Contemporary Irish Theatre and Social Change: Activist Aesthetics [1 ed.] 9781003205708, 9781032071589, 9781032071602

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Contemporary Irish Theatre and Social Change

This book uses the social transformation that has taken place in Ireland from the decriminalisation of homosexuality in 1993 to the repeal of the 8th amendment in 2018 as backdrop to examine relationships between activism and contemporary Irish theatre and performance. It studies art explicitly intended to create social and political change for marginalised constituencies. It asks what happens to theatre aesthetics when artists’ aims are political and argues that activist commitments can create new modes of beauty, meaning, and affect. Categories of race, class, sexuality, and gender frame chapters, provide social context, and identify activist artists’ social targets. This book provides in depth analysis of: Arambe – Ireland’s first African theatre company; THEATREclub – an experimental collective with issues of class at its heart; The International Dublin Gay Theatre Festival; and feminist artists working to Repeal the 8th amendment. It highlights the aesthetic strategies that emerge when artists set their sights on justice. Aesthetic debates, both historical and contemporary, are laid out from first principles, inviting readers to situate themselves – whether as artists, activists, or scholars – in the delicious tension between art and life. This book will be a vital guide to students and scholars interested in theatre and performance studies, gender studies, Irish history, and activism. Emer O’Toole is Associate Professor of Irish Performance Studies at the School of Irish Studies, Concordia University.

Routledge Advances in Theatre & Performance Studies

This series is our home for cutting-edge, upper-level scholarly studies and edited collections. Considering theatre and performance alongside topics such as religion, politics, gender, race, ecology, and the avant-garde, titles are characterized by dynamic interventions into established subjects and innovative studies on emerging topics. Entangled Performance Histories New Approaches to Theater Historiography Erika Fischer-Lichte, Małgorzata Sugiera, Torsten Jost and Holger Hartung with Omid Soltani Rechoreographing Learning Dance As a Way to Bridge the Mind-Body Divide in Education Sandra Cerny Minton Politics as Public Art The Aesthetics of Political Organizing and Social Movements Martin Zebracki and Zane McNeill Lessons for Today from Shakespeare’s Classroom The Learning Benefits of Drama and Rhetoric in Schools Robin Lithgow Notelets of Filth An Emilia Companion Reader Laura Kressly, Aida Patient, and Kimberly A. Williams Transcultural Theater Günther Heeg Shakespeare and Cultural Appropriation Vanessa I. Corredera, L. Monique Pittman, Geoffrey Way For more information about this series, please visit: https://www.routledge.com/ Routledge-Advances-in-Theatre-Performance-Studies/book-series/RATPS

“Jesse Jones’ Tremble Tremble. Two giant arms embrace a black box space swathed in dark curtains. Photo by permission of Ros Kavanagh”.

Contemporary Irish Theatre and Social Change Activist Aesthetics

Emer O’Toole

First published 2023 by Routledge 4 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN and by Routledge 605 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10158 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2023 Emer O’Toole The right of Emer O’Toole to be identified as author of this work has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN: 978-1-032-07158-9 (hbk) ISBN: 978-1-032-07160-2 (pbk) ISBN: 978-1-003-20570-8 (ebk) DOI: 10.4324/9781003205708 Typeset in Bembo Std by KnowledgeWorks Global Ltd.

For Oscar and Oisín My beautiful, beautiful boys Ye were no help

Contents

Acknowledgementsx Introduction: The Beauty of Change1 1 Arambe Productions: A Hammer, Shaping

25

2 THEATREclub: Class Acts

58

3 The International Dublin Gay Theatre Festival: Confession and Community

93

4 Art and the 8th: The Feminist Aesthetics of Tara Flynn, Jesse Jones, and the Suffragettes at the Galway Races

126

Ref lections: On Art That Is Activism

160

Index165

Acknowledgements

I’d like to thank my Research Assistants. Patrick Brodie was enormously helpful while I was formulating the chapter on THEATREclub. Patrick – thank you. Rebecca Stacey joined me for co-writing sessions while I was working on my International Dublin Gay Theatre Festival chapter and she was working on her thesis. My study of the IDGTF is indebted to her. Rebecca, thank you. Lily MacLean was an essential part of preparing the manuscript for submission and publication, including with permissions work, the index, and helping me to maintain an even tone. Thank you, Lily. No research task was too vague for Erin Hynes, who helped me find sources and organize my materials with an administrative zeal to which I will only ever aspire. Thank you, Erin. During my doctorate at Royal Holloway, University of London, I co-taught on a course called Critical Theories. It was lead in various years by Colette Conroy, Lynette Goddard, Dan Rebellato, and Karen Fricker, all of whom shared materials with me. The lectures I gave feed into theoretical sections of this book. Thank you all for your generosity when I was a graduate student. My thought is built on yours. The chapter on Arambe stems from my doctoral research, supervised by Karen Fricker and Helen Gilbert, my dear mentors and friends. Thank you both for all you have done to shape my scholarship. Thank you to all the artists and curators who have taken the time to speak to me, answer my e-mails, or send me videos and scripts, including: Bisi Adigun, Grace Dyas, Brian Merriman, Thalia Gonzalez Kane, Simon Murphy, Julie Gieseke, Jay Whitehead, Tom Noone, Tara Flynn, Sarah O’Toole, Mary McGill, and Tessa Giblin. Thank you to the photographers Aoife Concannon, Fiona Morgan, Ros Kavanagh, Peter Davies, Luca Truffarelli, Michael Dekker, and Sarah O’Toole for permission to use their lovely images. Thank you to Sarah Maria Griffin for allowing me to reprint part of her beautiful poem, We Face This Land, and to Woody Shticks for permission to transcribe some of his great show, Schlong Song. Gratitude to the FRQSC (Fonds de Recherche du Québec, Société et Culture), which funded the project, and to Michele Kaplan from Concordia’s Office of Research for her help with the grant application.

Acknowledgements xi Thank you to the reviewers and editors of Contemporary Theatre Review and Literature Interpretation Theory, from which I have repurposed some material for Chapters 2 and 4. Thank you Laura Hussey, commissioning editor at Routledge, for your enthusiasm for this project, and Swati Hindwan, senior editorial assistant, for your practical support. Thank you to the anonymous peer reviewers, whoever you are! Thank you Manisha Singh Pundir of KnowledgeWorks for co-ordinating the copyediting and typesetting. And thank you to the copyeditors for all your careful attention. To my students at Concordia, so often hive mind for these academic ideas – thank you. Thank you to my friends and colleagues at Concordia, especially Matina Skalkogiannis, without whom nothing would ever get done. Thank you to Colleen Kimmett, Bo Martin, and the Cult Wives, for laughs and levity. Thanks to Brian Higgins and Oliver McCrohan, for putting me up/putting up with me on my research trip. And especial loving thanks to my family, Willy, Oscar, Oisín, Mary, Ciarán, Ronan, Clarisse, and Elena.

Introduction The Beauty of Change

The Ins and Outs of It All In the run up to the 2018 referendum that would repeal Ireland’s eighth constitutional amendment and effectively legalise abortion, some friends and I discussed the sex education we’d received at school. During my last year at a girls’ primary school, my class was shown a video of a woman called Angela McNamara explaining the ins and outs of it all, so to speak. It began with a prayer asking God to help us to understand, gave advice on how to repel men pressuring us for sex outside marriage (‘And your answer must be: if you love me, you will wait’), proffered the proper biological terminology for what Angela assumed we were all calling a man’s ‘wee John Thomas,’ and, crucially, told us how to judge a couple who had a baby outside of wedlock (Don’t – God will do it later). Clips of the video have since become an internet sensation, so you can google Angela if you need to be convinced that I’m not making this up. I thought my story would easily best the rest. However, my cousin Niall nudged me from the podium. His school invited a travelling theatre troupe to educate the children about these sensitive matters, and the artistes performed a sexual tragedy worthy of Marlowe – broken dreams, broken lives, pregnancy, disease, disaster. If only those poor souls had kept it in their pants. ‘The takeaway,’ said Niall, ‘was that if I had sex outside marriage, I would almost certainly die.’ Niall and I are not that old. These things happened in the 90s and early 00s. Less than 25 years later, the same country where sex outside marriage was taboo and contraception deeply controversial was on the eve of legalising abortion by public vote. It often seems to me that the Ireland of my childhood is not just a different country, as the author L.P. Hartley might lyrically wax, but a different universe. And – sex tragedies for children notwithstanding – Irish theatre has played a part in this change. Using the social transformation that has taken place in Ireland since the decriminalisation of homosexuality in 1993 to the repeal of the 8th amendment in 2018 as a backdrop, this book examines relationships between activism and contemporary Irish theatre and performance. It studies theatre and performance explicitly intended to create social and political change for marginalised constituencies. It asks what happens to theatre aesthetics when DOI: 10.4324/9781003205708-1

2  Introduction artists’ aims are explicitly political and argues that activist commitments can create new modes of beauty, meaning, and affect. I use categories of race, sexuality, class, and gender to frame chapters, provide social context, and identify activist artists’ primary social targets. These vectors interact with each other and affect people in individual ways, meaning that theatremakers are rarely dealing with race, sexuality, class or gender in isolation – life doesn’t work like that, and neither does art. In this book, race, sexuality, class, and gender speak to each other, and the conversation is not always a civil one.1 This book is also about the nature of art and about how we experience beauty. In other words, it is concerned with aesthetics. Many aesthetic scholars are sceptical of art that professes also to be activism. For one thing – as cousin Niall’s schoolboy adventures in theatrical appreciation might illustrate – they are wary of Agit Prop. Agit Prop is an early soviet term. Vladimir Lenin recommended a combination of propaganda (raising awareness of an issue) and agitation (exciting an emotional response to the issue) in his 1902 pamphlet What Is To Be Done. In 1920, the Soviet Communist party established the Department of Agitation and Propaganda, its purpose to use theatre and other artistic means to speak to a largely illiterate working class who did not have access to radio.2 Subsequently, a bureaucracy emerged for which, as Richard Pipes memorably puts it, ‘culture was only a form of propaganda, and propaganda the highest form of culture.’3 It turned out to be a disconcertingly short hop from, ‘hey, maybe theatre could help us spread our message about class oppression,’ to ‘I’m sorry Comrade Dikiy, but Stalin did not like your opera: to the gulag you must go.’ For another, and related, reason, critics of art that intends to create social change are worried about quality: they are worried that art for politics’ sake threatens the special characteristics that belong to art alone. What happens to beauty, virtuosity, genius, pleasure, innovation, form, and affect, when we make, consume, and judge art based on its activist contributions? After all, agreeing with an artwork’s political message is not the same as believing it to be good art, though people do confuse these things.a This book hopes to assuage worries that activist art means the demotion of aesthetic experience. It argues that although our experiences of activist theatre and performance are shaped by politics, economics, and social context, they can remain primarily aesthetic. Contrary to theories of art that oppose the properly artistic

a Consider, for example, how many American conservative politicians declare Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged to be their favourite novel. I mean, ignoring its messaging, I really quite enjoyed Atlas Shrugged, but it remains a book where characters walk into rooms and say things like ‘Hello Dagny, I have just been thinking about the benefits of human greed,’ and proceed to a ten-page, uninterrupted monologue, to which their interlocuter eventually responds, ‘Yes, John, I have also been considering greed,’ and launches into another lengthy recital. Then they have sex. Undeniably terrible writing. But what can I say? I was entertained.

Introduction 3 to the Agit Prop, I believe that activist commitments often necessitate exciting aesthetic forms, strategies, and encounters. It’s probably worth noting that this book employs some aesthetic strategies of its own. It is an academic book written more or less in the vernacular. And it tries, as far as possible, to start with first principles. I’ll still be working with theoretical ideas and original research, but the prose remains personal and conversational. I have deep respect for formal academic writing. Sometimes complex ideas benefit from a compatibly complex register, and, of course, there is more space to develop our thoughts when we assume a shared vocabulary. However, I think one of my talents as a thinker is the ability to express difficult ideas simply, and I personally enjoy both reading and writing work that returns to basics before building to theoretical nuance. Really, I want anyone who cares enough to open the book to be able to follow my arguments. I’m aware that for some scholars this will feel indulgent (fair – it is more fun to write this way). All the same, I hope you’ll be able to see in the book’s form a reflection of my own activist convictions – that the personal is political, that scholarship can be accessible, and that the academy, like society, like the arts, is ours to mould and change.

Ireland Though I’m marking out the contemporary theatre I study in this book as activist, Irish theatre might be said to have a long activist history. It’s been a ‘mirror up to nation’ since before the founding of the state.4 Christopher Morash, in his influential monograph, A History of Irish Theatre, shows that diverse political factions have been using the proscenium to advocate, agitate, and appease since the 17th century.5 Nicolas Grene’s work convinces us that even Dion Boucicault’s crowd-pleasing 18th-century melodramas had anticolonial political intent.6 And the multitudinous accounts of Irish theatre history that hinge around Lady Gregory, Yeats, and the National Theatre Society at the beginning of the 20th century draw the lines between the cultural nationalist work of The Abbey and the struggle for independence from Britain that then defined Irish political life.7 Similarly, the work of Field Day in the 1980s was knitted into the project of imagining an Ireland beyond the violence and division of The Troubles. But there’s differences between the political intent we can read in these histories and the activist theatre and performance I discuss in this study. For one thing, the activist artists I’m studying are much more likely to be aiming their energies at modes of oppression, such as racism or sexism, originating within Ireland: they tackle Ireland as a perpetrator of injustice, not only a postcolonial victim. That’s not to suggest, of course, that racism or sexism are uniquely Irish phenomena. Patrick Lonergan argues that globalisation complicates many of the national categories long used to study theatre and performance.8 The effects of the global are certainly evident in the theatre I study here, not least in the throughlines between Irish activism and global rights movements.

4  Introduction Race, sexuality, class, and gender have undergone rapid transformation in Ireland since the 1990s. There are multiple reasons for this – including the influence of international rights movements and the effects of abuse scandals on the authority of the Catholic church. However, one of the most frequently cited drivers of this social change is The Celtic Tiger. From approximately 1995 to 2007, Ireland underwent an economic boom. The economist Kevin Gardiner compared it to the emergence of the ‘Asian Tiger’ markets in India and China, although Ireland’s tiger was obviously a much smaller beast – maybe a Celtic Caracal? During what I will now be calling the Celtic Caracal years, the country changed from a relatively poor European Union member into one of the richest countries in the world. Cranes cluttered Dublin’s skyline as high-rises housing multinational corporations shot up in the new docklands financial district. Previously an insular country, Ireland became globalised, a central node in major international networks of finance and technology. For example, in 2003 – attracted by (woefully) low corporate tax, government funded technology infrastructure, and access to the EU’s workforce – Google moved its European, Middle Eastern, and African headquarters to Dublin. Previously a Catholic place, where the church had been deeply entwined with the Irish state since independence, Ireland secularised rapidly.b Reliance on agriculture diminished as previously underdeveloped industrial and service sectors flourished. And Ireland’s image changed too. Writing in 2006, Diane Negra notes, ‘Long linked in the American imagination with the experience of poverty and the rigor of sexual repression, Irishness now factors in campaigns for Porsche automobiles and Candies stiletto-heeled shoes as a marker of luxury and eroticism.’9 A country with a long-standing twee, traditional image – turfcutters, shawls, donkeys – was suddenly cool.c It was as if Ireland, like Gregor Samsa, had woken up one morning in a very different body. In perhaps the most transformative effect of the boom, inward migration replaced outward migration as the dominant social trend for the first time in the state’s history. In practical terms, this meant that the Republic of Ireland, previously a predominantly white, Catholic place with a tradition of emigration, became a multicultural home of immigrants from diverse corners of the globe. This demographic change brought new skills, new worldviews,

b There’s a significant literature on this process of secularisation. You might like to read Daphne Halikiopoulo’s work, where she compares Irish secularisation to Greek secularisation; Tom Inglis’s extensive body of scholarship on Irish Catholicism, identity and secularisation; or Diarmuid Ferriter’s Occasions of Sin – which tells a story of secularisation through a sexual lens. c The essays in Diane Negra’s edited collection dig down into the global popularity of Irishness that maps onto the Celtic Tiger period, looking at the racial and nostalgic dimensions to this wave of Hibernophilia. Natasha Casey’s work on the commercialisation of brand Ireland is fascinating. And Aoife Monks’ work on diasporic Irish identities, and the nostalgic performativity of Riverdance in this period can also help us to understand how Ireland’s reimagining as modern, sexy and economically successful was also, paradoxically, based on a parallel bucolic fantasy of a land outside neoliberal modernity.

Introduction 5 and much needed labour to fuel the boom, but it was also met by racism and hostility,d presumably from patriots who had forgotten that Irish people were the refugees and stereotyped migrants of not so very long ago. In 2004, the Irish people voted 4:1 to remove the right to citizenship for Irish born children of non-Irish parents. This was implicitly directed against Africans, who, the media assured us, were falling out of planes at ten months pregnant and birthing their babies on the tarmac for the privilege of an Irish passport.10 The same year, asylum seekers were removed from the social welfare system, forbidden to work, and placed into a punitive institutional system called Direct Provision while their claims were being processed. Meanwhile, Ireland was one of the first EU countries to open its doors to free movement from new Eastern European member states, because it needed migrant workers: they just had to be white. Theatre and performance were particularly receptive to the political and creative imperatives of this moment, working to join up the dots between Irish memories of migration and empathy towards the country’s new arrivals.11 As Jason King argues, theatre created ‘an imaginative space of sympathetic engagement with immigrants.’12 The boom went bust in 2008, but its legacy of new ethnic, racial, cultural, and religious diversity is here to stay. In Chapter 1, I’ll focus on Ireland’s first African theatre company, Arambe Productions, who performed from 2003 until 2013. I’ll trace the aesthetic evolution of a company whose aims were to counter dispiriting representations of black people in Irish drama, make space for Africans on Irish stages, and introduce Irish people to African theatre and performance. In 2008 – due to a perfect storm of over-lending in the construction industry and volatile global finance markets – the boom went bust, and the Irish public underwrote private banking debt to the tune of 64 billion euros, guaranteeing that the Irish taxpayer would pay out even on high risk high yield bonds. The state took a bail out of 67.5 billion Euros from the Troika of the European Monetary Commission, the International Monetary Foundation, and the European Central Bank. A condition of these loans was that Ireland instigate severe austerity measures. And, of course, these measures hit the marginalised, who were dependent upon the social safety net, the hardest. Homeless numbers climbed, as did numbers of homeless children. Between 2008 and 2018 budgetary policy hit single parents, who are mainly women, significantly more than singles without children.13 People bled out of the country in search of employment and opportunities no longer available at

d Bryan Fanning’s Racism and Social Change in Ireland provides an invaluable book length study of the history and contemporary fact of racial prejudice in Ireland and cautions against understanding racist responses to changing demographics as the natural response of a previously homogenous society that just didn’t know any better. Fanning reminds us that ‘understandings of racial difference in Ireland, as elsewhere, were the product if colonial ideologies of Western superiority’ (8). Bryan Fanning, Racism and Social Change in the Republic of Ireland (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2002).

6  Introduction home. At the end of 2013, Ireland was understood to have entered economic recovery, but the effects of this did not reach middle- and low-income families,14 and homeless figures continued to climb.15 Again, Irish theatre conversed with these cliffs and troughs. Fintan Walsh, writing on Queer Performance during the period of The Celtic Tiger up until the Marriage Equality Referendum, finds it interesting that ‘a great deal of the queer performance produced during this time illuminated the darker social consequences of frenzied capitalism, systemic state failings, and pernicious cultural crises.’16 Similarly, the contemporary boom in site-specific and experimental work often tackles issues of economic inequality. In Chapter 2, I’ll close read the work of THEATREclub, a company who proclaim that, ‘Just as they got to an age where they could finally start making something of themselves; the whole country crashed down around them.’17 I’ll explore how commitment to economic activism can shape a radically experimental aesthetic. Life for LGBTQ people in Ireland has also changed seismically in the last quarter century. Let me tell you about my first encounter with LGBTQ activism. It was Galway city in the 90s. I was a child of about 9, watching the Saint Patrick’s Day parade, when a group passed by from what research tells me was likely Pluto Society – University College Galway’s Lesbian and Gay group. Their faces were painted as sad clowns and they waved at the crowd. I remember people around me sniggering. Later, an older, wiser kid let me in on the joke. They were gays! With sad clown faces! That was the punchline. It would take me many years to understand the bravery of that theatrical gesture. Gay and Lesbian groups first marched in Galway’s St Patrick’s day parade in 1993, just months before a bill decriminalising homosexuality was passed. Decriminalisation happened under directive from the European Court of Human Rights, not due to Irish public sentiment. Still, men and women whose lives and loves had long been hidden paraded through the streets of Galway, on Ireland’s national and religious holiday, knowing their fellow citizens would laugh at them, probably hoping that laughter would be the worst of it. In Paul Gouldsbury’s documentary Bród: Out in the Streets, Activist Nuala Ward, instrumental to the early days of Galway’s gay pride movement, remembers an article in a local newspaper, calling on all good Christians to prevent gay people from marching on St. Patrick’s Day.18 It must have been terrifying to be on the receiving end of that laughter. In 2015, the Irish people voted 62% in favour of same sex marriage, after a hard-fought referendum campaign, presided over by an openly gay Taoiseach. In the year that followed, transgender people won the right to self-identification, giving Ireland some of the most progressive trans legislation in the world. And the LGBTQ community won another victory, when the courts ruled that Catholic schools (and in Ireland the majority of state schools are run by the Catholic church) could no longer discriminate against LGBTQ teachers. Ireland is now recognised as one of the most progressive countries in the world on LGBTQ issues.19 I wonder if any of the activists in that parade many years ago could have imagined just how successful their campaign for equality would be?

Introduction 7 Theatre and performance were in close dialogue with these developments. Thomas Conway, artistic director of Druid Theatre, and editor of the 2012 Oberon Anthology of Contemporary Irish Plays, remarks that although the plays he has collected don’t foreground their Irishness, they all work through the ‘unfinished business’ of the nation.20 He says, ‘it becomes astonishing, in this light, to reflect just how often these plays revolve around the idea of sexual identity.’21 From St. Patrick’s day parades to gay stages, theatre and performance have been a significant part of Ireland’s process of coming out. In Chapter 3, I’ll hone in on the International Dublin Gay Theatre Festival to consider some performance aesthetics of this work. When the second wave of feminism in the ‘60s and ‘70s was winning abortion access for women across Western Europe and North American, Irish feminists were still trying to secure the right to contraceptives.22 These remained illegal until 1981. And, when they were finally legalised, there was a devastating backlash: the Catholic right launched a campaign to introduce an anti-abortion amendment to the Irish constitution. It was successful, and the 8th amendment was passed in 1983. In the decades that followed, Irish feminists worked hard to repeal it. However, a hostile political and social climate made their activism challenging and their messaging conservative compared to rights groups in other Western countries. In 2012, after Galway dentist Savita Halappanavar died from septicaemia following the denial of a medical abortion, the abortion rights movement went to work with a new fire and moral confidence, resulting in the referendum of 2018, in which 68% of the population voted to repeal the 8th. Like many Irish women of my generation, the campaign to repeal the 8th amendment has defined my adult political life. Writing now, in 2021/22, I feel I am only finally able to recognise the momentousness of what we achieved. When I was in secondary school – a Catholic school, of course – we had a classroom debate about abortion in which there was no pro side. Rather, we took turns debating why it was wrong. Was it because it encouraged promiscuity? Or because it killed an innocent unborn child? Maybe both? There were no dissenting voices. And outside the classroom – in the media, in culture – I experienced a near total absence of openly pro-choice people, stories, or rhetoric. Shame, stigma, and silence boxed in women’s stories, and Catholic morality seemed – on this issue – unshakeable. It disappoints me greatly that Irish theatre venues and companies were largely reluctant to explicitly play a part in the de-stigmatisation and support of abortion rights. However, much activism surrounding the campaign to repeal the 8th amendment used performance tactics. For example, Speaking of IMELDA (Ireland Making England the Legal Destination for Abortion) enacted pop up guerrilla performances, such as presenting then-Taoiseach Enda Kenny with a pair of red knickers at a state dinner or hosting an alternative pageant on the streets of Tralee, in which the winner was the contestant with the best reproductive rights in her country. In this book, I’ll look at three performances to make a case for the intergenerational feminist

8  Introduction consciousness of Repeal’s aesthetics. Looking at the consciousness raising narrative of Tara Flynn’s one person show, Not a Funny Word (2018), the witch symbolism in Jesse Jones’ video art installation Tremble Tremble (2017), and first wave imagery projected by women who arrived as Suffragettes at the Galway races, Chapter 4 will celebrate some feminist tactical aesthetics.

Aesthetics Staring at a sunset isn’t going to get the dinner on. So why do we do it? Beauty so enraptures us that some people spend their whole lives trying to create it and others spend all their free time trying to experience it. We tend to know beauty when we see it, but what is it? While the modern Western discipline of aesthetics is generally understood to begin in the mid-18th century,e people have been asking themselves questions like this about art for much longer. The Greeks and Romans saw art as mimetic or imitative of life and tended to prize realistic representations.f Shakespeare’s Hamlet voices a like philosophy when the prince tells a troupe of players that the purpose of their art is ‘to hold, as “twere, the mirror up to nature.”’23 In the 20th century, the hold of mimesis on Western art was challenged by movements like expressionism and formalism.g There are many aesthetic traditions and thinkers, philosophies and philosophers, but here I’m going to tell a particular story about aesthetics – one that begins with the universalist enlightenment ideals of the late-18th century thinker Emmanuel Kant; proceeds through the challenges to Kantian theory laid by postmodern, postcolonial, Marxist, and feminist thinkers in the 20th century; and ends up in contemporary debates about art and politics. But first, some intuitive work: how do we talk about beauty? A common-sense theory of beauty is that it’s in the eye of the beholder. This idea – that aesthetic value is a matter of opinion – is one that students often offer in my classes. After all, we enjoy different artforms and fall for different artists, both culturally and individually. I think the success of this ‘you do you’ theory

e Alexander Baumgarten’s Aesthetica, published in 1750, established the aesthetic as a subject of serious scientific/philosophical enquiry (at the time, science and philosophy weren’t differentiated in the same way as they are now). Kant’s work – which we’ll get to below – formalised Aesthetics as a discipline. And after Kant, a whole heap of serious Germans weighed in – Schiller, Hegel, Goethe, to name a few. f Although it is not, of course, as easy as this. As Stephen Halliwell explains in his wide-ranging exploration of mimesis in aesthetic philosophy, there are two radically contrasting ideas of mimesis discernible in Greek thought, even from a very early stage. The first holds that mimesis depicts the world outside art and that art can thus be judged by the norms and standards of this world; the second holds that mimesis creates an independent world, which might still hold some truth about reality. Stephen Halliwell, The Aesthetics of Mimesis: Ancient Texts and Modern Problems (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2009), 5. g Expressionism emphasises the transmission of an idea or vision rather than a representation of reality; formalism emphasises artistic form (e.g., shape, line, space, figure, structure) as opposed to realistically rendered subjects or themes.

Introduction 9 of beauty is partly a product of our scientific age, where many of us conceive of the world as neatly divided into demonstrable, objective facts and unprovable, subjective opinions. Within this dichotomy, beauty must be opinion. It’s very hard to explain beauty scientifically. I can tell you that a sunset is caused when beams of sunlight strike molecules in the atmosphere and an effect called Rayleigh scattering occurs, leaving longer waves of light – red, orange and yellow – to reach the observer (thanks National Geographic), but that has little to do with my fizzy feelings watching a West of Ireland sky as the sun goes down. The problem with the idea that beauty is purely in the eye of the beholder is that it doesn’t match the way that we behave towards things we perceive as beautiful. We don’t talk about our experiences of beauty in the same way we talk about experiences that are completely subjective – like pleasure, pain, hunger, or tiredness. For one thing, we often assume that others will share our experiences of beauty. If a friend tells you he has a headache, it would be weird (and mean?) to disagree with him. But if he tells you he doesn’t like your favourite author, it wouldn’t be at all weird to defend her virtues – say, her prose style, her world building, her play with narrative voice, the smart social critiques underlying her plots.h You might try to get your friend to see what you see. If you’ve spent a few years at university, you might throw in terms like postcolonial or postmodern. None of these things actually describes the feeling of excitement and immersion you feel when you are sucked into your favourite writer’s novels. But your explanations approach those feelings. And you’re not exactly telling your friend he is wrong (although he is clearly wrong); rather, you’re suggesting that there’s aesthetic merit that he’s missed. Maybe he’ll give the books another try. And maybe, now that he’s looking for the qualities you describe, he’ll appreciate the work. If beauty was purely in the eye of the beholder, it wouldn’t make any sense to offer reasons for our aesthetic judgements. But we discuss and debate aesthetics all the time – we make comparisons and offer reasons for our tastes. If beauty was purely in the eye of the beholder, we probably wouldn’t have art galleries. Everyone would just stay in their living rooms staring at things that they, personally, consider beautiful (coleslaw? kibble?) never imagining others could share in their experience. It’s this observation about the way that we experience beauty that informs Kant’s belief that beauty is not only subjective, but also universal. Yes, I must experience something for myself to tell that it is beautiful, but, for Kant, things are beautiful independent of personal opinion. All people should be able to perceive this beauty, but some allow practical or political ‘interests’ to muddy their aesthetic appreciation. The ability to find something beautiful is known, in Kantian theory, as taste. Kant tells us that taste is aesthetic, by which he means it has to do with our senses (the word aesthetics comes from the Greek and means, roughly,

h I learned this insight about beauty and subjectivity from a lecture by Dr. Dan Rebellato at Royal Holloway, University of London, sometime between 2008 and 2011.

10  Introduction ‘of the senses’ or ‘of perception’). Beauty is about senses and feelings, not about ideas. Kant directs us towards an aesthetic attitude that he refers to ‘pure disinterested delight’ i and argues it’s this attitude that tells us when an object is beautiful. He evokes a beautiful palace, and he gives reasons that someone might disapprove of it – the vanity of the rich, the wasted the sweat of workers who built it, the uselessness of such an ornate building. He notes that these ideologies (or what he calls ‘interests’) have nothing to do with the beauty of the building. For Kant, ‘Everyone must allow that a judgement on the beautiful which is tinged with the slightest interest, is very partial and not a pure judgement of taste.’24 So when it comes to aesthetic appreciation, politics and practicalities are out: they interfere with the pure appreciation of beauty. Beauty must be appreciated for its own sake. Kant says that some things are ‘agreeable,’ they provide gratification – they might be attractive or delicious or enjoyable. And a judgement about agreeableness is subjective. A burger might be agreeable because you’re hungry. Similarly, Kant says that some things are ‘good,’ they are objectively fit for a particular purpose – they might be efficient or educational. For Kant, the agreeable and the good are related to desire. It’s not only the object, but also what I might do with it, that pleases me. It’s not only the object, but the pleasure or use I could derive from it that delights me. The burger is not beautiful. A judgement on beauty can’t be about gratification or utility. It needs to be almost indifferent to the existence of the object. Kant calls this disinterested judgement the ‘judgement of taste.’ And, for Kant, it is the only true aesthetic judgement.25 Kant then deduces that if the delight I feel when I look at a beautiful object is not based upon any desire, need, or anything to do with me personally, it must be to do with the object itself. So, for Kant, beauty is certainly not in the eye of the beholder; rather, ‘Where anyone is conscious that his delight in an object is with him independent of interest, it is inevitable that he should judge the object as one containing a ground of delight for all human beings.’26 A pure aesthetic experience, unpolluted by desire and utility, can be shared by everyone, because some things are universally beautiful. This theory was immensely influential: it dominated how Western culture answered the question ‘what is art?’ for generations. It lent philosophical legitimacy to the Western canon: a body of artworks considered to meet the highest standards, to hold universal truths and timeless values. On the positive side of things, Kantian aesthetic theory gives beauty and art cultural autonomy and upholds freedom of expression. Art is for art’s sake. It doesn’t need to serve a religious or political function. And there’s still a lot to be said for Kant’s ideas: they safeguard artistic freedom and honour art as a profound shared experience and a precious facet of the human condition. This seems

i The ‘Disinterested’ here doesn’t imply boredom. As I’ll explain below, it implies a lack of ideology and self-interest. Disinterestedness implies a pure gaze, in which all your personal prejudices, needs, and desires are cast aside.

Introduction 11 especially important today as traditional arts funding comes under threat from neoliberal models of government. And Kant’s theory is also important because censorship sucks, and it helps us to tell book burners that art cannot and should not be judged by the standards of real life. A painting of a murder is not a murder. Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita is not child abuse. On the flip side, Kant’s theories are narrow, cutting art off from the events that inspire it and the people who enjoy it. As Stephen Halliwell eloquently puts it, 18th-century philosophy baptised aesthetics ‘with an identity so restricted as to imperil its connection with, and importance for, the rest of life’ (vii). Or, for the editors of the volume Artistic Citizenship, such thinking, ‘relegates many of art’s most powerful social, political, ethical, and moral values to residual or extra-artistic status.’27 Further, Kantian aesthetics laid the cultural foundation for the ‘civilising’ mission of colonialism. If beauty is universal, not relative, then the coloniser was justified in bringing universally beautiful European cultural artefacts to the colonised and attempting to teach the pure taste necessary to aesthetic appreciation. As for the caterwauling and crude carvings those colonials produced? Those were parts of religious rituals, everyday routines, or tribal squabbles – they were not true, autonomously beautiful art like the masterpieces of the Western canon. While I believe that ‘eye of the beholder’ theories of beauty are now more widely held than universalist ones, Kant’s ideas still inform how we think and speak about art today. If you’ve ever had someone respond to your critique of a song, play, or movie with ‘you’re over-thinking it,’ they’re offering a Kantian rebuttal of your analysis: namely, that if you don’t get all that political, social, personal clutter out of the way, you won’t be able to appreciate beauty. Kant is why no one wants to hear my postcolonial critique of Ironman. The idea of universally beautiful art took a bruising in the 20th century from a number of corners. As the brutality of two world wars cast doubt on Enlightenment ideas of Western rationality, civilisation and progress, j first modernist, and then postmodernist thinkers re-assessed the Western canon. The modernists tried to install new great works, new theories of progress, new forms of beauty in the place of the old. The postmodernists disregarded these universalist ideas. They went for aesthetic relativism – that is, they professed scepticism of pure truth or beauty, throwing aside distinctions between high art and low art, and creating works that did not pretend to appeal to the disinterested contemplation championed by Kant. As the European empires crumbled in the wake of the world wars, the peoples of formerly colonised nations reasserted the value of their own aesthetic forms and cultures and rejected the superiority of the Western canon. The academic

j The Enlightenment was a philosophical movement that gained currency in 17th- and 18th-century Europe. It stressed reason and empirical evidence as ways to gain knowledge about the world, and it championed individual rights and religious liberty, helping to move Europe away from the power of monarchy and religion.

