in setting and sets of characters (a rural farm, an imminent marriage, and a restless old woman). But as Melissa Sihra points out, Carr’s play almost one hundred years later overturned the myth of Yeats’s matrilinear myth of Mother Ireland: ‘The kitchen hearth, presented in Gregory’s and Yeats’s play as the feminized core, the womb of Ireland, is now irrevocably violated.’28 The hearth is the interior of Red Raftery’s farmhouse kitchen somewhere in the Midlands and thus at the very centre of the nation. The mother of the family is long dead while the grandmother wanders around the house in a delusional and reinfantilized state searching for a way out and a way back to her childhood. Red’s daughter Dinah has assumed the matriarchal position in the family while Red dominates and destroys all around him. The only other male in the family, Red’s son Ded, has retreated in selfimposed exile into the cowshed where he lives like an animal covered in manure and where his serious mental health problems can be contained in private. The youngest daughter, Sorrel, is the only bright hope in the play as she is betrothed to local boy Dara Mood and thus on the brink of escape from Red’s controlling influence. But while Red may dominate his family around the hearth, outside he has lost control. Where the farm should be a place of growth, new life, and nurture, Red’s farm is where dead animal carcasses lie rotting. Meanwhile Red ironically has an obsession with hunting wild hares that he believes are destroying his land. Grandmother Shalome describes how Red has been responsible for the destruction of the farm: ‘Far be it from me to say anything good about Old Raftery, but I will say this much. He kept his farm clean. You could eat your dinner off the yard if you were that way inclined. Now it’s just a river of slurry and rotten animals. The smell from these fields.’29 Red, though, has a completely different take on the situation on his farm and that concerns the patrilinear succession of the property as his son

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Ded is incapable of inheriting the farm given his psychiatric problems, as he tells his neighbour and hunting buddy Isaac: ‘Any other father’d have him in an asylum. Not me though. Whah am I to do with the farm, Isaac? Three hundred acre a the finest land this side a the Shannon and west a the Pale. And me only son and heir can’t tell nigh from day, oak from ash. He’d milk a bull and drink it in his tay and never know the differ. And I swear I seen him talkin to the corn, kissin ud and caressin ud as if ud were a golden wench swayin in the sun.’30 But it appears no different elsewhere as Dara Mood reports of a local girl digging up the corpse of her dead child who had been fathered through incest. And things are no different in the Raftery household as the play reveals. One of the most disturbing aspects of the play that made it uncomfortable to watch in its first production was the theme of incest running throughout, and enacted at one point on the stage. The youngest daughter Sorrel is the product of an incestuous relationship between Red and his eldest daughter Dinah. Red forced his son Ded to assist at the birth in the cowshed and this was the beginning of his mental decline. Dinah, though, it appears, has come to terms with the abuse which has been going on sporadically for the past eighteen years, and she has been able to adjust and accommodate. But when Red’s attentions turn to his youngest daughter at the end of Act One, the only light at the end of this cycle of incest goes out. Angered by a conversation he eavesdropped between Sorrel and her husband-to-be Dara, and fuelled by whiskey, Red rapes his daughter on the kitchen table in full view of the audience using the metaphor of skinning a hare, sadistically using a death-threat as a warning to comply with the rape. In the first production the director, Garry Hynes, stopped the action just short of the rape itself, as is indicated in the text: ‘Now Red has her down to her slip. He pauses, looks in satisfaction at his work […] He pushes her across the table, cuts the straps of her slip. Now this is how ya gut a hare. (Stabs knife in table.) Blackout.’31 Hynes, though, stretched out the blackout for what appeared to be an inordinate length of time, but it was time forced upon the audience to reflect on what they had just watched and it was time in which she did not permit the audience to ignore the horror of the dramatic action and escape to the bar. Though no rape was staged, it was one of the most chilling moments in contemporary Irish theatre that confronted its audience with the realities of a social taboo that was being played out in abuse scandals in popular media, many of them connected with the arch-patriarch of the nation, namely the Church. The second act brought even further destruction for the family. No longer a virgin, Sorrel breaks off her engagement to Dara in a very

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cruel fashion and begins to assert herself now in the house as a rival to Dinah whom we have learned is not her big sister but actually her mother. And the two rivals have now to vie for the incestuous affections of their father. Meanwhile grandmother Shalome appears in one of her night-time wanderings in Sorrel’s now stained wedding dress in a poignant metaphor of the destruction of innocence and the play ends with Red tearing off a strip of the dress to clean his gun, a final physical assertion of his patriarchal authority, configured as an abuse and act of destruction of the virgin’s dress. Far from the rape of the Old Woman’s four green fields in Gregory’s and Yeats’s Kathleen Ní Houlihan, this play does not present a metaphorical call for the young men of Ireland to overthrow and evict the oppressors. Carr presents an Irish topographical examination of the hearth and home as being violated from within, inter-generationally, that has existed for a very long time. Together with Hynes in the premiere production, audiences were forced to watch this reversal of nationalist myth-making, using the power of darkness in the blackouts to confront and disturb them, and to contest a century’s representation of the self-effeminization of Irish patriarchy, exposing its real mission of dominance and control over women and the subordination of other men. Carr’s work moved away from its Midlands setting and representations of Irishness with her play The Cordelia Dream, first performed in 2008 by the Royal Shakespeare Company at Wilton’s Music Hall in London. Nevertheless her focus on the performance of patriarchy inter-generationally within the family remained constant. Responding to the brief of writing a contemporary piece related to or inspired by the Shakespeare canon, Carr chose the relationship between Lear and his youngest daughter Cordelia as her inspiration, although her ‘daughter’ generically named Woman encapsulated also aspects of Lear’s other daughters Goneril and Regan. The play takes place in a oneroom flat inhabited by an ageing composer whose genius has deserted him, although in his mind he is conducting imaginary orchestras and completing a never-to-be-finished magnum opus. In the premiere production directed by Selina Cartmell and designed by Giles Cadle, the room appeared to be the back of a film set, the reverse of what we should be seeing with a glimpse of a more finished set off-stage. A CCTV monitor in that production was able to track the comings and goings of the outside world and help protect the generic Man from it. Only one woman ever appears and in Act One it is revealed that she is his daughter, another composer who has usurped his musical powers and genius and, according to him, has left him emasculated and

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artistically impotent. Rather than a battle of the sexes, the relationship between the two unmasks the sacrifices each had made for the sake of their respective careers and how the muse has deserted both of them. Each blames the other for the desertion of their muse, as it is only possible for one of them to be in the ascendant at any one time. The success of one talent is dependent on the destruction of the other. But while the Woman (or daughter) blames her loss of potency on the overwhelming power of patriarchy (and the Man – her father’s jealousy of her talent succeeding him), the Man rails against womankind generally. When prompted by her daughter to describe men, he replies: ‘We don’t exist. We have pianos and stools. We part with semen to procreate. We are remorseful in the afternoon. At night we disappear into women. If we’re lucky. That’s men for you. Sometimes we read a book or two and have really strong opinions. We make grand statements on art, music, poetry, the state of the country, you name it, we can pronounce on anything. And what never ceases to amaze me is, people believe us – worse, take us seriously. And somehow that’s enough, that sustains us for eighty years.’32 His self-awareness late in life reveals a knowledge of how men fool the world because the world is patriarchal and has constructed the world to let itself be fooled. Like her Shakespearian forebear, Woman is aware that her fate is inextricably enmeshed with that of her father. In the second act Carr takes the relationship into new territory, allowing the Man to be released from his one-note vision of his daughter as a dog-hearted ingrate. Here we see him in a near naked state, in pyjamas, bordering on dementia, and wearing his deceased wife’s flowery straw bonnet. The realization of who the woman is who has called to see him (his daughter again) prompts a moment of incontinence. And in the first five minutes of Act Two, Carr both feminizes and infantilizes him. Meanwhile in the premiere production, director Selina Cartmell took up the notion of the masculinizing of the woman. In Carr’s text she smokes her father’s cigar, and towards the end of the play she removes his white tie and tails for his imaginary last concert, and puts them on herself. The symbiotic inter-generational enmeshing of father and daughter (and two contrasting artistic talents) visually on the stage is a very definite swapping of gender roles. But it is also revealed that the woman and the man are no longer equal as she has taken her own life by hanging nine days previously and has returned to life to ease her father’s passing into death. One could argue that the woman’s self-sacrifice is an end-result of perpetual patriarchy, but other than the woman’s words, there is nothing visually to suggest she is a revenant. Her continuing embodiment and her deliberate masculinization of it points to possibilities of talent and genius

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untrammelled and defined by the boundaries of gender. The Man’s febrile descent into dementia and an infantilized state stands as counterpoint to a final image of Woman as righteous and natural heir. While Carr’s patriarchs remain on the stage they have been reduced to supporting roles grovelling at the feet of Woman begging for forgiveness for infidelity (in Woman and Scarecrow, 2007), or here in terminal decline, effeminized and infantilized, a host of other women writing for the Irish stage likewise have blazed a trail in their repositioning of patriarchy in performance: ‘Men do not delight, as we see them either at the point of collapse, or at the moment of their dematerialization.’33 In Stella Feehily’s Duck, lead female character Cat rejects her family in which her mother has masculinized herself and emasculated her husband and his role in the family, and goes on to reject the young patriarchs emerging in society, in favour of an uncharted journey with her best friend into the unknown in sisterhood.34 In Hilary Fannin’s Doldrum Bay (2003), the abusive and philandering patriarch is on his deathbed, represented only by the sound of a heart monitor, and then his ashes dispersed at sea.35 And in Ioanna Anderson’s Words of Advice for Young People,36 only the recorded voice of a dead patriarch (and celebrated children’s author) remains as an ironic counterpoint to his failure as a father to his daughter in real life. What all these performances of patriarchy set out to achieve is the disruption of mimesis, moving their action outside the country cottage and family home, setting their action often in the open spaces of beach (Doldrum Bay) and garden (Words of Advice) and permitting the performance of possibility beyond the bounds of lived reality. And what better way to contest patriarchy than to deconstruct and eventually eradicate its very materiality? The Mná na hÉireann are no longer mythical creatures conducive to the phallic erection of the hard-body male warrior of nationalist sentiment. While the women set out on uncertain journeys, again rootless but no longer embodying nation or nationalist mythology, the patriarchs in contemporary Irish theatre are performed as evanescent and ultimately immaterial.

4 Monologies and Masculinities

At the turn of the millennium a new breed of young male authors invested heavily in the monologue and monodrama forms to such an extent that it became a dominant theatrical trend. The fact that the vast majority of the characters in these plays were men calls into question how the dramatic form and the theatrical spectacle conjoin to offer a representation of masculinity that is at once abject and yet simultaneously spectacular. The need to speak alone (solus loquor) in contemporary society is the preserve of certain performing professions (law, education, politics, etc.) that have inherited their performative form from their social positioning as arbiters of society, and that possess a socially invested authority, based on knowledge. But the methodologies of medical authority in the nineteenth century, from Freud onwards, that pioneered empirical research in the analysis of speaking alone (psychoanalysis), provide a more private performance of self that is deconstructed as ‘sick’. Thus the private articulation of self becomes the prescriptive methodology for the healing and the re-entry into the public domain of the performance of self, that may or may not have the authority to speak alone. In both cases the ‘speaking alone’ is a privilege of the dominant, of authority, of the knowledgeable that subjects its subordinates to the passive role of listeners, who are not permitted to challenge the authority of the monologue, to interrupt it, or to subvert its authority. Speaking alone therefore is a professional performance of hegemonic authority. Nevertheless, in the theatre, since the 1970s onwards, feminism in its various forms has contested the authorial right of the monologist to perform a hegemonic and often patriarchal authority in the public sphere, by employing the monologue for the voiceless, the muted groups who traditionally have been at the margins of society, and who 70

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often have no social agency. Giving voice, and particularly a solo voice to the voiceless is not simply an auditory contestation; in the theatre the single image of the solo performer whose gender in so-called realist theatre from the latter half of the nineteenth century onwards is physically located around and about a masculine spectacle of embodiment, is a challenge and a confrontation. If we can only see a woman on the stage, men are visually erased, and only called up in the spectators’ imagination by the reconstruction of men’s position in relation to how the woman constructs them in her solo narrative. What, then, do we make of the extensive use of the monologue form by male writers in the contemporary Irish theatre? At first sight, of course, it would appear that this is a reassertion of authority over the use of the form and the performance of male authority on the Irish stage. To some extent this is a valid interpretation, since the economic circumstances of the period did not lend themselves to a necessary downsizing of publicly funded theatre companies to just the one actor. In another sense, however, these monologues do not feature hegemonic males performing authority. If anything, they are replete with socially subordinated male individuals who are performing their own abjection in a society in which they have lost their place. Further, the men represented form very much a muted group in themselves, confined to a nondiscursive and inverted self-loathing, whose alcohol-dependence both permits them to cope with their subordinated position, but ultimately causes their social self-destruction. And yet we have the quandary that spotlit on the stage they erase the embodiment of women on the stage, and reconstruct them according to their own narrative authority. In the dramatic world of the narrative construction of their own abjection they perform in a past tense, confessionally. But how does this confessed abjection of the drama relate to the theatrical display of the male body, speaking alone, visually and narratively unchallenged? If psychoanalysis teaches us that gender, and in this case, masculinity, is not an empirical (Freud) or archetypal ( Jung) given, but is representative of man’s emplacement in social relations (Lacan), the sociology of gender as articulated by R. W. Connell pushes us to think of gender ‘not fixed in advance of social interaction, but … constructed in interaction’.1 In his monograph Masculinities, Connell uses throughout an ethnomethodological approach to his empirical research on an array of men and their masculinities. Though prompted in conversation, Connell’s subjects invariably use the monologue form to tell their stories, most of whom are telling them for the very first time. Analysing these narratives, we see how men construct their masculinities in an interaction with

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others from their past ‘characters in their narratives’ as well as with the listening researcher. This ethnomethodological approach perhaps can be used as a template for the analysis of the contemporary Irish theatrical monologue, while being mindful simultaneously of the speaker’s invariable self-awareness of his performing role and thus his own conscious construction of his place in social relations in psychoanalytic terms. And that is why preference is given to the term ‘monology’ as a direct reference to the discursive method of ethnomethodological research. Monologic discourse occurs regardless of the theatrical form, whether it be in the form of a monologue drama from a single actor speaking alone, to two or more actors speaking alone in dramas where no onstage embodiment of social relations exists, or in monodramas where actors play multiple roles in a singular narrative voice. Monologies, therefore, call into question not only the sole interlocutor, but also the narcissistic impulse of monopoly and control over the construction of narrative, as well as a more medicalized interpretation of the monologist talking to himself. The issue of contemporaneity arises in the discourses of monologies as on-stage action never happens, and it is narrativized action in the past tense by a co-present and embodied monologist whose sole narrative and singular image provide for a spectacular construction of the monologist. Throughout the following analyses of plays and performances one of the most fundamental questions that will be asked is to whom is the monologist speaking? The privilege of monology assumes an agreed passivity in the listener/spectator, provided of course that the monologist is not talking to himself. And as we shall see, by the constructed evasion of the question of the listener to the monologist, the contemporary Irish plays and performances under examination here are able to further protect the masculine voice from a real-world reaction that ought to intervene in their solo pursuits. It is no accident, therefore, that one of the principal exponents of the form, Conor McPherson, stipulated that the action of his celebrated 2003 play Port Authority is ‘set in the theatre’. Setting the play deliberately in the theatre against abstract designs removes social contexts that might situate and therefore damage the spectacle of masculine narratival authority. Real-life men in a situational limbo is very much a visual statement on power, visual authority, and the male actor’s virtuosic potential. Unhinged from reality the monologists offer a display of spectacular memory, endurance, and physical control. Spotlit, they provide the only source of ocular pleasure. And regardless of their narratives of (often) hapless characters in dysfunctional social relations, spectators have nothing else to look at but the male body. So while the male characters wallow in their self-preoccupation, their inability

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to empathize with others, and barely conscious of their low self-esteem (in fact, all the attributes of the narcissistic personality), they conversely in the theatrical world present their own to-be-looked-at-ness. This, I would conjecture, stems from an erotic impulse to be desired physically in embodiment. It also marks a need for a listener to sympathize with their narratives of their actual place in the world that denies them the authority that their embodiment before us clearly demands. The focus of this chapter will primarily rest on the monologue dramas that provide a purely masculine stage although I am mindful of the use of the form by other contemporary authors, and I will refer to them as I go along. I do so in order not simply to analyse the narratival construction of the world by male characters as symptomatic of man’s place in social relations, but also to focus on the spectacle of phallic authority by analysing the all-male stage. Although some of the monologues feature just the one male on stage, the majority offer simultaneous images of two or more men, sometimes of different ages, sometimes simply of different sizes and physical characteristics. This interplay of visually competing masculinities is important in the construction of a theatrical spectrum. However, the characters never speak to each other. Isolated from each other physically, they speak out front, to us, although it is not clear what relation they have with us other than a theatrical one. Thus the main drive of the chapter will attempt to map the relationship between the narratival construction of a masculine abjection with a performance of theatrical dominance, a relationship between the socially subordinate and mute and the spectacle of embodiment and empowerment. Although the majority of this chapter will examine what happened on the stage, towards the end I will examine a narrative performance of a key player in Irish theatre throughout the contemporary period whose memoirs replicate a theatrical symbiosis of dominance and abjection. The successful American male actors-turned-monologists such as Spalding Gray and Eric Bogosian whose solo performances ranged from confessional direct address to monodramas with multiple characters have no match in Irish theatre. The new wave comedians that emerged in the 1990s are perhaps their Irish successors, such as Tommy Tiernan, Ed Byrne, and Dara O’Briain, all of whom speak as themselves and develop a cult of the personality, while excoriating the distorted values of Irish society both amusingly and shockingly. In the theatre no such performer has played as himself. The father of modern Irish monology is Brian Friel. The first part of his 1967 play Lovers frames the central hillside conversation of two young lovers, with two narrative reports positioning the action as a flashback of memory while the on-stage

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memory is just that, a memory of action. But it was in his celebrated 1979 play Faith Healer that he set the template for the wave of new writing in a similar form that was to come over a decade later. In it, Friel presents four stand-alone monologues, the first and last of which are by faith healer Francis Hardy in which he ponders over his gift, while the middle two are told by his wife Grace and manager Teddy. None of the actors appears on stage at the same time but each in turn refers to the same events, each version differing from the last, and offering audiences the theatrical game of piecing together a throughline of narrative truth. In his 1994 play, Molly Sweeney, however, three actors remain on stage throughout, all visible in a play about sight. The three characters are Molly, her husband Frank and her surgeon Mr Rice and the monologues detail from three different perspectives Molly’s journey from blindness to partial sight. Controlled by exegetic illumination in most productions, these monologues hold our interest in the points of divergence between them, in a world where meaning is unstable. Both of these forms of the monologue play, the separate display of the singular actor in succession, and the on-stage visual complementarity of all, act as templates for the more contemporary work by the new male writers. In the first form there is still a personal theatrical relationship between solo performer and an audience who has no other embodied competition in stage time to disrupt the relationship between actor and spectator/listener. In the latter form the co-presence of other actor/ characters and the divergent monologues, though dimly illuminated when not speaking in some productions, are visual reminders of how social relations determine the self. As much as Friel’s templates are useful comparisons from the point of view of form, they are not concerned with the relationship between form and the construction or manifestation of masculinities per se. Nevertheless, what emerged in the theatre in the 1990s reconfigured formally the use of monology on the stage to the point where, as Patrick Lonergan has remarked, ‘to speak of the Irish monologue as a distinctive style is problematic’.2 What did emerge was a mixture of narratival realism set against non-real and purely theatrical backdrops, as well as a highly self-conscious and unrealistic set of discourses that shifted the emphasis away from theatrical communication to dramatic invention, and shifted the centre of power away from a director’s vision of the world to a direct link between playwrightstoryteller and his actor-interpreter. The fact that all the practitioners involved were men necessarily pushes the focus of any analysis onto issues such as discourse, form, and the emplacement of self within social relations.

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The storyteller tradition in Irish culture is legendary. The seanchaí in traditional culture was an itinerant storyteller whose one-man performance would entertain privately in homes to which perhaps neighbours would be invited. It was the principal form of dissemination of myth and legend in which fact and fiction were meaningless terms and in which both the real and the magical would coalesce. In essence these performers were the purveyors of information in pre-literate culture who would wrap up their tales into the form of a fable. A seanchaí then was a ‘homo fabulator’, a creator of fables whose art was not simply the story but an art of the telling of the story. The inheritor and champion of this tradition in the contemporary theatre is Conor McPherson whose early plays were all written as monologues and whose later plays use monologue within a dialogic dramatic structure in order to create suspense, and it is a suspense which Peter Lenz describes as being created ‘not through action but through a traditional power of narrative’.3 All of McPherson’s characters have gone through some past horrific experience that they relate in stage time. That has the effect, in some instances, of atonement, and in others, a shamanic reordering of the chaos of their lives. As Scott T. Cummings relates, the narration of a fable by McPherson’s characters has multiple intentions: ‘It can be a plea for sympathy, an act of expiation, an affirmation of sanity, an effort to conquer or seduce, or a confession. In each case, a past personal ordeal is converted into a kind of present public ordeal. That is, a previous test of character, one which often reflects unfavourably on the speaker, becomes the basis for a story which, however fantastic, through the symbiosis of telling and listening redeems the speaker.’4 The theatrical storytelling then becomes a device for the therapeutic healing of his characters and their social status is crucial to an understanding of their need to speak. Many of his characters come from working-class or lower middle-class North Dublin and some have the aspirational tendencies of their partners or peers to rise to the upper middle classes thrust upon them. Some go through life unaware of their own position within it, inheriting as they go an incommunicability of their own fears, a difficulty in forming relationships, and an obvious recourse to alcohol. Indeed from what we know about their lives it is difficult to imagine them in real life ever finding a voice, or if they were to find that voice it would only be as the result of alcoholic lubrication in some pub tale of perhaps invented exploits. And therein lies the crux of the problem of masculine identity for McPherson’s working-class males in Irish society whose economic boom barely impacted on their lives. While they may all have had no fear of unemployment, the enforced drudgery of their

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social status has left them searching for a meaning. And yet at the same time they long to talk, to explain, to narrate, and at the same time to show their prowess in the articulation of their tale. These are no monosyllabic men on the psychiatrist’s chair, but men who have inverted their roles in the private and public sphere, remaining silent and undemonstrative with their loved ones, and performing their stories in the very public space of a theatre. Their tales constitute their existence and it is in those tales that their social relations are called into question. Therefore narrative is a powerful form with which to contest the emasculation they have experienced socially, regardless of how fanciful they dress up their life stories into fables. The first three plays by Conor McPherson were all monologues rather than monodramas, and were all directed by himself. In his Author’s Note to the collected edition of these three plays, McPherson demonstrates a mistrust of theatricality, and a determination that theatre should empower his narrative and not reinvent it: ‘These plays are set “in a theatre”. Why mess about? The character is on stage, perfectly aware that he is talking to a group of people. […] The temptation may be to launch into a one man “performance”, to “act things out”. But such a performance will never be as interesting as one where the actor trusts the story to do the work.’5 Here he betrays his desire for control; the actor must ‘trust’ his text and not ‘act out’. The play is not set anywhere but in a theatre and thus there is no embodied fictional world than the one narrated in the plays. One could also argue that the rejection of an embodied fictionality is a rejection of realism as a form. His characters talk directly to spectators/listeners without a medium; spectators are not asked to suspend disbelief, but simply to piece together information provided by the text that is all powerful as it conveys action, setting, and psychology. And what the audience watches is the bravura skill of the actor in being able to narrate the story and speak to them as individuals in a personal experience with the actor. Patrick Lonergan makes an important and interesting suggestion as to the use of the monologue form: ‘such characters often perform in monologue because they cannot credibly be represented in naturalistic encounters with others’.6 Nevertheless McPherson’s much later play The Seafarer (2007) finds a contextual naturalism for the socially marginalized that is also able to contain monologue not as a form but as a theatrical device. However, Lonergan’s reading of the early work points out that the dramatic functioning of these texts is the disjuncture between the tale told and the telling of it. Embodying or acting out negates the fable as to act it out is to make it real. Keeping action within a fable is to allow

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the fable greater potential for myth-making and questioning of reality. However, at the end of all the plays the socially relational masculinity is represented by one or more males trapped in spotlights as symbolic of their social relations; as Lonergan points out, ‘they are “talking to themselves” because no one else is listening to them’.7 R. W. Connell’s structuralist approach to the analysis of masculinities needs considerable attention while analysing these monologue dramas as there are competing sets of masculinities, both narrated and embodied, at play here. Connell’s useful tripartite categorizations deconstruct a singular masculinity into the hegemonic, the subordinated, and the oppositional. Through his ‘life history’ approach to the analysis of his masculine subjects he allows them to articulate masculinities for themselves. In all of the plays under scrutiny in this chapter is it extremely easy to identify those categorizations at play, although the characters in the dramas are not always aware of which category they fall into and indeed some use their narratives to chart a transition from one type of masculinity to another. Similarly the male characters often contradict themselves in terms of their masculinities and occasionally, when they come close to revealing emotion, the application of a structuralist approach to them makes no sense. Structuralist analysis, while useful for understanding life histories that articulate a man’s sense of his own masculinity, invariably focuses on action, on the male as agent in social interaction. Social relations of masculinities are thus constructed through the competing impulses of masculine agencies. But what of feeling, of emotion? In other words, what about the disjuncture between what men do and what men feel about what they are doing? Although as agents men might conform to a specific type of masculinity, their emotional response to their performance in that particular identity in a structuralist analysis has little or no room to be explored.

Non-negotiable masculinities It is impossible to use Connell’s structurated approach to masculinities while analysing contemporary Irish monologue drama, and tracing a line from the hegemonic, to the subordinated through to the oppositional or protest. In fact there are very few representations of the truly hegemonic in the first place, no more so than in the work of Mark O’Rowe. His one and only all-male monologue drama, Howie the Rookie, offers a useful starting point for analysis as it is set in a masculine environment of ardently fixed identities that are not up for negotiation. First performed at the Bush Theatre London (directed by Mike Bradwell) in 1999, it subsequently

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toured for several years and was revived in 2006 with the same cast, directed by Jimmy Fay at the Peacock Theatre Dublin. The play is set in the North Dublin criminal underworld and owes much to an Irishman’s reading of Hollywood crime fiction. It features two characters, the Howie Lee, and the Rookie Lee, who in two distinctly separate monologues tell of one incident in their lives from their own perspective and how it ended in various degrees of tragedy for both. The eponymous Lees are not related and apart from a shared name their characters are totally different. The Rookie is known by all, and crucially by himself, to be good looking and attractive to women and women appear to like him, while his namesake the Howie Lee has little success with women and in fact has constructed sex as a purely biological impulse. Further he makes some extremely derogatory remarks about the women in his life, such as his mother’s bad breath and worse dress sense, and about Avalanche, his hard-man friend Peaches’ sister, who is extremely overweight but is the only woman interested in him. Meanwhile the Rookie uses his hard-man masculinity less as a biological need and more instrumentally as a means to other ends that involve social relations with other men. They both have a gay friend called Ollie but they distance themselves from him and his sexuality. They may know that he is gay but they do not know what that is, simply that it is something subordinated and ‘not them’. For the Howie, Ollie’s ease with women is something of wonder but more crucially he uses Ollie to engage with the women he fancies because of his own low self-esteem with women. The Howie has a plethora of ne’er-do-well friends, although he narrates his social relations as being controlled by a series of acts of revenge for wrongs committed on them. Meanwhile, the Rookie has no friends at all and he is well aware of it,8 and this is one of the reasons why, despite his good looks and charm with women, he falls victim continually to acts of revenge from other men. Although the two men use the same stage space, they do not share it, but the Howie’s narrative depicts a set of relations between men that are constructed around assaultive violence. The Rookie Lee takes up his own version of the story but refracts the assaultive violence with the occasional moment of intimacy. In a spot of bother with the hoodlum the Ladyboy, and the brother of a woman he had sex with simply to wheedle money out of her, the Howie offers him assistance that the Rookie narratively constructs as tenderness. He is first able to help him with a cream for his scabies itch but there is something more at play: ‘Then he reaches out an’ touches me bruised eye. Gently. Gently. Not gay, like, just … And then he puts his hand once through me hair, like, that, starin’ at me

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like he’s thinkin’ ’bout somethin’ else.’9 The two Lees inhabit a world in which any sign of tenderness between men is interpreted as effeminate and therefore unmasculine. The total elimination of tenderness between men is used as an instrumental bonding device that shores up a form of masculinity that the characters in their own social milieu view as dominant, though in the social underclass, it is far from being hegemonic. And it is in this subordinated class that these young men go about their lives in opposition to society’s hegemonic drives, constantly conscious of their need to engage in acts of instrumental violence as a visible performance of their masculinity. Though powerless socially they perform their masculinity in a way that achieves for them social status. Ultimately in their narratives that performance has disastrous consequences: the Howie’s selfishness leads inadvertently to the death of his younger brother, while his selflessness in defence of his friend the Rookie leads to his own death. While O’Rowe’s two men may lack social power which leads them to a life of crime motivated to a large extent by the drives of their

Figure 4 Karl Shiels as the Howie Lee and Aidan Kelly as the Rookie Lee, Peacock Theatre, 2006. Photograph: ROS KAVANAGH PHOTOGRAPHER.

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masculinity, nevertheless, if one analyses these monologues as life histories then a more complex reading of these two male characters can be achieved. The narratives do not speak about the other more successful world. Their world is exclusively insular, and thus any action that takes place within it is not at all motivated by opposition or protest against social status, as a middle-class audience might interpret it. Instead, driven by their construction of themselves in the masculine order, they perform acts of subordination continually, either of gay men, women, or of other men who have wronged them. Linguistically O’Rowe further shores up their masculine sense of self by often omitting pronouns. The disavowal of action by not using ‘I’ constructs the men’s action not as a story, but as a performance, in a past tense that is alive and in the present setting of the theatre. And writing in short snatches of description he creates a fast-action whirlwind of a set of actions that move from one to the other without intervention of a narrative sense of feeling. But once the Rookie in the second monologue begins to join forces with the Howie the narrative begins to explore sense and feeling without disparagement. Although the moment of tenderness cited above is brief and swiftly moves on to another action, it is to an action that the Rookie performs that he would not have done without the Howie, namely rubbing his body all over with cream to stop the scabies itch. The Howie’s connection with the Rookie is thus physicalized and can be read as one which is instrumentally ameliorative. The stylized and lyrical snatches of action stop for this prose-like recounting of a moment of one man’s life history in which an emotional life flickers. When the play was first performed in 1999 the two actors Karl Shiels and Aidan Kelly were close in age to the characters they were performing and their interpretation clearly followed along the lines of the machismo espoused in the text. When the two actors reprised their performances seven years later, they had grown away from what they had originally embodied and thus interestingly there opened up a disjuncture between the now much older spectacle of the male body and the narrativized action of young men engaged in assaultive violence. And while the narratives swing between past and present tenses, the past tense was pushed further back in memory by the embodiment of the now older actors thus distancing the present theatrical spectacle of masculinity from actions they were supposed to have performed in a past life. In the same way as the characters achieve a certain hegemonic status, though socially subordinated, through oppositional action, similarly the remounted production negotiated a sense of masculinity between a hard-body masculinity in the narrative, and a more distanced

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and introspective telling of the story that permitted the life history to be of men who were no longer in the same physical and emotional place of the story they were recounting. Instead the production offered a negotiated nostalgia for a remembered past that was at odds at times with the hard-body narrativized action and much closer to the emotional rather than the social relations between men.

Negotiated masculinities All of the men in the monologue plays of Conor McPherson are from the lower middle or upper working classes of North Dublin, for whom the aspiration of self-betterment is a given. A young man’s trajectory in McPherson’s world is mapped out for him from birth, namely work, marriage, and parenthood, and throughout there is an expectation of compulsory heterosexuality. In his first play, Rum and Vodka,10 the protagonist fulfils every element of the trajectory when he reveals how it all went wrong for him. In a series of confessions he reveals the slippage between an understanding of a rigidly defined masculine order in terms of his place in the domestic sphere and the workplace and his seemingly innate inability to find his place satisfactorily within that order. He begins first with his status as a married man with two young daughters, a mortgage, and a secure job. But his entry into that defined masculine order was more accidental than desired. His marriage is the result of the unexpected pregnancy of a woman with whom he was having an affair while still dating his girlfriend whom his family adored. He does not present himself as a sexual predator at all; in fact he constructs a world in which he lets things happen to him rather than him deliberately and actively pursuing goals and conquests. This self-conscious state of abjection becomes for him a modus vivendi, and even his subsequent two-year period in which he entered the masculine order of the adult world (as worker, husband, and father) he found within it a freedom. His sense of freedom though is one in which he discovers a hegemonic status of his own which allows him to contest the construction of his life by others as ‘one big sordid detail’.11 This new-found hegemonic status of the protagonist is not a mirage by any means but a negotiated masculinity. He talks proudly of his two children, and of his wife’s insatiable sexuality (to which he is more than a match). However, in the workplace he is a simple clerk, who is positioned at the bottom of the pecking order, and since the office work does not inspire him he has no desire to move up the office ranks. Ironically he is working for Dublin Corporation’s Voting Registration office which collects

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data on the enfranchisement and potential empowerment of Dublin’s citizens. As an adult citizen himself he feels far from empowered. The reason for this is a growing sense of his own arrested development. Though he is proud of his achievements, further development is a mirage for him and he responds through a desire to be sixteen again.12 This desire to return to being a teenager is a desire for irresponsibility, to be allowed not to participate in the performance of masculinity in which his own position he knows will only ever be subordinated. By longing to be sixteen again he is silently wishing to contest his compulsory entry into adult masculinity. This impulse to regress drives him to alcoholism, which both restores his confidence to perform a less subordinated form of masculinity, but in reality leads him into a series of performances of protest masculinity. The ultimate act of protest comes in the workplace. In an irrational moment fuelled by post-alcohol dehydration he contests his surbordinated position, made doubly ironic because he is subordinate to an office superior he perceives as physically inferior with no fashion sense. He throws his computer out of the office window and it lands on his superior’s car. And thus he sets off on his adventure through the streets of Dublin guided by the pubs as landmarks. The journey he describes falls between further haplessness and an increasingly subordinated position within masculinity (such as when he is attacked physically in a supermarket by his wife when she discovers he has spent all his money), to an emboldened belief that the cure for his malaise is to be found in other women. Throughout this picaresque narrative journey, McPherson’s anti-hero blames others: ‘I think I’d have to say that my drinking or habitual drinking is due to the two men I work with’,13 and of a woman he meets at a late-night concert he says, ‘On the way out she squeezed my hand and smiled at me. She was curing my life.’14 At that same concert he is told of a cure for the depression into which he is sinking because of the kind of alcohol he was drinking. The combination of rum and vodka is presented to him as another ‘cure’, and it is in pursuit of this cure that he becomes emboldened in his sense of his own masculinity to construct himself as hegemonic and to subordinate others: ‘I got a rum and vodka at the bar after pushing about for ten minutes with housewifes and queers.’15 What has happened to him is a shift from negotiating a space for himself within the public sphere to becoming engaged in acts of protest against the masculine order that subordinates him and helps him construct a new masculine identity by subordinating others. He drinks away the family wage that is a prized attribute of a negotiated hegemony with lower-earning socioeconomic groups and since this family wage forms very much the structure on which gender relations exist in his domestic world, his subordination

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of women as housewives comes as no surprise. And similarly all around him are the ‘queers’, or men who do not construct women as objects of sexual desire, who are similarly subordinated in his drive to fully conflate hegemony with heterosexuality. For what we come to understand as we experience his life history is that his protest against his life stems from an awareness that to be hegemonic in any sense, negotiated or not, is to perform a masculinity that is complicit with it, regardless of whether one’s status confers any great degree of the hegemonic. And so with this perhaps subconscious awareness of his masculinity being complicit rather than hegemonic he embarks on a journey that rejects domestic patriarchy in favour of sexual adventuring, his home for the pub, and a low-expertise workplace for an alcohol-fuelled environment where his drinking prowess, social skills, and general pontifications on all subjects are revered. In the second part of the play, having met the ‘cure of his life’, Myfanwy, he is introduced to a whole new social class on Dublin’s southside. The new ‘couple’ drop by Myfanwy’s brother’s house in Ranelagh to find new clothes for him only to discover that her brother’s wealth is seemingly limitless and that he is in Pakistan writing a history textbook. Meanwhile, one of Myfanwy’s friends, Rupert, is at acting school and writing a film script. All of the people he encounters have aspirations, are in positions or aspiring to positions of both wealth, but more importantly, creativity and self-fulfilment. But McPherson’s anti-hero reads this only as a context within which he is further subordinated: ‘I knew I was as intelligent as these fuckers. But I just didn’t seem to have any opinions. I was embarrassed sitting there.’16 Having sponged off Myfanwy in an impecunious state for several days, he finally stoops to robbing her after a fight with another man and upon discovering that she has betrayed him for Rupert. And so the journey ends up back in Raheny in North Dublin where he realizes that his own story is one of many similar stories throughout the estate on which he lives. In a chip-shop he overhears another man fear the return to his wife after a night’s drinking all the while clutching his young daughter’s hand who had presumably been dragged around the pubs with him. He finally ends up silently on the floor of his daughters’ bedroom listening to them breathing in their white cotton pyjamas which brings him to his final and current state of despair: ‘I couldn’t bear it.’17 Throughout his narrative he tries to justify his actions, with his very self-conscious tales of humorous action which further reveal his emasculation in the social sphere (such as when he dresses in Myfanwy’s pink clothes to go to the pub and assuage his thirst as his own clothes are in the washing machine). Here we listen to a moment in which he

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was prepared to feminize and ultimately emasculate himself to satisfy a compulsion. Notably though we only have the image of the emasculated male; not one word of mockery of the image from those who must have witnessed it makes its way into the narrative. But these are moments that construct him as hopelessly and haplessly socially subordinate, but in the telling of them and in the theatre they come across as moments of narratival triumph. Setting himself up in the narrative in a series of performances of his own abjection has a similar motivation to the tales of his sexual exploits that are far from conventional. What is interesting here is that he confronts the self-justification of his own sometimes irrational behaviour with garrulous comic tales of his own abjection that make it appear that his irrational acts are part of an overarching rational project. Thus the rationalization of the irrational through comic narration forms a process of desire for expiation. The narrative bravura could be read as an act of contrition, but it could also be seen as a further refashioning of a hegemonic masculinity in the present ‘performance’ of an abject past. The anonymous speaker in Rum and Vodka preserves his anonymity throughout and is unable to be objectified or further subjected to scrutiny. His narrative journey, though, through to self-destruction is worthy of further analysis. If we read his narrative as a ‘life history’ in the sociological sense, the construction of that history reveals a journey through masculinities that is socially relational and indeed interrelational. Following on from R. W. Connell’s concept of the hegemonic within masculinity and its practice of subordinating other masculinities through patriarchy, which sometimes leads to the subordinated ‘protesting’ against the system that produces the rules and the hierarchization, James W. Messerschmidt offers a tripartite structure of socially practised masculinity. Messerschmidt’s categories of masculinities also include the hegemonic, the subordinated, and the oppositional. Crucially the latter term differs from Connell’s idea of the ‘protesting’ masculinity as he reveals that oppositionality does not necessarily imply a call for the end to the hegemonic but embraces the hegemonic and refashions it within a different set of social relations. McPherson’s narrator thus embarks on a narrative that winds its way through all three categories. At the outset of the narrative he reveals that he comes from a stable lower middle-class family environment, that he is employed in a secure job, he is heterosexual and sexually potent. Read as the context for a life history there is nothing to suggest that his subsequent action is motivated by his environment. Crucially though he reads his own situation and relates to it in terms other than the hegemonic. His self-expressed

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hegemonic status as a potent heterosexual male leads him to multiple infidelities; his hegemonic sense of self as sexually powerful and attractive fails to relate itself socially. Further, though he is employed, his white-collar job does not permit him to physically demonstrate his hegemony and he is very much aware of and affected by his junior position within the office in which he is perpetually subordinated by his immediate superior who is described physically as far from the hegemonic (‘Farah slacks’, ‘Clarke’s shoes’, ‘completely bald’18). Throwing his computer out of the office window was the first demonstrative act of his oppositional masculinity which in fact he reads as a protest against his subordination and a display of his belief that he is hegemonic. Thus the oppositional and hegemonic masculinities within which he negotiates his social relations cohere in this one act to reject a subordinated status within the workplace. It is the turning point in his life story, for though he displayed oppositionally masculine behaviour before which he read as hegemonic (his repeated infidelity) he has committed to the girl he accidentally made pregnant and embraced the role of fatherhood. Yet his masculine status within the workplace did not match up to his role within the domestic sphere. Messerschmidt presents a rationale for McPherson’s narrator thus: ‘At times and under certain social conditions men construct “oppositional masculinities” that are in one way or another extrinsic to and represent significant breaks from hegemonic masculinity, and may actually threaten its dominance.’19 Throwing a computer out of the office window then becomes an authentic transgression that is both an expression of opposition as well as a reassertion of hegemony. Going on a drinking binge around Dublin, which takes up the remainder of his narrative, also presents further examples of his conflation of the hegemonic and the oppositional. Despite the threat of failure caused by an excessive consumption of alcohol, he narrates a continued ability to be attractive to women and to be sexually potent. He also attacks a bunch of country lads for having stolen a bottle of vodka that he himself had stolen earlier, further asserting his physical hegemony and his territory (he is from the city and they are not). But the new South Dublin and upper middle-class environment he finds himself in towards the end of his narrative, through an experience of a new set of social relations that are economically and educationally superior, also makes him aware that despite his sense of self at the start of his narrative as being hegemonic, his actual position is subordinated socially. Thus his act of violence at the party was another example of an oppositional masculine practice as an attempt to assert a rightful

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hegemony in a social situation in which he finds himself a subordinate. This monologue play thus displays the complexities of masculinities and the relativity of their practice within given social situations. Oppositional protest, though violent, needs also to be read as a contestation of subordination. McPherson’s second monologue play, The Good Thief (1994),20 displays a different narrative trajectory. Again an anonymous narrator starts the monologue with a confirmation of his status as a professional oppositional masculinity, namely an enforcer for a Dublin criminal. And this oppositionality provides him with hegemonic status within the criminal underworld. It differs from Mark O’Rowe’s depictions of oppositional masculinity in Howie the Rookie as he uses a performative strategy, namely his own comic collapse into emasculation, as a counterpoint to his oppositional and would-be hard-man image. His masculine status is conflicted by having lost his girlfriend Greta to the crime boss. In order to reposition himself as hegemonic he narrates how his girlfriend is not faithful to the crime boss and that the latter has deviant sexual practices. Setting out on a paid job as enforcer he self-presents as possessing phallic power (with his guns and references to his sexual prowess with women) but his narrative abjectly presents a series of incidents that contribute to his comic collapse (despite physical damage he survives various attempts on his life and betrayals by his criminal associates). The narrative journey ends with him having left Ireland after a long stretch in prison looking back at a once oppositionally hegemonic status. One brief reference towards the end of the play interestingly reconfigures the narrator within power relations. Explaining how his prison sentence was a lot lighter than it could have been, he reveals a former life: ‘My army record was good, I’d never been arrested before.’21 Here is a man whose journey through masculinities begins with sublime status as a soldier, and whose necessarily physically embodied hegemonic status was also conferred on him by his employment status. McPherson only reveals that information near the end of the narrative, and as a distant and almost inconsequential memory. For us in this project of uncovering the practices of masculinities the placing of this information in the narrative is crucial. He had a good army record and so clearly he was not kicked out of his hegemonic status. But in civilian life he replaces the army with a job that also involves weapons and imbues him with a certain hegemonic status in the social underworld, though in wider social terms it is oppositional. Thus while we would read the narrator’s life history as a descent from the hegemonic to the oppositional, he himself sees it as a continuation of the

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one hegemonic project. Armies, though, like criminal gangs, have strict codes of hierarchy, but within the army he does not reveal any moment when he contested that hierarchy. In the criminal gang, too, he does not contest but embarks on a series of actions that help to negotiate his subordinated status (he does not challenge his crime boss for having stolen his girlfriend, and he is a paid employee without pretensions of usurping authority). And when he does embark on a series of oppositional acts of bravura against his boss, he does so accidentally and in an act of self-preservation, rather than as a rational and concerted plan to seize power. Ultimately, of course, when the crime boss catches up with him he is further subordinated, surrendered to the police and the judiciary, imprisoned, and ultimately on the run from Ireland. His narrative is in the past tense and he looks back nostalgically at a past which he constructs as hegemonic though which we read as oppositional and ultimately subordinated. The comic bravura of the present performance of the story, like that of the narrator in Rum and Vodka, acts as counterpoint to a subordinated past. McPherson’s breakthrough play, This Lime Tree Bower,22 further experimented with the monologue form, this time with three men on-stage throughout delivering their versions of the same events and characters from their own unique perspectives. All three display separate masculinities though they are conjoined by a shared gender, a shared stage, and a shared display of their storytelling powers. The action is set in a seaside town and features two brothers of a chip-shop owner, one of whom (Frank) works for his father while the other ( Joe) is eight years younger and still at school. The third member of the trio is Ray, boyfriend to the brothers’ sister Carmel. The action takes place in winter when the seaside town is bereft of day-trippers and the narration paints a picture of a town without a purpose, a metaphor perhaps for the men’s performed abjection. The chip-shop owner never appears on stage but he is depicted as a morally upright single parent struggling to cope with a family and business debt to a local councillor and bookie. Crucially the mother has died some years previously while Carmel makes rare appearances in the narrative and almost exclusively in relation to her boyfriend Ray. Joe demonstrates an emerging masculinity; he is admiring of his older brother with whom he shares a bedroom, and heroworships a good-looking boy new to the school, Demian. Carefully he positions his worship of Demian as admiration rather than attraction, and makes careful references to an emerging, though not yet realized, sexuality. Frank is extremely conscious that far from being the successful small business owner, his father is economically subordinate, and

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in a literal sense is positioned as permanently indebted to the bookie who has given him a loan. The principal action of the narrative centres around him staging a robbery of the bookie, using a weapon and instrumental violence to assert his belief in a rightful hegemony. Caught up in the narrative by accident rather than design is Carmel’s boyfriend and university philosophy lecturer Ray, of a superior social class but whose life is a total abuse of his hegemonic position to the point of it actually being a contestation. He is a serial abuser of his female students, takes pride in his ability to hold down alcohol, and throws tantrums in department meetings. The nadir of his oppositional masculinity comes during the question-and-answer session after a lecture by the famous (fictional) philosopher Konigsberg. Struggling to cope with his binge drinking Ray’s long-anticipated question to attack the philosopher comes out of his mouth as projectile vomit. Comically he stages a collapse of his hegemony through oppositional display in which he revels. It is at this moment when audiences laugh at the comic tale of one hegemonic male’s comic treatment of his intellectual superior that provides us with an insight into how McPherson’s plays work on the audience through the structured action of his performing masculinities. In response to Ray’s narration of this comic effect, Frank breaks the dramaturgical vow of silence and breaks into Ray’s narrative with: ‘I never heard that.’ Ray responds: ‘I’ve been saving it.’23 Cleverly, McPherson positions their narratives, not as first-time confessions, but in a long series of performances of oppositional masculinity. Caught between the two men, one a man of oppositional action in his robbing of the bookie, and the other a performer of oppositional abjection who prides himself on his anti-hegemonic position on the inside, is Joe whose incipient masculinity ends narratively in his entry to adulthood by agreeing to spend a weekend away with these two older men and his first actual performance of heterosexuality. In effect, the three are united in their successful oppositionality to more hegemonic masculinities that oppress them: Frank robs the man who is keeping his father economically subordinate and gets away with the crime; Ray’s anti-heroic vomiting at the lecture of a famous philosopher contests hierarchization in the academy and performs publicly a refusal to accept the hierarchy; and when Joe discovers that his hero Demian is prepared to sacrifice Joe for his own protection, he constructs a masculinity all of his own. McPherson, on the surface, offers audiences the life histories of subordinated masculinities in the form of monologues whose first-person narration presents ‘the meaning of social life for those that enact it,

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revealing their experiences, practices, and social world’.24 All his characters are aware of the tensions that exist within the structuration of masculinities, and their social performances (and the dramatic thrust of their narratives) are driven by those tensions in moments of contestation of the subordinated against the hegemonic. Where the comedy arises, though, and this is particularly evident in the character of Ray in This Lime Tree Bower, is when the hegemonic male rejects his status through often accidental oppositional acts caused by a persistent abjection. Following on from Gramsci’s notion of hegemony, Victor J. Seidler, in his book Young Men and Masculinities, points out that ‘hegemony is not simply a matter of power. It is crucially a matter of the legitimation of consent.’25 McPherson’s comic anti-heroes do not enact consenting masculinities in the structural sense. They are very much aware of the various masculinities they perform in the various aspects of their lives and of how their masculine world provides them with a complex and often competing set of demands that do not necessarily conform to their imagined position within masculinity. While the narrator in Rum and Vodka could not cope with the realization of his position in the masculine order and turns to alcohol, in This Lime Tree Bower, Frank and Ray contest their position within a set of masculinities: Frank rationally turns into a man-of-action while Ray’s abject act of contestation is performed through a failure of bodily control. Crucially we need Joe in this matrix as his masculinity is constructed before our very ears and positioned between the performances of the two older men. And before our very eyes we see an on-stage spectacle of masculinities that reveal a complex set of competing demands on and desires of men whose social performance achieves expiation and celebration through theatrical embodiment.

