Lynne Parker: “Radical” Director: Reflections of a Fellow Director

Charlotte Headrick

Writing about directing is a challenge. If a director does the job well, the direction blends into the rest of the elements on stage. Theatre is a collaborative art and, in the best situations, all the elements of the production, under the sure hand of an able director, combine to create a memorable production. And, since theatre is a most ephemeral art, capturing that direction after the fact can be daunting. There are several collections of interviews with directors and they are useful in examining how individual directors approach their work, but in the end, there is an elusive quality to directing that can be difficult to ascertain in the finished work. Additionally, while a scholar may write about the text of the play and a critic may review a production, identifying the director’s artistry in the process is often complex. It may be the actor’s brilliance that the audience experiences, but did that moment of brilliance arise from the director’s suggestion to that actor?

Despite the complications in writing about a director’s work, this paper will attempt to track the remarkable career of director Lynne Parker, and will largely be based on my direct observations of Parker’s work as a fellow director. Since I live an ocean and a country away from Dublin and London, secondary sources will support my comments about Parker’s direction. Directing is about dealing with humanity, about exploring emotions, and as a director, I cannot deal with a fellow director’s work without bringing in those “messy” aspects of research. To write about directing means that one has to write about feelings; it is not enough to analyze the director’s choices intellectually.

Lynne Parker’s career as a working director and as an artistic director of Rough Magic is radical in the scope of her work, in her commitment to helping writers (especially women writers), in subverting the audience’s expectations, in giving opportunities to young artists, and in continuing to seek new and challenging work, whether a Northern Irish Macbeth or a play that requires the audience to go outside a venue, on to the street, and travel to a new venue. For Parker, her work is not about tricks; she is inventive because those inventions are a way to communicate with the audience, or in her words “to turn on” those audiences (Manfull 167). Her generosity of spirit and her passion to tell these stories are revealed in every production she directs and in the larger scope of the work of Rough Magic.

From the beginning of her career as one of the founding members of Dublin’s Rough Magic Theatre Company, Lynne Parker’s work as a director has been radical and cutting edge. Since the early days of the company, Rough Magic has emphasized new Irish writing (the works of Gina Moxley, Paula Meehan, Morna Regan, Arthur Riordan, Elizabeth Kuti, and Declan Hughes) as well as striking and radical interpretations of classics of the Irish theatre. Although she is the Artistic Director of Rough Magic, Lynne Parker has been able to direct in Dublin at the Abbey and the Gate. Coupled with her artistic vision is her commitment to providing productions for emerging Irish women dramatists. It is because of the commitment to these women that Parker’s work is especially significant and radical. Celebrating women directors and women dramatists has not been the norm in Ireland. David Grant, in the 1990s, in speaking of women dramatists, has noted that the “common tendency” is “to exclude women” (qtd. in Roche 286). Parker’s work and wide success goes against traditional norms in Ireland.

Parker’s work has been seen not only in Dublin, but also all over Ireland, in Northern Ireland, in London, and the United States. Some of those productions include O’Casey’s The Silver Tassie at the Almeida in London (1995) and her 2012 re-visioning of Shakespeare’s Macbeth for the new Lyric Theatre in Belfast. She has also directed several of the dramas of her uncle Stewart Parker, and was an early director for the now legendary Charabanc Theatre Company. For Charabanc, she directed Neil Speers’ Cauterised (1990), Gillian Plowman’s Me and My Friend (1991), and Lorca’s House of Bernarda Alba (1993). Her direction of Stewart Parker’s plays include Nightshade (1987), Spokesong (1989), Pentecost (1996 and 2008), Northern Star (1996), and Heavenly Bodies (2004).

Sara Keating noted that female dramatists have traditionally been underrepresented (n.p. par.1). If women dramatists have been underrepresented, then the case with women directors is even more severe. Lynne Parker in her capacity as Artistic Director of Rough Magic has made great strides not only to provide more opportunities for women writers but also opportunities for women to develop directing skills. She has done this through the Rough Magic SEEDS program which mentors a number of theatre practitioners including young directors.

