Théâtre irlandais, droits humains et femmes actrices du changement

 

Théâtre irlandais, droits humains et femmes actrices du changement¹

par Virginie Roche

Résumé : Cet article explore la façon dont les droits humains sont abordés au théâtre à travers les contributions des femmes dramaturges sur la scène irlandaise depuis la naissance de la nation irlandaise avec la création de l’Abbey Theatre en 1904, de Field Day Theatre Company en 1980 ou de Smashing Times Theatre Company en 1991 et ce jusqu’aux productions plus récentes de 2022 ; de Lady Gregory, Mary Manning, Dorothy Macardle, Mary Devenport O’Neill, Kate O’Brien à Mary Moynihan et Sinéad McCoole. Puis il s’attache dans un second temps à mettre en exergue l’importance des personnages féminins frieliens dans le débat sur les droits humains comme compréhension créative de la souffrance. Enfin, il donne un aperçu de la performativité de l’égalité, des droits et des valeurs par le biais des voix, des corps et de l’espace en relation avec les femmes qui en Irlande sont actrices de changement et qui offrent au monde des perspectives alternatives en matière de droits humins.

Virginie Roche est Docteure de l’Université Paris 4 Sorbonne en Études anglophones. L’unité perdue : poétique du mythe dans l’œuvre du dramaturge irlandais Brian Friel. Thèse dirigée par Madame Élisabeth Angel-Perez, Professeur de l’Université Paris 4 Sorbonne. Mention très honorable à l’unanimité. Jean-Pierre Laffitte étant gravement malade n'a pu traduire cet article, traduisez-le vous-mêmes!

Today the battle for gender equality goes on, for our world mostly continues to fly badly on one wing instead of two. […] There is, in our world, a vast reservoir of female potential, talent, experience and knowledge just waiting to change the face of the Earth and make it smile. ¹

1. Foreword by Mary McAleese, former president of Ireland, in Anne Chambers, Grace O’Malley: The Biography of Ireland’s Pirate Queen, 1530-1603, Dublin, Gill Books, 2019, p. VIII.  "Aujourd’hui, la bataille pour l’égalité des sexes continue, car notre monde continue principalement à mal voler sur une aile au lieu de deux. [... ] Il y a, dans notre monde, un vaste réservoir de potentiel féminin, de talent, d’expérience et de connaissances qui ne demande qu’à changer la face de la Terre et à la faire sourire".

2.       Études irlandaises, n^o 50, 2025 

In the aftermath of the human rights legislation that emerged on the international scene after World War II and the United Nations’ 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR), and well into the 21^st century, Irish theatre has become an Artaudian political plague. To paraphrase Antonin Artaud, it has become a theatre, which without killing the people, induces the most mysterious changes not only in the minds of individuals but in a whole nation by raising concerns about human rights violations. Because “[t]he theatrical treatment of human rights allows for the dissemination of information, the arousal of compassion, and the raising of consciousness in a way that is particular to that form”. ² From the birth of the Irish nation linked to the creation of the Abbey Theatre by Lady Gregory and William Butler Yeats in 1904 to the Field Day Theatre Company, founded by Brian Friel and Stephen Rea in 1980, and Smashing Times Theatre Company, launched in 1991 by Mary Moynihan, Irish theatre has been about bringing people together and creating new patterns of belonging as a form of specific Irish citizen action crossing boundaries of ethnicity, religion, origin and gender. And Irish women playwrights, actresses as well as female characters have been changemakers on both sides of the border, exposing human rights abuses and empowering silenced communities through embodied performances to address the unspeakable. Because, as Eleonor Roosevelt asked in her famous speech at the United Nations for the tenth anniversary of the UDHR in 1958, “Where do universal human rights begin?”. Her answer, quoted by former president Mary Robinson who declared in her keynote address as United Nations High Com-missioner for Human Rights in 1998 that the UDHR “was the first international articulation of the rights and freedoms of all members of the human family”, ³ is the following:

In small places, close to home – so close and so small that they cannot be seen on any maps of the world. Yet they are the world of the individual person: the neighborhood he lives in; the school or college he attends; the factory, farm or office where he works. Such are the places where every man, woman and child seeks equal justice, equal opportunity, equal dignity without discrimination. Unless these rights have meaning there, they have little meaning anywhere. Without concerted citizen action to uphold them close to home, we shall look in vain for progress in the larger world. ⁴

2. Harry Derbyshire, Loveday Hodson, “Performing Injustice: Human Rights and Verbatim Theatre”,

Law and Humanities, vol. 2, no. 2, 2008, p. 191.

3. Keynote address by Mary Robinson, United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights, Forum 98, 50 years after the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, 28 August 1998, online: https://www.ohchr.org/en/statements/2009/10/keynote-address-mary-robinson-united-nations-high-commissioner-human-rights.

4. Eleanor Roosevelt, statement on 27 March 1958 at the presentation of the book In Your Hands: A Guide for Community Action to the United Nations Commission on Human Rights, sometimes called “The Great Question” speech. Quote from the publication of the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights, Human Rights Indicators. A Guide to Measurement and Implementation, 2012, p. 9, online: https://www.ohchr.org/sites/default/files/Documents/ Publications/Human_rights_indicators_en.pdf.

