Gender, Authorship and Performance in Selected Plays by Contemporary Irish Women Playwrights: Mary Elizabeth Burke-Kennedy, Marie Jones, Marina Carr, Emma Donoghue.

Anna McMullan

During the twentieth century, the staging of the Irish nation’s struggles to define itself was primarily in the hands of male authors from W.B. Yeats to Brian Friel. The absence of women from the national pantheon of playwrights does not necessarily mean that Irish women do not write plays, but that for a variety of reasons, Irish women playwrights in the past have had no place in the selection of playwrights and texts that the culture has endorsed as being of significance and value. These selected texts, often referred to collectively as a “canon”, are presented in established venues, and are circulated, published, re-produced, studied and written about. They often refer to each other, drawing on a literary and dramatic heritage which extends back through Western culture to ancient Greece. That heritage is largely shared between men – when women authors have been recorded in Western theatre history it has been as rare exceptions. Until recently, the only woman who figured in the Irish theatrical canon was Lady Augusta Gregory, and then mainly as co-founder of the Abbey Theatre rather than as a playwright.

C.L. Innes suggests that the dominance of the male literary writer in Irish culture is linked to the Modernist emphasis on the role of the individual artist in contesting dominant models of authority. In Woman and Nation in Irish Literature and Society 1880-1935, she refers to the focus of most Irish critics on Irish modernism, and their interest in the obsessive intertwining by Yeats and Joyce of their own unfolding identities with the creation of an Irish identity…. Male critics and male writers alike have also been absorbed into the ‘family romance’ which becomes linked to the colonial relationship; their concern is to challenge the authority of the father – the colonial power and the colonial cultural hegemony and tradition. Women writers and critics have often been marginalized in this contestation and struggle for authority (Innes: 1993, 4).

However, the parameters of Irish dramatic authorship are currently being renegotiated. Traditional issues of identity, politics, authority, dispossession, language and history are being redefined through the re-evaluation of the work of earlier women playwrights, including Lady Gregory and Teresa Deevy, and in the work of the current generation of women writers. Women playwrights are reclaiming the theatre as a space where they can explore the relationship between the public and the private, the political and the personal, sexuality and gender on their own terms.

The traditional canon is also being challenged by the increasing diversity of theatre practice in Ireland (See Bort, ed.: 1996). These theatre forms, including Theatre in Education and community theatre, are often geared towards particular, rather than “universal” audiences, and use a variety of modes of theatrical authorship, where members of the company and the community may have an input into the text through improvisation sessions or collaborative creation. Since the origins of the modern Irish theatre movement, women have been involved in collaborative theatre making. Such working practices in theatre or culture tend not to be recognised according to the traditional criteria of authorship. Writing of the decades preceding and following the founding of the nation, C.L. Innes notes that:

An approach to history and to political change as the work of groups rather than individual personalities, articulated by Anna Parnell, also typifies much literary and cultural activity carried on by women with a commitment to Irish nationalism. Here too, the merging of individual identities, or rather, the lack of concern about personal acclaim, is noteworthy…. Too often critics have taken the self-effacement of such women writers as an excuse for ignoring them (Innes: 1993, 125, 127).

In the contemporary theatre scene, many women are involved in non-traditional theatre forms, including those which are educational or community based. There is an increasing recognition of difference within the nation, and that there are many different audiences, with different needs and expectations. Jill Dolan emphasizes that: “Canons, by implication, exclude not only worthy plays but worthy spectators on the basis of their ideological perspectives.… A useful by-product of the deconstruction of traditional canons will be the dismembering of the generic spectator whom the dramatic canons once addressed” (Dolan: 1993, 40). Many Irish playwrights, male and female, established and emergent, work with communities helping them to explore their experiences, conflicts and traumas through the languages and structures of theatre.