Abjection and renegotiation Abjection as narrated though not embodied by McPherson’s monologists is a key critical strategy with which to renegotiate a masculinity by the narration of personal trauma that lives on which conflicting masculinities clash have experienced. One further play by McPherson and an autobiography by one of Ireland’s foremost theatre directors use critical solo voices for the performance of their masculine abjection. McPherson’s last staged monologue drama, Port Authority (2001),26 which I have elsewhere described as a ‘requiem for masculinity’,27 eschews the oppositional as a preferred male strategy and permits three masculinities subordinated by circumstance to seek solace, atonement,

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and a return to an infantile state, all the while offering them their moment of embodiment and hearing. In the first production, directed by the author while he was going through his own personal crisis that landed him in hospital before the production opened, the three men of this tripartite drama were isolated in an abstract space with a tolling bell to push them into speaking, with only the play title to suggest metaphorically that these male ‘ships in the night’ were seeking the security of some port after a storm. Unlike in This Lime Tree Bower the three men do not share the same story but they do share the same North Dublin spaces (from the tough housing estate of Donnycarney to the more affluent suburb of Sutton). They also share some of the same characters and locations and have similar experiences, and at times while listening to the complementary narratives it sounds as if these are three generations of the one family. But McPherson does not permit us fully to connect them. The youngest, Kevin, has a tale of a brief interlude in his teenage life when he left home to live in the squalor of a rented flat in Donnycarney, to be exposed to a hedonistic life of drink, drugs, rock bands, and women. While his incipient sexuality lusts after and eventually finds a woman, the whole experience for him is a disaster and his experiment with his own agency leaves him unfulfilled. He returns to the bosom of his family and a girlfriend whom he does not acquire, but who acquires him. In his late-thirties, the middle-aged Dermot recounts one incident in his recent life when he was mistaken for someone else and offered an accountancy position with a firm that manages celebrities. Aware of his failings socially, academically, and bodily, his is the funniest tale of all as it relates the complete collapse of the male body. His brief moment of empowerment provides him with a desire for other women as he complains of his wife’s size embarrassing him. But once his mistaken identity is discovered he returns to his wife with an awareness of the impossibility of his ever attaining a hegemonic masculinity. And finally there is Joe, who is in a nursing home run by a religious order. His tale is of how a picture came to be in his possession. Much earlier in his life, while his wife was in hospital, his neighbour looked after him and he felt a short but intense desire for her, although he never did anything about it. On her deathbed the neighbour bequeathed him the photo of her that he had refused to take all those years ago. His tale is again of the acceptance of his lot in life, now safely in the care of Sister Pat, for whom sexuality is not an issue. All three men relate incidents in their lives that foreground their bodily presence in the world, and this is corroborated by their on-stage presence. However, the narratives they relate do nothing to complement

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their phallic embodiment. In fact, the reverse is the case. Though their tales may contain comic moments, the comedy is at the expense of the men involved, as it is their own personal failings (psychologically, socially, and bodily) that provide the humour. But the humour is not one that exalts; it brings them all to the brink of revealing emotions. What McPherson is doing here is not presenting men of action but men consciously aware of their lack of agency. All three of them towards the end of their monologic sequences spell out their predicament. Kevin explains, ‘And I was thinking that maybe there isn’t a soul for every person in the world. Maybe there’s just two. One for people who go with the flow, and one for all the people who fight.’28 Dermot adds his lack of agency to the mix thus: ‘I was someone to whom things happened’,29 while Joe concurs about not acting on his desire: ‘It just wasn’t in me.’30 What all three men are doing is using their monologues to reveal their ‘emotional histories’31 and to disavow their hegemonic status as heterosexual lower middle-class males. And while their appearance on stage provides us with the only spectacle, these are not the hard-bodies of men of action turned soft from social failure. They were never hard in the first place and any attempts to seek agency were doomed from the outset. Although all three return to the ‘bosom’ of family, they do so in an infantilized state. Teenage Kevin experimented briefly with agency and returned to his home as ‘child’ though now with a girlfriend who is a ‘fighter’. Dermot falls into the lap of his wife at the end of his tale but not before he tells how she reminded him that she chose him, that she has always been a woman of action, and that she will still take care of him despite his failings. And finally Joe has found an asexual woman to look after him while he clutches the relics of his emotional life, a picture of his neighbour whom he coveted but never acted on it, and a set of rosary beads that belonged to his wife. Surrounded by women, Joe is still, and always was, unable to act on desire. All three men disavow their sexuality and what it leads them to. All three have two women in their lives: Kevin rejects the unfaithful Trish for Clare who takes control of his life; Dermot ends up with a prostitute during his brief fling with hegemonic social status but returns home jobless to a wife that is in control; and Joe does not give in to his desire for his neighbour, preferring to take no action throughout his entire life and stay with his wife. Clearly all three men disavow their sexual drive and project it onto women whom they divide into temptresses or mothers. But this simple division is a narratival conceit for if their disavowal of their abjection appears arrogant, it is precisely through the narration of their abjection that they are able to unlock their emotions. The monologue form is a

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symbiotic dramatic vehicle for the performance of this abjection; unable to move on stage they cannot ever be men of action. All they have are memories and loss. Their bodies might bear witness to that loss, but it is through their narratives that they transform the action of their lives into the emotional histories of their masculinities. While the contemporary Irish stage has numerous examples of the renegotiation of masculinities, the off-stage performance of many of its leading figures is also worthy of note. For the final example of monological renegotiation of masculinity I will turn to a publication by former Abbey Theatre director Ben Barnes whose diaries in 2008 recount his tenure at the helm of the national institution from 2000 to 2005. No other discursive self-analysis exists in Irish theatre, while the British theatre has numerous recent examples, not least by Richard Eyre whose diaries are referenced by Barnes as an influence. Barnes’s tenure at the Abbey was packed with a succession of media controversies, political fallouts, and one of the most spectacular exits ever made from the stage of theatre direction. Indeed Barnes completed a five-year performance that captured headline news, incited political furore, and held the nation riveted with an unfolding melodrama. But Barnes was hardly unique. Joe Dowling also fell by the wayside of the Abbey in the late 1980s and the first woman director, Garry Hynes, had to endure the opprobrium of the establishment through the media during her tenure. Barnes’s travails occurred at a time though when cultural journalism was at its apogee in Ireland thus ensuring that his drama would be played out amidst the most intense media scrutiny. It would not be wrong to say that Barnes had not courted the younger breed of cultural commentators in the run-up to his tenure but it would also be wrong to ignore his great contribution to Irish theatre, before his Abbey Theatre job. He had directed multiple performances on the main Abbey stage before, had been the protégé of Joe Dowling, and had singularly been at the helm of professionalizing the status of populist Kerry playwright John B. Keane, legitimizing his work despite the Abbey Theatre’s earlier rejection of it. Most media commentators had already formed the opinion the Barnes courted the position of Abbey Artistic Director in the last years of the successful and highly stable tenure of Patrick Mason before him. Thus his appointment came as no surprise to anyone, but possibly to the dismay of a new breed of practitioner who had been championed by the previous administration. Clearing the decks of traces of his predecessor, Barnes embarked on a series of programmes of a high international calibre, with multiple collaborations both within Ireland and beyond. Further, the weight of expectation

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on his shoulders was huge as his tenure would encompass the Abbey’s centenary celebrations in 2004. There were four major controversies that dogged his tenure, the first being the opprobrium of the public and the political establishment provoked by two plays and their productions. The first was Calixto Bieito’s production of Valle-Inclán’s Barbaric Comedies in 2000 that caused a string of invective hate-mail from right-wing Catholic conservatives because of its perceived immorality. The second was a seemingly innocuous play, already discussed in this book: Hinterland by Sebastian Barry (2002). The latter courted controversy because of its daring proximity to the life of former Taoiseach Charles Haughey who had fallen from grace at the time accused of political corruption. There was a threat of an injunction by the Haughey family, and the whole controversy made headline news; the fear of censorship was very much a reality, although it never materialized, and the production had a successful run. The third major controversy involved the proposals for a new building for the theatre and Barnes’s preference for a move to a dockland site on the southside of the city and away from its origins in the very territory where the nation was forged culturally (Abbey) and by direct paramilitary action (GPO). Further, the planned move to the city’s southside incited the ire of the then Taoiseach Bertie Ahern in whose constituency the Abbey was situated. Barnes struggled to cope with the political fall-out and appeared to take the rap for what could only be described as inept political indecision. The final controversy that was to prove the harbinger of his demise was the centenary programme that during the course of the year turned into a financial fiasco: with budget over-runs and no reliable system of internal accounting, Barnes had to turn his ambition for the year on its head and pull productions from the repertoire as well as announce a downsizing of the Abbey personnel. In a series of actions by the Board, his finance committee, and leaked memos to the press while he was out of the country, Barnes’s tenure was cut short and he left the building in ignominy, never (as yet) to return to directing in Dublin. So what do his diaries make of this series of controversies and how do they contribute to an understanding of the monologic negotiation of competing masculinities? Barnes’s impressive 459-page monograph entitled Plays and Controversies: Abbey Theatre Diaries 2000–2005, has two competing narratives. The main bulk is purported to have been written at the time of the events, while in italics and inserted throughout the main text are more recent reflections on that narrative and how it presents the events. Both narratives are in the past tense and

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the double sense of time lends a deepening perspective to the events themselves while safely historicizing them in a remembered past twice removed. In the early stages of the book, Barnes’s perceived sense of his job is written in hegemonically masculine terms. He invariably uses the military metaphor of soldiering with comrades in respect of his own performance throughout the book, as well as a trapeze artist performing a high-wire act.32 He clearly stakes his own territory from the outset by subordinating other masculine performances, first that of his predecessor Patrick Mason, whose re-staging in 2000 of Tom Kilroy’s The Secret Fall of Constance Wilde Barnes tried to prevent from obtaining an Abbey stage run prior to its London debut. Further, he reports an early battle for supremacy with the theatre’s managing director Richard Wakely: ‘Although it has been made clear to him that in this unsatisfactory dual executive structure my position is primus inter pares (first among equals) he behaves as if the art and the business are not related to one another and he has complete freedom to run the business side of the theatre as he sees fit.’33 Wakely was appointed in the last year of Mason’s tenure and thus was not perceived to be loyal to Barnes. Later in the book this need for a trusted band of loyalists around him permeates the narrative and he names those who have loyalty towards him and those who do not. Like a Roman Emperor in his last days the diaries reveal a paranoiac sense of embattlement with a hostile media circling him, and not enough loyalists to keep his enemies out. The sense of paranoid embattlement is not set up for him as a heroic status. Instead the work of others to undermine him and his programme clearly structures a hegemonic hero under siege. That hegemony is further squared by an enormous number of references to his wife and children. This is a self-portrait of a heterosexual family man in charge of a major national cultural institution who is feted throughout the world on his many travels for his theatrical work. At home, though, he comes under persistent attack, and it is to his native Wexford that he retreats to regain a sense of hegemony within the family. Thus the references to family are a renegotiating of a perceived lack of hegemony on the national stage. But one further renegotiation of hegemonic status pervades the book and that is to the collapse of his body as a potent force: he begins with general aches and pains, has flu, a major dental problem, stomach pains, and a host of other stress-related complaints, which he collectively refers to as his ‘condition’.34 This narrative description of the self is what Sally Robinson would describe as ‘toxic’,35 and is a common feature of the Hollywood Western, in which the hero constructs himself as wounded in order for him to be nurtured back to health and

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thus emerge from the battle with a greater performance of hegemony. These wounds, though possibly psychosomatic, are clearly referred to as by-products of stress inflicted upon him through the machinations of others. Although he never sets himself up physically in the narrative as the hard-body hero, his sporting metaphors clearly do reflect a desire for such a self-construction, which the stress-wounds threaten to emasculate. And so through the hard-body metaphor of the imagination to the wounded body of actuality Barnes is very much constructing himself within hegemony, shored up by his patriarchal position within the family unit, at war with enemy forces all around him. Throughout the narrative, though, and despite his convoluted attempt to remasculinize himself after a professional failure in one sense, his diaries provide a rare glimpse of the hegemonic hero as an emotional force. As he struggles to make sense of the war in which he is engaged, he uses moments of epistolary reflection to take time out from the battle usually in the Wexford countryside or in his sickbed. But just when we hope for a moment of emotional outpouring, the diaries reinvent him as a man of action. Illnesses appear to be cured overnight, and the hard-body hero comes out fighting fit. His final farewell as a walk through South Dublin in the sunset conforms to the hero of the Western riding out into the horizon, leaving behind him the wreckage of battle. The singular, solitary figure of the diaries attempted to wrestle the behemoth of a national institution, and while there were some notable artistic successes during his tenure (mostly as collaborative productions with outside companies), the ultimate political, structural, administrative, and financial struggles of the hegemonic artist-hero were to get the better of him. But the artist-hero remains intact, wounded psychosomatically rather than emotionally or physically, now using narrative rather than direct action to reconstitute a hegemony. Unlike the on-stage masculinities, Barnes’s diary uses his emotional life, not to transform his life of action, but to reinforce it as hegemonic in the face of the multiple narratives of others that threaten his wished-for hegemony in future historical reconstruction.

5 Quare Fellas1

Writing almost two decades after the term ‘queer’ was appropriated from homophobic discourse to form a post-structuralist paradigm for the disruption of the binarism inherent in sexuality as a marker of identity, little use of the term has been applied to the performance of queerness in Irish theatre. There are obvious reasons for this historically, of course. First, the suturing of the nation with the theatre in the cultural and political imaginary enshrined theatre as a cultural medium within a newly emerging hegemonic paradigm. Second, the theocratic influence on the new nation sought to retain any of the Victorian legislation that could be useful for its own religious project. One of the principal cornerstones of that legislation that was retained was the law criminalizing homosexuality. The 1861 Offences Against the Person Act and the 1885 Criminal Law (Amendment) Act brought into being by the UK parliament was eventually repealed in 1967 but still lingered on in the Republic of Ireland until 1993. Northern Ireland, as a constituent part of the United Kingdom, only repealed the law in 1982 after a long and bitter oppositional campaign entitled ‘Save Ulster from Sodomy’, spearheaded by the then firebrand loyalist politician, the Reverend Ian Paisley. The campaign petitioned some 70,000 signatures in the run up to the 1981 ruling at the European Court of Human Rights in the case of Dudgeon v. The United Kingdom. Jeffrey Dudgeon’s case was referred to the Court by the European Commission of Human Rights in 1976 on the back of a lengthy interrogation by the Royal Ulster Constabulary about his private papers and his sexual practice. Though the RUC never prosecuted him, Dudgeon made a complaint to the Commission of a violation of his human rights. This was the first ‘gay’ case to proceed successfully through the Court, and was seen as a landmark judgement that gave impetus to rights activists south of the border. Sadly, though 96

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the law was repealed, the net of control of hyper-masculine paramilitarism in the social fabric, as well as the dominant right-wing factions of religions across the society’s divide, ensured that homophobia survived any legislation. It was not until 1996, as Niall Rea points out, that a political party in the North (Sinn Féin) would address or indeed champion lesbian and gay rights in their policy document, Moving On: A Policy for Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual Equality.2 It was a major mind-shift in a society ruled by an ‘atavistic binary’ of nationalism and loyalism in which cities were segregated literally by peace walls and security cordons around commercial centres. Contingent to such division was an ensuing social and cultural apartheid. Lesbian and gay commercial and social spaces, by their very nature of transcending political binaries, were foremost in the queering of social and cultural divisions.3 In the Republic the campaign to decriminalize homosexuality had its origins and inspiration by the wave of protests of the Gay Liberation Front that followed the Stonewall Inn riots in Greenwich Village, New York in 1969. The Irish Gay Rights Movement (IGRM) was formed in 1974 with the aim of articulating and contesting discrimination in all its forms, including legislation, and followed on from the Irish Women’s Liberation Movement that had formed some four years previously. An alternative arts scene that had emerged under the umbrella title of the Project Arts Centre in 1966, hosted in 1978 the UK’s celebrated theatre company Gay Sweatshop that caused a furore, and led to the Centre’s grant from Dublin Corporation being withdrawn and Fianna Fáil councillor Ned Brennan dissociating the entwined Irish political and cultural project from the continuing subversive influence of the ‘nancy-boys’ from across the water.4 In the 1980s the IGRM was transformed into two separate groups known as Gay Men’s Collectives in Cork and Dublin in response to gay men being the targets of a particularly virulent series of discriminatory acts by Gardaí. Police action against gay men at the time constituted a clear infringement of their civil liberties, but these men were powerless to resist given the incumbent legislation. One of the most significant acts of police intervention that prompted outbursts of anger and calls for change, and which created an oppressive climate of fear among gay men, was the police investigation into the murder in January 1982 of Charles Self who was stabbed to death in his Dublin home. Gardaí investigating the murder used the occasion to harrass the gay community. Although the police had a description and sketch of the suspect, they proceeded to interview approximately 1,500 gay men, none of whom remotely resembled the suspect. Many of those interviewed were asked questions about their private lives including

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the names of the men they had slept with. Kieran Rose, in Diverse Communities, narrates the incident: ‘It became clear that the investigation was more concerned with compiling dossiers on gay men than with solving the murder. Many people were threatened that if they did not go voluntarily to the police station, the guards would turn up at their homes or their work places, with devastating results for those that were not “out”.’5 All of those who attended for interview were photographed and fingerprinted. The newly established Gay Defence Committee, in response to the ongoing trauma of gay men in Dublin, engaged the support of the Irish Council for Civil Liberties and other influential social activist agencies, and a demonstration of protest was held outside Pearse Street Garda Station in the city centre where the interrogations were taking place. Such was the media’s coverage of the protests that the interrogations were stopped and this whole event today is held up as a cornerstone of gay activism in Ireland. Homophobia, however, raged on in Irish society, and gay activism was to face an even bigger challenge a few months later in September 1982 when another gay man, 31-year-old Declan Flynn, was beaten to death by a gang of gaybashers in Fairview Park on Dublin’s northside.6 Two of the four men eventually caught for the crime were serving in the Air Corps and all were in their late teens and had a history of violence. A fifth juvenile was not identified in court. One of the men later admitted that they had already beaten up about twenty men in the preceding weeks before encountering Declan Flynn. The two Air Corps men appeared in court in dress uniform as a clear signal of their other more legitimate masculine practice with a clear intent to renegotiate their masculinity and separate it from their criminal action in an iconic reminder for the judiciary of their own hegemony. Although the men admitted to the murder, the sentencing by Justice Seán Gannon led to outrage that stretched far beyond the gay community. With sentences of between two and five years’ imprisonment, the judge suspended all of them, with the comment that there was ‘nothing to be served by sending them to jail’.7 The fact that one of them received a six-month sentence for car theft not long after his acquittal clearly demonstrated, as Brian Lacey points out, ‘what value the life of a gay man had in the eyes of the Irish justice system’.8 And to rub salt into the wound of the gay community, friends of the accused engaged in spontaneous street celebrations near the park where the murder had been committed. In swift response, a march was organized by the Dublin Gay Men’s Collective from the city centre out to the park that garnered the support of various trade union groups and women’s collectives. The banner at the front of

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the march read ‘Stop Violence Against Gays and Women’, and captured the imagination of a wider public that was intent on contesting both overt and tacit oppression in all spheres of life that sought to uphold the heterosexist patriarchy of the state. These two murders motivated by homophobia mirrored how culturally gay men were represented as victims, as we shall see later in the chapter, in protean attempts to dissociate sexuality from its medicalization, and to reinscribe diversity with normalcy. The wider social backdrop to these two murders is an important factor in the consideration of the near absence from the stage of any kind of ‘out’ gay theatrical representation other than in problematic terms. The increasingly right-wing papacy of John Paul II caught the Irish public imagination during his visit to Ireland in 1979, and with it came his now well-known views on sexuality that served to bolster prejudice in the period leading up to the first Irish diagnoses of HIV/AIDS. The Pope had a staunch right-wing ally in Ireland in the form of the Archbishop of Dublin, Desmond Connell, who engineered Church intervention in the wider debates around contestatory social issues such as divorce, contraception, and homosexuality. Infamously, in a 1990 interview he referred to homosexuality as an ‘objective disorder’ of morality, which led to a widespread outcry in a society secularizing at great speed.9 The Church’s secular branches furthered the ideological war against ‘deviance’ in the form of organizations such as Family Solidarity, Opus Dei, and the Knights of Saint Columbanus which staged aggressive opposition to the calls for the changes in legislation on the one hand, while on the other infiltrated the higher echelons of public office to exert political influence.10 Between them they fought and won decisive rejections of two referenda on contraception and abortion and engineered a pro-life clause in the EU’s 1992/3 Maastricht Treaty. The culmination of Family Solidarity’s war on sex and sexuality was their 1990 publication The Homosexual Challenge: Analysis and Response that aimed to block the campaign for decriminalization. Battling against the secret forces of the right were some very public and outspoken champions of the left backed by various interest groups and most importantly by the Irish Congress of Trade Unions. The first consitutional challenge to the two laws criminalizing homosexuality was heard in the High Court in 1980 in an action brought by gay rights activist (and later Senator) David Norris along with Senior Counsel Mary Robinson (later to be elected President of Ireland in 1990). Judgement did not favour the plaintiff and the case moved to the Supreme Court where the judges ruled (by only a slim majority) in 1983 that the laws did not

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contravene the Constitution. The rulings of some of the judges clearly displayed as much prejudice as legislative analysis, and came after the recent decision by the European Court that similar laws in Northern Ireland contravened human rights, a decision which led to parliament decriminalizing homosexuality there in 1982. Norris and Robinson followed the path to the European Court and won their case in 1988 but it was to take another five years of stalling and prevarication by successive governments before Irish legislation could be amended in compliance with the ruling. Finally, in June 1993, a new bill ensuring the rights of all sexualities came into law and marked a milestone in the visibility of Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgendered (LGBT) persons as legal citizens. Shortly prior to that the Unfair Dismissals Act crucially included a clause outlawing discrimination in the workplace on the grounds of sexual orientation. Thereafter LGBT citizens became the subject of increasing media interest; they took part in Dublin’s St Patrick’s Day parade, and each June marched for Gay Pride with little or no public hostility. Crucially, President Mary Robinson embraced the new legal citizens for whom she had fought for well over a decade through the courts and representatives were invited officially to her residence, Áras an Uachtaráin. In the euphoria that followed the new law that prevented the Gardaí from contravening the civil rights of gay men as they had done just over a decade before, there were many other issues particularly affecting gay men that had a life-saving influence on them. The spectre of HIV/AIDS had loomed large in the British media from the mid-1980s but in the Republic of Ireland health information was significantly not provided by the state to those most at risk. Confirmation by the Department of Health that HIV was in Ireland in 1985 only fuelled anger and fear among gay men since these were the pre-Internet days, and with discriminating sexuality laws still in place, they would have had no access to sexual health education whatsoever, had it not been for the efforts of Gay Health Action which printed information leaflets on HIV transmission despite open hostility from public officials. As Kieran Rose points out, the refusal by government officials to address gay men’s sexual health had a devastating effect on the extent of HIV transmission, given the level of secrecy surrounding sexual practices which had to be maintained in a society that outlawed them.11 As we shall see, it was between the legal challenge in the European Court in 1988 and the coming into law of the new legislation in Ireland in 1993 that gay men’s sexuality reached its apogee of representation on the stage, minimal as it was. Thereafter, gay male characters emerged in more popular cultural forms such as television soap operas, as investors

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and broadcasters realized the new marketing potential that existed with this new legal group of consumers. Indeed, one of the Dublin gay scene’s most well-known drag queens, Shirley Temple Bar, appeared on the screens of the national broadcaster RTE in 2001 twice a week calling the numbers in the Bingo lottery game, Telly Bingo. Her appearance caused a furore among conservative viewers of a show aimed at older housewives, even though she was not allowed to deviate from her script. Though she continued to appear on the screen for several years her creator, Declan Buckley, eventually dropped his character, a transition which some saw as an act of heteronormative hegemony by the broadcaster. Back on the nation’s stages, new dramas about gay men that had such agency in the early 1990s gave way to a few new plays about real-life and historical characters, while only one main-stage writer, Frank McGuinness, consistently chose to include gay characters in his plays, though the critics for the most part chose to ignore their existence; this, according to Sara Keating, was not ‘merely a case of prejudice: it was a case of invisibility’.12 Meanwhile an alternative performance scene emerged from popular gay culture to cross over into the theatre, and a new queer performativity emerged a decade after theories of the queer had been established in the academy.

Nationality/sexuality The conflation of the twentieth-century project of nationalism with a compulsory heterosexuality is the result of a wish to construct an imagined community conceived of by Benedict Anderson,13 as well as a desire to establish a contestatory post-colonial imaginary based exclusively on strict gender divisions constructed around a hegemonic notion of masculinity. This heteronormativity persisted despite suspicions and ultimately revelations about the sexual orientation of some of the main figures of Irish Republicanism. The subsequent rewriting of the revolutionary endeavours that gave rise to the new nation left out for the most part the commitment and contribution of a plethora of leading women revolutionaries, while the contribution of gay men to the cause was not recognized in a homophobic state with draconian laws on difference. Lesbian sexual practices notably escaped the eye of the judiciary because of the Victorian belief at the back of the legislation that women’s sexuality was only ever permitted to be performed within marriage and was thus compulsorily heterosexual. The use of gender and sexuality to represent Ireland by Britain and Britain by Ireland became a tit-for-tat discourse wrestling for supremacy.

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This war on sexuality, as Jonathan Dollimore argued in Sexual Dissidence: Augustine to Wilde, Freud to Foucault,14 demonstrated that the fear of the other was very much tied up with a fear that the other might be the same. Thus ‘masculinist nationalism’ emerged from both colonizer and colonized to disrupt the binary of the actual political and constitutional relationship between the two, but at the same time to reinscribe and reinforce the difference between the two in terms of gender. The feminine ‘other’ thus could not be the masculinist ‘self’ and both sides contributed to the binary in cultural discourse. As Éibhear Walshe argues in his book Sex, Nation and Dissent in Irish Writing, the possibility of permitting lesbian or gay contributions to the national cultural discourse would only have disrupted, or indeed as we now would say, ‘queered’ the binary of man and woman in representation. Thus the Irish nationalist movements, as was mentioned in the Introduction, foregrounded warrior urmasculinity in native sporting traditions, as a means of exclusion of the colonizer’s foreign games constructed as feminized. Walshe elaborates on the post-colonial struggle for the representation of gender and sexuality in cultural discourse: ‘In Irish cultural discourse, silencing sexual difference became imperative because of a supposed link between homosexuality and enfeebled “feminised” masculinity. The post-colonial struggle to escape the influence of the colonising power became a struggle to escape the gendered relation of male coloniser to female colonised. Therefore the post-colonial culture could not permit any public, ideological acknowledgment of the actuality of the sexually “other”.’15 Although never stated publicly, the notion emerged that the sexual ‘other’ was actually anti-nation. Meanwhile the British establishment used sexual otherness as a deliberate weapon to discredit Republicanism, exposing patriot Roger Casement’s homosexuality through the revelation of his so-called ‘black diaries’ that ultimately led to an appeal for his death sentence for treason to be dropped. Though historians and forensic scientists have argued through the last century over the authenticity of these diaries, the fact remains that the refusal to perform a compulsory heterosexuality was akin to an act of treason. Though Casement ultimately was laid to rest almost fifty years after his execution in 1916 in the Republican plot in Dublin’s Glasnevin Cemetery, his contribution to the creation of the nation was always troubled and indeed embarrassed by the accusations by Britain of his sexual dissent from heteronormativity. In 2002 the debate was reopened by Northern Ireland gay rights activist Jeffrey Dudgeon with the publication of a book on the affair (Roger Casement: The Black Diaries – with a Study of his Background, Sexuality and Irish Political Life) that helped to conjoin nationalism with gay sexuality,16 while for decades

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the Republican line in reponse to the revelations of the diaries was a defamatory plot to ensure the enactment of the death penalty for a true patriot. The use of sexuality as a political weapon continued in Ireland and against Ireland throughout the twentieth century. Turning the tables on Ulster loyalists in the 1970s the British intelligence service MI5 were reportedly implicated in the use of the Kincora Boys’ Home in East Belfast as a weapon of entrapment for loyalist paramilitaries and politicians whose sexual preferences deviated from heteronormativity. The sexual abuse that occurred there and that came to light in the southern newspaper the Irish Independent, was set against a background of a corrupt establishment propped up by local politicians who preached homophobia while at the same time covering up sexual abuse. But the media reporting of the case that came to light in 1980 conjoined gay sexuality with child abuse and theatened to derail attempts to legalize homosexuality. The conflation of the two practices of course is widespread but in the Irish case specifically this was a political strategy of debasement with a long-standing historical precedent. A more recent example in the cultural sphere was The Sun newspaper’s attack on the celebrated Neil Jordan film The Crying Game (1992) which explores the relationship between an IRA member on the run and the former girlfriend of a British soldier who turns out to be transgendered. With the catchy headline ‘Homo Provo’, completely ignorant of the actual screenplay, the discrediting of the Republican movement through charges of sexual ‘dissidence’ continued the colonial struggle for supremacy through a matrix of gender and sexuality.

Gay men and straight theatre Two early though hugely significant attempts at representing gay men on the main stages of Dublin occurred even before direct political action for gay rights became mobilized. The plays (by two male writers of the then avant-garde, Thomas Kilroy and Brian Friel) had no political agenda for the representation, other than a desire to break new ground and unmask theatrically subjects that were socially taboo. Both plays, significantly, focus on the issue of the sameness of the ‘homosexual’ socially and also on the surrounding society’s desire to construct his difference, and both plays offer an urban and a rural setting for the examination of how Irish society conspired to eliminate the threat of dissidence and difference. Notably, however, the two writers embraced their gay characters within the spectrum of Irish masculinities, and did

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not use them as a marker or threat to nation. Instead, the plays unmask society’s troubled relation with difference, and explore how the inability to deal with it is the truly cankerous wound of modern society. The first identifiably gay character in the modern Irish theatre made his way onto the stage in Thomas Kilroy’s groundbreaking play The Death and Resurrection of Mr Roche. It opened on 7 October 1968, directed by Jim Fitzgerald and produced at the Olympia Theatre as part of the Dublin Theatre Festival. The previous year, however, an adaptation of Brendan Behan’s homoerotic The Borstal Boy was directed at the Abbey by Tomás Mac Anna, and a decade previously Behan’s An Giall/The Hostage was premiered at the Pike Theatre in Dublin with its brothel setting and transsexual minor character. Off-stage, Ireland’s most celebrated gay couple, actors/writers/producers Hilton Edwards and Micheál Mac Liammóir had performed their sexuality as an open secret in the streets and salons of Dublin for decades. On-stage, though, direct representation by Kilroy of a central homosexual character was a novelty that was too much for the Abbey (and the play was rejected the year prior to the Festival production). Kilroy’s brave play explored unfamiliar territory in a society in which homosexuality was outlawed. The action of The Death and Resurrection of Mr Roche takes place in the drab basement flat in Georgian Dublin of ne’er-do-well Kelly. Kelly is unmarried, a boozer with a motley collection of similar ne’er-do-well friends of various ages and professions on the run from relationships and retreating into a totally masculine environment of irresponsibility. Mr Roche’s arrival into this company is imminent and a picture of him and his sexuality emerges before his arrival through stinging and homophobic remarks. He is referred to as ‘the queer’, ‘The Queen of Dunleary’, and Kelly dismisses his kind as ‘Perverts!’17 Mixed into the homophobia are references to the fact that Kelly has entertained Mr Roche in his flat before, but the subject is dropped almost instantly. Throughout the play Kelly’s homophobia is infectious and coupled with Mr Roche’s challenge to the men’s lack of self-respect in their inertia and alcohol-induced dribbling leads to a physical assault on Mr Roche that leaves him unconscious. The men presume he is dead and then set about a cover-up, removing his body from the flat in order to dump it. Mr Roche (unseen) miraculously comes back to life but not before Kelly confesses to having had sex with Mr Roche. Roche is a very strident antagonist who inadvertently, by his very presence and his open sexuality, forces the assembled men to confront their own ghosts, fears, lies, and prejudices. He brings with him on-stage the mechanism of catharsis and the possibility of redemption. His language suggests

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he is of the educated middle class, as does his nomination as Mister by the others. But the others are also middle-class subjects who have opted to abstain from the world by drowning out their inner voices of fear in a state of alcoholic abjection. Kilroy’s play not only presents the first truly open gay man on the Irish stage; he also uses the occasion to ‘out’ another, queering Irish masculinity at the point of its most rabid homophobia. Brian Friel presented the next set of gay characters that queered the heterosexual Irish landscape in his ironically titled The Gentle Island, first produced at the Olympia Theatre Dublin on 30 November 1971, directed by Vincent Dowling. The action takes place on Inishkeen in the present and we join the action at the moment of its almost total evacuation by the inhabitants in search of work in the industrial cities of Britain. Friel’s favourite theme of the period (emigration) is complicated and troubled by the arrival on the island of two male Dublin tourists, Shane Quinn and his older friend Peter Quinn. The seemingly affluent urban tourists are set against the impoverished country folk of the island. For some the island offers no hope of sustenance but for the new arrivals it offers leisure and renewal. The relationship between the two men is never spelled out but is inferred through most of the play. The age-gap alone signals something ‘queer’ on the island since they are clearly not related and could not be taken for father and son, despite sharing the same surname. Further they occupy just the one tent. They come from different social backgrounds and are of different generations; Peter is the older teacher and Shane the younger electrician, conforming to the stereotyped attraction of an age- and education gap of desire. Like Mr Roche these two men force the remaining inhabitants of the island to confront their own problems, namely their unspoken fears and prejudices. One of the islanders, Sarah, is bitter that her husband Philly has not given her the child she craves and, further, that he does not even have sex with her. Her deep-seated suspicions about his sexuality rise to the fore with the arrival of the gay couple and she categorically states that she saw her husband having sex with Shane, the young Dublin man: ‘[H]e’s doing to the tramp what he couldn’t do for me.’18 She demands his death and her father-in-law Manus shoots Shane. We hear reports that Shane survives but is paralysed and removed to a mainland hospital. Manus tries to rationalize his action: ‘And they blighted us! They cankered us! They blackened the bud that was beginning to grow again!’19 What the two men did in fact was act as scapegoats for the hidden prejudices and anxieties of the remaining inhabitants of the island who had been denied the prospect

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of reproduction and survival by the island’s evacuation. Shane, for all his endearing performative and amusing qualities on the island and on stage, becomes the archetypal victim of homophobia. Unlike Kilroy, Friel does not permit the catharsis of a violent action to lead to renewal and self-awareness. Instead, he chooses to let his characters remain in denial, trapped on the island as a metaphor for their entrapment in prejudice and fear. And thus Friel’s gay characters act as antagonists for a pervasive heteronormative masculinity that is threatened with extinction. Prescient and precocious, the plays of Friel and Kilroy were ahead of the political game and it would be two decades before legislation caught up with their imagination. Irish theatre had to wait until the mid-1980s before positive gay characters could take to the stage, through the writing talent of Frank McGuinness, albeit in settings distanced historically or removed socially from daily existence. His celebrated 1985 play Observe the Sons of Ulster Marching toward the Somme has an undercurrent of sexual attraction between two Ulstermen serving at the Somme during the First World War. In the first production at the Peacock Theatre the relationship between the two men was not explicit but as the play has gained in currency, from 1994 onwards there have been increasingly overt representations of sexual attraction between the characters Pyper and Craig. In this exclusively all-male play McGuinness gives a sensitive portrayal of a Protestant tradition written out of national history given the men’s allegiance to the English crown. The desire for the representation of otherness was a deliberate challenge to historical representation and further the normative coupling of the military patriot with heterosexuality was disabused. The following year, McGuinness went further back in history to the early seventeenth century for his play Innocence at the Gate Theatre to depict the life of Caravaggio operating in a state controlled by a corrupt and corrupting Catholic Church, exposing the hypocrisy of a hegemonic masculinity masquerading as asexual for the promotion of heterosexuality. The metaphorical resonance for Ireland of this play was duly noted by Irish Times critic David Nowlan: ‘The work abounds in metaphor, the predominant one in an Irish production, played in Irish accents before an Irish audience, being that of the potential saving grace of an artist struggling in a peasant Catholicism.’20 Coming before the wave of scandals, court cases, tribunals, and compensation claims against the Catholic Church for sexual and physical abuse, the play prefigured perhaps the greatest challenge to the state in the 1990s, namely the dissolution of the theocratic principles that held the state together. While Observe the Sons at its first outing (directed by

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Patrick Mason) downplayed the homosexual as homosocial, Innocence scabrously unmasked the hypocrisy of a compulsory heterosexuality among hegemonic forces. But it was not until 1988 that McGuinness wrote his first openly gay contemporary character, the drag queen Dido in Carthaginians, written in response to what is remembered as Bloody Sunday in Derry (30 January 1972) when soldiers of the British Parachute Regiment opened fire and killed thirteen civil rights protesters and injured many more. Set in a graveyard overlooking the city, the play is a lament for the dead by the living who have removed themselves from their social existence. Though largely inhabited by women grieving for men it also embraces a hardline and homophobic nationalist hardman, Hark, as well his polar opposite in electric blue Doc Marten boots, Dido. Dido is not presented as a spectacle of camp, but as a human being suffering along the same lines as everyone else, projecting a visual image of difference through a personal suffering of sameness. This production of sameness in the play is what is most disruptive of normalcy, and is a queer political transgression. Following on from David Pronger’s argument in The Arena of Masculinity, David Cregan articulates McGuinness’s representation of homosexuality as a dramaturgical device that helps to ‘undermine masculinity’ and to ‘undermine the metanarrative that supports all forms of cultured identity’.21 What emerges instead in Carthaginians is a community of the transgressive that waits for the dead to rise. What arises in front of us is a common bond of universal suffering through acceptance, and a triumph of the human spirit in the face of adversity. No quick resolutions are presented to right wrongs, including differences (sexual or otherwise), but instead the play presents a crucible in which pluralism accommodates all. While the first Irish gay theatre company, Muted Cupid, emerged in the 1990s to entertain largely niche audiences presenting iconic gay plays from the international repertoire, the years leading up to the decriminalization of homosexuality continued to depict the Irish gay man as a problem or having a problem (with the exception of course of the work of Frank McGuinness). Some notable productions, however, despite their problematizing of the gay man are worthy of note historically; and some are also remarkable for their refusal to conform to the stereotype. Aodhán Madden’s play Sea Urchins, first performed by Acorn Theatre Company at the Hawkswell Theatre in Sligo in 1988, is one such play though its focus primarily is on homophobia and gay man as victim. The action centres around a group of young delinquents who gather at a well-known gay cruising ground at Dun Laoghaire pier in south County Dublin revealing lives on the edge of prostitution and abuse, attenuated

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by the consumption of copious amounts of alcohol and by their performance of violence on the unlucky who by chance stumble across them on the pier. The gang is led by Huey and the structure of the play permits him to go back in time to an incident that was to have an extremely traumatic effect on his life. Although Madden sets his play outside the city of Dublin, the similarity to the real-life incident six years earlier in Fairview Park that gripped both media and public attention is striking. Interestingly in the first review of the production no connection between the play and real life was made, except to confirm that the play presented an exposure of ‘uncomfortable truths about Irish society’.22 When the play toured to Dublin some months later, critic Gerry Colgan clearly connected it to the real-life incident and took up the play’s passionate attack on ‘the mindless bigotry of society and its institutions, not least the apparatus of the law’.23 Madden makes it crystal clear in the dialogue of his young delinquents that they are fully aware that the law, for once, is on their side. The law, of course, criminalizing homosexuality, permits them to rob, assault, and even murder gay men with almost total impunity. The specific gay man in question, enigmatically referred to as The Duke, is never permitted to speak, but appears silently and is kicked to death in real time on stage. The Duke, we learn, is married with children, presumably because of the need of the gay man to disappear into heteronormativity in much the same way as the violent Huey’s blatant homophobia is revealed to be a cover for his own feared homosexuality. The play’s second act begins, like the real-life incident, with a victory parade of the delinquents who were acquitted of The Duke’s murder because they used the timeworn defence of what Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick describes as ‘homosexual panic’.24 Homosexual panic occurs when a man is so shocked to discover that another man might be homosexual that it causes him to have a temporary lapse of consciousness and provokes a disturbance in his normal behaviour, a panic attack in other words, and this leads him to commit an act of violence on the gay man. The defence, of course, cleverly repositions the perpetrator as victim, permitting ultimate absolution through acquittal. Although the play presents a scathing indictment of the social conditions of Ireland’s young urban poor, allowed to fester through abysmal economic conditions (their initial motive for violence is robbery), the primary cause of their behaviour is depicted as being the law itself that permits them, and ultimately sanctions them to behave in the way they do. Performed in the same year as David Norris’s landmark judgement in the European Court of Human Rights, the play underscored the necessity for the government to change the law, since not to do so made it complicit in state-sanctioned murder.