But where else can human rights begin? We may add on the Irish stage, because there are many overlaps and commonalities between Irish theatre and human rights throughout the 20^th and 21^st centuries. Both question identity and the world we live in. Both explore hidden stories and look at human relationships and human dignity. Irish theatre and human rights are crucial to understanding the past in the present era as a condition of the future of humanity. Both are concerned with the idea of transformation, with a view to creating new visions for the future of Ireland (Éire) and its enduring Constitution, Bunreacht na hÉireann (1937), with its reference to fundamental rights in articles 40 to 45, and which included the notion of the dignity of the human person over a decade before the UDHR. Human rights organisations and charities have long understood throughout the world and in Ireland in particular the importance of live performances to convey a message and fight against abuses, discriminations and prejudices. The gist of this paper will be an insight into the performativity of equality, rights and values through the medium of bodies, voices, space and content in relation to women changemakers highlighting hidden, invisible, or forgotten stories in Ireland and providing alternative human rights perspectives.

1916 women changemakers, theatre and human rights

The reality for women since the partition of Ireland and subsequent independence have not lived up to the ideal embraced by the rebel leaders in their Proclamation of 1916. Women writers like Teresa Deevy (1894-1963), Mary Manning (1905-1999), Dorothy Macardle (1889-1958), or Mary Devenport O’Neill (1879-1967) have been erased from the political and cultural stage of Ireland. Women had been essential to the events leading to the birth of the Irish Free State, from the 1913 lockout to the 1916 Easter Rising and their involvement in suffrage, nationalist and cultural organisations. On 16 July 1932, Hanna Sheehy Skeffington, in an article for An Phoblacht entitled “Constance Markiewicz, What She Stood for”, wrote about the divergent attitudes to women during the revolutionary period and the Free State comparing James Connolly with Eamon de Valera: “To the one, woman was an equal, a comrade; to the other, a sheltered being, withdrawn to the domestic hearth, shrinking from public life”. ⁵

From 1922 onwards, there was indeed a terrible backlash against women’s rights and in particular the cultural rights women had gained during the revolutionary period. During the first two decades of independence, according to Lisa Fitzpatrick and Shonagh Hill, “women continued to struggle for freedom and to offer resistance in the face of the conservatism of a patriarchal church-state”, ⁶ because

5. Hanna Sheehy Skeffington, “Constance Markiewicz, What She Stood for”, An Phoblacht, 16 July 1932, reproduced online: https://theirishrevolution.wordpress.com/2011/09/13/hanna-sheehy-skeffington-on-constance-markievicz.

6. Lisa Fitzpatrick, Shonagh Hill, “Introduction”, in Plays by Women in Ireland (1926-33): Feminist Theatres of Freedom and Resistance, Lisa Fitzpatrick, Shonagh Hill (eds.), London, Methuen Drama, 2022, p. 1.

The revolutionaries fought for full and equal citizenship, and this was asserted in the 1916 Proclamation of Independence which guaranteed “religious and civil liberty, equal rights and equal opportunities to all its citizens”, as well as “the establishment of a permanent National Government, representative of the whole people of Ireland and elected by the suffrages of all her men and women”. ⁷

They add that “[t]heatre […] offered the potential for women to explore their role as modern actors, both through employment in the theatre and through the characters presented on stage”. ⁸ Over a decade before the 1948 UDHR, women in Ireland were fighting for the right to work as well as for cultural rights and artistic freedom on the stage. Article 22 of the UDHR contains the expression “cultural rights” and the right to culture is understood notably in article 26 as a right to education and in article 27 as a right to take part in the cultural life of the community. ⁹ Indeed, according to article 27:

1. Everyone has the right freely to participate in the cultural life of the community, to enjoy the arts and to share in scientific advancement and its benefits.

2. Everyone has the right to the protection of the moral and material interests resulting from any scientific, literary or artistic production of which he is the author.

For the fiftieth anniversary of the UDHR in 1998, Mary Robinson, former president of Ireland, highlighted that:

[…] the Declaration […] treated human rights as not only universal but indivisible,

i.e. that civil and political rights, on the one hand, and social, economic and cultural rights, on the other, are both demanding of protection on the same plane and are inter-dependent and interrelated. In doing so, it laid the essential conceptual foundations of the international law of human rights, it […] awakened the great forces in civil society to the cause of human rights. ¹⁰

Culture is a right because it is a factor in human improvement and development. Culture is what opens up to the universal, gives people access to knowledge and a deep understanding of universal values. Cultural rights through artistic freedom on the stage were for playwright Mary Manning in the 1930s at the Gate Theatre “[n]ew forces […] at work; new ideas crowding in upon us”.¹¹ Ireland was “finding its soul”. ¹² But human rights as Irish women’s rights were crushed through legislation, from the 1927 Juries Bill, which excluded women from jury service unless they wilfully applied, to the 1924 marriage bar – i.e. the compulsory withdrawal from work upon marriage imposed on all female teachers and extended to the entire civil