Charabanc, a Belfast based professional theatre group with a strong community base, was founded by five out of work actresses and operated from 1983 – 1995. They brought in the playwright Martin Lynch to help them script their first play, Lay Up Your Ends, but he encouraged them to find their own voices (See Harris: 1996). They carried out research on women working in the former Belfast linen mills, where the play was set, and this community research became characteristic of their future work. They foregrounded frequently anarchic humour and the use of non-literary and popular forms in their work, in order to address an audience who would not usually go to the theatre. Through the research and devising processes Marie Jones, one of the founder members, emerged as an author in her own right. In an interview with Luke Clancy, she speaks of her responsibility to her audience: “The people I write for are the people in my plays. They are really just ordinary people who are really are powerless; who really don’t have a voice. I’ve always felt that I have this huge responsibility, because the background I came up in nobody had any power, nobody had any voice” (Jones: Irish Times, February 20th, 1996).

While women are involved in a range of theatre practices in Ireland, women remain underrepresented in the profession of playwriting. The reasons for this may include lack of resources, alienation from traditional working practices and forms of authorship in the theatre, and a lack of engagement with women’s playwriting in the channels of public discourse. This is beginning to change, and there is a growing interest in the perspectives on identity, sexuality and the legacies of myth and history which Irish women playwrights have presented. The playwrights whose work I shall be looking at in more detail below contest traditional stereotypes of women as a-sexual self-sacrificing mothers, powerless victims, or sexual comforts. Women are centre stage, propelling the action, and forcefully articulating their subjectivity and their sexuality. These playwrights present a range of theatre languages and often exploit the corporeal medium of performance to destabilize traditional concepts of gender.

Mary Elizabeth Burke-Kennedy worked in Focus Theatre, Dublin, as an actress and became resident director from 1976 to 1983, when she founded Storytellers Theatre Company. Several of her plays have been based on the material of Irish folk tales and mythology. Women in Arms was shortlisted for the Anglo-American Susan Smith Blackburn Award at the time of its first production by Cork Theatre Company in 1984. This play tells the story of four of the major female figures from the Ulster cycle of stories in Irish mythology: Nessa, Macha, Deirdre, and the proud warrior queen, Maeve. They are variously positioned in relation to authority and handle power differently.

The once gentle Essa, intellectual and writer, is rechristened Nessa, the tough one, after her humiliation at the macho court of King Fergus, and, on her return, she discovers her home in ruins and her beloved twelve tutors murdered. In spite of her father’s warning that “there was nothing she – a woman – could do in the circumstances” (unpublished typescript), she becomes a warrior, meets Cathbad the Druid, unbeknownst to her the slayer of her tutors, and has a child by him. Cathbad is a renowned prophet and guardian of secret knowledges which he passes on to Nessa. Nessa’s skill therefore lies not only in physical prowess but in her use of the knowledges she has acquired. Thus armed, she arrives at Fergus’ court, seduces him and marries him. Thereupon, she insists that her son, Conchubar, is king for a year, during which time she wields the real power, and does so so successfully, that Fergus is unable to recover his kingship again. Through her young son, she rules Ulster, using her power with her knowledge to maintain her own position and to civilize the land, at once manipulative ruler and benevolent educator:

NESSA: She supervised the building of the three houses of Eamhain Macha. The Red Branch House became famous for civilized entertainment.

MAEVE: No more orgies.

NAOISE: Weapons were kept in the second branch. Drink in the third.

DEIRDRE: Bronze mirrors in Conchobar’s apartment; spies in every other.

MACHA: She encouraged the visitations of poets and musicians.

DEIRDRE: She ‘invited’ the women to take instruction.

In the second story, Macha appears to Cruinniuc, the farmer, and his sons: “She poked up the fire, swept the hearth and laid her hand, companionably, on his thigh”. She warns her new family not to speak of her, but, during a festival held in honour of the new king Conchobar, from which she is absent because heavily pregnant, Cruinniuc cannot contain a boast that Macha can run faster than the King’s magnificent horses. Reluctantly, Macha runs and wins the race, but, as she gives birth to twins immediately afterwards, she curses the warriors of Ulster. Her curse condemns them to experience the agony of childbirth just as they are preparing to go into battle, transforming the traditional suffering of women into a powerful weapon.