12  Introduction field that grew from these voices became known as postcolonialism and it shook some of the foundational principles of Western aesthetics. In an article gently (and irresistibly) scolding art critics who conceive of aesthetic relativism as cuttingedge postmodern knowledge, Kwame Anthony Appiah points out that in Africa the fact that other cultures have their own aesthetic standards is ‘a piece of absolutely basic cultural knowledge, common to most precolonial as well as to most colonial and postcolonial cultures on the continent.’28 Under Appiah’s lens, the contingency of aesthetic standards is so evident that it seems bizarre Western aesthetics was in thrall to Kantian universalism for so long. Pierre Bourdieu’s work on the relationship between art and social class responded to universalist aesthetics from a Marxist and sociological perspective. His best-known work, Distinction, is subtitled ‘a social critique of the judgement of taste’ – that is, it’s an explicit riposte to Kant. It explores why the culture enjoyed by the working classes is considered low and that enjoyed by the bourgeoisie is considered high.29 Bourdieu demonstrates that our artistic culture reproduces systems of dominance, giving capital and social prestige to the wealthy and powerful. The difference between high and low art, in his reckoning, is not one of quality, but, rather, of the cultural capital it represents. There is no ‘disinterested’ judgement of taste. We are all socialised and educated to appreciate some artforms over others. In this view, there’s nothing more intrinsically valuable or universally beautiful about an opera than there is about a Marvel movie, about a Greek sculpture than about a bowl of decorative pebbles from IKEA. Kant’s judgement of taste only serves to mask class snobbery and inequality. Feminists did their bit to dismantle the canon too, investigating the absence of women from histories of art. Griselda Pollock calls a canon that leaves out female and non-European artists ‘an increasingly impoverished and impoverishing filter for the totality of cultural possibilities generation after generation.’30 She says that staunch investment in the canon can only be understood by thinking about the deep psychosexual pleasures that Western maledominated stories provide.31 Far from representing a Kantian judgement of taste unsullied by interest, for Pollock, the canon is a monument to male desire. Carolyn Korsmeyer says that women artists have been conceptually excluded from the very idea of art. The traditional concept of the artist – which she traces to the Renaissance – is ‘heavily gendered as a masculine ideal’32 – the artist works alone or directs a crew of underlings and is an exceptional genius. She explains that as Fine Art 33 began to emerge as a category, it was distinguished from everyday, functional objects. This meant that the things made by women for daily use or to decorate the home were relegated to the status of crafts, and the skill involved in making them differentiated from masculine artistic genius. Korsmeyer explores how feminist artists have deliberately overturned traditional aesthetic values. For example, Jana Sterbak’s Vanitas: Flesh Dress for an Albino Anorectic places a thin woman wearing a slowly rotting meat-dress in a gallery (and you thought that was all Lady Gaga). Or, Carolee Schneeman’s performance The Interior Scroll has the artist pull an account of a conversation with a sexist film critic from her vagina. These works reject the

Introduction 13 most basic notions of beauty, aiming to disgust and disturb us. And this rejection pillories an art world that has ignored women’s work while objectifying their bodies. Korsmeyer believes it’s impossible to define a specific feminist aesthetic as feminist work is so diverse, but she says that ‘what feminist artists do share is a sense of the historic subordination of women and an awareness of how art practices have perpetuated that subordination.’34 And this stands as a significant challenge to those who believe in the universal Western canon. So wham bam, take that canon. Take that universal beauty. Different people and cultures make different aesthetic judgements, and it’s not because conceptual bric-a-brac is impeding their ability to apprehend universal beauty. The Western artistic canon does not represent universally beautiful artefacts, just contingently beautiful ones that often reflect hierarchies of culture, race, class, and gender. And art does not exist in some autonomous realm, cut off from desire, human need, or practical concerns – rather, it’s both a product and producer of our flawed and unequal society. As I hope the above accounts of postmodern, postcolonial, Marxist, and feminist challenges to Kantian universalism show, this critical work was never just about bashing the Western canon; it was also about expanding the purview of beauty and art, admitting the work of women, people of colour, the formerly colonised, and the working classes to art galleries, theatre stages and university curricula, learning to appreciate artistic traditions different to our own, and creating exciting new forms, sounds and stories. However, in all of this important work, beauty risks not only being held up to the light and questioned, but also elbowed off to the shadows and left gathering dust. Kant’s theory had many problems, but it kept aesthetic experience front and centre. And some argue that the untethering of art from the concept of beauty has diminished art’s autonomy. In The Expediency of Culture, George Yúdice shows that in our globalised world diverse groups have come to understand culture as a resource to be mobilised for social, political, and economic ends. He calls this expansion of culture into the realm of the political and economic ‘unprecedented’ k and notes that conventional notions of culture as ‘transcendent’ – of art for art’s sake – have been emptied out in favour of ‘legitimation based on utility.’35 So we’ve gone from

k To play the pedant, it’s not quite right to say this state of affairs is unprecedented. According to Oleg V. Bychkov and Anne Sheppard, ancient Greek and Roman aesthetic thought has three salient features – considering the link between aesthetics and ethics; reckoning with the value of the arts for human society; and reflecting on the link between aesthetics and religious subjects. Certainly, there is much ‘expediency’ observable in these concerns. Also, as we’ll learn in Chapter 1, African aesthetics are deeply imbricated in everyday life – you might say that they too are expedient. In fact, some theorists consider the functionality of African art to be its most consistent aesthetic trait. I still think Yùdice’s observation that something significant has changed in the philosophy and practice of art under global capitalism is astute, but the change effects a Western idea of art for art’s sake that dates potentially back to the Renaissance and perhaps only as far back as the Enlightenment.

14  Introduction the recognition that art functions politically and that politics form a part of how we perceive beauty to a situation where art is obliged to offer political or practical justifications for its existence. In their edited collection Artistic Citizenship, Elliott, Silverman, and Bowman say that because the arts are inherently social practices – made by people and for people36 – ‘they should be viewed, studied, and practiced as forms of ethically guided citizenship.’37 They argue that artistry involves ‘obligations to engage in art making that advances social “goods.”’38 Errr. I think it’s great to have art’s relationship with life acknowledged, honoured, illuminated, erotically massaged in the moonlight, but I’m nervous of the suggestion that artists have an obligation to create ethical work for the social good. (To the gulag you must go!) And, honestly, even less prescriptive claims for the political function of art can leave me feeling weird. For example, Jill Dolan’s influential work on utopia in performance makes me wonder if my experiences at the theatre are all wrong. Dolan thinks that performances constitute temporary communities that can encourage people to be active in other public spheres. Okay. Yes. Sometimes, for sure. For her, in certain special moments when theatre is doing something as opposed to simply saying something, ‘the utopian performative’s evanescence leaves us melancholy yet cheered, because, for however brief a moment, we felt something of what redemption might be like, of what humanism could really mean, of how powerful might be a world in which our commonalities would hail us over our differences.’39 Look, I’ve been to a lot of shows and I have never felt this communal, evanescent, redemptive, humanist, utopic transcendence. Am I doing it wrong? Is my heart stone, my cynicism diamond? Or (oh God maybe Jill Dolan will see this and hate me and I met her once and she was so lovely) might this political custard be rather eggy? Claire Bishop teases out some of the challenges of all this politicising in the context of globalised neoliberal capitalism.40 Bishop reflects on what she terms the Social Turn in art – that is – a ‘recent surge of artistic interest in collectivity, collaboration, and direct engagement with specific social constituencies.’41 Because of the ‘social work’ that this kind of art performs, it is considered by many to be progressive.42 Bishop expresses sympathy with art that aims to connect people and counter the ills of capitalism, but she has reservations.43 She argues that it remains crucial to analyse such practice as art as opposed to social work, and she asks what happens when a commitment to the aesthetic is absent. Bishop astutely notes that the achievements of socially engaged art are never compared with non-artistic social projects, ‘despite the fact that they are perceived to be worthwhile precisely because they are non-artistic’44; rather, they are compared with other artworks. I think this is a very important observation. If our primary objective in making art were social change, wouldn’t we be better off supporting social projects with clearly accredited methodologies of success – for example, numbers of people lifted out of poverty or addiction? The ‘success’ of art is often of a less empirical kind45 and valuing it based on its success in remedying social problems just makes it look like lousy social work.

Introduction 15 In some fields, Bishop’s intervention might look more like tired orthodoxy than cutting-edge critique of the avant-garde. For example, in Applied Theatre and Theatre in Education discourses, the idea that theatre intended to benefit people can be distinguished from ‘pure’ theatre with aesthetics at its heart is widely considered to be a simplistic misconception, rooted in the outdated universalist aesthetic philosophies we’ve been discussing.46 However Jen Harvie’s work, which shows how the arts can be used by governments to gesture towards social inclusion while camouflaging the political reasons for inequality, provides good evidence that recasting art as social work can have some pretty nefarious consequences.47 Similarly, Maurya Wickstrom shows that enthusiastic cries of ‘social change’ within Theatre in Education projects can mask the important distinction between ‘collective, structural change made in the interests of those who wish to free themselves from domination by specifically exploitative, capitalist, liberal regimes’48 and a generic change in the behaviour of certain communities, useful to neoliberal agencies.49 In short, locating art’s value primarily in its social effects can lead to it being used by powerful interests to drive their agendas. Bishop’s answer to the problems that stem from side-lining aesthetic value might be described as neo-Kantian. In formulating it, she draws heavily on a theorist called Jacques Rancière. Remember that for Kant aesthetic experience must be disinterested, pure, free from personal or practical clutter. You can imagine Kant being appalled by the social turn Bishop explores or the expediency of culture Yúdice traces. For Rancière, the work of art is not fully autonomous – art is, after all, of the world – but our aesthetic experience should be autonomous. There’s an exciting tension between art’s autonomy (the way it’s irreducible to logic, reason, or morality and the way it’s, you know, pretend) and its heteronomy (the way it’s social and political and moral and, you know, not pretend). And experiencing that tension allows us to question how the world is organised. So Rancière’s aesthetics, unlike Kant’s, are political. However, he’s very sceptical of submitting art to moral judgements, of evaluating it in terms of its effects. He thinks this is the end of aesthetic experience and of art’s political potential. Bishop shares this wariness. She warns of ‘deferring to the social pressure of a pre-agreed tribunal in which a cautious self-censoring pragmatism will always hold sway.’50 Ethics, she says, ‘do not always have to be announced and performed in such a saintly fashion.’51 Loosely, Bishop conceives of an autonomous realm of aesthetic experience, which includes political, theoretical, and social discussions of art but resists ethical analysis.52 This is Kantian, but it isn’t Kant. It’s less credulous of the disinterested gaze. Bishop recognises that we can’t just vaporise all the political, theoretical, and social stuff that comes baked into art. Still, we can’t treat the perceived messages in art the way we’d treat them if a politician was espousing them or a pamphlet was shoved through our letterbox. Art should be free to shock, to be idiosyncratic or controversial; artists shouldn’t be ‘subdued and normalised in favour of a consensual behaviour upon whose irreproachable sensitivity we can all rationally agree.’53

16  Introduction I find all of this very tricky. In Bishop’s work, there is an over-arching sense that the effects of art on life are overstated by proponents of the social turn (or that art’s heteronomy is privileged over its autonomy), to the detriment of both art and politics. But are the effects of art on life overstated? Pierre Bourdieu thinks the extent to which art affects life is under recognised. In his view, art is mystified and it’s important to look behind the smokescreen. Bourdieu thinks art (including appreciation and criticism) is part of what reproduces the conditions that keep the rich rich and the poor poor. Pull back the curtain and you find power and money, money and power. Okay, Distinction came out in 1979, but I don’t think its analysis of art and capital is outdated. Rancière says that Bourdieu’s theory of the aesthetic is overly deterministic.l He thinks that Bourdieu takes a uselessly antagonistic side in the chicken and eggery of the debate on whether art produces society or society produces art. Shown a painting, Bourdieu analyses how it circulates in fields of capital and upholds class privilege. His analysis might be very astute, but, um, Pierre mon cher, is it a nice painting? Bourdieu doesn’t know, he’s just bouncing around shouting, ‘Show Me the Monet.’ Rancière also accuses Bourdieu of a neo Platonic reduction of the aesthetic to the ethical54 albeit a radical one.55 I won’t go back to Plato here in detail, because I made a decision to start this story of aesthetics in the 18th century and so help me I’m sticking with it. Suffice to say that Plato does not trust art. It leads away from truth and is dangerous. In Plato’s ideal Republic, artists are out. (Fine, Plato, Fine. That just means more artists for my ideal Republic, to which you, sir, are not invited.) So, when Rancière accuses Bourdieu of neo Platonism, he is accusing him of distrusting art, of dismissing its beauty and value because of prissy ethical concerns. He’s sort of accusing him of sucking all of the joy out of one of the most joyful things about being human. It’s true that, in Distinction, Bourdieu doesn’t spend a lot of time on the aesthetic. He does not theorise, for example, the beauty we experience and the pleasure we feel in listening to music.m He is more interested, say, in mapping the connections between childhood exposure to high culture, that culture’s privileged place in the education system, and the reproduction of class privilege. But, to my mind, that doesn’t mean that a Bourdieusian approach to culture will not allow for beauty. Bishop acknowledges that all the postmodern, postcolonial, Marxist, and feminist canonical destabilisation that lead to the currently shaky status of the aesthetic was important, but she says, ‘While these arguments were necessary to dismantle the deeply entrenched authority of the white male elites

l Determinism is the idea that all individual actions are predetermined by already existing factors. It gets rid of free will. If you chose Rice Krispies over Cornflakes this morning, it’s because a complex web of causal factors determined that choice: the Cornflakes never stood a chance. Determinism picks a side in a chicken or egg debate. Does society produce people or do people produce society? Both, probably, unless you’re a determinist. m Bourdieu does try to make a case for literary pleasure in the The Rules of Art, arguing that ‘scientific analysis of the social conditions of the production and reception of a work of art, far from reducing it or destroying it, in fact intensifies the literary experience.’ Bourdieu, The Rules of Art, xix.

Introduction 17 in the 1970s, today they have hardened into critical orthodoxy.’56 I tend to disagree. Humanities and arts curricula are still dominated by the works of the white, male, bourgeoise thinkers and artists that constitute the Western canon, and although this situation is partially due to history, it has ongoing effects. Contemporary theatre stages are still male dominated.57 Attempts to challenge this deeply entrenched status quo can lead to abuse or career endangerment, particularly for artists and scholars from marginalised demographics.58 It is tempting to believe that we have left prejudiced attitudes in the ‘70s, but the claim that the attempt to tackle sexism, racism, or classism in the arts is hardened dogma seems premature. And this matters, because positioning oppression in the past masks ongoing injustice. What appears to me under-addressed in Bishop’s otherwise sophisticated critique is an insight akin to that which Appiah positions as ‘absolutely basic cultural knowledge’ in Africa. Namely, that people of different eras, classes, genders, races, and cultures have long come to different conclusions about value when considering art as art and when considering what aspects of art are expedient or useful. And the usefulness of art in terms of normalising cultural supremacy, racism, sexism, homophobia, and other types of prejudice often goes unremarked. To my mind, it’s still necessary to point out that art and aesthetic experiences are informed by hierarchies within society. But I don’t think this necessarily undermines them as aesthetic experiences. Twentieth-century postmodern, postcolonial, feminist, and Marxist critiques don’t tell us that the works of the Western canon are not beautiful. They tell us that they are not only beautiful but also the product and producer of imperialism, white supremacy, patriarchy, and capitalist exploitation of the working classes. Might aesthetics, then, become a product and producer of something else? Might art lead us away from the normalisation and reproduction of dominance uncovered by those who challenged the canon? And might it do this without bowing to a kind of instrumentalising group think that stifles artistic freedom? In her response to the destabilisation of traditional Western aesthetic ideas, Janet Wolff argues that art is neither universal nor relative, but, rather, grounded in shared values. This leaves beauty open to communal negotiation and renegotiation.59 To me, this is far more exciting than either worshipping some things as universally beautiful or insisting that beauty lives lonely in the beholder’s eye. And it’s more radical that Rancière’s limiting of the political potential of art to an individual questioning that occurs during an aesthetic experience. (I don’t have to worry that Rancière will see this and hate me because any brief perusal of his bibliographies confirms that I have too many boobies to make his reading list.) A little like Wolff, proponents of Social Aesthetics believe that art objects and events ‘transcend their narrow material, temporal, and spatial boundaries’ and ‘participate vitally, richly, and vigorously in the larger socio-material assemblages within which they are created, circulated, and consumed.’60 These ways of thinking give art back to life. And life, like theatre, is usually a communal endeavour – with all the joy and conflict that can bring.

18  Introduction Along with Bourdieu, I recognise that what an individual or society considers good art is deeply enmeshed with questions of class, power, and privilege. Along with Rancière, I hold that the fact that our aesthetic experiences – whether of creating or appreciating art, loving or hating it – are shaped by all this ethical, political, social stuff doesn’t discount them as, primarily, aesthetic experiences. In this book, I propose that anti-oppressive aims can lead artists to create and audiences to apprehend new forms of beauty. But I do not see anti-oppressive work as an artistic obligation, and I don’t think such aims represent aesthetic value in themselves. I agree with Kant that beauty is not only in the eye of the beholder. I consider beauty to be a shared value, though not a universal one. Rather, following the wisdom of postcolonial, feminist, and Marxist thinkers, I think that art and beauty are entwined with the beliefs and values of societies and communities. The critical theorist Theodor Adorno notes that artistic form (and not just content) responds to time and place and social structures;61 in this book I illuminate such responses. I think we can pay attention to the ways that power relations shape aesthetic forms and experiences and still honour beauty and aesthetic freedom. I hope the case studies in this book show that attention to the interplay of art and power might help us to create and appreciate beauty unfettered (or at least less fettered) by prejudice – which, some of you might note, is really quite a Kantian aim for an avowed anti-universalist. The chapters that follow pay keen attention to the interrelation of art and society, connecting aesthetics and activist commitment, yet they keep aesthetics centre stage. And I hope, as you read, you’ll agree that there is immense pleasure in this way of thinking about art.

Notes 1 This mode of analysis in indebted to intersectional feminist thought, as first conceived by Kimberlé Crenshaw, who explains that subordination is ‘frequently the consequence of the imposition of one burden that interacts with pre-existing vulnerabilities to create yet another dimension of disempowerment.’ Kimberlé Crenshaw, “Mapping the Margins: Intersectionality, Identity Politics, and Violence against Women of Color,” Stanford Law Review 43.6 (1991): 1299. 2 Kevin Brown, “Agitprop in Soviet Russia,” Constructing the Past 14.1 (2013): 4. 3 Richard Pipes, A Concise History of the Russian Revolution (New York: Vintage, 1995), 6. 4 Christopher Murray, Twentieth-Century Irish Drama: ‘Mirror up to Nation’ (Manchester: Manchester UP, 1997). 5 Christopher Morash, A History of Irish Theatre 1601-2000 (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2002). 6 Nicholas Grene, The Politics of Irish Drama: Plays in Context from Boucicault to Friel (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999). 7 Including but by no means limited to: Frazier, Adrian, Behind the Scenes: Yeats, Horniman, and the Struggle for the Abbey Theatre. Vol. 11 (Berkely: University of California Press, 1990); Gregory, Augusta, Our Irish Theatre: A Chapter of Autobiography (New York; London: GP Putnam, 1913); Hunt, Hugh, The Abbey, Ireland’s National Theatre, 1904-1978 [ie 1979] (New York: Columbia University Press, 1979); Levitas, Ben, The Theatre of Nation: Irish Drama and Cultural Nationalism 1890-1916 (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2002); Mikhail, Edward Halim, Ed. The Abbey Theatre: Interviews and

Introduction 19 Recollections (Totowa: Barnes and Noble 1988); Pilkington, Lionel, Cultivating the People: Theatre and the State in Twentieth-Century Ireland (London; New York: Routledge, 2001); Saddlemyer, Ann, ed. Theatre Business. The Correspondence of the First Abbey Theatre Directors: William Butler Yeats, Lady Gregory and JM Synge (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1982); Saddlemyer, Ann, In Defense of Lady Gregory, Playwright (Dublin: Dolmen, 1966); Sihra, Melissa, ed. Women in Irish drama: A Century of Authorship and Representation (Basingstoke; New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007); Mary Trotter, Modern Irish Theatre (Cambridge: Polity, 2008). 8 Patrick Lonergan, Theatre and Globalization: Irish Drama in the Celtic Tiger Era (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009). 9 Diane Negra, The Irish in Us: Irishness, Performativity, and Popular Culture (Durham; London: Duke UP, 2006), 6. 10 For a thorough critique of this ideology, see Eithne Luibhéid’s Pregnant on Arrival: Making the Illegal Immigrant (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2013). For an in-depth portrayal of the media landscape that demonised pregnant migrants see Ronit Lentin, “Pregnant Silence: (en)gendering Ireland’s Asylum Space,” Patterns of Prejudice 37.3 (2003): 301–322. And for a compelling argument about the threat pregnant asylum seekers were construed as posing to neoliberal economic prosperity see Dominic Hewson, “Pregnant With Risk: Biopolitics, Neoliberalism and the 2004 Irish Citizenship Referendum,” Irish Political Studies 33.4 (2018): 569–588. 11 See Jason King, “Interculturalism and Irish Theatre: The Portrayal of Immigrants on the Irish Stage,” The Irish Review 33 (Spring 2005): 23–39; Jason King, “Black Saint Patrick: Irish Interculturalism in Theoretical Perspective & Theatre Practice,” in Global Ireland: Irish Literature for the New Millennium, Ed. Ondřej Pilny ̉ and Clare Wallace (Prague: Litteraria Pragensia, 2005): 45–61; Charlotte McIvor, Migration and Performance in Contemporary Ireland: Towards a New Interculturalism (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016), 19; Charlotte McIvor and Matthew Spangler, Staging Intercultural Ireland: New Plays and Practitioner Perspectives (Cork: Cork University Press, 2014). 12 King, “Interculturalism and Irish Theatre,” 24. 13 Karina Doorley, Maxime Bercholz, Tim Callan, Claire Keane, and John R. Walsh, The Gender Impact of Irish Budgetary Policy (Dublin: ESRI, Parliamentary Budget Office, 2018), 37–39. 14 Aidan Regan and Samuel Brazys, “Celtic Phoenix or Leprechaun Economics? The Politics of an FDI-Led Growth Model in Europe,” New Political Economy 23.2 (2018): 223–238. 15 Kitty Holland, “Almost 10,000 People Now Homeless, New Figures Show,” The Irish Times, March 28, 2018: Richard Waldron, Bernie O’Donoghue-Hynes, and Declan Redmond, “Emergency Homeless Shelter Use in the Dublin Region 2012– 2016: Utilizing a Cluster Analysis of Administrative Data,” Cities 94 (2019): 143–152. 16 Fintan Walsh, Queer Performance and Contemporary Ireland (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016), 2. 17 THEATREclub, “THEATREclub Stole Your Clock Radio What the FUCK You Gonna Do About It,” www.theatreclub.ie. Accessed 01 Mar 2019. 18 Paul Gouldsbury, “Bród: Out in the Streets,” Youtube.com, March 9, 2009. YouTube, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wEGClLPlJ5Y 19 In 2017, the Global Acceptance Index placed Ireland in 7th place out of 174 countries for its acceptance of LGBT people. Andrew Flores, “Social Acceptance of LGBT People in 174 Countries 1981 to 2017” (Williams Institute: UCLA School of Law, 2017). 20 Thomas Conway, This Is Just This. It Isn’t Real. It’s Money: The Oberon Anthology of Contemporary Irish Plays (London: Oberon, 2012), 7. 21 Conway, This is Just This. It Isn’t Real. It’s Money, 7. 22 Evelyn Mahon has an illuminating article from 1987 articulating feminist frustration that the Women’s Liberation Movement of Ireland’s second wave had such limited success in the context of Catholic Ireland.

20  Introduction 23 William Shakespeare, The Tragedy of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark (Project Guttenberg, Act 3 Scene 2). 24 Kant, Critique of Judgement, 37. 25 Kant, Critique of Judgement, 42. 26 Kant, Critique of Judgement, 42. 27 David Elliott, Marissa Silverman, and Wayne Bowman, Eds., Artistic Citizenship: Artistry, Social Responsibility, and Ethical Praxis (New York: Oxford University Press, 2016, 3). 28 Appiah, Anthony Kwame, “Is the Post in Postmodernism the Post in Postcolonial?” Critical Inquiry 17.2 (1991), 341. 29 Pierre Bourdieu, Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste, Trans. Richard Nice (Harvard: Routledge, 1986). 30 Griselda Pollock, Differencing the Canon: Feminist Desire and the Writing of Art’s Histories (London; New York: Routledge, 1999), 4. 31 Pollock, Differencing the Canon, 8. 32 Carolyn Korsmeyer, Gender and Aesthetics: An Introduction (New York: Routledge, 2004), 6. 33 Fine art is art made for its own sake – for wholly aesthetic purposes – and not to serve another function. Some thinkers trace the idea of fine art back to the renaissance, while others argue that it’s an 18th-century idea. 34 Carolyn Korsmeyer, Gender and Aesthetics, 118. 35 George Yúdice, The Expediency of Culture: Uses of Culture in the Global Era (Durham: Duke University Press, 2003), 11. 36 David Elliott, Marissa Silverman, and Wayne Bowman, eds., 6. 37 Ibid 6. 38 Ibid 7. 39 Jill Dolan, “Performance, Utopia, and the “Utopian performative”.” Theatre Journal 53.3 (2001): 165–166. 40 Neoliberal capitalism refers to a small government, free market philosophy that weakens social safety nets and places increased power in multinational corporate and financial institutions. 41 Claire Bishop, “The Social Turn: Collaboration and Its Discontents,” Artforum 44.6 (2005): 178–180. 42 See, for example, Nicolas Bourriaud, Relational Aesthetics and Grant H. Kester, Conversation Pieces: Community and Communication in Modern Art for two substantial arguments in this vein. 43 Bishop, “The Social Turn,” 178–180. 44 Claire Bishop, Artificial Hells: Participatory Art and the Politics of Spectatorship (London; New York: Verso, 2012), 19. 45 For a critique of expectations for the ‘success’ of socially engaged performance projects in the Canadian context, you might like to read Dara Culhane’s account of her attempt to forge new ethnographic practices through performance in Downtown Eastside Vancouver. For a discussion of the problems with judging community theatre by social welfare criteria, Eugène Van Erven is thought-provoking. Nicola Shaughnessy’s expansive essay ‘Valuing Performance,’ shows how a drama project working with autistic kids was able to establish that it impacted language abilities, social interaction, and empathy, and also discusses other, arguably more complex, forms of evaluation with much nuance. 46 See Gareth White, Applied Theatre: Aesthetics (London: Bloomsbury, 2015). 47 Jen Harvie, “Democracy and Neoliberalism in Art’s Social Turn and Roger Hiorns’s Seizure,” Performance Research 16.2 (2011): 113–123; Harvie, Fair Play - Art, Performance and Neoliberalism (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013). Both Bishop and Harvie draw links between the proliferation of socially engaged art in the UK and the neoliberal reign of New Labour from 1997 to 2010, and, later, to David Cameron’s conservative ‘Big Society’ initiative – where citizens were encouraged take on many of the social duties of government without training or pay.

Introduction 21 48 Maurya Wickstrom, Performance in the Blockades of Neoliberalism: Thinking the Political Anew (Basingstoke: Palgrave McMillan, 2012), 92. 49 Wickstrom, Performance in the Blockades of Neoliberalism, 93. 50 Bishop, 26. 51 Bishop, 25. 52 Bishop, Artificial Hells, 18–30. 53 Bishop, 25. 54 Jacques Rancière, “From Politics to Aesthetics,” Paragraph 28.1 (2005): 13–25. 55 Jacques Rancière, The Philosopher and His Poor (Durham; London: Duke University Press, 2004). 56 Bishop, Artificial Hells, 18. 57 Miriam Haughton, “‘Them the Breaks’: #WakingTheFeminists and Staging the Easter/ Estrogen Rising,” Contemporary Theatre Review 28.3 (2018): 345–354; Michael Paulson, “Theatre Jobs Skew White and Male, Study Finds,” The New York Times, 26 June 2017; Julia Pascal, “Women Are Being Excluded from the Stage,” The Guardian, 24 Apr 2018. 58 Lola Mosanya, “Trolled for Asking for More Writers of Colour at Cambridge,” BBC, 27 Oct 2017. 59 Janet Wolff, The Aesthetics of Uncertainty (New York: Columbia University Press, 2008). 60 Born, Georgina, Eric Lewis, and Will Straw, eds, Improvisation and Social Aesthetics: Improvisation, Community, and Social Practice (Durham: Duke University Press, 2017): 2. 61 T.W. Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, Trans. and Ed. R. Hullot-Kentor (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997), 6.

Bibliography Appiah, Anthony Kwame, “Is the Post in Postmodernism the Post in Postcolonial?” Critical Inquiry 17.2 (1991): 336–357. Aristotle, Aristotle’s Poetics, Trans. George Whalley (Montreal; Kingston: McGill-Queens University Press, 1997). Baumgarten, Alexandre Gottlieb, Aesthetica (Hildesheim: Olms, 1986). Bishop, Claire, Artificial Hells: Participatory Art and the Politics of Spectatorship (London; New York: Verso, 2012). ––––––, “The Social Turn: Collaboration and Its Discontents,” Artforum 44.6 (2005): 178. Born, Georgina, Eric Lewis and Will Straw, eds. Improvisation and Social Aesthetics (Durham: Duke University Press, 2017). Bourdieu, Pierre, Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste, Trans. Richard Nice (Harvard: Routledge, 1986). ––––––, The Rules of Art: Genesis and Structure of the Literary Field (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1996). Bourriaud, Nicolas, Relational Aesthetics (Dijon: Les Presses du Reel, 2002). Brown, Kevin, “Agitprop in Soviet Russia,” Constructing the Past 14.1 (2013): 5–8. Bychkov, Oleg V. and Anne Sheppard, Greek and Roman Aesthetics (Cambridge; New York: Cambridge University Press, 2010). Casey, Natasha, “The Best Kept Secret in Retail’: Selling Irishness in Contemporary America,’ in The Irish in us: Irishness, Performativity, and Popular Culture, Ed. Diane Negra, (Durham; London: Duke, 2006), 84–109. Casey, Natasha, “Converging Identities: Irishness and Whiteness in US Popular Culture,” (PhD diss., 2014, McGill Scholarship Online). https://escholarship.mcgill.ca/concern/ theses/nc580q613

22  Introduction Conway, Thomas, ed. This Is Just This. It Isn’t Real. It’s Money: The Oberon Anthology of Contemporary Irish Plays (London: Oberon, 2012). Crenshaw, Kimberlé, “Mapping the Margins: Intersectionality, Identity Politics, and Violence Against Women of Color,” Stanford Law Review 43.6 (1991): 1241–1299. Culhane, Dara, “Stories and Plays: Ethnography, Performance and Ethical Engagements,” Anthropologica 53.2 (2011): 257–274. Dolan, Jill, “Performance, Utopia, and the “Utopian Performative,” Theatre Journal 53.3 (2001): 455–479. Doorley, Karina, Maxime Bercholz, Tim Callan, Claire Keane and John R. Walsh, The Gender Impact of Irish Budgetary Policy (Dublin: ESRI, Economic and Social Research Institute, Parliamentary Budget Office, 2018). Elliott, David, Marissa Silverman, and Wayne Bowman, eds., Artistic Citizenship: Artistry, Social Responsibility, and Ethical Praxis (New York: Oxford University Press, 2016). Fanning, Bryan, Racism and Social Change in the Republic of Ireland (Manchester: Manchester UP, 2002). Ferriter, Diarmaid, Occasions of Sin: Sex and Society in Modern Ireland (London: Profile, 2010). Filewood, Alan, “Agitprop Theatre,” in The Routledge Encyclopedia of Modernism, Ed. Stephen Ross (Taylor and Francis, 2016). Date Accessed 5 Jun 2019. Flores, Andrew, “Social Acceptance of LGBT People in 174 Countries 1981 to 2017,” (Williams Institute: UCLA School of Law, 2017). Frazier, Adrian, Behind the Scenes: Yeats, Horniman, and the Struggle for the Abbey Theatre (Berekely: University of California Press, 1990). Gouldsbury, Paul, “Bród: Out in the Streets”, Youtube.com, March 9, 2009, YouTube, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wEGClLPlJ5Y Gregory, Augusta, Our Irish Theatre: A Chapter of Autobiography (New York; London: GP Putnam, 1913). Grene, Nicholas, The Politics of Irish Drama: Plays in Context from Boucicault to Friel (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999). Halikiopoulou, Daphne, Patterns of Secularization: Church, State and Nation in Greece and the Republic of Ireland (Surrey: Ashgate, 2011). Halliwell, Stephen, The Aesthetics of Mimesis: Ancient Texts and Modern Problems (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2009). Hardy Aiken, Susan, “Women and the Question of Canonicity,” College English 48.3 (1986): 288–301. Harvie, Jen, “Democracy and Neoliberalism in Art’s Social Turn and Roger Hiorns’s Seizure,” Performance Research 16.2 (2011): 113–123. ––––––, Fair Play - Art, Performance and Neoliberalism (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013). Haughton, Miriam, “‘Them the Breaks’: #WakingTheFeminists and Staging the Easter/ Estrogen Rising,” Contemporary Theatre Review 28.3 (2018): 345–354. Hewson, Dominic, “Pregnant with Risk: Biopolitics, Neoliberalism and the 2004 Irish Citizenship Referendum,” Irish Political Studies 33.4 (2018): 569–588. Holland, Kitty, “Almost 10,000 People Now Homeless, New Figures Show,” The Irish Times, March 28, 2018. Hunt, Hugh, The Abbey, Ireland’s National Theatre, 1904-1978 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1979). Inglis, Tom, Moral Monopoly: The Rise and Fall of the Catholic Church in Modern Ireland (Dublin: University College Dublin Press, 1998).