7. Lisa Fitzpatrick, Shonagh Hill, “Introduction”, in Plays by Women in Ireland…, p. 1.

8. Ibid., p. 3.

9. United Nations General Assembly, Universal Declaration of Human Rights, 10 December 1948, A/RES/217(III).

10. Keynote address by Mary Robinson…

11. Quoted in Lisa Fitzpatrick, Shonagh Hill, “Introduction”, in Plays by Women in Ireland…, p. 1.

12. Ibid.

service which remained in place until 1973 –, and to the 1937 Irish Constitution with the contentious article 41, section 2 which confined a woman’s “life within the home” ¹³ and advocated the image of woman as mother; “mothers shall not be obliged by economic necessity to engage in labour to the neglect of their duties in the home”. Playwright Dorothy Macardle, well before the 1948 UDHR, expressed her thought-provoking and ahead of her time support for women’s right to work on 13 May 1932:

The right to work – not only to earn a livelihood but to work for work’s own sake, is surely the inalienable right of every human being. It is not men only who, denied work, become restless, unhappy, unbalanced, unhealthy in body and mind. ¹⁴

Those women working for the stage were human rights changemakers because they offered a feminist theatre of freedom and resistance, becoming part of a counterculture of experimentation through their involvement in the creation of the Peacock stage at the Abbey Theatre in 1927 and the Gate Theatre in 1928. Playwrights like Mary Devenport O’Neill, Teresa Deevy or set designers like Norah McGuinness, Dorothy Travers Smith or Tanya Moiseiwitsch brought, according to Fitzpatrick and Hill, “European innovations to the Irish stage and underline the importance of women’s contributions to theatre across a range of roles”. ¹⁵ Artistic freedom entails an array of rights, including the right to create without censorship or intimidation, the right to freedom of association, the right to pro-tection of social and economic rights, the right to participate in cultural life, the right to have artistic work supported, and the right to freedom of movement. But the space for Irish women to explore and expand their freedom and artistic expression decreased drastically from the 1930s onwards. Women had to serve the state through their “life within the home” as mothers, and those who did not follow that path and comply with this patriarchal pattern were at risk of being sent to industrial and reformatory schools, mother and baby homes or Magdalene asylums. Women playwrights like Mary Manning with Youth’s the Season–? (1931), Mary Devenport O’Neill with Bluebeard (1933), Dorothy Macardle with Witch’s Brew (1931) or Kate O’Brien with Distinguished Villa (1926) decided to confront the seething notions of confinement to the space of the home and to the roles of wife and mother. According to Fitzpatrick and Hill, they challenged the official ideal woman created by the new Irish state to denounce feminine archetypes used as scapegoats, such as “the unmarried woman, the working woman, the emigrant woman; and women in public life, in politics or culture”. ¹⁶ Women were unable to escape these stereotypes and in Mary Devenport O’Neill’s ballet-poem (Bluebeard, 1933), they were trapped in the bloody chamber of Bluebeard’s castle. The ghosts of Bluebeard’s murdered wives haunt the stage and the birth of the Irish Free State.

13. Bunreacht na hÉireann (Constitution of Ireland), 1937, art. 41.2.

14. Quoted in Lisa Fitzpatrick, Shonagh Hill, “Introduction”, in Plays by Women in Ireland…, p. 5.

15. Ibid., p. 3.

16. Ibid., p. 2.

A low murmur is heard coming from the closed door. It grows louder and voices are heard singing. Bluebeard rouses himself from his dream and recoils.

CHORUS

We have no graves Like the dead

Who spend their lives and die And lie in graves.

We have no graves. […]

Bluebeard, shrinking backwards and trembling, goes out at the left. ¹⁷

This entrapment obviously foreshadowed metaphorically the cultural and polit-ical disempowerment of Irish women, the living dead, often silenced, and even sometimes completely erased from Irish national history as journalist Una Mullally suggested in her article for The Irish Times in 2015, entitled “Abbey Theatre Celebrates 1916 Centenary with Only One Woman Playwright”:

Conversations about women in the context of 1916, and the fierce battles for their republic and their suffrage that they so bravely fought for, are gaining traction. One of the reasons why it’s so important to shine a spotlight on the female aspect of the birth of our republic is because of how extensively it was erased, not least by our subsequent Constitution. ¹⁸

To commemorate the centenary of the 1916 Easter Rising, the Abbey Thea-tre’s Waking the Nation season launched by the Abbey’s artistic director Fiach Mac Conghail was intended to question the past and the events that led to Irish independence. But it sparked a wave of resentment because this programme only included one play, Me, Mollser, by a female playwright, Ali White, and two female directors Annabelle Comyn, directing Tom Murphy’s The Wake and Vicky Featherstone, directing David Ireland’s Cyprus Avenue. Moreover, the response to this programme became viral on social media and was criticised on Facebook and Twitter. Lian Bell, stage designer and arts manager, henceforth launched the hashtag #WakingtheFeminists that led to protests supported by Irish theatre artists and even Hollywood stars like Meryl Streep, Christine Baranski and Wim Wenders. For Olwen Fouéré, “the principles of any national theatre have to be founded on equality and inclusiveness, particularly one as symbolically important as the Abbey”. ¹⁹

But in a century-long pattern of female marginalisation, even some of Lady Gregory’s works were erased, her part in the composition of Yeats’s play Cathleen ni Houlihan (1902) for example, or the fact that she dug into Molière’s plays to

17. Lisa Fitzpatrick, Shonagh Hill, “Introduction”, in Plays by Women in Ireland…, p. 248.

18. Una Mullaly, “Abbey Theatre Celebrates 1916 Centenary with Only One Woman Playwright”,

The Irish Times, 2 November 2015.

