Théâtre
irlandais, droits humains et femmes actrices du changement
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
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".
Études
irlandaises,
no
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 21st
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
Harry
Derbyshire,
Loveday
Hodson,
“Performing
Injustice:
Human
Rights
and
Verbatim
Theatre”,
Law
and Humanities,
vol. 2, no. 2, 2008, p. 191.
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.
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 20th and 21st
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
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.
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:
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.
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
Lisa
Fitzpatrick, Shonagh
Hill, “Introduction”, in Plays
by Women in Ireland…,
p. 1.
Ibid.,
p. 3.
United
Nations
General
Assembly,
Universal
Declaration
of
Human
Rights,
10
December
1948,
A/RES/217(III).
Keynote
address by Mary Robinson…
Quoted
in Lisa Fitzpatrick,
Shonagh Hill, “Introduction”, in Plays
by Women in Ireland…,
p. 1.
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.
Bunreacht
na hÉireann (Constitution of Ireland), 1937, art. 41.2.
Quoted
in Lisa Fitzpatrick,
Shonagh Hill, “Introduction”, in Plays
by Women in Ireland…,
p. 5.
Ibid.,
p. 3.
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
Lisa
Fitzpatrick, Shonagh
Hill, “Introduction”, in Plays
by Women in Ireland…,
p. 248.
Una
Mullaly,
“Abbey
Theatre
Celebrates
1916
Centenary
with
Only
One
Woman
Playwright”,
The
Irish
Times,
2
November
2015.
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 17th-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
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.
Notes in Molière,
The Kiltartan Molière,
Lady Gregory (trans.), Dublin, Maunsel & Company,
1910, p. 231.
See
Mechele
Leon,
Molière,
the
French
Revolution,
and
the
Theatrical
Afterlife,
Iowa
City,
University
of Iowa Press, 2009.
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 20th and 21st
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
The
Cotillion,
Act
II,
Scene
iv,
Air
IV.
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
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.
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.
Brian
Friel, Aristocrats,
Act I, in Selected
Plays,
London, Faber and Faber,
1984, p. 257.
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
Mary Moynihan,
“States of Independence: Citizenship in Performance”, 23 June
2022, online:
https://smashingtimes.ie/states-of-independence-citizenship-in-performance
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.
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,
Harry Derbyshire,
Loveday Hodson, “Performing Injustice…”, p. 211.
Quoted
by Lisa Fitzpatrick,
Shonagh Hill, “Introduction”, in Plays
by Women in Ireland…,
p. 1.
Preamble
of
Olympe
de
Gouges’s
The
Declaration
of
the
Rights
of
Woman,
1791,
online:
https://
revolution.chnm.org/d/293.
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
Áine
Phillips,
“Introduction”,
in
Performance
Art
in
Ireland:
A
History,
Áine
Phillips
(ed.),
London,
Live Art Development
Agency, 2015, p. 8.
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.
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.
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.
Chris
Morash, “Katie
Roche (1936)
by Teresa Deevy”, in
Fifty Key
Irish Plays,
p. 59.