Introduction 23 Kant, Emmanuel, Critique of Judgement, 1790, Trans. James Creed Meredith (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007). ––––––, Critique of Pure Reason, 1781, Trans. J.M.D. Meiklejohn (New York: Dover, 2003). ––––––, Critique of Practical Reason, 1788, Trans. Mary J. Gregor (Cambridge; New York: Cambridge University Press, 1997). Kester, Grant H., Conversation Pieces: Community and Communication in Modern Art (Berkeley; Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2004). King, Jason, “Black Saint Patrick: Irish Interculturalism in Theoretical Perspective & Theatre Practice,” in Global Ireland: Irish Literature for the New Millennium, Ed. Ondřej Pilnỷ and Clare Wallace (Prague: Litteraria Pragensia, 2005): 45–61. ––––––, “Interculturalism and Irish Theatre: The Portrayal of Immigrants on Stage,” The Irish Review 33 (2005): 23–39. Korsmeyer, Carolyn, Gender and Aesthetics: An Introduction (New York: Routledge, 2004). Lenin, Vladimir Ilʹich, and V. J Jerome. What Is to Be Done? : Burning Questions of Our Movement. New York: International, 1999. Lentin, Ronit, “Pregnant Silence: (En)gendering Ireland’s Asylum Apace,” Patterns of Prejudice 37.3 (2003): 301–322. Levitas, Ben, The Theatre of Nation: Irish Drama and Cultural Nationalism 1890-1916 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002). Luibhéid, Eithne, Pregnant on Arrival: Making the Illegal Immigrant (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2013). Lonergan, Patrick, Theatre and Globalization: Irish Drama in the Celtic Tiger Era (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009). Mahon, Evelyn, “Women’s Rights and Catholicism in Ireland,” New Left Review 166 (1987): 53. McIvor, Charlotte, Migration and Performance in Contemporary Ireland: Towards a New Interculturalism (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016). McIvor, Charlotte and Matthew Spangler, eds. Staging Intercultural Ireland: New Plays and Practitioner Perspectives (Cork: Cork University Press, 2014). Mikhail, Edward Halim, ed. The Abbey Theatre: Interviews and Recollections (Totowa: Rowman & Littlefield, 1988). Monks, Aoife, “Comely Maidens and Celtic Tigers: Riverdance and Global Performance,” Goldsmiths Performance Research Pamphlets (London: Goldsmiths, 2007). ––––––, “‘Everyone Can Be Irish for the Day’: Towards a Theory of Diasporic Performance in the St. Patrick’s Day Parade,” New England Theatre Journal 16 (2005): 117. ––––––, “Virtuosity: Dance, Entrepreneurialism, and Nostalgia in Stage Irish Performance,” in Performance, Feminism and Affect in Neoliberal Times, Ed. Elin Diamond, Candance Amich and Denise Varney (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017), 147–159. Morash, Christopher, A History of Irish Theatre 1601-2000 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002). Mosanya, Lola, “Trolled for Asking for More Writers of Colour at Cambridge,” BBC, 27 Oct 2017. Negra, Diane, ed. The Irish in Us: Irishness, Performativity, and Popular Culture (Durham; London: Duke University Press, 2006). Paulson, Michael, “Theatre Jobs Skew White and Male, Study Finds,” The New York Times, 26 June 2017. Pascal, Julia, “Women Are Being Excluded from the Stage; It’s Time for Quotas,” The Guardian, 24 Apr 2018.

24  Introduction Pilkington, Lionel, Cultivating the People: Theatre and the State in Twentieth-Century Ireland (London; New York: Routledge, 2001). Pipes, Richard, A Concise History of the Russian Revolution (New York: Vintage, 1995). Plato, Republic, Trans. Robin Waterfield (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993). Pollock, Griselda, Differencing the Canon: Feminist Desire and the Writing of Art’s Histories (London; New York: Routledge, 1999). Rand, Ayn, Atlas Shrugged (New York: Signet, 1996). Rancière, Jacques, “From Politics to Aesthetics,” Paragraph 28.1 (2005): 13–25. ––––––. The Philosopher and His Poor (Durham; London: Duke University Press, 2004). Regan, Aidan and Samuel Brazys, “Celtic Phoenix or Leprechaun Economics? The Politics of an FDI-Led Growth Model in Europe,” New Political Economy 23.2 (2018): 223–238. Saddlemyer, Ann, In Defense of Lady Gregory, Playwright (Dublin: Dolmen, 1966). Saddlemyer, Ann, ed. Theatre Business. The Correspondence of the First Abbey Theatre Directors: William Butler Yeats, Lady Gregory and JM Synge (Gerrards Cross: Colin Smythe, 1982). Saloman, Nanette, “The Art Historical Canon: Sins of Omission,” in (En)Gendering Knowledge: Feminists in Academe, Ed. Joan Hartman and Ellen Messer-Davidow (Knoxville: University of Tennesse Press, 1991): 222–235. Shakespeare, William, The Tragedy of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark (Project Guttenberg, 1998). Shaughnessy, Nicola, “Valuing Performance: Purposes at Play in Participatory Theatre Practice,” in Artistic Citizenship: Artistry, Social Responsibility, and Ethical Praxis, Ed. David Elliott, Marissa Silverman and Wayne Bowman (New York: Oxford University Press, 2016), 480–505. Sihra, Melissa, ed. Women in Irish Drama: A Century of Authorship and Representation (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007). THEATREclub, “THEATREclub Stole Your Clock Radio What the FUCK You Gonna Do About It,” www.theatreclub.ie. Accessed 01 Mar 2019. Trotter, Mary, Modern Irish Theatre (Cambridge: Polity, 2008). Van Erven, Eugène, Community Theatre: Global Perspectives (London: Routledge, 2001). Waldron, Richard, Bernie O’Donoghue-Hynes and Declan Redmond, “Emergency Homeless Shelter Use in the Dublin Region 2012–2016: Utilizing a Cluster Analysis of Administrative Data,” Cities 94 (2019): 143–152. Walsh, Fintan, Queer Performance and Contemporary Ireland (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016). Wickstrom, Maurya, Performance in the Blockades of Neoliberalism: Thinking the Political Anew (Basingstoke: Palgrave McMillan, 2012). White, Gareth, Applied Theatre: Aesthetics (London: Bloomsbury, 2015). Wolff, Janet, The Aesthetics of Uncertainty (New York: Columbia University Press, 2008). Yúdice, George, The Expediency of Culture: Uses of Culture in The Global Era (Durham: Duke University Press, 2003).

1

Arambe Productions A Hammer, Shaping

Story There were two friends who were only delighted with each other. They did everything together and were so happy that they neglected to worship the Gods. Displeased, Esu, the Trickster, schemed. He wore a hat that was red on one side and white on the other, and, as the friends were out walking, he passed between them. ‘Who was that fella with the red hat?’ asked one. ‘Red? That hat was white!’ said the other. An argument ensued, becoming heated, until Esu saw his opportunity and passed between the friends again, in the opposite direction this time. ‘I’m sorry – you were right,’ said the first friend, ‘the hat was white after all.’ ‘White? No, it was red – you were right,’ said the other. White. Red. Red. White. They worked themselves into a terrible state and soon it was all fisticuffs. Then Esu, ever crafty, sent his priest to break things up. When the friends explained their confusion, the priest told them to make offerings at Esu’s shrine so that harmony would be restored to their friendship. And so, they did. The Gods called Esu’s successful ploy ‘story’ and made up lots more tales to convince us humans to do as they wanted. They sent storytellers out into the world to spread the word.1 This South African folk tale is performed with music, singing, and mime to introduce Arambe Productions’ Once Upon a Time and Not So Long Ago (2006), a play that Charlotte McIvor and Matthew Spangler believe exemplifies the company’s ‘critical mission to critique the everyday practice of interculturalism in Ireland and to re-imagine Irish identity in new, more inclusive terms.’2 In opening with Esu, Arambe suggests that it intends to tell us stories not only to entertain us. As the Gods weaving tales to ensnare poor mortal fools can attest, story has power. In this knowledge, this chapter teases out the varied and evolving aesthetic strategies that Arambe used during its decade of work in Ireland to encourage its audiences to think, see, and act differently. Arambe Productions, Ireland’s first African theatre company, was founded in 2003 by Bisi Adigun. This was at the heart of the Celtic Tiger boom and Ireland was fast becoming multicultural. The company had a dual aim: ‘to diversify Irish theatre by introducing Irish audiences to the tradition of African theatre and to provide a platform for African immigrants living in Ireland DOI: 10.4324/9781003205708-2

26  Arambe Productions to present, re-present, and express themselves through the art of theatre.’3 Discussing the impetus behind Arambe, Adigun recalls his disappointment with representations of black characters on the Irish stage and screen – even while he played many of these characters himself. He notes the dearth of black actors on Irish stages playing roles that have no relevance to their skin colour.4 And he regrets that black characters on Irish stages are typically represented as foreigners, asylum seekers, intruders, or refugees who, by the closing curtain, are returned to where they came from.5 Adigun writes, ‘My conclusion was that Irish theatre itself needed to experience diversity for it to be in a position to successfully represent and celebrate diversity.’6 Active until 2013, Arambe provided that experience: it produced a wide range of material that was radically new in the context of Irish theatre, including original works, classic and contemporary African plays, and interpretations and adaptations of Irish drama. Arambe had an activist mission, and the social context of Ireland in the Celtic Tiger and post-Celtic tiger era further politicised its work. Charlotte McIvor shows that, at this time, the government liked to gesture to intercultural policy and to using the arts to achieve intercultural cohesion even while enacting racist policies.7 As Ronit Lentin and Robbie McVeigh ask us to remember, there was pronounced racism towards national minorities in Ireland before the economic boom.8 Unsurprisingly then, there were also racist and exclusionary reactions to Ireland’s new multiculturalism, and African immigrants experienced the brunt of this racism more profoundly than other ethnic groups.9 As I explained in the introductory chapter, in the year 2000, the Irish government removed asylum seekers from the mainstream welfare system and put them under a system of ‘direct provision,’ with lower rates of benefits, administered by the Department of Justice, Equality and Law Reform (DJELR), which had no history of welfare provision. Writing in 2011, Bryan Fanning argued that the DJELR was charged with the job of deliberately excluding asylum seekers from Irish society,10 and proceeding decade proved him right. Direct provision has shown itself to be a cruel and punitive system.a As also mentioned in the introduction, in 2004, Irish people voted 4 to 1 to remove the right of citizenship from Irish-born children of non-Irish parents, in a referendum that Fanning locates as a top-down and racist initiative. In the years since, there has been a number of high-profile campaigns to stop the deportation of children born and raised in Ireland.

a Direct Provision provides compulsory communal accommodation, three meals a day at strict times and a small monetary allowance. The centres – located in old hotels, hostels and guest houses; on paved caravan sites; in disused barracks; and, in the case of one centre, a defunct holiday park – are run by private contractors for profit. The architects of the scheme believed that placing accommodation in Dublin would attract more people. Thus, direct provision centres are often in isolated locations poorly served by public transport. If the residents want to eat, they cannot leave for more than a few hours. Direct provision was supposed to accommodate people for no more than 6 months. Some people have been there for years – thousands of children have grown up in these institutions. In the two decades since its inception, Direct Provision has proved to be a horrific system. The 2015 McMahon report revealed that asylum seekers feel they live in prison-like conditions.

Arambe Productions 27 Jason King, writing in 2005, says that theatre had been receptive to the tensions and potentials of the multiculturalism born of the Celtic Tiger in ways that other art forms have not. He traces the beginnings of an intercultural theatre movement in Ireland and considers his scholarship something of an intervention. While Irish theatre scholars are busy wrangling with the question of whether Ireland can still be postcolonial now that it’s so globalised and rich, King wants to redirect the conversation to the new stories, talents and traditions on Irish stages.11 McIvor and Spangler’s 2014 anthology of intercultural plays and practitioner interviews does the important work of inserting underrepresented voices – including those of immigrant artists, traveller artists, and artists of colour – into the narrative of contemporary Irish theatre and into Irish theatre history.12 Yet, despite this promising theatrical start and dedicated academic service, I would argue that the burst of interest in multicultural and intercultural work that peaked towards the end of the economic boom gently tapered out. With notable exceptions, Irish created multicultural and intercultural work is still sparse on Irish stages. Charlotte McIvor’s book-length study of Irish interculturalism differentiates between high profile productions and grassroots ‘interculturalism from below’ and shows that exciting intercultural work is often happening outside the mainstream. All the same, I think Eva Urban is correct when she notes that, ‘In spite of Ireland’s rapid development towards an intercultural society in the last 20 years, only few plays and theatre productions in mainstream theatres have since included the ‘New Irish’ as either characters or professional actors cast in productions.’13 Our case study, Arambe Productions, is a rare bird. It’s a company that grew from the grassroots, edged in from the fringe, and, in 2007, ended up on the national stage and at the heart of the 50th Dublin Theatre Festival. I analyse four Arambe plays: Once Upon A Time and Not So Long Ago (2006); Kings of the Kilburn High Road (2005); The Playboy of the Western World (2007); and The Butcher Babes (2012) to tell a story about intercultural Ireland and the aesthetic strategies that allowed Arambe to be heard there. I’ve chosen Arambe’s original works and adaptations as opposed to its stagings of African classics because, while introducing Irish audiences to African work is certainly an important way to claim space, I’m interested in what happens when migrant artists want to talk about not only where they are from, but also where they live. That’s a risky, gutsy thing to do. The intercultural theorist Young Yun Kim writes about the special vantage point of migrants on both their culture of origin and their new homes.14 Migrants see things that natives do not. Yet, these insider-outsider perspectives are unlikely to please people invested in myths of nation and resistant to change. Intercultural artists must tread carefully: Arambe shows us how.

Once Upon a Time and Not So Long Ago (2005/2006) Consisting of seventeen playlets linked by dramatised narration, Once Upon a Time and Not So Long Ago is an energetic mixture of drumming, dancing, scripted drama, narration, and mime. The first half, Once Upon a Time,

28  Arambe Productions dramatises a number of Sub-Saharan African folktales, with a storyteller and his ensemble performing stories of justice, power, confusion, and sacrifice. But towards the end of these wise and often funny parables, the ensemble stops listening. The storyteller’s voice is drowned out by a television set. A performer hands out Western clothing, mobile phones, watches, and sunglasses, which the ensemble don enthusiastically. When the second half begins, the storyteller is a theatre director – a guest on an Irish talk show discussing the work of his African company. Instead of folktales the ensemble now enacts the real testimony of African people living in Ireland, but the power of telling these stories remains the same: as Esu reminds us, well-told stories change people’s beliefs and behaviours. If you, like I, are a Westerner who studies theatre, in thinking about this play’s aesthetics you’ll probably consider the influence of Bertolt Brecht. Brecht conceived of a theatre that would politically activate its viewers. He thought simple identification with characters made audiences accept the narrative before them as inevitable. He wanted to wake people up to the contingency of the world on stage and, by extension, of the social world in which they lived. Brecht was reacting against the trends of naturalism and Stanislavskian method acting, which he saw as having a numbing political effect. He was a Marxist thinker defending theatre against other Marxists thinkers, because for many Marxist theorists of culture, theatre was simply a part of the capitalist superstructure (that is to say, the cultural institutions and ideas) that kept economic exploitation in place. (Or, in the terms of Arambe’s play, theatre was the story told by capitalist Esu to make everyone worship at the shrine of class oppression.) Amongst the aesthetic techniques that Brecht uses in pursuit of his new theatre is the alienation effect. His concept of alienation drew on his observations of Chinese acting, which did not use the European conventions of a fourth wall and mimetic (or imitative/representational) identification between actor and character. For Brecht, this ‘making strange’ drew attention to the constructed nature of the drama, encouraging audiences to see the stuff of life as they saw the stuff on stage – malleable, in service of an ideology, and capable of being otherwise. Brecht’s drama did not hide the seams and knots that held it together – it was anti-illusory. It used various aesthetic tricks to jar and discomfit, for an expressly political purpose.15 It’s easy to read Once Upon a Time and Not So Long Ago as part of this Brechtian aesthetic tradition. Its artifice is on display; its actors change from character to character, helping to create the distance essential to alienation; the song and dance interrupt the narrative (so much as there is narrative in this episodic play); and, like Brecht’s drama, Arambe tries to shake us out of everyday beliefs and practices that mask oppressive systems. However, as I prepared to embark on an enthusiastic aesthetic analysis of Arambe’s successful hybridisation of Brechtian techniques with African performance forms and stories, I sat down and read Bisi Adigun’s doctoral thesis on the dramatic work of the Nobel Prize winning Yoruba writer Wole Soyinka. Adigun’s scholarship pointed me to Ola Rotimi,

Arambe Productions 29 a Nigerian playwright, who argues that techniques resembling Brecht’s alienation effect have been in effect in Nigerian drama since before dear Bertolt was even born.16 Elsewhere in the thesis, Adigun argues that interculturalism – in the terms defined and re-defined and over-defined by the Western academy as the intentional hybridisation of familiar and foreign cultural forms – had been happening throughout Africa long before it was a Western academic buzzword.17 I thought about this, and added it to Kwame Anthony Appiah’s insight, which you’ll remember from the introductory chapter, that Western postmodern art critics think they discovered the notion of aesthetic relativity, when, in Africa, the idea that people from different cultures have different aesthetic standards is absolutely basic cultural knowledge.18 And I started to wonder why I am so quick to jump to Western frameworks to understand the aesthetics of a play that is intercultural, yes, but also unmistakably African. While I see Brechtian influence in Once Upon A Time and Not So Long Ago, I now suspect reading it as piece of Brechtian dramaturgy using African stories and forms may be Eurocentric. I think it might be more correct to say that it has an African aesthetic. I am treading tentatively with the terminology ‘African aesthetic.’ Africa is a big, heterogenous continent, with 54 countries and thousands of cultures, languages, and performance traditions. There’s much disagreement as to whether you can talk in a unified sense about African culture, philosophy, or aesthetics at all. Afrocentrist scholars such as Molefi Kete Asante19 and Ama Mazama 20 argue for the political necessity of foregrounding African thought, history, and creative norms as a riposte to Eurocentric hegemony that spent centuries writing and arguing these things out of existence. In opposition, thinkers such as Clarence Walker argue that the idea of an essential Africanness is an a-historical, therapeutic mythology.21 It’s important to put this debate in its historical academic context. As Kariamu Welsh-Asante explains, early anthropological Africanist writers – mainly white Europeans and North Americans – claimed that African cultures had no aesthetic philosophy or ideology, and that their art was primitive because it served ritual and everyday functions, and it was tribal insofar as it differed from people to people without the cultural cross-fertilisation or unifying aesthetic tropes that define Western art.22 We need to go back to our friend Kant to understand the Africanists’ conclusions. There was certainly a fog of racist cultural supremacy clouding their thinking, but there was also a powerful aesthetic theory that located real art, true art, as autonomous art for art’s sake. Ajume Wingo and Dele Jegede argue that a key feature of African aesthetics is that they are closely embedded in social life. By their accounts, African art practice is inextricable from the lived experience of the people who make and enjoy it. Art is part of religious practices, festive social gatherings, and daily life. For Wingo, it exists primarily to bring people together, to strengthen the social fabric.23 For Jejebe, in Africa, ‘art is integral to life and to man’s well-being. It is expressive of a people’s world-view, and its absence creates an obvious but uncomfortable vacuum.’24 He considers African aesthetic

30  Arambe Productions objects taken out of context and placed in museums as ‘emblematic of artistic decapitation.’25 For these thinkers, it’s the very characteristic that disqualified African art from the realm of the aesthetic for Western anthropologists that in fact constitutes its most robust aesthetic quality. African art is useful. Perhaps that’s why I look at Once Upon a Time and Not So Long Ago and see Brechtian aesthetics – maybe when Western art tries explicitly and unabashedly to serve a function, as Brecht’s theatre does, it starts to look African. Robert Douglas is a scholar of African Aesthetics who pushes back on the Western tendency to understand African art as tribal and lacking continental interconnectedness or cohesion. He points to stylistic norms and recurring motifs in African art, including the cultural functionality we just discussed, and also something he calls multidominance – that is, the presence of simultaneous significant elements. So, to give an example, where European music tends to have one rhythm in command at any given moment, a piece of African music might have up to four simultaneous rhythms, none of which are secondary. And, to dance to music with multiple rhythms, good dancers are often expected to move different parts of their bodies in concert to an individual drum – for example, move their feet in time to one drum but their shoulders and back in time to another. Douglas gives other examples: ‘the predisposition to apply colour in layers; the proclivity to use high-key sharply contrasting colours, the predilection for use of multiple textures, mixed media, and complex design patterns and shapes is fundamental to African material culture and its visual art.’26 Once Upon A Time and Not So Long Ago has a multidominant aesthetic. There is no primary narrative but rather playlets which function individually but resonate most fully as part of a whole. Dance, song, and mime interact with dialogue and narration to create what European scholars might refer to as Total Theatre,b but what in African practice is not aesthetically unusual. The themes of manipulation, justice, truth, and confusion in the first act become the beats to which the second act dances its modern messages about African experiences in a strange land. This multidominance allows a multitude of perspectives, individual, and cultural, on subjects and stories that could otherwise be unhelpfully reduced to a clash of cultures narrative. Instead of staging irreconcilable cultural values, they foreground confusion and missed connections. In one of the folktales, a woman tries to reward a deaf man who pointed her, quite by coincidence, in the direction of her missing goats; he, however, thinks she’s blaming him for her misfortunes. They have experienced the same interactions and events, but they understand them differently. As Adigun says in relation to the themes in

b Total theatre is an anti-naturalist performance mode that includes a variety of forms including dialogue, mime, dance, visual imagery and song. Dorothy Max Prior has a good online explainer of total theatre’s roots and aims. Dorothy Max Prior, “What is Total Theatre,” Total Theatre Magazine 13.2 (2001): 6–7. http://totaltheatre.org.uk/archive/features/what-total-theatre

Arambe Productions 31 the first part of the play, ‘People are bound to misunderstand one another for all sorts of reasons: differences in opinion, ideology, worldview, class, cultural background, social status, sexual orientation, and so on.’27 Because of the lessons of the folktales, the scenes of confusion and disagreement in the second half are not framed in terms of cultural incompatibility, but rather, in terms of the regrettably human tendency to see things only from one’s own perspective. The hardest hitting playlet is based on a true story. A baby dies due to a botched circumcision, to which his African father resorted because the Irish medical system refused to perform the procedure until the child was a year old. In a play in which this narrative was predominant, we might declare the incompatibility of the cultural beliefs on display, an idea which can lead to anti-immigrant sentiment. But as one drumbeat, one layer, one texture amongst others, the play encourages us to look at the problem from all angles. The multidominant whole changes depending on how you focus your attention. In a playlet from the second half, ‘The Question of Home,’ a cashier in a perfume shop gets angry when a customer asks where she’s from and if she’s going home for Easter. ‘But Ireland is my home. Here,’ she says, angry, while the customer insists that she didn’t mean any offense.28 In Ireland, ‘where are you from?’ is a very common question. Irish people ask each other where they’re from all the time. But for the cashier, constantly reminded by customers that they don’t see her as Irish, the question of where she’s from and when she’s going home take on a very different meaning. The customer was treating the cashier just as she’d treat any other Irish person. And still, the cashier had a right to be offended. In discussing the playlet with the TV show host, the director explains, Now imagine this scenario. You are sitting in a pub and someone collides with your seat. Before you look up, you say, ‘are you blind or something?’ And when you finally look up the person is actually blind. In that context you’ll agree with me that the question: ‘are you blind?’ suddenly takes a different meaning. Doesn’t it?29 It’s a provocative position – that anti-racism does not mean treating everyone equally, but, rather, accounting for difference. There’s something about a traditional Western teleological30 narrative, with a sole protagonist within a fourth walled play, that creates the illusion of one reality playing out, applicable to all. But the multidominance of this play’s aesthetic allows us to see multiple stories within the same interaction. An Ireland still learning to listen to its new migrant voices would do well to worship at this particular shrine.

Kings of the Kilburn High Road (2006) Adigun would end up staging three different plays inspired by Jimmy Murphy’s Kings of the Kilburn High Road. In Murphy’s play from the year 2000, four male Irish immigrants to London meet in the back room of

32  Arambe Productions a social club after the tragic death of one of their old friends, Jackie. Each of them hopes that Joe, the only one of their number who came to England and made good, will arrive to honour Jackie’s life and their decades’ long friendship. It’s a brutal script, in which machismo, sexism, and racism mask the migrants’ broken dreams, financial precarity, alcoholism, depression, and isolation. Adigun’s evolving use of it as a vehicle to explore the Nigerian experience in Ireland encapsulates both hope and trepidation. The first production, performed at the Dublin Fringe in 2006, was a relatively faithful performance of the original, with the conceit of casting black African and African-Irish actors in the roles of Murphy’s jaded London Paddies. The second version, Home Sweet Home, was performed in Lagos in 2010 and is an adaptation of the play in which the characters are Nigerians living in South East London. Finally, Adigun wrote and staged The Paddies of Parnell Street, in which he rebelled against the play’s morose ending, turning Paddy Englishman Joe Mullen into Victor, ‘an unambiguous mentor and a role model,’31 who helps his compatriots find work and acts as a cipher of the success that can be achieved by Nigerian migrants to Ireland with hard-work, determination, and deliverance from temptation. McIvor convincingly argues that the three plays should be seen as an ensemble as opposed to a teleological progression from claiming the right for immigrants to stage Irish plays to positioning immigrants on the margins of Irish culture. 32 In this section, I’m going to consider the aesthetics of the 2006 staging, a production which dramaturgically33 links traditional patterns of Irish outward migration and the experiences of new immigrants to Ireland. There are differing academic perspectives on the politics of linking migration to Ireland in the Celtic Tiger era to waves of Irish migration in the past. Ronit Lentin points to the (annoyingly persistent) tendency to deny that the Irish are capable of racism due to histories of emigration and anti-Irish sentiment. She calls the habit of evoking parallels between past and present day discourses of immigration a specificity of Irish racism.34 Jason King, contrarily, celebrates that ‘the Irish theatre has proven highly receptive to the experiences of immigrants in Ireland, and provided an impetus for expressions of intercultural contact between them and the collective self-image of the Irish as an emigrant people that is enshrined in historical memory.’35 He sees much potential in the attempt to awaken audiences to historical duty through performance. For Adigun, his use of Kings of the Kilburn High Road isn’t just about creating links specifically between Irish emigrants past and immigrants to Ireland present. He says, ‘Although the play is based on the case of Irish immigrants in London, it is my belief that many people could enjoy the play and understand its message because it explores the universal phenomenon of human migration.’36 If you’ve read the introductory chapter, you have probably divined how I feel about universalism. So, bear with me on this one. While I

Arambe Productions 33 think very few, if any, universals exist in matters of society, art, or culture,c I can also entertain Adigun’s idea that an understanding of migration – of the excitement and pain of leaving home – is something that most humans can imagine, even if they haven’t experienced it. That doesn’t mean, of course, that this particular play communicates that message in a universal way. So, to put my anti-universalist curmudgeon’s convictions to the test, I’ve spent a few years asking students in my Intercultural Ireland class to adapt key scenes from Kings of the Kilburn High Road as a way to experiment with the idea of a universal migrant experience. The documentary maker Mieke Bal, in her exploration of migrant aesthetics, notes that migrancy changes not only the host society but also the migrant.37 The beauty and tragedy of that change has remained a constant in the adaptations created in my classroom. Students have rewritten the nationalities, host countries, names, occupations, and genders of Murphy’s immigrants dozens of times. They’ve created scenes featuring Italian immigrants in a New York pizzeria, elderly Iranian ladies drinking tea in a Montreal apartment, and rural Quebecers in a Toronto sports bar. My observation from watching and enjoying The Monarchs of N’importe Où in all their permutations, is that Adigun is generally right about this play. There is something about migration – with its opportunities seized and missed, the push-pull between keeping a hold of your national identity and integrating, the pressure to make something of yourself that comes with knowing you broke your loved ones’ hearts by leaving – that Murphy captures with great poignancy through his world-worn Irishmen, but that is certainly not unique to them. And yet, in every class, there was an adaptation or two that didn’t quite work. Often those, though less fun in preparation and performance, were good in discussion. An adaptation based on Syrian refugees to Canada couldn’t mesh with the original text. We realised it was because, with the Syrian war still claiming lives, these immigrants had no choice. They couldn’t go home, and their longing and pain for what was left behind was qualitatively different, and not easily served by Murphy’s script. Another adaptation had Anglophone Canadians from the Maritimes move to Montreal, where they felt alienated from Francophone culture. In trying to puzzle out what didn’t gel, we figured that it was the power relations. Okay, economic conditions in the Maritimes create a lot of migrants, but the historical relationship between Francophone and Anglophone cultures in Canada is such that mapping Anglophone immigrants onto Murphy’s Irish labourers inverted the post-colonial Irish-English relationship – the Anglo migrants were from the historically more powerful group. Migrancy means something everywhere, and there are similarities in migrant experience regardless of origins and destinations. Yet specifics do

c I won’t go so far as to say that there are no universals, because that would be a universal statement. However, I would like to say it, proving that universals are very tempting when they support your convictions.

34  Arambe Productions matter. Arambe’s original staging of the play – with Murphy’s text unchanged but non-conforming casting choices working to disrupt how it signified – gestures to shared human experience. And it also uses African bodies and accents in tandem with Murphy’s Irish dialect and British mise-en-scène to create an imaginative meeting point between Ireland and Africa in the way that Jason King suggests. At the same time, the aesthetic strategy for connecting Murphy’s characters and African migrants to Ireland works against the tendency, critiqued by Lentin, of using past experiences of emigration and discrimination to deny that the Irish are capable of racism. McIvor, following Brandi Wilkins Catanese, defines Arambe’s casting choices in this production as ‘non-conforming,’ which is to say, ‘the racial or ethnic identity of the performer intentionally counters audience expectations socially, culturally, and/or politically.’ McIvor understands the non-conforming casting used here to ‘draw attention to complex Irish histories of race and racialisation.’38 It does this, I think, through what I’m going to call a phenomenological jar. Phenomenology is a philosophy of experience, perception, and consciousness. It conceives of two attitudes: the natural attitude and the philosophical attitude. The natural attitude is the perspective of everyday life. It’s the attitude that allows us to interact with the objects and people around us unquestioningly. The philosophical attitude, on the other hand, requires us to take a step back from or to ‘transcend’ the everyday and learn to see the world purely as it constitutes itself in our consciousness. In theory, this allows you to see the realm of the natural attitude anew – without prejudice and with systematic rationality. I always see a connection between this and the disinterested aesthetic attitude championed by Kant – in both, we’re supposed to forget what an object is for, and, instead, experience it in itself. Theatre is particularly interesting phenomenologically speaking, because while a chair in a painting is made from paint and canvas and is a representation a chair, and a chair in a photo or film is similarly a representation of the original object through the medium of photography or film, a chair on stage is different. It is both a representation of a chair through the medium of theatre and a real chair in real life. In theatre, the medium is reality. Theatre phenomenologist Bert O. States, says ‘theatre… is really a language whose words consist to an unusual degree of things that are what they seem to be.’39 States gives examples of things on stage that transport us from the theatrical illusion, or to speak in phenomenological terms, things that take us from the natural attitude into the philosophical attitude. Fire and water, he says, retain a ‘primal strangeness’ that make them hard to read as symbols. Or, he talks about children and animals. The dog on stage, as opposed to the photographed dog or filmed dog or painted dog, is not a representation of a dog, but an actual dog. And it’s part of the stage illusion. So what kind of phenomenon is it? Are we reading it imaginatively as a sign of a dog, or phenomenologically as a dog in and of itself? States says that we can allow ourselves to oscillate between these two kinds of consciousness, much like looking at the famous duck-rabbit figure of the psychologist Joseph Jastrow.40

Arambe Productions 35

Figure 1.1  Jastrow’s Duck Rabbit Illusion. A pen and ink illustration which can be seen as a rabbit with its ears flapping backwards or a duck with its beak pointing up41

As numerous philosophers have pointed out, you can hold Jastrow’s figure in your consciousness as a rabbit, or you can hold it in your consciousness as a duck, but you can’t perceive both figures at once, although you know both are there. When you switch your concentration from the duck to the rabbit, you’re switching paradigms. You’re choosing how to perceive reality. In Arambe’s Kings of the Kilburn High Road, there’s a phenomenological jar between the characters represented and the actors representing them. We know that the characters do not look like the actors playing them. And yet we’re wellversed as theatre audiences in suspending our disbelief – accepting, for example, young people with talc in their hair as old people – and so we can flip in and out of the illusion, just like flipping between the duck and the rabbit in Jastrow’s famous illustration. And while we’re often doing this to some degree in theatre – a bumbled line or improbable costume might jar us out of the illusion – in Arambe’s Kings of the Kilburn High Road the artistic choices are designed to create that friction, to keep you flipping between the story and the way it’s being told. The powerful effects of this aesthetic tactic are highlighted when Murphy’s characters showcase their racism: when Jap downplays the seriousness of his relationship with a black woman, Shirley, by claiming that if he has kids, he wants them to look like him, or when Maurteen taunts Jeb by referring to Shirley with vicious racial slurs. In the mouths of these African and African-Irish actors, the significance of Irish racism is heightened – the people most affected by it are right there, not only listening, but speaking the lines like evidence. Watching the play with white actors in the role, the racism might not seem as prominent a strand for analysis. An audience might be complacent about it, precisely because of how squarely it sits within our sphere of expectation. But with black men reading the lines, it is very hard to persist in the illusion that the Irish are incapable of racism because of their own experiences of migrancy and discrimination. The phenomenological jar created by the casting choices also allows Adigun and the performers to critique Irish racism from a protected vantage point. When immigrants point to the discrimination they experience, they are often met with denial from people offended by hearing that their country is racist, or, worse, by the suggestion that if they don’t like it, they can go back home.

36  Arambe Productions Here, as black actors embody white characters and speak the lines written by a white Irish playwright, the audience must phenomenologically flip between the statement made by the script and the statement made by the dramaturgy. If the script says that the prejudice the immigrants have faced doesn’t stop them being prejudiced in return, the dramaturgy not only asks us to see the experience of African migrants to Ireland in the experiences of Irish migrants to England but also foregrounds the danger of Irish racism in newly multicultural Celtic Tiger Ireland. This aesthetic strategy creates the points of contact King celebrates as promising, does not let us forget the specificities of Irish racism, and maintains a protective structure around Arambe’s social critiques.