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Protean queerness The year 1990 marked a change in the representation of homosexuality on the Irish stage, as well as marking a contestation of patriarchy through the election of Mary Robinson as President. While Frank McGuinness stood at the vanguard of an emergent sense of the queering of Irish society prior to the last decade of the century, he was almost a lone voice on the main stages. Operating Theatre’s 1984 production entitled The Diamond Body25 by Aidan Mathews was one of the few contributions to a performative articulation of sexuality prior to 1990. It was a musical theatre piece with text performed by actress Olwen Fouéré at the Project Arts Centre that was to house most of the performative contestations to fixed notions of sexuality. The Diamond Body removes the issue of the acceptance of difference in Ireland by its location on a Greek island where the local population gang up against and murder the perceived interloper who owns the East Island Statues Club, a gay discotheque on the island. Like Friel’s ‘gentle’ Irish island this Greek idyll suffers from identical prejudice emboldened even more because of the slipperiness or indeed queerness of the gender identity of the disco-owner protagonist Stephanos. With Olwen Fouéré telling the story as the hermaphrodite’s lover, in a multifarious aural landscape, the slipperiness of identity was highlighted further, providing a space for the binary fixities and medicalization of sexualities to be challenged and androgynous alternatives to be explored. The hugely important musical score intersected with the text to create, according to Aidan Mathews, ‘the psychological shifts the play goes through, the various transitions from the narrator to the narrated’.26 Needless to say, contemporary criticism could not contain its disapproval of the production’s ‘doubtful anatomical verisimilitude’27 and could not embrace the notion that identities (including gender and sexuality) are unstable, here effected through musical composition rather than through visual or verbal constructions. In 1990 two productions significantly added to the canon being constructed by Frank McGuinness in terms of challenging the stereotyped image of homosexuality as repressed and different. The first was by Druid Theatre Company in Galway who presented a double-bill of new plays by Geraldine Aron (Galway-born but raised in South Africa). Although The Donahue Sisters came to be the more celebrated of the two, reproduced in both the professional and amateur theatre circuits, The Stanley Parkers had a much shorter, though significant, impact. The play features two gay men (one Irish and one Greek) not only in a relationship, but also in a bed, and confronting death. So many taboos about

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homosexuality were faced down in one simple theatrical image. Aron was clear in her intention to contest what Foucault and others warned about, namely the heteronormative fear of the sameness of the homosexual: ‘I wanted to show this couple as ordinary folk […] who have similar feelings to the rest of us. Homosexuals form a large part of the community, perhaps more hidden in Ireland than elsewhere, and it is unbelievable that people can feel righteous about their unchristian and vicious prejudices against them. I hope the play might, in some small way, enable people who only know about homosexuals through hearsay or by stereotypes, see something different, something human.’28 And to compound the assault on heteronormativity, one of the production photos depicted the two actors/characters in a moment of affection and intimacy and expressing love for one another. Though this was a stage photo, as all the action takes place in a bed, its visible challenge to stereotyped representation was an important cultural landmark in the visibility of a positive gay sexuality, particularly when the then Arts

Figure 5 Michael Roberts and Des Keogh in Druid Theatre Company’s production of The Stanley Parkers by Geraldine Aron. Photograph by kind permission of Amelia Stein, courtesy of the James Hardiman Library Special Collections, NUIG.

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Editor of the Irish Times picked up on the photo and used it to accompany his article on the play’s issues in the national broadsheet. The Stanley Parkers begins at a turning point in the relationship of its two protagonists and in retrospect the main dramatic force and characterization might be interpreted as belying any queer sensibility. For instance, the couple has survived infidelity and rampant homophobia and is now confronting HIV/AIDS. Written in the days before combination drug therapy restored near normal life expectancy to those suffering from HIV, this AIDS-related imminent death has the potential to turn the characters into victims. Furthermore, the age and class disparity between the two in the text also conforms to another stereotype of the older affluent and Irish male together with the younger Greek peasant boy, similar to Friel’s earlier depiction of the stereotyped gay Irish couple. The difference of the poor Greek boy Dimitri who is feminized by the title of the play into being Mrs Stanley Parker, on the one hand could be read as a heteronormative impulse on the part of the author but we need to dig deeper below the surface to acknowledge that Stanley could only ever express and perform his sexuality on a faraway island rather than in Ireland. Further, the disparity between the two men was played down by director Garry Hynes’s casting of two actors of similar age (Des Keogh and Michael Roberts). But while the two share the same stage space of the bed, Stanley is inside the covers while Dimitri is fully clothed on top of the bed. They do not speak to each other but address the audience with their own versions of their lives and we are able to see the complementarity and divergence of two lives brought together by love for each other. The turning point in this poemdrama is the moment of revelation of Stanley’s HIV status, a result of his infidelity, which in those days very likely meant death. But despite the fact that Stanley contracted HIV through infidelity, there is no bitterness and no recrimination. The two men use nouns to record their emotions, as if verbs might link them too much with actual pain: STANLEY: Anger… DIMITRI: Denial… STANLEY: Bargaining… DIMITRI: Depression. They turn to look at each other STANLEY DIMITRI: (together) Acceptance.29 Aron’s achievement in creating an emerging queer consciousness in Irish theatre is her refusal to write suffering in the face of adversity.

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Throughout the play the two characters cite themselves and each other. Thus the performance of sexuality here becomes a citational practice in its assertion of sameness. And in the final moment of the play, while the Irishman remains in bed, Dimitri performs a Greek dance both in defiance against the imminent dissolution of their relationship but also and importantly in the reclaiming of a national identity and conjoining it with a sexuality excluded from national discourses. In the lead review of the production, David Nowlan in the Irish Times did not shy away from the issue of sexuality, describing the play as ‘a touching cameo of two middle-aged homosexuals, tender and loving and open’.30 Analysing the discourse of the journalism that surrounded this production both before and after the opening night, the medicalized term ‘homosexual’ holds sway throughout, while the issue of HIV/AIDS is not even mentioned, such was the taboo status of the condition at the time. In November the same year another production tackling the subject of gay male sexuality though in the coming out process rather than at the end of life was produced in Dublin’s Project Arts Centre by a socially committed company, now defunct, called Wet Paint whose imperative was to develop young people’s access to and participation in the arts.31 The show was devised and directed by then Dublin Theatre Festival director David Grant. This was a love story with a difference. Set among Dublin’s working-class youth and shaped by feedback by the outreach workshops of the company, the play was a love story with a Shakespearian influence and performed in a commedia dell’arte style. The choice of the acting form was a crucial index to the state of Irish theatre at the time (namely a strong desire among emerging practitioners to escape the word-bound literary tradition they had grown up in), and a deliberate strategy to open up a space for debate of a taboo subject made all the more so by draconian legislation. Freeing the subject from realism was a performance of protean queerness that helped crucially to sidestep any attempts to disavow the subject of representation. The production described itself as follows: ‘Tangles tells the story of five young Dubliners: Lorcan loves Oonagh, Oonagh loves Kevin, Kevin is Lorcan’s best friend, and Kevin is gay.’32 In fact, Kevin has a twin brother who arrives unannounced from Detroit and the nature/nurture question in relation to homosexuality is comically explored. Then there is the only out gay man Fergus, the fruitman, who really does sell fruit. He challenges Kevin’s closetness, re-enacts his coming out to his parents with puppets, and proudly declares: ‘I’m gay. Not an exhibit in a freak show.’33 But the real star of the show is the eponymous Tangles, the local bully-boy, who parades the stage with the sole purpose of keeping the streets clean of filth. Crucially and

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comically he was emasculated in pink socks. The play ends on a rousing choral number called ‘Disguises’: Oh, your knees are heterosexuals, But bits of you are gay. One of your legs is a lesbian, The other’s either way. The ears are queer, you’re bent up here, Likewise in one of your eyes, but Jayz, Your poor oul’ feet they can’t compete And they change from day to day.34 Though performed in the commedia style, the contemporaneity was refreshing as here was Irish theatre for the first time not resorting to its default representation of a gay Irish man through historical or geographical distancing. Instead through its appropriation of a familiar Shakespearian plot (Twelfth Night) was the appearance of an emerging queer sensibility, destabilizing categorizations of difference by representing them as sameness. As part of the rehearsal and production process representatives from approximately eighty youth and community groups from all over Dublin attended the company’s city centre base to see and discuss scenes from the play in advance of the opening night. The aim behind this was to build and connect with its target audience, to air the theme before the production, and prepare the groups for the unfamiliar journey to Dublin’s high cultural space. However, it was also a response to the decision of Dublin County Council not to fund the tour of the production around the working-class estates in Dublin’s suburban sprawl at which the production was targeted. The funding cut was a shock to the company as the Council had supported such touring in the past. The upshot was that a community touring company could not tour to its communities. The company’s response between a working draft of the production and the beginning of the rehearsal process was to perform the show in the safe and neutral space of the Dublin city centre’s avantgarde venue. The surprise funding decision led many people to believe, and Éibhear Walshe to voice an interpretation, that the Council’s decision was motivated by an ‘anxiety over the theme’.35 Excerpts from the production were also performed in advance of the opening in Dublin’s Peacock Theatre as part of a conference entitled ‘Culture is for Everyone’ organized by The Workers’ Party. This invitation was indicative of how the political left in Ireland, through the formal responses of the trade

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unions, had championed the cause of gay rights, and contributed hugely to the eventual change in legislation. David Grant notably was one of the first theatre practitioners to openly declare his sexuality, praising Wet Paint’s ‘courage to address issues like homosexuality. I’m glad of the opportunity, being gay myself, to give the issue a hearing.’36 As director of the Dublin Theatre Festival at the time this was a very significant coming out. One of the work’s main successes of course was not simply the production values of a rare physical and devised piece of theatre on the Irish stage, but the outreach work that brought a new audience into the prime venue for artistic innovation, and brought a taboo theme into the public arena and crucially to Ireland’s emerging citizens. Though the ‘theme’ had been making headlines for the previous six years as a socially and legislatively constructed problem of difference, Tangles offered a rare opportunity to the binaries of medicalized sexualities. Critic David Nowlan addressed the issue in his Irish Times review,37 and took exception to the play’s ‘preaching’ quality; although he included it in his theatrical highlights of 1990, he attenuated its significance and challenge to legalized homophobia by referring to it merely as ‘sexually ambivalent’.38 While practitioners were taking risks and enduring funding cuts over the queering of Irish masculinity, conservative criticism turned its attention away from the subject in question to the commedia acting form, and in so doing shored up the cultural institution of theatre’s moment of deviance by emasculating it. The following year, 1991, Jim Nolan’s Moonshine, first produced by the Red Kettle Theatre Company, Waterford and directed by Ben Barnes, further developed the theme of a sexuality suppressed through a desire for social normativity, but without the celebratory performance style of Tangles or the exclusively gay world of Geraldine Aron’s play. In Moonshine, the unsuccessful undertaker and amateur thespian McKeever is holding a flame for a former love, Elizabeth, daughter of a Church of Ireland minister. Like the Church, McKeever’s business is on the wane. And like his business his amateur theatrical enterprise is in serious trouble with walkouts. Only two young men remain with the company. One of those men is the aggressive Griffin whose posturing and bullying behaviour to the other young man Michael is revealed to be a cover for his own latent homosexuality. Griffin holds the secret that McKeever made Elizabeth pregnant but McKeever also holds the secret that Griffin had a passionate sexual encounter with a German boy. Although Griffin is not the protagonist, homosexuality is placed within a range of silenced and repressed subjects by the townsmen. Demonstrating the power of theatre to transcend reality for personal enlightenment and for social good,

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Nolan presents McKeever’s theatrical enterprise as a vehicle by means of which he learns to know himself and to expose Griffin to us all, but more importantly to himself. All of these plays configure homosexuality in relation to homophobia to a certain degree. They construct the world as heterosexual and normative but use gay men to queer that illusion of heteronormativity, to expose the toxicity of compulsory heterosexuality in the performance of masculinity.

Coming out/coming in On 30 June 1993 President Mary Robinson signed into law the decriminalization of homosexuality in the Republic. This landmark day for gay rights in Ireland was celebrated in many media circles. Though the stage representation up until then was scant and any queer consciousness barely emergent, the real drama of gay rights had been performed consistently for the previous decade and more on the streets, in the Dáil, and increasingly in various media outlets. The fear of public authorities supporting the representation of homosexuality through monetary subvention up until the law was changed, was obviously no longer an issue. However, ingrained prejudices in all sectors of culture persisted despite the change in the law. Though the television cameras scoured the gay bars of Dublin with impunity to mark the change, their official existence was hardly front-page news since the biggest of the bars, The George, was already a well-known landmark in popular consciousness. What the law really enabled was not an increase in cultural representation or a mind-shift in prejudice, but an opportunity for commercial exploitation. Suddenly all things gay became the new trend and this gave licence to the straight community to pour into the bars in their droves, and for the new cool super-pubs that emerged as a symptom of the economic boom in the mid-1990s to ‘turn gay’ for one night a week. And while the young Irish prospered along with the nation’s Celtic Tiger economy, gay consumers unfettered by the economic burden of family achieved an even greater status in the eyes of those who would exploit them. The hugely significant appointment of Patrick Mason as Artistic Director of the Abbey Theatre in 1994 was a timely opportunity for cultural representation to mirror the legal shift. Not only was he responsible for one of the most groundbreaking productions in the 1980s (of Tom MacIntyre’s 1983 The Great Hunger), as well as being associated from the beginning with premiere productions of plays by Frank McGuinness, Mason was also gay. One of his first major decisions was

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to revive McGuinness’s Observe the Sons of Ulster Marching toward the Somme on the main Abbey stage, and significantly to shift the subtextual homoeroticism of the play to a full representation that led a critic for the first time (Gerry Colgan in the Irish Times)39 to admit that the play’s principal character is gay. Though it was apparent to everyone except the critics even in the first production that this was the case, the admission in the national broadsheet was a major step in gay recognition in the cultural arena. In 1995 Mason also directed the first part of Tony Kushner’s award-winning Angels in America: Millennium Approaches to critical acclaim, and ensured that Irish theatre contributed to breaking the taboo surrounding HIV/AIDS discussion in the public sphere. Reading the reviews of plays and performances on gay-themed or featured plays since Thomas Kilroy’s The Death and Resurrection of Mr Roche in 1968, right up to Tangles in 1990, the medicalized term ‘homosexual’ was the default term for gay in Irish critical discourse. Not once in all of the reports about and surrounding the production of Angels in America in the Irish Times did the term ‘homosexual’ appear, marking a mind-shift in journalism at the higher end of the socio-economic scale. But while critical discourse shifted, audiences stayed away and the production played to poor houses. Producing such a long and complex play in the month of June when schools and universities, and the whole middle-class structure around them, are engaged in examinations followed by the holiday exodus abroad, was a risky strategy and it would be foolish to suggest that the gay theme and issues of the play itself were to blame for a lack of public support. Nevertheless Gerry Colgan’s colleague at the Irish Times, David Nowlan, persisted with his medicalization of gay men in his reviews, probably no doubt as much because of his medical training in early life, as for ingrained prejudice. It was in the production of two of the most significant new plays after legislation that such prejudice was laid bare and contrary to the tide of public opinion. The two plays were Gerry Stembridge’s The Gay Detective that ran in the Project Arts Centre in 1996 and Frank McGuinness’s Dolly West’s Kitchen, directed by Patrick Mason at the Abbey in 1999. The significance of these plays lies in what purported to be representation in the past, namely the default recourse to alterity. While gay men were on the stage before the legislative sea change they were there because they were victims of homophobia (and thus used primarily as ciphers for the analysis of the ills of society and its constructions of masculinity in particular), or were in or from another country, or from a place that definitely was not Ireland, or were Oscar Wilde. The two plays now under the microscope deliberately placed gay

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men centre stage, in Ireland, and in the uniforms of the state, conjoining their sexuality with their nationality. Stembridge’s The Gay Detective is a comic film noir exploration of the seedy underworld of sexual exploitation by some leading figures in the state. It certainly makes one think of the Kincora Boys’ Home scandal that had rocked Northern Ireland’s establishment in 1980, but here Stembridge firmly locates his characters in the Republic. It tells the story of how a closeted Garda, Pat, shifts from self-loathing to acceptance through an undercover operation that reveals how far from deviant his own sexuality is, faced with the corruption of the rich and powerful. The play begins in blackout and we hear the voice of Pat declaring that ‘I am the gay detective.’40 The lights snap on and we discover hilariously that he is in bed with his male lover Ginger. They have just had sex and Pat begins to put on his clothes, a Garda uniform, and then later reveals that he prefers to be the ‘passive’ partner in any sexual encounter and he acts this out with an unemployed youth whom he would normally arrest. Stembridge’s queering of the iconicity of the nation state comes in a serious of revelations that are increasingly shocking and increasingly hilarious. Through his sexual practice Pat also queers notions of the hyper-masculine that supports fixed notions of hegemony and state power. The first theatrical depiction of the act of sex between two men had already occurred on the Abbey stage the year before during Angels in America, though that was between two American characters, already fictionalized in the imagination. Here was the first ‘Irish’ gay sex act on the stage and more than that it was the disruption of the spectacle of state power in the form of a Garda who had been used to oppress and repress gay men with horrific consequences only a decade previously. Pat’s superior homophobically warns him of the incompatibility of his occupation and his sexuality, but Stembridge humorously names him Inspector Bear (a term from gay culture that queered him instantly). Pat’s journey to self-acceptance leads him to uncover a violent sex-ring of the state’s most powerful men who enact horrific acts of violence on young men. His journey also helps us to explore how a state in the closet permits such practices to fester. Stembridge sets his play in 1993 and at a time on the cusp of legal change. When we discover this, the sexual activities of Pat take on even greater significance as we learn that his sexual activity was performed at a time when it was outlawed in reality and in representation. The principal review of the play by David Nowlan in the Irish Times is wonderfully conflicted in terms of sexual politics. On the one hand Nowlan writes of his wariness before the play, wondering if he was ‘in

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for another of those cloyingly sentimental dramas that have encumbered too much of “liberal” theatre in recent years’. No doubt this was a swipe at Angels in America, since there was nothing else on the Irish stage at the time that could come close to what he feared. He continues his distancing attack with references to ‘men of the gay persuasion’. But by the end of the play, uplifted by the quality of the comedy and by the craft of the actors, even though the theme or subject troubled him (as was evident in his aforementioned review of Operating Theatre’s The Diamond Body in 1984), he is able to accommodate the play’s message and the sea-change in public opinion since decriminalization: ‘It goes a long way towards normalizing a normal sexual orientation that too many societies have perceived as an abnormal deviance.’41 Though this may be a mind-shift by one of the leading figures of the theatrical establishment, it fails to see how the play strives to move away from normalcy in its continued disruption of it, made evident in the hero’s troubled relationship throughout with himself, his partner suffering from HIV, and his encounter with the corruption of the closet in which he was once enveloped. The performance of the closet surfaced again in Frank McGuinness’s 1999 play at the Abbey Theatre, Dolly West’s Kitchen, set in Donegal during the Second World War, but since Ireland was in a state of neutrality, the war was called an ‘Emergency’. Like Gerry Stembridge’s play the man in the closet is also in (army) uniform, is conflicted about the relationship between nationality and sexuality, and turns his anger at the outer enemy of England simultaneously with turning it inwards to the rejected part of himself that is his sexual desire. The play is set in the household of the widowed Rima West whose three children struggle to form or retain relationships with partners: Dolly is insecure about a former fellow student and now British airforce man who is bisexual; Esther is in a stale marriage and is unsure whether she should abandon it; and Justin is trapped in the closet of internalized homophobia. In the first act their mother Rima returns from a shopping trip to Derry, across the border in British Northern Ireland, with three servicemen, one British (Dolly’s former partner) and two Americans. Their border crossing is of course illegal, but Rima’s intentions are to provoke her children to cross their own personal borders. Though she dies at the end of the act, the play follows her legacy in the form of her adult children coping with loss and imagining futures. Of the three siblings Justin arguably makes the biggest leap by coming out of the closet, aided and abetted by one of the American servicemen, though not without a struggle. His internalized homophobia is shrouded in a virulent hatred

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Figure 6 Michael Colgan as Justin (seated left in Irish Army uniform), Dolly West’s Kitchen by Frank McGuinness, Abbey Theatre, 1999. Photograph by kind permission of Abbey Theatre Archive.

of the English and it reminds us of Michel Foucault’s analysis of such a psychological state as being constructed as a ‘death wish’.42 In uniform for most of the play and crucially the only one on stage iconically and emblematically representing the Irish nation, Justin’s transformation from closetedness to self-acceptance can be read as a deliberate queering of the nation in much the same way as Stembridge did three years previously. And while the latter’s gay policeman is still conflicted at the end, McGuinness leaves Justin, not in a relationship but in a healthy state of acceptance. The agent of queerness in the play is thus not the soldier who turns gay or his American counterpart who teaches him that patriotism and being gay can be synonymous, but Rima West, Justin’s mother. Her bold and illegal agency in literally crossing the border, as well as her scabrous tongue, turns her into a queer agent provocateur, disrupting notions of family, as well as pushing at the boundaries of

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sexualities. She is not the controlling ur-matriarch of stereotype, but the liberator of her children. She is the most linguistically brave in matters of sex and sexuality of them all (fuelled by her love of alcohol) and she embraces every manifestation of sexuality presented to her, unlike her children. Further, McGuinness’s setting in the familiar country cottage that has been used for decades as a trope for nation, challenges also the compulsory heterosexuality of family and the strict binaries of gender, enshrined in the Constitution. This linkage of sexuality and nation was the most criticized aspect of the play when it first appeared, and described as a ‘logical fallacy which is ultimately lethal’.43 That particular criticism though failed to address how the exclusionary practices of nation construction had a literal and not a fallacious effect on real identities and subjectivities. Hilariously, in this play the heteronormativity of hegemonic masculinity as represented by the three men in Rima’s ambit (a closeted son, a seemingly asexual son-in-law, and a more than likely potential son-in-law who is bisexual) is queered by a straight woman in an iconic maternal role. Rima’s queering of the men in her family is an act of exposure of potential pluralism that leaves the Irish family porous to positive possibilities.

We’re here, we’re queer, we’re Irish Theories of the queer emerged in the late 1980s after a renewed bout of political action by rights activists prompted by the pandemic that was HIV and the contingent scaremongering and homophobia prompted by AIDS, and also on the back of the influence of J. L. Austin’s ‘speech act theory’ on post-sructuralist notions of gender performativity. Gender, we learned, is not an innate given but a citational practice; uncoupled from gender was sexuality leading to the biggest disruption of all, that of normalcy and normativity. Such discourse did not emerge to any great extent in Irish critical discourse about theatre until over a decade later, until after queerness could be both legitimate and legal. Before we examine the impact of queering in an Irish context we must first reflect momentarily on the length of the delay of the impact of the destabilizing of fixed identities that the politics of queer sought to achieve. Despite the relatively low level of enforcement of the laws governing homosexuality, the effect on lives lived and practices performed cannot be overestimated. We must not forget either that the economy of the emerging nation of Ireland forced the generations who might have contested the laws earlier to emigrate. For many gay men the tide of emigration also swept them legitimately into safety from exposure.

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Thus the material and legal conditions in which those who stayed had to operate determined the performance of a hetero-masculinity that was nothing other than a mask. Both the law and its predication on the binary oppositions of hetero/homo based on a medicalization of sexuality enshrined the one as healthy and the other as sick, the one legal and the other illegal, the one that could be outwardly performed and the other only performed in the closet. The ‘closeted’ sub-culture that emerged in Dublin, for instance, was an open secret, with its codes that helped negotiate an interiorized private performance of sexuality. Bars and clubs were meeting places rather than spaces for the performance of identity through culture. The decriminalization in the North in 1982 and in the Republic in 1993 initially legitimized what was already known and had little impact on the creation of a new mode of performance that critiqued the normative. The performance of the closet by the 1990s was already a thriving commodity enshrined in folklore, in the performance for a good swathe of the twentieth century of actor, director, and founder of the Gate Theatre, Micheál Mac Liammóir who, arguably was the ur-queer of Irish theatre given his assumed identity (neither his name nor nationality was Irish) and his celebrated open secret of his relationship with fellow non-Irishman of the theatre Hilton Edwards. And of course, Irish theatre had also Oscar Wilde to reclaim as well. The process of reclamation in the form of plays about Wilde and a biography of the non-Irish queer ‘boys’ might indeed have been a default response to the problematic exposure of the newly legitimized gay man, but the real-life gay man in the present had few performative representations save for those already mentioned earlier in the chapter. While Frank McGuinness continued his positive portrayal and an emerging sense of queerness in his mainstream plays (though as often as not it was his women characters who were more queer than his men),44 the club scene though happy for an alternative identity to be legal initially, eventually in the late 1990s began to foster a contestation of fixed identities, primarily through cross-dressing. Though overlooked by theatre and other cultural historians for the most part, gay male culture in Ireland in the last decade of the twentieth century was doing more than simply provide through drag a popular and commercially successful form of entertainment. The beginnings of mainstream Irish drag in gay culture both conforms to and deviates from similar international contexts. Take, for instance, the now institutionalized and annual Alternative Miss Ireland (AMI) competition that began in 1987 as a fun event but quickly fell victim not to homophobia or the law but to the onslaught of HIV/AIDS. Six of the people who

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had been central to that first event died in the following years.45 The competition was only revived in 1996 but this time with an agenda. Returning emigrants to the newly prosperous nation returned also with a decidedly queer consciousness and a desire to express it through performance. They issued manifestos such as ‘The Future Testament’ and ‘1000 Future Genders’ that were actually calls for monthly costume parties. Such was the success of the venture that they were asked to resurrect the Alternative Miss Ireland but this time as a charity event for HIV/AIDS and as a performative marshalling of formerly gay rights activism into AIDS activism. The competition mirrored the beauty pageants such as the still popular Rose of Tralee that features young women representing their counties or their diasporic nations through some kind of performative turn. The AMI also incorporated the swim/day and nightwear costume structure of the Miss World competition but with each costume had to come a performance. While the appropriation of a performance of heterosexuality that is now politically unacceptable might seem questionable it is clearly in the AMI only a device within which a queer consciousness can be performed, a device that shifts, as Fintan Walsh outlines, from a ‘homelysexuality’ of the Irish beauty pageant to its ‘unheimlich relative, homosexuality’.46 Drag is that device of course but as we shall see, drag deviates considerably from the mainstream. Unlike much drag performance, the bitchy lip-synching diva was not the lynchpin of the scene. Instead a more challenging, and indeed much older set of characters emerged. Chief among them was Miss Pandora ‘Panti’ Bliss (aka Rory O’Neill) who emerged from Dun Laoghaire College of Art & Design with a graduating show that was his own performance in drag. Such was her popularity by the late 1990s compèring the AMI competition in Dublin’s largest theatre (Olympia) that she spread into the mainstream and was at the forefront of an exposure by the media of the popular drag scene. In an interview in the Irish Times in 1999 she explained how she was based on one of her very benevolent aunts, who had a very ‘motherly’ approach to the young Rory.47 Indeed it is that motherly feeling that is supplemented by her appearance as a glamorous older woman that is part of her ability to contest the mythologizing of stereotype. The benevolent exterior is a deliberate strategy to permit a much more truthfully dark persona to emerge. In many respects she is very similar to Frank McGuinness’s Rima West as her appeal lies directly in the shock value of a middle-class and seemingly conventional older woman being unashamedly forthright in her exposure of the hypocrisy surrounding a closeted sexual desire, and thereby, to contest ‘the regimes

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of the normal’.48 Her alter ego, though, also came to be a very successful businessman organizing for decades weekly gay nights in the straight clubs such as Homo Action Movie (HAM), Powderbubble, and Strictly Handbag. Panti herself took up residence once a week as karaoke compère in one of the ‘mixed’ bars in Dublin, the Front Lounge, and then eventually opened her own establishment, Pantibar, in 2007 that catered for alternative performance in all guises and was not simply a money-making drinking house. Ultimately she crossed over, albeit temporarily, into avantgarde theatre at the Project Arts Centre under the aegis of the theatre company thisispopbaby. Her theatrical apogee, arguably, was her appearance in the 2009 Dublin Theatre Festival entitled A Woman in Progress. An earlier version of the production appeared three months previously in a week-long series of events called Queer Notions at the Project Arts Centre. Unused to a script in the early version, Panti had a succession of huge cue cards on the downstage floor and even invited the director, Philip McMahon, to intervene if she deviated (which she did). Panti slipped between her visually performed identity and her social identity and thus slipped between genders in an act that uncovered her forbidden life in Catholic Ireland in which she was criminalized, weaving between anecdotes and passing photographs through the audience of her life as her creator, from art school student to celebrated performer. And as her creator Rory O’Neill constructed his alternative identity the audience were taken through a life of oppression, HIV/AIDS, and prejudice, but also through a life of resilience, defiance, and celebration. In many ways it was a memory performance like her 2007 intervention entitled All Dolled Up, that Fintan Walsh describes as ‘an interactive, embodied journey through a lived Irish queer history in which identity, propriety, and relationality are all drawn into question’.49 The most poweful elements of her 2009 performance were both the slipperiness of identity in construction that we read as unstable, ever-changing, and constantly under threat, but also our witnessing through performance of a personal act of disclosure. Disclosure, as Goffman reminds us, is a strategy the stigmatized use both as a defence mechanism and also as a strategy of containment of the stigma, a strategy by which to forge a new community of acceptability: ‘[a]fter laboriously learning to conceal the individual may go on to unlearn this concealment’ in a private reconstitution of the self.50 The public performance, though, of an act of disclosure such as in this drag performance, was a powerful political act. This queer act or notion that gave voice to the voiceless, and staged gender and other identities as constructions, used theatre as a means of disclosure of a life lived in the shadow or margins of the national narrative.

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The second winner of the AMI competition in 1997 was the other most notable ‘queen’, Shirley Temple Bar (aka Declan Buckley). Playing on the iconic film actress and the name of Dublin’s entertainment district, Shirley is the girl-next-door with pigtails and freckles and only aged 14. In the same way as Panti but with a different strategy, Shirley constructs around her a veneer of innocent respectability and harks back to an older and more trouble-free Dublin. This performance of nostalgia taps into her much older audience’s consciousness and is a mask that slips to reveal how the performance of our nostalgia masks our troubled relationship with the past. The true joy comes when the mask slips and she reveals her true feelings; this is the moment when authenticity breaks open the door of the closet and queers a rose-tinted Irish past. As has already been mentioned, Shirley’s popularity is unique in that it has crossed successfully into straight television culture. Nevertheless her Sunday night Bingo sessions always attracted large crowds to Dublin’s oldest surviving gay bar, The George, where she can truly perform her very queerness. Most celebrated among her strategies was to contest the mythologizing of Ireland’s past in the form of an alternative Riverdance performance with herelf and other drag queens being the principal dancers, assisted by real teenage Irish dancers in a step-line, much to the delight of their mothers in the audience, and thus she was able to queer the very notion of ‘Irishness’ and normalcy. And further, instead of being a lip-synching diva, Shirley also signs for the deaf without irony, and in the process she queers the iconic performative mode of the drag queen. Arguably the queerest of all of the winners of the AMI competition in 2005 and the most theatrically successful was actor and playwright Neil Watkins’s character and persona Heidi Konnt, dressed as a Nazi officer who had come to teach and live among Ireland’s most disadvantaged youth. The character sported thick white pancake make-up that forced her to become more exaggerated and clearly signifed from the outset that this was a wholly performative creation.51 The creation of Heidi was influenced undoubtedly by several members of Corn Exchange Theatre Company, one of whose principal actors (Mark O’Halloran) Neil credits with the idea for the make-up, and whose director Annie Ryan would be responsible for Heidi’s first stage show. This defined drag/nondrag character does not lip-synch and entertain through innuendo; she sings her own songs that are scathing satires on contemporary hypocrisy in all its forms. In fact, Neil also saw Heidi as a reaction against the insincerity of much drag on the gay scene, and as an outlet for his anger against the society in which he grew up and with which he is still

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coming to terms.52 Such was the success of the character that Watkins created a show around her (The Heidi Konnt XXXmas Show in Dublin’s Project Arts Centre) and allowed her character to develop, to contract HIV, and ultimately to be a political force beyond the stereotype of drag. Watkins’s character was already nascent in his self-penned A Cure for Homosexuality in 2005,53 a play featuring a series of monologues in which a Dublin bar owner, Paddy Doyle, in a leather Nazi uniform, tells of being broke in Berlin and being a slave to an older man. Later he comes back from the USA with an evangelical message of God being able to turn you straight, and finally he becomes a drag performer who has escaped from a concentration camp in the USA for people with HIV. Finally he ends up a drunken bar manager going nowhere. The development into Heidi, though, permitted Watkins to package the political satire into a positive force, as Heidi is very much a survivor in a very dark world. Later in 2008, Watkins would take Heidi one step further, or actually back in performance terms, in his critically acclaimed The Dark Room, under the auspices of the Gentle Giant Theatre Company54 that featured Watkins as a cabaret performer introducing scenes from the gay sub-cultural world of S&M which still provides closetedness for Irish men, while interspersing them with songs of political satire underpinned by a queer consciousness constructed through AIDS activism. There was one crucial moment of slippage when he donned the white pancake mask of Heidi (made all the more noticeable because he had grown a beard). It was a slippage that unravelled a fixed identity for Heidi but also for Watkins himself. In his ‘dark room’ still lurked the spectre of HIV/AIDS, but also the fixity of identities that allowed the spectre to spread. Queering himself through Heidi, or Heidi through himself, and in a theatrical form rather than in club-drag, Watkins contested the normativity of hetero and homo alike, slipping from one gender to the other, in the same way as one of his characters slipped in and out of sexualities, in a performance of otherness that was indeed the self. Part cabaret, part play, part political performance, The Dark Room, according to Watkins, was a homage to the superheroes battling the villain of HIV. And thus Watkins in all his queer masculinities marshalled AIDS activism into performative action and released a potential for Irish theatre to contest rather than represent. This new queer consciousness was championed in 2009 by Dublin Theatre Festival director Loughlin Deegan (himself in an earlier incarnation the author of several plays with a queer consciousness).55 Not only did he import the UK physical theatre company DV8’s production To Be Straight With You about homophobia throughout the world

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(which included an infamous radio interview with northern Democratic Unionist politician Iris Robinson who preached a cure for homosexuality), he included a revised production of Panti’s A Woman in Progress and Brokentalkers’ documentary theatre piece by Seán Millar Silver Stars that also featured Neil Watkins. Panti’s revised show was much more political in content than her protean version a few months earlier, following her politicized marshalling of gay and lesbian activism on the issue of marriage and civil partnership in the intervening period. Revisiting her political performance in a theatrical context revealed how the wider Irish public sphere still uses sexuality and queerness in a politics of fear, and points to a queering of the role of Irish theatre as portrayer of nation into civil rights activism. Brokentalkers’ production, Silver Stars, also used real-life documentation to perform through a series of songs the lives of Irish gay men, performed by gay non-actors, with the exception of Watkins, to generate authenticity. The simplicity of the stories, the rejection of theatricality, coupled with live music on mostly stringed instruments, created an emotional yet hugely political contestation of the notion of difference as deviance. Two scenes are of particular note: one featured the non-actors pairing off and performing a slow waltz and thus enacting a performative intimacy that had been denied them in the public sphere; the second featured the men in a tableau, each holding a real picture of his mother, as a reminder of the emotional need of all human beings for love and unconditional acceptance. While not shying away from the difficulties and dangers of growing up as different and labelled as deviant by an essentially theocratic and homophobic state, these productions testify to a new queer consciousness whose very presence in Irish theatre is a contestation of the compulsory heteronormativity of nation and state and a queerness, as Fintan Walsh has rightly argued, which ‘is not just about contesting a dominant culture […] but about radically imagining a new one as well’.56

6 Male Races

Visual histories of Irish theatre will always conclude that the Irish ‘race’ was white. While some commentators, such as Declan Kiberd, will argue that the Irish are a miscegenated race of multi-origin, the truth is that the matrix of race in an Irish context of origin predating the formation of the state was white. Kiberd’s utopian vision of an Ireland traumatized by historical dispossession lends itself readily to a confident sense of community that is ‘open to all joiners’.1 A snapshot of the racial formation of the nation at its inception, however, transfixes concepts of racialization in Ireland and just as in all strongly symbolic and mythical moments of history, the mythical assumes a reality of its own and forms a template for future legislators and cultural processors. Kiberd’s historicization of Irish hybridity unleashes the undeniable fact that Ireland positioned itself as a victim of colonization and thus by extension aligned itself with all of the former colonies, including the non-Caucasian. This elision of a communal desire for self-determination with race found its way into popular cultural expression at the height of Empire, and sustained mythological versions of the nation through times of economic hardship throughout the twentieth century. The last most celebrated example of this was in the 1991 film adaptation of Roddy Doyle’s novel The Commitments in which Jimmy Rabitte declares: ‘The Irish are the Blacks of Europe … I’m black and I’m proud.’ The self-identification of the oppresed with another oppressed minority belies several facts: first, that the Irish in the Civil Rights Movement in the USA were quite often in competition with African Americans for housing, jobs, and the control of neighbourhoods; second, that ‘race’ is constructed primarily around a notion of social and economic exclusion. This racial imaginary, of course, works well in the popular discourse of the post-colonial; it feeds continuously the myth of victimization in a 127

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nation that had long since decolonized; it nurtures the belief that the difference between the Irish and the English is primarily that of a racial separation. But like all mythologies, it elides or glosses over the simple fact that the Irish race as constructed at the formation of the state was an Anglo-Norman hybrid, and completely ignores the possibility that race might also be factored by skin colour. The semi-irony of that oft-quoted line from The Commitments meant that in popular discourse the Irish could be whoever they wanted to be, or more precisely, could construct themselves as whatever race for the sake of expediency. In many senses Ireland had a privileged post-colonial status as being both colonized and European, and also being subjugated in racial terms though still Caucasian. This liminality, though, afforded Ireland a position of strength in the cultural imaginary that had not been challenged physically and materially by the truly racial and subjugated others. But that was true of an Ireland that had not yet begun to develop an economy that was the envy of the world and an attraction to economic migrants, as well as a haven for asylum-seekers. Ireland’s quasi-total homogeneity was enshrined in the 1937 Constitution and protected by the state as well as the Church. Its neutral position throughout the twentieth century that prompted the country to adopt in hindsight morally dubious positions with fascist regimes throughout Europe for the sake of the protection of its post-colonial status, and for the sake of the retention of Catholic supremacy, ensured that Jewish refugees from Eastern Europe were unable to find refuge in Ireland’s neutral shores. The economic prosperity of the mid-1990s that was the result of a liberalization of protectionist policies of Irish industry through a lowering of taxes enabled a host of overseas companies to enter the well-educated and English-speaking Irish labour market. Ireland’s entry into the forces of global capital had an exponential effect on the Irish economy. For the remainder of the century and beyond a reversal of historical emigration was achieved and Ireland’s imaginary status as a poor post-colonial nation was very quickly erased. In the space of a decade since The Commitments was released, Ireland had shaken off its ‘poor mouth’ self-representation as it out-performed every other European nation economically. The representation of self, too, crucially altered in that time period as a new generation of theatre writers and film-makers aligned themselves less with the traditions of storytelling and memory of a rural or utopian past, and instead placed themselves in both form and content with the Hollywood industry. In the theatre a new generation of writers who ultimately were to migrate to the cinema fell in love with the gangster genre,

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from film noir to Quentin Tarantino, bringing with them new definitions of masculinities for Irish contexts. But what precisely is the precursor to this dramatic shift in economic circumstance and cultural change in representation? Historians widely believe that approximately 25 per cent of the population of Ireland left the country as a direct result of the Great Famine of the 1840s and consistently in every decade thereafter migration remained high. The lack of an indigenous manufacturing economy and Eamon de Valera’s twilight imaginary of a pre-modern people ensured that the country would and could never compete in the global economy and its people never achieve economic prosperity. The rural idyll of romantic nostalgia belied the fact that large rural families were forced to send their children abroad as they could not afford to keep them. The primogeniture of inheritance of the farm rendered other males in the family dispossessed and their physical skills had no other form of expression or economic power in the country. The transatlantic route remained open for some but for many the old enemy, England, was the site of destination. There, the emigrants were largely employed in blue-collar manual jobs building England’s post-war infrastructure in large-scale motorway projects and building sites. For most this was their first experience of being racialized, of their bodies been exploited for an economy not of their own making rather than for a family of community. Joining the European Economic Community (now European Union) in 1973 had a temporary effect in halting the decline of the population but by the 1980s the economy took a further tumble and emigration soared. In terms of immigration, there were of course several examples of state policies of the acceptance of refugees from war-torn areas particularly in the post-war period, the exclusion of Jewish settlers earlier notwithstanding. For instance, the state opened its borders for Hungarians fleeing a Soviet crackdown in 1956, Vietnamese boat people in the 1970s, Iranian Bahai in the 1980s and Bosnians fleeing ethnic cleansing in the former Yugoslavia not long after. Though all were initially dispersed throughout the country, most either continued their journey eventually to other countries or migrated to Dublin, forming small communities. Despite these rare examples of peoples arriving in Ireland as the result of conflict migration, the economic realities of the country until the 1990s meant that few were inclined to stay and they too joined the exodus of the national population. The result of a continually dwindling population over one and a half centuries feeds into the popular consciousness of a beleaguered people, and with the continued debasement of traditional masculine roles in a rural economy, a sense of emasculation prevailed.

