The Golden Thread: Women playwrights from Mary Davis to #WakingtheFeminists

The Golden Thread: Irish Women Playwrights, 1716 - 2016

Author: edited by David Clare, Fiona McDonagh, and Justine Nakase

ISBN-13: 978-1800859470

Publisher: Liverpool University Press

Guideline Price: £90

In 1994, the centenary year of the birth of playwright Teresa Deevy, her play Katie Roche found its way to the Peacock stage of the Abbey Theatre. Amid much positive feedback, one (male) reviewer opined that “unfortunately today there seems little point in dragging out this eccentric curio … a very silly, very dated, very small and unexciting little play”. That “review” is just one symptom of the undeniably gendered and patriarchal working and artistic conditions experienced by women playwrights in Ireland.

The Golden Thread: Irish Women Playwrights, 1716-2016, edited by David Clare, Fiona McDonagh and Justine Nakase, a two-volume set, traces a linear history of plays by women produced in Ireland, beginning in the 18th century with Mary Davys, the first Irish-born woman playwright to have a significant production in Ireland or Britain, and culminating with the event that sparked a major movement, #WakingtheFeminists, that has since reassessed the working conditions (or lack of) for Irish women in theatre.

Key events over the timespan of the book chart the progress and also many frustrations for Irish women playwrights, perhaps none more eye-roll inducing than the comments made by a Dublin bookseller to a visiting American scholar who, when looking for published works by women dramatists, was told “there are no Irish women playwrights”. The statement would go on to be the title of an important event held by Glasshouse Productions in 1992, the year which also splits these two volumes.

Play boys

The history of Irish theatre has largely been a history of the play boys – the male writers, but what about the play women? The books’ editors highlight three reasons for the lack of recognition for work by Irish women dramatists: their plays are less likely to be produced, less likely to be revived, and less likely to be published. All are absolutely true, but another factor to be considered is the history of theatre criticism, particularly in the 20th century, which largely has been a history of male criticism (with exceptions – Mary Manning and Caroline Swift for example, were noted critics of theatre and dance respectively).

How does this reflect the voices which carry through time, as future generations return to dis(re)cover past works by women writers? The editors mention this point on criticism in their introduction to Volume II and further future study on the history of criticism of plays by women would be well worth exploring. Studies of Carolyn Swift and Jennifer Johnston would be welcome additions to an already admittedly packed Volume II. While Feargal Whelan’s chapter on Máiréad Ní Ghráda looks at her 1964 An Triail/On Trial, wider examination of writing by women in Irish would also be interesting to consider.

The editors make surgical-like precision in their dismantling of the concept of “canon” in Irish drama, a term in itself which is a self-sustaining misrepresentation of “important” literary works. The pacey chapters (42 in all) make welcome discussion of intersectional feminist works, making visible those women writers, their stories, and their characters’ voices, who are otherwise marginalised beyond the stage and also often rendered invisible within the mechanisms of the State – those who are disabled, queer, Travellers, carers, migrants and others who find a place to be heard and recognised on the stage.

Chapters on work by Rosaleen McDonagh, Amy Conroy, Marie Jones, and Lizzie Nunnery, the latter’s Intemperance (2007), a fascinating insight into mental health difficulties among Irish diasporic communities in Liverpool, show how such communities find voice in the theatre. Two coda chapters, from Cathy Leeney and Melissa Sihra respectively, complete each ground-breaking volume with reflections that shape past critical understandings and set foundations for future thought-provoking studies.

Nation/nationhood

Social and political contexts also run deep in the question of nation/nationhood and identity, from 19th-century works by Clotilde Graves, through to 20th-century works by Christine Longford, Maura Laverty, Anne Devlin and Christina Reid.

These fascinating and richly detailed volumes throw open an archive of Irish theatrical work from past and present, carefully and rigorously assembling an array of articles and reflections. The editors and contributors argue articulately not just for the need for these volumes to explore a vibrant and essential (neglected) part of Irish cultural history, but also to identify and dismantle the gendered working and artistic conditions that have resulted in such a one-sided and male history of the Irish theatre across three centuries. “That,” as the editors explain, “is an Irish theatre world worth establishing”.

In 2020, Garry Hynes directed Druid Theatre’s landmark production of DruidGregory, a series of Gregory plays which opened in Coole Park, Gregory’s home estate. Aligned with the plays was a series of commissioned poetry readings. One poem, In the Heart of the Wood, was translated by Gregory and read by writer Doireann Ní Gríofa, who likens the layering of language through the poem as an act of “cloaking” by Gregory. The Golden Thread volumes, by pulling on the fibres of Irish theatre and cultural history, uncloaks the work of Irish women dramatists and makes visible the legacy and achievements of the women of Ireland’s theatre.

Barry Houlihan is an archivist at the James Hardiman Library at NUI Galway.