The Playboy of the Western World: A New Version (2007) John Millington Synge’s The Playboy of the Western World (1907) is, arguably, the foundational text of modern Irish theatre. Folks in Irish theatre circles tend to chummily refer to it as Playboy, but I would advise against doing so as an overly enthusiastic new assistant professor in a Canadian classroom. Playboy is the story of a meek young man, Christy Mahon, who arrives in a country village and reveals to the locals that he’s on the run because he killed his father. The villagers celebrate his murderous bravery, and the local ladies fight over the exotic romantic prospect that has landed in their midst. Thought to be a hero, Christy becomes one. He wins the local sports, courts the local beauty, and is wondering why he did not kill his father in the years gone by when, in the final act, his father appears, very much alive, and attempts to spoil his good fortune. It’s a play with a history almost as entertaining as its silly plot and delicious characters. When it was first performed at Dublin’s Abbey Theatre (an institution destined to become Ireland’s national theatre when independence was won), the audience protested and/or rioted. The academic consensus these days tends to be that the unrest was based in well-founded cultural and religious grievance and that boisterous disruption of plays was not unusual audience behaviour at the time.42 Irish nationalists didn’t like the play’s portrayal of the people of the West of Ireland as patricidal, lawless, salacious eejits (albeit very poetical ones), and that was legitimate critique. At any rate, the audience shrieked ‘that’s not the West,’ a Galwayman in an overcoat offered to fight any man who dared, Unionists in the stalls sang ‘God save the King,’ Nationalists in the pit sang ‘God Save Ireland,’ street brawls erupted afterwards, arrests were made, and William Butler Yeats gave an inflammatory interview to the Freeman’s Journal, accusing the protestors of having no books in their houses.43 The lines between protest and riot are like the lines between life and art – they get messy. The furor died down, as furors will tend to do, and, though poor Synge did not live to see it, after independence, his play came to be generally acknowledged as one of the great dramatic contributions of the Irish literary revival: for no apparent reason, according to Declan Kiberd, other than that it was demonstrably true.44

Arambe Productions 37 When things become canonical, they can assume an air of must. Generations of Irish teenagers studied Playboy for their school exams in that attitude of forced appreciation that stamps the spark out of everything. It became less performed in repertoire and more appreciated as text. This is how many plays die, but not Playboy, thankfully. In 1975, a student theatre troupe in Galway decided to cash in on the summer tourist season by staging an Irish classic, and dug out copies of Synge. As they put the star-crossed lovers Pegeen Mike and Christy Mahon on their feet and laughed at Pegeen accusing her rival Widow Quin of breast-feeding a goat or at a village girl enticing Christy to feel the lovely fat (chicken) breast she has brought for him, they realised it wasn’t the dull farce they’d remembered from school, but something full of fun, life, and edge. Playboy was the making of Druid theatre company, who remain a powerful force in Irish and global theatre to this day, and it was the re-making of Synge, who was rescued from literature and restored to repertoire. So, when the idea began to tug at Adigun that he should update Synge’s classic in time for its 100th birthday, he knew that it was time, as he explained to me, ‘to eat the frog with eggs.’ This, if I understand it correctly, is the Nigerian way of saying, ‘go big or go home.’ If you’re going to take a protagonist from a classic Irish play and transform him into an African in order to expand the definition of Irish culture to include immigrants, then why not take the most celebrated play in the Irish canon? Adigun asked the booker prize winning author Roddy Doyle to work with him on his idea, secured an Arts Council grant to fund the collaboration, and succeeded in getting the resultant co-authored adaptation onto The Abbey stage 100 years after Synge’s Playboy first evoked riots, sorry, I mean protests based in wellgrounded political and religious grievance.

Figure 1.2  A publicity shot for The Playboy of the Western World: A New Version (2007). Giles Terera (Christy), dapper in a suit, sits between a leather clad Eileen Walsh (Pegeen) and leopard print adorned Angeline Ball (The Widow Quinn) Photo by permission of Ros Kavanagh

38  Arambe Productions The Playboy of the Western World: A New Version played at The Abbey in 2007 and was so successful that it was programmed for a second run the next year. Because of this initial popularity, it can be easy to overlook the radicalism of Adigun’s proposition and what an immense achievement it was to get a piece of intercultural or multicultural or migrant theatred onto the main stage of a European national theatre in 2007 at all. In an article on activist aesthetics (see, I’m not the only one banging on about this), Szabulcs Musca points out that national and public theatre institutions across Europe have been poor at addressing and integrating migrant voices and perspectives in their structures and practices. Following the work of Dragan Klaic, Musca suggests that this pan-European failure of public theatre to include migrant artists and communities calls the entire enterprise of public theatre into question.45 A publicly funded national theatre is supposed to serve the nation, so what happens when the demographic of the nation changes, but the public theatre structures and practices do not? Adigun may have managed to get Arambe’s work on the Abbey stage, but this tension around the mission of a national theatre in a multicultural state very much affected what happened after he got there. The play was – like Synge’s original – rambunctious and raucous and fun. But it also had serious activist intent. In an article for The Irish Times, Adigun calls the idea for, collaboration on, and commissioning and producing of The Playboy his ‘greatest achievement by far, since arriving in Ireland in 1996.’46 Adigun didn’t just have a good idea. He didn’t just co-write a good play. He managed to manoeuvre the machinery of the Irish national theatre to his intercultural work, to have his migrant voice included in the mainstream narrative of Irish national theatre and forever in Irish theatre history. And then it all went to hell. Behind the scenes, deep rifts had formed. Arambe withdrew support from the second production and Adigun initiated myriad legal proceedings in relation to it. Following the second mounting of the Playboy, Adigun sued The

d Jacqueline Lo and Helen Gilbert formulate several definitions of cross-cultural theatre that might apply to Adigun and Doyle’s Playboy. Intercultural theatre they define as the hybrid result of intentional encounters between traditions. Lo and Gilbert outline two different types of multicultural theatre – Small ‘m’ multicultural theatre and Big ‘M’ multicultural theatre. The former often draws on techniques of colour-blind and non-traditional casting and does not actively draw attention to cultural difference or tensions; it sometimes engages in folkloric display, fetishizing cultural difference. Big ‘M’ multicultural theatre speaks to marginalization and manifests itself in a variety of forms, including Ghetto Theatre, Migrant Theatre and Community Theatre. Migrant Theatre is ‘concerned with narratives of migration and adaptation’ (34), and, according to Gilbert and Lo, ‘cross-cultural negotiation is more visible in migrant theatre where there is an emerging exploration of cultural hybridity reflected in aesthetic as well as narrative content’ (34). Within this taxonomy, Adigun and Doyle’s Playboy is an example of intercultural, big M Multicultural, and migrant theatre. Jacqueline Lo and Helen Gilbert. “Toward a Topography of Cross-Cultural Theatre Praxis,” TDR/The Drama Review 46.3 (2002): 33–36.

Arambe Productions 39 Abbey, Roddy Doyle, and director Jimmy Fay for breach of contract and infringement of his copyright, claiming that 120 changes had been made to the script without his consent. This action went to the High Court, and, in 2013, resulted in an admission of failure to pay royalties and violation of Adigun’s moral rights on behalf of The Abbey, who settled the case at great expense. Adigun was awarded €200,000 – including €40,000 in royalties to Arambe, and €60,000 to cover some of his legal costs. Doyle signed over all copyright to Adigun. It is estimated that the entire ordeal cost The Abbey between €500,000 and €600,000.47 This is a heartbreaking ending for this landmark production, which Adigun originally conceived of as a means to speak to Ireland’s emergent ‘discourse of migration, otherness, diversity.’48 Let’s remember the lesson of Once Upon and Time and Not So Long Ago, and recognise that there are likely multilayered ways to understand what happened here. Elsewhere,49 I explore the controversy in greater detail, and the appendices of my doctorate offer interviews with both Adigun and Doyle about the issue. Here I want to think through two things: (1) the question of the aesthetic malleability of theatre from an intercultural perspective and (2) the aesthetic strategy the new playboy took in relation to race and racism in Ireland. Adigun and Doyle’s intercultural collaboration fused the creative talent of two artists from distinct cultural contexts. Both authors brought knowledge of and intimacy with their experiences and traditions, allowing rich characterisations based in two cultures, even while the play was written line by line together. An eccentric, expletive-laden Dublin working class idiom harmonises with the refined, proverb-laden speech of the upper class Nigerian Malomos; each of these registers, the authors believe, has a poetry of its own. The stage directions place us in O’Flaherty’s pub, where an ‘invented form of Irishness’ is on display in the form of old-fashioned Guinness signs and an ornamental bale of turf beside an artificial fire. On the walls hang pictures of Mary Robinson, Michael Flatley and Roy Keane, each icon representing of a certain type of modern, cosmopolitan Irishness, marking the space as a site of globalised encounters, an Ireland that must be understood in wider context, even before Christopher Malomo makes his blustering entrance. It’s an intercultural aesthetic that shows us Ireland from inside and out, simultaneously. ‘Intercultural’ is a loaded term in theatre studies, connoting an enormous body of artistic work and scholarship that has often been controversial. As I want to keep this book bouncing along, I’ve decided not to rehearse the debates over intercultural theatre here. I think all that’s really important to know for the purposes of this chapter is, first, that Western theatre practitioners and scholars who want to work interculturally have often gone about it in paternalistic ways that re-enforce rather than challenge power dynamics based in colonial histories, and, second, that many intercultural practitioners and scholars are now actively working against this tendency and carving out new modes of making art that melds cultures.50

40  Arambe Productions Adigun notes that The Abbey did not see the production as intercultural and points out that the word is not used in any of the theatre’s publicity.51 Sure enough, the emphasis in the promotional material on The Abbey website is on the new Playboy as a ‘contemporary reimagining’ of ‘the most famous and infamous play in The Abbey Theatre’s repertoire.’52 We are told that in ‘this vivid retelling Synge’s play rediscovers its ability to tell the truth of a contemporary Irish experience and continues its legacy, vibrant as ever.’53 The outreach resources issued by The Abbey for students – including performers’ diaries, interviews, extensive notes on the production, and guidelines for writing a review of the show – do not mention the words intercultural or multicultural at all. Although the 64 page guidance notes do touch on issues of national identity, refugees and asylum seekers, contemporary Nigeria, and the significance of being an outsider, in the main, the focus is on Synge’s play re-imagined and The Abbey as a cultural institution. This framing is important, because the impetus behind Adigun’s idea in the first instance was an activist one: to use interculturalism to speak to multicultural realities. The Abbey is Ireland’s national theatre and has a responsibility to produce and promote Irish drama. But the absence in its promotional and outreach material of multicultural and intercultural handles raises the issue of the increasing complexity of the role of The Abbey as a national theatre in a multicultural society. A national theatre might be excited to host reworkings and re-imaginings of canonical Irish texts, but how does it deal with the fact that in intercultural work this also means representing ‘Other’ people and cultures. Can it learn the lesson of Arambe’s Once Upon A Time and Not So Long Ago – that sometimes anti-racism does not mean treating everyone the same, but, rather, respecting different standards, beliefs, and boundaries? For Adigun, the script was an absolutely finished artefact; he was very protective of his and Doyle’s writing. For example, he tells the following story: Giles Terera [the actor who played Christy] used to say ‘I am the son of a businessman.’ I said ‘no no no, not the son, you are a son. There is a difference between ‘a’ and ‘the,’ so you can’t say ‘the.’ What I’m trying to say is the play was finished, so that an actor wasn’t allowed to say ‘the’ instead of ‘a.’54 This protectiveness of the text likely also feeds Adigun’s anger at the unauthorised changes to the script made by The Abbey, changes which Adigun regards as mutilation and distortion. In 2010, when Adigun’s copyright suit was made public, the social commentator Fintan O’Toole observed, ‘there is an inherent tension between the nature of theatre open, collaborative, fluid on the one hand and the closed, precise notion of legal ownership on the other.’55 O’Toole points out that the production itself is an adaptation, and asks where Synge’s moral rights are ‘when his famous closing line, Pegeen Mike’s ‘My grief, I’ve lost him surely. I’ve lost the only playboy of the western world’ becomes, in the

Arambe Productions 41 Adigun/Doyle version, Fuck!?’56 Placed in this framework, Adigun’s allegations of distortions and mutilations to the script might seem hypocritical, and his conviction, stated in interview, that if Synge were alive today, he would have written the same play,57 presupposes that the canonical writer would be much less attached to the immutability of his art than is Adigun himself. Legally speaking, there are, of course, significant differences between Adigun and Doyle adapting Synge and The Abbey making unauthorised changes to the new version. Adigun and Doyle adapted Synge and created a new play under their names. The Abbey, by contrast, made changes to Adigun and Doyle’s play and left it under the authors’ names. The former is an adaptation. The latter constitutes a violation of the playwright’s right to integrity. Playwrights and theatres sign contracts preventing this kind of behaviour, which, the result of legal proceedings indicates, Doyle, Adigun, and The Abbey signed. While the legal aspect of this question has been decided, rightly, in the courts, O’Toole gestures towards the broader implications of artistic collaboration. O’Toole feels that the fact that Adigun has used the Irish Canon in a revisionary manner gives The Abbey the right to use his work in the same way. It’s a kind of intercultural argument holding that since we all borrow material from each other all the time, such borrowings are not ethically or politically problematic – even if, as his nod to author’s moral rights suggests, they are legally so. While it’s true that cultures borrow from each other all the time, it’s important to recognise that the ramifications of those borrowings look different depending on where you’re sitting.e In the introductory chapter, I talked briefly about the challenges to the Western canon presented by postmodernism. Postmodernists profess scepticism of pure truth or beauty, throwing aside distinctions between high art and low art. They question the value of originality and create works from pastiche and deconstructed classics. Great! I’m all for a bit of postmodern frolicking in the wreckage of Western hubris. But what about when postmodernists decide to do the same thing with cultures that are not their own, cultures which, unlike the Western canon, have been denigrated and classed as inferior?f Deconstructionist airs, such as those

e Rustom Bharucha’s pioneering work on theatrical interculturalism is a good place to start. For Bharucha, it is imperative to acknowledge that ‘the implications of interculturalism are very different for people in impoverished, “developing” countries like India, and for people in technologically advanced capitalist societies like America.’ Bharucha, Rustom, ‘A Reply to Richard Schechner,’ Asian Theatre Journal 1.2 (1984), 255. f This argument is based on the post-colonial theory of Franz Fanon, who says, ‘The claim to national culture in the past does not only rehabilitate that nation and serve as a justification for the hope of a future national culture. In the sphere of psycho-affective equilibrium, it is responsible for an important change in the native.’ For Fanon, universalists and postmodernists make a mistake with potentially serious consequences when they advocate that colonized and previously colonized cultures skip a period of formulating and celebrating their national culture. Franz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, Trans. Constance Farrington (New York: Grove Press, 1963), 210; 233–247.

42  Arambe Productions embraced by O’Toole in his commentary on the new Playboy, take on troubling overtones in intercultural situations, because we cannot demand of the people with whom we choose to collaborate that they adopt the same approach to the representation of their culture. Adigun understood the play to be finished, to the extent that exchanging a definite for an indefinite article was to corrupt it; his protectiveness should be understood in light of the limiting ways in which Africans are usually represented in Irish arts and media.58 These, after all, were part of the impetus behind the founding of Arambe in the first place. Arambe was meant to counter misrepresentation, to carve a space for African cultures and voices on their own terms within Irish theatre. For the Abbey, on the other hand, the Playboy was noteworthy because it reworked and reinvigorated the Irish canon.g Sometimes Western collaborators, afire to deconstruct and reconstruct their cultures in an exciting current of post-Kantian aesthetic relativity, cannot understand that people from other cultures might have good reasons for not wanting to join in this postmodern party. Where there are histories and contexts of racism and misrepresentation, it may be very important for marginalised people to insist their stories are not (yet) open to revision. The new Playboy undertook a very specific aesthetic strategy in relation to race and racism in Ireland, and one that responds to concerns Adigun had voiced in academic contexts about the portrayal of black people on Irish stages. Namely, it creates a stage reality in which there is hardly any racial tension at all. Many critics found this surprising. For reviewer Karen Fricker, this elision is a weakness. She says: ‘Adigun and Doyle’s impulse to tell a new story through Synge honours the author and argues for the play’s continuing relevance. It’s only a shame they did not use their inspired concept to dig deeper into the hidden recesses of today’s Irish culture.’59 I see Fricker’s point – in one way, the absence of prejudiced responses to Christy (on behalf of all but the cowardly and jealous Sean Keogh) sugar-coated Ireland’s racial tensions. It risks feeding the widespread denial that Irish people can be racist critiqued by Ronit Lentin.60 However, as Brian Singleton argues, the lack of overt racism also ‘revealed a good deal about the presentation of race […] in a post-colonial society.’61 Singleton observes: ‘when Christy walked onto the stage as a black man he was doubly othered and there were audible intakes of breath in the audience’; he reads these gasps as an anxiety for Christy ‘in the particular environment that had been set up on stage, […] not renowned for its inter-cultural understanding.’62 This anxiety turns out to be ill-founded within the dramatic world, but, much like the phenomenological jar I discussed in Kings of the Kilburn High Road, it reveals an acute consciousness of racism on behalf of

g Critique of the Western interculturalist drive to use ‘other’ cultures to reinvigorate moribund Western canons is a key feature of what Ric Knowles calls ‘The Interculture Wars.’

Arambe Productions 43 the audience. To argue along Brechtian lines, it potentially effects a muchneeded questioning of the inevitability of this racism. The lack of racism in the play, to borrow Adigun’s favourite Brechtian quote, is acting not as ‘a mirror to be held up to society, but a hammer with which to shape it.’ h Doyle recalls that he often had to reassure himself and check with Adigun that this was the right road to take.63 Adigun believes that the line between reality and fiction is blurred, and the more normalised representations of people of colour a public is given, the more it will accept them. For instance, he believes that the representations of black presidents on television shows such as 24 led to the election of President Obama in real life.64 This is an interesting thesis, and one which deserves serious attention in a conversation about interculturalism and aesthetics. Edward Said’s argument in Orientalism is that cultural representations of Eastern people by Western artists and politicians tell us more about the West than they do about the East, and also that these representations have power – they provide justification for imperialism and prejudiced attitudes, both historically and in the present day.65 Adigun’s ideology of representation means subverting the Orientalist dynamic of this power, providing representations that influence attitudes to diversity in positive ways without being didactic. Art acts like Esu’s trick – you get people praying without ever preaching a sermon. Adigun is irritated by the Irish media’s tendency to racialise black people rather than taking them first as individuals, observing that ‘every time you see a black man on The Late Late Show, there will be a discussion about immigration that night.’66 He believes that if black people were represented foremost in their social roles as doctors, journalists, or artists, this would naturalise white Irish people’s reactions to black people in real life. In the conviction that fiction has the power to shape reality, Adigun and Doyle’s dramatic choices create an Ireland in which race does not matter. While Ireland likely needs more art which highlights racist realities, Adigun’s theory of representation convinces me. There’s a place for drama that uses idealised representations rather than realistic ones to effect social change. Adigun and Doyle’s funny and entertaining adaptation of Synge’s classic was inspired by a strong ideological commitment. More, it reached wide audiences, including working-class and youth audiences that wouldn’t usually go to the theatre. Whether the authors wished to highlight race issues or not, a black Christy Mahon still resonated politically in its performance context. Reviews and criticism are full of musings on the significance of Christy’s race. Christy’s

h The origin of this quotation, commonly attributed to Brecht, is in fact contentious, as it does not appear in any of his published writings. In The Political Psyche, Andrew Samuels attributes the quotation to the 1920s Russian Futurist poet Vladimir Mayakovsky (Samuels 10). All the same, it is so congruent with Brecht’s aesthetic and political philosophy, that it is fair to call the quotation Brechtian. Andrew Samuels, The Political Psyche (Oxon; New York: Routledge, 2015), 10.

44  Arambe Productions blackness also made certain parts of the script and plot signify differently: for example, when he’s bound and burned at the end of the third act. Clumsily disguised by the Widow Quin in a pink hooded tracksuit with the word Bitch emblazoned across the backside, Christy is tied by the Dubliners and burned with a cigarette by his erstwhile sweetheart Pegeen. As attendees at the Irish Theatre Magazine’s 2007 International Critics Forum discussed at length, the iconography of a black man attacked by a white mob recalled lynching.67 I find it interesting that Playboy answered neither Adigun’s complaint about the dearth of black actors on Irish stages playing roles that have no relevance to their skin colour, nor his grievance with the representation of black characters as foreigners, asylum seekers, intruders, or refugees who ultimately return to where they came from. In this regard, McIvor sees Adigun and Doyle’s Playboy as politically dysfunctional; it doesn’t gather ‘enough courage to push convincingly against the text or break past its proscribed ending.’68 The project breaks down ‘from the moment Christopher appears as an outsider with no real claim to the space he enters, whether Pegeen’s bar or the Abbey’s stage, because there is no way he will be permitted to stay at the end of the three acts.’69 When I asked Adigun about Christy’s ultimate fate, he pointed out that at the end of The Playboy of the Western World Christy is empowered – he leaves the stage as master of his own destiny, with his head held high.70 This marks the production out from the representations of black characters Adigun has observed in the past. Much as with Arambe’s use of Murphy’s immigrant Irishmen in Kings of the Kilburn High Road, the status of Adigun and Doyle’s production as an adaptation of a well-known canonical text does political work here. For Doyle, ‘it’s well established by the time the rope goes around [Christy] that it’s not because he’s from Nigeria. He’s just a pain in the arse.’ 71 As with much of his writing, Doyle’s flippancy reveals a subtlety. Ultimately, the things that happen to Christy in Adigun and Doyle’s The Playboy of the Western World do not happen to him because he is black, but because he is Christy. The knowledge that the play is a relatively faithful adaptation of Synge means an audience must logically trace the reasons for the violence against Christy back to the original. Arambe already tried and tested this strategy for using theatre to critique racism in Kings of the Kilburn High Road, which powerfully pillories Irish attitudes to black people without changing a line. Here, something similar is achieved. The violence towards the outsider is part of a canonically enshrined Ireland, and awareness of its origins echoes Lentin and McVeigh’s reminder that pre-existing attitudes to outsiders, and not immigrants, are the cause of racial tension in multicultural Ireland. So, if the production is utopic, presenting a racism-free present where racism exists, then the utopia is complicated when it comes into contact with reality. The audience expects to see prejudice and is made to confront this expectation, even while the play offers a model of how things could be. The

Arambe Productions 45 imagery created when Christy is tied and attacked evokes racial history, even while the audience knows that the violence is present in Synge’s original. In this way, Adigun and Doyle’s Playboy highlights unconfronted beliefs in the inevitability of racism with a ‘softly, softly’ approach. It critiques, while plausibly denying it is doing so. This might well be a valuable tactic for migrants and people of colour attempting to claim space on Ireland’s national stage. And it is understandable that Adigun, as a migrant artist walking a delicate line between explicit utopic representation and implicit social critique wants and needs to be protective of his art, of the way his culture is represented, and of the reverberations of the voice that he worked so hard to place at the centre of the Irish stage.

The Butcher Babes (2010)72 The Butcher Babes (2010) departs dramatically from a diplomatic approach to critiquing Irish racism. It is a challenging work that confronts its audiences with the fact that, as its tragic protagonist Rafah attests, ‘Being black in Europe is hard; being black in Ireland is harder.’ 73 Perhaps, given its material, it couldn’t be otherwise. The Butcher Babes dramatises the gruesome 2005 murder and dismemberment of Kenyan man Farah Swaleh Noor by the ‘scissor sisters,’ Charlotte and Linda Mulhall. Swaleh Noor was in a relationship with Kathleen Mulhall, Charlotte and Linda’s mother. The sisters murdered him during a night of heavy drinking and drug use. They claim Charlotte acted to protect Linda from sexual assault by Swaleh Noor. Adigun’s play attempts to tell the side of the story that Swaleh Noor cannot. The Butcher Babes wastes no time in implicating its audience in something more complex than a sombre re-enactment of the murder. As two stage managers apologetically explain that the knives needed for the night’s dismemberment are not yet ready and as we listen to a disembodied head (the head that was never found) offer treatises on the function of theatre against a soundscape of blades and grindstones, it becomes clear that the artists are not here to assuage an Irish audience’s white guilt. The darkly comic dialogue certainly does not sugar coat the Irish propensity for racism. Rafah (Farah) regales his girlfriend Geraldine (Kathleen) with stories of Irish mobs on the streets of New York in 1865 so enjoying their mutilation of black lynching victims that police could not recuperate the bodies. He cleverly critiques racist Irish media tropes in the coverage of murdered black people. Geraldine and her daughters, Sharlene (Charlotte) and Lisa (Linda), are always keen to remind Rafah that he is not Irish – that he shouldn’t slaughter ‘our songs’ by singing them,74 that it doesn’t matter if he has an Irish passport – ‘You have to look Irish to be bleedin Irish.’75 Softly, softly, The Butcher Babes is not. The play is also funny and bawdy, with edgy jokes about everything from castration to Martin Luther King, and cartoonish portrayals of the white

46  Arambe Productions Irish characters in particular. An aesthetic choice that helps to enforce this parodic air is the use of whiteface. The white painted actors of colour create a phenomenological jarring effect like the one I discussed in relation to Kings of the Kilburn High Road and Playboy above. However, unlike those productions, we can’t trace the critique of Irish racism here back to an Irish text. This is an original script. The whiteface aesthetic creates a jar, but it is inherently confrontational. While Jean Genet’s famous whiteface play, The Blacks (1959), is invoked here, I also think Adigun is drawing on Rufus Norris’s 2009 production of Wole Soyinka’s Death and the Kings Horseman. Adigun addresses this production at length in his doctoral thesis, digging into the reasons behind the choice to use whiteface to portray the while colonists and laying out critical reaction to the production. There was (to this naïve fool) a surprising number of UK critics who thought the whiteface was racist. They could see no difference between theatrical use of whiteface and blackface, in spite of the history of white supremacy that informs the latter.76 Adigun was aware of the controversy caused by Norris’s dramaturgy, and I think his use of whiteface demonstrates a particular desire to provoke and challenge here. In the case of The Butcher Babes, it’s not only whiteface that creates a parodic representation of white Irishness, but also the working class Dublin dialogue – with its ‘c’meres,’ excellent swears, and sentences ending in ‘but.’

Figure 1.3  Actors Elizabeth Suh and Nofe Liberty, in tight monochrome clothing and whiteface make up, perch on a rock. Behind them, a concrete wall bearing the notice ‘no dumping, offenders prosecuted’ Photo by Permission of Aoife Concannon

Arambe Productions 47 Adigun has a good ear for this dialogue, but not a perfect one, and so there’s slippages between things working class Dubliners would say and things they would not, all of which also serve to jar an Irish audience out of illusion, and to reflect a cartoonish version of Ireland as seen through African eyes back at the audience. And yet the play is not primarily a parodic instrument. It is, like Once Upon a Time and Not So Long Ago, a play with a multidominant aesthetic. It uses songs, drums, chants, dance, and stylised choreography alongside its dialogue. It is also a play with a function, which, you’ll remember from the discussion of African aesthetics above, is a characteristic some thinkers believe integral to African art. In an interview with the Irish Independent in advance of the play’s première, Bisi Adigun explained that at a certain point in the creative process he recognised that he was ‘trying to do something more spiritual’ with the play. In many African cultures, it is believed that if the dead are not given a proper burial, they will come back to haunt the living. The Butcher Babes, Adigun explained, would fill the place of the ritual necessary to let Swaleh Noor go.77 The play’s ritual function is foregrounded from the prologue, when Rafah’s head informs the audience: And the moment our knives are sharpened and we are good to go, I shall embody the spirit of the deceased brother confined in that coffin, personify his personality and demystify the mystery of the last twelve hours he drew breath on earth with his head on his shoulders and his balls in between his legs. And so help me Dionysus!78 The call to Dionysus – as well as the goat imagery that weaves through the play – recalls Euripides’s The Bacchae, in which the God of wine, ritual madness, ecstasy, and theatre, angered that the people of Thebes have not paid him due worship, lures the womenfolk of the city to the mountains to partake in his rites. In a state of hallucinatory frenzy, they rip the king Pentheus limb from limb. Rafah certainly does not make Pentheus’ mistake of failing to pay homage to Dionysus. His St. Patrick’s festival is characterised by plentiful libations, while the organic free-range goat’s head he cooks for pepper soup becomes a wry burnt offering. This homage to the ritual roots of Greek drama, reminds us that if we don’t take the time to sing, dance, and adequately grapple with this death, there may well be more tragedy in store. It also creates an intercultural link between African theatre and performance aesthetics and those foundational to Western theatre. And it creates those links in a way that avoids the postmodern deconstruction that Adigun resisted in relation to the new Playboy. Rather, the interculturalism here stresses the shared values of African and Hellenic aesthetics, as defined by their involvement in social processes. It remains important to recognise the distinctiveness of these traditions. Where, for the Greeks, theatrical catharsis would heal the body politic, Adigun’s use of African ritual is intended to set Swaleh Noor’s spirit free, not to absolve and assuage Irish society.

48  Arambe Productions

Figure 1.4  Gabriel Uche Akujobi’s head eyeballs us from atop a velvet pedestal. Behind him, Elizabeth Suh, Mary Duffin, and Nofe Liberty hover ominously Photo by permission of Aoife Concannon

The Butcher Babes nods to Wole Soyinka, whose masterpiece, Death and the King’s Horseman, is also based on a true story. Soyinka’s protagonist Elesin must commit ritual suicide in order to bring his deceased leader’s soul to the next life. If he does not, the King will wander the earth, bringing misfortune on his people. The British colonial administration becomes involved, arresting Elesin to prevent a cultural practice it deems barbaric. Like Adigun’s Rafah, Elesin is a great lover of life. And like The Butcher Babes, Soyinka’s play ends in tragedy. Elesin’s soul, as well as the spiritual fate of his people, may be in jeopardy. A point of departure, however, is that Adigun is more committed to his flawed protagonist’s redemption than is Soyinka. This commitment to Rafah’s moral recuperation feels uncomfortable from a feminist perspective. In some ways, Adigun’s tale cleaves to the facts of Swaleh Noor’s last hours as far as we can know them: the hard liquor street drinking with his girlfriend and her daughters, the ecstasy surreptitiously slipped into his drink. Yet The Butcher Babes also dramatises a series of events in which Lisa engages in consensual sex with Rafah, then lies about it. Further, in Scene 2, it’s revealed that while Geraldine initially said no to sex with Rafah, she ended up enjoying it. Essentially, the play clears Rafah of the charges of sexual violence against him, and his rape of Geraldine is positioned as largely the result of cultural confusion.

Arambe Productions 49 In reality, Swaleh Noor probably had a significant history of violence against women. He allegedly preyed on vulnerable teenagers, including a Chinese girl whom he impregnated. Three partners say he beat and raped them.79 He once allegedly beat Kathleen so badly that she was hospitalised with broken bones. While no one deserves Swaleh Noor’s fate, there seems to be good reason to believe or at minimum entertain the murderers’ charges that sexual aggression was a contributing factor to the night’s violence. To understand what can look like straightforward rape apologism at first glance, I think it’s necessary to look at the media culture surrounding the murder. When the dismembered black body was first pulled from Dublin’s Royal Canal, both the Gardaí and the Irish media followed a ‘ritual killing’ line of enquiry. The same thing had happened when the decapitated body of Paiche Unyulo Onyemaechi, a Malawian woman killed by a pimp, was found in Co. Kilkenny in 2004. Apparently, murdered or mutilated black bodies must result from juju or voodoo, a racist assumption that conceives of violence as an alien import.80 The Irish media were quick to humanise pretty, troubled Linda in particular. Both TV3 and RTÉ documentaries about the murder emphasise how much she loved her children and tried to do her best for them in spite of her difficult background. Journalist John Mooney’s book, The Torso in the Canal, opens with these lines: ‘She was, she later remembered, always in the wrong place at the wrong time. Life had thrown her blow after blow; good luck and fortune had never visited her.’81 This is, by any account, a bizarre way to appraise Linda’s culpability. Not to put too fine a point on it: there’s being in the wrong place at the wrong time, then there’s hacking a man to pieces in a bathtub. Sarah Share’s RTÉ documentary, Killers: Sisters (2011), re-enacts Linda’s testimony of the killing with shots of a beautiful, frail actress in great distress. In its recreation of the moments prior to the murder, a towering black man grabs and molests the diminutive blonde.82 The scene recalls American antebellum era fears of black male sexual threat to pristine white femininity – imagery which has long been used to justify racist violence. The extent to which Linda’s testimony that her sister, Charlotte, slit Farah’s throat to protect her was unquestioningly accepted by the Irish press is astonishing, especially given the extreme violence that followed. Certainly, racism in the public discourse of Swaleh Noor’s death needs redress. I understand the urge to present an alternative series of events, especially as Swaleh Noor is not here to tell his side of the story. Still, the treatment of sexual violence in the play leaves me uneasy. In the introduction to this book, I mentioned that this study would throw up circumstances where the activist intent of a production, company, or artist seems to be in conflict with a different mode of anti-oppressive work. This is one of them. I understand why the play takes this representational road, but I am also wary of a tactic that fights racism with rape culture. The Butcher Babes remains, in my opinion, one of the most important theatre texts about race and racism to emerge from Ireland’s Celtic Tiger and post-Celtic Tiger period. Ronit Lentin, in charting Ireland’s progression

50  Arambe Productions from a racial to a racist state talks about way in which the nation constructed a myth of racial purity, then defended this construction against Celtic Tiger migrants through racist legislation.83 Adigun’s play stages the effects of this racist biopower i on migrants: it shows us that it doesn’t matter what kind of football jersey an immigrant wears, he is not part of the body politic; he is, in fact, no body at all. As we’ve seen, The Playboy of the Western World (2007) featured very little overt racism, and some thought Adigun and Roddy Doyle unhelpfully sugar-coated Ireland’s racial tensions. For Adigun, this creative choice was in part due to his conviction that the art we produce and consume shapes the world we live in. As I’ve argued, there is power in staging an Ireland where race does not matter to our dramatis personae. Yet, in this angrier, more confrontational piece, the audience must face the reality of racial abuse and racially motivated murder. There’s power in this too. To riff on that Brechtian adage – sometimes art is a hammer, tapping out beautiful shapes, building a better world; sometimes it is a knife, slitting our complacency open, and insisting that we see the ugliness inside.