19. Quoted in Helen Meany, “Irish Theatre Abounds with Brilliant Women – Unlike the Abbey’s Programme”, The Guardian, 9 November 2015.

assert women’s rights. She brought “gold from beyond the sea” ²⁰ to quote Matthew Medbourne who was the first playwright to translate Tartuffe into Tartuffe or The French Puritan for the London stage in 1670. In 1906, Lady Gregory decided to translate some of Molière’s plays into the Kiltartanese dialect, the Hiberno-English of County Galway. It became a political statement, a way of building a national identity. Yeats upheld Lady Gregory’s idea of translating Molière into Kiltartanese. In a note for the Abbey Theatre programme on 25 February 1909, Yeats wrote:

The word translation, however, which should be applied to scenery, acting, and words alike, implies, or should imply, freedom. In a vital translation, and I believe that our translations are vital, a work of art does not go upon its travels; it is re-born in a strange land. ²¹

Lady Gregory translated, before the Easter Rising, Le médecin malgré lui (1666) as The Doctor in Spite of Himself (1906), Les fourberies de Scapin (1671) as The Rogueries of Scapin (1908) and L’avare (1668) as The Miser (1909). Molière was deployed in Irish political culture at the Abbey Theatre before and after 1916 as he was during and after the French Revolution from 1789 onwards ²². Molière, this 17^th-century playwright often associated with Louis XIV and the Old Regime, was reappraised, reintegrated into a French revolutionary context, becoming one of the most performed playwrights of the French Revolution. French actors from the Théâtre Français like Naudet, Alma, or Grammont, took part in the storming of the Bastille and the French Revolution in July 1789 as did actors from the Abbey Theatre during the 1916 Easter Rising. For James Moran, “When the Easter Rising began, some bystanders believed they were witnessing the opening of a play”. ²³ Lady Gregory thought that there were unquestionable commonalities between Molière and Irish popular theatre in terms of themes and characters. Lady Gregory’s urge to translate Molière into Kiltartanese demonstrated her committed linguistic assertion of a cultural human right. Translating Molière in Ireland from 1906 to 1926 was not only a praiseworthy choice for the National Theatre, but also a political statement in a country partly liberated from colonial rule. The translated plays advocated the emancipation of the younger generation from the inequitable and heartless tyranny of fathers. The creation of the Irish nation is intertwined with the mythical figure of Cathleen Ni Houlihan, fighting against the British patriarchal authority. Lady Gregory’s translations of Molière can therefore be seen as a critique of the structure of colonial power and patriarchal

20. Tartuffe: or The French Puritan: A Comedy, Lately Acted at the Theatre Royal. Written in French by Molière; and Rendered into English with Much Addition and Advantage, by M. Medbourne, Servant to His Royal Highness, London, printed by H. L. and R. B. James Magnus, Russell Street near the Piazza in Covent Garden, 1670, preface, p. III.

21. Notes in Molière, The Kiltartan Molière, Lady Gregory (trans.), Dublin, Maunsel & Company, 1910, p. 231.

22. See Mechele Leon, Molière, the French Revolution, and the Theatrical Afterlife, Iowa City, University of Iowa Press, 2009.

23. James Moran, Staging the Easter Rising: 1916 as Theatre, Cork, Cork University Press, 2005, p. 15.

constraints. In Molière’s work, the unequal power relations between men and women determine the erratic and thought-provoking conditions of any encounter when linguistic exchanges become a duel. Lucy, the woman oppressed by her father Geronte, knows that in this linguistic duel she can win by refusing the language of the fathers. Lady Gregory celebrated this act of linguistic resistance through the character of Lucy who embodies Lady Gregory’s ideal for Ireland, i.e. the emancipation of her people through culture. This threat of linguistic containment is linked to the fear of confinement to the space of home for women, captured by Mary Manning in Youth’s the Season–? (1931). The question mark in the title of the play Youth’s the Season–? is extremely important and full of cynicism. It is extracted from John Gay’s The Beggar’s Opera (1728).

