‘I love craft. I love the word’

We would like to thank the authors of the essays and the interviewer for their generosity with their time and their crafting of these thoughtful and illuminating essays, and to Deirdre Kinahan for access to her unpublished manuscripts and her photographs of performances and herself. Thanks to Peter Lang Publishers and Carysfort Press for their support with this volume, and particular thanks to Eamonn Jordan and Tony Mason for their advice and encouragement throughout. Thank you to Brian Singleton and Joan FitzPatrick Dean, who were kind enough to volunteer their time as expert readers. We are also grateful to Nick Hern, the publisher of Deirdre Kinahan’s plays, for the permission he granted to use several quotations from the respective playtexts. Finally, our thanks to the community of Irish drama scholars for their conference papers – public and private discussions of the plays, our scholarship, and this project, and their enduring commitment to the development of Irish theatre scholarship.

Deirdre Kinahan (1968) is an elected member of Aosdána, Ireland’s association of outstanding artists, Literary Associate with Meath County Council Arts Office, and has served as a board member for the Abbey Theatre, Theatre Forum Ireland and the Stewart Parker Trust. Her work is translated into many languages, published primarily by Nick Hern Books, and produced regularly in Ireland and on the international stage. In an interview Kinahan says that ‘I was pretty much reared on [Irish playwrights] as my mother and I trotted along to pretty much everything in Dublin when I was a teenager. My mother loved the theatre and was delighted to have an enthusiastic partner. I saw all the great traditional productions at the Abbey and many more contemporary ones at the Project and Peacock.’¹ From this special early interest there developed a dedication to the profession of theatre making, acting and then playwriting. To begin with, she received an MA degree in Drama Studies from University College, Dublin. Later, as a daring enterprise, Kinahan co-founded with Maureen Collender Tall Tales Theatre Company, a small independent group, which ran for fifteen years and produced new contemporary drama. Coming from a financially secure, loving and encouraging family environment, Kinahan had always been interested in the problems and needs of those who are less lucky and face various hardships, for instance connected with the disadvantages of the Celtic Tiger economic boom and its aftermath. She worked for some time with a group called Ruhama Women’s Project, which supported women earning a living by prostitution in Dublin. They asked her to ←1 | 2→write a play about prostitutes, and fulfilling this request after some hesitation, she wrote Bé Carna (an old Irish term which means women of the flesh, in fact prostitutes), this first play reaching the stage in 1999. Since then she has been producing for the Irish and international stage at a remarkable speed and has won a variety of acknowledgements of her work, including Arts Council of Ireland Commission Awards. In the above-quoted interview Kinahan also says: ‘I love craft. I love the word’,² which short, confession-like statement seems to function as a playwright’s creed evoking the Revival tradition of verbal theatre, and was chosen to be the title of this collection.

Over the last twenty-two years Kinahan has emerged as a significant and original female voice in Irish theatre, whose dramatic work explores issues of individual and communal identity, bringing forward the difficulties that arise for people when they experience a gap between conventionally accepted rules of moral behaviour and the challenges of contemporary social diversity. In this collection the essays and an interview with the playwright address the ways in which Kinahan’s plays interrogate and seek to renegotiate value systems of family, class, ethnicity, age and gender in the twenty-first century, with an emphasis on experimental forms and the renewal of certain generic conventions. The playwright makes us aware of some sympathy for even the biased or sinning characters; although her works are usually anchored in historical time or issues of the contemporary scene, they share the dramaturgical choice of presenting micro-histories. Regarding her plays’ relation to Irish dramatic traditions, Patrick Lonergan’s view can be quoted: ‘Conor McPherson, Mark O’Rowe and Deirdre Kinahan are developing the form by building on the achievements of earlier writers.’³ Kinahan’s theatre tackles the genre in diverse and innovative ways yet usually leading to a positive note at the end, or at least allowing the audience to imagine that some change for the better in the intersubjective relations is possible.←2 | 3→

‘“Haunted by the Past”: Representations of Women in the Plays of Deirdre Kinahan’ is the title of Rebecca (Bex) Wharton’s essay, which offers a survey of Kinahan’s female characters in five plays, from Bé Carna to Spinning. These women characters, as Wharton demonstrates, while seeking to carve out a space for themselves in the social fabric, have to confront traumatic memories of what they have experienced, ranging from sexual abuse and humiliation to the unexplainable loss of a child. Kinahan is approached as a writer keen on staging her female characters’ efforts to name the truth of what has been tormenting them, a comprehension necessary for moving forward. Next to this essay is the one entitled ‘Translation, ←3 | 4→Adaptation and Feminism: Revealing “A Familiar Reflex of the Repressed” in Deirdre Kinahan’s The Unmanageable Sisters’ by Aileen Ruane, which focuses on the only adaptation Kinahan has undertaken so far. The author is a Canadian scholar familiar with joual, a French dialect used by working-class people in Montreal, which Michael Tremblay’s play, Les Belles-sœurs, put on stage for the first time. Ruane introduces feminist theoretical assumptions of translation strategies which provide a specific angle on the Irish version by a woman playwright giving voice to an all-female cast’s private language habits against the context of the 1970s. In Ruane’s interpretation, Kinahan makes interventionist choices while working with the English translation to achieve her own, ideologically sensitive adaptation.