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But while the Irish were able to reproduce themselves at a rate that did not signal an irrevocable decline, the lack of inward migration because of a stagnant, inward-looking and a forever collapsing economy meant that Ireland’s homogeneity was never in question. Though self-constructed symbolically as ‘black’ in popular culture to feed post-colonial mythology, Ireland remained indubitably ‘white’ in reality.

In-migration Inward migration (in-migration), however, was dramatically reversed with the upturn in the economic fortunes of the country. In 2001 an EUfunded report on migration in Ireland, intra-census data collected from various sources such as the Quarterly National Household Survey revealed that in the period 1995–2000 net in-migration to Ireland totalled roughly a quarter of a million, about half of which was made up of returning emigrants.2 Set against the total population of the Republic of Ireland in 1995 we see that in-migration resulted in a 7 per cent increase in the population, something unprecedented in any other country in Europe. By the time of the 2006 census, the in-migration flow had reached 10 per cent of the total population who had declared their nationality on census night.3 More interesting, though, is the figure for the total number of people born outside the Republic of Ireland on the same night: more than 25 per cent of the population declared themselves born outside the jurisdiction.4 The concentration of the self-declared non-Irish in the census revealed an uneven distribution of ethnic communities in the country. For instance, approximately half of the so-called black or black Irish lived in Dublin while almost 60 per cent of the population with Asian ethnicity were living in the capital.5 The visibility of the nonCaucasian populations in particular was a radical departure for a formerly racially homogeneous society. Apart from the negligible influx of conflict migrants already mentioned, most of the remainder of the racially ‘other’ who migrated into the country were the result of educational recruitment, particularly of doctors and scientists, many of whom would permanently settle in Ireland. Of course, it must also be mentioned that not all of the incoming migrants were entering the state in a process of charted migration. State policies determined who was desirable and/or economically useful. For instance, specific ethnic groups were targeted by the state for employment skills shortages. In the early years of the new millennium nurses were actively recruited from the state of Kerala in India and the Philippines, two countries renowned for their expertise and their ability to communicate in English. Bizarrely, the government also decided to

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give Chinese students visas to learn English with minimal employment rights, in what most commentators saw as a cynical and cheap way to fill the many vacancies in the service industries, abandoned by the Irish who had higher expectations of employment. The embracing by the state of the EU accession states in 2004 also led to a huge population influx from the former Eastern Europe, particularly from Poland. Polish workers were by and large not constructed as a problem because of their lack of difference (white, Catholic, and willing to work hard for a living). The specific recruitment of target ethnicities, of course, was complemented by asylum-seekers fleeing persecution for beliefs, sexualities, or for fear of genital mutilation in traditional patriarchal societies. While the former group reaped the benefits of induction courses, accommodation, and relatively high wages, the latter were often confined to specialist accommodation centres in remote areas, and were not allowed to work. Trapped in a legal limbo and unable to contribute to society, these migrants became the target of populist myth-making by both the press and even TDs anxious to secure votes in marginal constituencies and feeding on the fears of assimilation of otherness. While one group was highly visible and rewarded with the responsibility of ensuring the wheels of Irish industry turned and indeed the very social fabric of the country was secure, the other group became the target of hate speech from numerous corners. Roughly speaking, the former group was composed to a large extent by Europeans or Asians while the latter was composed of Africans. And here lies the root of the problem of the self-identification of the Irish as black, which lived on from the nineteenth-century racialization of the subjects of the British Empire. In a new Ireland of rapid in-migration from Africa, Ireland and the Irish could no longer self-identify as black. The missionary work of Catholic Ireland, though legendary, was always constructed on the selfless few (nuns and priests) labouring in dangerous foreign climes to Christianize and by extension civilize ‘others’. Migration as a result of conflict or as part of the process of globalization, though, meant that Africa and Africans were no longer romanticized fictions of a Christian imagination, but living realities with needs, hopes, and aspirations that required addressing in the economic and social here and now, and not subjected to the distancing drive of the charitable foundation that never came closer to the Irish than a collection box at Mass. While statistics reveal that there was an equal gender representation among new immigrants, there was an undue bias in media reporting towards the representation of women claiming asylum from Africa, particularly those who were pregnant. The pregnant African woman became in populist cultural discourse a fixation around whom issues

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of identity and citizenship revolved since before 2004 anyone born in the Republic of Ireland had an automatic right to citizenship. Not only was the prospect of an Irish person not being white a lived reality and also anathema to many on the political right, the impossibility then of separating the Irish-born child from his non-Irish mother essentially blocked the deportation of those whose asylum applications failed. The consequences of this, and the populist outcry against it, led to perhaps one of the most shocking referenda ever to have been thrust on the Irish people, namely a Citizenship Referendum in 2004 that proposed to deny automatic citizenship rights to the newborn of asylum seekers. An overwhelming endorsement of the proposal – some 85 per cent – clearly drew a circle around the whiteness of its citizens despite government claims to inclusivity and integration, a policy with a junior ministry to lead it. This clearly racial circumscription is what leads Ronit Lentin and Robbie McVeigh to call Ireland ‘the gated community of the globalised world’6 policed by a system of ‘biopolitics’. African men, on the other hand, largely escaped such a symbolic proscription in quasiracist populist media, though not from direct racism in their daily lives. Their assimilation into the larger society through the world of work did not clearly replicate their social status in their countries of origin. The transference from one masculinity status to another more subordinated one is a characteristic of most forced or economic migration and a characteristic, too, of the first generation of diasporic communities. The ability of the black male to commit and contribute to Irish society was the subject of legislation and thus his visibility is predicated on the extent to which he is ringfenced and gated. Before we begin to examine the representation of masculinities in an Irish cultural context from the perspective of race we must refrain from essentializing race and/or ethnicity as a discrete form of masculinity, as to do so ignores what critical race theorists call the ‘intersectionality’ in terms of the interplay between the racialized male and the forces of power and authority. As Richard Delgado and Jean Stefancic ask, ‘Should persons who experience multiple forms of oppression have their own categories and representation, apart from those that correspond to the separate varieties of discrimination they incur?’7 In all forms of representation in this chapter we must keep in mind that not all characters marked in terms of race see race as their essential defining character, but are made to suppress their other subjectivities because of the dominance of one form of representation over the other. Similarly, we must not always assume that the aspiration of all migrants is assimilation and the wiping out of one’s origins. The de-essentializing of race in cultural representation

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needs close scrutiny if we are not to fall victim to the dominant specularity of state discourses.

Popular culture I want to begin my analysis unusually with a focus on popular representations of race in order to better provide a context for theatrical representation. The small body of non-Irish performers crucially cross several media and have been much more visible in television representation than on the stage. Theatre directors and performers have chosen primarily the medium of television rather than the theatre to explore issues of race, racism, and racializing. As we shall see later in the chapter, the emergence of characters of colour on the Irish stage is a rare phenomenon, which is as much to do with the enmeshing of the imagination of the nation through theatrical representation historically as it is to do with issues of class and the exclusion of race from class, given the not-as-yet assimilated migrants into the forces of social mobility. Between 1997 and 2007 over fifteen documentary films were broadcast dealing with issues of racism in Ireland, most of which were responses to the rise of in-migration. These marked a decided shift from the previous decade when racism in documentary film-making charted the white Irish as being on the receiving end of it abroad, and particularly in England. Despite such a high number of films being broadcast, it is important to note that the films’ focus was constructed from the point of view of the white Irish and their new-found problem, rather than on positive representations of the newly arrived. Such ethno-centrism only permitted positive stories when long-standing immigrants have been settled and are part of the fabric of society such as in the RTE One documentary, broadcast in 2005, entitled Love Story that featured an Irish man and his Zimbabwean wife. But here again the ethno-centrism swung the production away from how such a marriage challenged prejudice at the outset, to how years later the Zimbabwean woman has been naturalized as part of the society. A narrative thus of acceptance and tolerance drives the story to a happy ending. It is not surprising then that television should come late to the issue of race in its various genres of representation. As a popular medium, it appeals to the largest and widest demographic and with a country almost exclusively white at the beginning of the 1990s, the ethno-centrism of the state broadcaster went unquestioned. By 1997, however, television operated in a reactive mode, responding to the changing face of the country and feeding off the tabloids and their letters pages for inspiration.

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Dramatized representations of race on Irish television were also broadcast in the same late period. The first came in the one-hour 2001 TV film Black Day at Blackrock written and directed by Gerry Stembridge and screened on RTE One. Coming several years prior to the Citizenship Referendum the action takes place among the inhabitants of a small rural village who discover that the government intends to place a number of African asylum-seekers among their community, reflective of a decentralization policy without any kind of social mediation typical of successive government policies in the last decades of the twentieth century. In the absence of such mediative preparation, the villagers are left to stoke their own fears and most are totally opposed to the new arrivals. While there is a small number of liberal supporters of the planned new arrivals led by the kind doctor, Seamus, the village is united in total opposition, led by supermarket owner Eugene who pressures the hostel owner to turn the Africans away. Two Department of Justice officials are dispatched to the village to calm the situation down but their encounter with the villagers is in the form of a public meeting which leads to the dark underbelly of Irish society in racist form being exposed. Typically, there is much humour in Stembridge’s script as he pokes fun at the hypocrisy of Irish society, ironically through the presentation to the government officials of the village tramp Billy as an example of the state’s neglect of its own people. What this film is not about is the representation of asylum-seekers; they are only visible on screen very briefly as they appear in the village on a bus. But they never get off the bus and thus never actually arrive. In many senses the film, while focusing on racism and hypocrisy, works towards maintaining the status quo by not permitting any kind of inter-cultural encounter. Restricting them to a bus retains them in the limbo of exile. However, it must be mentioned that the lack of geographical specificity, the stereotyping of Irish characters, and a production design that was not exactly contemporary, shifted the film into a hyper-reality that could not accommodate the preoccupations of real life. In many senses the portrayal of the Irish in the film was ‘absurd’ and its message perhaps one of why anyone in their right minds would want to transpose outsiders, regardless of race or origin, into this clearly dysfunctional microcosm of petit-bourgeois Ireland. In the same year, however, the first black male in an Irish context made his screen debut in Roddy Doyle’s first original screenplay, When Brendan Met Trudy (directed by Kieron J. Walsh). It is a romantic comedy set in contemporary Dublin with a host of inter-textual references to iconic Hollywood precursors (including its title inspiration from When

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Harry Met Sally). The hapless and ultra-conformist teacher Brendan is thrown off kilter by his new love Trudy who, far from being the preschool aspirant teacher she claims to be, is actually a burglar. Their relationship is momentarily halted by Trudy and in the interim Brendan is goaded into action by the threat of deportation of Trudy’s Nigerian friend Edgar (played by British Nigerian actor Maynard Eziashi). Brendan’s contribution to the protest turns out to be the plot device for reconciliation. In an interview in The Observer, Doyle commented on how his desire to reflect contemporary reality led to the inclusion of an African character: ‘I had to make a big effort to get Dublin the way it is now. It’s changed so much in the last decade, and I wanted to get that – the Nigerian character who gets deported, that wouldn’t have happened before.’8 Edgar is a friend of the marginalized Trudy, but her marginalization is not through race (white) or class (middle), but because she has chosen the life of criminal anarchy. Edgar, by association, is criminalized symbolically, despite the huge amount of sympathy Doyle wishes us to have for him, and ultimately his legal status becomes the mechanism to erase him from the screen. Writer and director Bisi Adigun offered an apologia for the tangential representation of other races in the film as a ‘well-meant contribution[s] to the emergent discourses of new multicultural Ireland’.9 What audiences see, however, is a black man being handcuffed and deported as an other, while the dominant white and albeit neo-liberal context moves on having achieved its desired use-value for the black man of conscience provocation and plot resolution. Again in 2001 the urban RTE television soap opera Fair City responded to increasing public interest and media reporting of Ireland’s new arrivals with a storyline of a young Kurdish refugee, Ashti. In the first episodes in which he was featured the storyline concentrated on the reactions of the soap opera regulars to him (and they were not always positive). As his storyline progressed, however, the plot drip-fed details of his back story which shed light on how and why he came to be in Ireland, and that he had been the victim of torture, while the on-screen action almost sensationally portrayed the real dangers he was facing. It also highlighted how the constructed ignorance of the regulars in the fictional Dublin suburb of Carrigstown absorbed the inherent xenophobia of erroneous media reporting. Further, as scriptwriter Mary Halpin outlined, the plot moved on to examine how that initial xenophobia was translated into the official state response of the ‘criminalisation of asylum-seekers and immigrants such as Ashti’.10 Halpin is careful in the report to insist that the writers consulted the Irish Refugee Council for advice, and also to

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suggest that the care shown in researching the storyline was indicative of a desire for the soap opera not to resort to pure fictionalization but to reflect an authentic experience of an asylum-seeker in contemporary Ireland. Ashti arrived in the story as the product of shop-owner, Christy Phelan’s greed; he wanted cheap labour. As an illegal immigrant Ashti’s cheapness was in no doubt. However, a romantic relationship developed between Ashti and Christy’s wife Renee, which only increased Christy’s levels of xenophobia. The story explained clearly how the issues of refugees and asylum-seekers in Ireland were synonymously confused in the public imagination, since Ashti was a refugee but had not declared himself an asylum-seeker. At the same time the fear of the other race was represented, albeit non-threateningly, in quasi-sexual terms. Ashti, though, had his own female friend Sadiya who differed markedly in that she was an economic migrant rather than a refugee. Her similarity to him was that she was an illegal as well. Ashti bore the scars of torture and would have had a reasonable chance of being granted permission to stay but his underlying motive was to track down the driver who transported him into the country and who dumped Ashti’s nephew by the roadside when he fell ill in the container and died. The storyline concluded with Ashti being taken in by the authorities and the storyline hung in midair reflecting the limbo-like situation of many asylum-seekers awaiting a decision on their legal status. Despite the attempts by the writers and producers to reflect a reality, as Gavan Titley observes, ‘representations of this kind may be less an attempt at an essential record of the refugee’s experience and more a process of imagining a symbolic experience in relation to processes and attitudes in Irish society’.11 Operating symbolically, the non-Irish male then becomes a cipher for the imagined experience of all refugees, as well as their imagined symbolic capital. After all, the Sri Lankan-Irish actor who played Ashti, Paul Dylak, does not map neatly onto Kurdish ethnicity. Further, by turning out to be a love interest for a much older married woman, he conformed in part to the stereotype of the fantasy of the other race in sexual (and thus orientalist) terms. Nevertheless, his very strong work ethic (as Titley notes)12 was indicative of his positive social usefulness, while his good looks and charm provided a superficially positive representation of a symbolic refugee-male, who, despite his innate desire for vengeance, and his potential threat to the marital stability of white Irish society, had to be sacrificed to the forces of law and order. While not deported, he was effectively imprisoned by a hanging storyline. Race returned as a storyline to Fair City in 2006 (and ran for almost a year) in the form of an issue rather than a character. The Nigerian Udenze

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family, often on screen in traditional dress, conformed to the orientalizing representation of otherness pictorially but their back story did not fit neatly into the immigration narrative propagated by the popular press. Gabriel Udenze did not come directly from Nigeria to Dublin but had been living in London and had sought to move his family in order to ensure his son Joshua did not get mixed up in gang culture. Prosperous and hard-working, like Ashti, with strong moral leadership from the parents, the family again provided a positive and socially useful image of the immigrant, despite the fact that in the popular imagination the erroneous conflation of immigrant with asylum-seeker still persisted. Gabriel Udenze, played by Uganda-born actor George Seremba, took over the lease of the Bazaar from long-standing character Bela. But before long things turned nasty as two local racist thugs targeted his son Joshua and at one low point doused him in urine and forced him to clean their shoes. The humiliated Joshua decided to fight back but this only provoked the racists even more, as they set fire to Gabriel’s van and eventually his new house, though not realizing Gabriel was asleep inside. Gabriel died of smoke inhalation and his wife Nina (played by British actress of Nigerian descent Mojisola Adebayo) decided to leave Carrigstown immediately and return to the safer haven of London. The two racists were caught by CCTV cameras and eventually went to trial and were convicted. Subsequently, it was reported a year later that one of them had committed suicide while in prison. In many senses the Udenze family storyline corresponds to Ashti’s. The immigrant male is hard-working and reputable, and in this case he comes to stand in for his entire family. He is morally upright and positioned within a seemingly secure heterosexual unit. Furthermore, he is of a mature age and his family is grown up and thus not a burden economically on society. In many senses, then, he poses no threat whatsoever to the social or economic fabric of contemporary Irish society. The demise of the family, however, is much more problematic. The choice of the manslaughter of the male head of the family emasculated the family immediately; it removed the principal breadwinner. Without a community behind her, Nina, who was written in as a subject of patriarchy, has little option but to leave. And so the family appears to have been flown in to deal with an issue and flown out again sensationally once the issue has been raised. Like the potential immigrants in Black Day for Blackrock and Ashti in a previous Fair City storyline, the Udenze family failed to materialize as members of Irish society and their non-white colour became nothing more than a mirage. The removal of the male from the plot and also from the screen in both circumstances meant the removal of racial representation. What would have happened had Nina stayed? To do

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so, though, would have required the creation of a completely different character. Rather than a black wife and mother, she would have had to be written with a good deal more agency. This univocal landscape of race in Irish cultural representation (constructed in patriarchal, heterosexual terms while permitting the male to engage in the business of commerce and thus imbue him with a sense of temporary social hegemony) is what Ronit Lentin decries as a re-rehearsal of hegemonic power relations. The storyline constructs the other race as a mirror-image of the hegemonic (in gender terms) but only as a temporary aberration and never permits during the lifetime of the hegemonic black male a deviation from the normative, or an agency for the black woman in the post-male scenario. Lentin, instead, calls for new ethnic landscapes that are not univocal, but are ‘gendered, sexualised, politicised in different ways that render the “we” of contemporary Ireland obsolete as an “authentic” mono(cultural) voice’.13 The final episode in 2007 of RTE’s four-part hour-length mini-series Prosperity, written by Mark O’Halloran and directed by Lenny Abrahamson, centred on a successful Nigerian ayslum-seeker Pala, a widow whose ten-year-old son was not permitted to stay in Ireland. In their trademark slow-moving, hypnotic, and atmospheric style the film-makers captured the irony of the title through the lens of the marginalized. Pala has been in Dublin for two years and works nights as a cleaner with other migrants. The episode is interesting from two perspectives, namely her relationship or lack of it with other African or Nigerian migrants, and her relationships with Irish men. In an early scene we see her in a minibus on the way to and from work. She stands out among the other white East European women in the bus and her isolation is marked from the outset, but not just in terms of race. She lives in a North Dublin inner-city bedsit owned by an Irish landlord called Paddy. Though there are other Africans in the house she feels cut off from them. Upon her return to her bedsit early one morning she has to pass on the stairs and corridors the remnants of an all-night party of leering men who immediately sexualize her and try to force their way into her bedsit. She remonstrates with her landlord to do something about the situation: PADDY Why don’t you talk to them yourself? PALA They do not listen to me. PADDY Well they’re hardly going to listen to me then. They’re your people.

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PALA They are not my people. PADDY Well they’re more your people than they are mine.14 This disavowal by Pala of identity in purely racial terms is a clear rejection of stereotyping. Pala does not see her male neighbours as African but as men who are threats to her sense of well-being. She requests an Irish male of authority to confront these other males on her behalf. Though having left her son in Nigeria with her mother, and revolving her life around work in order to send money home to him, Pala lives her life in isolation from other Africans. Further, she lives her life almost monosyllabically, responding to questions rather than initiating them. The Irish men in her life are mostly constructed in terms of economic relations. First there is the unscrupulous Brian, the cleaners’ gangmaster operating outside of the law as none of his women are registered employees. Pala’s landlord Paddy is claiming rent allowance directly from the state authorities on Pala’s behalf. The ‘prosperity’ of the Irish male is clearly based on exploitation of other races. An interesting scene near the beginning of the film shows Pala, immediately after her night shift at six in the morning, turning up on the doorstep of a dishevelled divorced white man. We learn from a very one-sided conversation that he is a former teacher turned social worker in a resource centre for asylum-seekers. It is not clear why Pala has come to this man but the sub-text is that he is her former lover and she has rejected him. Here the white neo-liberal’s empathy is rejected by Pala as a resolution to her isolation. Though we can only surmise, Pala is unwilling to enter into a relationship with another man in order to ease her financial situation even if it increases her chances of being reunited with her son on Irish soil. The final man she encounters is a hegemonic white Irish male called Eamon, the boss of the company whose offices she cleans at night who has stayed behind at work because he cannot face going home to his wife. This is the first man that Pala shows any interest in and after a slow courtship over the making of a cup of tea and the emptying of bins, the two have sex. Pala goes to the toilets afterwards to wash herself and returns to find that Eamon has gone but has left a large number of bank notes on his desk. Pala picks them up and after some moments’ hesitation she puts them in her pocket. The final image is of her staring out impassively over the skyline of Dublin city. Pala’s discovery of the bank notes comes as a complete surprise as there was no indication of Eamon being anything other than genuine. Her impassivity at the end

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can be read as recognition that despite her obvious willing and sexual desire, the Irish male does not provide a solution for her. There is a sense that Pala does not want a relationship with a man but wants to remain a single mother with her son by her side. Men, for her, are a means to this end rather than a desired outcome. As we see the country from her perspective, white Irish men become for her an ethnic grouping despite the differences in class and politics (from the unscrupulous gangmaster and landlord through to the sympathetic liberal or hegemonic boss). And although class and social status may divide them, their construction of Pala in terms of her economic value is resolute. To what extent then is this kind of representation a regressive discourse? Pala is clearly used by the end of the episode, but to what extent is she abused? Her sexual encounter is mutually instigated; we are never given a sense that a relationship between Eamon and Pala would ever materialize: after all he is married and they make love within minutes of meeting. Pala is for the first time on screen filmed as happy and the discovery of the bank notes, rather than simply a departed Eamon, comes as a disappointment. But Pala does not break down, show anger, or convey an emotion that she was on the receiving end of exploitation. We end the episode looking out over a city landscape that covers an ethnic underbelly configured in gendered terms. Pala is excluded from social integration not because of her race per se, but because of her enforced social class, and most particularly because of her gender.

From screen to stage Irish theatre joined the race representation game much earlier but with much less sustained representation and arguably with less effect. The first black character played by a black actor to grace the stage of Ireland’s national theatre came in 1994 in actor and playwright Donal O’Kelly’s Asylum! Asylum! in the studio Peacock Theatre. But that character is found in a prison, on trial, and about to be deported, his plea as an asylum-seeker being rejected. The issue of Ireland as an asylum was a hot topic at the time and the exponential rise of asylum-seekers in the last decades of the twentieth century bear out the theatre practitioners’ interest. For instance, census statistics for the 1980s show that there was net emigration of some 40,000 people. However, the statistics from the Office of the Refugee Applications Commissioner tell a different story. By 1998 there were 4,626 applications received, and in 2002, the year when the number of applications peaked, there was a total of 11,632, with over a thousand people a month entering the country to

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claim asylum. But while the figures may have appeared staggering to some of the journalists in the populist press, the number of successful applications was in fact extremely low (only 10.7 per cent in 2002). The number dwindled, year after year, most likely due to the immigration and citizenship law that no longer permitted Irish children born to foreign mothers to claim citizenship, and latterly the spectacular economic collapse of the country probably configured Ireland as a less than desirable place to make a living. In 2007 only 3,985 applications were received with a success rate of only 9 per cent. Significantly though, the percentage of applications from one African country dominates the statistics: Nigeria. Immigration, and reactions to it, have thus become unduly racialized because of the high numbers of applicants from one African country. The popular myth of African women arriving to repopulate Ireland, though, is not borne out in the figures: in 2007, the majority of applications for asylum were from men (62.3 per cent).15 The very first African man on the Irish stage in O’Kelly’s play fitted neatly into the national narrative of the African immigrant: a problemcauser, and a protaganist to force the white Irish audiences to question themselves. This inherent dramatic impulse is what Jason King interestingly observes as a dramaturgical mapping of ‘Irish historical memories of migration upon the contemporary experiences of asylum seekers, refugees, and other immigrants in Ireland’.16 Dramaturgical mapping of one experience onto another of course highlights the expectation for resolution and thus the failure to resolve or put right past wrongs to the self through the mapping onto others; this is more than just a failure of dramatic resolution, it is an inherent crack in the social imaginary as well. While the mapping might be dramaturgical, O’Kelly finds other links to bind the Irish with the migrant. The play was inspired by two real-life incidents. The first was reported by Amnesty International in 1991 and occurred in Uganda where prisoners were forced into a pit, logs were placed on top and a fire was then lit, killing all inside. The second event occurred in Rostock in Germany in 1992, the widely reported arson attack on a hostel housing a group of Vietnamese immigrants while the police looked on. Both of these events provide the dramatic structure for O’Kelly’s play, and cause Irish immigration officials to question their role as guardians of national purity whatever the cost. The representation of self through a male other came in the form of Ugandan refugee Joseph Omara (the surname being a pun of sameness) played by black English actor David Fishley arguing his case for asylum on an Irish justice platform. The vision of Ireland, though, is far from sympathetic, as he is seen being roughed up by Irish immigration officials. First critic of the

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production Fintan O’Toole writing in the Irish Times spelled out for all the power of the play in exposing the erroneous self-perception of Irish people as being both racially and economically other as a strategy of post-colonial reconstruction in a series of consistently failing economies post-Independence: ‘Our view of ourselves as a morally pure part of the Third World, as belonging to the oppressed rather than the oppressors, is blown away in O’Kelly’s stark images of a Ugandan refugee.’17 O’Kelly’s rare use of a realist form forces Irish audiences to confront a reality and does not allow the porous nature of allegory to permit an escape route from the unpalatable truths of society. We must remember that this play was first performed at a time when the state was being seriously challenged, and would continue to be, as a corrupt and corrupting matrix of institutions. That the Irish state could also be racist, given Ireland’s own memories and experiences, was a double blow. Joseph Omara’s claim for asylum is based on his being tortured in

Figure 7 David Fishley as Joseph Omara being interrogated by David Herlihy playing Leo Gaughran in Donal O’Kelly’s Asylum! Asylum!, Peacock Theatre, 1994. Photograph by kind permission of Abbey Theatre Archive.

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his home country and thus the play fits neatly into the memory tradition made popular by Brian Friel amongst others. But it is the white Irish who surround him who form the central figures of the play: his interrogator Leo and Leo’s sister Mary, who is recommended to Joseph as a solicitor for his defence. In many respects the division of the family, one against and one in support of the asylum-seeker, mirrors the divisions within Irish society in relation to immigration, and thus the battle that is fought out in the play is an intra-Irish one, with the black character at times moving from his role as protagonist to the antagonist of a wholly Irish domestic drama. Mary not only defends him but also falls in love with him and runs the risk of falling into the orientalist trope of objectifying sexually the black male body. The conventions of realism, however, mean that reality must be reflected and flights of imaginative fancy to allow alternative solutions to the lived-out ones are not permitted. As Mary helps to elicit horrific tales of torture, so does the Irish justice system conform to its narrative of expulsion. Her ambitious immigration officer brother Leo undergoes a conversion of sorts when he witnesses the burning of the asylum-seekers in Germany but ultimately is powerless to contest the state’s deportation order against Joseph. And that order is carried out mercilessly by fellow officer Pillar who is spurred on for personal reasons, namely his sexual jealousy of Joseph for his ‘ex’ Mary. Mary offers to marry Joseph as a means to stop the deportation but Joseph rejects her: ‘I want to join my life to yours … I have dreamed about it. How I bring that about is a matter of honour to me. I will not do it with a chain round my neck … the bond of the slave. I want to come to you with strength, with pride, with freedom, and with a future.’18 The neo-liberal response to the plight of the asylum-seeker is rejected for its unequal reassertion of a replicated colonial power relation. The Irish home, as in so many other dramas before it, becomes in this play a metaphor for nation. Mary and Leo’s father Bill who has just retired as a sacristan offers refuge to Joseph, whom he sees as a surrogate son for the one he has lost to ambition. The black African male becomes highly visible, is treated as a real human being, and is the object of sexual desire by a white Irish woman, but ultimately is dispatched through an act of socially normative closure. Irish society as constructed by the theatre, turns back white. Non-white Irish masculinity is trussed, bound, and expelled; his use-value was as a catalyst for self-healing of the white Irish family but his potential for assimilation never materializes. The African male was to be reinvented in an Irish context in Charlie O’Neill’s 2003 play Hurl, directed by Raymond Keane of Barabbas the Company, first performed at the Galway Arts Festival in July that

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year and revived for the Dublin Theatre Festival at the Tivoli Theatre in October. Hurl charts the formation of a new hurling team made up largely of asylum-seekers in rural Ireland, joined by a collection of other internally marginalized people from mainstream Irish society. The choice of hurling as the sporting team is hugely significant. As mentioned in the Introduction, hurling is the national sport, played exclusively by men, and cultivated by the Gaelic Athletic Association as the descendant sport of Ireland’s Celtic warrior heroes. Contemporary marketing of the sport focuses on its pre-modern roots and places it as an iconically potent symbol of ur-masculinity. Of course it is a sport that is uniquely Irish and thus uncontestable by foreign teams, though it does have similarities with lacrosse. Its exclusivity is also a marker for an essential Irish masculinity that is constructed as racially free from external influences. O’Neill’s play then challenges head on the essentialization of this unique brand of Irish culture by constructing a team of asylum-seekers and women who have abandoned their city

Figure 8 Publicity image of the cast of Charlie O’Neill’s Hurl, Barabbas the Company, 2003. Photograph: ROS KAVANAGH PHOTOGRAPHER.

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lives of hardship and oppression. This constructed commonality and communality permitted the director to further de-essentialize gender and race through casting. A company of eight actors was assembled to perform a multiplicity of roles that at times ignored boundaries of race and gender. The impetus for the team is simply to combat boredom without any desire to play competitively. Learning to play the national sport, of course, could be interpreted as a desire for assimilation, although the characters are as much bemused by the sport as desirous to play it. The playing of contact sports or any kind of athletic game is a route for the attainment of a hegemonic masculinity in many societies. The development of a physique necessary for speed and contact provides a visible marker of physical masculine status, regardless of race or class. However, as R. W. Connell points out the hegemonic status of physical sporting prowess does not necessarily translate into actual social authority because social marginalization in terms of race has already occurred and is immutable: ‘marginalization is always relative to the authorization of the hegemonic masculinity of the dominant group’.19 Hegemonic masculinity is contingent on social dominance and while a sense of hegemony can be transferred to the black male in sporting terms and circles, the transfer is either only temporary, or markedly ring-fenced within its specific cultural domain. The choice, further, of composing a hurling team in Hurl, fits neatly into the narrative drive of capitalist societies of self-betterment through active and socially useful leisure endeavours. In the Irish context, hurling takes on added significance in that it permits the characters to clothe themselves, again temporarily, in a veil of nationalism. The conjoining of a hegemonic masculinity with nationalist authority, through the game of hurling, can be read as a litmus test for the asylum-seeker to prove his allegiance to the nation. Nevertheless, such allegiance can be marvelled at but is only permissible temporarily. Irish nationality configured through the national game is a mirage for the outsider and, as we shall see, is never attainable. In many national contexts, where the dominant and hegemonic group is white, sport becomes a route for the self-betterment narrative permissible by the dominant groups, as Michael A. Messner notes: ‘an athletic career is determined by the individual’s rational assessment of the available means to construct a respectable masculine identity’.20 Charlie O’Neill’s play dangles social respectability in front of the marginalized, and throughout the narrative there is acute awareness that social respectability does not readily translate into social authority, whatever the playfulness permitted in asylum-seekers playing Irish.

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Hurl’s portrayal of difference, described by Patrick Lonergan as a play that exposes how ‘an Ireland of difference has made a different Ireland’,21 unpacks the stereotype of the populist media invention of the ‘non-national’. The collection of characters played by the eight actors are a mixture of asylum-seekers, refugees, immigrants, Irish children born to immigrants, as well as Irish caricatures. Indeed, there appear to be two registers to mark the national and so-called ‘non-national’: the immigrants are largely played realistically while the same actors play the Irish as caricatures, reversing the stereotype. Indeed the Irish men are very poorly represented in terms of social status. First there is Lofty, the de-frocked ex-missionary alcoholic priest who comes to the team’s assistance and provides them with inspiration, and the local GAA chairman, Rusty, played with a joke red wig, who is both a self-interested cheat and a racist, despite the role he plays for the team. Such is the poor representation that the principal female asylum-seeker Fatmata, on arrival in Lofty’s house, declares: ‘The place is a pigsty. Irish men!’22 The reduction of the Irish male to stereotype is a deliberate strategy to move the cultural discourse surrounding asylum-seekers away from a representation of the foreigner as an Irishman’s ‘problem’. The largely self-inflicted problems of the Irish are so markedly caricatured that the ‘foreigner’s’ stories, lives, and aspirations are the principal subject of the drama. Dramaturgically, also, the play has its characters both narrate and act in the action. The narration comes across as a quasi-sports commentary, while the action of the game is performed through stylized choreography. Throughout the play iconic moments in popular cultural Irish life are marked. One of the most hilarious is the singing of the National Anthem (in Irish of course) at the beginning of every game. The new team of Ireland’s others, the Freetown Slashers, stumble through the anthem in a hilarious mumble, reflecting back to Irish audiences their own, often incompetent, performance of nationalism. Helen Meany recorded the moment: ‘As the team members mumble their way through the (Irish language) words before lapsing into an enthusiastic roar, the Galway arts festival audience cheers in recognition: very few Irish people know the words either.’23 This allows a further distance for spectators to note the construction of race through representation, and in particular the Irish man is racialized through stereotype to demonstrate how dominant white society profiles and caricatures culturally the so-called ‘foreign national’. But the team, despite the odds, and conforming to the ‘against-all-odds’ self-betterment narrative so beloved of Hollywood cinema, rises to become provincial club champion. In

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the popular cultural imaginary, then, this is a fantasy of acceptability, achieved through the mastery of the national in sporting terms. And since women are members of the team as well, contravening the strict gender divisions in Gaelic Games, the transcending power of the dramatic narrative challenges both racism and sexism simultaneously. This is an Irish fantasy of inter-cultural acceptability transferred onto the presumed fantasy of a recent immigrant to Ireland. It is the story of a team inspired by a new arrival. The principal male character in the play is asylum-seeker Musa, whose idea the team was in the first place. He was a boy soldier from Sierra Leone with a back story of being forced to commit acts of machete-wielding barbarity. O’Neill allows the story to resonate but then undercuts the rose-tinted sympathy by allowing him to use his past as a method of intimidation of the opposing players during the match. The laughter that ensued reflected director Raymond Keane’s intention of opening ‘people’s eyes rather than driv[ing] them closed in horror’.24 In some respects this is Musa’s story, of how through sport he can achieve social respectability despite the horrific war crimes he has committed. But conforming to the familiar narrative of Irish drama in respect of the outsider, Musa (like Joseph Omara in Asylum! Asylum!) fails in his asylum application and is deported. In many senses Ireland for Musa is an unattainable mirage, as O’Neill commented in the production programme: ‘this protagonist proactively goes on a fantastic journey and as a result creates intercultural waves in this lovely little country we’ve built for ourselves’.25 Meanwhile, the legacy he has left behind is the transformation of another male, Irish Lofty, from no-hoper alcoholic to inspirational and successful team manager. In some ways then one could read Musa’s transformation through sport to replicate the failure of physical or sporting hegemony to transfer into social acceptability, let alone authority. It could also be read as a dramaturgical sacrifice for the recovery and redemption of an Irish masculinity, as Lofty can remain behind and be imbued with the social authority that transfers through sport. Both Musa and Lofty share many similarities as the outsider and indeed the outcast, but the difference between the two men’s respective narratives is the outcome determined exclusively through race, and that proves crucial and ultimately definitive. Ireland’s normativity exposes the narrative as fantasy, and the foreign male is not only returned to Sierra Leone, but also imprisoned, and thus unable to return to Ireland to make the fantasy a reality. Written at a time when in-migration was at its peak, an imagined inter-cultural Ireland was a theatrical impossibility.

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The theatrical ideal of an inter-cultural imaginary Ireland was also played out in Dublin-based Calypso’s production entitled Mixing it on the Mountain that coincided with the St Patrick’s Festival in 2003.26 Calypso was formed in 1993 specifically to create theatre that ‘challenges injustice and social exclusion in today’s rapidly changing world’.27 All of their early work was written by Donal O’Kelly who wrote Asylum! Asylum! at roughly the same time.28 In 1998 O’Kelly returned to the theme of the plight of refugees and asylum-seekers in Ireland in his imaginative multi-focused spectacle entitled Farawayan, first produced by Calypso at the Olympic Ballroom in Dublin. As a piece of devised physical theatre with soundscape this piece evoked haunting memories of Irish emigration through the arrival of strangers to Irish shores. Throughout most of its history until its Arts Council grant was cut in 2008, Calypso has been devoted almost exclusively to producing plays and devising work for young people around issues of racism and immigration. Its youth project entitled ‘Tower of Babel’ was specifically designed to engage young people directly in the creative processes of inter-cultural dialogue through theatre. Mixing it on the Mountain was just one performative result of that process and incorporated young asylum-seekers in the care of the state who were part of the inter-cultural project with four professional Irish actors. Written by Maeve Ingoldsby and directed by Calypso’s Báirbre Ní Caoimh, it was a sentimental musical comedy in which Irish national St Patrick was represented as an African slave and all other arrivals in Ireland were either African or East European and all in thrall to their white Irish masters. The production attracted controversy, despite high-profile media interest in it, in that the professionalism of the Irish actors was pitted against the lack of theatrical skills of the young non-Irish performers. Critic Karen Fricker’s review of the production in Irish Theatre Magazine suggested that the unevenness in skills displayed a non-imaginative conservative representation of the asymmetrical power relations between the Irish and non-Irish.29 Jason King, however, rethought the differential skill levels as indicative of the play being ‘at its most politically progessive’.30 But what all agreed on was that the large cast of performers taking to the stage presented a positive specacle of non-Irishness with the patron saint configured as black. Rethinking the iconicity of nationality is a contestation of tradition and a challenge to the mythology of the patriarch. The black performer standing in for the white Irishman and holding a mirror up to him has been the principal trope of the work of Ireland’s first African theatre company, Arambe. Initiated by Bisi Adigun in 2003, as a result of an invitation by Project (arts centre) director Willie White

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to devise a production for the St Patrick’s Festival about African oral traditions, this was the first time that Adigun, a TV presenter turned workshop facilitator/performer, had worked directly with other Africans on an Irish-based production. Towards the end of the evening, an extract from Jimmy Murphy’s play The Kings of the Kilburn High Road was read by African performers, and provided inspiration for one of their most important subsequent performances. The first production by Arambe was Nigerian playwright Ola Rotimi’s The Gods are Not to Blame (a version of Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex) and this was followed in subsequent years by two contemporary productions devised by Adigun and his cast entitled Once Upon a Time and Not So Long Ago. These productions featured scenes directly from the experiences of the cast as immigrants in Ireland, mixing the good with the bad, and were vitally important contributions to Irish theatre in that they gave immigrant African actors a voice for the first time on stage. In 2006 Adigun decided to return to The Kings of the Kilburn High Road. This was a high-risk strategy as the play is not about African experiences at all but about white Irish experience of emigration in London. Having African actors perform as white Irish was a contestation of the uniqueness of the Irish experience of emigration that had

Figure 9 Cast of Jimmy Murphy’s The Kings of the Kilburn High Road, Arambe Productions, 2006. Photograph: John Nelson.

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been mythologized in all forms of cultural mediation. Murphy’s play is set in a pub in the Irish community of Kilburn in North London. Irish immigrants are gathered at a wake for one of their own and in the process detail the loneliness and pain of emigration. They all talk of their desire to return to the home country but the irony of the play is that the only one returning is the man in the coffin, and the reason he is returning is that he jumped in front of an Underground train. To have African performers speak the pain of the Irish and identify with it, and further retaining the original Irish references in the text, was an extraordinarily powerful political irony. The most potent moment came when the spectators could not suspend their disbelief and retain their colour blindness when one of the ‘Irish’ characters Jap Kavanagh is mocked for having a black girlfriend, and the ‘African’ performance retained the racist slurs of the original. There were other moments, too, such as when the ex-pats direct their ire towards the Ireland that has forgotten them, that spoke crucially to the contemporary experience of Ireland’s own immigrants. As mentioned earlier in the chapter the Irish memory of historical emigration, despite it conflicting with the contemporary experience of immigration, lives on in the post-colonial cultural imaginary (after all Murphy’s play deals with Irish men who struggle to come to terms with an exilic condition that entraps them twenty-five years after their departure from the home country). Arambe’s production provided the opportunity to map contemporary embodiment onto historical memory with the effect not so much of revealing similarities, but exposing ironies and contradictions in the mask of memory. Matthew Spangler identifies the implications of signs and signification of this hybridic performance: What we saw and heard on stage, then, was a hyperbolic hybrid created through a visual and aural amalgamation that was simultaneously Irish and Nigerian, both, but not fully either. The performance of this hybrid identity functioned to destabilize cultural authority by making visible the fact that what we think of as culture is itself a collection of arbitrary signs and signifiers that, while they may appear to be naturally fixed, are, in fact, inherently mutable and always open to redefinition.31 From the perspective of masculinities, a futher layer of the erroneous conflation of historical memory with lived reality was exposed. Murphy’s Irish characters are all working on building sites, with little social status or economic power. The actors in Arambe’s production,

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however, belied the reality of their social and economic condition. They did not look or speak in any way that would reflect a subordinated masculinity. Thus the production, by its mapping of race onto class, only exposed another bitter irony of emigration, that the immigrant is subject to a repositioning of his masculinity status simply because of his immigrant status, and nothing at all to do with his education or social status in his country of origin. As Adigun himself says, one of the drives of the production was to ‘remind Irish people that many immigrants who had recently arrived in Ireland would rather have remained in their countries of origin’32 and the mapping of race onto class does not conform to a simple set of binaries in the Nigerian/Irish matrix.33 The disjuncture between the textual references to the Irish experience of emigration, and the embodiment by African actors of that experience, exposed the differences between the historical memory of the condition and the contemporary reality of it, in terms of race and class. Rather than being marked by memory of failure, African masculinities in Ireland are marked almost exclusively by colour as sign of ‘non-national’ status that masks their social and economic potential.34

George Seremba One African actor and playwright cuts across much of the cultural visibility of non-white Ireland. George Seremba was born in Kampala, Uganda but escaped in 1980 after a botched execution attempt, as he had been a vocal opponent of President Milton Obote who had succeeded the notorious Idi Amin. He successfully applied for Canadian citizenship as an asylum-seeker and went on to make a succesful career as an actor, as well as charting his near-death experience in a hugely successful monologue drama, Come Good Rain (1993). It was the success of his play that first brought him to Ireland to perform it at the Galway Arts Festival in 1994. Though Canada remained his home he made repeated trips to Ireland (such as for a national tour of his play in 1996) and took on the role of Joseph Omara in a revival of Donal O’Kelly’s play Asylum! Asylum!, directed by Vic Merriman in 1997 at the Granary Theatre, Cork to mark the opening of the Centre for Migration Studies at University College. In 2001 Ireland became his home when he moved to first read for a Masters degree in Irish Theatre and Film at Trinity College Dublin and subsequently to research a PhD on Ugandan playwright Robert Serumaga (who had many connections with Ireland), graduating in 2008. Throughout his time as a student and beyond Seremba worked professionally, either in his own productions or in

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theatre and television. Other work in which he was involved and the subject of study in this chapter, was the role of Gabriel Udenze in the RTE soap opera Fair City. Arguably his most successful role was as Sam in the 2004 Calypso production of Athol Fugard’s Master Harold and the Boys for which he received Best Actor nominations from the Dublin Fringe Festival and the ESB/Irish Times Irish Theatre Awards. But it is his production of Come Good Rain in which he plays himself that the representation of a non-white masculinity contests popular representations of masculinities configured exclusively as foreign, problem, or migrant. The autobiographical monologue is a testament to political intervention. Seremba was a vocal opponent of the dictator Obote, who had rigged the presidential election in his favour, while he was a student on the campus of the celebrated Makerere University in Kampala. One night in 1980 Seremba was abducted by G Branch, the military intelligence unit, interrogated and tortured by Obote’s right-hand man. He was subsequently taken to a forest on the outskirts of the city and shot several times. Fortunately, the execution failed. Seremba managed to escape to Kenya, from where he migrated to Canada. In performance

Figure 10 George Seremba in rehearsal for Come Good Rain at the Samuel Beckett Theatre Dublin, 2005. Photograph: Paul Farren.