Reflections Arambe’s last production was The Paddies of Parnell Street in 2013, an adaptation of Kings of the Kilburn High Road which pushed again the pessimism of the original to provide a model of ideal immigrant behaviour. And, when the production was done, Arambe shut up shop and Adigun moved back to Nigeria, with a newly awarded doctoral degree from Trinity College Dublin in his back pocket. He is now a senior lecturer at Bowen University. In an interview with Colin Murphy of the Irish Independent, Adigun is philosophical about his career in Ireland, and about the disappointment that his hit play for The Abbey did not lead to more high-profile theatre work, but, instead, to a ‘very harrowing’ legal dispute. ‘Irish theatre is very good at dealing with things that are long gone,’ says Adigun, ‘but it’s still grappling with how to deal with contemporary issues.’84 Murphy says, ‘Adigun’s achievement was to force contemporary African experiences on to the Irish stage, more or less single-handedly. At the time, with immigration booming and a dysfunctional asylum system buckling, there was ready support and an urgent need for his plays.’85 There is a mournful tone to the interview – Adigun’s voice was vital, and it is being lost. Adigun, as discussed, has long critiqued that fact that many Irish productions end with an immigrant going back to where he came from. There’s a tragic aesthetic to the fact that the tale of one of the most important immigrant contributors to Irish theatre ends the same way. The lines between art and life are a little like the lines between protest and riot: they get fuzzy. Adigun leaves aesthetic blueprints for how to make i Biopower is a term theorized by Michel Foucault in The History of Sexuality, which refers to the control of human bodies in order to govern populations.

Arambe Productions 51 theatre that insists on migrant presence within the Irish nation. And perhaps in studying those blueprints, Irish theatre might grapple more firmly with the pressing contemporary issues of race, migration, and interculturalism.

Notes 1 Bisi Adigun, “Once Upon a Time and Not So Long Ago,” in Staging Intercultural Ireland: New Plays and Practitioner Perspectives, Ed. Charlotte McIvor and Matthew Spangler (Cork: Cork University Press, 2014), 201–244. 2 Matthew Spangler, Introduction to Bisi Adigun’s “Once Upon a Time and Not So Long Ago,” in Staging Intercultural Ireland: New Plays and Practitioner Perspectives, Ed. Charlotte McIvor and Matthew Spangler (Cork: Cork University Press, 2014), 198. 3 Bisi Adigun, “Once Upon a Time in the Life of Arambe: A Personal Reflection,” in The Palgrave Handbook of Contemporary Irish Theatre and Performance, Ed. Eamonn Jordan and Eric Weitz (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018), 547. 4 Bisi Adigun, “In Living Colour.” Irish Theatre Magazine 4.19 (2004): 31. 5 Bisi Adigun, “Arambe Productions: An African’s Response to the Recent Portrayal of the Fear Gorm in Irish Drama,” in Performing Global Networks, Eds. Karen Fricker and Ronit Lentin (Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars, 2007), 54. 6 Bisi Adigun, “To Adapt or Not to Adapt: The Question of Originality in a Nigerian Rewrite of an Irish Classic,” in Where Motley Is Worn: Transnational Irish Literatures, Ed. Amanda Tucker and Moira Casey (Cork: Cork University Press, 2014), 32. 7 Charlotte McIvor, Migration and Performance in Contemporary Ireland: Towards a New Interculturalism (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016), 19. 8 Ronit Lentin and Robbie McVeigh, Racism and Anti-racism in Ireland (Belfast: Beyond the Pale, 2002). 9 Bryan Fanning, Immigration and Social Cohesion in the Republic of Ireland (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2011); Bryan Fanning, Racism and Social Change in the Republic of Ireland (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2002); Frances McGinnity, Phillip O’Connell, Emma Quinn, and James Williams, “‘Migrants’ Experience of Racism and Discrimination in Ireland: Survey Report,” Esri.ie. (Dublin: Economic and Social Research Institute, 2006). www.esri.ie/publications 10 Fanning, Cohesion, 133. 11 Jason King, “Interculturalism and Irish Theatre: The Portrayal of Immigrants on the Irish Stage,” The Irish Review 33 (Spring 2005): 23–39; Jason King, “Black Saint Patrick: Irish Interculturalism in Theoretical Perspective & Theatre Practice,” in Global Ireland: Irish Literature for the New Millennium, Ed. Ondřej Pilnỷ and Clare Wallace (Prague: Litteraria Pragensia, 2005), 45–61. 12 Charlotte McIvor and Matthew Spangler, Staging Intercultural Ireland (Cork: Cork University Press). 13 Eva Urban, “Intercultural Arrivals and Encounters with Trauma in Contemporary Irish Drama,” in The Palgrave Handbook of Contemporary Irish Theatre and Performance, Ed. Eamonn Jordan and Eric Weitz (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018), 555. 14 Young Yun Kim, Becoming Intercultural: An Integrative Theory of Communication and Cross-Cultural Adaptation (California: Sage, 2001). 15 Bertolt Brecht, Brecht on Theatre, Ed. John Willett (New York: Hill and Wang, 1992). 16 Ola Rotimi, “Much Ado About Brecht,” in The Dramatic Touch of Difference: Theatre Own and Foreign, Ed. Erika Fischer-Lichte, Josephine Riley, and Michael Gissenwehre (Tübingen: Gunter Narr Verbg Tübingen, 1990), 253–262. 17 Bisi Adigun, Complexity, Post-coloniality, Transculturality: The Birth of Wole Soyinka’s Yoruba Tragedy in Nigeria and its Intercultural Presentation in Britain (PhD Diss., Trinity College, 2013), 87.

52  Arambe Productions 18 Anthony Kwame Appiah, “Is the Post in Postmodernism the Post in Postcolonial?” Critical Inquiry 17.2 (1991): 341. 19 Molefi Kete Asante, An Afrocentric Manifesto: Toward an African Renaissance (Cambridge; Malden: Polity, 2007). 20 Ama Mazama, “The Afrocentric Paradigm: Contours and Definitions,” Journal of Black Studies 31 no .4 (2001): 387–405. 21 Walker, Clarence E. We Can't Go Home Again: An Argument about Afrocentrism (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001). 22 Kariamu Welsh-Asante, The African Aesthetic: Keeper of the Traditions (Connecticut: Greenwood Press, 1993), 249–255. 23 Ajume H. Wingo, “The Many Layered Aesthetics of African Art,” in A Companion to African Philosophy, Ed. Kwasi Wiredu (Malden: Blackwell, 2004), 425–433. 24 Dele Jegede, “Art for Life’s Sake: African Art as a Reflection of an Afrocentric Cosmology,” in The African Aesthetic: Keeper of the Traditions, Ed. Kariamu Welsh-Asante (Connecticut: Greenwood Press, 1993), 239. 25 Jegede, “Art for Life’s Sake,” 245. 26 Robert Douglas, “African Aesthetic,” in Encyclopedia of Black Studies, Eds. Molefi K. Asante and Ama Mazama (Thousand Oaks, CA: SAGE, 2005), 7–8. 27 Adigun, “Once Upon a Time in the Life of Arambe,” 551. 28 Adigun, “Once Upon A Time and Not So Long Ago,” 227. 29 Adigun, “Once Upon A Time and Not So Long Ago,” 227. 30 A teleological narrative is one in which effects progress logically from causes. 31 Jason King, “Three Kings: Migrant Masculinities in Irish Social Practice, Theoretical Perspective and Theatre Performance,” Irish Journal of Applied Social Studies 16.1 (2016), 33. 32 McIvor, Migration and Performance in Contemporary Ireland, 100. 33 Dramaturgy means the imaginative, conceptual, and physical work of theatre-making that turns the script on the page into the play on the stage. 34 Ronit Lentin, “Responding to the Racialisation of Irishness: Disavowed Multiculturalism and its Discontents,” Sociological Research Online 5.4 (2001): 2.8. http://www. socresonline.org.uk/5/4/lentin.html 35 King, “Interculturalism and Irish Theatre,” 25. 36 Bisi Adigun, “Arambe Productions: An African’s Response to the Recent Portrayal of the Fear Gorm in Irish Drama,” in Performing Global Networks, Ed. Karen Fricker and Ronit Lentin (Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars, 2007), 62. 37 Mieke Ball, “Documenting What? Auto-theory and Migratory Aesthetics,” in A Companion to Contemporary Documentary Film, Ed. Alexandra Juhasz and Alisa Lebow (Malden: Wiley-Blackwell, 2015), 131. 38 McIvor, Migration and Performance in Contemporary Ireland, 87. 39 Bert O. States, Great Reckonings in Little Rooms: On the Phenomenology of Theater (Berkeley: U of California P, 1985), 20. 40 States, Great Reckonings in Little Rooms, 36. 41 Joseph Jastrow, Fact and Fable in Psychology, 1900 (Gutenberg Project, 2015) 353. 42 Lionel Pilkington, “Historicizing Is Not Enough: Recent Developments and Trends in Irish Theatre History,” Modern Drama 47.4 (2004): 721–731; Christopher Morash, A History of Irish Theatre 1601-2000 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 130–139. 43 Morash, A History of Irish Theatre 1601-2000, 130–139. 44 Declan Kiberd, Synge and the Irish Language (London: Macmillan, 1979), 257. 45 Szabolcs Musca, “Crisis in the Making: Public Theatre, Migration and Activist Aesthetics,” Comunicazioni sociali 41.1 (2019): 42–52. 46 Bisi Adigun, “Why + How = Wow,” Irish Times Magazine, 1 Nov 2008, 6. 47 Ronan McGreevy, “Abbey ‘to pay €600,000’ in Dispute Over Play Copyright,” The Irish Times, Jan 31 2013.

Arambe Productions 53 48 Bisi Adigun. ““Interview”, 13 Jan. 2009,” in Rights of Representation: An Ethics of Intercultural Theatre Practice, Ed. Emer O’Toole (PhD Diss., University of London, 2012), 301. 49 Emer O’Toole, “The Eternal Interculture Wars: Reading the Controversy Surrounding Bisi Adigun and Roddy Doyle’s Playboy of the Western World,” in The Playboy of the Western World: A New Version, Ed. Matthew Spangler (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, Forthcoming 2023). 50 To learn more, you might like to read: Rustom Bharucha’s critiques of old-school intercultural theatre practice; Jacqueline Lo and Helen Gilbert’s useful taxonomic article that accounts for exploitative and non-exploitative practice and everything in-between; Daphne Lei on what she terms hegemonic intercultural theatre and the place of East Asian theatre artists within the discourse; Royona Mitra on a new interculturalism with ‘an interventionist aesthetic,’ which changes power dynamics and dismantles us-them hierarchies (14/15); and Charlotte McIvor and Jason King’s edited collection defining a new interculturalism driven from below by minority and subaltern voices. Rustom Bharucha, Theatre and the World: Performance and the Politics of Culture (London; New York: Routledge, 1993); Rustom Bharucha, The Politics of Cultural Practice: Thinking Through Theatre in an Age of Globalization (London: Athlone, 2000); Jacqueline Lo and Helen Gilbert. “Toward a Topography of Cross-Cultural Theatre Praxis,” TDR/The Drama Review 46, no 3 (2002): 31–53; Lei, Daphne P., “Interruption, Intervention, Interculturalism: Robert Wilson’s HIT Productions in Taiwan,” Theatre Journal, 63. 4 (2011): 571–586; Royona Mitra, Akram Khan : Dancing New Interculturalism (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015); Charlotte McIvor and Jason King, Interculturalism and Performance Now (Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2019). 51 Adigun, “Interview,” 304. 52 The Abbey Theatre, “The Playboy of the Western World,” Abbeytheatre.ie, 2007, The Abbey Theatre, 10 Dec 2008. http://www.abbeytheatre.ie/whatson/playboy.html> 53 The Abbey Theatre, Ibid. 54 Adigun, “Interview,” 309. 55 Fintan O’Toole, “Theatre Has Nothing to Declare But an Innate Uncertainty,” The Irish Times, 22 May 2010, 16 October 2017, 9. https://www.irishtimes.com/ life-and-style/people/theatre-has-nothing-to-declare-but-an-innate-uncertainty1.668749> 56 O’Toole, Ibid. 57 Bisi Adigun, “Interview,” 302. 58 Bisi Adigun, “Arambe Productions,” 52–65; Adigun, “To Adapt or Not to Adapt.” 59 Karen Fricker, Rev. of The Playboy of The Western World, dir. Jimmy Fay. Variety. com. 10 Oct 2007 (Reid Elsevier, 25 Apr 2009). 60 Lentin, “Responding to the Racialisation of Irishness,” 2. 1. 61 Brian Singleton, Masculinities and the Contemporary Irish Theatre (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), 40. 62 Singleton, Masculinities and the Contemporary Irish Theatre, 39. 63 Roddy Doyle, ““Interview,” 14 Jan. 2009,” in Rights of Representation: An Ethics of Intercultural Theatre Practice, Emer O’Toole (PhD Diss., London: University of London, 2012), 316. 64 Adigun, “Interview,” 305. 65 Edward Said, Orientalism, 1978 (London: Penguin, 2003). 66 Adigun, “Interview,” 305. 67 Irish Theatre Magazine. “International Critics Forum 2007.” Transcript. Available from ITM on Request. 68 Charlotte McIvor, “Staging the ‘New Irish’: Interculturalism and the Future of the Post-Celtic Tiger Irish Theatre,” Modern Drama 54.3 (2011), 318. 69 McIvor, “Staging the ‘New Irish’,” 318. 70 Adigun, “Interview,” 304. 71 Doyle, “Interview,” 317.

54  Arambe Productions 72 This section on The Butcher Babes is derived, in part, from my introduction to the play published in Bisi Adigun, An Other Playboy, Home Sweet Home!, The Butcher Babes: Plays (Leeds: Universal, 2018). 73 Bisi Adigun, The Butcher Babes, Unpublished Production Draft, 53. 74 Adigun, The Butcher Babes, 31. 75 Adigun, The Butcher Babes, 38. 76 Adigun, Complexity, Post-Coloniality, Transculturality, 279–288. 77 Irish Independent, “Ritual Cleansing Goes in for the Kill,” independent.ie, 10 Sept 2010. https://www.independent.ie/incoming/ritual-cleansing-goes-in-for-the-kill26681794.html 78 Adigun, The Butcher Babes, 6. 79 Burnhill, Eleanor, “Sister Told Me They Killed Farah Because He Tried to Rape Her,” Irish Independent, 18 Oct 2006; Irish Times, “Witness Says Victim Raped Her,” 24 Oct 2006; McCarthy, Justine, “Doomed to Depravity: The Mulhall Sisters,” Magill, 01 Nov 2006. 80 Ronit Lentin, “Black Bodies and ‘Headless Hookers’: Alternative Global Narratives for 21st Century Ireland,” The Irish Review 33 (2005): 23–39. 81 John Mooney, The Torso in the Canal: The Inside Story on Ireland’s Most Grotesque Killing (Dublin: Maverick), 15. 82 Sarah Share, Killers: Sisters (Dublin: RTÉ, 2011), documentary. 83 Ronit Lentin, “Ireland: Racial State and Crisis Racism,” Ethnic and Racial Studies 30.4 (2007): 610–627. 84 Colin Murphy, “Our Stage Will Be a Poorer Place After Losing One of Its Few African Voices,” Irish Independent, 24 Aug 2013. https://www.independent.ie/ entertainment/books/our-stage-will-be-a-poorer-place-after-losing-one-of-itsfew-african-voices-29524300.html 85 Murphy, “Our Stage Will Be a Poorer Place.”

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Arambe Productions 55 Adigun, Bisi, “Why + How = Wow,” Irish Times Magazine, 1 Nov. 2008, 6. Appiah, Anthony Kwame, “Is the Post in Postmodernism the Post in Postcolonial,” Critical Inquiry 17.2 (1991), 336–357. Asante, Molefi Kete, An Afrocentric Manifesto: Toward an African Renaissance (Cambridge; Malden: Polity, 2007). Ball, Mieke, “Documenting What? Auto-Theory and Migratory Aesthetics,” in A Companion to Contemporary Documentary Film, Ed. Alexandra Juhasz and Alisa Lebow (Malden: Wiley-Blackwell, 2015), 124–144. Bharucha, Rustom, ‘A Reply to Richard Schechner,” Asian Theatre Journal 1.2 (1984): 254–260. Bharucha, Rustom, The Politics of Cultural Practice: Thinking Through Theatre in an Age of Globalization (London: Athlone, 2000). Bharucha, Rustom, Theatre and the World: Performance and the Politics of Culture (London; New York: Routledge, 1993). Brecht, Bertolt, Brecht on Theatre, Ed. John Willett (New York: Hill and Wang, 1992). Burnhill, Eleanor, “Sister Told Me They Killed Farah Because He Tried to Rape Her,” Irish Independent, 18 Oct 2006. Douglas, Robert, “African Aesthetic,” in Encyclopedia of Black Studies, Ed. Molefi K. Asante and Ama Mazama (Thousand Oaks, CA: SAGE, 2005), 7–8. Doyle, Roddy, “‘Interview,’ 14 Jan. 2009,” in Rights of Representation: An Ethics of Intercultural Theatre Practice, Ed. Emer O’Toole (PhD Diss., London: University of London, 2012), 316. Fanning, Bryan, Immigration and Social Cohesion in the Republic of Ireland (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2011). Fanning, Bryan, Racism and Social Change in the Republic of Ireland (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2018). Fanon, Franz, The Wretched of the Earth, Trans. Constance Farrington (New York: Grove Press, 1963). Foucault, Michel, The History of Sexuality: An Introduction (New York: Vintage, 1990). Fricker, Karen, Rev. of the Playboy of the Western World, dir. Jimmy Fay. Variety.com. 10 Oct 2007 (Los Angeles: Reid Elsevier, 25 Apr 2009). Husserl, Edmund, Ideas Pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology and to a Phenomenological Philosophy: First Book: General Introduction to a Pure Phenomenology, 1912. Trans, F. Kersten (The Hague; Boston: Martinus Nijhoff, 1983). Inglis, Tom, “Individualisation and Secularisation in Catholic Ireland,” in Contemporary Ireland: A Sociological Map, Ed. Sara O’Sullivan (Ireland: University College Dublin Press, 2007), 67–82. Irish Independent, “Ritual Cleansing Goes In for the Kill,” independent.ie, 10 Sept 2010. https://www.independent.ie/incoming/ritual-cleansing-goes-in-for-the-kill26681794.html Irish Theatre Magazine, “International Critics’ Forum 2007,” Transcript Available from ITM on Request. Irish Times, “Witness Says Victim Raped Her,” Irish Times, 24 Oct 2006. Jastrow, Joseph, Fact and Fable in Psychology, 1900 (N.P.: Gutenberg Project, 2015). Jegede, Dele, “Art for Life’s Sake: African Art as a Reflection of an Afrocentric Cosmology,” in The African Aesthetic: Keeper of the Traditions, Ed. Kariamu WelshAsante (Connecticut: Greenwood Press, 1993), 239. Kiberd, Declan, Synge and the Irish Language (London: Macmillan, 1979). Kim, Young Yun, Becoming Intercultural: An Integrative Theory of Communication and CrossCultural Adaptation (California: SAGE, 2001).

56  Arambe Productions King, Jason, “Black Saint Patrick: Irish Interculturalism in Theoretical Perspective & Theatre Practice,” in Global Ireland: Irish Literature for the New Millennium, Ed. Ondřej Pilny ̉ and Clare Wallace (Prague: Litteraria Pragensia, 2005): 45–61. King, Jason, “Interculturalism and Irish Theatre: The Portrayal of Immigrants on Stage,” Irish Review 33 (2005): 23–39. King, Jason, “Three Kings: Migrant Masculinities in Irish Social Practice, Theoretical Perspective and Theatre Performance,” Irish Journal of Applied Social Studies 16.1 (2016), 20–34. Knowles, Ric, Theatre and Interculturalism (London: Palgrave, 2010). Lei, Daphne P., “Interruption, Intervention, Interculturalism: Robert Wilson’s HIT Productions in Taiwan,” Theatre Journal 63.4 (2011): 571–586. Lentin, Ronit, “‘Black Bodies and Headless Hookers’: Alternative Global Narratives for 21st Century Ireland,” The Irish Review 33 (2005): 23–39. Lentin, Ronit, “Ireland: Racial State and Crisis Racism,” Ethnic and Racial Studies 30.4 (2007): 610–627. Lentin, Ronit, “Responding to the Racialisation of Irishness: Disavowed Multiculturalism and Its Discontents,” Sociological Research Online 5.4 (2001), n.p. Lentin, Ronit and Robbie McVeigh, Racism and Anti-Racism in Ireland (Belfast: Beyond the Pale, 2002). Lo, Jacqueline and Helen Gilbert, “Toward a Topography of Cross-Cultural Theatre Praxis,” TDR/The Drama Review 46.3 (2002), 31–53. Max Prior, Dorothy, “What Is Total Theatre?” Total Theatre Magazine 13.2 (2001), 5–6. http://totaltheatre.org.uk/archive/features/what-total-theatre Mazama, Ama, “The Afrocentric Paradigm: Contours and Definitions,” Journal of Black Studies 31.4 (2001): 387–405. McCarthy, Justine, “Doomed to Depravity: The Mulhall Sisters,” Magill, 01 Nov 2006. McGinnity, Frances, Phillip O’Connell, Emma Quinn and James Williams, “‘Migrants’ Experience of Racism and Discrimination in Ireland: Survey Report,” Esri.ie. (Dublin: Economic and Social Research Institute, 2006). www.esri.ie/ publications McGreevy, Ronan, “Abbey ‘to pay €600,000’ in Dispute Over Play Copyright,” The Irish Times, Jan 31 2013. McIvor, Charlotte, Migration and Performance in Contemporary Ireland: Towards a New Interculturalism (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016). McIvor, Charlotte, “Staging the ‘New Irish’: Interculturalism and the Future of the PostCeltic Tiger Irish Theatre,” Modern Drama 54.3 (2011): 318. McIvor, Charlotte and Jason King, Interculturalism and Performance Now (Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2019). McIvor, Charlotte and Matthew Spangler, Intercultural Ireland: New Plays and Practitioner Perspectives (Cork: Cork University Press, 2014). McMahon Report, “Report to government Working Group on the Protection Process on improvements to the protection process, including direct provision and supports to asylum seekers, Final Report, June 2015,” Justice.ie (2015). Merleau-Ponty, Maurice, Phenomenology of Perception, Trans. Colin Smith (London; New York: Routledge, 2002). Mitra, Royona, Akram Khan: Dancing New Interculturalism (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015). Mooney, John, The Torso in the Canal: The Inside Story on Ireland’s Most Grotesque Killing (Dublin: Maverick, 2007).

Arambe Productions 57 Morash, Christopher, A History of Irish Theatre 1601-2000 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 130–139. Murphy, Colin, “Our Stage Will Be a Poorer Place After Losing One of Its Few African Voices,” Irish Independent, 24 Aug 2013. https://www.independent.ie/entertainment/ books/our-stage-will-be-a-poorer-place-after-losing-one-of-its-few-africanvoices-29524300.html Murphy, Jimmy, The Kings of the Kilburn High Road (London: Oberon, 2001). Musca, Szabolcs, “Crisis in the Making: Public Theatre, Migration and Activist Aesthetics,” Comunicazioni Sociali 41.1 (2019): 42–52. O’Sullivan, Sara, ed. Contemporary Ireland: A Sociological Map (Dublin: University College Dublin Press, 2007). O’Toole, Emer, “The Eternal Interculture Wars: Reading the Controversy SurroundingBisi Adigun and Roddy Doyle’s Playboy of the Western World,” in The Playboy of the Western World: A New Version, Ed. Matthew Spangler (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, Forthcoming 2023). O’Toole, Fintan, “Theatre Has Nothing to Declare But an Innate Uncertainty,” The Irish Times, 22 May 2010, 16 October 2017, 9. https://www.irishtimes.com/life-and-style/ people/theatre-has-nothing-to-declare-but-an-innate-uncertainty-1.668749> Pilkington, Lionel, “Historicizing Is Not Enough: Recent Developments and Trends in Irish Theatre History,” Modern Drama 47.4 (2004): 721–731. Rotimi, Ola, “Much Ado About Brecht,” in The Dramatic Touch of Difference: Theatre Own and Foreign, Ed. Erika Fischer-Lichte, Josephine Riley and Michael Gissenwehre (Tübingen: Gunter Narr Verbg Tübingen, 1990), 253–262. Said, Edward, Orientalism, 1978 (London: Penguin, 2003). Samuels, Andrew, The Political Psyche (Oxon; New York: Routledge, 2015). Share, Sarah, Killers: Sisters (Dublin: RTÉ, 2011), documentary. Singleton, Brian, Masculinities and the Contemporary Irish Theatre (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), 40. States, Bert O, Great Reckonings in Little Rooms: On the Phenomenology of Theater (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985). Synge, John Millington, The Playboy of the Western World, 1907 (London: Methuen, 2006). The Abbey Theatre, “The Playboy of the Western World,” Abbeytheatre.ie, 2007, The Abbey Theatre, 10 Dec 2008. http://www.abbeytheatre.ie/whatson/playboy.html Urban, Eva., “Intercultural Arrivals and Encounters with Trauma in Contemporary Irish Drama,” in The Palgrave Handbook of Contemporary Irish Theatre and Performance, Ed. Eamonn Jordan and Eric Weitz (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018), 555. Walker, Clarence E., We Can’t Go Home Again: An Argument about Afrocentrism (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001). Welsh-Asante, Kariamu. The African Aesthetic: Keeper of the Traditions (Connecticut: Greenwood P, 1993), 249–255. Wingo, Ajume H., “The Many-Layered Aesthetics of African Art,” in A Companion to African Philosophy, Ed. Kwasi Wiredu (Malden: Blackwell, 2004), 425–432.

2

THEATREclub Class Acts

Finding Forms That Do Justice In 2008, the year the Celtic Tiger boom went bust, Dublin Youth Theatre alumni Doireann Coady, Shane Daniel Byrne, and Grace Dyas founded THEATREclub. The company grew to encapsulate three further core members: Gemma Collins, Barry O’Connor, and Eoin Winning. The name started as a joke: if they were going for coffee, they’d call it Coffee Club, to the Cinema, then Cinema Club. THEATREclub started as a handle for their collaborations and stuck.1 The company made boundary pushing experimental activist art until 2020, when it appears to have wrapped up operations. THEATREclub’s work is defined by activist commitment to social change, starting conversations, and collaborating with a wide range of communities and individuals.2 This ethic was probably influenced by the fact that, to quote publicity from an early production, ‘Just as they got to an age where they could finally start making something of themselves; the whole country crashed down around them.’3 The social need brought to the fore by the devastating economic crash of 2008 was visible everywhere and is often centre-stage in their work, particularly in the projects created with community partners, everyday experts, and public participants. These projects include HEROIN (2010), which deals with drug addiction; Twenty-Ten (2011), which staged the year 2010 using daily contributions e-mailed anonymously by volunteers; Moyross (2014), a documentary piece made with and performed by the residents of a Limerick housing estate with a reputation for violent crime and deprivation; The Game (2015), about the sex industry; and It’s Not Over (2016), an account of the Northern Irish troubles made in collaboration with former IRA Volunteers. THEATREclub is part of a wave of experimental and socially engaged contemporary artists, including ANU Productions, Brokentalkers, THISISPOPBABY, HotForTheatre, and Úna McKevitt Productions, widely understood to be creating some of the most formally innovative and thematically rich material in contemporary Irish theatre.4 While, as Ian W. Walsh’s work shows, experimental work has been part of the Irish dramatic tradition since the revival, it has often been marginal – neglected in the process of DOI: 10.4324/9781003205708-3

THEATREclub 59 canon-formation in favour of more literary fare.5 Now, these companies and artists are centre stage and – if anthologies of contemporary Irish theatre by Patrick Lonergan6 and Thomas Conway7 are signs to go by – they are settling into the canon. It’s interesting just how often socio-economic ideas underpin contemporary Irish experimental work. THEATREclub rose to prominence in 2010, following an acclaimed production called HEROIN. The incident that inspired this play has class and activism at its heart. In 2009, Dyas was working in a shop on North Earl Street in Dublin, where many of the people she interacted with on a day-today basis were drug addicts. One day, due to an argument over a SIM card for a mobile phone, an addict spat in her face. She went to get cleaned up, and when she returned, colleagues and customers were expressing venomous sentiments about drug addicts: they were scum; they should be rounded up and shot. Dyas realised how little it took to dehumanise someone in the eyes of others and decided that she wanted to work with addicts to understand the basis of the problem.8 So, for two years, she conducted workshops and outreach with recovering and current addicts at the Rialto methadone clinic. She was fascinated by the throughlines between economic and social deprivation, sexual abuse, failed social housing projects, and drug addiction. She felt that there was a story there that the public didn’t understand: the current heroin epidemic is a man-made situation, there’ve been so many reports given to the government saying, ‘if you build this kind of housing, without amenities, this is what you’ll get.’ There’s a formula to it, which is repeatedly denied. The piece became about value and class. About how we value each other.9 Dyas also worked with Rachel Keogh, whose 2009 autobiography, Dying to Survive, details her harrowing story of addiction. Informed by workshops and conversations with addicts and former addicts, HEROIN attempts to tell the story of addiction in Ireland over the five preceding decades. It played at Dublin’s Project Arts Centre in 2010, then toured Ireland sporadically for eight years, with its latest performances in Dublin in 2018.a It was programmed in 2016, along with the other two plays of THEATREclub’s The Ireland Trilogy, as part of The Abbey Theatre’s 1916 centenary celebrations.b

a The company remained committed to talking about and representing addiction issues beyond the production of HEROIN, and a new durational art campaign called The Radical Shift was launched in 2018 to this end. b 1916 was the year of Ireland’s Easter Rising, often understood as a birth of nation moment. When The Abbey’s centenary programme was originally announced, The Ireland Trilogy was not included. After outcry at the sexism of the male-dominated line-up, THEATREclub’s trilogy was one of a number of works included in an extended programme.

60  THEATREclub Ciara Murphy reads this programming as indication that ‘new & unsettling work is being recognised on the more prominent Irish stages.’10 A sharp attention to social issues, class, and history in the Irish context influenced THEATREclub’s work over the next decade. And this attention, in turn, led to experimental artistic forms. When there’s a real, actionable social cause at the centre of your art, then, according to Dyas, that requires different modes of theatremaking: We’ve had to break new grounds in terms of form, because the theatrical forms that were available when we started out didn’t do justice to what we wanted to create in terms of activism. So I guess there’s a symbiosis there between the two things: our artistic work wouldn’t be as accomplished if the activist element wasn’t there – we would have been more satisfied with what was available in terms of how to make.11 A conversation I had with Dyas back in 2013 planted seeds for what would become the key argument of this book. Namely: that while what an individual or society considers good art is tied up with questions of class, power, and privilege, anti-oppressive objectives can lead artists to create and audiences to experience new forms of beauty. Dyas’s insight about activism and art helped me to come to this position for two reasons. First, she pushes back against the contradiction Kantian academic aesthetics tends to assume between art and agit-prop, which I discussed in the introductory chapter. Second, she turns a lot of assumptions about class and avant-garde art on their heads. Experimental, avant-garde, and conceptual art carry connotations of elitism. In Distinction, Bourdieu associates enjoyment of avant-garde aesthetics with the Bourgeoisie and enjoyment of the aesthetics of popular entertainment with the working class. He links ‘enjoyment’ of the avant-garde to the Kantian pure gaze – both involve a denial of the everyday visceral pleasure of art (what Kant would call its agreeableness), a pretence that there is some kind of objective aesthetic standard by which important art is valued, and a detached, ‘disinterested’ aesthetic experience that requires instruction to achieve. In this chapter, I’ll close read four THEATREclub productions to discover the aesthetic contributions that arise from their activism. I also think through the way the company interacts with the problem of elitism and the avant-garde broached above. I start with the three plays of The Ireland Trilogy – HEROIN, The Family, and HISTORY and finish with one of THEATREclub’s most controversial pieces, The Game, which uses volunteers working alongside professional performers to investigate the politics of selling sex. But first, we’re going to gently dip our toes, and maybe even our lovely ankles, into the theoretical pool of aesthetics and class.

THEATREclub 61

Class and Aesthetics: On Your Marx, Get Set, Everyone Makes This Same Marx Pun I’m Sorry Karl Marx saw culture as economically determined.c For Marx, culture in capitalist society exists to reproduce the social hierarchy between the Bourgeoise and the working classes.12 Marx doesn’t say a lot about the function of art in upholding unequal class relations, but plenty of his acolytes do. For example, The Frankfurt School was a group of thinkers writing in the 1920s and ‘30s, who more or less invented critical theory, which they conceived of as a unification of scientific and philosophical thinking.13 So if you like reading Derrida and Butler and other linguistically impenetrable brainiacs, you may thank the Frankfurt School. Or, if you spend your time in presentations on Foucault thinking what the actual beans has this got to do with theatre, then you may place the faces of Max Horkheimer, Leo Lowenthal, and Theodor Adorno on your dartboard, like a deranged ex-fan of the world’s least attractive boyband. You may not throw darts at Walter Benjamin, however. The thinkers of the Frankfurt school don’t all agree on the role of art in class oppression, with Benjamin being a particular sore thumb, but, in general, they’re worried about the rise of the culture industry.d The culture industry creates products through industrial techniques for sale to a mass audience for profit. The Frankfurt School thinkers are interested in this, partly, because it’s new for them – new technologies mean that film, TV, and recorded music are proliferating rapidly in their time. And the rise of this culture industry in Europe is happening at the same time as the failure of socialist uprisings and the rise of fascism. The Frankfurt school see the industrially produced culture the masses are consuming, they observe the dawn of all the evil moustaches, and they connect the dots. They think that the culture industry limits the capacity for autonomous thought and upholds the ruling order.14 Theodor Adorno, the Frankfurt School’s Alpha Jock, believes, in a Kantian vein, that the culture industry renders capitalism more ‘agreeable’ to the proletariat or workers. And it shouldn’t! They need to know it’s terrible! For Adorno, popular music is trash – it’s ‘standardised,’ which means that listeners come to never expect anything new,15 and even Jazz, which pretends to be free and innovative, is rubbish – maintaining an ‘inexorably rigid

c He thought that everything in the superstructure of society – which means the laws, the religions, the customs, the politics, the family structures, and, of course, the art – was a reflection of the economic base – which consists of (1) the means of production (the tools and raw materials used to create goods that have economic value) and (2) the relations of production (the social structures that manage relationships between the people involved in making goods – primarily between owners and labourers). d They tend to choose this term over ‘mass culture’ because they don’t want to confuse it with culture that spontaneously arises from the working classes.

