The work and role of women playwrights in Irish theatre has been overlooked for decades, but a new book attempts to redress the imbalance, writes Catherine Foley.
Some believe that the ghosts of forgotten women playwrights haunt our stages. A newly-published book sets out to re-appraise the worth of women playwrights, starting with Lady Gregory, who is the author of over 40 plays. It aims to change the perception that we have few, if any, Irish women playwrights.
The book, Women in Irish Drama: A Century of Authorship and Representation, is edited by Melissa Sihra, a lecturer in drama studies at Trinity College, Dublin.
More than 250 women playwrights along with the titles of over 700 plays are listed in the book's appendix. "We still haven't assimilated culturally that there is a major tradition of women writing for theatre in this country," says Sihra. "We need to fundamentally shake the foundation of what we think Irish theatre history is."
Sihra insists that the plays assessed in this book are important. "They are of very high quality," she says. In many cases, these plays "have literally fallen into obscurity, we don't know where the manuscripts of some of them are". As for all of the other plays that are listed: "I couldn't attest to the quality of them, but I think that the political act of naming these women is important, and hopefully some manuscripts will come to light.
"Why these women have been utterly written out, it's a very difficult question to answer. It is a worldwide phenomenon, and it is a part of patriarchal culture and authority, which seems to be a universal phenomenon," says Sihra.
"Even now, the most avid theatre-goers, and, generally, very savvy cultural commentators in Ireland, would not be able to name more than five Irish women playwrights. Why is this? We have Lady Gregory, we have Marina Carr and we have Marie Jones. And yet look at the body of work that's there haunting the country.
"Of all the writers, I've nearly felt more angry for Lady Gregory than for anybody. We think of her as a kind of Victorian, almost like Coole Park itself [Lady Gregory's former home], a very strong edifice of a woman, almost masculinised. Yeats used to admire her for what he called her masculine imagination. We need to think of her as a living, breathing woman. Obviously, she was very passionate . . . What way did she feel as a woman to be written out of her own work?"
In 1919, Lady Gregory had to play the lead in the play she wrote with WB Yeats, Kathleen ní Houlihan(which is often attributed solely to Yeats), purely out of necessity because Máire Walker couldn't come to the theatre. "The irony of the fact that she played says so much, it encapsulates everything about how women have been marginalised," says Sihra. "She was in a sense haunting her own play. Women have traditionally literally haunted the gaps and marginal spaces and shadows of Irish theatre and now we want to get the women out of the shadows and into the main."
Sihra suggests that critics in the past have responded negatively. "There's a real sense of disdain, a lack of any sense that this is real drama, this isn't literary. This is just women talking about unimportant things. I'm thinking about the plays of Teresa Deevy, wonderful plays, and Máiréad Ní Ghráda, which give the most fascinating social accounts of men and women in Ireland.
"There's a view that the kind of subjects that women write about don't make for great drama and that the domestic isn't as important as the public. We need to reassess, because very often a play gets written off at the time, which is simply a reflection of the conservative, patriarchal values that the critic is reproducing. And that makes me angry."
SIHRA'S BOOK, WITHchapters from academics such as Brian Singleton, Anthony Roche, Mark Phelan and Anna McMullan, looks at the works of virtually unknown playwrights from the early part of the last century, such as Teresa Deevy, Margaret O'Leary, Geraldine Cummins, Susanne Day, Eva Gore-Booth and Dorothy Macardle, as well as neglected Northern Irish women playwrights, including Alice Milligan, Helen Waddell and Patricia O'Connor from the 1940 to 1969 period, and contemporary playwrights, such as Ioanna Anderson, Hilary Fannin, Stella Feehily and Elizabeth Kuti.
"We are at a very important point. If we didn't have this debate now, I think it would be a very difficult situation. What I want to get to is the point where women playwrights are not an exceptional phenomenon."
According to Sihra, Marina Carr "is the most prolific woman playwright to come out of this country, more so than Lady Gregory. Her work has not only infiltrated the main stages in Ireland but it is also produced internationally, is on academic courses, and is available in published form, unlike the work of Marie Jones."
Carr "in a sense carries the can for women playwrights in Ireland", according to Sihra. "There's a sense that if she's produced at the Abbey, then that deals with women playwrights. She isn't produced enough on the main stage even now." Carr's new play, Woman and Scarecrow, will be produced for the Dublin Theatre Festival, but Sihra points out that it will be staged at the smaller Peacock Theatre. "We need to see the contemporary women's voice being allowed to breath in the main stages, all over the country," she adds.
Sihra says that the producer and director Phyllis Ryan, who made her acting debut at the age of 16 in 1937 on the Abbey stage, embodies what has eluded women playwrights for so long. Ryan founded two theatre companies and she encouraged and produced writers such as John B Keane and Hugh Leonard. A photograph of Ryan from the Abbey's 1937 production of Shadow and Substanceillustrates the book's jacket. "She embodies everything and she [nurtured] male writers, she was helping them, she was the facilitator," says Sihra. "To have her body there, it's about being, that we are living, breathing entities, that we exist; her physical existence is very powerful."
Women in Irish Drama: A Century of Authorship and Representation , edited by Melissa Sihra, is published by Palgrave Macmillan, £45.