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the tall, well-built, and athletic Seremba speaks directly to the audience accompanied by a percussionist who acts in a rhythmical dialogue with the actor. Seremba has had several different percussionists during his various tours and performances of the play in Ireland, including the director of Arambe Bisi Adigun and white Irish director Matt Torney. The latter performance lent a whole new meaning to the play as the white actor was drumming African rhythms, adding a contemporary inter-cultural context to the play. Further, it offered a visual disjuncture between the white man, not in rhythmical control, but in rhythmical response, marking out and acknowledging the suffering that the black actor literally embodied. The ninety-minute performance shifts mood and tone from recounting an idyllic childhood to the horrors of dictatorship in his early adult life in a tour de force virtuoso performance that allows the migrant to speak, to exist as himself, and not be represented by someone else. One of the most crucial moments in the production is when Seremba removes his shirt and there, visible to the assembled spectators, is the marked body of torture and execution; large wounds scar his athletic torso in a moment that exposes the indomitable strength of the male physique, but also attenuates it by the wounds of vulnerability. We cannot look away; we cannot hide in theatrical distance. Seremba’s moment of self-revelation is a poignant and personal contestation of the failure of the representation of the African in Irish cultural discourse. His body stands in successfully for the discourse of asylum. There is no arguing with it. He need not narrativize his experience; his body maps it. This showing of wounds has a completely different agenda to the purpose of ‘wound culture’,35 namely to momentarily wound the hegemonic male body in order for it to be cared for, healed, and ultimately to be mastered, as a mere hurdle to hegemony. In many senses, Seremba’s exposure is conflicting. On the one hand, his body iconically represents the healthy, fit male, with a ‘warrior body’36 as a signifier of his masculinity. But the wounds on the body are real and his continuous emotional retelling of the story of how they came to be there nearly two decades ago is proof of empowerment after subjection and loss. Exposure of his athletic physique does not corroborate his hegemony through physicality; rather the opposite is true. His physical subjection and emotional loss are made even more transparent. The retelling of the story and the physical revelation as proof is an emotionally draining experience for him. In interview, though, he returns to the myth of restorative justice through theatrical transformation: ‘There is an element of poetic justice in it. It is definitely a celebration of the spirit of humanity, and how sometimes those who are prepared to lose their life actually cling to it.’37 But this play was

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also an emotional charting of a man’s near-death experience: ‘It had to be a one-man show, with a percussionist on the side, to accompany me, through the tears and ruptures as I relived the horror of my therapeutic voyage.’38 It must not be forgotten that the traumas of Uganda have their roots in the erroneous division of tribal lands into European concepts of nation states. Seremba’s theatrical testament replaces the hard-body image of imperial man with the post-colonial iconic body, wounded and restored, but marked to remind us that his masculinity is not a marker of difference but a marker of our collective guilt for any disbelief. Taking off his shirt is a hugely powerful act: it is an act of disclosure of his suffering, of his own contestation of hegemony, of his subjection, that turns the theatrical moment into political action. Unlike the Irish asylum plays to date in which the black African is fantasized over by neo-liberal white Irish, deported, murdered or not even allowed to land, Seremba renders his body ultra-visible. It does not disappear but remains on stage throughout, becoming more and more psychologically and physically exposed as the play progresses. Though some might argue it is not an Irish play per se (as it was premiered in Canada) its multiple performances the length and breadth of Ireland render it an important theatrical intervention in the cultural discourses surrounding race and migration, and offer a direct challenge to the mythology of eulogizing erroneously the white Irish as the blacks of Europe.

Race-ing futures The Irish theatrical representation of race in a specifically Irish context is faced with the challenge first of identifying what race means beyond skin colour, and of unravelling the matrix of hegemony and fantasy surrounding the other in a reinscribed post-colonial nation. Whatever the myth of the Irish being subjected perpetually to the colonial gaze, the reality is that the post-colonial society in various cultural forms adopts a dominant specularity to survey race. The race–sex trope as evidenced above is further augmented by plays such as Christian O’Reilly’s It Just Came Out (Druid, 2001), Ken Harmon’s Done Up Like a Kipper (Peacock, 2002), Jim O’Hanlon’s The Buddhist of Castleknock (Fishamble, 2002), and Brian Campbell’s Voyage of No Return (DubbelJoint, 2004). All of these plays to a certain degree construct a non-white person in terms primarily of race, but also in terms of race as fetish. In some senses they display a desire for the other, but that desire is not a simply hegemonic form of wished-for dominance. That desire is what bell hooks determines as a ‘desire to make contact with those bodies deemed Other’.

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That desire, she continues, ‘establishes a contemporary narrative where the suffering imposed by structures of domination on those designated Other is deflected by an emphasis on seduction and longing where the desire is not to make the Other over in one’s image but to become the Other’.39 Thus, the racialized other in contemporary Irish theatre is a desire to the point of fetish so that it becomes an imagined source of renewal, a complex condition of modernity, namely the desire to reinvent through the agency of a wished-for other. Is this then not another form of imperialist nostalgia, orientalist in a sense, in which the Western male pursues the otherness of the other for the rejuvenation of the self? In many of the plays and the television dramas mentioned above, the racial other is removed visibly for representation at the end of the performance leaving a white hegemony or a mixed-race economy to be reinscribed. And this is the crucial importance of African performers such as George Seremba and the African theatre company Arambe, who work from the inside out, from a position of subjected specularity, to reconfigure the white Irish as other, but interestingly in Arambe’s case, not to the point of excluding him. The mythological configuration of the colonized Irish as ‘female’ is contested by such representation by the African male performer’s very presence on the stage and screen of Ireland, performing a theatrical agency in the face often of a lack of agency in other spheres of public life.

7 Protestant Boys

The Protestant Boys are loyal and true Though fashions are changed and the loyal are few The Protestant Boys are true to the last Though cowards belie them when danger has past Aye still we stand A loyal band And reck not the liars whatever they say For let the drums rattle The summons to battle The Protestant Boys must carry the day.1 Popular folk songs provide a rich source for understanding the mythmaking and self-belief of Protestant masculinities in Northern Ireland. Though the tunes to which they are sung are non-indigenous, their performance in a Northern Irish context testifies to the origins of Protestants in the country on a grand scale as part of the Plantation of Ulster in the early seventeenth century. The confiscation of lands owned by the Irish chieftains O’Neill and O’Donnell and their resettlement by Presbyterians and Dissenters from Scotland and England were a deliberate attempt to prevent any further rebellion in Ireland and ensure English control. The new settlers on the frontier of an English empire faced a largely unpopulated region of Ireland (bogland and woodland) and new villages and towns emerged around garrisons. The link between the settlers and the army was a visible symbol of the colonizing process that determined the superiority of the settlers, economically and socially. Part of the condition of settlement was that the newly acquired land could not be sold back to the native Irish Catholics and this condition was in no uncertain terms the basis for the resulting 156

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apartheid society that emerged over the subsequent centuries, and conditioned culturally a siege mentality. Popular loyalist songs also point to this condition and their performance even today are by marching bands tied to a town or locality with the name ‘Defenders’ in their title. The cultural processing of settler siege mentalities tied to the militarization and colonization of a large swathe of the province of Ulster ensured that the representation of Protestants would be determined largely through masculinist discourses of subjugation and control. Of course, it must not be forgotten that the Protestant settlers were not one unified conglomerate. Many emanated from the Borders region of Scotland, and were Presbyterian, and had little in common with the English Dissenters who sought disestablishment of the state from the church. And further, there were some settlers who came from Gallicspeaking regions of Scotland and were in fact Catholic. Thus religious harmony of a Protestant–Catholic division was never present from the outset. Among Protestants themselves there were many religious subdivisions that were not all in thrall to the English monarchy after the Restoration in 1660. Further, there were distinct class divisions that emerged between the Protestant settlers that were to prove significant in subsequent historical acts of violence and their commemoration in performance and song. Towards the end of the eighteenth century there were clear divisions and grievances emerging between Protestant working classes and unscrupulous landlords that led to the formation of what was known as the Peep O’Day boys,2 a secret organization that swiftly settled grievances by establishing a unity of differing Protestant classes through the fabrication of an enemy without (Catholics) as well as a literal enemy within (the Society of United Irishmen). The latter was a republican organization that took its inspiration from the American War of Independence and the French Revolution, that ironically was led not by Catholics but by the Presbyterians themselves. Conjoined with the Catholic Defenders, they staged a rebellion in 1798 that led to a bloody conflict characterized by internecine slaughter that did not obey traditional sectarian lines. The rebellion was vehemently suppressed by Protestant militias, a repression that David Cairns and Shaun Richards declare as indicative of the insecurity of Protestant settlers, such was its vigour. The threat to their security by such a rebellion of both Dissenters and Catholics was very clear: ‘Their hope for a non-sectarian alliance of the Irish would not only have dissolved the Ascendancy of the Anglo Irish but would also have removed the basis upon which Protestants outside the Ascendancy understood their positions to rest.’3 The Ascendancy was a very small and powerful grouping that owned much of the wealth and land of Ireland that had

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only an ethnic relationship with the Protestant settlers. Other than ethnicity they had nothing in common either socially or economically. The Protestant militias that defended the Union with England also became defenders of the Ascendancy by proxy. And it was around the time leading up to the rebellion that the Peep O’Day Boys were transformed into a legitimate fraternal organization, the Orange Institution (known as the Orange Order), formed after a local sectarian skirmish in Loughgall, County Armagh in 1795, to foster the cult of King William of Orange who defeated the Catholic King of England at the celebrated Battle of the Boyne in 1690. Though the institution suffered through most of the nineteenth century from successive prohibition of secret societies, it underwent a revival in late Victorian society where many of the traditions currently existing emanate, such as the bowler hat and collarette, and even a temperance movement. Throughout the twentieth century it had indelible links with the Ulster Unionist Party, and many of its members fought in the Ulster Division of the British Army at the Battle of the Somme in 1916. It was the revival of Catholic emancipation in the 1960s under the banner of the civil rights movement that led to a revival in the recruitment to the Order, as its original aim of the defence of Protestant supremacy found a new raison d’être. Quite obviously from this potted history of Protestant colonization of Ireland, masculinist discourse prevails as the history is remembered through acts of violence, militarily or paramilitarily. It should be mentioned that the Association of the Loyal Orangewomen of Ireland was revived in 1911, but unlike the contemporary Suffragists in England the Association both emulated the men’s institution and ensured strict gender divisions. Equality was not part of the remit for the Association, and this is evidenced throughout the twentieth century in the public performances of Orangeism, most notably on the annual public holiday to celebrate the Battle of the Boyne on 12 July and to herald the triumph of William over James, Protestant over Catholic. Throughout Northern Ireland parades take place of the Orange lodges accompanied by bands playing a mixture of religious, military, and popular folk tunes processing through towns and villages before congregating in a Demonstration field where a religious service takes place, often political speeches decrying nationalism are heard, and the Protestant faith is declared. This performance of Protestantism is very much a performance of hegemonic masculinity. The men all wear suits and ties pointing to a class order that belies many of the members’ actual class. The parades are composed almost exclusively of men, apart from the bands that are not part of the Order. The militaristic iconography of the

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march is accompanied by each lodge’s banner, depicting either a religious battle, an Old Testament biblical scene as emblematic of the local situation, a siege of Protestantism, or an iconographic triumph over Catholicism. Conversely the spectators are dominated by the women left behind by the men on parade, by children, and by older men unfit to parade. The banners point to a trade union legacy and the class origins of the Order, while the pyramidal structure of the Order itself replicates Masonic traditions that again serve to perform exclusivity as well as to secure the unity of a religious grouping despite the barriers of class. And as we shall see during the course of this chapter, the few plays that deal with Protestant culture focus on some of the historical moments mentioned above when Irish Protestant men were called to arms, such as in Stewart Parker’s Northern Star and Frank McGuinness’s Observe the Sons of Ulster Marching Toward the Somme. These two plays are very much theatrical projects of deracination, without any celebrating or condoning of Protestant culture and historical myth-making. In Northern Star, Parker focuses on the Protestant United Irishmen while in the latter Frank McGuinness uncovers the unity of the classes within Protestantism for the pursuit of a colonial dream. Later the work of Gary Mitchell reveals the colonial legacy for contemporary Protestant masculinity as men struggle to negotiate historical supremacy with the lived realities of social subordination. There is a distinct irony inherent in the performance of Protestantism in Ulster, and most particularly in Northern Ireland, the state created after the partition of Ireland in 1922. Protestantism is a religious denomination of protest against a hegemonic Catholic doctrine. Though divided into various hues and sects, what unites Protestants is the rejection of the idea of transubstantiation and of the idea that a human agent can act as a symbolic representation of the divine. With its belief in direct communication with the divine and the abolition of symbols, relics, and most rituals, Protestantism is characterized by its puritan performance ethic. Within its performance there is no ‘as if’; worshippers are not asked to suspend disbelief as the divine cannot be represented. And thus the performativity of Protestantism lies very much at the heart of an almost total rejection of theatricality. And this is the point where we must separate Protestants as a religious grouping in Northern Ireland from their social and cultural organizations, as well as their political parties. As has already been mentioned, throughout Irish history the elision of Protestantism with Unionism has been far from watertight; many of the leaders of historical Republicanism were in fact Protestant. In post-partition Northern Ireland, in which six counties of the Province of Ulster were hewn from

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Ireland to create the state of Northern Ireland, a constituent part of the United Kingdom, a heightened sense of an already existent siege mentality meant an almost complete elision of Unionism with Protestantism. But within the political sphere of Unionism divisions were acute, and those divisions were principally constructed by both religious denomination and, crucially, by class. The historical legacy of the Plantation still plays out to a broad extent within Unionism, and a general divide exists between Anglicanism and Presbyterianism reflecting the English or Scottish origins of the settler descendants. Politically, the division is further exacerbated by the evangelism of Presbyterianism and other dissenting denominations and degrees of secularism and religiosity bifurcate along the historical division of denominations. Culturally, however, those divisions are exacerbated by class divisions. Thus, in broad terms, the traditional Ulster Unionist might very well conform to Anglicanism and be of land-owning or the middle classes, while other more militant shades of Unionism might belong traditionally to dissenting denominations, and no irony is to be seen in the increased political militancy of those who perform most fervently their religious beliefs with zeal. Uniting those class and religious divisions within Protestantism is the cultural condition known as ‘loyalism’. Loyalists profess allegiance to the English monarchy, though rarely to the British government. This tautological position is reflective of the curious irony already mentioned of the hegemonic social position of Protestantism within the state of Northern Ireland, and their rejection of British governance of their affairs. Loyalists, however, are much more than mere Unionists. Their loyalty is professed by their membership of the Loyal Institutions (Orange Order, Royal Black Institution, Royal Arch Purple Institution, Apprentice Boys of Derry) and performed in demonstrations and parades throughout the summer months on the streets and lanes of Northern Ireland. With the exception of the Apprentice Boys, the Loyal Institutions have a very strong religious foundation and their performance through parades is understood as a demonstration for their civil and religious liberties, an inherited perceived need from Plantation-era settlers and their experience of the struggle between church and monarchy in the early seventeenth century. The pre-eminance of masculinity within the Loyal Institutions is another historical legacy of colonialism and a conserved frontier mentality meant that the performance of loyalty was masculine. The resurrection of the Orange Order at the end of the nineteenth century and the obsessive maintenance of the concept of tradition, as well as the secretive operation of business, meant that while Northern Irish society moved on at an exponential rate economically and socially in

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the twentieth century, the practices and strict gender divisions of the Loyal Institutions remained intact. As we shall see later in the chapter the theatrical performance of Protestantism was very much from a liberal humanist perspective. While some authors sought to explore representations of Protestant communities (spelling out the elisions and divisions between Protestantism, Unionism and loyalism), others from outside the religious tradition sought to understand the ironies and contradictions of how hegemonic masculinities could also be protest masculinities. And this is where the strict sociological divisions of generic types of masculinities, as put forward by R. W. Connell, though still relevant, begin to be troubled. If it is religion which offers Protestants the motivation to protest Catholic hegemony, and if it is their ancestral inheritance of settler siege mentalities that motivate the protest against the British politicians for abandoning them, what is it that helps to assert hegemony? Social and economic hegemony, of course, was inherent from the outset in the contractual settlement of the English and Scots on appropriated land. But with the rapid industrialization of Belfast, at the expense of its southern counterpart, Dublin, by the technologies of modernity, Protestants could not hope to exclusively service industry. What asserted Protestant hegemony most of all, and emboldened the Protestant land-owners and industry leaders were the social and cultural processes of loyalism, that cut across class boundaries ostensibly, but because of their exclusivity created a ready-made compliant working class of Protestants that was elevated socially because of their religion. That is not to say that Protestant working classes were immune to exploitation, or immune to the pull of the class struggle at the turn of the last century. Protestant working-class compliance was manipulated not just by political leaders, but also by the economically powerful to override social protest by calling on loyalism to override class divisions. With a working class divided along religious lines the incitement of political differences by means of the cultural processes of loyalism ensured a hegemony of an exclusively Protestant middle class.

Sham fights History teaches us that the relationship between the theatre and the Protestant communities in Northern Ireland has been fraught. The canonical Irish theatre has been constructed almost exclusively along nationalist lines, paradoxically led by the Protestant Ascendancy-class writers (Yeats, Lady Gregory, Synge). The imagination of a nation through

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the cultural fabrication that is theatre meant little or no role for the hegemonic loyalist tradition in the North. As Eugene McNulty has pointed out, the nationalist project had a northern rival in the Ulster Literary Theatre,4 an aborted project of a Northern Revival in the early twentieth century that aped and in some cases mocked its Southern counterpart. While that project was aborted in the popular arenas of performance throughout Ireland, audiences divided along religious lines to hurl both approbation and abuse (and in many cases missiles) at Irish characters of various political hues in local melodramas. Though scrims were often erected to protect the performance, theatres often became the focal point for sectarian tensions that spilled out onto the street.5 Skirmishes along sectarian lines in theatrical sites diminished rapidly after the First World War as the cultural space of the theatre became almost exclusively middle class; when the most recent period of civil strife known as the Troubles hit the streets in 1969 (until the IRA ceasefire in 1997) the social space of cities, long targeted by shooting and bombing campaigns, became militarized no-go areas and the theatres suffered a significant decline. From a geographical perspective it is interesting to see how theatrical creativity moved out of the centre of Belfast and into the southern middle-class suburbs around Queens University (Lyric Theatre and the former Arts Theatre). In the late twentieth century after a referendum on the future of Northern Ireland in 1998 both north and south of the border overwhelmingly endorsed a process of peace (known popularly as the Good Friday Agreement, GFA) and huge tranches of overseas aid were pumped into the economy that resulted in the re-emergence of the city centre as a social and cultural space as well as a building programme of theatres in major towns throughout Northern Ireland. Until that happened, however, much of the political performance took place on the streets. And within the Loyal Institutions, ritual performances continued to be enacted annually at parades and demonstrations. One of the most significant performances of loyalism occurs annually on 13 July organized by the Royal Black Institution at Scarva in County Down. The RBI is connected to the Orange institution and entrance to it is loyal service and good behaviour for two years in the Orange. More Masonic in appearance than its Orange fellow order, and more religious in its connotation, its parade in Scarva to a large extent excludes the hyper-masculine fife and drum bands, some of which have connections to paramilitarism. Where these are present, their performance is more subdued and their music more religious than folk. After the parade to the Demonstration field and under an oak tree that is reputed to have provided shelter for King William and his army on the way to the Battle

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of the Boyne a pageant takes place re-enacting the famous battle. Ruth Dudley-Edwards takes up the story: King William and his main henchman General Schomberg on the one hand, and King James and General Patrick Sarsfield on the other, appear on horseback to thunderous applause followed by motley footsoldiers more or less dressed for the part. After riding round and round for a while, the kings and generals, still on horseback, fight each other with swords while their followers use swords and pistols with blanks or generally tussle. The fight […] rages enthusiastically around the field with much gunshot, shouting, laughter and cheering. By the end of the fight, James’s standard has been destroyed, William’s is held high and James runs away.6 This re-enactment is performed with a highly self-conscious amateurism that does not even try to reflect the reality of the battle, and in no way conforms to the performances of other battle re-enactment societies who pride themselves on accuracy. This is a performance only of an outcome. As the ‘actors’ move into the Demonstration field for the fight, the ‘actors’ playing James and his men politely move the audience out of the way. Again there is no suspension of disbelief being attempted. This is a Protestant representation of otherness that conforms to its own conception of the ‘other’. James cannot be portrayed as evil as everyone knows he is a Protestant actor. The performance is known as a ‘sham fight’ and its efficacy lies in the performance of supremacy of a tradition historically. It is a ritual moment that is not watched by the vast majority of the thousands who assemble each year. For most the occasion is a family day out for a largely rural community to parade, picnic, and socialize. While most nationalist commentators of the loyalist parades and demonstrations focus on the militaristic appearance of the procession, most ignore the socially cohesive role the loyal orders play within various Protestant communities. While the parades are public demonstrations of politics and religion, they are also celebrations of community that gained huge importance during the Troubles, particularly in border areas where Protestant inhabitants perceived themselves to be victims of an IRA process of ethnic cleansing. Throughout the year in 900 or so Orange halls throughout Northern Ireland the lodges organize dances and barbecues and even host amateur theatre companies as fund-raising events for their upkeep. Their social importance is in their ability to bind a community with most of the social aspect of the organization being carried out by

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relatives and partners of the male members. In many senses the Loyal Institutions provide a social space for male bonding that is performed as a show of strength with militaristic hues on an annual occasion. Their performance through the streets is a profession of their ‘liberty’ to do so and much of the conflict that these processions incur comes from nationalist neighbours who find the militarism offensive. The ritual reconstitution of the cult of William and the appropriation of presumed analogous scenes from the Bible pictorially represented on many lodge or preceptory’s banners provide a rich resource for the articulation of a historical position within a fast-changing and often threatening political situation. These rituals are crucial to loyalists; in fact they constitute their raison d’être, as Neil Jarman points out in Material Conflicts: Even when the form remains stable it does not imply that the meaning is static: in fact discontinuity between form and meaning may contribute to the persistence of a ritual by increasing the multi-vocality of the event and thereby its ambiguity, and in turn, its vitality. The ambiguity of the ritual process is an important factor in its accessibility to a large number of people.7 In the annual ritual moment for a mass audience, history collapses into a multi-layered sign that folds 1690 (Boyne) over 1798 (Rebellion) over 1916 (Somme), and indeed over every other subsequently commemorated moment when supremacy needed assertion, including the always precarious present-day trauma in the ongoing siege of Protestantism. In many ways, according to Dominic Bryan the ritual is configured as being ‘out of time’,8 and the late twentieth-century development of the inclusion of bands in the parade with (in)direct links to paramilitarism completes the time-circle. The binarism of a collapsed and homogeneous past versus an impossible heterogeneous future is replicated in the binarism of identitarianism in Northern Ireland that permits the performance of a political ritual to be promoted as cultural. This ‘chameleon-like nature of cultural identity’,9 as Richard Kirkland points out, is an appropriation of performative culture for strategic political purposes. In this context, the Troubles thus gave the ritual a new lease of life, for without opposition, its performance would have all the vitality of a quaint re-enactment. Instead this ritual ensures the visibility of memory through a performative act of hegemonic masculinity. And this is where we return to the ironic position held by Protestant men in a society designed for their exclusive hegemony and yet that hegemony is premised on a historical legacy of protest. In many senses the performance is one of poacher

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turned gamekeeper. The Sham Fight of Scarva throughout recent history provided a rare occasion when that hegemony could be celebrated. But it was and still is celebrated in a ritual space for an audience of initiates while all around them their political hegemony was crumbling, their economic status challenged, and their social influence eroded during processes of peace where such performance was seen as an anachronism.

Theatre and Northern Ireland It is no surprise to discover that the theatre in contemporary Northern Ireland has not been the cultural forum chosen for the representation of the Protestant community. Theatres in Northern Ireland sit geographically in shared social spaces in an otherwise apartheid society. The siege mentality of settler-Protestants has led to a cultural circling of wagons for the most part, and this has been reinforced by the appropriation of theatre on the island of Ireland as a whole for the imagining of a new nation, something anathema to the wishes of the loyalists within Protestantism. Partition only served to reinscribe that division between the Protestant community and the theatre. While popular theatre flourished since partition it came in the form of reviews, sketches, and variety, some of which was even in drag. The power of the evangelical churches in Northern Irish society further reinforced the antipathy in the Protestant community towards the theatre. Playing someone other than yourself was frowned upon also in the collective Protestant work ethic that had profited in the industrialized North, and leisure entertainment was not considered favourably. As Lionel Pilkington points out, however, the Northern Unionist state after the Second World War began to see the attractiveness of fostering a regional Ulster theatre for the purposes of both contributing to an overall British culture as well as legitimizing culturally a contested state: ‘an Ulster theatre was seen as an indication of the state’s bourgeois stability, an attractive sign of its present and potential capitalist development and an opportunity to exhibit social consensus’.10 The establishment of the Council for the Encouragement of Music and the Arts (CEMA) in 1943, which was a copy of a similar initiative in England that aimed to demonstrate the legitimate democracy of the state, in fact further alienated Protestants from public performance. For the next twenty-two years CEMA ordered that the British national anthem be played at every public event in Northern Ireland, including theatres, an edict that was a performance of power rather than performance of democracy. The anthem, sure to incite nationalists, would either keep them out of the theatres or at least

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ensure obedience. CEMA, as Pilkington notes, also frowned on modern or experimental work in the theatre because of its potential to incite nationalist unrest. But it was not only nationalists who were targeted by the ruling Unionist elites. Breaks within their own ranks were feared even more, and dissenting cultural voices within the broad framework of Protestantism were perceived as a sign of moral degeneracy of a kind liable to bring down the infrastructure of the state, and one that summoned the spectre of the United Irishmen.11 The Ulster Group Theatre (attached to the Ulster Hall which was a venue for loyalist meetings and demonstrations) became the site of grievance between the theatrical production of Protestantism on the stage and the state’s desire (under the auspices of CEMA) to suppress it. Sam Thompson’s 1959 play Over the Bridge was pulled from production through political interference because of a perceived detrimental attack on the state. In fact the play is set in the exclusively all-male preserve of the Belfast shipyards with a trade unionist as protagonist seeking election but lamenting the role anti-Catholic sectarianism plays in elections. The narrative proceeds, however, to run into problems as the only Catholic representative on the stage is linked to a recently proscribed organization (Sinn Féin) and thus subversive. Further, he is represented as someone who loses his temper and thus his self-control. The result is an apologia of Protestant sectarianism as reaction to provocation. The play was subsequently staged the following year (1960) by the intended director, James Ellis at the Empire Theatre in Belfast and played to full houses. But this version eliminated the ending in which sectarianism is discussed and critiqued and thus it ironically ended up being an assertion of the state by its working-class Protestant masculinities bowing in deference to a clergyman, thus rescuing the potentially subversive working classes who were perceived to be in danger from the rising tide of trade union activism and socialism (and anti-sectarianism) and thus elevating them to a false hegemonic position by reasserting sectarian divisions. The political shift within nationalism from the 1950s to the 1960s was marked by an altered approach to the contestation of the legitimacy and anti-democracy of the state in the form of civil rights protests to end discrimination in terms of housing, social services, and even electoral franchise. Undoubtedly, the reason for the shift was the rise of the Catholic middles classes. This, too, had an impact on theatre. After a decade of student amateur work Pearse and Mary O’Malley established the Lyric Players Group Trust, a professional organization that was to become the leading theatre in Northern Ireland over the next half-century.

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Avoiding direct confrontation with the state deliberately, the group consciously included both nationalist and unionist voices, writers, and cultural expressions, regardless of their religious origins. Playing to exclusively middle-class audiences in a leafy South Belfast suburb, it set out to be the theatrical conscience of a divided society. At the outset, however, it came into direct conflict with the state with the refusal of the O’Malleys to bow to pressure from CEMA regarding the playing of the British national anthem, a symbolic request for assent to the state. The civil rights movement’s protest marches and demonstrations in the late 1960s moved the political debate into performative political action and enabled the Lyric to establish its independence from perceived anti-state forces. The imposition of Direct Rule from Westminster and the suspension of the Stormont parliament in 1973 brought Unionists and loyalists into direct confrontation with Britain, forcing them into an anomalous situation of being loyal to a nation whose government was perceived to be betraying them. The following year an attempt by the British government to establish a power-sharing Assembly for Northern Ireland was met with a general strike by the Ulster Workers Council, reinforced by paramilitary elements within loyalism. The strike crippled the state, and was a hugely impressive though scary assertion of Unionist/loyalist control. But the British government persisted with direct rule and new approaches to resolving the intractable situation of divided communities through education and culture were rolled out as quasi-experimental policies of cultural integration. The Lyric, thus, became crucially important in this cultural project. Triumphalist displays of Protestant hegemonic masculinities continued to be played out in the loyal orders’ marches, the loyalist paramilitary organizations’ terror campaigns in response to a resurgence in IRA operations, and in riots that linked the two groupings to assert geographical control of towns and cities. Meanwhile, in the theatre (and in Belfast’s Lyric Theatre specifically), Protestant masculinities’ ironic relationship with the British state historically and their contested hegemony in contemporary social reality could be explored with relative impunity.

History repeating The Lyric Theatre contributed hugely to the re-presentation of historical moments in Irish history in which Protestants played a significant role. While the contemporary realities of the Troubles all around the theatre positioned Protestants as loyalists almost exclusively, the theatre

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sought to remind the middle classes that the link between loyalism and Protestantism was far from watertight historically. Re-presenting the history of significant events in political life and revolutionary struggle, of course, determined a masculinist perspective. Battles were fought, won, and lost by men, for men, and the leading factional organizations such as the Orange and the United Irishmen were exclusive brotherhoods. The Lyric’s leading playwright during the Troubles was undoubtedly Stewart Parker, a liberal Protestant intellectual who produced a series of plays that interrogated Protestantism within a Northern Irish context and clearly dissociated religion from political affiliations. One of his most celebrated plays was Northern Star, first produced in 1984, directed by Peter Varago at the Lyric. The play focuses on a relatively minor figure in the overall 1798 rebellion of United Irishmen, Henry Joy McCracken. However, he was hugely significant from a Northern perspective in that he was a well-connected and successful Protestant businessman who led the County Antrim brotherhood in an aborted revolution. For his trouble he was captured and hanged, having refused to accept a pardon. The play focuses on the last seven years of his life in which he was a member of the United Irishmen and each year of his life is presented in a different Irish theatrical style, from Sheridan to Beckett (with Boucicault, O’Casey, and Synge along the way) using each style to reflect his political ascendance through to his capture and defeat. It begins at the last moment of his life when he is holed up in a farm labourer’s cottage outside his native Belfast, his coup having failed. Reflecting on his campaign, through a series of seven stages of man from innocence to shame, we learn of the irony of how his campaign for the emancipation of all non-landowning men of Ireland, regardless of religion, led in fact to the deepening and final entrenchment of divisions of loyalism and nationalism, aligned almost exclusively with the religious division of Protestant and Catholic. Early in the play, McCracken and his men enter the discourse of Irish politics in a song which extols their campaign as a ‘moral force’ but constructs it through masculinist militarism as a counter-strategy to the brotherhood of Orangemen that had aligned itself in purpose if not in execution with British forces: We wear no scarlet We sound no trumpet Yet we are warriors of great resource We know the outcome We march in triumph We are the Army of Moral Force.12

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With the benefit of hindsight, of course, this song portrays the cruel irony of a theatricalized ideal, since McCracken and his brethren were defeated and executed. The Moral Force is not one founded on the principles of attribution of loyalty or nationality but on issues of social justice for all men regardless of affiliation. McCracken explains: ‘It is not the Peep O’Day Boys, or the Orange Boys, who threaten your livelihood and life. They themselves are your fellow prisoners in this vast cage that we call a country. It is the landlords and magistrates […] the gentlemen of rank and fortune, who deliberately foment this kind of rancour between you and your neighbours, for their own greater security. They are the cruel jailers we must unite to oppose!’13 Parker’s call is a direct one to his 1980s audience with the benefit of a post-colonial understanding of the British project in Ireland of the division of the working classes for the maintenance of colonial oppression. But this is not a one-sided political diatribe. He gives the opposing British forces in the form of an army captain, rather than an Orange boy, a speech which is a direct challenge to the national project: ‘There has never been the least vestige of a nation-state on this island. Nor will there be. There have been petty fiefdoms, Gaelic provinces, clan territories, tribal settlements – all of them in a perpetual flux of slander and slaughter. Only one allegiance has ever succeeded in uniting a majority of them – the allegiance to the British crown.’14 The disparagement of the national project inherent in the speech is doubly strident in the mockery of the failed revolution being led by Protestant settlers, rather than native Irish Catholics. But what this play does is to deny the militarization of the national project by its own self-mockery, self-questioning, and its inherited theatricality. As Fintan O’Toole noted after the first production, the play ‘involves not so much the historical McCracken, as the images of McCracken that have come down to us through history’.15 This is a post-modern pastiche of historical memory and its subsequent reinscription of history to disrupt the notion of an essentialized Protestant identity as being synonymous with a loyalist militaristic masculinity. The subject of the 1798 rebellion was revisited at the Lyric Theatre fourteen years later (1998) in Gary Mitchell’s play Tearing the Loom. Mitchell at the time was an emerging voice in the theatre for the Protestant/ loyalist community as it struggled to come to terms with the changing political face of Northern Ireland in the last decade of the millennium. Tearing the Loom was premiered on St Patrick’s Day, 17 March 1998, in the run-up to the momentous historical event, the signing of the Belfast Agreement between the British and Irish governments and all the political parties in Northern Ireland with the undoubtedly huge influence

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and pressure from US President Clinton and his envoy George Mitchell. The Agreement was reached on Good Friday that year (10 April) and the day was to mark how the Agreement would be remembered. It came after successive ceasefires by the nationalist Provisional wing of the Irish Republican Army (PIRA). The cessation of violence caused loyalist politicians and paramilitaries huge problems within their own communities. Their politics of ‘No Surrender’ clearly had been abandoned, and without a tangible enemy in the form of the PIRA, the loyalist paramilitary organisations had no real raison d’être. The men who had flocked to the latter in the defence of their community were left high and dry without a political mandate for their violent campaign. The protest masculinities of oppositionalism that bordered on criminality, an ironic positionality for the supposed defenders of the Union, were to feature largely in Gary Mitchell’s plays about contemporary loyalism that will be examined later. For the moment the 200th anniversary of the failed rebellion of the United Irishmen could not have been celebrated better than the signing of an agreement ending hostilities between loyalists and nationalists. The promised financial support from the USA in particular in no small measure contributed to the endorsement of the Agreement on both sides of the Irish border by overwhelming majorities, which clearly spoke to a major cause of the inter-factional strife in Ireland historically, and which was mentioned by McCracken in Parker’s play, namely the social injustice of the division of the working classes and the inequitable division of the ownership of wealth. Mitchell’s 1798 history play invents imaginary characters for the re-enactment. Instead of McCracken’s County Antrim territory, Tearing the Loom takes place in County Armagh, the birthplace of Orangeism. It is set in the home of master weaver Robert Moore. Robert is a tradesman through and through. He is first seen attempting to teach and persuade his son David to learn the craft, but David has been in thrall to his friend William whose father is Grand Master of the recently constituted Orange institution. The two families are further linked by William being enamoured of David’s sister Ruth, who rejects him in favour of a United Irishman Harry. The master weaver, though not a member of the society, has clear sympathies with the organization because of the heavy involvement of many trades, including weavers, within its ranks. His son David, though not an Orange boy, has been affected by the family friend and the Orange boys’ call to arms: ‘Father! Since martial law was imposed, all gatherings of more than four people have been declared unlawful. That would include a march. So you may keep your flags and banners and best clothes for another year, that is if we ever return to

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normality, because let me tell you this, Father. If you and many like you don’t wake up soon, you will never march through the town again.’16 Robert’s annual march is in celebration of his trade, while David’s notion of a march is a triumphalist show of strength of the Orange society. Of course in 1998 when this play was first seen, loyalist marches were (and still are) highly contentious. The expression of cultural identity through an exclusively male militaristic parade is anathema to nationalists and the declaration of a right based on tradition to walk on the so-called Queen’s Highway regardless of local sensibilities came to the fore at an Orange march in Drumcree, near Portadown, County Armagh for several years before the play was produced. The annual parade to a church service had followed a route back to the town since 1807. But since that time the demographics of the region had changed significantly. Sinn Féin’s policy of contestation of such rights and traditions among the residents of the Garvaghy Road in Portadown led to one of the most bitter and infamous stand-offs between communities. The first contestation came in July 1995 and for the first three years the march was forced through aided and abetted by the security forces. But political will changed in the face of mounting protest and following the Good Friday Agreement and the march was subsequently banned along the route. This was one battle that loyalism lost. The after-effects reverberated through loyalist communities; the prohibition of the march was interpreted as a sign of the potential dissolution of loyalism as a political and social force since its very form of cultural expression is the militaristic parade. Thus Mitchell’s historical reflection in Tearing the Loom had in mind very contemporary concerns. Robert Moore’s family is torn apart; David joins up with the Orange boys in defence of their town in a violent campaign of death and destruction targeted at Catholics and United Irishmen regardless of their religious persuasion. Ruth attempts to escape with her lover and United Irishman Harry but the play ends in tragedy for the entire family. David is killed in action, while Harry and Ruth are executed for their reputed treachery. It is a play about divided loyalties within Protestantism and mirrors the contemporary divisions within the community. However, the play points out the painful irony of the contemporary situation in the social world as in the next few months the traditional route for the Drumcree march was lost forever, and the loyalist communities in the towns and cities throughout Northern Ireland failed to capitalize on the investment brought about by the Good Friday Agreement. These descendants of English and Scots settlers were left out in the cold and the inherited siege mentality was

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confirmed by social and economic exclusion. A steadily increasing number of the Protestant working classes were made redundant as the heavy industries that employed them exclusively were shut down or their restricted entry policies on religion were abandoned by the legislation in the wake of the process of peace. The loyalism of the workingclass Protestant Boys suffered a serious challenge: to whom should they show their loyalty if they had been disenfranchised and socially and economically emasculated by the so-called home nation, and what means did they have now of expressing their identity if their chosen form (marches and parades) was increasingly being banned from public performance? Grand Master of the Orange, Samuel, at the end of Tearing the Loom tries to unite all Protestants with an ominous threat: ‘Come with me now before I burn this place to the ground and with all of you inside it.’17 Spoken in 1998, after a referendum on an agreement for unity if not a United Ireland, these words are ominous. But they point to an endgame within loyalism, configured exclusively in masculinist military terms. Dialogue, debate, and dis/agreement do not form part of the discourse or the performance of a self-fashioned hegemonic masculinity, struggling to maintain that hegemony through force when social and economic realities only serve to contest its positionality.

Old wars for new men The contemporary civil strife known as ‘Troubles’ from roughly 1969 to 1997 invited history to repeat itself in a context of Unionist political supremacy. The civil rights marches and protests of the early years were predominantly a Catholic movement arguing for political equality as well as social justice in matters of public housing. With the benefit of hindsight the Unionist government’s lack of concessions, its military response, and the subsequent deployment of British troops on the ground galvanized the Republican movement in the form of the IRA. Working-class loyalist communities responded with paramilitary forces all of their own committed to the rejection of the drive to Republicanism. The Ulster Volunteer Force (UVF) emerged as a cellbased terrorist organization that had little overt popular support among Protestant communities for its campaign of shooting and bombing from the mid-1960s up until 2006, despite announcing a ceasefire in 1994. It was organized on similar principles to the IRA but its list of victims over the decades was overwhelmingly made up of civilians. The largest of the paramilitary forces was the Ulster Defence Association (UDA) that was reputed to have 40,000 members at its peak and in its earliest formation.