In 2011, she gave a tribute to Alice Milligan in which she acknowledged that as women artists, “we are standing on the shoulders of those who have come before” (“Lynne Parker-IWD”). In this speech, Parker remarked that she has directed productions in which the entire artistic staff was comprised of talented women: producers, designers, stage managers, and the director. For many of us in theatre, this in itself is a radical concept. It has been only in recent times that women have taken their rightful place in the long male-dominated world of directing. In 1998, for the first time in the United States, two women finally won Tony Awards as directors: Garry Hynes for her work on McDonagh’s The Beauty Queen of Leenane and Julie Taymor for her direction of the musical The Lion King. Since the beginning of her career with Rough Magic, Lynne Parker has consistently been recognized with glowing reviews and numerous awards for her directing, and without a doubt, she is one of the most important directors of the late twentieth and twenty-first centuries.

As directors, Parker believes that “women are good at this job” (Headrick) and in that belief, she has been instrumental in the SEEDS initiative of Rough Magic whose website states that the

SEEDS programme is a structured development initiative for emerging theatre practitioners. Now in its twelfth year, the SEEDS Programme has introduced a new generation of Irish theatre-makers to the professional theatre world. Participants have the opportunity to observe and experience Rough Magic’s work and to gain exposure to the working methods of international artists through mentoring and placements. The SEEDS artists are encouraged to engage with the company’s approach and become part of its process. (“Developing Artists”)

Although the Abbey Theatre solicits new scripts and has some education programmes, it is Parker and Rough Magic who have created a programme for theatre practitioners: directors, designers, and management.

In 1991, I finally had the opportunity to meet Parker. She was one of two women directors to be interviewed. Although I was able to interview her as part of a sabbatical project, it was not until the spring of 1992 that I saw her remarkable production of Declan Hughes’s Digging for Fire. Hughes co-founded Rough Magic with Parker. Since that first experience at the Bush Theatre in London, it has been my good fortune to experience Parker’s direction of several plays in London and in Dublin. Parker has been generous to me and to others who have sought interviews with her.

Parker’s staging of Digging for Fire at the cramped Bush Theatre was impressive; the Bush is one of London’s many pub theatres, this one with a long legacy of featuring new Irish writing. Digging for Fire revolves around a reunion of a group of college graduates. Reminiscent of the American film The Big Chill which also centres on a group of college friends reuniting, Hughes’s piece depicts the complicated lives of a group of young thirty-somethings in Dublin. Parker staged the scene change as part of the action, going from the apartment setting to the pub and back to the pub. During the production, the actors executed the scene changes while remaining in character, even Peter Hanley’s gay solicitor who refused to move anything, and, keeping a drink in his hand, supervised the change.

Later that spring, I saw another Parker directed play. Love and a Bottle was a reworking by Declan Hughes of George Farquhar’s late Restoration play. It was at the Tricycle Theatre located in the Kilburn neighbourhood of London known for its transplanted Irish populace. The Tricycle is often the site of both Irish dramas created at the theatre and touring Irish productions. In his blog, Declan Hughes writes about this production noting that, “All restoration plays are about sex and money; George Farquhar’s Love And A Bottle combined them in the form of George Roebuck, an impecunious Irish rake cutting a sexual swathe through London society” (par. 6). Keeping true to Hughes’s wonderfully raunchy text, Lynne Parker did not shy away from boldly staging the sexuality in the comedy. As the rake George Roebuck, Phelim Drew dripped with testosterone in every scene in which he performed. Parker and her costume designer used many white costumes and wigs that contrasted with the lusty pink flesh throbbing underneath all those white outer coverings—a marvelous visual image of white purity masking all those colorful emotions. This production was a good example of Parker’s attitude toward the theatre. In Helen Manfull’s In Other Words: Women Directors Speak, Lynne Parker is one of the fourteen women directors Manfull interviewed. Parker, in speaking about her approach to directing, says, “I also think that theatre is substantially subversive and is about making mischief and being naughty. It’s more useful to me to regard it as something I was doing, almost blowing off my lessons, in order to be in the theatre and just explore what I wanted to there” (Manfull 6). Certainly, Hughes’s play is filled with sexual situations, but Parker’s staging was uninhibited, revealing that naughty and subversive streak. Jeremy Kingston compliments both Hughes’s writing and Parker’s staging, describing the performance as “a zestful and shamelessly saucy evening of amoral fun.”