Youth’s the Season made for Joys, Love is then our Duty… ²⁴

But youth is not the season made for joys and love, because young Dubliners like Terence, the failed poet who will commit suicide at the end of the play, Desmond, unable to join art school because of his father, his sisters Coonie and Deirdre or even the American girl Priscilla in the play are, according to Ruud van den Beuken, “a lost generation, whose dreams are shattered by the Irish Free State conservative society that will not condone personal ambitions, let alone alternative gender roles or sexual identities”.²⁵ The entrapment of women within a domestic role is portrayed by Irish playwrights throughout the 20^th and 21^st centuries and functions through inversion and renewal. Playwrights like Brian Friel (1929-2015), one of Ireland’s greatest dramatist and prolific theatrical explorer who burrowed deep into family ties, incommunicability, mythmaking and strong female personae, empowered women characters on stage like the Mundy sisters in Dancing at Lughnasa, Lily in The Freedom of the City, Cass in The Loves of Cass McGuire, Grace in Faith Healer, or Judith in Aristocrats. But how did Brian Friel ritualise and interrogate national identity by unveiling human rights abuses in those plays?

Brian Friel: human rights as Irish women’s rights

In Brian Friel’s play, Dancing at Lughnasa (1990), the five Mundy sisters (Kate, Maggie, Rose, Agnes and Chris) suffer from domestic containment in 1936 in Ballybeg, a Frielian fictional small town in Donegal. In 1936, de Valera was drafting the new Irish Constitution with the help of Archbishop John Charles McQuaid. According to Yvonne Scannell, de Valera’s Constitution and article 41.2 in particular may be regarded as “the grossest form of sexual stereotyping” which denies women

24. The Cotillion, Act II, Scene iv, Air IV.

25. Ruud van den Beuken, “Youth’s the Season–? (1931) by Mary Manning”, in Fifty Key Irish Plays, Shaun Richards (ed.), New York, Routledge, 2023, p. 56.

a freedom of choice that men take for granted, particularly given that the duties of fathers are not mentioned in the Constitution. ²⁶ De Valera was ensnaring the lives of Irish women in a web of legal denials of human rights such as the denial of the right to work; furthermore, he enclosed women’s rights and voices in the topo-graphic space of the Constitution, excluding them from the political and auctorial stage as Friel’s narrator, Michael, in Dancing at Lughnasa, encloses the lives of his mother and aunts in the typographic space of the text and on the stage space, in the kitchen. The Frielian women are enclosed like Bluebeard’s murdered wives in Mary Devenport O’Neill’s ballet-poem in the nightmarish space of the Irish state. The Mundy sisters in Dancing at Lughnasa weave threads of grief, bereavement and exile. Since men have deserted the Mundy sisters’ home for Africa or Spain, the five sisters have to work, and two of them, Agnes and Rose, even choose exile. The spectators are drawn from the parochial (the Mundy sisters) to the universal human right defined by article 9 of the UDHR: “No one shall be subjected to arbitrary arrest, detention or exile”. Before the exile of Agnes and Rose from the stifling domestic space, the five Mundy sisters transcend their lack of freedom and human rights through dance. Because words cannot convey the claustration that is draining the life out of them. “[A]s Conor Gearty has argued, the term ‘human rights’ signifies an imaginative understanding of suffering that insists on action”. ²⁷ The speaking bodies of those five women are transformed into dancing and ecstatic bodies to open a liberating psychic space. The dancing bodies speak of great expectations and broken dreams.

Cass McGuire in The Loves of Cass McGuire (1966) is the epitome of this shattered dream pattern as she returns to Ireland after fifty-two years of exile in the United States. Having fled containment in Ireland, on her return home, she woefully falls victim to institutional confinement by her own family at Eden House in a nursing home for the elderly. She tries to escape from the text, from the stage, by breaking the fourth wall and addressing the audience to break the deadly circle of the past and the abysmal confinement of her memory. Cass rewrites the past, transforms the vanishing shreds of her memory, and thus conquers her psychic freedom and right to choose.

But Grace in Faith Healer (1979) is not able to escape. Her monologue is ensnared in that of Frank Hardy and Teddy. The male voices, one living and one dead, ensnare the female voice in a web of lies. Her monologue opens, like Frank’s, with an incantation, a list of names, forgotten Scottish villages, that ties her to their stillborn child. Grace’s eyes are closed, just like Frank’s. She is alone on stage, locked up in the dark, locked up in her memory. Grace speaks to us from beyond the grave. She offers her truth, not the subjective story rewritten, transformed, manipulated by Frank and Teddy. But she is still locked up in

26. Yvonne Scannell, “The Constitution and the Role of Women”, in De Valera’s Constitution and Ours, Brian Farrell (ed.), Dublin, Gill and Macmillan, 1988, p. 125.

27. Harry Derbyshire, Loveday Hodson, “Performing Injustice: Human Rights and Verbatim Theatre”,

Law and Humanities, vol. 2, no. 2, 2008, p. 211.

Frank’s psyche, just as her own mother was locked up in a psychiatric hospital by her father. Grace tried to free herself from her father to find freedom on the road with Frank Hardy, the Faith Healer. And after Frank’s sacrificial death in Ireland, her voice is finally heard. With a moving and heart-wrenching account of the traumatic birth of her stillborn child, Grace is a disembodied voice who offers her truth from beyond the grave.