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The association was formed in 1971 from a motley amalgamation of localized vigilante groups that had been set up to defend communities perceived to be under attack from Republicans. In fact these vigilante groups were led predominantly by local hard-men who marshalled the community’s hoodlums into a quasi-military force. With a motto of ‘law before violence’ it managed to escape proscription until 1992 despite having waged a violent campaign against Catholics under the aegis of its military wing, the Ulster Freedom Fighters (UFF). The peace processes of the mid-1990s and the GFA in 1998 that were endorsed by the majority of the Unionist population called into question the role and function of these terrorist organizations. Further, from 2001, when terrorism became a mediatized global phenomenon, the political legitimacy of these terrorist organizations came under intense scrutiny. But the members of the UDA and UVF did not disappear. They were very much part of the communities in which they had grown up. Both had established political wings, but the majority of the armed men had to renegotiate a role for themselves within their communities. The hard-men had no longer a quasi-legitimate currency for their status (namely the defence of their communities) and for many their status was upheld by refashioning themselves as drug barons and lords of associated criminality. In the space of four decades the working-class Protestant upholders of the settler tradition of Unionism that had imbued them with hegemonic political force, if no actual economic status, had become outlawed by the very nation they were born to defend. This not only caused a political crisis but because of the paramilitary structure of communities, it also led to a crisis in masculinity. Though status within the broader Northern Irish community may have been damaged irreparably, status within their individual communities saw no change by refracting their aims and objectives while maintaining control through force. Dramatic representations of this crisis in masculinity in loyalist communities were numerous, and the most celebrated clearly foregrounded the masculinity crisis over the armed struggle of the Troubles that was being waged around them. With the atrocities of the Troubles being the main performances in the public spaces of Northern Ireland, theatre and television avoided direct representation in dramatic form. This was no great surprise. The early 1980s saw what was possibly the nadir in the political situation and armed struggle in Northern Ireland. The decade began after the highly symbolic killing of a member of the British royal family (Lord Mountbatten) in an explosion off the coast in the Irish Republic. On the same day, and just over the border in Warrenpoint, eighteen members of the British Parachute Regiment were killed by two

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more remote-controlled explosions. That day, 27 August 1979, was arguably the single most successful attack on the British crown in the Troubles period. Thereafter, the situation became worse. For several years a blanket protest followed by a dirty protest by prisoners/internees in Long Kesh took place. The prisoners/internees demanded the return of the special category status for paramilitary prisoners, who had either been interned previously or convicted in jury-less trials, known as Diplock courts. In 1981 the IRA embarked on a new strategy to secure that status with a collective hunger strike of prisoners. During the spring of that year, ten out of a total of twenty-three prisoners from the IRA and the Irish National Liberation Army starved themselves to death. British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher remained intransigent and refused to negotiate let alone accede to the prisoners’ demands. Though the strike was called off seven months later, and though it was a Pyrrhic victory for Thatcher in some respects and consequently for Northern Irish loyalists, it proved to be a turning point in Irish Republican political strategy with the emergence of the IRA’s political wing, Sinn Féin, as a credible political force. Sinn Féin emerged with a clever and articulate policy for the future of Northern Ireland that the Unionists could only counter with their timeworn ‘No Surrender’ strategy, a strategy so intractable as to be useless in the current situation. Thatcher became the direct target of an IRA bomb attack on the Grand Hotel in Brighton where she was staying for her annual Conservative Party conference in October 1984. She survived, but the direct attacks on both the government and the royal family marked the beginning of a more realistic approach to the desire by the British to come to a more credible understanding of the situation, and behind the scenes began to tentatively negotiate a process of peace. It was in that highly volatile and politically charged context that Northern Ireland Protestant cultural voices turned their critical lenses on their hegemonic position in society with a view to better understanding their ironic position rather than to join the cultural process of unification. Two plays are highly significant in that regard from this period: Ron Hutchinson’s Rat in the Skull and Robin Glendinning’s Mumbo Jumbo. Both writers came from families with hegemonic social status in the North. Hutchinson was the son of an RUC officer (Royal Ulster Constabulary, the then almost exclusively Protestant police force of Northern Ireland) while Glendinning was a former pupil and teacher in two of Northern Ireland’s leading grammar schools that are modelled on English public schools and that have educated since their inception the leaders of the main professions in society. Both plays attempted to understand the psychological make-up in the formation of hegemonic

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masculinity in the Northern Ireland context. Though they show such masculinity as precarious and in Hutchinson’s case positively dangerous, the two plays avoid positing any kind of post-conflict utopia for the Protestant male. Interestingly, too, neither play was first performed in Northern Ireland. Of course, many an Irish play in the twentieth century, regardless of its subject of representation, has had a British premiere before an Irish one for economic reasons, but these two plays offer an insight into the Protestant hegemonic psyche that does not fit neatly into a desired post-nationalist fantasy of the nationalist cultural project. Rat in the Skull was premiered at the Royal Court Theatre in London less than two months before the Brighton bombing. It is set in Paddington Green police station after the arrest of a suspected IRA bomber named Roche. Nelson, an RUC interrogator, has been summoned back from leave after the death of his father to extract a confession, and is flown to London to confront Roche. Early in the play we are told of the outcome of the investigation, namely that Nelson lost control and violently assaulted Roche leading to the suspect escaping conviction. Just why this paragon of hegemonic Protestant masculinity could ultimately commit an act of self-destruction is the subject of the drama. Initially Roche remains silent while the focus is almost exclusively on a series of monologues by Nelson. He first greets his English counterpart Harris by pointing out his difference. Though they all ultimately belong to the one force, and with the one agenda, Nelson is crucially aware of the exponential differences between the two. The first difference is in life expectancy. Regular English policemen do not carry guns and have an expectancy of long service and a pension. By contrast Nelson does not expect to reach pensionable age but is more likely to be killed by a bullet or a bomb. But his other crucial difference is in his stock. The son of a land-owning settler farmer, Nelson perceives himself in exclusively male terms. In fact he goes on to characterize his own people as a masculine race, calling himself in ironic and exaggerated terms ‘this thug of a farmer’s son. One of twenty-seven brothers and all thugs. Brothers, you notice – us Proddies drown the girls at birth. And all of my brothers, it goes without saying, hold down tremendous jobs, and always have done, good jobs with good money, finagled off the papes, we’d none of us feel right in a job unless we pinched it off a Roman with better qualifications for it, somehow. It’s that that makes us special.’18 Although there is some truth in his reference to discrimination against Catholics, it was more true historically than in the early 1980s, and it points to the fraternal brotherhood that characterizes the Loyal Institutions and their

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anti-Catholic bias. But the tone throughout, designed to unsettle and provoke Roche, is mocking of the social and economic impotence of his arch-enemy, but it also reveals a self-mocking tone, since his supremacy is based on historical antecedents rather than on a contemporary reality. The exclusion of women from the fraternity of Ulstermen should also be read within that self-mocking agenda. Of course, such gender supremacy was very much a reality as pointed out by many other writers of the period, including Christina Reid who contests the rights to representation of community in purely masculinist terms, most notably in her 1989 play The Belle of the Belfast City.19 The self-feminization of Catholic Republicans in this colonial context is the target of Nelson’s ire and thus he plays up his hegemony in exclusively masculinist terms. We learn later in the play that Nelson’s social performance of hegemonic masculinity is in crisis. The death of his father and his divorce (his wife left him for another man) have caused his crisis of masculinity transferred here to the very gendered situation of policeman/terrorist interrogation. Nelson’s ultimate loss of control in the world of work, with real hegemonic status being conferred on him as an instrument of state power, is symptomatic of a much wider sense of the impotence of masculinist Protestant power under attack from self-feminized others. The play ends with the lights fading on both Nelson and Roche occupying the same space, in a sort of stand-off. The image is of Nelson’s other as nemesis. Any act of expressive violence on his other will inevitably lead instrumentally to Nelson’s loss of hegemony. Nelson’s quandary is his loss of hegemonic power, despite his status. His ultimate violent expression of his status leads ironically to his loss of power. Robin Glendinning’s Mumbo Jumbo takes us away from the sharp end of Protestant military supremacy in Northern Ireland to the elite hegemonic social and economic training grounds of Ulster’s grammar schools. It was first produced by the Royal Exchange Theatre in Manchester and directed by Nicholas Hytner. The play throws up the highly complex nature of Protestant supremacy in a Northern Irish context. It begins with a class of boys learning by rote and chanting the American poet Vachel Lindsay’s 1917 poem ‘The Congo’: Fat black bucks in a wine barrel room. Barrel-house kings, with feet unstable, Sagged and reeled and pounded on the table, Pounded on the table, Beat an empty barrel with the handle of a broom! Hard as they were able BOOM, BOOM, BOOM.

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With a silk umbrella and the handle of a broom. Boomlay, boomlay, boomlay, BOOM!20 Though Lindsay consistently argued that his poem was not racist, it is a product of its colonial-era anthropological representation of Africa. Its use here in a Northern Ireland grammar school harks back to the same colonial era in British history that used boys’ public schools as training grounds for the defence of and the expansion of Empire. Chanted by Northern Irish boys, however, it adds another layer to the colonialism in that their very accent marks them as being colonial settlers already, although that is disputed during the play. The chant is led by the Dean, an Englishman supplanted in Belfast to replicate the public school experience for Northern Ireland’s educated elite. By 1986 when the play was first produced the Protestant grammar schools had almost completely discarded their image of being educators of the sons of Empire drawing their catchment from Northern Irish society. Entrance to the schools was much more on merit rather than the ability to pay. However, many of the schools, such as the one represented in Glendinning’s play, had a large boarding department that removed the education of boys and their entry into manhood from the family and the responsibility of the father, into a contractual arrangement with their English forebears. Though much of the play details the choric learning by rote of the boys, apparently unconscious of the racist undertones of the poem, the play charts the development of one boy, Dunham, to his first faltering steps into adult masculinity. Dunham is the son of a soon-to-be promoted magistrate and thus from an elite Protestant family whose mother stays at home reinforcing strict gender divisions. In the all-male environment of the school Dunham struggles between his desire to kiss a girl and his homoerotic relationship with fellow-pupil Creaney. The latter is very much the antithesis of Dunham and his ilk. Dunham is from the urban professional classes with no direct ties to the Loyal Institutions, configured as lower class. Creaney on the other hand is the son of a farmer from County Armagh, the home of Orangeism, and proudly defends his Orange credentials much to the dismay of his urban contemporaries and his teacher. Thus the divisions within Protestantism are distinctly developed as class-based. Dunham is artistic; he has been chosen to play the lead in Hamlet, and write poetry. Creaney, ever the realist, reminds him that Protestants and the Protestant condition have been excluded from any kind of cultural validation as they configure culture to have been hijacked by Nationalists, ignorant of course of the role of their own Unionist forebears in CEMA. He says: ‘to succeed as a poet in

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this country you have to be called Seamus’.21 With this innate sense of cultural exclusion from a certain brand of Irishness, Creaney is equally distanced by the English Dean who disowns Orangeism’s cultural displays of tribalism. Thus neither culturally Irish nor English, Creaney configures his ancestor settlers as the original inhabitants of Ulster, and thus sees the Plantation in the early seventeenth century as a natural act of resettlement. Unlike many of the pro-British boys and their families around him he does not see England as the mainland or motherland and is aware that he and his like are the last defenders of the Empire that England has forgotten or renounced. In as much as Creaney is secure in his identity, Dunham is not. He desires to become a day boy and mix in the real world and establish a relationship with a girl. Becoming a day boy, dabbling with poetry, and with an emerging but still confused sexuality, permits the performance of a feminized masculinity at odds with the hegemonic power for which he is being trained. Once elevated to the position of magistrate his father becomes the target and ultimately victim of the IRA and Dunham is able to relocate home as a day boy and discover his sexuality in a no longer mono-gendered environment. His faltering conversation with his neighbour Shirley that ends the play with her teaching him one of her games is in stark contrast to the formulaic incantation that opens the play. Freed from the verse of colonialism the play ends on an optimistic note of personal discovery. It is a small personal act that eschews any wider political implications of the rejection of a Protestant hegemony. Dunham does not leave and thus reject his school. He becomes a day boy and thereby achieves a perspective on his education. With such distance a different masculinity can be forged, one that is not gender exclusive, triumphalist, and performative. This new day boy learns to listen and be schooled by an ‘other’. While these two plays exposed the ironic contradictions within Protestant hegemonic masculinities, no utopian vision of a post-conflict society emerges from them in any political sense. They both show hegemonic Protestant masculinity being trapped as a condition of existence and allude to, and sometimes expose, the inherited colonial structures that refuse to provide the means of escape from that trap, though Glendinning points to the personal being political. Nevertheless the 1980s saw further dramatic explorations of Protestantism in various class-based situations that presented alternative hopes for and visions of post-conflict. Stewart Parker’s play Pentecost (first performed in the Guildhall, Derry by Field Day Theatre Company in 1987) was set in 1974 during the Ulster workers’ strike, when vigilantism amongst Protestants crippled the state and brought the first attempt at power-sharing between communities to

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its knees. The play features a bunch of middle-class friends who seek refuge from personal trouble as well as the macro-political Troubles around them in a house recently inherited by bohemian Lenny but haunted by the ghost of its recently deceased tenant, the arch-loyalist Lily Matthews. Lily’s hard brand of anti-Catholicism is rejected by these new middle-class liberals, but as the play reveals, Lily’s hard-line stance is a mask for some very great personal tragedy. Though seemingly devoted to the memory of Alfred George Matthews, who served at the Somme in 1916, and configured by Lily as a hero of Ulster, she only reveals much later that their marriage since the end of the war was in trouble, with Alfred presumably suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder. The condition was further exacerbated by one of its attendant symptoms: impotence. The lack of sexual union led her to take a lover in the form of an insurance salesman while Alfred was working in England. She became pregnant but was forced to give her baby away for the sake of her marriage and the sham of Protestant patriarchy: ‘I went to my grave a respectable woman, Mrs Alfred George Matthews, I never betrayed him. That’s the way I atoned, you see. I done him proud. He never knew any reason to be ashamed of me, to doubt my loyalty.’22 In the contemporary reality of the play, another man in uniform, again whom we never see, is David the policeman husband of Ruth who seeks refuge in the house from the violence of her husband. Later we learn that he suffers a complete mental breakdown and is hospitalized. These two off-stage men both wear the uniforms of the British forces and both suffer emasculation through the traumas of war or a paramilitary campaign of violence. These emasculations are examples of true human suffering of Protestant men and stand in counterpoint to the self-deluded triumphalism of the vigilantes who had defeated a worthy attempt at reconciliation of the two communities in Northern Ireland. Parker presents a lament to the patriarchy of oppression through the state and religion, and calls upon a ‘Christ within us’ motif as the only possible redemptive force in a riven society. The sexual potency and instrumental violence of Protestant masculinity collapses, and marks a vision of a post-conflict utopia, albeit in the milieu of the Protestant middle classes whose education and economic status render them susceptible to a more readily achieved desire than if they were in the loyalist enclaves in which paramilitarism resists the articulations of desire for difference.

Billy Boys Working-class Protestantism as configured in dramatic representation in Northern Ireland provides us with a focus on masculinity in terms of

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power within social relations. Protestant working-class men economically and socially have nothing in common with their imagined hegemonic status within a class-based masculinity conferred on them by the state. Thus in the absence of a discourse of power relations more focus can be placed on a masculinity configured through feelings and emotions. The most celebrated of representations of Protestant working-class masculinities in the 1980s was in a trilogy of television dramas by Graham Reid for the BBC Play for Today series. Collectively known as the ‘Billy Plays’ they were one-off dramas broadcast one per year between 1982 and 1984. They each focus on young Billy Martin (played by Kenneth Branagh), the only son of a violent alcoholic father, Norman, and a dying mother, Janet. Joined by older sister Lorna (played by Bríd Brennan) the pair take on the parental role in the family caring for two younger sisters and a sick uncle. Sectarian strife is not the focus of the plays but it features as a backdrop. The Martins occupy a terraced house in inner-city Belfast. They refer to the dangers of Belfast’s geography and shady paramilitary figures attempt to determine Billy’s life, particularly in the first play, Too Late to Talk to Billy. The primary focus is on Billy being haunted by the relationship between his parents, their violent quarrels, and by his fear of being trapped in a similar marriage. His girlfriend in the first play, June, leaves for university in England not having secured any commitment from Billy and it is inferred that Billy’s inability to commit to the relationship is also motivated by his fear of social mobility, for to marry a university graduate would automatically contest his own class. Billy’s character shows similarities with Jimmy Porter in John Osborne’s 1956 play Look Back in Anger, a working-class lad who fears a loss of control through social mobility. Billy’s only response to that is to retreat into silence, to not commit to his girlfriend, and to mete out violence to other men who cross him, which manifests as transference of emotional release. This ‘angry masculinity’23 exhibited by Billy is a response to his fear of becoming emasculated through social elevation. In many scenes we see him in his working clothes though no scene is filmed at his workplace. His anger, though, is not a substitute for a political position, but is an emotional response to his family situation. In fact, for the most part, his anger is suppressed. He is broody, at times seething, and with his father, monosyllabic. This suppression of emotion is what Victor J. Seidler determines an ‘ethics of masculinity’, common to Protestant working-class men, and following on from Max Weber’s diagnosis in The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism.24 In both Weber’s and Seidler’s analyses young Protestant men affirm their masculinity by suppressing their feelings of inadequacy and guilt, induced in them by a

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work and family ethic that can never be satisfied in a capitalist system of production. According to Seidler, ‘Young men feel they constantly have to affirm masculinities that can never be taken for granted, and that it is through showing control over their emotional lives that they prove themselves “man enough”.’25 This ultimately leads to Billy losing his girlfriend to another country and to another class. In the second play, A Matter of Choice for Billy, we discover him with a new girlfriend, Pauline, a nurse who is looking after Billy’s uncle in hospital. Pauline is Catholic and thus represents a contestation of his loyalty to his specifically Protestant community. History, though, threatens to repeat itself; Billy will not commit to Pauline for most of the play and she threatens to leave for a job in Canada. Billy’s affirmation of masculinity through silence is broken momentarily by defending his unwillingness to commit to her through citing their religious differences and thus their inability to marry. His sister Lorna, though, confronts his angry masculine stance, having seen it already in their father’s behaviour: ‘Have you asked her to stay? You’re so like Dad you know … keeping everything bottled up inside. It doesn’t make you any less of a man to be able to tell someone how you feel.’ In a rare moment of performed truthfulness Billy reveals his fear of doing the wrong thing or making the wrong choice: ‘I’m afraid a week after I’d got her I’d discover she’s not what I want.’26 Though this could be read as Billy determining relationships as acquisitions, it does reveal his insecurity and his inability to trust his emotions. In the third play, A Coming to Terms for Billy, we find Pauline and Billy co-habiting and taking on a parental role in the lives of his younger siblings. But while Billy’s masculinity is able to come to terms emotionally with the women in his life, his relationships with other men have a more faltering progression. In the first play, Protestant paramilitaries are conceived as local thugs elevated socially by a political cause, but Billy, like his father, totally rejects them. His friend Ian has joined them, but Billy mocks their behaviour. Further, his father Norman is a renowned fighter who leaves the paramilitaries scared and Billy is configured by them as a chip off the old block. As the trilogy progresses we find Ian has left the ranks, has been forced into marriage by an unexpected pregnancy, and subjected to a violent father-in-law. After a fight with Billy in part one, John Fletcher, the leader of the local thugs, renounces violence altogether. He spends the remainder of the trilogy on the fringes of Billy’s life, enamoured of Lorna, Billy’s sister, but ultimately spurned. What is most interesting about this representation of Protestant workingclass masculinities is that expressive violent acts are used to emasculate masculinities that are using instrumental acts of violence for political

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ends. Reid converts the Troubles and the social divisions they caused into a battle between masculinities. The end point of the trilogy comes with a resolution of the conflict between father and son. Redemption of their relationship is achieved by one final conspired act of violence by the two men against paramilitary UDA thug, Big Davie. Violence as a discourse of angry masculinity is used explicitly to reject, subject, and emasculate paramilitary power. The redemption is also shown only to have been possible through their ability to confront their fears that has been enabled by the new women in their lives who come from outside their communities (for Billy, a Catholic – Pauline, and for Norman, a middle-class Englishwoman – Mavis). Permitting oneself to move outside the self-constructed barricades of class, religion, and political identity engineers crucially a coming to terms with the self for a particular brand of Protestant working-class masculinity. Reid’s trilogy was broadcast at the height of political stalemate and the attendant violent atrocities on an almost daily basis. Over a decade later Gary Mitchell took up Reid’s mantle in a completely different political context for Protestant working-class men, namely a peace process and a referendum for change. Mitchell’s terrain is his own Rathcoole estate, an exclusively Protestant working-class community in North Belfast. Two of his plays in particular provide a rich source for understanding the crisis within masculinity for the Protestant working class in a political climate in which that class feels emasculated. Mitchell’s men, unlike Reid’s, do not work and are involved both in and around UDA paramilitarism and criminality. His 1997 play In a Little World of Our Own, which first premiered at the Peacock Theare, Dublin, features a family of three brothers struggling to survive in a world that has set them adrift. Upstairs and offstage their mother remains permanently sedated, like Reid’s dying mother in the first part of the Billy trilogy. Ray, a thief and thug, has assumed the parental role caring for his younger brother Richard who has learning difficulties. The third brother Gordon lives with Deborah who wants to take Richard out of the precarious situation she believes him to be in. Unlike in the Billy plays, Mitchell takes us into the world of the paramilitaries where we see the hierarchical shift within paramilitarism given the new political context that challenges their very reason for existing. With the new political dimension within paramilitarism, foot soldiers like Ray and his friends are cut adrift from power, and their entry to this world through criminality is now seen as a threat to political stability. Mitchell complicates the situation by inferring that the new political masters are not as white as they make themselves out to be and thus we are presented with a matrix of masculinities vying for supremacy.

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Figure 11 Gordon (Sean Kearns) confronts Ray (Stuart Graham) while young brother Richard (Marc O’Shea) covers his ears, in Gary Mitchell’s In a Little World of Our Own, Peacock Theatre, 1997. Photograph courtesy of Abbey Theatre Archive.

On the level of family versus paramilitary organization, Ray’s younger brother Richard’s learning difficulties provided an entry into masculinity for a much younger Ray when he assumed the role of defender of his brother in the school playground and in the streets. Here he describes that rite of passage when he confronted the fear of his position within masculinity: ‘At school, these big lads taking the piss out of me the whole day long because my brother had to go to special school. Joke after joke after joke and then I slapped one, he didn’t laugh no more, and then I slapped another, and he stopped laughing too. And then it got easier and easier.’27 Conversely, however, Richard’s own entry into manhood and the discovery of sexuality, leads to Ray’s demise. Richard falls for Susan, the daughter of a paramilitary leader, who uses him as a front while she is secretly having an affair with a Catholic lad. Ray’s response to Susan’s use of his brother, however, tips the scales; he violently attacks and rapes Susan and leaves her for dead. In many

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senses this violent action is an expression of defiance of his emasculation within paramilitarism. It is also a knowing act of self-destruction because the little Old Testament world they live in rules that retribution by the gun is the only solution. Emasculated within a tightly defined and very rigid definition of masculinity, Ray has nowhere to go but to self-destruct. Mitchell’s next play, As the Beast Sleeps (which also premiered in Dublin’s Peacock Theatre in 1998), even more explicitly represents the UDA and its precarious position within the wider gamut of Ulster society. The chief protagonist Kyle is depicted as being as far from the ideal anti-hero as one could get. His background is one of thief for the local UDA who supplied their club with stolen goods to be sold on cheaply to their supporters. Mitchell even takes us inside a punishment room where retribution is meted out to members for breaking unwritten rules of engagement. Kyle’s role within paramilitarism has been emasculated. With the political shift in the preceding years overt criminality is frowned upon by the new political leaders. Kyle, unemployed and having lost his social status, is an angry young man with nowhere to go. The new leadership tempts him back under their control by offering the job of enforcer, reining in those who disobey the new masters. UDA leader Larry spells it out for him: ‘We’re the Ulster Defence Association. We exist solely to defend Ulster.

Figure 12 Freddie (Patrick O’Kane) undergoing interrogation in Gary Mitchell’s As the Beast Sleeps, Peacock Theatre, 1998. Photograph courtesy of Abbey Theatre Archive.

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Now our leadership have told us that we’ve reached a point where we’ve to stand down or step back a bit. Ulster isn’t under attack at the minute. So, there’s nothing for us to defend.’28 Kyle struggles against this definition of the situation but is further caught between the new leadership and his best friend Freddie who longs for the glory days to return when he had status within his own community. A robbery at the club causes chaos within the rank-and-file members and it is Kyle’s job to find out who did it. His discovery that his best friend was aided and abetted by his own wife Sandra, motivated by the desire for self-betterment for her family, is the low point of Kyle’s emasculation within masculinity. She defiantly spits in his face when he discovers what she has done. At the end of play we see him alone, swigging from a beer can, smashing a phone against the wall and laughing uncontrollably. This final scene is a searing portrait of the crisis within Protestant masculinities that are far from working class. For a start this Protestant man is not working, and appears never to have done. His role within the community has been swept aside by political developments. He is no longer able to attend freely the UDA club where he must pay his own way. Without a job, that is nigh on impossible. His best friend deserts him in an action he probably would have committed himself. The attempt to convert his masculinity into a controlled political configuration of dialogue fails miserably. And ultimately his social masculinity is emasculated by his wife. At the end he is isolated by everyone around him, as a father, a husband, and a hard-man in the community. Kyle epitomizes the crisis within loyalist communities from the mid-1970s onwards configured as a crisis of masculinity. Motivated at its inception by the folk myth of the Protestant Boys, the UDA’s hegemonic social position has transformed them into Billy Boys, modelled on the infamous Protestant street gang in Glasgow in the 1920s and mythologized through the folk song of the same name beloved of Glasgow Rangers football supporters. Notably, Rangers insignia features as part of Kyle’s life at the beginning of the play. The final image of an emasculated Kyle is also by proxy an emasculation of the myth of the Billy Boy. With no enemy any more, the Billy Boys turn on themselves.

Post-Protestants The processes of peace that led to the signing of the Good Friday Agreement and the establishment of an Assembly for local government (though it was to be interrupted by continual disputes between nationalist and loyalist politicians) engendered and forged a new cultural space for interrogative empathy of the ‘other’ community by playwrights of

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Catholic backgrounds. Of, course, Frank McGuinness had set the agenda with his seminal play Observe the Sons of Ulster Marching Toward the Somme in 1985, a semi-expressionist examination of the motivations, traditions, and bonds between Protestant tradesmen who fought and were slaughtered ultimately at the Battle of the Somme on 1 July 1916, coinciding with the 326th anniversary of the Battle of the Boyne. The link between the two battles to this day marks the collapse of history for Ulster Protestants and marks out their identity in both military and exclusively masculine terms. A revival of the play at the Abbey Theatre in Dublin in 1994 was heralded by many commentators as a cultural contribution to the nascent peace process and reportedly Unionist politicians from the North came to Dublin to attend the opening night. The play’s focus is not so much the inexorable march of history to the Protestant men’s own destruction, but the relationships between them, each from one of the six counties of Northern Ireland, hived off in the partition of Ireland from 1922. Its exclusively male cast permits the dissection of the hegemonic masculinity that they represent into the subordinated multiple masculinities of class, religious denomination, and sexuality. With undertones of homoeroticism, the play is a hugely empathetic portrayal of the identities of a settler people marshalled into the singular martial force for the defeat of the multiple enemies of the British monarchy as history determines them. Protestant authors in the contemporary period have also empathized with their Catholic and nationalist ‘others’, most notably in Christina Reid’s Joyriders (1997), a searing critique of social and economic devastation and its impact on Catholic youth against a backdrop of the Troubles, and in Robin Glendinning’s 1990 play Donny Boy, which received its Northern Ireland premiere in David Grant’s production for Tinderbox Theatre Company the following year. The latter is a satirical examination of the mythology of Republicanism, in which the eponymous Donny, who suffers from learning difficulties, is forced to stash a gun, and is elevated to the status of a saintly Republican hero by his nationalist mother blind to the realities of her son’s actions. Interestingly, these two plays contextualize their Catholic others primarily in social terms. Catholic authors’ representations, however, decontextualize by and large Protestant identity from its social and economic position to engage with issues concerning historical legacy, and manipulation of Protestant identity for political purposes. One of the most celebrated plays of post-nationalist fantasy, Tim Loane’s Caught Red Handed, or How to Prune a Whin Bush, directed by the author in a first production by Tinderbox in 2002,29 is set in the future

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and in the context of an impending referendum on a United Ireland. In fact, it is set in the not too distant future (2005), a year not entirely outside imaginative possibility. It is centred around the death in a toilet of the leader of the (imaginary) Alternative Unionist Party, a thinly disguised theatrical version of the Reverend Ian Paisley and the Democratic Unionist Party. Fearing defeat in the referendum, the party hacks do not reveal the death of the leader but uncover a lookalike, in the form of Pat, a Catholic, whom they school in the rhetoric of Unionism. Hilariously Pat is so convincing that his political speeches veer to the dark side of sectarian hatred, and notably the leader’s real wife, Constance, prefers the lookalike because of his sexual potency. The play is farcical; it demands a set full of doors for concealments and reveals, but its underlying proposition about the constructedness of identity revealed through similarity is telling. It also reveals that political positions are similarly constructed and not innate features of one identity. Further, it deconstructs the Protestant heterosexual identity myth, as the leader’s son Wayne reveals he is gay. But whatever the fantasy element of its representation of identity, its moments of direct address to the audience, calling on them to reveal their identities, and positioning them as the voters in the referendum, ask citizens rather than audiences to determine the identities of the future, beyond the binaries of Protestant/Catholic, loyalist/nationalist, men/women, hetero/homosexual. The play with the most direct title, whose impetus was the pursuit of knowledge of Protestantism through the representation of multiple representations of iconic Protestant masculinities, comes in Robert Welch’s play Protestants, a commission by Ransom Productions in Belfast’s Old Museum Arts Centre in 2004, and directed by Rachel O’Riordain. Welch, a Southern Irish Catholic, initially wrote the play for his Protestant sonin-law actor Richard Dormer. It features an actor embodying numerous Protestant identities, from a Glasgow Celtic supporter and descendant of the original Billy Boys failing to enlist the support of his Northern Irish colleague in a racist attack as the latter is in a process of peace, to Queen Elizabeth I excoriating her suitor and courtier Essex for his inability to rout the Irish rebel O’Neill, and to a Cork-born supporter of Cromwell whose seventeenth-century campaign of Catholic genocide enshrined and defined a legacy of religious binaries. The most touching scene of all features a Little Boy who tells of his grandfather anointing him with his orange sash and thereby passing on a tradition to him in a moment of tenderness. The play is a journey through multiple Protestant masculinities, embracing the colonial Elizabeth within the masculinist matrix. It roams to Scotland and the USA with the aim of representing Protestants

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outside the binary of Catholic others. And it ends with a plea by the narrator who takes us on the journey from the heart of Protestantism as a revolutionary movement, to return to its origins and protest against the stories that encrust and strangle the movement that have mythologized and ultimately trapped Protestantism into a self-defining instrument of colonialism: ‘I am free when I am free of what people want to tell me. All stories are lies. I protest against all stories. All. I protest. A Protestant.’30 In many ways Welch exposes how Protestantism in Northern Ireland has been locked into a silence constructed by the telling and retelling of largely mythical stories of colonial adventure. By unlocking the silence and revealing the multiple identities within Protestant masculinities he provides what Dan Baron Cohen has termed ‘dialogic identities’ in which the theatrical disruption of embodiment from identity through devices of detachment enables the unfolding of new metaphoric discursive spaces beyond binaries of religion and politics.31 The disconnection of gender from religious and political identities in an empathetic theatrical form pluralizes and thereby releases masculinities trapped silently in the monolithic mythology of a constructed supremacy. The dialogic possibilities that ensue offer the possibility of rethinking Protestant masculinities as subordinated by the legacy of colonialism. Far from utopian

Figure 13 Paul Hickey in Protestants by Robert Welch. Ransom Productions, Old Museum Arts Centre, Belfast, 2004. Image courtesy of Ransom Productions.

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fantasy, Welch, McGuinness, and Loane culturally provide dialogic space. Post-Protestant voices within that space will be those that contest the binaries of historical myth. Binarization in the quasi-apartheid society of Northern Ireland refracted even further with the self-globalization of identitarianism. As Andrew Hill and Andrew White point out, the flying of Israeli flags in Northern Ireland’s loyalist communities emerged in the summer of 2002, referencing symbolically a perceived analogous siege and settler community.32 The erection of analogous symbols was in response to the similar practice of self-identitarianism within nationalist communities by the display of Palestinian flags. Though that practice started much earlier, 2002 is a significant start-date for loyalism to enter the symbolic discourse of extra-community flags. The global televised exposure of terrorism on an international scale and its subsequent pan-national denunciation had an indirect impact on the perception of armed struggle in a Northern Irish context. Loyalist communities ostensibly seized on the near global revulsion of the 9/11 attacks in the USA as an opportunity to reconfigure themselves as victims, and in the case of symbolic flag-erection, as Israelis under threat from pan-Arab terrorism. Such manipulation of global symbols was a manifest sign of a sense of embattlement within a decolonizing state. With the Good Friday Agreement came a devolved powersharing government, something loyalists had successfully vetoed in a paramilitaristic show of strength in 1974. The elected First Minister of the Assembly brought the arch-dissenter the Reverend Ian Paisley to power for the first time, where he was joined by Martin McGuinness, a former member of the IRA turned Sinn Féin politician as Deputy First Minister. Their subsequent ‘performance’ in public events and in the media took everyone by surprise. The congeniality and spirit of cooperation with which they publicly performed the business of power-sharing led to them being called the ‘Chuckle Brothers’ after a British popular comedy double act. As Janelle Reinelt has observed, the redefinition of self by Adams and Paisley was a performance of replacement of ‘former versions of themselves as figureheads of political constituencies’,33 and thereby the removal of their warrior masculinity of threats and distance, to reveal a kind of post-colonial second encounter that was marked by congeniality and proximity. For many in loyalist communities this was the ultimate sell-out by the leader of former ‘No Surrender’ politics. However, as a performance of masculinity this was what Stephen M. Whitehead might term a ‘reflexive negotiation’34 that permits the retention of hegemony despite contestation. The perceived surrender to compromise pointed out the precariousness of binarism within loyalism in a political context of

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British–Irish cooperation. With the British no longer configuring the Irish Republic as an enemy, the identitarianism of loyalism is undermined. It also demonstrated the usurpation of Protestantism by loyalism and fractured their bedrock of a monolithic hegemony. Though perhaps not an ultimate act of post-nationalist fantasy, the performance of Paisley and McGuinness on the political stage acted out a collapse of binarism. In the years subsequent to the GFA the withdrawal of the British army bases from Northern Ireland, the setting up of cross-border institutions, and the infrastructural link-up of North and South further eroded loyalist hegemony. Exclusively constructed in terms of masculinist militarism throughout history, the performance of Protestantism in the first decade of the new millennium refracted to embrace otherness, however fleetingly, exposing the hegemonic as protest, and repositioning it as (politically) subordinated. With the refraction and ultimately ‘re-embodiment’35 of hegemonic masculinity, it is not impossible to imagine that identitarianism in Northern Ireland continues to refract, to contest the binarism even further, and to emancipate the Protestant Boys from their highly gendered historical legacy.

8 After Words

There is so simple way to conclude this book. The performance of masculinities and their ongoing construction and re-evaluation precludes the possibility of making overarching claims for the representations of masculinities on the Irish stage in the contemporary period. I used 1990 as a historical marker to begin the book but kept the frame porous enough to reflect on what led up to the beginnings of the contestation of hegemonic patriarchal practices in all aspects of Irish political and cultural life. The period covered by this book embraced the Celtic Tiger years, the period between 1996 and 2007 that saw a remarkable shift in the economic fortunes of the country, as well as the demographic shifts, legal changes, and political agreements that were to have an enormous impact on the performance of masculinities in the social sphere on both sides of the border. Economically, the boom fuelled a spending spree and a property bubble that ensured the collusion of a hegemonic speculation of reckless financial gambling with a working-class hard-body masculinity that created the property on which fortunes were made. Demographically, the boom configured Ireland as a beacon for migrant workers and asylum-seekers from Eastern Europe and Africa. And thus Irish masculinities had a new identity marker (race) to add to the ranks of the subordinated, and re-subordinated. Legally, decades of various forms of social activism challenged the patriarchal dominance of the state through the legalization of divorce, and challenged the heteronormativity of the state by the decriminalization of homosexuality. Politically, the Good Friday Agreement in Northern Ireland contested the self-constructed sense of supremacy of the Unionist communities and forced them to engage in a unique form of power-sharing to ensure political stability of opposing allegiances and ideologies. 191

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Culturally, the economic boom saw an unprecedented rise in the number of theatre productions, for instance, and in the number of theatre companies funded from the public purse. Successive Arts Council policies ensured that nearly every large town and Dublin suburb had its own theatre building. Given the sharp rise in activity in this area one can assume (though no empirical research has been done) an increase in the number of spectators to theatre and cultural events. There is also little question that the vogue for monologue plays or monodramas, and the success of playwrights such as Mark O’Rowe and Conor McPherson, ensured that male characters dominated the stages, often performing their own abjection as counterpoint to the myth of the dominance of masculinity as a performed gender practice in a thriving economy. Economist and journalist David McWilliams, in his various books and documentary television programmes, would coin memorable catchphrases to describe the generation that had come of age in the economic boom period. In his book The Pope’s Children1 he introduced us to a society of hedonists hurtling blindly towards a cliff. In this society we met characters such as Breakfast Roll Man, developers too busy making money constructing a larger-than-life Ireland to be present in family, community, or society, and RoboPaddy, speculating on foreign property. And we also met HiCos (Hibernian Cosmopolitans), or the men of the new elite class who accommodate both their nationalism and their sense of being in a globalized world by being comfortable both on the Boulevard Saint Michel as well as on the Croke Park terraces of Hill 16, the national stadium of Gaelic Games. Later in his sequel, The Generation Game (2007),2 McWilliams would feature three new types, Jaggers, Jugglers, and Bono Boomers. Jaggers are the middle-aged accidental millionaires who had cashed in on the property boom and market speculation, getting out before the bubble burst. Jugglers are on the flipside of the economy, those trapped in negative equity and struggling to make ends meet. And in between are the Bono Boomers, or Ireland’s first generation of the middleaged who feel they are forever young, yet are too old to be cool and hip. As an economist of some standing, McWilliams offered the nation sound advice and dire warnings about the economic abyss into which we were looking, especially in his TV mini-series accompanying both books. However, his accent and ego were lampooned erroneously in the popular press and his warning configured as popular entertainment. When the bubble did actually burst in 2008 and when in 2009 unemployment rose dramatically in the space of a few months, most of the banks were facing extinction and a threat of the intervention by the IMF appeared imminent, McWilliams became a sought-after commentator and speaker

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in debates in all media. The success of his analysis of Irish society lies in his ability to dramatize it and to create recognizable character types that have purchase in the popular imagination all the while ironically standing for the folly of the hedonistic lifestyle many people in Ireland had chosen. The Celtic Tiger economy drama that Williams serialized finally in 2008–9 had a dramaturgical conflict moment of Aristotelian proportions when hundreds of thousands of men and women lost their jobs. Few of McWilliams’s male characters are tragic heroes (other than the Jugglers) and they join the long list of abject males in cultural and social performance. While theatre had avoided for the most part the Breakfast Roll Men and the Jaggers (with some notable exceptions of negative representations in the plays of Paul Mercier3 and Jimmy Murphy4), it is not insignificant that McWilliams took to the stage in 2010 (the Peacock stage at the Abbey) with his one-man stand-up performance of social observation, Outsiders. In it he ensured another form of monology would strengthen the performance of Irish masculinity, embodied by a commentator who was fast coming to represent one of his own character creations, a Bono Boomer.5 McWilliams’s performance in various media encapsulates a form of reinscribed hegemonic masculinity. His superior economic vision saw through the folly of government light-touch financial legislative practice, and carved out for himself a superior form of hegemony, though not patriarchy, since he is a commentator and not a legislator. But his hegemony relies on the power of the orator to deliver a vision. Monology in this sense and indeed his live theatrical performance of it can only come from the position of the hegemonic. And yet conversely it is a performative hegemony in the cultural sphere that contests the hegemony of the political classes. But it does so by positioning itself as visionary, prescient and all-knowing while the politicians with their lack of financial acumen and vision are defined as stupid. In essence this is simply the war of two hegemonic forces with an overarching performance of social masculinity. Both are defined by their ability to persuade through oratory, and that oratory for McWilliams comes in single-authored books, television documentary with an omniscient exegetic commentary in his own voice, and in a theatre production in which he plays himself and in which soliloquy is the modus operandi of unchallengeability. But what of those masculinities that do not have the social or educational capital to be in a position to speak alone? Irish theatre’s response to the sudden and intense economic downturn is interesting in terms of its representation of masculinities who have been affected by dominant

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discourses from the shibboleths of the state. That response is very much determined by certain types of masculinities to achieve agency, or personal healing, through words. What comes after words, when words in Irish theatre so often in the past were the determinant of male action? Irish male characters through history do little, but say a lot about what they have done or what they might do. Two plays offer similar strategies of self-representation that come after words fail to define who they are as men. Owen McCafferty’s 2010 play The Absence of Women, produced by the Lyric Theatre, Belfast6 returns to the author’s familiar character types, men who have spent a lifetime doused in alcohol, unable to deal with the emotional wasteland of their working and social lives. But McCafferty’s advance in this play is to introduce the men after their working lives are over, and after they have renounced alcohol. Gerry and Iggy are two Belfast men in their early sixties who live in a London hostel and as they remember what might have been in their lives they drink tea, a substitute for the beer of the homosocial drinking culture of their past. Both have spent a lifetime as ‘navvies’ building the roads and tunnels of England’s transport infrastructure. But there is no road that leads them home. The play offers us a rare insight into the emotional lives of workingclass Irish men, men normally represented on the Irish stage as hardbody masculinity. While they still refer to their own physical machismo, they are distanced from it by younger characters being called up as they recall the past and are embodied on stage by younger versions of themselves, or by other people they encountered in their early lives. Instead they confront their fear of using words to carve out for themselves a wished-for identity: Gerry: frightened to use the words ya need to use to get what ya want Iggy: digging all day every day – built like a house – frightened of no man – but scared to talk – what the fuck’s that about Gerry: belfast taught ya not to talk – wha – fuckin joke7 They paint a picture of their lives on various construction sites and jobs in England, but always in blue-collar manual jobs that required a great deal of physical strength. But those jobs required the men for their physical labour only and ensured they worked in a homosocial environment in which it was impossible to converse with one another. That working life was replicated by a social life that was immersed in a

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drinking culture. And that drinking culture was another strictly homosocial environment where men are defined by what they are as opposed to who they are in relation to others. Belfast looms in their memories as a city that not only threw them out but also forced them into silence. Iggy, the former teenage boxer who was forced to leave Belfast in a hurry because he was gay, claims the macho working-class culture he fled was mute and muting if you didn’t conform: ‘a city built on the notion of not really saying stuff – an then you’re kicked out with not enough words in yer pocket’.8 Iggy’s straight friend Gerry concurs: ‘I was taught not to talk ya know that’, ‘Belfast taught me not to talk’.9 While Iggy was forced to flee for fear of being outed Gerry’s emotional strangulation was not caused by any specific incident but simply by being in an all-male working and social environment without the social skills to talk to let alone engage with a woman, despite his deep-seated desire to be able to do so. He is able to recall being approached by a woman for a dance and despite his desire to say yes he replied with the learned macho mantra, ‘belfast men don’t dance’.10 That woman, though, earlier in the play materializes in a dream sequence as Dotty and she is able to provide a context for the social behaviour of Irish working-class men isolated among their own kind in London: Do you know what it takes for a woman – any woman – to walk up to a man they don’t know – to walk up to a man they don’t know and say something – say anything […] and that to be told by a look – a noise – by no noise – by a punch – by a scream – by silence – that you cannot be seen – that you are invisible […] do you know what it feels like to be told that a man would rather stand on his own drinking in silence or be in the safe company of those like himself – rather than be with you.11 The emotional impact on Dotty of the mutedness of the man is cruelly devastating, but the recall of the incident by Gerry reveals how appalled he is at his own lack of agency in his social world. However, he does not have the skills to do anything about it. This is not abjection being performed here but a deep-seated though thwarted desire to perform a masculinity in the social world that would emulate the agency he feels in the world of work. Similarly for Iggy; there is no mention of whether he ever attempted to be true to his sexuality after the incident in his youth when he kissed his young boxing friend, an incident that would force him out of Belfast. Both appear to have gone on a tour of England

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their whole lives from one manual job to another, and from a succession of pubs, swelling their livers as they went. Now at the point where they have dried out and are no longer working, the point where their hard-body masculinity has evaporated, they are left with each other for comfort and solidarity. Like Beckettian tramps they are tied inexorably to one another; one straight, one gay; one who desires to return to Belfast, one who absolutely refuses to do so. On stage Gerry was played by Karl Johnson with lightness and softness, an open face and wild hair, while Ian McElhinney played Iggy as stern, harsh, and with a woolly hat tight over his head. All they have is their respective memories of loss but no love. Still, it is the straight Gerry who is able to reveal his secret of not being able to socialize with women his whole life. The gay Iggy, though, is tight-lipped about his own secret. As if by way of expiation for Gerry’s past sins with women Iggy initiates a dance with Gerry, humming the tune of the Tennessee Waltz. The moment is tender and transformative. Iggy, like Dotty in the past, is the one who asks Gerry to dance. This time he does not refuse. But as the dance ends Iggy disappears from the stage and Gerry slumps into the doorway revealing that Iggy passed away, and has taken his secrets to his grave. All alone, he is unable to talk except to recite the names of the streets that Belfast and London have in common. These words are road maps for memories. But talk is cheap and as Jane Coyle pointed out in her review for the Irish Times, both characters ‘are acutely aware that they have done a lot of talking in their lives while saying very little’.12 What comes after words, as evidenced in the dance, is emotional as well as physical connection. Words of the monologist in a monosocial environment are configured as barriers of protection from emotional vulnerability. In a brief moment after words this unlikely couple of men performed a contestation of a hard-body masculinity that previously brought them to the brink of self-destruction. Running at the same time at the Abbey Theatre, Dublin was another performance that explored the struggle of the Irish male to carve out a masculine identity in a society whose strict rules and conventions defined hegemonic performance and did not brook any deviance from it. In some ways Thomas Kilroy’s Christ Deliver Us! fills in the back story of the two men in McCafferty’s play. Kilroy’s play is a reimagining of Frank Wedekind’s Spring Awakening relocated to a rural Irish town in the late 1940s/early 1950s, and its focus on young men and women’s desire for but inability to attain a healthy sexuality frames Gerry and Iggy’s formative experiences. In some senses also its time period mirrors the reimagined scenes of Gerry and Iggy’s youth.