62  THEATREclub stereotypology.’16 Adorno differentiates ‘popular music’ from ‘serious music.’ He thinks high art (by which he often means the classical music in which he, funnily enough, is trained) and avant-garde aesthetics can perform a liberatory function – drawing people’s attention to the work of art as a whole as opposed to repetitive mind-numbing parts, in much the same way Marxist consciousness-raising tries to get people to think in societal as well as individual terms.17 In popular music, contrarily, ‘every detail is substitutable; it serves its function only as a cog in a machine.’18 Okay, for someone proclaiming to be a Marxist, and all about the class equality, Adorno is clearly quite the snob. And he was accused of elitism in his own time. His answer was (to paraphrase), which is more condescending – to actually think in a serious way about the cultural products people are consuming, or to refuse to take the cultural products being sold to the masses seriously at all?19 Which is a fair point, I think. And actually, while Adorno gets a lot more flack, what he’s saying isn’t very different to what another Marxist theorist of culture, Antonio Gramsci, writing in one of Mussolini’s prisons, said. And nobody ever calls Gramsci a snob. You’re not allowed. Gramsci wasn’t primarily concerned with Mass Culture – but with all culture, with everything in the superstructure of society. Writing secretly in captivity, he essentially asked, if everything that Marx says is true, then why don’t the workers rise up? Why did they support Mussolini and Fascism instead of embracing communism? Gramsci’s answer was that what he calls hegemonic control is not only achieved through coercion or force but also through consent. People often agree with the hegemonic values of their society, and even think of them as common sense. Gramsci tells us that the dominated classes often agree with the norms and ideas that ensure their subordination.20 And the art and culture we consume plays a part in this. So there’s actually quite a strong Marxist tradition of trashing popular culture – the culture which lots of regular people enjoy without taking multiple university courses to understand why – and positioning ‘serious’ art, like high art or the avant-garde – which many people learn to enjoy having been expensively educated to do so – as remedies to the ills of inequality. I am not innocent of this snobbery. When I see winner takes all reality TV competitions, like The Voice or X Factor or whatever the whippersnappers are watching nowadays, I am entertained, doubtless, but I also read a sort of propagandistic repetition of the rags to riches myth, telling people in our capitalist society that they too can ‘make it’ if they really try – all they need is talent, hard work, and individual gumption. And fuck all the people who don’t make it. They weren’t good enough anyway. Back to the job in an Amazon warehouse they have tearfully told us is destroying their soul. So how do you intervene in this repetitive, ideological culture of the superstructure to alert the masses to the need for liberation? Can true art, serious art, get people thinking and activated and engaged? WAKE UP SHEEPLE.

THEATREclub 63 But not all Marxists are as snobby about art as Adorno and occasionally me. Others think high art is the enemy. For example, Roger Taylor, writing in 1978, argued that our modern sense of art was only really born in the 17th century, when the Bourgeoisie, or Middle Class, were on the way up and the aristocracy were on the way down. According to Taylor, the Aristocracy’s reaction to this sudden decrease in their power and wealth was to retire into a world of art, creating a fetish out of the artwork – that is to say, giving it an irrational value. When the Bourgeoisie wanted a way to convince themselves that their lives spent accumulating capital for capital’s sake had deeper meaning, they too looked to the aristocratic fetish of art. 21 So, yeah, you can try to convince yourself that you’re deep cause you love Ionesco and Stein and you, unlike the masses, truly understand them, because you, unlike the masses, took an avant-garde aesthetics class during your Master’s degree, but actually you are just a capitalist pig dog swine. 22 Pierre Bourdieu analyses the ways in which art reproduces the capitalist system – the ways in which it keeps the rich rich and the poor poor. For Bourdieu, an anthropologist by training who has a keen eye on cultural difference, what any one society considers good art is arbitrary. Artistic merit is not, as Kant would have it, universally appreciable. And social origins tend to determine your academic and cultural attainment in capitalist societies. The children of the wealthy do well at school, because they are introduced to ‘high culture’ before they even go. It’s part of how the dominant class reproduces the conditions of its dominance.23 We’d probably all agree that it matters if powerful people reproduce their dominance over education. But why does it matter if the dominant class reproduces its mastery over art. If aesthetic standards are arbitrary, and if the working classes like what they like and the bourgeoisie like what they like, what difference does it make? Everyone likes what they’ve got – everybody’s happy. But Bourdieu bites his thumb at this, sir. And not because, as Adorno believes, mass culture is inferior to high culture and propagates capitalist ideology. For Bourdieu, domination is not just economic – it is also symbolic. Power is not just about money. The symbolic capital represented by art and taste and cultivation can be converted back into economic profits. You’ll never really be down and out once you’re sufficiently cultured. Bourdieu calls the system in which art and status circulate and interchange ‘the economy of cultural practice.’ In the economy of cultural practice, social groups are engaged in a continual competition for real and symbolic profit for the benefit of their families. Again, it’s all about reproducing dominance – passing privilege on to your children. When Bourdieu takes issue with the idea of the pure gaze, or the Kantian aesthetic judgement of taste, he’s taking issue with how this idea reinforces social inequality. He’s arguing that the pure gaze – a disinterested disavowal of what the object is good for, of the pleasure to be had from it – is now required to view art. And education is required to learn the pure gaze. So if we take

64  THEATREclub an avant-garde work like Duchamps Fountain,e which is a urinal with the name R. Mutt scrawled on it in black paint, there’s no longer an option to see the function of the art as entertainment; there’s no longer even an option to simply find it pleasurable. So, what’s its function? Bourdieu answers this question sociologically rather than aesthetically: the pure gaze devalues popular art, while giving those who produce and enjoy high art distinction or cultural capital. For Bourdieu, the pure gaze is hypocritical and pretentious – it’s disavowing simple pleasure and entertainment.f What Bourdieu recommends is treating culture, ‘that present incarnation of the sacred,’24 as an object of science. He wants to demystify the irrational fetish of art. It should not be barbarous to ask what art is for. So there’s also a pretty longstanding Marxist distrust of avant-garde aesthetics as an elitist fetish propping up a system in which those cultured enough to ‘get it’ – often the middle classes – gain cultural capital and those who consume mass produced cultural products – often the working classes – are considered less sophisticated. And although many avant-garde and experimental artists consider/ed themselves to be counter-cultural radicals pushing back against the status quo, neither the culture industry, to ape the Frankfurt School, nor the economy of cultural practice, to monkey Bourdieu, care much for artists’ intentions. For example, in 1971, Coca Cola domesticated the radical cultural aesthetic of the hippy movement with a hilltop full of fresh-faced multi-racial youth singing ‘I’d like to buy the world a coke.’ And in 2017, Pepsi tried the same trick with the aesthetics of the Black Lives Matter protests, having Kendal Jenner face off a dishy police officer armed only with a can of revolutionary fizz. The radical theatrical experiments of Jarry and Artaud now live most fully in university curricula, while anti-capitalist street artist Banksy’s paintings sell to private collectors for up to $17 million. The capitalist system

e A 2004 poll of 500 British art experts named Marcel Duchamp’s Fountain as the single most influential artwork of the 20th century. In 1997, Dimitri Daskalopoulos, a Greek collector, forked over almost $2 million for 1 of 17 replicas released 50 years after the creation of the original (which was discarded) by Duchamp’s dealer. Fountain, as you are probably aware, is a urinal. Just a regular old urinal upon which Duchamp’s artistic intervention was to scrawl the name R. Mutt in black paint. Oh, and he kicked up a ruckus about getting it into an art gallery. Makes ya think though. You can’t deny it makes ya think. f He gives us the example of critics commenting on nakedness on stage. The first review he discusses is of a ballet at The Opera, France’s most famous theatre. The critic says that the naked dancers retain, because of the dignity of the stage on which they are performing, an ‘inviolable purity.’ The second performance is the musical Hair, where the critic calls the nude scene a cheap box office gimmick and derides it for failing to be symbolic. Bourdieu’s point is that in denying the pleasure of seeing a naked body on stage and pretending only to enjoy it if it’s symbolic, the bourgeoisie affirm their own superiority within the field of culture, and they legitimate social difference. For Bourdieu, it’s deluded to think that the function of the naked body on stage is not primarily to titillate. Bourdieu, Pierre. Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste. Trans. Richard Nice (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1986), xxx.

THEATREclub 65 wants to consume and deradicalise every aesthetic attempt to challenge it, like a great ravenous blob from a ‘50s horror movie.g But can activist aesthetics resist this? In studying THEATREclub’s work, I’m going to ask if participation built into the aesthetic experience can keep activist art radical. I’ll ask if strategies of care and self-care embedded into the work can disrupt the logic of profit that harms the working class and sucks the soul from radical art. As well as highlighting the aesthetic contributions that arise from artists’ activist commitments, in this chapter, I’ll consider ways in which THEATREclub’s aesthetics are in tension with the elitism often associated with avant-garde and experimental work.

The Ireland Trilogy25 HEROIN (2010): Valuing Each Other Two little kids play on stage. They’re chased out by the players and the action begins. But the action gets us nowhere. Three interrelated timelines play out at once. First, there’s Ireland from the 1960s ‘til the 2010s. Each decade is marked by changes in music, snippets of TV shows. There are nods to the economic reforms of Seán Lemass in the ‘60s; to the choice between ‘leaving or staying to do nothing’ as factories close in the ‘70s; and to the arrival of ‘the virus’ – AIDS – in the ‘80s. Italia ‘90 is followed closely by ‘the moment we got rich.’ In the 2000s, everyone is drinking Starbucks, then ‘watching it all crash down around us,’ incredulous that ‘it’s happening again.’26 Woven into this socio-economic timeline are personal stories rife with child abuse and neglect, intergenerational trauma, incarceration, and poverty. These tales can descend into anger, chaos, violent tussling, or all three players talking over each other. At times, Barry (Barry O’Connor) gently delivers reflections on the addiction crisis in monologues that resemble performance poetry, a lyric aesthetic mode that we’ll see return throughout The Ireland Trilogy. With stark changes in energy and tempo, the children that became heroin-addicted adults might have been chased away, but they never seem far from the stage. Second, there is the timeline of addiction, which can follow a pattern that starts with experimentation, proceeds to initiation, and leads, finally, to isolation. One of the most striking moments in this timeline comes when Ger (Gerard Kelly), using gear hidden in a VHS case, meticulously prepares a hit and injects it. Barry watches closely, his face betraying some of the first signs of pleasure we’ve seen from him so far. Unlike typical portrayals of drug use on film or TV, the process of preparing the heroin is specialised and laborious, and the audience must sit and watch. It is mundane. It is chilling. It is the only thing happening. Afterwards, things are subtly different. The

g Although in 50s horror movies, the blobs tended to symbolism the communist threat. But whatever, I like my simile and I’m keeping it.

66  THEATREclub construction of the set also emphasises the addiction timeline. Starting with an empty stage and floor plan, Barry directs a distracted and inefficient Ger to ‘bring everything in’ from outside, until the players are enclosed in a decrepit flat – with a battered couch and armchair, worse for wear appliances, collapsing walls, and a rickety door. The third timeline is that of recovered addict Rachel Keogh’s life. Lauren (Lauren Larkin) reads Keogh’s book, sometimes to herself, sometimes aloud, sometimes without emotion, and sometimes passionately inhabiting the character of Keogh. The three timelines improvise and interweave differently each night, but, like addiction, they follow a familiar pattern, ensured by design. According to scholars Georgina Born, Eric Lewis, and Will Straw, improvisation, ‘has often been conceived by both its practitioners and its theorists as being intimately inflected by the social formations in which it is created and as being, in aesthetically relevant ways, a social practice in itself.’27 You need to know the society you’re improvising for. The art of improvisation is always a social creation. The improvisation on display in HEROIN does more than just inject the play with a live and tense energy. It also reflects the ways in which addiction is social: it is formed by social structures and it creates its own societies, isolated from the mainstream. THEATREclub’s dramaturgy sets itself up to fail. As Dyas explains, In terms of construction, HEROIN is a set of rules and games between the three people on stage. Barry is trying to tell the story of heroin in Ireland over the last fifty years, using the others to help him – an impossible task, basically. And the rules are very simple: Ger has to do everything Barry says and Lauren can do anything she wants. […] There are set texts, but mostly it’s improvised. There’s also the physical task: they’re trying to build the set over the course of the action. That was us looking at design, at how design impacts people’s lives.28 Though each player appears to be pursuing an agenda, they are trapped, as so many Irish citizens have been trapped, in a structure of addiction. Part of the aesthetic experience consists in finding these links, in seeing how the characteristics unique to the art form of theatre and performance – liveness, shared space, bodies improvising – become a metaphor for the complexity of drug addiction. Like much experimental theatre, HEROIN is not ‘easy.’ It defies expectations for narrative, plot, character, and structure. It demands patience and work. The answers to the heroin crisis are not easy either. But the potential elitism created by the unconventional form – what Bourdieu would critique as replacing pleasure with the intellectual game of working out a riddle – is offset in HEROIN by the fact that the experimental aesthetic is inextricable from the social context of the play. To ‘get it,’ you don’t need to be familiar with the history of avant-garde theatre. Your gaze does not need to be pure or disinterested. The opposite, in fact. You need to be familiar with the addicts that fringe Ireland’s city streets. And it’s the attempt

THEATREclub 67 to address the complacency of a society inured to addiction that creates the production’s experimental aesthetics. The Family (2012): The Cutting Room Floor The second play in The Ireland Trilogy, The Family (2012) premiered at The Project Arts Centre, and was also revived as part of the complete trilogy in 2016. The production was devised by THEATREclub members, drawing on their family backgrounds and personal experiences. The aim was to explore the themes that had been left on the cutting room floor of HEROIN. Dyas calls it ‘autobiographical’ of the company.29 If the family is our first society, where we learn our lines, THEATREclub wanted to explore individual formative experiences to bring themselves and audiences to an awareness of Ireland’s larger structural problems. The Frankfurt School, I suspect, would approve. The production toys with roles – social roles, family roles, gender roles. The actors, using their real names, switch in a wink from parental behaviours to childish ones and back again. Doireann Coady’s bright set channels a cartoonish 1950’s fantasy: stage right is the family kitchen, a checker-clothed table at its heart and an impressive array of cardboard appliances upstage; stage left is a garden, complete with gaudy green astroturf and a white picket fence. There are also hints of Happy Days in the costume and choreography – with Lauren (Lauren Larkin) and Gerard (Gerard Kelly) sartorially channelling Joanie and the Fonz, and the cast performing a synchronised dance number while loudly arguing with each other. But the dramaturgy contests the fiction of the happy family – there is near-constant bickering: over borrowed clothing, secret drinking, improperly chopped carrots. As the play progresses, that bickering boils over into tears, accusations of abandonment, and physical violence. A warmly anticipated family dinner results in heavy silence around the table. Anyone who tries to leave is made to sit back down. No one in the family seems able to communicate or to listen. Again, a series of games, rules, and timelines structure this piece. The 90 minutes spent in the theatre are highlighted throughout, with Gem-Gems (Gemma Collins), holding herself aloof from the kitchen homestead, sporadically informing the audience of the time, how many minutes into the piece they are, and what day it is. She also informs us as the players progress through Winter, Spring, Summer, and Autumn. Each company member brings the entirety of their own lifespan to the stage, and some of the abstracted arguments and emotional reactions read as intensely personal. The Family has an underlying tension between the team of players who represent hope, the desire to believe that everything is all right, and the team who want to reckon with untruth. ‘It happened,’ insists a tearful Lauren to Louise (Louise Lewis) in the Autumn of the show, ‘We need to talk about it.’ Louise tries to distract from the conversation with cups of tea. She doesn’t want to talk about ‘it.’ She is not ready.

68  THEATREclub Despite its experimental character, Dyas explains that the play hangs around conventional Aristotelian dramatic unities: the first half, which the company nicknamed ‘Pleasantville,’ upholds a kind of fiction, while the second half offers tragic catharsis, working as an essay on dysfunction in Irish families. The material can be heavy, perhaps because – for this product of an Irish family at least – its energy is so familiar. Yet it is also a very funny play: there are spats with the neighbours and incessantly barking dogs; there are threats to leave that only ever result in a trip down the shops. The Family has an intense denouement. In a skilfully choreographed double act, Barry aggressively deconstructs the cardboard kitchen as Louise struggles to stop him; meanwhile, The Neighbour (Brian Bennett in earlier versions) reads Éamon de Valera’s twee 1943 St. Patrick’s Day address about romping sturdy children, athletic youths, and happy maidens to the unlikely soundtrack of The Rhythm of the Night. Even after the destruction of the fantasy, and the harsh comparison between the Ireland de Valera dreamed of and the one on stage, hope shines through. The kitchen table remains at the heart of the home. The family returns to it, magnetically drawn by an eternally boiling electric kettle, and GemGems’ detached pronouncements throughout the piece, that the family ‘loves one another, supports one another, accepts one another,’ ring at least halfway true.

Figure 2.1  L ouise Lewis, Barry O’Connor, Lauren Larkin, and Shane Byrne sit around the kitchen table in The Family Photo by permission of Ros Kavanagh

THEATREclub 69 The Family is less clearly ‘activist’ than much of THEATREclub’s other productions. Even though it is the ‘cutting room floor’ of HEROIN, it doesn’t have the same direct involvement of a marginalised constituency. Where HEROIN presents an issue that is very complex but also directly actionable, The Family deals with a fuzzier set of social conditions. HEROIN stages the roots – personal and political – of Ireland’s drug crisis. In placing addicts’ personal stories about abuse and marginalisation in social and historical context and, further, in relating that context to an ongoing situation, it finds a fractured, fragmented aesthetic, in which characters, stories, and themes have multiple voices and forms. This aesthetic carries over into The Family. Though autobiographical, it unearths root causes, root tensions, and cultural conditions that are not specific to THEATREclub, but that begin to build a story of nation and to lay the groundwork for the final piece in The Ireland Trilogy. In the introduction, I discussed the work of Claire Bishop, a theorist of the ‘social turn’ in art practice, who is broadly supportive of art that aims to create a fairer society and to reconnect communities fragmented by capitalism, but who also urges us to think critically about what an increased focus on these social and activist ends does to the aesthetic. Bishop is concerned – and, as I argued in the introduction, not without reason – that the value of the aesthetic can be reduced to that of second rate social work or instrumentalised for neoliberal ends. For Bishop, our current cultural moment responds to the deliciously troubling tension between art’s autonomy (insofar as it’s precisely what is not wholly real or rational) and its heteronomy (its blurring of art and life) by sacrificing the former and overstating the latter.30 Shannon Jackson is a thinker often read in conjunction with Bishop, as she tackles a similar set of problems but advances very different arguments. She frames the tension between autonomy and heteronomy differently – as the avant-garde question of where art ends and the rest of the world begins. As a Performance Studies scholar, she thinks in spectrums, not binaries. She is sceptical of any theoretical frame that would ‘cast the social as extra.’31 Artists must eat, so sustaining art means sustaining artists. All art has what she calls an ‘infrastructural politics’ – it exists in a web of social, political, and economic supports that cannot be detangled from the work. The process that created The Family takes this infrastructural politics very seriously. The production marks a point when the company starts to integrate self-care into their process of rehearsal and theatremaking. Later, as we’ll see, that care will become explicitly visible in their productions. As Dyas explains, ‘If you expose yourself to this kind of material – day in, day out – it can have a real impact. […] you have to look after yourself first. Actually it starts with you.’32 Working from this knowledge, THEATREclub integrated therapeutic supervision into its creative process. A counsellor began to work with the company on their projects. For Dyas, this is essential. She has seen activists run themselves into the ground. This acknowledgment of the need for support, of the effects of the social upon

70  THEATREclub the artist’s ability to create is a powerful challenge to that frame that casts the social as ‘extra.’33 And, as we will see more fully in an analysis of The Game, in skilful artists’ hands, it can avoid the trap of subsuming aesthetic concerns beneath activists ones. In THEATREclub’s work, self-care leads to startling aesthetic results. Maybe you’re thinking: self-care? Therapeutic supervision? Come on – you’re making theatre, not working in a war zone. But integrating and foregrounding self-care in experimental practice has much radical potential. Radical, etymologically speaking, connotes the roots of a system, and this is the potential I mean. Unfortunately, the very idea of self-care has been absorbed into the blob of capitalist appropriation of counter-culture that I discussed above. It can be hard to finds its radicalism while aswim in a sea of ‘Love Yourself – Have Liposuction! Empower Yourself – With Vitamin Water! Practice Mindfulness – Put a Jade Egg up your Vagina!’ But a commitment to taking care of yourself – physically, intellectually, psychologically, economically, spiritually, erotically, and socially – was something that the Greeks, the philosophical progenitors of Western civilisation, took extremely seriously. Michel Foucault explains that for the Greeks the phrase epimelesthai sautou, roughly translating to ‘to take care of yourself ’ or ‘the concern with self,’ is of the utmost importance to the successful functioning of a society.34 Socrates, in Plato, presents himself as master of epimelesthai sautou, which he considers the pursuit of wisdom, truth, and the perfection of the soul. Foucault explains that the better known Delphic maxim ‘Know Yourself ’ was originally secondary to epimelesthai. Knowing yourself was essential to taking care of yourself. Foucault discusses several reasons why ‘know yourself ’ has overshadowed ‘take care of yourself ’ in Western thought. Among these is Christian morality, which compels us to know our inner selves not in order to cultivate and care for them, but rather so that we can disavow our thoughts, desires, and bodily needs as sinful and worldly. For Foucault, the principle that ‘we should give ourselves more care than anything else in the world’ runs counter to contemporary moral austerity, and, thus, [w]e are more inclined to see taking care of ourselves as immorality, as a means of escape from all possible rules. We inherit the tradition of Christian morality which makes self-renunciation the condition for salvation. To know oneself was paradoxically the way to self-renunciation.35 When I say that attention to self-care in THEATREclub’s process and in their finished theatrical products is radical in the etymological sense of the world, this is what I mean. It can recover the importance of self-cultivation to our individual and social selves without having to drink algae, pay Gwyneth Paltrow a penny, or stick anything weird in your ass (unless that’s your bag). And while some activists run themselves into the ground, maybe feeling that self-care is

THEATREclub 71 selfish or coddling when so many people in this world are suffering, others recognise the political urgency of concern for the self. As Audrey Lorde wrote in A Burst of Light while dealing with a second cancer diagnosis: ‘Caring for myself is not self-indulgence. It is self-preservation, and that is an act of political warfare.’36 In THEATREclub’s work – as we will see in particular when we analyse The Game – the commitment to self-care also creates avant-garde effects. And, it pulls the work down out of the abstract, out of the cerebral realm of disavowed pleasures that Bourdieu critiques (and that I would like to note also carries connotations of Christian moral renunciation) and gives it back to life. HISTORY (2013): A Conversation Piece The final play in The Ireland Trilogy is HISTORY. It also premiered at the Project Arts Centre, and it was in many ways the most ambitious, attempting to understand Ireland’s present through a return to the past. Commissioned by the Dublin City Council Arts Office to make a piece in response to St. Michael’s Housing Estate in Dublin’s Inchicore, THEATREclub found that the 14-acre site served as a Cathleen Ní Houlihan h for the 21st century – whatever way they tried to look at it, St Michael’s was a symbol of nation. As Dyas explains: there’s a famine burial ground there; the first Catholic emancipation burial ground is there; Richmond barracks where the 1916 leaders were kept before they were executed; the Golden Bridge industrial school which is the kick-off of the Ryan report […] When we started working there were two people living in one of the tower blocks and then they moved out over the course of our residency, and just the massive injustice that had happened to those people at the hands of the state, in terms of housing. When [building contractor] Bernard McNamara pulled out in 2008 – that was the 4th failed regeneration plan that had happened on that land. […] There’s all these human rights abuses that are really present. The failure of the new state since 1922 to actually provide adequate housing and to meet people’s human rights and basic needs, is present in a place where the 1916 leaders dreamed of a time when all the children of the nation would be treated equally: all those contradictions are present on the same site, where those men knelt and prayed the rosary.37

h Cathleen Ní Houlihán (1902) is a play by Augusta Gregory and W.B. Yeats in which a strange crooning old lady arrives in a humble peasant cottage the night before the eldest son is due to be married, and entrances him with tales of the wrongs done to her – of her four beautiful green fields stolen. The young man forgets his bride and goes to fight for Cathleen’s honour. And Cathleen, she transforms into a beautiful young woman with the walk of a Queen. In case you are having trouble interpreting this oh so subtle allegory, Cathleen is Ireland, and the play encourages young men to make blood sacrifices in order to atone for the ills of history and restore her to glory.

72  THEATREclub HISTORY blends archival visuals of the estate, projected onto Doireann Coady’s stark white set, with irreverent play with sacred symbols of Irish history and culture: the execution of the leaders of the 1916 rising; Cathleen Ní Houlihan; the Virgin Mary. It also communicates the facts of what happened on that land – the decades-long battle between the residents and the city council, the economic violence – and asks the audience to take responsibility for that history. At the end, spectators are invited to march with the performers, to participate in a rally that is at once theatre and not theatre, which Dyas describes as a kind of accessible activism. Irish Times theatre critic Peter Crawley notes that the show’s ending – in combination with Eoin Winning’s lights, which disrupt any clear division between playing space and audience – ‘reveal the true agenda of the production: ending less as a performance than as a rally.’38 But does this attempt to include the audience actually result in greater aesthetic or political engagement? The idea of participation as an aesthetic and political choice in theatre is also deeply enmeshed in theories of class. For some artists, like Bertolt Brecht, who influenced and was influenced by the Frankfurt School, audiences need to be engaged by specific dramaturgical strategies so that they don’t accept the reality onstage as inevitable. This is supposed to provide an antidote to the numbing effects of the culture industry. For others, like Augusto Boal, creating work that is primarily about community and process rather than product resists the radicalism-absorbing blob of capitalism. Augusto Boal was a Brazilian theatremaker and activist. Although middle class himself, he was horrified by the oppression suffered by the poor in Brazil and other Latin American countries and was persecuted for the ‘dangerous’ ideas he spread and practiced through his theatre. He developed modes of activist and political theatre under the banner of ‘Theatre of the Oppressed.’39 Theatre of the Oppressed focuses on problem solving, consciousness raising, and empowering and activating audience members, who Boal reframes as ‘spect-actors.’ It includes strategies like Forum Theatre, where a scene representing a social problem is played through multiple times and can be stopped at any point by a spectactor, who steps into a performer’s shoes and shows how they might handle the situation differently. It also includes the practice of Invisible Theatre, performed in real social situations in public spaces, where the audience may not even be aware they are watching a show. So, for example, you’re in a fancy restaurant when a customer loudly reveals they can’t pay the bill and offers to work it off in the kitchen. Through the unfolding drama, it is revealed that the people producing the food on customers’ plates would have to work for days to be able to afford a single meal there. Scholar Susan L. Feagin points out that Boal is opposed to ‘the traditional conception of the aesthetic as the pleasurable perception of an independently existing object or event in the world’ – opposed, that is, to Kantian aesthetics. She further explains that ‘[h]is views were not based on general metaphysical

THEATREclub 73 grounds, but on his knowledge of what an active engagement in making art could do to transform a life.’40,i Uptake of Brechtian and Boalian ideas and of the Marxist assumption that theatregoers needs to be activated in order to have a valid experience led, for a while, to something of a participation craze in contemporary theatre. This, in turn, left many thinkers and artists uneasy. The aesthetic philosopher Jacques Rancière notes that with all this focus on activation and participation spectatorship seems to have been coded as ‘bad’ – looking is framed as the opposite of knowing, the opposite of acting, and a common conclusion appears to Rancière to be that a new theatre is needed where looking is replaced with acting. He notes that there are various methods proposed to do this – whether by making what’s on stage strange and demanding that the spectator mentally interrogates it (like Brecht), or by insisting on an embodied relationship with the drama on behalf of those spectators who, by the nature of theatre, share space with the performers (like Boal – although Rancière does not explicitly name Boal).41 But for Rancière the distinction between spectating and acting is prescriptive and unequal. It assumes there are those who know and those who don’t know. For Rancière, the spectator is already active – already observing, selecting, comparing, interpreting. In a phrase that reminds me of Oscar Wilde’s aesthetics, j Rancière says, ‘He [the spectator] makes his poem with the poem that is performed in front of him.’42 Every spectator is an actor in their own story. Rancière pushes back on the idea that what is important about theatre is its liveness and togetherness – its assumed formation of a community just because spectators and actors are gathered together in shared space. The communal power available to spectators, he says, ‘is the power to translate in their own way what they are looking at’43 and the stage must be brought back to equality with the writing and the reading of a book. This perspective is meant to stand as a corrective to ‘spectacles boasting of being no more spectacles but ceremonials of community.’44 Rancière wants to remind a theatre culture whipped into a quasi-religious reverence for the political and communal power of drama that ‘words are only words.’45 This,

i Later, Boal will go on to theorize an ‘Aesthetics of the Oppressed,’ in which he conceives of art as ‘the search for truths by means of our sensory equipment’ and thinks beyond theatre and into the other arts, looking to transcend words, which he sees as the instruments of reason, in order to access sensory, aesthetic communication. Boal, Augusto. The Aesthetics of the Oppressed. Trans. Adrian Jackson (London; New York: Routledge, 2006). For this theoretical work, see particularly, pp. 11–40. j This book used to include a section on Wildean aesthetics, but I painfully axed it. Wilde is also a defender of the noble activity of art criticism, which he frames, like Rancière, as a creative act. Some of my thoughts on Wilde’s aesthetics have ended up in a literary journal called Mirror Lamp Press, if you are interested! O’Toole, Emer, ‘Oscar Wilde: The Critic as Performance Artist.’ Mirror Lamp Press 6 (2022): 53–65.

74  THEATREclub he hopes, ‘may help us better understand how words, stories, and performers can help us change something in the world we live in.’46,k Alongside Rancière’s other theories on issues like equality (which he frames as the ability for individuals to take their own perspectives free from socially enforced conformity) and consensus (which is a bad thing – a set of norms held in place by powerful interests and institutions), this critique of activation has been extremely influential in theatre studies. And not everyone is wholly enthusiastic about its effects. Janelle Reinelt links uptake of Rancière’s ideas with ‘an emphasis on individual experiential possibilities rather than collective address and discursive signification.’47 She relates this individual emphasis in turn to a trend within theatre studies to ‘denigrate the political impact of theatre.’48 She’s uneasy with the prospect of a quietism that ‘neither expects too much nor ventures too far in the name of a politics of performance.’49 A Rancière influenced idea of the political possibilities of the aesthetic tends to pooh pooh community formation or any political mobilisation beyond an individually realised ‘dissensus.’ l And it takes this stance partly because of the radicalism absorbing blob that has been chasing activist theatre around this chapter. Thinkers have been convinced that because political and neoliberal institutions can and do neutralise the radical elements within them, there is no point in making art that aims to organise with or influence others within the system at all. This is pretty defeatist. And it’s also, some of you might have noticed, somewhat universalist and Kantian, siphoning off art from the life and politics that feed and are fed by it. Rancière’s emancipated spectator – individually appreciating and analysing – is locked into something like the Kantian pure gaze. And, for a philosopher who is so anti anything that smells like prescriptivism that we’re not even allowed to try to find common ground to get some shit moving for marginalised groups because it would silence genuinely political individual dissensus, it’s pretty prescriptive to say that theatre ‘should question its privileging of living presence and bring the stage back to a level of equality with the telling of a story or the writing and the reading of a book.’50 Like, as someone who’s made a lot of theatre, seen a lot of theatre, told the odd story down the pub, as well as written two books and read a lot k Note how different this is from Boal’s aesthetic theory, which sees the role of art as searching for truth, transcending words, looking for forms of sensory communication that are not only rational. Boal, Augusto. Aesthetics of the Oppressed, pp. 4–40. l Rancière, ‘The Thinking of Dissensus: Politics and Aesthetics’, in Reading Rancière: Critical Dissensus, Ed. Paul Bowman and Richard Stamp (London; NY; Continuum, 2011). Dissensus, in Rancière’s theory, arises from a clash between sensory perception (sensing) and rational interpretation (making sense). There are parallels here with Kant’s theories of cognition, which conceives of the faculties of imagination and understanding that are roughly analogous to the experiences Rancière is discussing here. For Rancière, this experience of dissensus is at the heart of politics because it prompts us to redraw the frame of what is possible, to invent new subjects, and to do all of this outside of the prescriptive mores of social obligation and control that he calls ‘the police.’