Mary Elizabeth Burke Kennedy’s Deirdre is neither tragic heroine nor treacherous seductress – some of the roles she has played in numerous retellings of the myth. Maire Herbert emphasizes that the material of Celtic myth was “protean, reflecting the manner in which the theme was constantly reworked throughout the centuries, to suit the changing circumstances in which it was being re-counted” (Herbert: 1991, 14). This Deirdre is determined and sure of what she wants, trusting her own sexuality and emotional responses. She runs away from the fortress where the King Conchobar is keeping her until he can marry her, because he was beginning to stifle her, and his lust repelled her. Conchobar’s, and indeed, other powerful men’s desire to possess Deirdre is seen as instrumental in the disaster. When she is a young girl, Conchobar tells her the countryside she loves will be hers as his bride. Deirdre comments: “That meant nothing to her. Owning it. Older people were always on about ownership. Just be”. The economy of patriarchal ownership over land and women is opposed to Deirdre’s unselfish and uncalculated responses:

FERGUS: They loved her without reservation, for that was how she gave her own love.

(This opposition is similar to the French writer, Helene Cixous’ opposition between the masculine economy of the Proper (propriety, ownership, calculated measurement of assets) and the feminine economy of the Gift. For a discussion of this see Toril Moi: 1985, 110-13.)

When Naoise and his brothers are killed by Conchobar on their return, despite his promises of forgiveness, Deirdre is again imprisoned by Conchobar. Exasperated by her refusal of him, he orders her to be exchanged between him and the man who killed Naoise. Deirdre kills herself rather than become “a ewe between two rams”, thereby taking her destiny into her own hands by the only means available to her.

In the next and final story, we see that women can also become obsessed with ownership and rivalry. Like the other three women, Queen Maeve is comfortable with her active sexuality:

MAEVE: Maeve was the queen of Connaught; a warm-hearted hospitable woman, as every man who ever stayed at her house could testify, for she went out of her way to fill his plate, his goblet and his bed. And the one man was never enough for her.

She is the equal of her husband, Ailill, in wealth and possessions, and they are “delighted with each other”, until it is discovered that Ailill has in his herd a magnificent bull, which Maeve cannot match. She sends an expedition to Ulster to bring back their famous bull, the Dun Bo Cuailnge, and a bloody war ensues.

These figures are all strong influential women who have left their mark on Irish myth and history. They contrast with the highly feminised images which emerged during the nineteenth century, as women became symbols of a national loss of authority under the imperial rule of England. Citing Lorna Reynolds, Lyn Innes refers to the “change from one kind of society to another, in which the powerful and sovereign Mother-goddess figure of Maeve is supplanted by a romantic and tragic heroine in a society where women lose their rights and become chattels” (Innes: 1993, 22, 34). Burke-Kennedy reclaims these powerful women without idealising them.

The play challenges traditional assumptions about gender, power and language – the women are self-assured and articulate with a strong sense of humour. However, when power is involved, it can be both used and abused. While we are presented with a spectrum of attitudes and characters, all four main figures have actively participated in the violent events which have shaped their people’s history, for good or ill, thereby restoring women’s place in and responsibility for political/historical processes. As Gerardine Meaney insists:

Women are not… essentially more peaceable, less dogmatic, uninfected by bloodthirsty political ideologies…. Women have supported and carried out violent actions. They have gained and lost from their involvement. If patriarchal history has portrayed us as bystanders to the political process, it has lied (Meaney: 1993, 238).

The form of the play is highly performative, and, while the set is bare apart from isolated boulders, the actors’ bodies are used to create landscape. While the story of each woman is told, the other characters act as chorus, and take up other parts as required.