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The action takes place in and around two schools in the unnamed town, a Diocesan College, a secondary school run by the Catholic Church, and a boys’ Industrial School, a young offender’s centre in all but name. The crucial thing to know, however, is that the Industrial School did not only receive boys handed down from the courts, but also received boys whose own families believed should receive a short sharp educational shock in the school. The play follows, in a series of alternating vignettes, the friendship between the socially superior and educationally gifted Michael and his more naïve partner Mossie, pupils of the Diocesan College. Both boys are curious about sex, but also about their place in the world. The silence all around them when they question their existence as well as their identity only ensures that they become trapped by dark thoughts. While Mossie has no girlfriend, Michael develops a friendship with local girl Winnie. Conversations with Winnie also reveal that the questions regarding sexual awakening are just as bad for the girls in the town, and in some cases much worse. Winnie’s friend Monica tells how she is beaten at home, and once was punished for wearing inappropriate clothes by being tied in a sack up to her neck, and then beaten by her father. Winnie’s sexual curiosity falsely equates physical punishment with sexual desire and this leads her to demand Michael to beat her with a stick, and ultimately later to have sex with her violently. Similarly, Michael has learned that sexual arousal can only be achieved through violence. The collusion between the two in their skewed imagination regarding sex obviously leads to their own downfall, with pregnant Winnie being paid off by Michael’s father, and Michael being sent to an Industrial School. Conversations between all the young people, boys and girls, follow the track of escaping to some foreign land, for their awareness of being trapped in a repressive state is particularly acute. Michael dreams of Greece while Mossie’s ambition typically is more practical: England. Foreign countries, though, are mirages, temptations for the souls of the young boys, like their desires of the flesh. All around them, adults are conspiring to continue the repression. Winnie’s mother, Mrs Butler, is first seen lowering the hem of Winnie’s dress in a vain attempt to cover her daughter’s legs. But she doesn’t express the reason why she is doing it – to ensure her daughter’s modesty – and Winnie is angry at this incomprehensible restriction of her freedom, as she loves the pleasure of the wind on her legs. Sensual pleasure, though, for her mother’s generation is equated completely with sexual pleasure, and thus is configured as a sin. Similarly Michael’s father, Mr Grainger, laments the dissolution of Irish society after the Second World War, and the threat to the morals

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of the country from foreign influences, as he opines to Michael’s clerical headmaster: I blame the Hitler war, Canon. Nothing will ever be the same again after that war. Mr De Valera may have protected this country and kept the war from our shores. Still! The devil is out! Breakdown. Once upon a time everything was in its place. Not anymore. Look at the filth in the picture-houses. Foreign influences! We may not have been invaded before. But we are being invaded now!13 As was highlighted earlier in the book (in Chapter 3), Irish society was controlled by strict laws on censorship of the media and film censorship was particularly virulent. The Catholic single-sex education system was one way of protecting both boys and girls from discovering each other. Further, the silence surrounding all matters of sex, as well as any questioning of religious matters (thus, in a sense, of all matters that might contest the essentialism of the adolescent’s as yet unformed identities) was omnipresent. This culture of enforced silence, following on from the Wedekind play, produces questioning adolescents who do not know even what questions they should be asking. And we also discover that the previous generations were similarly afflicted. There are tales of suicide from the past, and even the one good and kindly priest at the Diocesan School, Father Seamus is afflicted by a stammer that effectively impedes the outward expression of his feelings. Everyone in the play who dares to question meets the same fate, and we watch while Mossie, Winnie, and Michael successively take their own lives. Mossie breaks open a wardrobe in his home to discover a shrine to his late soldier father in the form of his military uniform, complete with pistol. And it is his father’s pistol that Michael turns on himself. Winnie gives birth to a stillborn child on the banks of Gowlawn Gash, her special place to meet Michael and where her baby was conceived. But giving birth is her last act in life and we learn later that she dies, though we are not told if it was because of giving birth or if she took her own life. Upon hearing of the news of Winnie’s death, Michael escapes from the Industrial School to which he was committed by his father and escapes its culture of violence, by the one route he knew he would not be caught, falling off the school tower. In the final scene of the play Michael meets the ghosts of Mossie and Winnie, and also of Father Seamus as he stands at the point of death. Father Seamus clearly lays out the wrongs of Irish society and encourages him to live: ‘Go, Michael! Be true to your own nature. That’s

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all there is, finding one’s manhood, finding one’s womanhood, and being true to it, no matter what form it takes. That’s what salvation is, Michael.’14 Kilroy’s text has Michael not returning to the living but following Winnie into death, unheeding Father Seamus’s call to life. And director Wayne Jordan, in the production, reinforced the finality of the decision by letting drop the school’s lamps in a shocking and frightening theatrical metaphor for suicide. Throughout the play silence is used as a weapon of control by patriarchal forces, and the lack of language in the vocabulary of the young people means that their questions are never fully formed, like their budding sexualities. The culture of silence, and not knowing the words let alone the questions, leads inexorably to one conclusion. Nevertheless there is one example in the play, as in McCafferty’s, of a possible and positive rejection of words of containment. This comes in a scene in the Diocesan College in which the boys are taught to socialize in preparation for entering the world outside. A gramophone recording of a 1930s waltz accompanies the boys who are being taught to dance in pairs. The scene is hilarious as the boys struggle to come to terms with being both the leader and the follower. But one pair of boys has no difficulty, and as the gramophone was packed up in the production and the other boys departed, the pair’s formal waltz morphed into a balletic

Figure 14 Schoolboys learning to dance in Thomas Kilroy’s Christ Deliver Us! Abbey Theatre, 2010. Photograph: ROS KAVANAGH PHOTOGRAPHER.

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fantasy of pirouettes, leaps, throws, and catches. And as their movement fantasy came to a stop, the boys paused and kissed. Watching a matinee performance, as I did, surrounded by many people for whom this period of Irish social history was a lived reality, there were audible gasps of shock at the kiss. Was it the shock of seeing two boys kiss live on stage, or the stage representation of their performed past that was so shocking? But the shock was momentary, and it seemed to be quickly absorbed, if not necessarily accepted. Given the contemporary real-life revelations of the abuse at such schools in the past, both in physical and sexual terms, of one generation on another, this voluntary same-sex moment of tenderness and desire was read as completely natural, and a counterpoint to the sadistic culture of repression that was constructed around a warped notion of Christianity. Like Gerry and Iggy, these boys dance freely, unconstrained by a social dance of the past, and kiss freely, unconstrained by thoughts of the then illegality of their act. Surrounding the production of Kilroy’s play was a series of debates, readings, and staged performances documenting Ireland’s inglorious past in which the performance of patriarchy ensured a compliant society, regardless of the physical and emotional damage of the generations that suffered it. And all these performative interventions, including Kilroy’s play, came in the wake of the publication of the Ryan report on child abuse that shocked the establishment and the nation to the core.15 In response to the report in the public sphere a war of words ensued: words of exposure from survivors of abuse contested the words of the Church’s doctrine of oppression. In the theatre, however, words ceased to be uttered; moments such as the dance in both plays mentioned here, in which physical intimacy stood in for expressions of feeling (that led ultimately to a kiss), were fleeting but powerful interventions in the representation of Irish masculinities. In Kilroy’s words, these moments offered powerful performative possibilities for ‘finding one’s manhood […] being true to it, no matter what form it takes’.

Notes 1

Introduction

1. Melissa Sihra (ed.), Women in Irish Drama: A Century of Authorship and Representation (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007). 2. Anthony Bradley and Maryann Gialanella Valiulis (eds), Gender and Sexuality in Modern Ireland (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1997), p. 6. 3. Ibid., p. 2. 4. Paul Sweeney, The Celtic Tiger: Ireland’s Economic Miracle Explained (Cork: Oak Tree, 1998), p. 1. 5. Diarmaid Ferriter, The Transformation of Ireland, 1900–2000 (London: Profile, 2005), p. 662. 6. R. W. Connell, Masculinities, 2nd edn (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2005), p. 37. 7. Ibid., p. 37. 8. Michael Mangan, Staging Masculinities: History, Gender, Performance (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003), p. 5. 9. Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (New York and London: Routledge, 1990), p. 140. 10. Michael A. Messner, Power at Play: Sports and the Problem of Masculinity (Boston: Beacon Press, 1992), p. 10. 11. Ibid., p. 19. 12. Connell, Masculinities, p. 216. 13. Jill Dolan, ‘Bending Gender to Fit the Canon: The Politics of Production’, in Lynda Hart (ed.), Making a Spectacle: Feminist Essays on Contemporary Women’s Theatre (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1989), p. 331. 14. David Cairns and Shaun Richards, Writing Ireland: Colonialism, Nationalism and Culture (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1988), pp. 49–50. 15. Colm Toibín, ‘Tom Murphy’s Volcanic Island’, Irish University Review, Vol. 17, No. 1 (Spring 1987), p. 30. 16. Ferriter, Transformation of Ireland, p. 657. 17. Throughout the decade Shirley Temple Bar (a conflation of the name of the iconic Hollywood child star and the new fabricated cultural quarter of Dublin, Temple Bar) performed a regular Sunday evening slot at the then biggest gay club in Dublin, The George, which also attracted a huge following of straight women. 18. The 2008 Dublin Gay Theatre Festival was advertised on banners all along the River Liffey throughout the heart of Dublin, and on every waste bin at Dublin airport, using the iconic image of Oscar Wilde to attract attention. Such mass exposure would not have been permitted fifteen years earlier, and even five years ago this would still have been unthinkable. 19. Ferriter, Transformation of Ireland, p. 726. 20. Jason King, ‘Beyond Ryanga: The Image of Africa in Contemporary Irish Theatre’, in Patrick Lonergan and Rianna O’Dwyer (eds), Echoes Down the 201

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Notes Corridor: Irish Theatre – Past, Present, and Future (Dublin: Carysfort Press, 2007), p. 156.

2 Contesting Canons 1. Jill Dolan, The Feminist Spectator as Critic (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1993), p. 40. 2. Nicholas Grene, The Politics of Irish Drama (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), pp. 147–9. 3. Lionel Pilkington, Theatre and the State in Twentieth-Century Ireland: Cultivating the People (London: Routledge, 2001). 4. Paul Murphy, Hegemony and Fantasy in Irish Drama, 1899–1949 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008). 5. Grene, The Politics of Irish Drama, p. 146. 6. Sean O’Casey, Seven Plays (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1985), p. 154. 7. Ibid., p. 154. 8. Steven Griffith, Review of The Plough and the Stars, Theatre Journal, Vol. 44, No. 1 (1992), p. 98. 9. Theo Dorgan, ‘The Plough and the Stars Flies High’, Irish Times, 25 May 1991, p. 33. 10. Fergus Linehan, ‘A Tale of Two Ploughs’, Irish Times, 11 May 1991, p. 33. 11. David Nowlan, ‘Hynes Puts Emphasis on Expressionism’, Irish Times, 8 May 1991, p. 8. 12. Katie Donovan, ‘Hynes’s Rising at the Abbey’, Irish Times, 7 May 1991, p. 10. 13. Nowlan, ‘Hynes Puts Emphasis on Expressionism’, p. 8. 14. Linehan, ‘A Tale of Two Ploughs’, p. 33. 15. R. W. Connell, Masculinities, 2nd edn (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2005), p. 229. 16. This production was directed by Ben Barnes as part of the Abbey centenary celebrations in 2004. 17. See http://www.arambeproductions.com 18. Arambe’s production of Jimmy Murphy’s The Kings of the Kilburn High Road was directed by Bisi Adigun and first performed in September 2006 in the Teachers’ Club (T36) as part of the Dublin Fringe Festival. 19. Review by Peter Crawley, Irish Times, 5 October 2007, p. 16. 20. Review by Karen Fricker, Variety, 9 October 2007, http://www.variety.com/ review/VE1117935049 (accessed 15 January 2009). 21. In an interview with the author (21 November 2009), Adigun revealed that the mobility though class in Nigerian society helps Christy to become assimilated in an opposing class in his new Irish location. 22. See Declan Kiberd, Inventing Ireland (London: Jonathan Cape, 1995), p. 175. 23. Grene, The Politics of Irish Drama, p. 92. 24. David Lloyd: Anomalous States: Irish Writing and the Post-Colonial Movement (Dublin: Lilliput Press, 1993), p. 144. 25. J. M. Synge, The Playboy of the Western World and Other Plays (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), p. 146. 26. Bisi Adigun has subsequently written another version of Synge’s play, entitled The Playboy of the ‘Sunny’ South East, first performed in September 2009 in Garter Lane Arts Centre by Waterford Youth Arts, directed by the

Notes 203 author. In this version which is relocated to the home place of the production’s young actors, Christy is a Northern Protestant who plays hurling, the national sport of Ireland, and thus in defiance and betrayal of his father’s British heritage and loyalism.

3

Performing Patriarchy

1. Melissa Sihra (ed.), Women in Irish Drama: A Century of Authorship and Representation (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), p. 2. 2. Anthony Bradley and Maryann Valiulis (eds), Gender and Sexuality in Modern Ireland (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1997), p. 6. 3. Donal O’Drisceoil, Censorship in Ireland, 1939–1945: Neutrality, Politics and Society (Cork: Cork University Press, 1996), p. 54. 4. Yeats’s famous declaration to rioters at the opening of Sean O’Casey’s The Plough and the Stars in 1926, referring back to similar protests that greeted Synge’s The Playboy of the Western World in 1907. 5. Lionel Pilkington, Theatre and the State in Twentieth-Century Ireland: Cultivating the People (London: Routledge, 2001), p. 152. 6. Quoted at http:// www.dublintheatrefestival.com/media/documents/1950s/ 7. Pilkington, Theatre and the State in Twentieth-Century Ireland, p. 156. 8. Caitriona Beaumont, ‘Gender, Citizenship and the State, 1922–1990’, in David Alderson and Scott Brewster (eds), Ireland in Proximity: History, Gender and Space (London: Routledge, 1999), p. 100. 9. Fintan O’Toole, ‘Wrestling for O’Casey’s Legacy’, Irish Times, 3 April 2008, p. 22. 10. Fintan O’Toole, ‘Should the National Theatre Learn to Cooperate?’, Irish Times, 5 April 2008, p. 44. 11. Off-the-cuff remark at the International Critics’ Forum of Irish Theatre Magazine 2005. 12. Susan Shaw Sailer, Representing Ireland: Gender, Class, Nationality (Gainesville, FL: University Press of Florida, 1997), p. 95. 13. Stuart Carolan won the George Devine award for Defenders of the Faith in 2004. 14. Stuart Carolan, Defenders of the Faith (London: Nick Hern Books, 2004), p. 7. 15. Ibid., p. 68. 16. Review by Karen Fricker, Variety, 26 September 2006, http://www.variety.com/ review/VE1117931684.html?categoryid=33&cs=1 (accessed 13 January 2009). 17. Enda Walsh, The Walworth Farce (London: Nick Hern Books, 2008), p. 82. 18. The Walworth Farce, reviewed by Gerry McCarthy, Times Online, 2 April 2006, http://entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/tol/arts_and_entertainment/ article699255.ece (accessed 14 January 2009). 19. Directed by Max Stafford-Clark, with Patrick Malahide playing the leading role of fictional political leader, Johnny Silvester. 20. Sebastian Barry, Hinterland (London: Faber & Faber, 2002), p. 16. 21. Lisa Fitzpatrick, ‘Nation and Myth in the Age of the Celtic Tiger: Muide Eire’, in Patrick Lonergan and Riana O’Dwyer (eds), Echoes Down the Corridor: Irish Theatre – Past, Present, and Future (Dublin: Carysfort Press, 2007), pp. 177–8. 22. Marina Carr, Ariel (Oldcastle, County Meath: Gallery Press, 2002), p. 14.

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Notes

23. Melissa Sihra, ‘Renegotiating Landscapes of the Female: Voices, Topographies and Corporealities of Alterity in Marina Carr’s Portia Coughlan’, in Brian Singleton and Anna McMullan (eds), ‘Performing Ireland’, special issue of Australasian Drama Studies, No. 43 (October 2003), p. 21. 24. Carr, Ariel, p. 18. 25. Ibid., p. 33. 26. Ibid. 27. Ibid., p. 74. 28. Melissa Sihra, ‘The House of Woman and the Plays of Marina Carr’, in Sihra (ed.), Women in Irish Drama, pp. 201–18 (p. 213). 29. Marina Carr, On Raftery’s Hill (Oldcastle, County Meath: Gallery Press, 2000), p. 31. 30. Ibid., p. 21. 31. Ibid., pp. 35–6. 32. Marina Carr, The Cordelia Dream (London: Faber & Faber, 2008), pp. 9–10. 33. Brian Singleton, ‘Sick, Dying, Dead, Dispersed: The Evanescence of Patriarchy in Contemporary Irish Women’s Theatre’, in Sihra (ed.), Women in Irish Drama, p. 198. 34. Stella Feehily, Duck (London: Nick Hern Books, 2003). Out of Joint/Royal Court theatre production in association with the Abbey Theatre, first performed 2003. 35. Hilary Fannin, Doldrum Bay (London: Methuen, 2003). First performed at the Peacock Theatre, Dublin in 2003. 36. Ioanna Anderson, Words of Advice for Young People (London: Nick Hern Books, 2004). First produced by Rough Magic at Project, Dublin in 2004.

4 Monologies and Masculinities 1. R. W. Connell, Masculinities, 2nd edn (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2005), p. 35. 2. Patrick Lonergan, Theatre and Globalization: Irish Drama in the Celtic Tiger Era (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), p. 176. 3. Peter Lenz, ‘Talking Cures or Tall Stories? The (Dis-)Establishing of Reality in Conor McPherson’s The Weir’, in Werner Huber, Martin Middeke, and Hubert Zapf (eds), Self-Reflexivity in Literature (Würzburg: Königshausen and Neumann, 2005), p. 166. 4. Scott T. Cummings, ‘Homo Fabulator: The Narrative Imperative in Conor McPherson’s Plays’, in Eamonn Jordan (ed.), Theatre Stuff: Critical Essays on Contemporary Irish Theatre (Dublin: Carysfort Press, 2000), pp. 10–11. 5. Conor McPherson, This Lime Tree Bower: Three Plays (London: Nick Hern Books, 1996), p. 5. 6. Lonergan, Theatre and Globalization, p. 184. 7. Ibid. 8. Mark O’Rowe, Howie the Rookie (London: Nick Hern Books, 1999), p. 34. 9. Ibid., p. 41. 10. First directed by the author while a student at University College Dublin in 1992. Subsequently it was performed under the auspices of McPherson’s newly created company, Fly by Night, at the City Arts Centre Dublin on 30 August 1994 with Jason Byrne as performer and Colin O’Connor as director.

Notes 205 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20.

21. 22.

23. 24. 25. 26. 27.

28. 29. 30. 31. 32. 33. 34. 35.

5

McPherson, This Lime Tree Bower: Three Plays, p. 10. Ibid., p. 12. Ibid., p. 13. Ibid., p. 30. Ibid., p. 27. Ibid., p. 39. Ibid., p. 45. Ibid., p. 15. James W. Messerschmidt, Nine Lives: Adolescent Masculinities, the Body, and Violence (Boulder and London: Westview Press, 2000), p. 13. First performed under the title of The Light of Jesus at the City Arts Centre, Dublin by McPherson’s own company, Fly by Night. Loopline Productions subsequently revived it under its published title later the same year for the Dublin Theatre Festival, again directed by McPherson. McPherson, This Lime Tree Bower: Three Plays, p. 6. First performed at the Crypt Arts Centre, Dublin in 1995, directed by the author, and subsequently re-staged the following year at the Bush Theatre, London. McPherson, This Lime Tree Bower: Three Plays, p. 118. Messerschmidt, Nine Lives, pp. 16–17. Victor J. Seidler, Young Men and Masculinities: Global Cultures and Intimate Lives (London and New York: Zed Books, 2006), p. 48. First produced at the New Ambassadors Theatre, London in a Gate Theatre, Dublin production, with a subsequent transfer to Dublin. Brian Singleton, ‘Am I Talking to Myself? Men, Masculinities and the Contemporary Irish Theatre’, in Clare Wallace (ed.), Monologues: Theatre, Performance, Subjectivity (Prague: Literaria Pragensia, 2006). Conor McPherson, Port Authority, revised edn (London: Nick Hern Books, 2005), p. 49. Ibid., p. 50. Ibid., p. 54. Seidler, Young Men and Masculinities, p. 102. Ben Barnes, Plays and Controversies: Abbey Theatre Diaries 2000–2005 (Dublin: Carysfort Press, 2008), pp. 100, 347. Ibid., p. 86. Ibid., p. 348. Sally Robinson, ‘“Emotional Constipation” and the Power of Damned Masculinity: Deliverance and the Paradoxes of Liberation’, in Peter Lehman (ed.), Masculinity: Bodies, Movies, Culture (London and New York: Routledge, 2001), p. 135.

Quare Fellas

1. The title is an obvious reference to Brendan Behan’s 1954 play The Quare Fellow. My own title is a queering, after Noreen Giffney, of the term ‘queer’ (‘Quare Eire’ in Journal of Lesbian Studies, Vol. 11, No. 3–4 (2007): 275–89) in an Irish context, but going further by using the colloquial ‘fella’ as a deliberate strategy to unhinge Irish theatrical masculinities from a fixed gender binarism.

206

Notes

2. http://www.sinnfein.ie/contents/16522 (accessed 20 November 2009). 3. For a discussion of segregated space in Belfast, see Niall Rea, ‘Sexuality and the Dysfunctional City: Queering Segregated Space’, in David Cregan (ed.), Deviant Acts: Essays on Queer Performance (Dublin, Carysfort Press, 2009), pp. 113–32. 4. Cited in Kieran Rose, Diverse Communities: The Evolution of Lesbian and Gay Politics in Ireland (Cork: Cork University Press, 1994), p. 12. 5. Ibid., p. 19. 6. For a description of the events see Ireland’s GLBTQ website: http://www. glbtq.com/social-sciences/ireland,2.html (accessed 5 March 2009). 7. John Burke, ‘Out at Last!’, The Sunday Business Post Online, 8 June 2008: http://archives.tcm.ie/businesspost/2008/06/08/story33417.asp (accessed 5 April 2009). 8. Brian Lacey, Terrible Queer Creatures: Homosexuality in Irish History (Dublin: Wordwell, 2008), p. 253. 9. For an analysis of the incident and surrounding debate, see Chrystel Hug, ‘Moral Order and the Liberal Agenda in the Republic of Ireland’, New Hibernia Review, Vol. 5, No. 4 (Geimhreadh/Winter 2001), pp. 22–41. 10. For an analysis of the struggle for control of Ireland’s social agendas by rightwing organizations, see Emily O’Reilly, Masterminds of the Right (Dublin: Attic Press, 1992). 11. See Rose, Diverse Communities, pp. 22–5. 12. Sara Keating, ‘Observing a Son of Ulster’, Irish Times, 14 September 2009, p. 14. 13. See Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London: Verso, 1991). 14. See Jonathan Dollimore, Sexual Dissidence: Augustine to Wilde, Freud to Foucault (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991). 15. Éibhear Walshe (ed.), Sex, Nation and Dissent in Irish Writing (Cork: Cork University Press, 1997). 16. See Jeffrey Dudgeon, Roger Casement: The Black Diaries – with a Study of his Background, Sexuality and Irish Political Life (Belfast: Belfast Press, 2002). 17. Thomas Kilroy, The Death and Resurrection of Mr Roche (Oldcastle, County Meath: Gallery Press, 2002), p. 15. 18. Brian Friel, The Gentle Island (Oldcastle, County Meath: Gallery Press, 1993), p. 61. 19. Ibid., p. 72. 20. David Nowlan, Irish Times review, 8 October 1986, p. 12. 21. David Cregan, ‘Coming Out: McGuinness’s Dramaturgy and Queer Resistance’, in Irish University Review, Vol. 40, No. 1 (Spring/Summer 2010), p. 50. 22. Michael Finlan, Irish Times review, 26 May 1988, p. 12. 23. Gerry Colgan, Irish Times review, 9 August 1988, p. 10. 24. Eve Kosovsky Sedgwick, The Epistemology of the Closet (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992), p. 20. 25. First performed 29 February 1984, directed by Brendan Ellis and Roger Doyle. 26. Aidan Mathews quoted in Charles Hunter, ‘Making Theatre and Music Work in Tandem’, Irish Times, 1 March 1984, p. 12.

Notes 207 27. David Nowlan, Irish Times review, 1 March 1984, p. 12. 28. Paddy Woodworth, ‘Geraldine Aron: Writing for Druid’, Irish Times, 26 July 1990, p. 10. 29. Geraldine Aron, The Stanley Parkers (London: Samuel French, 1995), pp. 13–14. 30. David Nowlan, ‘Telling Tales of Five Fragmented Lives’, Irish Times, 27 July 1990, p. 10. 31. Wet Paint was set up in 1984 and operated very successfully until 1991. 32. http://www.irishplayography.com/search/play.asp?play_id=688 33. David Grant, Tangles (unpublished script), p. 21. I am indebted to David for providing me with a script, and for filling in some missing pieces of the story. 34. Nico Brown, ‘Disguises’, in Grant, Tangles, pp. 51–2. 35. Walshe, Sex, Nation and Dissent, p. 240. 36. Quoted in Paddy Woodworth, ‘Wet Paint Takes up Challenge of Gay Theme’, Irish Times, 24 November 1990, p. 31. 37. David Nowlan, ‘Grand Acting Lightens the Burden of the Preaching’, Irish Times, 29 November 1990, p. 12. 38. David Nowlan, ‘It was a Lively Year of Theatre’, Irish Times, 25 December 1990, p. 16. 39. Gerry Colgan, Irish Times review, 20 October 1994, p. 12. 40. Gerard Stembridge, The Gay Detective (Dublin: New Island Books, 1996), p. 7. 41. David Nowlan, ‘Underworld Bereft of Sentimentality’, Irish Times, 9 February 1996, p. 11. 42. Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality 1: The Will to Knowledge (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1998), p. 156. 43. David Nowlan, ‘Ambitious Play with a Logical Fallacy’, Irish Times, 8 October 1999, p. 12. 44. See for example the older relatives of gay men such as aunt Eleanor Henryson in The Bird Sanctuary (1994) and mother Rima West in Dolly West’s Kitchen (1999). 45. See the official Alternative Miss Ireland website: http://www.alternativemiss ireland.com/page.aspx?mode=blog&tag=history&page=Pageant 46. Fintan Walsh, ‘Homelysexuality and the “Beauty” Pageant’, in Sara Brady and Fintan Walsh (eds), Crossroads: Performance Studies and Irish Culture (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), p. 204. 47. See Ger Philpott, ‘The Man and the Mask’, Irish Times, 17 August 1999, p. 10. 48. Michael Warner (ed.), Fear of a Queer Planet: Queer Politics and Social Theory (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993), p. xxvi. 49. Fintan Walsh, ‘Touching, Feeling, Cross-Dressing: On the Affectivity of Queer Performance. Or, What Makes Panti Fabulous’, in David Cregan (ed.), Deviant Acts: Essays on Queer Performance (Dublin, Carysfort Press, 2009), p. 63. 50. Erving Goffman, Stigma: Notes on the Management of Spoiled Identity (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1963), pp. 101–2. 51. Author’s interview with Neil Watkins, 17 October 2009. 52. Ibid. 53. For a review of the play, see Gerry Colgan, Irish Times, 26 May 2005, p. 14.

208

Notes

54. Performed as part of the Dublin Fringe Festival in Players Theatre, Trinity College. 55. The Stomping Ground (1997), The Queen and Peacock (2000), both performed by Red Kettle Theatre Company 56. Fintan Walsh, ‘Shirley Temple Bar at the Abbey: Irish Theatre, Queer Performance and the Politics of Disidentification’, Irish Theatre International, Vol. 1, No. 1 (2008), pp. 61–2.

6 Male Races 1. Declan Kiberd, ‘Strangers in their Own Country: Multi-Culturalism in Ireland’, in Edna Longley and Declan Kiberd, Multi-Culturalism: The View from the Two Irelands (Cork: Cork University Press, 2001), p. 65. 2. Piaras MacÉinrí, ‘Immigration into Ireland: Trends, Policy Responses, Outlook’, http://migration.ucc.ie/irelandfirstreport.htm (accessed 28 July 2009). 3. That total had risen significantly (approximately by 40 per cent) since a census in 2002. For an analysis of how that breaks down by gender, see Carla De Tona and Ronit Lentin, ‘Overlapping Multi-Centred Networking: Migrant Women’s Diasporic Networks as Alternative Narratives of Globalization’, in Karen Fricker and Ronit Lentin (eds), Performing Global Networks (Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars, 2007), pp. 67–87. 4. Central Statistics Office Ireland, Report on 2006 Census, http://www.cso. ie/statistics/Population.htm/ (accessed 28 July 2009). 5. Press statement, 2006 Census, Volume 5, Ethnic or Cultural Background, Central Statistics Office. 6. Ronit Lentin and Robbie McVeigh, After Optimism?: Ireland, Racism and Globalisation (Dublin: Metro Eireann, 2006), p. 4. 7. Richard Delgado and Jean Stefancic, Critical Race Theory: An Introduction (New York and London: New York University Press, 2001), pp. 51–2. 8. Nicci Gerard, interview with Roddy Doyle entitled ‘What Keeps Roddy Rooted’, The Observer, 15 April 2001. Interestingly, at the same time, Doyle was reworking for the stage another celebrated screenplay under the title Guess Who’s Coming for the Dinner?, and by so doing, forcing his famous working-class Dublin characters to confront issues of race. 9. Bisi Adigun, ‘Arambe Productions: An African’s Response to the Recent Portrayal of the fear gorm in Irish Drama’, in Fricker and Lentin (eds), Performing Global Networks, p. 54. 10. Report on the Forum on Media and Interculturalism, Dublin City University, 21 and 22 March 2002, http://www.comms.dcu.ie/interculturalism/report/ finaldraft.htm#_ftn40 (accessed 30 July 2009). 11. Gavan Titley, ‘Cultivating Habitats of Meaning: Broadcasting, Participation and Interculturalism’, Irish Communications Review, Vol. 9 (2003), p. 7. http:// www.icr.dit.ie/volume9/articles/Titley.pdf (accessed 25 August 2009). 12. Ibid., p. 8. 13. Ronit Lentin, ‘Responding to the Racialisation of Irishness: Disavowed Multiculturalism and its Discontents’, Sociological Research Online, Vol. 5, No. 4, http://www.socresonline.org.uk/5/4/lentin.html (accessed 31 July 2009).

Notes 209 14. Mark O’Halloran, ‘Pala’s Story’, Prosperity, Shooting Script, p. 14. http://www. scribd.com/doc/11562682/Prosperity-Palas-Story (accessed 30 December 2009). 15. Statistics from the Office of the Refugee Applications Commissioner, http:// www.orac.ie/pages/Stats/statistics.htm (accessed 3 August 2009). 16. Jason King, ‘Interculturalism and Irish Theatre: The Portrayal of Immigrants on the Irish Stage’, Irish Review, Vol. 33 (2005), p. 27. 17. Fintan O’Toole, Review of Asylum! Asylum!, Irish Times, 9 August 1994, reprinted in Julia Furay and Redmond O’Hanlon (eds), Critical Moments: Fintan O’Toole on Modern Irish Theatre (Dublin: Carysfort Press, 2003), pp. 126–8 (p. 127). 18. Donal O’Kelly, Asylum! Asylum!, in Christopher Fitz-Simon and Stanford Sternlicht (eds), New Plays from the Abbey Theatre, 1993–1995 (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 1996), p. 162. 19. R. W. Connell, Masculinities, 2nd edn (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2005), pp. 80–1. 20. Michael A. Messner, Power at Play: Sports and the Problem of Masculinity (Boston: Beacon, 1992), p. 153. 21. Patrick Lonergan, Review of Hurl, Irish Theatre Magazine, Vol. 4, No. 7 (Winter 2003), p. 120. 22. Charlie O’Neill, Hurl, unpublished script, p. 9. 23. Helen Meany, Review of Hurl, The Guardian Online, 24 July 2003, http://www. guardian.co.uk/stage/2003/jul/24/theatre.artsfeatures3 (accessed 4 August 2009). 24. Raymond Keane, quoted in Sophie Gorman, ‘United Colours’, Irish Independent, 11 July 2003, p. 13. 25. Charlie O’Neill, programme notes to Hurl, Dublin Theatre Festival, October 2003. 26. Performed at the Samuel Beckett Theatre, Trinity College, Dublin. 27. As described by the non-profit organization’s website, http://www.activelink. ie/irish/organisation.php?id=68 (accessed 5 August 2009). 28. Hughie on the Wires (1993) on the manipulation of lives by the media; Trickledown Town (1994) on international debt and the structural adjustment programmes in the Third World; The Business of Blood (1995) on the West’s involvement in the international arms trade. 29. Irish Theatre Magazine, Vol. 3, No. 15 (Summer 2003), pp. 74–5. 30. Jason King, ‘Interculturalism and Irish Theatre’, Irish Review, No. 33 (Spring 2005), p. 34. 31. Matthew Spangler, ‘The New Irish in Irish Theatre: Arambe Productions and Irish/West African Performance’, SIAR: The Journal of the Western Institute of Irish Studies, Vol. 2, No. 1 (2008), p. 42. 32. Adigun, ‘Arambe Productions: An African’s Response to the Recent Portrayal of the fear gorm in Irish Drama’, pp. 63–4. 33. Author’s interview with Bisi Adigun, 21 November 2009. 34. For an analysis of how the production worked for simultaneous audiences of Africans and white Irish, see Eric Weitz, ‘Who’s Laughing Now: Comic Currents for a New Irish Audience’, in Sara Brady and Fintan Walsh (eds), Crossroads: Performance Studies and Irish Culture (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), pp. 226–36.

210

Notes

35. See the argument about ‘wound culture’ as a manifestation of toxic masculinity in Sally Robinson, ‘“Emotional Constipation” and the Power of Damned Masculinity: Deliverance and the Paradoxes of Liberation’, in Peter Lehman (ed.), Masculinity: Bodies, Movies, Culture (London and New York: Routledge, 2001), p. 135. 36. John Benyon, Masculinities and Culture (Buckingham and Philadelphia: Open University Press, 2002), p. 52. 37. George Seremba quoted in Jason King, ‘Canadian, Irish and Ugandan Theatre Links’, Canadian Journal of Irish Studies, Vol. 31, No. 1 (2005), p. 114. 38. George Seremba, Introduction to Come Good Rain, 2005 edition, unpublished script, p. 5, courtesy of the author. 39. bell hooks, ‘Eating the Other: Desire and Resistance’, in Meenakashi Gigi Durham and Douglas M. Kellner (eds), Media and Cultural Studies: Key Works (Oxford: Blackwell, 2006), p. 368.

7 Protestant Boys 1. Loyalist marching song played extensively at Orange Order parades in Northern Ireland. It is sung to the tune of the seventeenth-century folksong of unknown origin, ‘Lillibullero’ adopted by a British army regiment as well as by the BBC during the Second World War. 2. Their name was indicative of their nocturnal clandestine and subversive activities. 3. David Cairns and Shaun Richards, Writing Ireland: Colonialism, Nationalism and Culture (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1988), p. 24. 4. Eugene McNulty, The Ulster Literary Theatre and the Northern Revival (Cork: Cork University Press, 2008). 5. For an excellent description of some of these violent performances, see Mark Phelan, ‘The Rise and Fall of the Ulster Literary Theatre’, unpublished PhD thesis, Trinity College Dublin, 2007. 6. Ruth Dudley Edwards, The Faithful Tribe: An Intimate Portrait of the Loyal Institutions (London: HarperCollins, 2000), p. 21. 7. Neil Jarman, Material Conflicts: Parades and Visual Displays in Northern Ireland (Oxford: Berg, 1997), p. 11. 8. Dominic Bryan, ‘“Ireland’s Very Own Jurassic Park”: The Mass Media, Orange Parades and the Discourse on Tradition’, in Anthony D. Buckley (ed.), Symbols in Northern Ireland (Belfast: Institute of Irish Studies, Queens University, 1998), p. 40. 9. Richard Kirkland, Identity Parades: Northern Irish Culture and Dissident Subjects (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2002), p. 14. 10. Lionel Pilkington, Theatre and the State in Twentieth-Century Ireland: Cultivating the People (London: Routledge, 2001), p. 169. 11. For a discussion of the dissenting cultural voices within Protestantism, see Gillian McIntosh, The Force of Culture: Unionist Identities in Twentieth-Century Ireland (Cork: Cork University Press, 1999), pp. 20–4. 12. Stewart Parker, Northern Star, in Plays: 2 (London: Methuen, 2000), p. 20. 13. Ibid., p. 25. 14. Ibid., p. 46.

Notes 211 15. Fintan O’Toole, Review of Northern Star, Sunday Tribune, 2 December 1984, reprinted in Julia Furay and Redmond O’Hanlon (eds), Critical Moments: Fintan O’Toole on Modern Irish Theatre (Dublin: Carysfort Press, 2003), p. 32. 16. Gary Mitchell, Tearing the Loom & In A Little World of Our Own (London: Nick Hern Books, 1998), p. 86. 17. Ibid., p. 124. 18. Ron Hutchinson, Rat in the Skull (London: Methuen, 1995), p. 21. 19. Christina Reid, Plays: 1 (London: Methuen, 1997). 20. Robin Glendinning, Three Plays: Mumbo Jumbo, Donny Boy, Summerhouse (Belfast: Lagan Press, 2004), p. 17. 21. Ibid., p. 23. 22. Stewart Parker, Pentecost, in Plays: 2 (London: Methuen, 2000), p. 231. 23. John Benyon, Masculinities and Culture (Buckingham and Philadelphia: Open University Press, 2002), p. 72. 24. Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (London: Allen & Unwin, 1970). 25. Victor J. Seidler, Young Men and Masculinities: Global Cultures and Intimate Lives (London and New York: Zed Books, 2006), p. 52. 26. Graham Reid, Billy: Three Plays for Television (London: Faber & Faber, 1984), p. 91. 27. Gary Mitchell, In a Little World of Our Own (London: Nick Hern Books, 1998), p. 7. 28. Gary Mitchell, As the Beast Sleeps (London: Nick Hern Books, 2001), p. 49. 29. This play won the award for Best New Play in the Irish Times/ESB Irish Theatre Awards, 2002. 30. Robert Welch, Protestants (Belfast: Lagan Press, 2006), p. 51. 31. Dan Baron Cohen, ‘Listening to the Silences: Defining the Languages and the Place of a New Ireland’, in Scott Brewster, Virginia Crossman, Fiona Becket, and David Alderson (eds), Ireland in Proximity: History, Gender, Space (London: Routledge, 1999), p. 174. 32. Andrew Hill and Andrew White, ‘The Flying of Israeli Flags in Northern Ireland’, Identities: Global Studies in Culture and Power, Vol. 15, Issue 1 (January 2008): 31–50. 33. Janelle Reinelt, ‘Witnessing Change: Public Life and Performance in These Times’, Irish Theatre International, Vol. 1, No. 1 (April 2008), p. 15. 34. Stephen M. Whitehead, Men and Masculinities: Key Themes and New Directions (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2002), p. 219. 35. R.W. Connell, Masculinities, 2nd edn (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2005), p. 233.

8

After Words

1. David McWilliams, The Pope’s Children: Ireland’s New Elite (Dublin: Gill & Macmillan, 2005). 2. David McWilliams, The Generation Game (Dublin: Gill & Macmillan, 2007). 3. Paul Mercier, Homeland, Abbey Theatre, 2006. 4. Jimmy Murphy, The Muesli Belt, Peacock Theatre, 2000. 5. Directed by Conall Morrison, June 2010.

212

Notes

6. Directed by Rachel O’Riordain. 7. Owen McCafferty, The Absence of Women (London: Faber & Faber, 2010), p. 55. 8. Ibid., p. 54. 9. Ibid., p. 53. 10. Ibid., p. 16. 11. Ibid., pp. 43, 44, 45. 12. Jane Coyle, Review of The Absence of Women, Irish Times, 15 February 2010, http://www.irishtimes.com/newspaper/features/2010/0215/1224264465032. html (accessed 8 May 2010). 13. Thomas Kilroy, Christ Deliver Us! (Oldcastle, County Meath: Gallery Press, 2010), p. 55. 14. Ibid., p. 65. 15. The Ryan report was named after Justice Sean Ryan, chairman of the Commission to Inquire into Child Abuse, established by the Irish government in 1999. The report was published in 2009.