THEATREclub 75 of them, one of the markedly different, exciting, and sometimes terrifying things about theatre is the living presence, the live experience. Some of the most aesthetically exciting and thought-provoking theatre art I’ve seen has been the kind that plays with the possibilities of the form and makes cool things happen with the fact that people are gathered together in shared space. The stuff you can’t do with other art forms is often what makes people into theatre nuts as opposed to film buffs or book sluts. And in the same way that the form of a novel opens up political possibilities unavailable to theatre, so does theatrical form open up political possibilities unavailable to the novel. In Reinelt’s critique of Rancière’s influence on theatre studies, she notes that there’s a sort of binary structure of contrast in his writing that doesn’t allow for spectrums and gradations. And while I recognise that theatre can overstate its own political efficacy and also that it shouldn’t have to prove it activates spectators or forms anti-capitalist community in order to be meaningful or valuable, can’t we admit that some theatre practice, like Boal’s, does form community, does avail of theatrical form to create a different type of spectatorship? I mean, the Brazilian government didn’t send Boal into exile for 15 years because he wasn’t a threat to the system. There are times when theatre’s political and aesthetic importance rests in individual interpretation from critics who are also artists, as Oscar Wilde might say, or spectators who are also poets, to cite Rancière. That’s cool. Respect. Now listen to this wild idea: there are also times when theatre is so linked to community, to politics, to social engagement, that if you decide not to stand up and join in the rally, you are having an aesthetic experience that is very different from those who do. That’s not to say that yours is invalid or unequal to that of the participatory theatre enthusiasts in the front row making tits of themselves.51 Your experience is yours. Fine. But aesthetics means ‘of the senses’ and even if theatre connotes seeing (from the Greek theatron), the art form allows for an expansion of those sensory possibilities. And you can avail of that. If you like. Or not. No pressure. We can have both, guys, okay? We can have both! No one’s coming to take away your right to sit silently in the dark having political epiphanies, Mr. Rancière, I swear. Wait, wasn’t I supposed to be analysing a show? Okay: the participatory element of HISTORY’s dramaturgy is an aesthetic choice that arises from its activist commitments. And it potentially challenges the danger of elitism that haunts the avant-garde: the aesthetic rupture here is one that carries a social invitation, that welcomes people into a conversation. But does it work? Or is it didacticism, pretending community but actually setting up the inequality between those who know and those who don’t that Rancière fears? To answer this, I thought it might be helpful to look at what reviewers had to say about how the politics of the piece hit them. Chris O’Rouke writing for The Arts Review refers to the ‘agenda’ of HISTORY, diplomatically stating that ‘some might argue it borders on propaganda.’52 Meanwhile Katie-Ann McDonough for the review site MEG.ie notes the unusual diversity of the

76  THEATREclub show’s audience, and asks, ‘Do you ever feel like there are some conversations about this country that you are not invited to?’ She positions HISTORY as an antidote to the feeling that ordinary citizens have no right or space to question the narratives of the Irish Republic.53 The theatre blogger nomoreworkhorse.com notes that after she and her friend left the theatre, they ‘initially talked about the play but then moved on to quite a broad discussion on the wider topics raised, dealing with how the issues were treated and whether we agreed with their various points of view.’54 While there are disparaging connotations to calling a play a ‘conversation piece,’ an effect of HISTORY’s aesthetic, clearly, is that its participatory structure invites the public into dialogue rather than excluding them based on the impurity of their gaze or incompleteness of their education.

The Game (2015) The Game (2015) premiered at the Project Arts Centre during the Dublin Theatre Festival and toured to Brisbane, Australia in Sept 2016, to London, Manchester, and Brighton in March 2017, and to venues around Ireland, including Dublin, Cork, and Galway in April 2017. An immersive, experimental piece, created in dialogue with women with experience of sex work or prostitution, The Game explores ‘the rules, the language, and the power structures’ of buying and selling sex.m While the angle of class was not as explicit as in other THEATREclub works, sex work is certainly a class issue, with economic precarity and addiction playing roles in many sex worker’s choices and class inequality a norm between workers and clients.55 Activism in The Game is of an exploratory not an explanatory kind – it recognises a problem, but not how to define or solve it. And, I will argue, it creates an uncertain, unstable, ambiguous aesthetic to represent this politics. The play stages two contentious viewpoints regarding which legal policies best support sex workers, both those who want or need to remain in the industry and those who wish to leave it. The Nordic Model, ultimately adopted by Ireland in early 2017, is based on legislation that Sweden enacted in 1999. Under this model, selling sex is not criminalised, while buying is. The Nordic model is meant to discourage, decrease, and eventually end demand for paid sex, which is framed as inherently harmful, while allowing sex workers protection under the law.56 However, despite these feminist aims, there is much evidence that, in practice, Nordic Model laws further victimise sex workers, particularly those in the most precarious positions.57

m I feel most comfortable using the term ‘sex workers’ as it represents my politics and I always use that terminology in my everyday life. However, some of the people whose stories are the basis for THEATREclub’s show do not understand themselves to have been sex workers, and they object to that terminology. They have real lived experience of the sex industry and their perspectives matter to me. I don’t want to erase their preferred language here.

THEATREclub 77 Decriminalisation is the other side of the coin, a system similar to which has been adopted in New Zealand, in which no aspect of the trade is criminalised (in theory), and sex workers rights are guaranteed through existing employment and human rights legislation.58 As of May 2016, based on years of international research and consultation with sex workers, Amnesty International committed to a policy which calls for the complete decriminalisation of sex work.59 The Game debuted just weeks after Fine Gael TD Francis Fitzgerald, then minister for justice and equality, published the Criminal Law (Sexual Offenses) Bill 2015 which included the criminalisation of the buying of sex. Even though the Bill would not pass until 2017, it’s clear that solid government support for the Nordic Model already existed when The Game was in development and performance. Meanwhile, Amnesty released its draft sex work policy in July 2015, driving conversations about how best to address shortcomings in Irish law. It would be a mistake to assume, however, that these conversations were happening without prejudice. Scholars Eilís Ward and Gillian Wylie performed the first empirical study of the issue of sex trafficking in Ireland. Sex trafficking is often cited by those advocating for abolition of the sex trade and for Nordic Model legislation, arguing that the especially vulnerable women and children trafficked for sexual exploitation would not be trafficked at all if there were no demand for commercial sex. Ward and Wylie’s report identified 76 cases of sex trafficking to Ireland between 2000 and 2007. It also acknowledged a lot of greyness and encouraged those engaging with the research to do the same. For example, the 76 identified cases probably did not represent all cases and attempts to extrapolate outwards to estimate the real number could not be empirically informed. Or, the very idea of who counts as trafficked is loaded. Intuitively, most of us would assume a difference between someone who is effectively tricked by traffickers into travel for sexual exploitation and someone who consentingly uses the path to illegal migration provided by people smugglers with the intention of selling sex on arrival. But the terminology does not distinguish between these experiences. Women in both of these situations are ‘sex trafficked.’ Without diminishing the harms experienced by many trafficked women and children, Ward and Wylie advocate an understanding of complex lives and diverse experiences.60 In a 2014 article reflecting on the aftermath of their report, Ward and Wylie write that they made few friends with their work. The research was displeasing to the government, because it proved the existence of a trafficking problem where it wanted to pretend there was none. It was also displeasing to Ireland’s abolitionist movement, which positioned the researchers as anti-feminist for digression from the narrative that all trafficked women were victims in need of saving and also implied that they had understated the statistics.61 The Immigrant Council of Ireland, a group with strong ties to the Catholic Church, commissioned its own report, which entirely ignored Ward and Wylie’s study, as well as, according to Ward and Wylie, academic

78  THEATREclub convention and methodology. The report is emotive and lacking in the complexity Ward and Wylie advocate. It was seized on as ‘ground-breaking’ by the Irish media and became a tool of the Irish abolitionist movement, influential in securing political support for the Nordic Model. Any attempt to explore the questions at the heart of the sex industry in this climate would be fraught. And while the abolitionist movement certainly seemed to have captured the ears of the Irish media and political establishment, discussions about The Game on social media in advance of the production indicate that voices for decriminalisation were gaining in confidence and amplitude. The Sex Workers Alliance of Ireland (SWAI), who campaign for decriminalisation, feared that The Game would act as Nordic Model propaganda. A Twitter argument was instigated by an article posted on the THEATREclub website entitled ‘A Message from The Game Makers’ which outlined the research that the creative team had already undertaken and called for more input from sex workers.62 Twitter respondents felt that the language in the article and the bulk of Dyas’ research meant that The Game intended to favour the opinions of women who had exited sex work over those who were currently working.63 Dyas maintained during the Twitter debate that The Game would be ‘exploring all legal models and leave it up to the audience to decide for [themselves].’64 The decriminalisation stance was also present in the post-show discussion I attended. Dyas responded to a question by stating her dislike of the ‘world’s oldest profession’ discourse, opining that just because something is long entrenched doesn’t mean we should accept it. Slavery, after all, was long entrenched, but that’s no moral or political reason to legalise or encourage it. For Dyas, it is possible to end demand for sex work, and so the urgent question is whether we want to. A young man in the audience responded, framing his contribution as in solidarity with his friends who were sex workers, and noted that the piece claimed to be even-handed, but, in Dyas’s proclamation that we can ‘end demand,’ he saw support for the rhetoric of the Nordic Model and abolitionism. Personal opinions of the theatremakers and tensions of the social climate aside, how did The Game aesthetically represent the politics of sex work? Did this representation constitute a propagandistic account of the situation, or did it achieve the exploratory autonomy that Dyas and the company claimed for it? Let’s address the first question first, because that, my friends, is called structure. The Game turns its black box space into the set of a cheesy ‘90s game show. However, arriving to sit in the imagined studio audience, any expectation that we are about to experience some light entertainment is tempered by a note on each seat advising the audience of explicit and violent content, telling us that we are free to leave and/or return at any time, and encouraging us to accommodate anyone who does need to go. It’s the first sign of the

THEATREclub 79 therapeutic care I discussed above making its way into the theatre space and into the aesthetic of the piece. The Game begins. Our two presenters, commanding THEATREclub veteran performers Lauren Larkin and Gemma Collins, open with an abstract introduction, a little like performance poetry, that recalls the aesthetic of HEROIN. The introduction presents the goals of the game: to examine, as a society, what sex work is and what we want it to be. Larkin and Collins will – with the help of their ‘contestants’ – re-enact real life experiences of sex workers. These stories have been scripted and dramatised in collaboration with women with direct experience of the sex trade. THEATREclub worked closely with two abolitionist campaigners, Rachel Moran, who entered the industry partly due to class vulnerabilities, and Mia deFaoite, who entered prostitution due to heroin addiction. The company also attempted to collaborate with Kate McGrew of SWAI, but this collaboration broke down. It appeared to me as an audience member that there were more stories from exited women than from women still working. However, stories contributed by currently working providers still formed a central and significant part of the production. Enter the contestants. Five men, who have volunteered to be a part of the show. In earlier iterations, they volunteered to ‘redress misogyny’ (a loaded

Figure 2.2  Lauren Larkin (left) and Gemma Collins (right) sit atop a sofa in their underwear. They challenge the camera with uncompromising gazes Photo by Permission of Fiona Morgan

80  THEATREclub formulation, as it implies that misogyny is intrinsic to sex work) and, later, to tell stories and tackle the issue of selling sex. Dyas says that the use of volunteers reflects the company’s frustration that men are often not included in conversations about sex work despite there being far more men who buy sex than women who sell it. The five men have seen no scripts, and – in an aesthetic inversion of the gendered dynamics of the sex industry – they consent to participation, but do not know what their parts will entail. They introduce themselves and their reasons for volunteering. At the performance I attended, these introductions emphasised wanting to help because they cared about equality and also about the women in their lives. The game begins when a volunteer’s number is drawn from a bingo ball, indicating who will re-enact the next scene. The scenes range in timbre from a description of a woman who works from home with regular clients, whose day might best be understood as a combination of sex work and care work, providing companionship, connection, and pleasure; to tales of little bruising indignities – a client who asks a sex worker what she does, then interrupts her pleasant chatter about the studies she’s pursuing to explain that’s not what he meant; to the violent and brutal – a woman and her friend horrifically attacked by a group of men in a hotel room. Throughout, Larkin and Collins break character and remind the audience, ‘this is not happening to us, here, now, but it did happen to someone.’ I find this really interesting in terms of the tendency of the avant-garde to blur art and life. Here, THEATREclub seems to want to stop that happening: to remind the audience that there is a real, somewhere, that this is just an artwork, standing in for reality but not replacing it. The men are fed lines and actions by Collins and Larkin. There are also three phrases they can say at any time, painted behind the audience on the back wall of the studio: ‘I’m not enjoying this, but I’ll pretend to enjoy it.’ ‘This isn’t happening to me, Dave; it’s happening to X.’ ‘I’m here to help’ (To which Larkin or Collins reply, in affirmation, ‘And he is helping.’) The first two phrases echo dissociative techniques often used by sex workers to separate their work lives and personal lives, a process which academic and sex work advocate Teela Sanders sees as healthy compartmentalisation,65 but which some scholars read as proof of psychological trauma.66 The third phrase gives the men a chance to distance themselves from the action, and also reminds us of the function of the play – to do something, to figure out a politics together. The men can also tap out at any time and go backstage to where a trained counsellor is waiting to help them process what they’ve experienced. They can choose to come back on, or not. This therapeutic supervision is expanded from the one THEATREclub artists apply to themselves and their productions processes in

THEATREclub 81 general. At the show I attended, a man who introduced himself as the father of two daughters left the stage, emotionally overwhelmed. He had been asked to chase one of the actors with a gun. The game went on. In The Game, the company’s commitment to care in approaching difficult subjects becomes a part of not merely the artistic process, but also the product. Something phenomenologically jarring happens when we watch a participant leave, when his emotional well-bring forms part of the spectacle. A complex psychological response in real time becomes a part of the drama, heightening the stakes. It also functions symbolically, both as a man standing up to say ‘I would never do this,’ and as a human being who has the ability to opt out when shit gets scary. In The Game’s insistence on a process of therapeutic supervision surrounding the work, there’s an explicit recognition of the ‘infrastructural politics’ that Jackson argues are always part of art’s aesthetic. The therapeutic supervision is based on a learned understanding of the need to take care of yourself and of others when approaching difficult material. These social commitments then frame the way the performance is created in the moment – notes on seats creating a community of care; a tap-out system; stepping in and out of representational roles; insistence that the audience recognise that ‘this is not happening to us, here now, but it did happen to someone.’ This dynamic also makes a case for the aesthetic value of participation. While spectators still have the option to sit quietly in the dark bringing their own individual life experiences to their own individual interpretations of the show (don’t worry, Jacques), the deeply felt reaction of the participants can’t help but change the way the art signifies, affects us, and is received. At the show I attended, audience members began to speak back during some of the ‘performance poetry’-esque sections, answering from the usually silent stalls some questions that, in a play less inclusive of the emotional responses of those involved, would certainly have been read as rhetorical. Contrary to fears that the aesthetic risks being sacrificed at the altar of social work, the commitment of the production to staging real stories and its aesthetic choice to stage male reactions to those stories in real time creates what is most startling and innovative in its aesthetic – for example, the men’s real discomfort, but not so real that they can’t tap out. The dramaturgy that gives rise to this discomfort, the process of therapeutic supervision that gives rise to the dramaturgy – these things function metaphorically. They stand in for a response to the precarity of sex work. What legislation will keep sex workers safest? This is a politics that we have yet, as a society, to agree. So does The Game succeed not only aesthetically, but also in terms of its activist goal to be discursive as opposed to propagandistic? If the reviews written by the Dublin theatre critics are to be taken at their word, then what The Game set out to accomplish, it achieved – a balance in dealing with the logic of decriminalisation and abolitionism. In the Irish Independent, Maggie Armstrong summarised the social context thus, ‘THEATREclub’s

82  THEATREclub new play drags up what we really need to know […] as the Government moves to criminalise the buying of sex, [And] Amnesty International calls for the decriminalisation of prostitution.’67 Nearly all the Dublin-based reviews of The Game identify these two sides of the argument either directly, as Armstrong does, or indirectly, citing language that the play uses as signifiers for the opposing viewpoints: sex workers within the play referring to themselves either as victimised or as empowered. But it’s important to complicate this binary. Not everyone fighting for decriminalisation thinks the sex industry is a bouncy castle of sex positive feminist japes. Fighting for decriminalisation can also be a response to a complex social reality where economic precarity, migrancy, lack of support for single mothers, the criminalisation of addiction, and generalised patriarchal, homophobic bullshit make sex work the best choice available out of an array of crap choices for many marginalised people. So the question is, as we also try to tackle these social issues, how do we keep the workers in the industry safe? The empowerment/victimisation binary in the play might seem to be balanced, but it risks simplifying the case for decriminalisation.n Like, if we can prove sex work isn’t a day at the beach, then it should be illegal. Overall, the Dublin reviewers seem to come to the general conclusion that, while The Game poses questions surrounding the future of comprehensive sex work legislation, it ‘offers no answers.’68 Instead, it allows for the ‘audience to come away with their own conclusions.’69 For Dublin theatre critics the play succeeds in ‘resisting a single argument.’ 70 This seems to hold for The Game’s 2017 Irish tour, where reviews find it ‘does give equal time to different arguments’71 and is balanced in its portrayal of ‘all sides’ when it comes to ‘how sex work should be dealt with by legislation.’72 But perhaps these conversations, and the debates around whether the Nordic Model or Amnesty International’s approach was the best way forward, and even THEATREclub’s insistence upon fairness (all of which circulated with the performances in Ireland) primed the Irish audience to seek out a measure of balance. When the play was staged outside of Ireland, the reviews did not reflect the balance or nuance of previous Irish reviews but were instead oddly divided. In 2016, Steph Harmon, writing for the Australian Guardian, concluded that while ‘The Game aims to be balanced […] it’s fairly easy to ascertain which side the creators are on. The most memorable scenes are the most graphic ones: […] re-enactments of abuse, rape and forced prostitution – which overpower the sex work success stories.’73 Harmon concludes that all of the scenes

n In fact, in their recent book, Revolting Prostitutes, Juno Mac and Molly Easo Smith critique Grace Dyas directly for framing the politics of The Game in terms of this harm or empowerment binary. Juno Mac and Molly Easo Smith, Revolting Prostitutes: The Fight for Sex Workers Rights (London: Verso, 2019), 35–36.

THEATREclub 83 are taken together present ‘an industry that either needs to be completely reinvented, or abolished altogether’ echoing the language that many Nordic Model supporters use in their arguments: that criminalising the buying of sex will decrease demand and end or ‘abolish’ the industry. Interestingly, the other review from Brisbane took away something different, explaining that the play was clearly ‘designed to make the case for the decriminalisation of sex work in Europe’74 and noting that it had reduced poignancy in Queensland where most forms of sex work are legal. These two opposed viewpoints from the Brisbane reviewers suggest that it was quite possible to see within the play the perspective one wished, while also suggesting that there may have been other aspects of the Irish environment that led to so many reviewers being unified on the subject of the play’s balance. The Game played in London, Manchester, and Brighton in March 2017. The only London review says that while the play presents a wide range of opinions, ‘to its merit,’ it settles on a relatively conclusive position – namely, that sex work should be decriminalised because there will always be a demand for it and thus a supply, and it’s therefore important that we focus on the safety of those involved.75 Something interesting to note here is that for director Dyas the ‘there will always be a demand’ argument is an unconvincing one. When the production toured to Manchester, the reviewer, whose mixed review represents the least positive critical reaction to the show I’ve found, gives credit to the production for the range of voices it represents but complains that it doesn’t make clear when it is presenting the politics of the sex workers and exited women THEATREclub worked with and when the views are the artists’ own. ‘It feels important to know,’ she says.76 I think the oddly disparate interpretations of the reviewers – from Irish audiences who saw balance between Nordic Model and Decriminalisation stances, to Brisbane reviewers who saw, variously Nordic Model and Decriminalisation proselytising, to the London reviewer who saw an argument for Decriminalisation, to the Manchester reviewer uneasy because she couldn’t identify the theatremakers’ politics – indicate that the show is not balanced so much as ambiguous. The aesthetic games that it sets up each night, with the improvisation and personal complicity these require, likely create different emotional and intellectual resonances with every performance. The artists might have their personal opinions, but the show they created is defined by uncertainty, and their professed commitment to exploring the question rather than preaching a sermon resulted in this ambiguity. Of course, in spite of the participation that underpins its dramaturgy and bleeds into audience experiences, the Rancièrian emancipated spectators in the audience bring their own life experiences and political convictions to the play. Sometimes, as when people from the stalls responded to the arguably rhetoric questions posed by Larkin and Collins, these individual responses make their way into the theatre space, into the community briefly created around the complex politics of social responsibility towards sex work. And

84  THEATREclub sometimes, I am quite sure, these individual responses foment private but no less radical political moments. See – we can have both.

Reflections THEATREclub’s work – often created with input from marginalised constituencies, sometimes participatory, usually surrounded by an ethic of care, and always avant-garde – explores issues that have social class and economic inequality at their heart. As well as addressing specific Irish social problems, the company also speaks to Marxist debates around radicalism and aesthetics. In this chapter, I’ve tried to tease out two characteristics of THEATREclub’s work. First, as will come as little surprise to those of you who’ve been reading this book from the beginning, I’ve tried to show how the company’s activist commitments manifest in aesthetic patterns. I’ve found that its classconscious activism often leads to avant-garde and experimental forms – forms that, like the therapeutic care that informs THEATREclub’s process and is foregrounded aesthetically in some of its productions, highlight the question of ‘where art ends and the rest of the world begins.’77 THEATREclub’s aesthetics don’t simply blur the boundaries between art and life, they don’t overstate the efficacy of political art; rather they often foreground their own limitations in the face of entrenched social harms. For example, when the players in HEROIN try and fail to tell the story of addiction in Ireland over the last 60 years, as they enclose themselves in an inevitable structure of isolation and stymied communication, there’s an aesthetic representation both passionately tied to social reality and frustratingly symbolic. Irish Times theatre critic and social commentator Fintan O’Toole writes that The Game is ‘hopeful’ – ‘Not in the sense that it is anything but bleak – this is a ferocious piece, built on savage experiences – but its brilliant idea is to take an avant-garde cliche (there are no rules) and make it terrifyingly real.’78 For him, The Game is all about rules, an insistence that rules can create a safe space within the theatre, juxtaposed with a second set of real-life rules that fall apart. While that collapse is not ‘an aesthetic pleasure,’ it does allow the audience to imagine that something else is possible. The play is nothing if not ambiguous. Where Uncle Fintan sees an aesthetic attempt to make the lawlessness of the avant-garde real and living, and to undermine as unrealistic the ethic of care that attempts to make the theatre space safe, I see simultaneously a sincere commitment to and belief in those rules of care and an undermining of the production’s ability to adequately approach reality at all. In THEATREclub’s aesthetics, there is a paradox that gives the work so much of its imagination and energy – a drive to be close to life, to explore, to advocate, to understand, to experience, to create, to change, matched by an awareness of the limitations of art, of the aquarium of its black box space, of the extent to which it is not the thing it pretends to be. This tension is clearly the source of great generative energy, of the jarring,

THEATREclub 85 profound, and sometimes beautiful things created in the space where art and life entwine, refuse to connect, or – sometimes – crash violently. Secondly, in this chapter, I’ve played with the extent to which THEATREclub resists the elitist connotations of avant-garde work, how it evades the danger of becoming another exciting new aesthetic product for the bourgeoise, its radicalism tamed. I’d like to suggest that it’s the very social commitment that can feel like an overstatement of the political power of drama resists elitism. The desire to activate, to foster participation, and to encourage recognition of our place in an unequal social order invites people into a conversation rather than excluding them from the riddle of experimental art. Yes, THEATREclub requires a different kind of interpretative work than a play with traditional plots, characters, or structures, but what you need to ‘get’ the aesthetic isn’t an arts degree – it’s experience of Ireland’s social fabric and interest in a body politic. THEATREclub offers experimental art made by a collective including people who are now among Ireland’s most prominent working class artists, it is often made in collaboration with working class communities and individuals, and its creators have invested a lot of time and energy in curating audiences – getting people who don’t usually go to the theatre to attend their shows. However, as THEATREclub’s star rose, this activist foundation and social commitment was complicated. Analysing a participatory THEATREclub production about The Troubles in The North, It’s Not Over (2016), Ciara Murphy suggests that Irish theatre and performance, like the nation itself, may be ‘opening up and asking its citizens to interpret history, to be a co-participant in the creation of the national myth and the story of nation, rather than just accepting worn narratives of the past.’ 79 Yet she also astutely observes that while the public money that funds such productions is helping to place excluded narratives back into the canon of Irish history, access to It’s Not Over was limited to those who could afford expensive tickets, due to its prestigious slot at the Dublin Theatre Festival.80 There is a catch 22 here. THEATREclub’s aesthetic accomplishments gain it the cultural capital to partake in some of Ireland’s most prestigious cultural events, including the Dublin Theatre Festival and Waking the Nation programmes. Activist art which is aesthetically unimpressive will be read in terms of the limiting dichotomy between aesthetic excellence and social affect I discussed in the introductory chapter. Yet, when activist artists achieve recognisable virtuosity, bending their social agenda to the creation of pioneering aesthetics, they risk being positioned as an elite interest only available and attractive to the wealthy. This catch 22 is at base about the assimilation of radical art and culture by the capitalist system that we’ve been discussing throughout this chapter. It’s interesting that just as THEATREclub’s work began to make main stages and gain the kind of cultural cache that pushed up ticket prices and may have made it more difficult to experiment freely (because, remember,

86  THEATREclub experiments can always fail) they wrapped up operations. Maybe it wasn’t intentional, and had more to do with where the artists were at in their lives, but, nonetheless, I’d like to see the radicalism munching blob of capitalist assimilation eat them now. In a country in which struggles of income inequality, housing injustice, and class are being fought vocally and passionately against a neoliberal political system, the body of work THEATREclub leaves behind represents a powerful attempt to understand and interact with these structures aesthetically.

Notes 1 Eoin Butler, ‘I See These People in the World with Us Who Are Barely Viewed as Human Beings. And I Think It’s Weird That We’re Okay With That.’ The Irish Times, 13 Nov 2010. https://www.irishtimes.com/culture/stage/theatre/i-see-thesepeople-in-the-world-with-us-who-are-barely-viewed-as-human-beings-and-ithink-it-s-weird-that-we-re-okay-with-that-1.676724. Accessed 01 June 2019. 2 THEATREclub, ‘Home Page.’ www.theatreclub.ie. Accessed 01 Mar 2019. 3 THEATREclub, ‘THEATREclub Stole Your Clock Radio What the FUCK you Gonna Do About It.’ www.theatreclub.ie. Accessed 01 Mar 2019. 4 For more on the contributions and contexts of these companies, see Haughton, Miriam. ‘Flirting with the Postmodern: Moments of Change in Contemporary Irish Theatre, Performance and Culture.’ Irish Studies Review 22.3 (2014): 374–392. And Paul B. Donnelly, Post-Dramatic Theatre in Ireland (2009-2014), Doctoral Dissertation (Dublin: Trinity College, 2015). For a location of these companies in a rich history of devised and community-based theatre in Ireland, see O’Gorman Siobhán and Charlotte McIvor, Eds., Devised Performance in Irish Theatre: Histories and Contemporary Practice (Dublin: Carysford, 2015). 5 Ian Walsh, Experimental Irish Theatre: After WB Yeats (Basingstoke; New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012). 6 Patrick Lonergan, Ed., Contemporary Irish Plays (London: Bloomsbury, 2015). 7 Thomas Conway, Ed., The Oberon Anthology of Contemporary Irish Plays: ‘This Is Just This. This Is Not Real. It’s Just Money’ (London: Oberon Books, 2012). 8 Dyas, ‘An interview with Grace Dyas’, in The Winter Pages, Ed. Kevin Barry and Olivia Smith (Dublin: Curlew Editions, 2015), 111. 9 Dyas, ‘An Interview’, 111. 10 Murphy, ‘Reflecting Irishness, Mirroring Histories: Performing Commemoration in Irish Theater in 2015’, New Hibernia Review 20.3 (2016): 118. 11 Dyas, ‘An interview’, 112. 12 Karl Marx, ‘Preface to a Critique of Critical Economy’, in Karl Marx: A Reader, Ed. Jon Elster (Cambridge & New York: University of Cambridge Press, 1986), 187–188. 13 Max Horkheimer’s inaugural lecture as president of the Frankfurt institute of social research in 1931 serves as sort of a mission statement for the Frankfurt School. I like this quotation: ‘the essence, the substantial content of the individual is not revealed in personal actions but in the life of the totality to which it belongs.’ Max Horkheimer, ‘The State of Contemporary Social Philosophy and the Tasks of an Institute for Social Research’, in Critical Theory and Society, Ed. Stephen Eric Bronner and Douglas MacKay Kellener (New York: Routledge, 1989), 26. 14 Max Horkheimer, and Theodor W. Adorno, ‘The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception’, in Dialectic of Enlightenment: Philosophical Fragments, Ed. Gunzelin Schmid Noerr (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2020), 94–136. 15 Theodor W. Adorno, ‘On Popular Music’, in Cultural Theory and Popular Culture: A Reader, Ed. John Storey (Athens, Georgia: U of Georgia P, 1998), 197–209.

THEATREclub 87 1 6 Theodor W, Adorno, ‘On jazz.’ Trans. Jamie Owen Daniel. Discourse 12.1 (1989): 47. 17 Theodor W Adorno, ‘On jazz.’ Trans. Jamie Owen Daniel. Discourse 12.1 (1989): 45–69. 18 Theodor W Adorno, ‘On Popular Music’, in Cultural Theory and Popular Culture: A Reader, Ed. John Storey (Athens, Georgia: U of Georgia P, 1998), 197–209. 19 Theodor W Adorno, ‘The Culture Industry Reconsidered’, in Critical Theory and Society, Ed. Stephen Eric Bronner & Douglas MacKay Kellener (New York: Routledge, 1989), 128–135. 20 Antonio Gramsci, Prison Notebooks. Ed Joseph A. Buttigieg. Trans. Antonio Callari (New York: Columbia UP, 1992). 21 Roger Taylor, Art, an Enemy of the People. Philosophy Now (Hassocks: Harvester Press, 1978). 22 Even though I wrote this insult myself, I am pretty hurt by it. 23 Pierre Bourdieu, and Jean Claude Passeron, Les Héritiers: Les Étudiants Et La Culture. Le Sens Commun (Paris: Editions de Minuit, 1964). 24 Bourdieu, Distinction, xv. 25 This section on The Ireland Trilogy is derived, in part, from an article published in Contemporary Theatre Review on 20 Dec 2019. http://wwww.tandfonline.com/10.1080/ 10486801.2019.1657105 26 The set texts of HEROIN are available in Thomas Conway’s anthology. Conway, Thomas, ed, The Oberon Anthology of Contemporary Irish Plays: ‘This Is Just This. This Is Not Real. It’s Just Money’ (London: Oberon Books, 2012). 27 Georgina Born, Eric Lewis, and Will Straw, Eds. Improvisation and Social Aesthetics (Durham: Duke University Press, 2017), 9. 28 Dyas, ‘An Interview’, 112. 29 Dyas, ‘An Interview’, 112. 30 Claire Bishop, Artificial Hells: Participatory Art and the Politics of Spectatorship (London: Verso Books, 2012). 31 Shannon Jackson, Social Work: Performing Art, Supporting Publics (New York; London: Routledge, 2011), 16. 32 Dyas, ‘An Interview’, 115. 33 Jackson, Social Works, 16. 34 Michel Foucault, ‘Technologies of the Self.’ Lectures at University of Vermont in October 1982, in Technologies of the Self (Univ. of Massachusetts Press, 1988), 16–49, P. 19. 35 Ibid, 22. 36 Audrey Lorde, A Burst of Light and Other Essays. 1988 (New York: Ixia, 2017), 130. 37 Dyas, ‘An Interview’, 114–115. 38 Crawley, ‘Making History’ The Irish Times, 20 Dec 2013. https://www.irishtimes. com/culture/stage/making-history-1.1634573 39 Augusto Boal, Theatre of the Oppressed. New Ed (London: Pluto Press, 2008). 40 Feagin, Susan, ‘Theatre and Everyday Life: Three Models’, in Aesthetics of Everyday Life: East and West, Ed. Yuedi, Liu, and Curtis L. Carter (Newcastle upon Tyne, U.K.: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2014), 102 (96–114). 41 Jacques Rancière, ‘The Emancipated Spectator.’ Artforum March 2007, 271–280. 42 Ibid 277. 43 Ibid 278. 44 Ibid 290. 45 Ibid 290. 46 Ibid 290. 47 Janelle Reinelt, ‘Resisting Rancière’, in Rancière and Performance, Ed. Collette Conroy and Nic Fryer (London: Rowman & Littlefield, 2021), 171–194. 48 Ibid p. 172 49 Ibid p. 173 50 Rancière, Emancipated Spectator, 290.