There is the sound of wind blowing over a vast empty space. The actors take their places around the boulders, sitting, leaning, curled around them, becoming extensions of the landscape. Each actor speaks as if beginning a particular story. Each story should be allowed to hang in silence for a beat, before the next cue comes in.

MACHA: One time…

DEIRDRE: Once, there was…

CON: Now in those days…

MAEVE: Upon a time…

NAOISE: Now once…

FERGUS: Now there was once…

NESSA: Then there was the…

They keep repeating their lines, letting their voices mingle. As the voices build to a gentle climax, Naoise cuts through them.

NAOISE: Now once.

In Women in Arms, story-telling is an important vehicle for alternative histories. The focus on four different stories and on an ensemble playing team creates a flexible, accessible and rhythmic style which rejects a linear unfolding of narrative, and reclaims an oral tradition of story-telling and performance, anchored in the corporeal presence of the narrator/s. The particular mixture of corporeal enactment, dialogue and oral narrative enables each of the four women to be simultaneously inside and outside her own story, actor and commentator, past and present, each becoming part of the others’ stories.

Marie Jones developed as a writer with Charabanc Theatre Company which operated from 1983 until 1995. Since the disbandment of Charabanc, she has achieved broad popular success with several plays, including her one man show, A Night in November, which explores sectarian attitudes in Northern Ireland and one man’s rejection of them, Women on the Verge of HRT, and Stones in His Pockets, which explores the effect on a small community of the installation of a film crew working on a Hollywood version of Irish life. Her main characters are not drawn from myth – they are “ordinary” individuals, usually working class, fighting prejudice, discrimination and narrowmindedness in others and sometimes in themselves. However, she often takes her characters into a “mythical” realm of play through theatre, where the usual barriers of communication or perception become flexible, capable of being examined and changed. She draws on popular culture, from football (A Night in November) to popular music (Women on the Verge of HRT) in order to extend the potential of theatre to question dominant ideologies and attitudes to a wide audience. An important tool in this project is her use of the ironic and deflationary force of humour.

Women on the Verge of HRT is set in a bedroom in the hotel in Donegal owned by the well-known singer, Daniel O’Donnell, where each year he holds a tea party to meet with his fans. The bedroom is occupied by Vera, whose ex-husband Dessie has just had a son with his new wife, twenty-five years younger than him, and Anna, who is trying to hide from others and herself the fact that her marriage to Marty went stale a long time ago. Vera, the more extrovert and questioning character, complains about the double standards applied to male and female sexuality. She feels that if she were to choose a man twenty five years her junior, tongues would wag. She has been dating but no one special:

I wanted to shop around, there is no harm… the harm is the shop is about to close and I haven’t finished my messages… its like… going for your groceries at a quarter past five and then you hear… ‘This shop will be closing in five minutes’, and you panic and take something you don’t want… that’s what I’m scared of… panic buying (Jones: 1999, 5).

The two women start up a conversation with the room service waiter, Fergal, who performs conjuring tricks, and has a passing resemblance to Daniel O’Donnell himself (the role was originally played by Dan Gordon). He invites them to come and watch the dawn on the nearby beach. The second act is set on the beach, which turns out to be an “enchanted” realm, haunted by the suppressed voice of the banshee, where the waiter becomes a kind of “shape-shifter” (a traditional Irish spirit which can take any shape), acting out the roles of those most closely connected to Vera and Anna, including Marty, Dessie and his new wife. In this “magical” space of performance, where hidden assumptions and attitudes are brought to the surface and exposed, they are able to confront the sources of their grievances, and evaluate the possibilities of change, in themselves and others. Women on the Verge of HRT protests vociferously against dominant attitudes towards women’s sexuality and the menopause, celebrating women’s refusal to be shut up and rendered sexually invisible after a certain age. The play is punctuated with songs, breaking the traditional narrative framework. The recurrent refrain is a refusal to be thrown on the “sexual scrap heap”:

Chorus: I wont go easy I’ll go down protestin’

The rest of my life is too long for restin’

All I’m askin’ is the right to reply

When I’m told my passion should lie down and die

(Jones: 1999, 6).