While it is the director who oversees the production, Parker always acknowledges the importance of the designers to her work as a director. In her interview with Manfull, she praises designer Kathy Strachan and how flexible Strachan was on a project. She says of collaboration and her way of working, “So there’s no straightforward process. You’ve just got to allow yourself time to keep working, to keep churning it over. I cannot say I have a process. I just have to let it cook in there until I get the idea. And I can’t force it” (Manfull 28).

Parker and Rough Magic have been leaders in encouraging new writing by women. In 1999, they published Rough Magic: First Plays—a volume of plays containing an equal number of plays by women as men. Of the six plays in the volume, three are by women: Pom Boyd, Gina Moxley, and Paula Meehan. Up until Cathy Leeney’s Seen and Heard was published, anthologies of Irish drama, with very few exceptions, might include a play by Lady Gregory. Gender balance was of importance to Parker and Rough Magic. In Parker’s introduction to the volume, she writes,

Two of these plays arose out of a particular initiative. The women’s playwriting competition was thought up by Siobhán Bourke (Executive Producer for Rough Magic from 1984-1998) in an attempt to address the gender imbalance in playwriting. Both as a statement and as a mechanism for creating new work it was extremely important. (“Introduction” xii)

Rough Magic is known for its commitment to new writing by women and we can trace that commitment back to Lynne Parker and to Siobhán Burke, another founding member of Rough Magic. Kuti’s The Sugar Wife won the 2006 Susan Smith Blackburn Award for the best play written by a woman in the English language. Earlier, Parker had directed Kuti’s reworking and completion of Frances Sheridan’s play A Trip to Bath in a new version entitled The Whisperers (1999). Parker suggested a Restoration play to Declan Hughes and she suggested the title for Kuti’s reworking of the Sheridan play and then directed both productions. The Rough Magic archive says of the play, “Begun by Frances Sheridan in 1765 and completed by Elizabeth Kuti in 1999, The Whisperers combines eighteenth century wickedness and wit with a very modern attitude to the sexual power of money and the market value of sex” (“The Whisperers” par. 2).

In 1995, Rough Magic produced Danti-Dan, a play written by Gina Moxley and directed by Parker. Although Moxley had been an actor in the company, Parker had an instinct that Moxley had a play in her and notes, “That’s why I picked on her” (Manfull 142). Parker writes:

When Gina Moxley joined the company as an actor we discovered her talent for inventing characters and asked her to try her hand at straight drama. We were prepared for the sharpness and wit of her writing but not for its darkness and compassion. Danti-Dan is an astonishing debut, not least in that it treats adolescent sexuality objectively and reverses the gender stereotypes usually associated with stories of aggressive sexuality. (“Introduction” xi-xii)

Parker staged Moxley’s play at the Hampstead Theatre. Paul Taylor in The Independent writes, “Brought to Hampstead in a winning Rough Magic production by Lynne Parker, the drama is set in an Irish backwater 10 miles from Cork in the summer of 1970, and if you ever needed further proof that a repressed society creates sexual obsessives, this play would be your man” (“Danti-Dan” par. 1). Fintan O’Toole speaks of Moxley’s integrity in telling such a story about sex and power, noting that “It manages to do justice to the ultimate bleakness of the piece without itself being bleak, and above all [gives] a fine young cast the confidence to take emotional risks” (Critical Moments 137). Parker’s depiction of adolescent sexuality in this play was unflinching. Parker’s encouragement of Moxley and her risk-taking with youthful actors paid off: the play went on to win the New Playwrights’ Bursary Award from the Stewart Parker Trust, and it has been anthologized both in The Dazzling Dark and in Rough Magic: First Plays. As Moxley’s work illustrates, Rough Magic is known for launching new writers, particularly women, and this commitment can partly be traced to Parker’s respect for writers:

I know I can’t do that [playwriting], and I have great admiration for anybody who can. But I would be very unhappy and sad if the show didn’t have something of my personality in it, and it’s bound to have just a little style in presentation and something of my trademark upon it. (Manfull 47)

Also in 1995, at the Almeida in London, Parker staged Sean O’Casey’s The Silver Tassie. If bravery is radical, and in the commercial theatre it is, Parker challenged herself in the Almeida production and she continues to challenge herself today. O’Casey’s play has been challenging for both directors and audiences, as it mixes realism with expressionism. My argument is that it was Parker’s vision of the play and her skill as a director and her fearlessness that led to the excellence of the production. The Silver Tassie is often described as “rarely produced” and with good cause. It is a difficult play that mixes forms but Parker has never been one to skirt a challenge.

The Herald Scotland praises Parker’s “unsentimental lyricism,” saying the fact the play is not seen more often is a “shame, because judging by this wonderful revival from Dublin’s Rough Magic director Lynne Parker, it’s the kind of play once seen is likely to leave an impression for life” (n.a., “The Silver Tassie, Almeida” par. 1). In the production, Parker did not shy away from making an overt anti-war statement by evoking the power of the Vietnam Wall. In one scene, long drapes filled with names were hung over the stage. It also evoked the WWI memorials all over Britain but not in Ireland. The image evoked not only the dead of World War I but also the dead of later wars, and, it could be argued, the wars yet to come. It was a very powerful image on stage. Michael Billington refers to “Lynne Parker’s excellent revival” and how she solves some of the problems in the play by “treating the whole play as a piece of twenties expressionism”

One of the characteristics of Parker’s work is her range, which can certainly be viewed as radical. Traditionally, many directors find their directing niche and specialize in one genre: musicals, dramas, new work, or comedies. She goes from realism to expressionism, to classics, to the wacky world of a new musical theatre piece. In 2005, Lynne Parker’s production of Arthur Riordan’s Improbable Frequency was staged at the Abbey. In an interview, this is a play that she has described as “bonkers” (Woddis). Reminiscent of Tom Stoppard’s Travesties, in which Tristan Tzara, James Joyce, and Lenin are all in Zurich at the same time, Riordan imagines what might have happened if the poet John Betjeman, physicist Erwin Schrödinger, and Myles na gCopaleen (satirist Brian O’Nolan’s alter persona) met in Dublin (all three were in the city at the same time). Riordan, like Stoppard, excels in word play in Improbable Frequency. Parker’s staging of the play at the Abbey was as zany and acrobatic in physicality as Riordan’s play was in verbiage. At the play’s intermission, a confused American tourist asked me, since I had been laughing, if I could explain the musical to her. I couldn’t. Improbable Frequency had some of the zaniness (stylized movement, makeup, exaggeration) of Parker’s staging of Love and a Bottle only magnified many times. Caomhan Keane describes it as a “musical fantasia set during The Emergency” (par. 1). Drawing on music hall traditions, stylized costumes and makeup, Irish history and politics, and over-the-top antics, this was a wonderful night in the theatre. The production showed, again, how fearless Lynne Parker is. Improbable Frequency is not a usual musical. Oklahoma it isn’t. Improbable Frequency in its subject matter, storyline and staging is not a traditional formulaic musical like South Pacific or Sound of Music; it also contains a sampler of musical styles. The play swept the awards for the 2005 Irish Times Theatre Awards including a Best Directing prize for Lynne Parker. The company eventually toured with this production, and in 2012, they staged a revival of it.