For his essay under the title ‘Intersectionality and Form in Five Short Plays by Deirdre Kinahan’ Eamonn Jordan builds up a theoretical framework in terms of which intersections of class, gender, sexuality, race and age are considered as the basis of analysis. Also, the generic properties of the so called ‘short play’ are discussed in the introductory part of the essay with reference to the use of the form especially in the dramatic output of the early twentieth-century Irish Literary Revival, thus reconfirming the link between Kinahan’s work and the traditions of Irish drama. Only two of the fives short plays, Bé Carna, BogBoy, Hue & Cry, Wild Sky and Wild Notes, were published in print earlier and the others can be accessed only as manuscripts courtesy of Deirdre Kinahan, but all of them are going to be published in one volume by Nick Hern, presumably later this year. Jordan discusses each play in detail, exploring the adaptability of form to interrogate the characters’ experience of trying to cope with or even transcend intersectional determinedness. ‘“I suppose I feel disappeared meself”:⁴ Shamed and Silenced Characters in Deirdre Kinahan’s BogBoy’ written by Lisa Fitzpatrick focuses on one of the short plays waiting to be published in the prospective collection by Nick Hern. The essay relies on the tropes of vanishment and disappearance to address the social and political embeddedness of the play’s portrayal of people who became silenced and disappeared from public view for being vulnerable, powerless, dispossessed or poor and abused. Fitzpatrick draws a parallel between the ←4 | 5→three characters (including one already dead) and their relationships to the bogland where the protagonist, Brigit, finds temporary shelter from the ruins of her life before her past catches up with her in the form of patriarchal control and stigmatization. In spite of this, she has gained a voice and is capable of narrating her own story, Fitzpatrick emphasizes. The essay also discusses the manifold significance of bogs in Irish history as well as in aesthetic representations, ranging from a place of hiding or struggle with the enemy to a space of freeing the self.

Next are placed two essays, both dedicated to the ways in which respective plays by Kinahan compare with some of her both male and female contemporaries in Ireland. ‘Problematizing the Easter Rising in Monologues: Deirdre Kinahan’s Wild Sky and Other Irish Plays’ by Wei H. Kao begins with an inclusive survey of a great variety of artistic responses in the Irish theatre to the Rising across the one hundred years that have elapsed since then. Kao looks at Wild Sky in this context, reading Kinahan’s adaptation of the monologue technique against other playwrights’ use of the form in the collection called Signatories, published in the centenary year of the Easter Rising, 2016. An important feature of the monologue form, Kao writes referring to theoretical ideas about it, is that it normally gives voice to the personal side of experiences, influenced by political actions in this case. Wild Sky is considered rather special against Signatories as the eight short monologues of the collection are by front-line participants of the Rising respectively, while Kinahan constructs and juxtaposes monologues of ordinary young country people experiencing the influence of the Rising. Flanking this essay, ‘An Act of Love? Filicide and Child-killing in Marina Carr’s By the Bog of Cats and Deirdre Kinahan’s Spinning’ by Mária Kurdi takes the planned filicide in award-winning Spinning and the actual one in the play by Carr under scrutiny. Through close reading of the texts an attempt is made here to demonstrate that Hester and Conor, the abandoned and lovelorn protagonists in the respective plays, bear some basic similarities to each other in their aggravated depression and fatal loss of self-restraint. Therefore, their filicide, real or envisaged, can hardly be regarded as an act of love but as an irrational one verging on insanity, which they both regret minutes later.←5 | 6→

‘An Other Interview with Dee’ by Bisi Adigun is really not an ordinary one, as the title suggests. Interviewer and interviewee have known each other since 1997 when they both were postgraduate students of Drama Studies at University College, Dublin. Nigerian Adigun is a man of the theatre entirely, an actor and founder of the first African theatre in Ireland, called Arambe, who also taught works of Kinahan to undergraduate students at Trinity College Dublin. The focus of the talk is on the intriguing ←6 | 7→presence of ‘other’ and ‘otherness’ in Kinahan’s oeuvre, which constructs several characters living on the margin of society or belonging to a specific minority group, or who suffered violence of a lasting impact at some stage in the past. This vivid interview reintroduces most of the major themes raised by the ten preceding essays while placing them in a new light, because here the author of the plays herself touches on their importance and intertwining characteristics.