Marina Carr is one of the most prominent of the younger generation of Irish playwrights, in national and international terms. She was born in Dublin and was brought up in the Irish Midlands. Her first play, Ullaloo, not the first to be performed, was presented at the Peacock Theatre, Dublin, in 1991. Low in the Dark is Marina Carr’s second play and was first presented at Project Arts by Crooked Sixpence Theatre Co. in 1989. Carr’s plays have spanned a wide range of theatrical genres. Her latest three plays, The Mai (1994), Portia Coughlan (1995) and By the Bog of Cats (1998) combine elements of realism with mythical references, otherworldly visitations and black humour. Set in the Midlands, each play focuses on a central female character struggling to establish her identity which is symbiotically connected with a lost other, whether husband, brother or Mother. Although for each of the protagonists the struggle ends in suicide, their lucid perception of their own alienation, their evocation of mythical forces, and their critique of the lack of accommodation of difference in small town or rural Ireland is powerfully articulated.

Carr’s early work discards realism altogether, and is characterised by non-naturalist settings, non-psychologized characters and a non-linear structure. The names of the characters in Low in the Dark are abstract and symbolic rather than indicative of social or familial status.

BENDER, in her fifties, attractive but ageing.

BINDER, BENDER’s daughter, in her mid-twenties, a spoilt brat, whimsical.

BAXTER, in his mid-thirties, CURTAINS’ lover.

BONE, in his late twenties, BINDER’s lover.

CURTAINS, can be any age as she is covered from head to toe in heavy, brocaded curtains and rail. Not an inch of her face or body is seen throughout the play (Carr 1999: 5).

The gender divide is literalised as the stage is split between the female area, representing a bathroom (associated with intimate bodily functions), and the male area, a work space, consisting of tyres, rims, blocks and unfinished walls. Curtains opens and closes the play, telling a story of the man from the north and the woman from the south. The dialogue is punctuated by fragments of her tale of their vain attempts to communicate: “Long after it was over, the man and woman realized that not only had they never met north by north east or south by south west, much worse, they had never met. And worse still, they never would, they never could, they never can and they never will” (Carr 1999: 99).

There is no unfolding of story or action, but rather a series of juxtaposed dialogues or role plays, like Estragon and Vladimir’s “canters” in Waiting for Godot, or the music-hall and variety acts which inspired them. The main focus is on the performance of identity. With the exception of Curtains whose body cannot be gender identified since it is never seen, the women adopt male roles and the men, female roles. Such self-conscious performances of gender identity question any kind of gender essentialism, and comically frame our expectations of gender roles and differences. The lack of communication between the sexes is both recounted in Curtains story and articulated on stage:

BONE: I want a woman who knows how to love. I want lazer beams coming out of her eyes when I enter the room. I want her to knit like one possessed. I want her to cook softly.

BINDER: I want a man who’ll wash my underwear, one who’ll brush my hair, one who’ll talk before, during and after. I want a man who’ll make other men look mean (Carr 1999: 48).

Low in the Dark refuses to idealize or essentialize the role of mother in relation to female identity. Maternity is taken to parodic extremes as both male and female characters become pregnant:

BENDER: There’s plenty where she came from… as soon as I get my figure back I’ll have another and then another, because I am fertile!

BINDER: I had a dream last night your uterus fell out.

BENDER: I dreamt your ovaries exploded!

BINDER: At least I have ovaries and eggs, lots of eggs, much more than you because I’m young. I’m in my prime.

BENDER: I’ve had my fair share of eggs. Now give her to me.

BINDER: Take her then! (Throws the baby) (Carr: 1999, 10-11).

Items of costume such as pink socks become signifiers of gender which can be exchanged between male and female characters. The foregrounding of the body and costume point to the construction of identity through social and gender conditioning inscribed on the body. Role play and performance are used to emphasize the rigidity of traditional gender roles. Curtains’ story, however, offers a final note of hope or perhaps a challenge, as the woman from the south confronts the man from the north: “‘You’ she said, ‘if you have courage get off your bicycle and come with me’” (Carr 1999: 99).