From the fall of 2012 until the present, Parker has continued to challenge herself as a director. Her Macbeth at the Lyric reveals her radical and inventive approach to one of Shakespeare’s most popular plays. The actors spoke in their native Northern Irish accents and Parker’s approach to the witches was remarkable. Lisa Fitzpatrick describes how Parker’s version offers a new perspective on the play:

Beautifully designed and performed by an excellent cast, this version offers another engaging and challenging interpretation that creates a strong atmosphere of moral and political decay. The horror of Macbeth’s rule of Scotland is communicated in the harsh comfortless set and a series of directorial decisions by Parker … One of these decisions is the visible multi-roling by the three actors playing the weird sisters: Eleanor Methven, Carol Moore, and Claire Rafferty. As witches, they are unsettling figures in long shapeless military parkas with hoods that extend down over their faces. (Par. 1-2)

Fitzpatrick describes how the actresses remove their witches’ clothing to reveal other costumes, with the actresses morphing into servants, soldiers, and other minor characters who follow Macbeth: “They are therefore with him all the time, shadowing his movements and inhabiting his household, and making visible and embodied the evil that he embraces in the pursuit of his ambitions” (par. 2). Jane Coyle in her review for The Stage also comments on how the three witches dominate the production in “Lynne Parker’s fascinating, Northern Ireland-inspired revival …” (par. 1). As a native of Belfast, Parker was also using not only the accent of Northern Ireland in the speech, but also recalling the violent memories of the city of Belfast echoing the world of one of Shakespeare’s most violent plays. Her use of the three actresses who played multiple roles in the production was unusual and striking. It is not often that one sees the drunken porter played by a woman.

A year after Macbeth, Parker directed Sheridan’s The Critic (2013) with her own unusual twist. Parker changed the setting of the play from London to Sheridan’s birthplace Dublin. The play opened in the Culture Box in Temple Bar and the final act played in the Ark about a hundred meters down the street. Peter Daly acted as the “director” and guide and he led the audience from the Culture Box to the Ark carrying a red umbrella. Chris O’Rourke remarks that this is a play with “lofty ambitions … fully realized with great charm and humour in a towering production that deserves to be a runaway success” (par.1). He continues, “Played in the round and performed across two venues, Lynne Parker’s excellent direction kept The Critic’s many plates spinning successfully” (par. 4). One of Parker’s spinning plates featured a cast composed of student actors from the Gaiety School of Acting, University College Dublin Dramsoc, and DU Players of Trinity in the second half of the play. Fintan O’Toole is impressed with the sheer number of actors on stage in Parker’s productions. He writes of The Critic and the Gate’s Threepenny Opera, which have sixty-three performers between them, that, “There’s something magnificently defiant about all of this. If nothing else, it is a reminder that theatre can be ambitious, extravagant and a little reckless now and then” (“Culture Shock” par. 4). What Parker did with the production of The Critic is well outside of the usual parameters of a theatrical production. Of course, other productions have used promenade style and moved audiences around, but the combination of a classic play, newly envisioned, using students alongside professional actors, and moving the audience from one venue to another is very unusual.

Perhaps the best testimonial about Parker as a radical, inventive, and creative director comes from those actors who have worked with her. One of these is filmmaker, actress, and director Carol Moore, one of the founding members of Charabanc Theatre Company. Moore praises Parker as a director who works with her fellow artists, encourages their input into the final vision of a production, and allows actors to explore and experiment however they need to discover a character. This has resulted in productions that subvert the audiences’ usual expectations of characters. Of this process, Carol Moore wrote the following about working with Parker:

I remember well Rough Magic’s production of Pentecost and wondering why in the early stages of rehearsals, I wasn’t being given notes to guide my interpretation of Lily. I only realized much later that Lynne wanted me to trace Lily’s journey and find for myself the pain of having an affair and a baby and keeping that secret until the end of her days. This suppression of complex emotions is the antithesis of her as a ghost, where her sectarianism is chillingly vicious towards the Catholic Marian, because I believe it offers the cause and effect of a life unfulfilled. Similarly in her Lyric Theatre production of Macbeth, while Lynne had a very strong sense of the witches infiltrating the Macbeth castle as “other characters”, it was very much left to the actors, Eleanor Methven, Claire Rafferty and myself to find what that infiltration looked and sounded like, yet retaining the essence of a witch. It is this organic approach where creative decisions happen moment by moment by her and the actors in the rehearsal room that encourages genuine ownership of the production.

