Female voices finally finding a stage

Irish female playwrights have traditionally been under represented, but two new plays at the Peacock showcase their increasing confidence and relevance, writes SARA KEATING

‘THERE ARE No Irish Women Playwrights” was the name of a two-part festival staged at the Project Arts Centre in 1992 and 1993 by Glasshouse Productions. The festival’s aim was two-fold: firstly, to stage the work of women writers such as Lady Gregory and Teresa Deevy whose plays had been excised from the Irish theatrical canon, and secondly to provide a context for staging the plays of emerging contemporary female playwrights. There are women playwrights in Ireland, the festival programme suggested; it is just that they get neither the critical attention nor their historical due.

Glasshouse’s festival could well be staged again today, as Irish women playwrights remain under-represented in Irish theatre. Indeed, Marina Carr, whose work featured at the Glasshouse festival, remains the only major female voice to have emerged in Irish theatre over the past 30 years. Of course, there have been some brilliant plays written by Irish women during this period. The work of Christina Reid, Anne Devlin and Marie Jones was a major influence on Northern Irish theatre during the 1980s, providing a critical female alternative to the patriarchal voice of Field Day Theatre Company.

In the 1990s plays by Emma Donoghue placed female sexuality on the Irish stage in a significant way, while Dolores Walshe refracted the gaze outside of Ireland with plays set in South Africa and California. Hilary Fannin's Doldrum Bayand Stella Feehily's Duck, both premiering in 2003, made a significant critical impact, while Elaine Murphy's Little Gemcontinues to tour internationally following its premiere at the Dublin Fringe Festival in 2008. There are dozens more names that could be added to the list.

However, the work of these writers, like the work of pioneers such as Gregory and Deevy before them, remains largely on the fringes of Irish theatrical discourse. Why? Is it because they provide a more individual, personal engagement with Ireland than the largely patriarchal canon, which is for the most part defined by its interrogation of the state? Or, as has been suggested, because the “private” discourse of the novel is less intimidating for women than the “public” space of the theatre is? There appears to be no easy answer, but the reality of their under-representation remains.

Aideen Howard, literary director at the Abbey Theatre, is “aware that the Abbey Theatre has a certain responsibility to try to redress the [gender] imbalance within Irish theatre,” she says. “When I took on the post in 2006, I had a clear ambition to promote and commission work by women.”

With the celebrated production of Carmel Winter's B for Babyat the Peacock Theatre last October, and with the premiere of new work by young writers Nancy Harris and Stacey Gregg forthcoming at the theatre this spring, it is clear that the Abbey's commitment is paying off. However, Howard is keen to reinforce the fact that "the [work] is being produced on its own merit. These are writers that are in it for the long haul, and we hope that we will have a relationship with them for the rest of their career."

Neither Nancy Harris nor Stacey Gregg seem particularly interested in talking about being “women writers”; in practical terms gender doesn’t make any difference when you are writing a play. They are more preoccupied with preparations for their forthcoming productions at the Peacock Theatre, and “terrifying” is a word that they both use to describe the process. Although they have both had work produced in London, they are aware of the “particular kind of scrutiny” that new work produced by the Abbey Theatre gets, as Howard, who has helped develop their plays, puts it.

It is fortunate, then, that Harris and Gregg offer such a diverse engagement with contemporary issues and theatrical form. Harris's No Romanceinterrogates the changing face of social interaction and sexuality in the internet age, while Gregg's Perveputs adolescence at the heart of family dysfunction in a play as preoccupied with the visual potential of theatre as it is with the literary text.

Both plays were commissioned by the Abbey following the successful 2008 Twenty Love season, in which the Abbey invited a group of young playwrights to write 20-minute plays. Harris and Gregg were then invited to develop full-length commissions for the theatre, but neither had any explicit expectation that their plays would ever be produced.

The commissioning process has become the “standard way in which theatres nurture young writers who are scratching at the edge of things”, Gregg says. However, the reality is that much of the time the work does not get produced.

Gregg, whose work regularly features enormous casts and ambitious staging conceits, knows this well. ( Perve, which features seven actors, is the smallest-scale piece that she has written.) It is a frustrating reality: writing plays that you might never see produced, she says. "To be honest you'd even struggle to call yourself a writer most of the time, because people want to know what you are writing, but you don't have any [production] to show them."

And Harris agrees: “It is like a musician playing an instrument that they cannot hear.” Yet the commissioning process has been invaluable to both writers as they have developed their craft. “Even if a theatre can’t give you a full production, [commissions] allow you to have a conversation, to get feedback, about your work,” Gregg explains.

Harris agrees: “Even just having someone talk to you about what you have written is important, because it makes you question your own choices. Or with a rehearsed reading [an important stage in the commissioning process] you get to see what you have imagined taking shape on stage. And that’s one of the hardest things to do when you are learning your craft: to realise that the play is not a literary text, not a finished document, and if you over-write it you will kill the magic between audience and actor.”

As Howard elaborates, it is from this need for practical experience that the New Playwrights Programme, now in its third year at the Abbey, evolved: to provide emerging writers with access to the total infrastructure of a working theatre. They engage in workshops with directors and actors. They observe the journey of a play from rehearsals to opening night, because it is important for them “to gain understanding of what actors and director will bring at 10 in the morning”. It was the type of programme that Gregg and Harris – who “sent my first play to the Abbey when I was 22” – would have benefited from when beginning to discover their individual theatrical voices.

Instead, Harris (daughter of senator and journalist Eoghan Harris) did the prestigious master’s programme in playwriting in Birmingham, where her work was constantly being discussed and dissected. “It helps to have a good relationship with criticism and disappointment,” she jokes, “but it also gives you confidence, to know that when you finish something it can stand up to interrogation.”

After a graduation showcase to which key members of the theatre industry were invited, Harris found herself with an agent and an attachment to the Bush Theatre. She has stayed in London since because “that is where most of the opportunities have been. But I feel like there is a really interesting culture of new writing evolving in Ireland at the moment.”

Belfast-native Gregg is also based in London, again a case of circumstance rather than ambition. Her journey to playwriting came through an undergraduate degree in documentary film-making, where she realised that the “visual culture I was interested in – editing together images into narratives – was something that applied to the theatre as well.”

Her first play, produced at the university theatre, got “a lot of attention, and I got an agent out of that”. London, she says, “has a bigger pool of opportunities but also writers, so it’s easier to drown in it too and that can happen to you in London very quickly. There is this infatuation with youth – I mean I’m 28 now, which is practically ancient in London – so going back and forth when the opportunities come seems to be the natural thing to do.”

Harris and Gregg both speak about having wholly committed themselves to writing for the theatre, but for the moment they remain a bit "terrified'', as the opening night of No Romancelooms and Perveis prepared for rehearsals.

“But terror’s good for you,” says Harris. “And there is something especially pure about the process when you are putting a new play out there, because nobody knows what to expect.”

No Romance

by Nancy Harris runs at the Peacock Theatre until April 2nd.

Perveby Stacey Gregg runs at the Peacock Theatre from May 25th to June 25th.