Emma Donoghue was born in Dublin in 1969. She has published an academic study of Passions Between Women: British Lesbian Culture 1668-1801, as well as works of fiction, including the novels Stir-Fry and Hood. Her play, I Know My Own Heart, subtitled a Lesbian Regency Romance, was first premiered as a lunchtime show by Glasshouse Productions, then given a full production by the same company in October 1993 at Andrew’s Lane Theatre. Based on Anne Lister’s diaries (1791-1840), this play explores female sexuality and the performance of gender roles from a lesbian perspective. Teresa de Lauretis argues that within the masculine sexual economy “female desire for the self-same, an other female self, cannot be recognised” (De Lauretis: 1990, 18). Lesbian sexuality claims women as both objects and subjects of desire. Jill Dolan writes: “When the locus of desire changes, the demonstration of sexuality and gender roles also changes” (Dolan: 1987, 173).

The main character is a squire’s daughter, who has liaisons with three women, one of whom, Tib, is her social equal while the other two – daughters of Farmer Brown – are social inferiors. The play focuses on her negotiations of her desire, on the one hand, and social conventions and distinctions on the other. She tries to resist her infatuation with Marianne Brown, musing: “Think what damage this acquaintance may do to my dignity, my social standing” (Unpublished Manuscript). (Note: Subsequently published in Seen and Heard: Six New Plays By Irish Women, edited by Cathy Leeney)

Marianne returns her passion, emotionally and sexually, and continues the relationship after her marriage, though both are tormented by other liaisons – Anne by Marianne’s “connections” with her husband, Marianne’s by her husband’s infidelities and Anne’s liaisons with her friend Tib, and Marianne’s sister, Nancy. Again, the central character is not romanticized – we are aware of her class position operating in relation to her socially marginalised sexuality, producing a complex profile of privilege and constraint, confidence and vulnerability. Costume, in particular her cloak, is important in signifying Anne’s hybrid gender identity – while enjoying female intimacy her dress code and behaviour appropriate the masculine.

Ladies and Gentlemen also focuses on a historical story – a love story set on the East Coast of the U.S.A. between a late nineteenth century male impersonator, Annie Hindle, and her Irish immigrant dresser Annie Ryan, or Ryanny, who decide to get married. Their happiness is short-lived, however, as Ryanny dies of breast cancer. The first part of the story takes place in the dressing rooms/stage of Tony Pastor’s Vaudeville Troupe. The other characters are a female impersonator, Gilbert, and another dresser, Ellie, one time lover of Annie, who graduates to becoming a male impersonator as the play progresses. Costume is foregrounded, as the stage personas of the characters parody gender stereotypes and unsettle gender identities through cross-dressing and songs such as “A Real Man” sung by Annie: “As men go I’m much realer than some” (Donoghue: 1998, 103). The play draws on the musical hall, vaudeville and variety act format to both entertain and foreground issues of performing gender, while the enigma of Ryanny, partly conventional Irish Catholic girl, but married to a woman, provides the emotional centre of the play.

These plays present a range of very different perspectives and identity positions, whose relationship to dominant concepts of cultural identity is complex and contestatory. The work of these and other playwrights challenges conventional representations of women, clearing a space for the representation of female subjectivities, in pain or pleasure. While many of these plays show the rigidity and restrictions of gender roles in Irish culture, they also frequently embrace performative strategies such as cross-dressing to unsettle traditional gender positions, presenting gender not as destiny, but as subversive performance:

As a corporeal field of cultural play, gender is a basically innovative affair, although it is quite clear that there are strict punishments for contesting the script by performing out of turn or through unwarranted improvisations. Gender is not passively scripted on the body, and neither is it determined by nature, language, the symbolic, or the overwhelming history of patriarchy. Gender is what is put on, invariably, under constraint, daily and incessantly, with anxiety and pleasure, but if this continuous act is mistaken for a natural or linguistic given, power is relinquished to expand the cultural field bodily through subversive performances of various kinds (Butler: 1990, 282).