In Aristocrats (1979), the women are subjugated to the father, Judge O’Donnell, and like Grace in Faith Healer, seek to free themselves from the father figure who is also a judge. The father’s voice is transmitted on stage with a loudspeaker, “a baby alarm”. The father judges and condemns his children, his four daughters and his son. At the heart of the play is the scandal of the “home babies”, and the children of Irish orphanages, abandoned as illegitimate by unmarried mothers, just like Judith in the play and whom her father accuses of having betrayed the family: “Judith betrayed the family. […] Great betrayal; enormous betrayal. […] Anna has the whole convent praying for her”. ²⁸ Judith’s motherhood threatens the social, moral and political order of the father because it symbolises the sexual freedom of women outside marriage. Amid Ireland’s civil rights struggle, in the Bogside in Derry, Judith defied her father. She fell in love with a Dutch reporter, became pregnant, did not get married and this relationship resulted in the child being placed in an orphanage. But when the father suddenly dies, Judith vows to get her child out of the orphanage.

JUmITH: The first thing I’m going to do is take the baby out of the orphanage. ALICE: Of course. Yes…

JUmITH: The baby, he must be seven now… ²⁹

Women in Friel’s plays are locked in the past, judged and condemned. Ballybeg’s society is built on walls of contempt, judgement, condemnation, division and hidden secrets like Judith’s son.

But women playwrights in Ireland will tear down those walls using the stage to fight for human rights. Eclipsed, produced by Punchbag in 1992 and written by Patricia Burke Brogan, is a play about the Magdalene laundries. No Escape by Mary Raftery, produced in 2010 by the Abbey, was the first Irish documentary drama, whose verbatim staging of the Ryan Report gave a voice to those who across decades suffered institutional child abuse. Human rights projects across Ireland, Northern Ireland and Europe are more and more numerous and cover topics such as historical remembrance, social exclusion, or gender equality. The Dublin Arts and Human Rights Festival is a perfect example of this new wave of projects and performances underlining the role of theatre in embodying the fight against the denial of human rights.

28. Brian Friel, Aristocrats, Act I, in Selected Plays, London, Faber and Faber, 1984, p. 257.

29. Ibid., Act III, p. 318.

Women changemakers, Smashing Times and Irish performance art

Mary Moynihan, the artistic director of Smashing Times International Centre for the Arts and Equality, a prolific writer, theatre and filmmaker intertwines in her work human rights and historical memory, exploring the stories of women changemakers. For her, what is common to most of the stories told through her work with Smashing Times is that they are “stories of women who stood up for the rights of others and in doing so these women created an embodied self-proclaimed form of citizenship in spaces where fundamental human rights were denied”. ³⁰ Moynihan has dug into the stories of women from three distinct periods commemorated as a decade of centenaries in Ireland from 1916 to 1923, stories from World War I and stories of women across the world today. For this decade of centenaries, Smashing Times collaborated with renowned historian, curator and playwright Sinéad McCoole, ³¹ presenting her play Leaving the Ladies, published in 2019, to explore Irishwomen’s stories from 1916 to 1923. The play Constance and Her Friends by Moynihan about Countess Markievicz and her memories of the 1916 Easter Rising was also performed, and the film Courageous Women, an adaptation of the aforesaid play was released in 2020. McCoole’s play, Leaving the Ladies, is based on a true historical event which took place on 11 December 1917 in Dublin, in the lavatory beside the Round Room in the Mansion House, a meeting of the most important and influential women of the day, members of organisations such as Cumann na mBan, the Irish Women’s Workers’ Union and the Irish Citizen Army. In her play, McCoole intermingles historical figures (Constance Markievicz, Rosamond Jacob, Dulcibella Barton, Mary Perolz, Margaret “Lou” Kennedy, Alice Ginnell and Dr Kathleen Lynn) with fictional characters from the rank and file of the Cumann na mBan organisation, university-educated women from Dublin and Galway, as well as male and female hecklers. For McCoole, “Performance is a way of bringing across a story. It is a teaching tool. When we think about gender justice or social justice and when you are passionate about teaching, you have to do it with other mediums”.³² Because as Derbyshire and Hodson argued in “Performing Injustice: Human Rights and Verbatim Theatre”:

[…] theatre is a medium that invites an imaginative rather than a practical response, the dramatic representation of human suffering allows for a sustained empathetic engagement with the issues explored and creates, therefore, a greater likelihood that

30. Mary Moynihan, “States of Independence: Citizenship in Performance”, 23 June 2022, online: https://smashingtimes.ie/states-of-independence-citizenship-in-performance

31. Since 2018, Sinéad McCoole has been working with the Smashing Times Theatre Company bringing Irish women’s stories to new audiences, participating in panel discussions on social justice, social inclusion, human rights, equality and conflict resolution. She has written extensively in the area of modern Irish History. Her books include Hazel, A Life of Lady Lavery (1996, revised and reissued in 2014), Guns and Chiffon (1997), No Ordinary Women (2003, revised and reissued in 2008 and 2015) and Easter Widows (2014). She is an expert in the history of Irishwomen from 1880 to the present day, but also a curator and a script writer for television documentaries and films.