Together with Carol Moore, Eleanor Methven, also a founding member of Charabanc, has worked with Lynne Parker for over a twenty-three year period. During the performance run of The Critic in which she played Mrs. Dangle, Eleanor Methven wrote the following:

I see Lynne Parker’s “Radicalism” not so much in terms of her Direction of Plays (though she is undoubtedly one of Ireland’s foremost Directors), but in her Artistic Direction of Rough Magic: wherein she lives her politics. Lynne’s raison d’etre in terms of the Company ethos is the dissemination of resources to the next generation, largely through the foundation of the Rough Magic SEEDS scheme. It is evidence of her fundamental belief in mentorship, empowerment and opportunity as the only foundation for a Living Theatre. This is echoed in her work in rehearsal room, which is deeply collaborative and Playful.

Parker has acknowledged that she learned her trade at Trinity, where she made the friends who would become the foundation of Rough Magic Theatre Company. She has also on numerous occasions spoken of the influence of her uncle Stewart Parker and about how much she learned from him and part of her work today is keeping his legacy alive. Additionally, she has acknowledged the influence of the French director Ariane Mnouchkine (who herself is often identified as “radical”) whose company Théâtre du Soleil is unlike any other in the contemporary theatre. Like Mnouchkine and Théâtre du Soleil, which is a commune, Parker speaks of her relationship with Rough Magic as being one of family.

Interviewed while directing a new reworking of Phaedra (2010), in an Irish setting with music (translator, composer, and director, all women), Parker talks about the challenge of directing, describing how “When you do any play, you bring your whole toolbox to it, everything that influences you and someway uses you as a conduit but you have to make a selection about what you will actually bring to the specific demands of the show” (Areaman, “Interview”).

What makes Parker “radical” as a director? It is that toolbox that she brings with her as a director and as Artistic Director of Rough Magic, which includes her bravery in choosing new work and reworking classic texts for new audiences, her strong commitment to women’s writing and to establishing the SEEDS program for new young artists as theatre practitioners, her generosity in opening her world to so many, fellow artists, interviewers, and scholars. As the artistic head of Rough Magic, she has done more than any other artistic head in Ireland to promote writing by women and to open the door for young directors through the SEEDS program. Parker notes that if you look back over the array of Rough Magic productions, “none of the shows look like one another.” She says that “you have to go for new territory each time, otherwise you stagnate. For me it’s not deliberately looking for the opposite of what you have just done but it really helps if you go into a whole new world or a whole new thread of theatre” (Keane, “Diatribes of a Dilettante”). And as Methven has pointed out, it is Parker’s commitment to mentorship and empowerment of young artists, particularly women, that makes her radical. In the commercial world of theatre, this is an unusual stance, a radical position and it is the essence of what makes Parker the skilled director that she is.

Works Cited:

Billington, Michael. Rev. of The Silver Tassie, dir. Lynne Parker. Theatre Record 15.10 (1995): 589. Print.

Bourke, Siobhán, ed. Rough Magic: First Plays. London: Methuen, 1999. Print.

Coyle, Jane. Rev. of Macbeth dir. Lynne Parker. The Stage. The Stage Media Co. Ltd., 26 Oct. 2012. Web. 9 Oct. 2013.

“Developing Artists.” RoughMagic.ie. Rough Magic Theatre Company, n.d. Web. 25 Jan. 2014.