Works Cited:

Bort, Eberhard, (1996), The State of Play: Irish Theatre in the ‘Nineties (Trier: Wissenschaftlicher Verlag Trier)

Burke-Kennedy, Mary Elizabeth, Women in Arms (All quotations from unpublished manuscript)

Butler, Judith, (1990), ‘Performative Acts and Gender Constitution: An essay in Phenomenology and Feminist Theory’, in Performing Feminisms, ed., Sue-Ellen Case (Baltimore: John Hopkins Press) 270-282

Marina Carr, (1999), Plays 1 (London: Faber and Faber)

Case, Sue-Ellen, (1990), Performing Feminisms: Feminist Critical Theory and Theatre (Baltimore and London: John Hopkins University Press)

De Lauretis, Teresa, (1990), ‘Sexual Indifference and Lesbian Representation’ in ed., Sue-Ellen Case, Performing Feminisms: Feminist Critical Theory and Theatre (Baltimore and London: John Hopkins University Press) 17-39

Dolan, Jill, (1987), ‘The Dynamics of Desire: Sexuality and Gender in Pornography and Performance’, Theatre Journal 39.2, May, 156-174

------ (1993), The Feminist Spectator as Critic (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press)

Donoghue, Emma, I Know My Own Heart (All quotations from unpublished manuscript) (Note: Subsequently published in Seen and Heard: Six New Plays By Irish Women, edited by Cathy Leeney)

--- (1998), Ladies and Gentlemen (Dublin: New Island Books)

Gallagher, S.F., (1983), Women in Irish Legend, Life and Literature (Gerrards Cross: Colin Smythe)

Harris, Claudia, (1996), ‘Reinventing Women: Charabanc Theatre Company’ in ed., Eberhard Bort, The State of Play: Irish Theatre in the ‘Nineties (Trier: Wissenschaftlicher Verlag Trier), 104-123

Herbert, Maire, (1991), ‘Celtic Heroine? The archaeology of the Deirdre Story’, in eds., Toni O’Brien Johnson and David Cairns, Gender in Irish Writing (Buckingham: Open University Press), 13-22

Innes, C.L., (1993), Woman and Nation in Irish Literature and Society 1880-1935 (Hemel Hempstead: Harvester Wheatsheaf)

Jones, Marie, (1995), A Night in November (London: Nick Hern Books)

------ (1996), ‘Speaking for the Powerless’, Interview with Luke Clancy, Irish Times, February 20

--- (1999), Women on the Verge of HRT (London: Samuel French)

Meaney, Gerardine, (1993), ‘Sex and Nation: Women in Irish Culture and Politics’, in ed., Ailbhe Smyth, The Irish Women’s Studies Reader (Dublin: Attic Press), 230-244

Moi, Toril, (1985), Sexual/Textual Politics: Feminist Literary Theory (London: Methuen)

Johnson, Toni O’Brien and David Cairns, (1991), eds., Gender in Irish Writing (Buckingham: Open University Press)

Reynolds, Lorna, (1983), ‘Irish Women in Legend, Literature and Life’, in ed., S.F. Gallagher, Women in Irish Legend, Life and Literature (Gerrards Cross: Colin Smythe), 15

Smyth, Ailbhe, (1993), The Irish Women’s Studies Reader (Dublin: Attic Press)

Extract From: Theatre Stuff: Critical Essays on Contemporary Irish Theatre, edited by Eamonn Jordan (2000)

Cross Reference: Various essays on the writers discussed here in this article

See Also: Performing Feminisms in Contemporary Ireland, edited by Lisa Fitzpatrick and Seen and Heard: Six New Plays By Irish Women, edited by Cathy Leeney.