32. Interview with Dr Sinéad McCoole in Paris on 26 May 2024.

audience members will contribute to debate within the public sphere and, indeed, will act upon their experience of the drama. ³³

The protagonists chosen by McCoole for her play were women who hoped that human rights in Ireland would be women’s rights, and that full suffrage would be attained in Ireland becoming a shining beacon of hope for women worldwide. It is important to remember that some of those women had fought in the Easter Rising the previous year. As Cynthia Enloe points out, “the history of a nationalist movement is almost always a history filled with gendered debate”. ³⁴ The theatrical treatment of women’s social and cultural rights by McCoole is a clear echo of the French Revolution and Olympe de Gouge’s 1791 The Declaration of the Rights of Woman:

Mothers, daughters, sisters, female representatives of the nation ask to be constituted as a national assembly. Considering that ignorance, neglect, or contempt for the rights of woman are the sole causes of public misfortunes and governmental corruption, they have resolved to set forth in a solemn declaration the natural, inalienable, and sacred rights of woman […]. ³⁵

Leaving the Ladies is a perfect illustration of storytelling which transforms ways of thinking and seeing because this play challenges our vision of the past by promoting human rights and artistic integrity. It offers an imaginative understanding of Irish women’s historical erasure, suffering and resilience. Through her dramatic representation, McCoole is linked to Irish women playwrights who in the 1920s and 1930s epitomised a feminist theatre of freedom and resistance. In Leaving the Ladies, thanks to Constance Markievicz’s last line, McCoole ploughs through the metaphor of the closed door used by Mary Devenport O’Neill in her ballet-poem Bluebeard (1933).

CONSTANCE: Let me open the door. After my time in prison you have no idea the joy of opening and closing doors! Ladies, it is time to leave the lavatory! ³⁶

McCoole opens a door for women, highlighting stories of self-empowerment for action in Ireland. Like her, many performance artists refused to be subjected to the limitations of political and gendered borders. Events and performances organised by theatre companies such as Pan Pan, Anu Productions, Charabanc Theatre Company – founded in 1983 in Belfast by five actresses (Marie Jones, Maureen Macauley, Eleanor Methven, Carol Moore and Brenda Winter) eager to create more opportunities in theatre for women –, or Field Day took place on both sides of the border, in Belfast, Derry, Cork and Dublin. For Áine Phillips,

33. Harry Derbyshire, Loveday Hodson, “Performing Injustice…”, p. 211.

34. Quoted by Lisa Fitzpatrick, Shonagh Hill, “Introduction”, in Plays by Women in Ireland…, p. 1.

35. Preamble of Olympe de Gouges’s The Declaration of the Rights of Woman, 1791, online: https:// revolution.chnm.org/d/293.

36. Sinéad McCoole, Leaving the Ladies, Dublin, Arlen House, 2019, p. 50.

Feminist artists embraced performance art in the 1980s to speak what was before unspeakable and do what was unthinkable for women in this conservative society where contraception, divorce and abortion were illegal. Performance became an artistic strategy enacting social change both in terms of sexual politics, social justice, and in response to the Troubles. ³⁷

Women playwrights, directors and actresses from the 1900s onwards in Ireland proved that walls, mental and physical, needed to be challenged and that the fight for human rights was embedded within the idea of renewal. Because writing on the female body, psyche and society changes the history of the world. Irish theatre and human rights crack open the hard shell of modern Irish plays to reveal the rich variety of a dynamic and sometimes conflicting tradition led by women changemakers. So many plays by women must be explored and compared, bridges must be created between the often-erased female voices of the past and the women artists or female characters of today and examined in terms of cultural rights and human rights more broadly. Alice Milligan’s play The Last Feast of the Fianna (1900), staged by the Irish Literary Theatre, has barely been acknowledged; nor has the work of the prolific Abbey playwright, Teresa Deevy, ³⁸ who lost her hearing in her late teens due to Ménière’s disease. Her plays The Reapers (1930, now lost), A Disciple (1931), Temporal Powers (1932) or The King of Spain’s Daughter (1935) have been forgotten, and even Katie Roche (1936), staged by Caroline Byrne in 2017, went from masterpiece in the 1930s directed by Hugh Hunt at the Abbey Theatre in Dublin, followed by tours in London, Cambridge and New York, or in the 1940s and 1950s directed by Ria Mooney, to being nearly forgotten until Judy Friel directed this play in Dublin’s Peacock Theatre in 1994. In Katie Roche, men are capable of domestic violence like Reuben who hits Katie with his stick until she collapses onto a chair. Judy Friel commenting on this play wrote that “Deevy’s feminism is much more than a male-bash […] because Katie Roche shows a patriarchy fully colluded in by women”. ³⁹

REUBEN: You’re playing with danger – that’s why I hit you.

KATIE: I’ll get over that – (As accepting apology.) – for all you could know I might have deserved it…

REUBEN: You did deserve it. ⁴⁰

37. Áine Phillips, “Introduction”, in Performance Art in Ireland: A History, Áine Phillips (ed.), London, Live Art Development Agency, 2015, p. 8.