Select Bibliography Adams, Rachel and David Savran, eds, The Masculinity Studies Reader (Malden, MA and Oxford: Blackwell, 2002). Adigun, Bisi, ‘Arambe Productions: An African’s Response to the Recent Portrayal of the fear gorm in Irish Drama’, in Karen Fricker and Ronit Lentin, eds, Performing Global Networks (Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars, 2007), 52–66. Adler, Alfred, Understanding Human Nature (Oxford: Oneworld, 1998). Anderson, Benedict, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London: Verso, 1991). Anderson, Ioanna, Words of Advice for Young People (London: Nick Hern Books, 2004). Aron, Geraldine, The Stanley Parkers (London: Samuel French, 1995). Aston, Elaine, Feminist Views on the English Stage: Women Playwrights, 1990–2000 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003). Aston, Elaine and Janelle Reinelt, The Cambridge Companion to Modern British Women Playwrights (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000). Barnes, Ben, Plays and Controversies: Abbey Theatre Diaries 2000–2005 (Dublin: Carysfort Press, 2008). Barry, Sebastian, Hinterland (London: Faber and Faber, 2002). Barton, Ruth, Irish National Cinema (London: Routledge, 2004). Barton, Ruth and Harvey O’Brien, eds, Keeping it Real: Irish Film and Television (London: Wallflower Press, 2004). Beaumont, Caitriona, ‘Gender, Citizenship and the State, 1922–1990’, in David Alderson and Scott Brewster, eds, Ireland in Proximity: History, Gender and Space (London: Routledge, 1999), 94–108. Behan, Brendan, The Complete Plays (London: Methuen, 2001). Benyon, John, Masculinities and Culture (Buckingham and Philadelphia: Open University Press, 2002). Bolger, Dermot, Druids, Dudes and Beauty Queens: The Changing Face of Irish Theatre (Dublin: New Island Books, 2001). Boltwood, Scott, Brian Friel, Ireland, and the North (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009). Bort, Eberhard, The State of Play: Irish Theatre in the Nineties (Trier: Wissenschaftler Verlag, 1996). Brady, Sara and Fintan Walsh, eds, Crossroads: Performance Studies and Irish Culture (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009). Bradley, Anthony and Maryann Gialanella Valiulis, eds, Gender and Sexuality in Modern Ireland (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1997). Brewster, Scott, Virginia Crossman, Fiona Becket, and David Alderson, eds, Ireland in Proximity: History, Gender, Space (London and New York: Routledge, 1999). Brown, Terence, Ireland: A Social and Cultural History, 1922–2001 (London: HarperPerennial, 2004).

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Select Bibliography

Bryan, Dominic, ‘“Ireland’s Very Own Jurassic Park”: The Mass Media, Orange Parades and the Discourse on Tradition’, in Anthony D. Buckley, ed., Symbols in Northern Ireland (Belfast: Institute of Irish Studies, Queens University, 1998), 23–42. Buckley, Anthony, D., ed., Symbols in Northern Ireland (Belfast: Institute of Irish Studies, Queens University, 1998). Butler, Judith, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (New York and London: Routledge, 1990). Cairns, David and Shaun Richards, Writing Ireland: Colonialism, Nationalism and Culture (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1988). Carolan, Stuart, Defenders of the Faith (London: Nick Hern Books, 2004). Carr, Marina, By the Bog of Cats (Oldcastle, County Meath: Gallery Press, 1998). Carr, Marina, On Raftery’s Hill (Oldcastle, County Meath: Gallery Press, 2000). Carr, Marina, Ariel (Oldcastle, County Meath: Gallery Press, 2002). Carr, Marina, Woman and Scarecrow (London: Faber and Faber, 2006). Carr, Marina, The Cordelia Dream (London: Faber and Faber, 2008). Chambers, Lilian, Ger FitzGibbon, and Eamonn Jordan, Theatre Talk: Voices of Irish Theatre Practitioners (Dublin: Carysfort Press, 2001). Chaudhuri, Una, Staging Place: The Geography of Modern Drama (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1997). Cleary, Joe and Claire Connolly, The Cambridge Companion to Modern Irish Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005). Cliff, Brian and Éibhear Walshe, eds, Representing the Troubles: Texts and Images, 1970–2000 (Dublin: Four Courts, 2004). Cohen, Dan Baron, ‘Listening to the Silences: Defining the Languages and the Place of a New Ireland’, in Scott Brewster, Virginia Crossman, Fiona Becket, and David Alderson, eds, Ireland in Proximity: History, Gender, Space (London and New York: Routledge, 1999), 173–88. Connell, R.W., Masculinities, 2nd edn (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2005). Coulter, Colin, Contemporary Northern Irish Society: An Introduction (London: Pluto, 1999). Cregan, David, ‘Coming Out: McGuinness’s Dramaturgy and Queer Resistance’, in Irish University Review, Vol. 40, No. 1 (Spring/Summer 2010): 46–58. Cregan, David, ed., Deviant Acts: Essays on Queer Performance (Dublin: Carysfort Press, 2009). Cummings, Scott T., ‘Homo Fabulator: The Narrative Imperative in Conor McPherson’s Plays’, in Eamonn Jordan, ed., Theatre Stuff: Critical Essays on Contemporary Irish Theatre (Dublin: Carysfort Press, 2000), 303–11. Deane, Seamus, Strange Country: Modernity and Nationhood in Irish Writing since 1790 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1999). Delgado, Richard and Jean Stefancic, Critical Race Theory: An Introduction (New York and London: New York University Press, 2001). De Tona, Carla and Ronit Lentin, ‘Overlapping Multi-Centred Networking: Migrant Women’s Diasporic Networks as Alternative Narratives of Globalization’, in Karen Fricker and Ronit Lentin, eds, Performing Global Networks (Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars, 2007), 67–87. Dodd, Luke, ed., Nationalism: Visions and Revisions (Dublin: Film Institute of Ireland, 1999).

Select Bibliography 215 Dolan, Jill, ‘Bending Gender to Fit the Canon: The Politics of Production’, in Lynda Hart, ed., Making a Spectacle: Feminist Essays on Contemporary Women’s Theatre (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1989), 318–44. Dolan, Jill, The Feminist Spectator as Critic (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1993). Dollimore, Jonathan, Sexual Dissidence: Augustine to Wilde, Freud to Foucault (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991). Donovan, Katie, ‘Hynes’s Rising at the Abbey’, Irish Times (7 May 1991), 10. Dorgan, Theo, ‘The Plough and the Stars Flies High’, Irish Times (25 May 1991), 33. Dudgeon, Jeffrey, Roger Casement: The Black Diaries – with a Study of his Background, Sexuality and Irish Political Life (Belfast: Belfast Press, 2002). Edwards, Ruth Dudley, The Faithful Tribe: An Intimate Portrait of the Loyal Institutions (London: HarperCollins, 2000). Edwards, Tim, Cultures of Masculinity (London: Routledge, 2005). Fannin, Hilary, Doldrum Bay (London: Methuen, 2003). Fanning, Bryan, Racism and Social Change in the Republic of Ireland (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2002). Fanning, Bryan, Immigration and Social Change in the Republic of Ireland (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2007). Fanon, Frantz, The Wretched of the Earth (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 2001). Fanon, Frantz, Black Skin, White Masks (London: Pluto, 2008). Feehily, Stella, Duck (London: Nick Hern Books, 2003). Ferriter, Diarmaid, The Transformation of Ireland, 1900–2000 (London: Profile, 2005). Ferriter, Diarmaid, Occasions of Sin: Sex and Society in Modern Ireland (London: Profile, 2009). Fitzpatrick, Lisa, ‘Nation and Myth in the Age of the Celtic Tiger: Muide Eire’, in Patrick Lonergan and Riana O’Dwyer, eds, Echoes Down the Corridor: Irish Theatre – Past, Present, and Future (Dublin: Carysfort Press, 2007), 169–80. Fitz-Simon, Christopher, The Boys: A Biography of Micheál Mac Líammóir and Hilton Edwards (Dublin: New Island, 2002). Fitz-Simon, Christopher, The Abbey Theatre: Ireland’s National Theatre: The First 100 Years (London: Thames & Hudson, 2003). Fitz-Simon, Christopher and Stanford Sternlicht, eds, New Plays from the Abbey Theatre, 1993–1995 (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1996). Foley, Imelda, The Girls in the Big Picture: New Voices in Ulster Theatre (Belfast: Blackstaff, 2003). Foucault, Michel, The History of Sexuality 1: The Will to Knowledge (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1998). Frazier, Adrian, Behind the Scenes: Yeats, Horniman, and the Struggle for the Abbey Theatre (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990). Fricker, Karen and Ronit Lentin, eds, Performing Global Networks (Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars, 2007). Fricker, Karen and Brian Singleton, ‘Critical Ireland’, Special issue of Modern Drama, Vol. 47, No. 4 (Winter 2004). Friel, Brian, The Gentle Island (Oldcastle, County Meath: Gallery Press, 1993). Friel, Brian, Plays 2 (London: Faber and Faber, 1999). Friel, Brian, Plays 1, new edn (London: Faber and Faber, 2001).

216

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Friel, Brian, The Home Place (Oldcastle, County Meath: Gallery Press, 2005). Furay, Julia and Redmond O’Hanlon, eds, Critical Moments: Fintan O’Toole on Modern Irish Theatre (Dublin: Carysfort Press, 2003). Giffney, Noreen, ‘Quare Eire’, Journal of Lesbian Studies, Vol. 11, No. 3–4 (2007): 275–89. Gilroy, Paul, The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness (London: Verso, 1993). Gilroy, Paul, After Empire: Multiculture or Postcolonial Melancholia (London: Routledge, 2004). Glendinning, Robin, Three Plays: Mumbo Jumbo, Donny Boy, Summerhouse (Belfast: Lagan Press, 2004). Goffman, Erving, Stigma: Notes on the Management of Spoiled Identity (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1963). Gorman, Sophie, ‘United Colours’, Irish Independent (11 July 2003), 13. Grant, David, Tangles, unpublished script, courtesy of the author. Gregory, Lady Augusta, Selected Plays (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 1993). Grene, Nicholas, The Politics of Irish Drama (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999). Grene, Nicholas and Patrick Lonergan, eds, Interactions: Dublin Theatre Festival 1957–2007 (Dublin: Carysfort Press, 2008). Grene, Nicholas and Christopher Morash, Shifting Scenes: Irish Theatre Going 1955–1985 (Dublin: Carysfort Press, 2008). Griffith, Steven, Review of The Plough and the Stars, Theatre Journal, Vol. 44, No. 1 (1992): 97–9. Hall, Donald, E., Queer Theories (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003). Harrington, John P. and Elizabeth J. Mitchell, eds, Politics and Performance in Contemporary Northern Ireland (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1999). Hart, Lynda, ed., Making a Spectacle: Feminist Essays on Contemporary Women’s Theatre (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1989). Hill, Andrew and Andrew White, ‘The Flying of Israeli Flags in Northern Ireland’, Identities: Global Studies in Culture and Power, Vol. 15, Issue 1 (January 2008): 31–50. Hocquenghem, Guy, Homosexual Desire (London: Allison & Busby, 1978). hooks, bell, ‘Eating the Other: Desire and Resistance’, in Meenakashi Gigi Durham and Douglas M. Kellner, eds, Media and Cultural Studies: Key Works (Oxford: Blackwell, 2006), 366–80. Huber, Werner, Martin Middeke, and Hubert Zapf, eds, Self-Reflexivity in Literature (Würzburg: Königshausen and Neumann, 2005). Hug, Chrystel, ‘Moral Order and the Liberal Agenda in the Republic of Ireland’, New Hibernia Review, Vol. 5, No. 4 (Geimhreadh/Winter 2001): 22–41. Hunter, Charles, ‘Making Theatre and Music Work in Tandem’, Irish Times (1 March 1984), 12. Hutchinson, Ron, Rat in the Skull (London: Methuen, 1995). Jarman, Neil, Material Conflicts: Parades and Visual Displays in Northern Ireland (Oxford: Berg, 1997). Johnston, Denis, The Old Lady Says “No!” (Washington, DC: The Catholic University of America Press, 1992).

Select Bibliography 217 Jordan, Eamonn, The Feast of Famine: The Plays of Frank McGuinness (London and Frankfurt: Peter Lang, 1997). Jordan, Eamonn, ed., Theatre Stuff: Critical Essays on Contemporary Irish Theatre (Dublin: Carysfort Press, 2000). Jordan, Eamonn, Dissident Dramaturgies: Contemporary Irish Theatre (Dublin: Irish Academic Press, 2009). Keating, Sara, ‘Observing a Son of Ulster’, Irish Times (14 September 2009), 14. Kelly, Mary J. and Barbara O’Connor, eds, Media Audiences in Ireland: Power and Cultural Identity (Dublin: University College Dublin Press, 1997). Kennaway, Brian, The Orange Order: A Tradition Betrayed (London: Methuen, 2006). Keohane, Kieran and Carmen Kuhling, Collision Culture: Transformations in Everyday Life in Ireland (Dublin: Liffey Press, 2004). Kiberd, Declan, Inventing Ireland (London: Jonathan Cape, 1995). Kiberd, Declan, ‘Strangers in their Own Country: Multi-Culturalism in Ireland’, in Edna Longley and Declan Kiberd, Multi-Culturalism: The View from the Two Irelands (Cork: Cork University Press, 2001), 45–74. Kilroy, Thomas, The Death and Resurrection of Mr Roche (Oldcastle, County Meath: Gallery Press, 2002). Kilroy, Thomas, Christ Deliver Us! (Oldcastle, County Meath: Gallery Press, 2010). King, Jason, ‘Interculturalism and Irish Theatre: The Portrayal of Immigrants on the Irish Stage’, Irish Review, Vol. 33 (2005): 23–39. King, Jason, ‘Canadian, Irish and Ugandan Theatre Links’, Canadian Journal of Irish Studies, Vol. 31, No. 1 (2005): 113–17. King, Jason, ‘Beyond Ryanga: The Image of Africa in Contemporary Irish Theatre’, in Patrick Lonergan and Rianna O’Dwyer, eds, Echoes Down the Corridor: Irish Theatre – Past, Present, and Future (Dublin: Carysfort Press, 2007), 153–68. Kirby, Peadar, Luke Gibbons and Michael Cronin, Reinventing Ireland: Culture and the Celtic Tiger (London: Pluto, 2002). Kirkland, Richard, Identity Parades: Northern Irish Culture and Dissident Subjects (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2002). Kushner, Tony, Angels in America, Parts 1 and 2 (London: Nick Hern Books, 2007). Lacey, Brian, Terrible Queer Creatures: Homosexuality in Irish History (Dublin: Wordwell, 2008). Lehman, Peter, Masculinity: Bodies, Movies, Culture (London and New York: Routledge, 2001). Lentin, Ronit, ‘Responding to the Racialisation of Irishness: Disavowed Multiculturalism and its Discontents’, Sociological Research online, Vol. 5, No. 4, http://www.socresonline.org.uk/5/4/lentin.html (accessed 25 August 2009). Lentin, Ronit and Robbie McVeigh, After Optimism? Ireland, Racism and Globalisation (Dublin: Metro Eireann, 2006). Lenz, Peter, ‘Talking Cures or Tall Stories? The (Dis-)Establishing of Reality in Conor McPherson’s The Weir’, in Werner Huber, Martin Middeke, and Hubert Zapf, eds, Self-Reflexivity in Literature (Würzburg: Königshausen and Neumann, 2005), 165–78. Levitas, Ben, The Theatre of Nation: Irish Drama and Cultural Nationalism, 1890–1916 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2002). Lewes, Kenneth, The Psychoanalytic Theory of Male Homosexuality (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1988). Linehan, Fergus, ‘A Tale of Two Ploughs’, Irish Times (11 May 1991), 33.

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Llewellyn-Jones, Margaret, Contemporary Irish Drama and Cultural Identity (Bristol: Intellect, 2001). Lloyd, David, Anomalous States: Irish Writing and the Post-Colonial Moment (Dublin: Lilliput Press, 1993). Lojek, Helen, The Theatre of Frank McGuinness: Stages of Mutability (Dublin: Carysfort Press, 2002). Lonergan, Patrick, Theatre and Globalization: Irish Drama in the Celtic Tiger Era (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009). Lonergan, Patrick and Rianna O’Dwyer, eds, Echoes Down the Corridor: Irish Theatre – Past, Present, and Future (Dublin: Carysfort Press, 2007). Longley, Edna, ed., Culture in Ireland: Division or Diversity, Proceedings of the Cultures of Ireland Group Conference (Belfast: Institute of Irish Studies, Queens University, 1991). Longley, Edna and Declan Kiberd, Multi-Culturalism: The View from the Two Irelands (Cork: Cork University Press, 2001). Madden, Aodhán, Sea Urchins. Downloaded from http://www.irishplayography. com/search/script.asp?play_ID⫽719 Maguire, Tom, Making Theatre in Northern Ireland: Through and Beyond the Troubles (Exeter: Exeter University Press, 2006). Mangan, Michael, Staging Masculinities: History, Gender, Performance (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003). Mathews, Aidan, Communion (London: Nick Hern Books, 2002). Mathews, P. J., The Cambridge Companion to J. M. Synge (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009). McCafferty, Owen, The Absence of Women (London: Faber and Faber, 2010). McDonagh, Martin, The Beauty Queen of Leenane (London: Methuen, 1996). McDonagh, Martin, Plays 1 (London: Methuen, 1999). McDonnell, Bill, Theatres of the Troubles: Theatre, Resistance, and Liberation in Ireland (Exeter: Exeter University Press, 2008). McGuinness, Frank, Plays 1 (London: Faber and Faber, 1996). McGuinness, Frank, Gates of Gold (London: Faber and Faber, 2002). McGuinness, Frank, Plays 2 (London: Faber and Faber, 2002). McIntosh, Gillian. The Force of Culture: Unionist Identities in Twentieth-Century Ireland (Cork: Cork University Press, 1999). McKay, Susan, Northern Protestants: An Unsettled People (Belfast: Blackstaff, 2000). McKenna, Bernard, Rupture, Representation, and the Refashioning of Identity in Drama in the North of Ireland, 1969–1994 (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2003). McLoone, Martin, Irish Film: The Emergence of Contemporary Cinema (London: British Film Institute, 2000). McMullan, Anna and Cathy Leeney, eds, The Theatre of Marina Carr: Before Rules Was Made (Dublin: Carysfort Press, 2002). McMullan, Anna and Brian Singleton, eds, ‘Performing Ireland’, Special Issue of Australasian Drama Studies, No. 43 (October 2003). McNulty, Eugene, The Ulster Literary Theatre and the Northern Revival (Cork: Cork University Press, 2008). McPherson, Conor, This Lime Tree Bower: Three Plays (London: Nick Hern Books, 1996). McPherson, Conor, Plays: Two (London: Nick Hern Books, 2004).

Select Bibliography 219 McPherson, Conor, Port Authority (London: Nick Hern Books, 2005). McPherson, Conor, The Seafarer (London: Nick Hern Books, 2006). McWilliams, David, The Pope’s Children: Ireland’s New Elite (Dublin: Gill and Macmillan, 2005). McWilliams, David, The Generation Game (Dublin: Gill and Macmillan, 2007). Memmi, Albert, The Colonizer and the Colonized (London: Earthscan, 2003). Messerschmidt, James W., Nine Lives: Adolescent Masculinities, the Body, and Violence (Boulder and London: Westview Press, 2000). Messner, Michael A., Power at Play: Sports and the Problem of Masculinity (Boston: Beacon, 1992). Mikami, Hiroki, Minako Okamura and Naoko Yagi, Ireland on Stage: Beckett and After (Dublin: Carysfort Press, 2007). Mitchell, Gary, Tearing the Loom and In A Little World of Our Own (London: Nick Hern Books, 1998). Mitchell, Gary, As the Beast Sleeps (London: Nick Hern Books, 2001). Monahan, Barry, Irish Theatre on Film: Style, Stories and the National Stage on Screen (Dublin: Irish Academic Press, 2009). Moore, Chris, The Kincora Scandal: Political Cover-up and Intrigue in Northern Ireland (Cork: Marino, 1996). Morash, Christopher, A History of Irish Theatre, 1601–2000 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004). Morash, Christopher, A History of the Media in Ireland (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009). Murphy, Gerald, Take Me Away (London: Nick Hern Books, 2004). Murphy, Jimmy, Two Plays (London: Oberon, 2001). Murphy, Paul, Hegemony and Fantasy in Irish Drama, 1899–1949 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008). Murphy, Tom, Plays 1 (London: Methuen, 1992). Murphy, Tom, Plays 2 (London: Methuen, 1993). Murray, Christopher, Twentieth-Century Irish Drama: Mirror Up to a Nation (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 2000). Nally, Kenneth, Celebrating Confusion: The Theatre of Frank McGuinness (Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars, 2009). Nolan, Jim, Moonshine (Oldcastle, County Meath: Gallery Press, 1992). Nowlan, David, ‘Telling Tales of Five Fragmented Lives’, Irish Times (27 July 1990), 10. Nowlan, David, ‘Grand Acting Lightens the Burden of the Preaching’, Irish Times (29 November 1990), 12. Nowlan, David, ‘It was a Lively Year of Theatre’, Irish Times (25 December 1990), 16. Nowlan, David, ‘Hynes Puts Emphasis on Expressionism’, Irish Times (8 May 1991), 8. Nowlan, David, ‘Underworld Bereft of Sentimentality’, Irish Times (9 February 1996), 11. Nowlan, David, ‘Ambitious Play with a Logical Fallacy’, Irish Times (8 October 1999), 12. O’Brien, Harvey, The Real Ireland: The Evolution of Ireland in Documentary Film (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2004). O’Casey, Sean, Seven Plays (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1985).

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O’Drisceoil, Donal, Censorship in Ireland, 1939–1945: Neutrality, Politics and Society (Cork: Cork University Press, 1996). O’Halloran, Mark, ‘Pala’s Story’, Prosperity, Shooting Script, p. 14. http:// www.scribd.com/doc/11562682/Prosperity-Palas-Story (accessed 30 December 2009). O’Reilly, Emily, Masterminds of the Right (Dublin: Attic, 1992). O’Rowe, Mark, Howie the Rookie (London: Nick Hern Books, 1999). O’Toole, Fintan, ‘Wrestling for O’Casey’s Legacy’, Irish Times (3 April 2008), 22. O’Toole, Fintan, ‘Should the National Theatre Learn to Cooperate?’, Irish Times (5 April 2008), 44. Parker, Stewart, Plays: 2 (London: Methuen, 2000). Philpott, Ger, ‘The Man and the Mask’, Irish Times (17 August 1999), 10. Pilkington, Lionel, Theatre and the State in Twentieth-Century Ireland: Cultivating the People (London: Routledge, 2001). Pine, Richard, Brian Friel and Ireland’s Drama (London: Routledge, 1990). Porter, Norman, Rethinking Unionism: An Alternative Vision for Northern Ireland (Belfast: Blackstaff, 1996). Powrie, Phil, Ann Davies, and Bruce Babington, eds, The Trouble With Men: Masculinities in European and Hollywood Cinema (London: Wallflower, 2004). Rea, Niall, ‘Sexuality and the Dysfunctional City: Queering Segregated Space’, in David Cregan, ed., Deviant Acts: Essays on Queer Performance (Dublin: Carysfort Press, 2009), 113–32. Regan, Morna, Midden (London: Nick Hern Books, 2001). Reid, Christina, Plays: 1 (London: Methuen, 1997). Reid, Graham, Billy: Three Plays for Television (London: Faber and Faber, 1984). Reid, Graham, Ties of Blood (London: Faber and Faber, 1986). Reinelt, Janelle, ‘Witnessing Change: Public Life and Performance in These Times’, Irish Theatre International, Vol. 1, No. 1 (April 2008): 5–21. Richards, Shaun, The Cambridge Companion to Twentieth-Century Irish Drama (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004). Richtarik, Marilynn, Acting Between the Lines: The Field Day Theatre Company and Irish Cultural Politics (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 2003). Robinson, Sally, ‘“Emotional Constipation” and the Power of Damned Masculinity: Deliverance and the Paradoxes of Liberation’, in Peter Lehman, ed., Masculinity: Bodies, Movies, Culture (London and New York: Routledge, 2001), 133–47. Roche, Anthony, The Cambridge Companion to Brian Friel (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006). Rockett, Kevin, Irish Film Censorship: A Cultural Journey from Silent Cinema to Internet Pornography (Dublin: Four Courts, 2004). Rose, Kieran, Diverse Communities: The Evolution of Lesbian and Gay Politics in Ireland (Cork: Cork University Press, 1994). Ryder, Chris and Vincent Kearney, Drumcree: The Orange Order’s Last Stand (London: Methuen, 2001). Sailer, Susan Shaw, Representing Ireland: Gender, Class, Nationality (Gainesville, FL: University Press of Florida, 1997). Savran, David, Taking It Like a Man: White Masculinity, Masochism and Contemporary American Culture (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1998).

Select Bibliography 221 Sedgwick, Eve Kosovsky, The Epistemology of the Closet (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992). Seidler, Victor J., Young Men and Masculinities: Global Cultures and Intimate Lives (London and New York: Zed Books, 2006). Seremba, George, Come Good Rain (2005 edition), unpublished script, courtesy of the author. Sheehan, Helena, The Continuing Story of Irish Television Drama: Tracking the Tiger (Dublin: Four Courts, 2004). Sihra, Melissa, ‘Renegotiating Landscapes of the Female: Voices, Topographies and Corporealities of Alterity in Marina Carr’s Portia Coughlan’, in Brian Singleton and Anna McMullan, eds, ‘Performing Ireland’, special issue of Australasian Drama Studies, No. 43 (October 2003): 16–31. Sihra, Melissa, ed., Women in Irish Drama: A Century of Authorship and Representation (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007). Sihra, Melissa and Paul Murphy, eds, The Dreaming Body: Contemporary Irish Theatre (Gerrard’s Cross: Colin Smythe, 2009). Singleton, Brian, ‘Am I Talking to Myself? Men, Masculinities and the Contemporary Irish Theatre’, in Clare Wallace, ed., Monologues: Theatre, Performance, Subjectivity (Prague: Literaria Pragensia, 2006), 260–77. Singleton, Brian, ‘Sick, Dying, Dead, Dispersed: The Evanescence of Patriarchy in Contemporary Irish Women’s Theatre’, in Melissa Sihra, ed., Women in Irish Drama: A Century of Authorship and Representation (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), 186–200. Singleton, Brian, ‘Queer Eye on the Irish Guy: Transgressive Sexualities and the Performance of Nation’, in Melissa Sihra and Paul Murphy, eds, The Dreaming Body: Contemporary Irish Theatre (Gerrard’s Cross: Colin Smythe, 2009), 99–114. Spangler, Matthew, ‘The New Irish in Irish Theatre: Arambe Productions and Irish/West African Performance’, SIAR: The Journal of the Western Institute of Irish Studies, Vol. 2, No. 1 (2008): 31–47. Stembridge, Gerard, The Gay Detective (Dublin: New Island Books, 1996). Sweeney, Bernadette, Performing the Body in Irish Theatre (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008). Sweeney, Paul, The Celtic Tiger: Ireland’s Economic Miracle Explained (Cork: Oak Tree, 1998). Synge, J. M., The Playboy of the Western World and Other Plays (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995). Titley, Gavan, ‘Cultivating Habitats of Meaning: Broadcasting, Participation and Interculturalism’, Irish Communications Review, Vol. 9 (2003), http://www.icr. dit.ie/volume9/articles/Titley.pdf, pp.1–11 (accessed 25 August 2009). Toibín, Colm, ‘Tom Murphy’s Volcanic Island’, Irish University Review, Vol. 17, No. 1 (Spring 1987): 24–30. Trotter, Mary, ‘Women Playwrights in Northern Ireland’, in Elaine Aston and Janelle Reinelt, eds, The Cambridge Companion to Modern British Women Playwrights (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 119–33. Trotter, Mary, Ireland’s National Theaters: Political Performance and the Origins of the Irish Dramatic Movement (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 2001). Wallace, Clare, ed., Monologues: Theatre, Performance, Subjectivity (Prague: Literaria Pragensia, 2006).

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Walsh, Enda, The Walworth Farce (London: Nick Hern Books, 2008). Walsh, Fintan, ‘Shirley Temple Bar at the Abbey: Irish Theatre, Queer Performance and the Politics of Disidentification’, Irish Theatre International, Vol. 1, No. 1 (April 2008): 53–72. Walsh, Fintan, ‘Homelysexuality and the “Beauty” Pageant’, in Sara Brady and Fintan Walsh, eds, Crossroads: Performance Studies and Irish Culture (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), 196–209. Walsh, Fintan, ‘Touching, Feeling, Cross-Dressing: On the Affectivity of Queer Performance. Or, What Makes Panti Fabulous’, in David Cregan, ed., Deviant Acts: Essays on Queer Performance (Dublin: Carysfort Press, 2009), 55–72. Walshe, Éibhear, ed., Sex, Nation and Dissent in Irish Writing (Cork: Cork University Press, 1997). Warner, Michael, ed., Fear of a Queer Planet: Queer Politics and Social Theory (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993). Weber, Max, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (London: Allen & Unwin, 1970). Weitz, Eric, The Power of Laughter: Comedy and Contemporary Irish Theatre (Dublin: Carysfort Press, 2004). Welch, Robert, Protestants (Belfast: Lagan Press, 2006). Whelan, Gerard, Spiked: State Intrigue and the Rose Tattoo (Dublin: New Island Books, 2002). Whitehead, Stephen M., Men and Masculinities: Key Themes and New Directions (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2002). Woodworth, Paddy, ‘Geraldine Aron: Writing for Druid’, Irish Times (26 July 1990), 10. Woodworth, Paddy, ‘Wet Paint Takes up Challenge of Gay Theme’, Irish Times (24 November 1990), 31.

Index Abbey Theatre 1, 6, 7, 13, 14, 18, 20, 24–6, 30–1, 34–8, 40, 47–9, 52–6, 61, 63, 92–4, 104, 115–19, 154, 186, 193, 196, 199 Abrahamson, Lenny 138 Acorn Theatre 107 Adams, Gerry 189 Adebayo, Mojisola 137 Adigun, Bisi 36–41, 43, 135, 148–9, 151, 153 Ahern, Bertie 93 Alternative Miss Ireland 121–2, 124 Amin, Idi 151 Amnesty International 141 Anderson, Benedict 101 Anderson, Ioanna 69 An Tóstal 48, 50 Anúna 5 Arambe Productions 20, 36–7, 148–50, 153, 155 Aron, Geraldine 109–11, 114 Arts Council 6, 192 Arts Theatre, Belfast 162 asylum-seekers 4, 19, 128, 131, 134–6, 139–40, 143–6, 148 Austin, J. L. 120 Barabbas the Company 6, 143–4 Barnes, Ben 56, 92–5, 114 Barry, Sebastian 61, 63–4, 93 Battle of the Boyne 158, 163–4, 186 Battle of the Somme 158, 164, 179, 186 Beckett, Samuel 12, 48, 50, 168, 196 Behan, Brendan 50, 104 Bieito, Calixto 93 Bloody Sunday 107 Blue Raincoat Theatre Company 6 Blythe, Ernest 49 Bogart, Anne 6 Bogosian, Eric 73 Bord Fáilte 48 Boucicault, Dion 168

Boyle, Consolata 27 Bradley, Anthony 1, 2, 45 Bradley, Mike 77 Branagh, Kenneth 180 Brennan, Bríd 180 Brennan, Ned 97 British Empire 2, 10, 16 Brokentalkers 126 Bryan, Dominic 164 Buckley, Declan 101, 124 Bush Theatre 77 Butler, Jean 5 Butler, Judith 9 Byrne, Ed 73 Cadle, Giles 67 Cairns, David 13, 14, 157 Calypso Theatre Company 8, 20, 148, 152 Campbell, Brian 154 Carolan, Stuart 56–7 Carr, Marina 7, 63–9 Cartmell, Selina 67–8 Casement, Roger 102 Castellucci, Romeo 6 Celtic Tiger 4, 14–16, 19, 21, 115, 191, 193 censorship 48–9 Charabanc 16 Charlton, Jack 5 Chekhov, Anton 56 Citizenship Referendum 132, 134 Civil Rights Movement 167, 172 Cohen, Dan Baron 188 Colgan, Gerry 108, 116 Colgan, Michael (actor) 119 commedia dell’arte 112, 114 Connell, Archbishop Desmond 99 Connell, R. W. 3, 9, 33, 71, 77, 84, 145, 161 Connolly, James 26 Conway, Denis 58–9 Conway, Frank 26

223

224

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Corn Exchange Theatre Company 124 Council for the Encouragement of Music and the Arts 165–7 Coyle, Jane 196 Craigie, Ingrid 28 Cregan, David 107 Cúchullain 8 Cummings, Scott T. 75

Eyre, Richard 92 Eziashi, Maynard 135

Deane, Seamus 25 Decroux, Étienne 6 Deegan, Loughlin 125 Delgado, Richard 132 Department of Justice 47, 134 De Valera, Eamon 7, 45, 48, 198 Devlin, Anne 16 Dolan, Jill 13, 24 Dollimore, Jonathan 102 Donoghue, Emma 18 Dorgan, Theo 31 Dormer, Richard 187 Dowling, Joe 32, 92 Dowling, Vincent 105 Doyle, Roddy 36–41, 43, 127, 134–5 drag 121–2 Druid Theatre Company 6, 25, 36, 52, 54–5, 57–8, 65, 109–10, 154 DubbelJoint Theatre Company 154 Dublin Corporation 97 Dublin County Council 113 Dublin Fringe Festival 152 Dublin Gay Theatre Festival 18–19 Dublin Theatre Festival 7, 37, 50, 104, 112, 114, 123, 144 Dudgeon, Jeffrey 96, 102 Dudley-Edwards, Ruth 163 DV8 125 Dylak, Paul 136 Edwards, Hilton 104, 121 Ellis, James 166 Empire Theatre, Belfast 166 Euripides 63 European Court of Human Rights 46, 52, 96, 100, 108 European Union 129–31 Eurovision Song Contest 5, 9

1,

Family Solidarity 99 Fannin, Hilary 69 Fay, Jimmy 78 Feehily, Stella 69 Ferriter, Diarmaid 6, 17, 19 Fianna Fáil 27, 52, 97 Field Day Theatre Company 178 Fishamble Theatre Company 6, 154 Fishley, David 141–2 Fitzgerald, Jim 104 Fitzpatrick, Lisa 62 Flatley, Michael 5 Flynn, Declan 98 Fonteyn, Margot 48 Foucault, Michel 110, 119 Fouéré, Olwen 35, 109 Frazier, Adrian 13 Freud, Sigmund 71 Fricker, Karen 148 Friel, Brian 7, 12, 51, 55–6, 58, 73–4, 103, 105–6, 109, 111, 143 Fugard, Athol 152 Gaelic Athletic Association 11, 49, 144, 146 Gaelic Games 10, 11, 12, 14, 147, 192 Gaiety Theatre 32 Galway Arts Festival 143, 146, 151 Gannon, Justice Seán 98 Gardiner, Kevin 4 Gate Theatre 6, 47, 48, 55, 106, 121 Gay Defence Committee 98 Gay Health Action 100 Gay Liberation Front 97 Gay Men’s Collectives 97, 98 Gay Pride 100 Gay Sweatshop 97 Gentle Giant Theatre Company 125 Geoghegan-Quinn, Máire 9 Goffman, Erving 123 Gleeson, Brendan 30, 31

Index 225 Glendinning, Robin 174, 176–8, 186 Good Friday Agreement 17, 162, 170–1, 173, 185, 189–91 Graham, Stuart 183 Gramsci, Antonio 89 Granary Theatre 151 Grant, David 112, 114, 186 Gray, Spalding 73 Gregory, Lady Augusta 22, 25, 44, 65, 67, 161 Grene, Nicholas 25, 42 Halpin, Mary 135 Hanly, Peter 56 Harmon, Ken 154 Haughey, Charles 27, 52, 61–2, 93 Hawkswell Theatre, Sligo 107 Hayes, Richard 47 Herlihy, David 142 heteronormativity 101–3, 106, 108, 110–11, 115, 120, 126 HIV/AIDS 7, 99–100, 111–12, 116, 118, 120–3, 125 homophobia 4, 7, 97–9, 101, 103–8, 111, 114–18, 120–1, 125–6 homosexual panic 108 hooks, bell 154 Hutchinson, Ron 174–5 Hynes, Garry 24–34, 36, 38, 52–4, 57, 66–7, 92, 111 Hytner, Nicholas 176 Ibsen, Henrik 22 Ingoldsby, Maeve 148 Ionesco, Eugene 48 IRA 16, 27, 166–7 Irish Congress of Trade Unions 99 Irish Council for Civil Liberties 98 Irish Gay Rights Movement 97 Irish Refugee Council 135 Irish Theatre Magazine 148 Irish Women’s Liberation Movement 97 Johnson, Karl 196 Jordan, Neil 103 Jordan, Wayne 199 Joyce, James 50 Jung, Carl 71

Kavanagh, Niamh 9 Keane, John B. 92 Keane, Raymond 143, 147 Keane, Roy 38, 42 Kearns, Sean 183 Keating, Sara 101 Kelly, Aidan 79–80 Keogh, Des 110–11 Kiberd, Declan 25, 127 Kilroy, Thomas 94, 103–6, 116, 196, 199–200 Kincora Boys’ Home 103, 117 King, Jason 19, 141, 148 Kirkland, Richard 164 Knights of Saint Columbanus 99 Kushner, Tony 18, 116 Lacan, Jacques 71 Lacey, Brian 98 Leeney, Cathy 14 Lentin, Ronit 132, 138 Lenz, Peter 75 Leonard, Hugh 3, 53 Lindsay, Vachel 176–7 Linehan, Fergus 33, 53 Littlewood, Joan 50–1 Loane, Tim 186, 189 Lombard, Garrett 59 Lonergan, Patrick 14, 20, 74, 76–7, 146 Lyric Players Group Trust 166 Lyric Theatre, Belfast 18, 162, 167–9, 194 Maastricht Treaty 99 Mac Anna, Tomás 104 Mac Conghail, Fiach 37, 54 Mac Liammóir, Micheál 104, 121 MacIntyre, Tom 115 Madden, Aodhán 107–8 Mangan, Michael 9 Martin, Linda 9 Mason, Patrick 92, 94, 107, 115–16 Mathews, Aidan 109 McAleese, Mary 4 McCafferty, Owen 194–6, 199 McClelland, Allan 50 McElhinney, Ian 196 McGinley, Seán 58

226

Index

McGuinness, Frank 7, 12, 18, 101, 106–7, 109, 115–16, 118–22, 159, 186, 189 McGuinness, Martin 189–90 McMahon, Philip 123 McMullan, Anna 14 McNulty, Eugene 162 McPherson, Conor 72, 75–7, 81–91, 192 McQuaid, Archbishop John Charles 46, 50 McVeigh, Robbie 132 McWilliams, David 192–3 Meany, Helen 55, 146 Mendes, Sam 33, 53 Mercier, Paul 193 Merriman, Vic 151 Messerschmidt, James W. 84–5 Messner, Michael A. 10, 11, 145 Milam, Wilson 56 Millar, Seán 126 Mitchell, Gary 16, 159, 169–71, 182–4 Murfi, Mikel 58 Murphy, Jimmy 37, 149–50, 193 Murphy, Paul 14, 25 Murphy, Tadhg 58 Murphy, Tom 12, 14, 25, 51, 55 Muted Cupid 107 national theatre 6, 22, 25–6, 32, 48–50, 53–4, 61, 140 Ní Caoimh, Báirbre 8, 148 Nolan, Jim 114–15 Norris, David 99–100, 108 Nowlan, David 31–3, 106, 112, 114, 116–17 Obote, Milton 151–2 O’Briain, Dara 73 O’Briain, Ruth 28 O’Casey, Sean 1, 12, 22, 25–33, 48, 50, 54, 168 O’Drisceoil, Donal 47 O’Halloran, Mark 124, 138 O’Hanlon, Jim 154 O’Kane, Patrick 29, 184 O’Kelly, Donal 8, 20, 140, 142, 148, 151

Old Museum Arts Centre, Belfast 187 Olympia Theatre 48, 104, 105, 122 O’Malley, Mary and Pearse 166–7 O’Neill, Charlie 143–5, 147 O’Neill, Rory 122–3 Operating Theatre 109, 118 Opus Dei 99 Orange Institution 4, 158, 160, 162–3, 169–72, 177–8, 188 Orangemen, see Orange Institution Orange Order, see Orange Institution O’Reilly, Christian 154 O’Riordain, Rachel 187 O’Rowe, Mark 77–80, 86, 192 O’Shea, Marc 183 O’Sullivan, Sonia 9 O’Toole, Fintan 26, 32–3, 54, 142, 169 Out of Joint Theatre Company 61 Paisley, Rev. Ian 17, 96, 189–90 Pan Pan Theatre Company 6 Panti Bliss, Miss Pandora 122–3, 126 Parker, Lynne 54 Parker, Stewart 159, 168, 178, 179 Partition 4, 7 Peacock Theatre 56, 78–9, 106, 113, 140, 142, 154, 182–4, 193 Pearse, Pádraic 26, 47 Peep O’Day Boys 157–8, 169 Pike Theatre 48–50 Pilkington, Lionel 13, 25, 49, 165 Pilkington, Lorraine 28 project, see Project Arts Centre Project Arts Centre 6, 97, 109, 112, 116, 123, 125, 148 Pronger, David 107 Queer Notions 123 Quinn, Eimear 9 Randolf SD: The Company 6 Rea, Niall 97 Red Kettle Theatre Company 114 Reid, Christina 16, 176, 186 Reid, Graham 180–2 Reinelt, Janelle 189

Index 227 Richards, Shaun 13, 14, 157 Riverdance 5, 124 Roberts, Michael 110–11 Robinson, Iris 126 Robinson, Mary 3, 9, 25, 44, 52, 99–100, 109, 115 Robinson, Sally 94 Rose, Kieron 98, 100 Rose of Tralee 122 Rotimi, Ola 149 Rough Magic Theatre Company 6, 54–5 Royal Ballet 48 Royal Black Institution 162 Royal Court Theatre 65, 175 Royal Exchange Theatre, Manchester 176 Royal National Theatre 61 Royal Shakespeare Company 67 Ryan, Annie 124 Ryan, Phyllis 1 Sailor, Susan Shaw 55 St Patrick’s Day Parade 100 St Patrick’s Festival 147–8 Samuel Beckett Theatre 152 Shakespeare, William 67–8, 113 Sheridan, Richard Brinsley 168 Shiels, Karl 79–80 Shirley Temple Bar 18, 101, 124 Sedgwick, Eve Kosovsky 108 Seidler, Victor J. 89, 180–1 Self, Charles 97 Seremba, George 137, 151–5 Serumaga, Robert 151 Sihra, Melissa 1, 14, 44, 64–5 Simpson, Alan 48–50 Sinn Féin 16, 97, 166, 174, 189 Smyth, Brendan 48, 50 Society of United Irishmen 157, 159, 166, 168, 170–1 Spangler, Matthew 150 Stefancic, Jean 132 Stembridge, Gerard 18, 116–19, 134 Sweeney, Paul 4 Swift, Carolyn 48 Synge, J. M. 12, 20, 22–3, 25, 34, 36–40, 42, 48, 55, 161, 168

Terera, Giles 40–1 Thatcher, Margaret 174 Theatre Workshop 50 thisispopbaby 123 Thompson, Sam 166 Tiernan, Tommy 73 Tinderbox Theatre Company 186 Titley, Gavan 136 Tivoli Theatre 144 Toibín, Colm 14 Toller, Ernst 22 Torney, Matt 153 Travellers 4 Trinity College Dublin 6 Trotter, Mary 14 Ulster Literary Theatre 162 Unionist/Unionism 16–18, 158–61, 165–7, 172–5, 177, 186–7 Valiulis, Maryann Gialanella 1, 2, 45 Valle-Inclán, Ramón del 93 Varago, Peter 168 Wakely, Richard 94 Walsh, Enda 58–60 Walsh, Fintan 122–3, 126 Walsh, Kieron J. 134 Walshe, Éibhear 102, 113 Watkins, Neil 124–6 Weber, Max 180 Wedekind, Frank 196, 198 Welch, Robert 187–8 Wet Paint Theatre Company 112, 114 White, Willie 148 Whitehead, Stephen M. 189 Wilde, Oscar 18, 102, 116, 121 William of Orange 158 Williams, Tennessee 49 Wilton’s Music Hall 67 Women’s Coalition 17 Workers’ Party 113 xenophobia

135–6

Yeats, W. B. 12–14, 22–3, 25, 29, 44, 48, 51, 55–6, 65, 67, 161 Young Vic 33