Fasciati, Diego. “Rough Magic Archive 10.” RoughMagic. Rough Magic Theatre Company, 26 Oct. 2012. Web. 3 Oct. 2013.

Finkel, David. Rev. of Improbable Frequency, dir. Lynne Parker. TheaterMania. n.p. 5 Dec. 2008. Web. 11 Oct. 2013.

Fitpatrick, Lisa. Rev. of Macbeth, dir. Lynne Parker. Irish Theatre Magazine. 25 Oct. 2012. Web. 10 Oct. 2013.

Headrick, Charlotte. “‘Women are Good at this Job’: Lynne Parker, Director.” Northwest Theatre Review 6 (1998): 9-17. Print.

Hughes, Declan. “On Not Rewriting Tartuffe.” DeclanHughesBooks, n.d. Web. 30 Sept. 2013.

Keane, Caomhan. “In Conversation with Lynne Parker: Improbable Frequency.” Entertainment.ie. Entertainment Media Networks Ltd. 17 Feb. 2012. Web. 9 Oct.2013.

---. “Lynne Parker Interview.” Diatribes of a Dilettante 30 May 2010, Web. 29 Jan. 2014.

Keating, Sara. “Female Voices finally finding a stage” Irish Times 2 March 2011. Web. IrishTimes.com, 14 March 2011.

Kingston, Jeremy. Rev. of Love and a Bottle, dir. Lynne Parker. The Times, 8 June 1992. n.p. Print.

Leeney, Cathy, ed. Seen and Heard. Carysfort Press, 2001. Print.

Manfull, Helen. In Other Words: Women Directors Speak. Lyme, NH: Smith and Kraus, 1997. Print.

Methven, Eleanor. Message to the author. 8 Oct. 2013. Email.

Moore, Carol. Message to the author. 13 Oct. 2013. Email.

N.A., “The Silver Tassie, Almeida.” Herald Scotland. Herald and Times Group. 16 May 1995. Web. 11 Oct. 2013.

O’Rourke, Chris. “Dublin Theatre Festival, 2013-Critical Acclaim for a Magical Production.” Tulsa Theater Examiner. Clarity Media Group, 4 Oct. 2013. Web. 10 October 2013.

O’Toole, Fintan. Critical Moments: Fintan O’Toole on Modern Irish Theatre. Ed. Julia Furay, and Redmond O’Hanlon. Dublin: Carysfort, 2003. Print.

---. “Culture Shock: Dublin Theatre Festival: Ambitious, Extravagant and a Little Reckless Theatre.” Irish Times. The Irish Times Ltd., 10 October 2013. Web. 10 Oct. 2013.

Parker, Lynne. “Introduction.” Rough Magic: First Plays. Bourke x-xii. Print.

---. “Lynne Parker-IWD.” YouTube. YouTube, LLC. 8 March 2011. Web. 10 Oct. 2013.

---. “Lynne Parker, School of Drama, Film, and Music.” Areaman, Areaman Productions 11 January 2011. Web. 29 January 2014.

Roche, Anthony. Contemporary Irish Drama: From Beckett to McGuinness. Dublin: Gill and Macmillan, 1994. Print.

Taylor, Paul. Rev. of “Danti-Dan, Hampstead Theatre, London.” Independent, 15 June 1995. Web. 3 October 2013.

“The Whisperers.” RoughMagic.ie. Rough Magic Theatre Company, n.d. Web. 10 Oct. 2013.

Woddis, Carole. “Dublin Theatre Festival: Lynne Parker and Rough Magic.” theatreVOICE. 8 Oct. 2010. Web. 29 Jan. 2014.

Extract From: Radical Contemporary Theatre Practices By Women In Ireland, edited by Miriam Haughton and Mária Kurdi (2015)

Cross Reference: Leeney’s following essay and Declan Hughes’ essay in Part Two

See Also: Performing Feminisms in Contemporary Ireland, edited by Lisa Fitzpatrick