38. Except for the pioneering research carried out by Lisa Fitzpatrick, Cathy Leeney, Anna McMullan and Melissa Sihra in Women in Irish Drama: A Century of Authorship and Representation, Melissa Sihra (ed.), New York, Palgrave Macmillan, 2007.

39. Quoted by John P. Harrington in his introduction to the play Katie Roche, in Teresa Deevy Reclaimed, vol. 1, Temporal Powers, Katie Roche, Wife to James Whelan, Jonathan Bank, John P. Harrington, Chris Morash (eds.), New York, Mint Theatre Company, 2011, p. 54.

40. Teresa Deevy, Katie Roche, in Teresa Deevy Reclaimed, vol. 1, p. 79.

For Chris Morash,

Caroline Byrne’s 2017 production led audiences to read Katie Roche in terms of the patriarchal world of 1930s Ireland, […] or, in terms of a deaf artist in a hearing world, where “grand” things can be imagined but only obliquely communicated. ⁴¹

Women’s voices have been silent long enough and need to strike their chord, to paraphrase Seamus Heaney’s poem Station Island. From Lady Gregory to Marina Carr’s 2024 play, Audrey or Sorrow, the female voice in Irish theatre has been mythologised and subjectivised. It embodies Ireland, but it is also a voice haunted by human rights denials, locked in the claustral invisibility of the male auctorial psyche.

Virginie ROCHE Université d’Artois

Membre des comités scientifiques de colloques

Membre de comités de sélection (MCF section 11)
2024 : Université Paris-Cité

Membre du comité́ scientifique du colloque international de L’AEDEI (Asociación Española de Estudios Irlandeses) : Violence: Repercussion, Resistance and Representation in Irish Society and Culture, Université de Valence, Espagne. 31 Mai, 1-2 Juin 2023.

Membre du comité́ scientifique du colloque international : Crossing Borders. Présences et circulations du théâtre contemporain de langue anglaise en Europe, qui s’est déroulé́ à Paris, les 11 et 12 octobre 2018. Organisé par l’Université́ Paris 4, l’Université́ Paris 13, l’Université́ Lyon 2, Grenoble Université́-Alpes, l’Université́ de Lille et RADAC.

Membre du comité́ scientifique du colloque, Rythmes du corps dans l’espace spectaculaire et textuel organisé conjointement par l’Université́ Paris 13 (CRIDAF, Estudanses, l’Université́ Jean Monnet de Saint Etienne (CIEREC) et le RADAC en 2009.
 

Présidence lors de colloques

Présidence du débat : « Empowerment on Stage » lors du colloque international de la SOFEIR, Unheard Voices: Telling Stories of Empowerment. Paris 19, 20, 21 March 2015, organisé conjointement par l’Université Paris 13, l’Université́ Paris Sorbonne, l’Université Sorbonne Nouvelle Paris 3, et l’Université́ UPEM.

Présidence du débat: « Détention avant jugement au Royaume Uni et en Irlande » (Pretrial Detention in the UK and in Ireland) lors du colloque international organisé par le CRIDAF à l’Université́ Paris 13, en décembre 2012, intitulé « Principes et modalités de la détention avant jugement en droit de Common Law et tradition civiliste (20e et 21e  siècles) », (Pretrial Detention : Principles and Procedures in Common Law and Civil Law Countries ( XX-th and XXI-th centuries)).

Coprésidence de l’atelier théâtre à Bordeaux en 2009 au colloque de la SAES. (Société́ des anglicistes de l’enseignement supérieur)

• Vice-Doyen, Relations internationales et institutionnelles (depuis mars 2018)
• Responsable du Master 1 APSFI (Action Publique et Stratégies, France International 2019-2020
•  Co-Responsable du Master 1 REI (Relations et échanges internationaux) 2012-2019 à l’Université Paris 13, Sorbonne Paris Cité (UFR DSPS).
• Coordinatrice de l’anglais au niveau de la licence AES1 et de la Licence AES3 EI (Programmes/Réunion de pré-rentrée/Sujets d’examen/Jurys) 2012-2020
• Direction de mémoires d’étudiants en Master 2 Etudes Stratégiques, en Master 1 REI et Master 1 APSFI. Exemples de mémoires : Les enseignements tactiques des opérations menées par l’armée britanniques en Irlande du Nord. /Le viol comme arme de guerre. / Les mesures antiterroristes au Royaume Uni et au Canada et leurs impacts sur les libertés civiles. /Le processus de paix engagé en Irlande du Nord peut-il être un modèle pour la résolution du conflit israélo-palestinien ?
• Membre des jurys d’examen en Licence AES1 et AES3, en Licence de DROIT 3, en Master 1 REI, en Master 2 Etudes Stratégiques.
• Correction des tests de certification en Anglais CLES1 (B1): niveau intermédiaire et CLES2 (B2): niveau intermédiaire fort.
• Jury à l’IUT informatique, Université Paris 13 : soutenance de mémoires de stage en anglais.

41. Chris Morash, “Katie Roche (1936) by Teresa Deevy”, in Fifty Key Irish Plays, p. 59.

1Irish Theatre, Human Rights and Women Changemakers