88  THEATREclub 5 1 But come on, they’re clearly having more fun. 52 O’Rourke, ‘THEATREclub’s Horrible History’ The Arts Review, 24 Nov 2016. https://www.theartsreview.com/single-post/2016/11/25/The-Ireland-Trilogy— HISTORY 53 McDonough, ‘HISTORY at Project Arts Centre’, Meg.ie, 21 Dec 2013. http://www. meg.ie/history-at-project-arts-centre/ 54 Nomoreworkhorse.com Blog, ‘History – Project Arts Centre – Review’, Nomoreworkhorse.com, posted 20 Dec 2013. https://nomoreworkhorse.com/2013/12/20/ history-project-arts-centre-review/. Accessed 3 Oct 2018. 55 Monica O’Connor, and Ruth Breslin, ‘Shifting the Burden of Criminality: An Analysis of the Irish Sex Trade in the Context of Prostitution Law Reform.’ The Sexual Exploitation Research Programme, UCD, 2020, 40. 56 Lori Watson, ‘In Defense of the Nordic Model’, in Debating Sex Work, Ed. Lori Watson and Jessica Flanigan (New York: Oxford University Press, 2020), 128–164. 57 See, for example, Niina Vuolajärvi, ‘Governing in the Name of Caring—The Nordic Model of Prostitution and Its Punitive Consequences for Migrants Who Sell Sex.’ Sexuality Research and Social Policy 16.2 (2019): 151–165; Wendy Lyon, ‘Client Criminalisation and Sex Workers’ Right to Health.’ Hibernian LJ 13 (2014): 58; Andrea Krüsi, Katrina Pacey, Lorna Bird, Chrissy Taylor, Jill Chettiar, Sarah Allan, Darcie Bennett, Julio S. Montaner, Thomas Kerr, and Kate Shannon. ‘Criminalisation of Clients: Reproducing Vulnerabilities for Violence and Poor Health among StreetBased Sex Workers in Canada—A Qualitative Study.’ BMJ Open 4.6 (2014): e005191; Sarah Kingston, and Terry Thomas. ‘No Model in Practice: A ‘Nordic Model’ to Respond to Prostitution?’ Crime, Law and Social Change 71.4 (2019): 423–439; Adina Landsberg, Kate Shannon, Andrea Krüsi, Kora DeBeck, M.J. Milloy, Ekaterina Nosova, Thomas Kerr, and Kanna Hayashi. ‘Criminalizing Sex Work Clients and Rushed Negotiations among Sex Workers Who Use Drugs in a Canadian Setting.’ Journal of Urban Health 94.4 (2017): 563–571. 58 Jessica Flanigan, ‘The Case for Decriminalization’, in Debating Sex Work, Ed. Lori Watson and Jessica Flanigan (New York: Oxford University Press, 2020), 169–240. 59 Amnesty International, Amnesty International Policy on State Obligations to Respect, Protect and Fulfil the Human Rights of Sex Workers, Amnesty.org, 2016. 60 Eilís Ward and Gillian Wylie, The Nature and Extent of Trafficking of Women into Ireland for the Purposes of Sexual Exploitation 2000-2006: A Report from Findings (Galway: Social Science Research Centre, National University of Ireland, 2007). 61 Eilís Ward, and Gillian Wylie, ‘‘Reflexivities of Discomfort’: Researching the Sex Trade and Sex Trafficking in Ireland.’ European Journal of Women’s Studies 21.3 (2014): 251–263. 62 THEATREclub, ‘A Message from the Game Makers, THEATREclub.com, 2015. 63 This is significant, because exited women’s groups tend to be affiliated with the Nordic Model, while current sex workers’ groups tend to campaign for decriminalization. 64 Grace Dyas, @gracedyas, twitter.com, 2015. https://twitter.com/gracedyas/status/ 633567886108442624 65 Teela Sanders, ‘‘It’s Just Acting’: Sex Workers’ Strategies for Capitalizing on Sexuality.’ Gender, Work & Organization 12.4 (2005): 319–342. 66 Stefan Tschoeke, Raoul Borbé, Tilman Steinert, and Dana Bichescu-Burian, ‘A Systematic Review of Dissociation in Female Sex Workers.’ Journal of Trauma & Dissociation 20.2 (2019): 242–257. 67 Maggie, Armstrong, ‘Review: The Game - Stories Leave Trauma in Their Wake’, Irish Independent, 10 Oct 2015. https://www.independent.ie/entertainment/theatrearts/review-the-game-stories-leave-trauma-in-their-wake-31598074.html 68 Courtney Byrne, ‘The Game Review’, TN2 Magazine, 15 Oct 2015. http://www. tn2magazine.ie/the-game-review/

THEATREclub 89 69 Cormac Fitzgerald, ‘The Game – Project Arts Centre – Review – DTF’, No More Workhorse, 09 Oct 2015. https://nomoreworkhorse.com/2015/10/09/the-gameproject-arts-centre-review-dtf/ 70 Helen Meany, ‘DTF Review the Game: A Complex Exploration of the Reality of Prostitution’, Irish Times, 08 Oct 2015. 71 Revolution for Art, ‘The Game Review’, RevoltionforArt.com, 18 Oct 2017. https:// revolutionforart.com/2017/10/18/the-game-review 72 Maebhdh, ‘The Game – THEATREclub.’ Draff, 16 Apr 2017. http://www.draff.net/ the-game.html 73 Steph Harmon, ‘The Game Review – True Stories of Sex Work Performed in a Mounting Torrent of Trauma’, The Guardian, 7 Sept 2016. https://www.theguardian. com/stage/2016/sep/07/the-game-review-true-stories-of-sex-work-performed-ina-mounting-torrent-of-trauma 74 Michaela Boland, ‘Festival Feels Its Way.’ The Australian, 06 Sept 2016, 14. 75 ArthursSeat, ‘The Game Southbank London Review.’ https://arthursseat.net/ the-game-southbank-centre-review/ 76 Hannah Hiett, ‘The Game: THEATREclub’, 16 Mar 2017. http://www.thereviewshub. com/the-game-contact-manchester/ 77 Jackson, Social Works, 15. 78 Fintan O’Toole, ‘When You’ve Killed Off Drama, Where Can You Go Next.’ Irish Times, 10 Oct 2015, 8. 79 Murphy, ‘“The State of Us” Challenging State-Led Narratives Through Performance During Ireland’s ‘Decade of Centenaries’, Journal of Contemporary Drama in English 6.1 (2018): 158. 80 2016 was THEATREclub’s most successful Arts Council funding year – it received €118,522. Meanwhile the Dublin Theatre Festival received €840,000.

Bibliography Adorno, Theodor W, “On Jazz,” Journal for Theoretical Studies in Media and Culture 12.1 (1989): 45. Adorno, Theodor W, “On Popular Music,” in Cultural Theory and Popular Culture: A Reader, Ed. John Storey (Athens, Georgia: U of Georgia P, 1998), 197–209. Adorno, Theodor W, “The Culture Industry Reconsidered,” in Critical Theory and Society, Ed. Stephen Eric Bronner and Douglas MacKay Kellener (New York: Routledge, 1989), 128–135. Amnesty International, “Amnesty International Policy on State Obligations to Respect, Protect and Fulfil the Human Rights of Sex Workers,” Amnesty.org, 26 Mar 2016. https://www.amnesty.org/download/Documents/POL3040622016ENGLISH. PDF Armstrong, Maggie, “Review: The Game – Stories Leave Trauma in Their Wake,” Irish Independent, 10 Oct 2015. https://www.independent.ie/entertainment/theatre-arts/ review-the-game-stories-leave-trauma-in-their-wake-31598074.html Arthur’s Seat, “The Game Southbank London Review,” Arthur’s Seat, https://arthursseat. net/the-game-southbank-centre-review/ Bishop, Claire, Artificial Hells: Participatory Art and the Politics of Spectatorship (London: Verso Books, 2012). Boal, Augusto, Theatre of the Oppressed, New Ed. (London: Pluto Press, 2008). Boal, Augusto, The Aesthetics of the Oppressed. Trans. Adrian Jackson (London; New York: Routledge, 2006).

90  THEATREclub Boland, Michaela, “Festival Feels Its Way.” The Australian, 06 Sept 2016. Born, Georgina, Eric Lewis and Will Straw, Ed. Improvisation and Social Aesthetics (Durham: Duke UP, 2017). Bourdieu, Pierre, Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste. Trans. Richard Nice (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1986). Bourdieu, Pierre and Jean Claude Passeron, Les Héritiers: Les Étudiants Et La Culture. Le Sens Commun (Paris: Editions de Minuit, 1964). Butler, Eoin, “I See These People in the World With Us Who Are Barely Viewed as Human Beings. And I Think It’s Weird That We’re Okay with That,” The Irish Times, 13 Nov 2010. https://www.irishtimes.com/culture/stage/theatre/i-see-these-peoplein-the-world-with-us-who-are-barely-viewed-as-human-beings-and-i-think-it-sweird-that-we-re-okay-with-that-1.676724. Accessed 01 June 2019. Byrne, Courtney, “The Game Review,” TN2 Magazine, 15 Oct 2015. http://www. tn2magazine.ie/the-game-review/ Conway, Thomas, Ed. The Oberon Anthology of Contemporary Irish Plays: ‘This Is Just This. This Is Not Real. It’s Just Money’ (London: Oberon Books, 2012). Crawley, Peter, “Making History.” The Irish Times, 20 Dec 2013, https://www.irishtimes. com/culture/stage/making-history-1.1634573 Donnelly, Paul B, Post-Dramatic Theatre in Ireland (2009-2014), Doctoral Dissertation, Dublin: Trinity College, 2015. Dyas, Grace, @gracedyas, twitter.com, 2015. https://twitter.com/gracedyas/status/ 633567886108442624 Dyas, Grace and Emer O’Toole, “An Interview with Grace Dyas,” in The Winter Pages, Ed. Kevin Barry and Olivia Smith (Dublin: Curlew Editions, 2015), 111–116. Feagin, Susan, “Theatre and Everyday Life: Three Models,” in Aesthetics of Everyday Life: East and West, Ed. Liu Yuedi and Curtis L. Carter (Newcastle upon Tyne, UK: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2014), 96–114. Fitzgerald, Cormac, “The Game – Project Arts Centre – Review – DTF,” No More Workhorse, 09 Oct 2015. https://nomoreworkhorse.com/2015/10/09/the-gameproject-arts-centre-review-dtf/ Flanigan, Jessica, “The Case for Decriminalization,” in Debating Sex Work, Ed. Lori Watson and Jessica Flanigan (New York: Oxford UP, 2020), 169–240. Foucault, Michel, “Technologies of the Self: Lectures at University of Vermont in October 1982,” in Technologies of the Self, Ed. Luther H Martin, Huck Gutman and Patrick H Hutton (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1988), 16–49. Gramsci, Antonio, Prison Notebooks. Ed. Joseph A Buttigieg. Trans. Antonio Callari (New York: Columbia UP, 1992). Harmon, Steph, “The Game Review – True Stories of Sex Work Performed in a Mounting Torrent of Trauma,” The Guardian, 7 Sept 2016. https://www.theguardian. com/stage/2016/sep/07/the-game-review-true-stories-of-sex-work-performed-in-amounting-torrent-of-trauma Haughton, Miriam, “Flirting with the Postmodern: Moments of Change in Contemporary Irish Theatre, Performance and Culture,” Irish Studies Review 22.3 (2014): 374. Hiett, Hannah, “The Game: THEATREclub,” The Reviews Hub, 16 Mar 2017. http:// www.thereviewshub.com/the- game-contact-manchester/ Horkheimer, Max, “The State of Contemporary Social Philosophy and the Tasks of an Institute for Social Research,” in Critical Theory and Society, Ed. Stephen Eric Bronner and Douglas MacKay Kellener (New York: Routledge, 1989), 25–36.

THEATREclub 91 Horkheimer, Max and Theodor W. Adorno, “The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception,” in Dialectic of Enlightenment: Philosophical Fragments, Ed. Gunzelin Schmid Noerr (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2020), 94–136. Jackson, Shannon, Social Work: Performing Art, Supporting Publics (New York; London: Routledge, 2011). Keogh, Rachel, Dying to Survive (Dublin: Gill Books, 2009). Kingston, Sarah and Terry Thomas, “No Model in Practice: A ‘Nordic Model’ to Respond to Prostitution?,” Crime, Law and Social Change 71.4 (2019): 423. Krüsi, Andrea et al., “Criminalization of Clients: Reproducing Vulnerabilities for Violence and Poor Health Among Street-Based Sex Workers in Canada—A Qualitative Study,” BMJ Open 4.6 (2014), 1–10. Landsberg, Adina et al., “Criminalizing Sex Work Clients and Rushed Negotiations Among Sex Workers Who Use Drugs in a Canadian Setting.” Journal of Urban Health 94.4 (2017), 563–571. Lonergan, Patrick, Ed. Contemporary Irish Plays (London: Bloomsbury, 2015). Lorde, Audrey, A Burst of Light and Other Essays (New York: Ixia, 2017). Lyon, Wendy, “Client Criminalization and Sex Workers’ Right to Health,” Hibernian Law Journal 13 (2014), 58–97. Mac, Juno and Molly Easo Smith, Revolting Prostitutes: The Fight for Sex Workers Rights (London: Verso, 2019). Maebhdh, “The Game – THEATREclub,” Draff, 16 Apr 2017. http://www.draff.net/ the-game.html Marx, Karl, “Preface to a Critique of Critical Economy,” in Karl Marx: A Reader, Ed. Jon Elster (Cambridge & New York: U of Cambridge P, 1986), 187–188. McDonough, “HISTORY at Project Arts Centre,” Meg.ie, Dec 21 2013. http://www. meg.ie/history-at-project-arts-centre/. Meany, Helen, “DTF Review the Game: A Complex Exploration of the Reality of Prostitution,” Irish Times, 08 Oct 2015. Murphy, Ciara, “Reflecting Irishness, Mirroring Histories: Performing Commemoration in Irish Theater in 2015,” New Hibernia Review 20.3 (2016), 112–124. Murphy, Ciara, “‘The State of Us’ Challenging State-Led Narratives Through Performance During Ireland’s ‘Decade of Centenaries’,” Journal of Contemporary Drama in English 6.1 (2018), 146–159. Nomoreworkhorse.com Blog, “History – Project Arts Centre – Review.” Nomoreworkhorse. com, posted 20 Dec 2013. https://nomoreworkhorse.com/2013/12/20/history-projectarts-centre-review/. Accessed 3 Oct 2018. O’Connor, Monica and Ruth Breslin, “Shifting the Burden of Criminality: An Analysis of the Irish Sex Trade in the Context of Prostitution Law Reform,” The Sexual Exploitation Research Programme, UCD, 2020, 40. O’Gorman, Siobhán and Charlotte McIvor, Ed., Devised Performance in Irish Theatre: Histories and Contemporary Practice (Dublin: Carysford, 2015). O’Rourke, “THEATREclub’s Horrible History,” The Arts Review, 24 Nov 2016. https:// www.theartsreview.com/single-post/2016/11/25/The-Ireland-Trilogy—HISTORY O’Toole, Emer, “Oscar Wilde: The Critic as Performance Artist,” Mirror Lamp Press 6 (2022): 53–65. O’Toole, Fintan, “Culture Shock: When You’ve Killed Off Drama, Where Can You Go Next,” Irish Times, 9 Oct 2015. https://www.irishtimes.com/culture/stage/ culture-shock-when-you-ve-killed-off-drama-where-can-you-go-next-1.2385442

92  THEATREclub Rancière, Jacques, “The Emancipated Spectator,” Artforum, March 2007, 271–280. Rancière, Jacques, “The Thinking of Dissensus: Politics and Aesthetics,” in Reading Rancière: Critical Dissensus, Ed. Paul Bowman and Richard Stamp (London; NY: Continuum, 2011), 1–17. Reinelt, Janelle, “Resisting Rancière,” in Rancière and Performance, Ed. Collette Conroy and Nic Fryer (London: Rowman & Littlefield, 2021), 171–194. Revolution for Art, “The Game Review.” RevoltionforArt.com, 18 Oct 2017. https:// revolutionforart.com/2017/10/18/the-game-review Sanders, Teela, “‘It’s Just Acting’: Sex Workers’ Strategies for Capitalizing on Sexuality,” Gender, Work & Organization 12.4 (2005): 319. Taylor, Roger, Art, an Enemy of the People. Philosophy Now (Hassocks: Harvester Press, 1978). THEATREclub, “A Message from the Game Makers,” THEATREclub.com, 2015. THEATREclub, “Home Page,” www.theatreclub.ie. Accessed 01 Mar 2019. THEATREclub, “THEATREclub Stole Your Clock Radio What the FUCK You Gonna Do About It.” www.theatreclub.ie. Accessed 01 Mar 2019. Tschoeke, Stefan, Raoul Borbé, Tilman Steinert and Dana Bichescu-Burian, “A Systematic Review of Dissociation in Female Sex Workers,” Journal of Trauma & Dissociation 20.2 (2019): 242. Vuolajärvi, Niina, “Governing in the Name of Caring—The Nordic Model of Prostitution and Its Punitive Consequences for Migrants Who Sell Sex,” Sexuality Research and Social Policy 16.2 (2019): 151. Walsh, Ian, Experimental Irish Theatre: After WB Yeats (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012). Ward, Eilís and Gillian Wylie, “Reflexivities of Discomfort’: Researching the Sex Trade and Sex Trafficking in Ireland,” European Journal of Women’s Studies 21.3 (2014): 251. Ward, Eilís and Gillian Wylie, “The Nature and Extent of Trafficking of Women into Ireland for the Purposes of Sexual Exploitation 2000-2006: A Report from findings” (Social Science Research Centre, National University of Ireland, 2007). Watson, Lori, “In Defense of the Nordic Model,” in Debating Sex Work, Ed. Lori Watson and Jessica Flanigan (New York: Oxford UP, 2020), 128–164.

3

The International Dublin Gay Theatre Festival Confession and Community

Because It’s Gay Theatre Brian Merriman, founder and artistic director of the International Dublin Gay Theatre Festival (IDGTF), tells a story from the inaugural year in 2004. After a show, an older man asked to speak to him. He began, ‘I’m gay.’ I replied ‘Many of us are.’ ‘No’ he said, ‘You don’t understand, I have never told anyone that before.’ I replied, ‘well you’ve come to the right place’ and talked him through the rest of the programme, many of the plays, he later attended.1 2004 is a long time ago and it’s not a long time ago. Britney was singing Toxic; Mel Gibson was hanging out on a crucifix. It was just 11 years after homosexuality was decriminalised. It was still six years before civil partnerships were recognised, and 11 before Ireland voted to change its constitution to recognise same sex marriage. Not that long ago; forever. At the 2019 festival, I sat in The Teacher’s Club bar, the unofficial festival watering hole, having caught a good play from the USA about race, class, reproduction, and gay parents. I was with my friend Brian (who is IDGTF royalty, having won the ‘Oscar’2 for best actor in 2015). Brian knows everyone, and soon two more theatregoers had joined our table. I ended up chatting to a softly spoken man in his 40s, bespectacled, articulate, and a little shy. We told each other what we’d been to see; he offered his festival recommendations, and then, in the tradition of all good Irish people (see Chapter 1), we moved on to ‘Where are you from?’ I explained Montreal by way of Galway. He was a Roscommon farmer who’d made the decision to move to the smoke only a year before. ‘If I can do it, anyone can do it,’ he said. Moving to Dublin from ‘the country’ (as Dubs will insist on calling anywhere further West than Naas and further South than Arklow) is hard. I found it hard in 2006, and I was a motor-mouthed theatre student whose favourite hobbies included dancing on tables and drinking the free tequila that people give you when you dance on tables. It’s probably harder when DOI: 10.4324/9781003205708-4

94  The International Dublin Gay Theatre Festival you are a quiet gay man, approaching middle age, who comes from the only county in Ireland to vote no to marriage equality. Brian and I went back to his and I told his husband, Oliver, about my conversation. And Oliver, a Kerry farmer born himself, told me that when the festival first started he saw posters and went with a friend. They saw something woeful, and the friend was in a rush to get out of there. Oliver acted as though he too thought it was all crap, but actually, he had wanted very badly to stay. There was something happening that he needed. In his memoir and account of the first ten years of the festival, Merriman often repeats the mantra, ‘don’t attend because it’s gay theatre, attend because it’s good theatre.’3 Some of the IDGTF really is good theatre. Some of it, alas, is not. But the festival has been hosting a two-week programme since 2004, through boom times, recession, and recovery, through challenging disputes about the identity of the festivala and in spite of controversy over its current politics. And the fact is: many people go because it’s gay theatre. The festival does something, offers something, alongside aesthetic experience – community and politics. It’s a place where gay people new to the city can go that isn’t a nightclub or techno-thumping bar (and I say that with love in my heart for all things that go thump in the night). It’s not weird to go to a play on your own. And there are ready made conversation topics if you feel like chatting with someone beside you in the stalls. You can find the cast of a production you liked at a festival event, or drinking in the Teacher’s club, and talk with them about their play. You can meet LGBTQ artists from all over the world. There’s family-friendly stuff in the programme you could invite your mad Catholic aunty to see with you. And there’s also stuff that’s all genitals and orgies (to which it might also be fun to invite your mad Catholic aunty). Or you can just go and sit in the dark on your own, and be immersed in LGBTQ stories, and maybe have the feeling that you’re a part of a community. Petra Kuppers says ‘storytelling, sharing language, and myth-making are the offerings that allow the horizon of community to appear.’4 She says, ‘we lean in, move our heads into the circle, hovering in the space between the I and the

a In 2010, the festival acrimoniously split in two. One faction, helmed by John Pickering, was sponsored by Absolut Vodka, and another, helmed by Merriman, refused this branding on point of principle. Merriman addresses the conflict extensively from his perspective in his book Wilde Stages. There are no first-hand accounts of the story from the other side of the dispute, but there are some very entertaining reviews in national papers from 2010 when both groups ran concurrent and competing programmes. Emer O’Kelly of the Irish Independent couldn’t understand why the gay theatre festival was relentlessly bombarding her with requests. Then she turned up to events she thought she’d booked only to be told she was not on the list. The Irish Times’s Peter Crawley opined, ‘Not since the acrimonious split between The People’s Front of Judea and The Judean People’s Front in Monty Python’s The Life of Brian has there been a separation as confusing.’ Emer O’Kelly, “Absolut Gay Theatre Festival,” Irish Independent, May 16 2010. https://www. independent.ie/incoming/absolut-gay-theatre-festival-26655603.html; Peter Crawley, “Absolut Gay Theatre Festival Dublin: The Time Keepers,” Irish Times, May 06 2010. https://www. irishtimes.com/culture/stage/absolut-gay-theatre-festival-dublin-the-time-keepers-1.661521

The International Dublin Gay Theatre Festival 95 communal story.’5 For LGBTQ audience members and performers, and even for the significant portion of the audience that is straight, the IDGTF invites us into a circle, invites us into ‘a community of I’s that are others.’6 And this quality of the festival – the affect invoked by political and social intent – brings us back to many of the questions at the heart of this book about how to value the aesthetic when art is also performing social work. In a 2007 piece for (the now tragically defunct) Irish Theatre Magazine, written when the IDGTF was in still in its infancy, Fintan Walsh wrote, ‘… should we judge the festival on performance or politics? The obvious answer is to address both, but by virtue of its “gay” designation, the political dimension seems more important than the theatrical one, and any straightforward critique of individual performances would not do justice to the cultural importance and potential of the festival.’7 In this chapter, I’m going to close-read the 2019 festival and try to give due weight to both performance and politics.b First, in the spirit of my overarching argument that activist commitments often necessitate particular aesthetic forms, I’ll focus on solo performance, which is predominant at the festival. I’ll play with solo performance’s aesthetic and political affect and efficacy, as well as its limitations. Second, I’ll try to get to grips with the aesthetic quality of a festival that bills itself as professional but has some less than professional programming, and to puzzle out whether the cultural importance that Walsh flags and the community function that I describe above might be considered part of our aesthetic experiences as festivalgoers. Before I do so, however, I need to address some controversial elements of undertaking this scholarship.

Homonationalism? In the Teacher’s Club, a portrait of the revolutionary Maude Gonne presides over the bar, imbuing the space with nationalist history. Another venue, The Ireland Institute, is home to a Republican organisation located in the former home of the 1916 martyrs Patrick and Willie Pearse. There’s even a social event at Pantibar, which is, of course, the official palace of the Queen of Ireland. The IDGTF radiates national history even as it proclaims an international gay present. The IDGTF has championed (potentially) lesbian and gay Irish historical figures such as Oscar Wilde, Eva Goore Booth, Roger Casement, Padraig Pearse, Kathleen Lynn, Elizabeth O’Farrell, Hilton Edwards, and Michaél MacLiammóir, both in its theatrical programme and in academic panels organised to complement the plays. This reclamation of Ireland’s gay past and insistence on gay contributions to national identity is something

b Most of the productions I saw live. The ones I accessed through video are indicated in-text. In one case, I was able to access a script but no video. The sole production missing analysis is Cello by Lesley-Ann Reilly, as I couldn’t contact the artists.

96  The International Dublin Gay Theatre Festival that Merriman is proud of.8 And I think it’d be hard to deny that the festival queers national symbols and spaces. However, this queering might not be unambiguously progressive. The festival is strangely under-represented in Irish theatre scholarship and Irish queer scholarship. When I decided to write about the IDGTF, I was surprised by how little material I could find, given the festival’s endurance, social and national import, and artistic scope. (Especially because if theatre scholars and queer theorists don’t write about it, they certainly talk about it.) The IDGTF gets scant mention and very little analysis in Walsh’s Queer Performance in Contemporary Ireland,c and a slightly longer treatment in his introduction to his anthology of Queer plays, Queer Notions,9 which contains a brief history of LGBTQ theatre in Ireland (two of the anthology’s eight contributions premiered at the festival). In David Creggan’s 2009 anthology, Deviant Acts, Merriman contributes a chapter on the festival, but no other contributors mention the event.10 And in J. Paul Halferty’s history of LGBTQ theatre in the Palgrave Handbook of Contemporary Irish Theatre and Performance, the inauguration of the festival in 2004 is duly noted, but there’s little analysis of its form or content.11 Cormac O’Brien dedicates a noteworthy paragraph to the festival’s role in the run up to the Marriage Equality referendum in an article on queer testimony on the Irish stage.12 But, overall, while there is much excellent Irish Queer performance scholarship, the IDGTF, hosting hundreds of plays from all over the world for almost two decades, is generally a footnote. In the course of my research trip in 2019, I learned that not all LGBTQ people feel comfortable with the kind of community and politics represented by the IDGTF. As I solicited friends to join me to see plays, two told me that they didn’t attend the festival due to Merriman’s role in Direct Provision – the system of containing asylum seekers that I discussed in the Introduction and Chapter 1. Merriman is a senior civil servant at the Department of Justice and Foreign Affairs, and Direct Provision is under his remit. I hadn’t known about this, and, while I still thought the festival worthy of study, I resolved to ask

c In Walsh’s monograph, the festival is briefly credited, alongside Irish ferries, with increasing the visibility of Oscar Wilde at the turn of 21st century (5) and then listed alongside a number of non-LGBTQ specific festivals, the GAZE LBGT film festival, the aLAF lesbian arts festival, and the Belfast Outburst Queer Arts festival as one example of an Irish festival that enables audiences to encounter international queer work. The IDGTF is the only one of these events dedicated exclusively to LGBTQ performance, and it is also the only one that receives a critical comment, with Walsh remarking that the IDGTF was significant in terms of LGBTQ cultural provision in Ireland, ‘though in a rather limiting way the festival originally aimed to foremost “celebrate gay men’s contribution to the arts,” programming “works by a gay author of a relevant theme, or have a gay theme, character or plot”’ (6). Fintan Walsh, Queer Performance in Contemporary Ireland: Dissent and Disorientation (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016).

The International Dublin Gay Theatre Festival 97 Merriman about his links with Direct Provision in the interview he kindly granted me. I anticipated, perhaps, some rhetorical wrangling. Civil servants, I know, can find themselves in positions where their personal politics and the politics of their departments are not complementary. There was no wrangling – Merriman is a straight shooter. There was, instead, admiration for and defence of the system of Direct Provision, which Merriman called ‘a very good service’ through which, ‘every single person who comes to Ireland and says the word “asylum” automatically gets food, shelter, medical services, access to education, and free legal aid.’ He singled out Mosney in particular as a ‘superb facility,’ calling it ‘is the best reception centre for Asylum Seekers in Europe if not the world.’ According to Merriman, critique of Direct Provision was coming from middle class Irish people exploiting the issue for attention.d And, as an Irish person, Merriman was proud of the system. Okay. Deep breath. In 2015, The McMahon report into Direct Provision was scathing of the material conditions – often cramped, cluttered, and unfit for purpose – in which Asylum seekers are forced to live. It was particularly critical of the fact that many people have spent years in a system originally designed to accommodate them for only six months. Asylum seekers described Direct Provision as prison-like, and the report offered an extremely sobering portrait of its effects on mental health and child welfare.13 While journalists have of course been central to exposing the abuses happening within the system, as that is their job, often – as in the Irish Times’ Lives in Limbo series – they have provided platforms for asylum seekers to tell their own stories, which can be harrowing.14 Further, asylum seekers run a number of advocacy groups, such as the Movement of Asylum Seekers in Ireland (MASI) and the Abolish Direct Provision Campaign, dedicated to ending the system, even as some of those who profit from Direct Provision try to intimidate them into silence.e Or, Vukašin Nedeljković’s Asylum Archive, which visually documents conditions in Direct Provision, is informed by Nedeljković’s own experiences as he awaited processing of his asylum application.15 As the European Ombudsman Emily O’Reilly pointed out in 2015, Direct Provision has been criticised internationally by two Council of Europe Human Rights Commissioners; the UN Committee on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination; the UN Independent Expert on the Question of Human Rights and Extreme Poverty; the Europe Commission against Racism and Intolerance; the Council of Europe Group of Experts on Action Against Trafficking in Human Rights; and the UN Human Rights Committee.16 The Irish government has since implemented some improvements, and it unconvincingly promises to end the system by 2024,17 but,

d I decided not to bring up the fact that I’d published a piece critical of direct provision in The Guardian just two days before our interview. Awkward. e At Mosney, there is actually video evidence of its millionaire director trying to intimidate peacefully protesting asylum seekers into silence, saying ‘this will be held against you.’

98  The International Dublin Gay Theatre Festival it’s awful that Direct Provision continues in spite of such clear evidence of human rights failures. The position that Direct Provision is something for Irish people to be proud of is a strange one to uphold in light of the available evidence. In November 2019, the Irish Times reported, based on e-mails obtained by FOI, that Merriman had objected to increases in Asylum Seekers’ monetary allowance and that had suggested that poor uptake of the right to work recently granted to Asylum Seekers might be a sign that they were illegally working.18 In 2021, some Irish theatremakers, artists, and activists called out Dublin Pride on twitter for having Merriman on its board given his responsibility for and publicly professed views on Direct Provision. Merriman says the e-mails reported on by the Irish Times were taken out of context – that he supported the changes, but in order to get them through he had to pre-empt any possible objections.19 On social media, the activist group MASI declared itself unconvinced by this explanation.f Things got heated and Merriman left the social media platform. In light of the links between the Festival’s artistic director and Direct Provision, the IDGTF might be read as a symbol of ‘homonationalism.’ Homonationalism is a term coined by Jasbir Kaur, which refers to an association between nationalism and LGBTQ rights. Nation states can gesture to gay inclusion as proof of equality in order to ‘pinkwash’ their other human rights abuses.20,g As Ed Madden’s instructive overview of queer theory in Ireland tells us, the Irish queer project, academically speaking, ‘extends beyond the very sexuality that seems to have grounded it,’ and towards ‘broader antinormative imperatives.’21 That is to say, Irish queer theory tends to care deeply about race, migration, class, gender – it has in its sights all of the oppressively normative strictures and structures of Irish society. It’s in this vein that Fintan Walsh rejects the label of ‘gay plays’ for the theatre he anthologises in Queer Notions.22 For Walsh, gay is ‘an elected, subjective position, and not a genre.’23 Gay and lesbian politics can be very divergent (for example, some people campaign for gay marriage, while others reject the state regulation

f ‘You’re lying through your dentures’ they said. @masiasylum. Tweet. Twitter.com 07 Jun 2021. g In 2011, Anne Mulhall wrote about the picket of the 2005 Dublin Gay and Lesbian film festival by African mothers and children. They were protesting the presence of the anti-immigrant minister for justice, equality, and law reform, Michael McDowell. Mulhall critiques the Irish gay community for attending films about family values while disavowing the experiences of the nation’s other second-class families – migrant families. Mulhall talks about the 2005 protest and the response to it as a homonationalist moment when Irish queer identity allies with an exclusionary and normative politics of nation. In another relevant essay, Mulhall argues that homonormalised subjects produced by the regulatory function of civil partnerships and marriage serve to mask Ireland’s other ethnic, gendered and racial exclusions. Anne Mulhall, “Queer in Ireland: “Deviant” filiation and the (un) holy family,” in Queer in Europe: Contemporary Case Studies, Eds. Lisa Downing and Robert Gillet (Farnham: Ashgate, 2011), 99–112; “What’s Eating Victor Cusack? Come What May, Queer Embodiment, and the Regulation of HeteroMasculinity,” Éire-Ireland 48.1 (2013), 291–293.

The International Dublin Gay Theatre Festival 99 of personal relationships altogether), and so Walsh chooses ‘Queer’ as a term that accounts for ‘the necessity for minorities to engage in political networks that target the production of violence and inequality on systemic rather than just subjective domains.’24 Madden and Walsh’s positions draw on scholar Lisa Duggan’s critique of ‘homonormativity’ – a kind of gay politics that strengthens heterosexual values and institutions by promising that gay lives and relationships are just like straight lives and relationships. This gains certain limited rights for certain limited categories of gay people. According to Duggan, the effect of homonormativity is to domesticate and de-radicalise the queer community.25 Discomfort with homonationalism and homonormativity is a distinctive feature of Irish queer scholarship, especially apparent in the academic discourse around the marriage equality referendum of 2015.h It’s easy to extend arguments about homonationalism and homonormativity to the IDGTF, where LGBTQ activism is performed in a structure presided over by a proponent of Direct Provision. And yet, importantly, Merriman’s role in Direct Provision is likely illegible to many if not most of the IDGTF’s performers, audiences, and volunteers. And the festival, as I hope this chapter shows, is a very special thing. I’m not sure that the correct scholarly answer to this moral situation is to turn away from it. The IDGTF provides a platform for artists from all over the world, who come to air LGBTQ topics and share political concerns

h For example, Mulhall wrote a post-referendum blog equating gay marriage with a conservative drive towards respectability and with neoliberal pinkwashing, noting the commercial and political opportunism of state agencies and elected officials in the wake of the result (2015). Walsh expresses concerns that neo-liberal violations are embedded in the apparent benefits of gay marriage; he notes that those without access to wealth are not privileged by this kind of legitimation (2015b: 8–9). James Cussen (2015) rejects the idea of ‘radical reform’ as a ‘contradiction in terms’ and regrets his previous enthusiasm for and involvement with the marriage equality campaign, believing, in hindsight, that gay marriage ‘was, and will continue to be used to set the limits of acceptable and unacceptable minority expression and civic participation in a dangerous way.’ Fiona Neary stresses the lived nature of LGBTQ politics and the pragmatism that defined the marriage equality campaign, a pragmatism that meant, in the polarised environment of pre-referendum debates, many LGBTQ people sceptical of marriage could not really voice their concerns (2016). Eithne Luibhéid writes about how same-sex marriage was used to pinkwash state migration controls, while Ronit Lentin critiques the white supremacy visible in the absence of migrants from the referendum campaign. Mulhall (2015), “The Republic of Love,” Bully Bloggers. https://bullybloggers.wordpress.com/2015/06/20/ the-republic-of-love/; Walsh, Queer Performance, 8–9; James Cussen, “At the End of the Rainbow: ‘Yes Equality’ Come Again No More,” Oireachtas Retort, 2016. https://oireachtasretort. ie/2016/05/24/at-the-end-of-the-rainbow-yes-equality-come-again-no-more; Fiona Neary, “Civil Partnership and Marriage: LGBT-Q Political Pragmatism and the Normalization Imperative,” Sexualities 19.7 (2016): 757–779; Eithne Luibhéid, “Same Sex Marriage and the Pink Washing of State Migration Controls,” International Feminist Journal of Politics 20.3 (2018): 405–424; Ronit Lentin, “Where Are the Migrants? White Supremacy and the 2015 Marriage Referendum,” RonitLentin.net, 12 May 2015. https://ronitlentin.net/2015/05/12/ where-are-the-migrants-white-supremacy-and-the-2015-marriage-referendum/

100  The International Dublin Gay Theatre Festival through a wide variety of performance styles and forms. It was shouting GAY from the rooftops at a time when many were still whispering it in phone booths. It is sustained by passionate volunteers. It creates cultural space to investigate and celebrate gay and queer identities. It forges community. It fosters new writing. I think we need complexity in our thinking here; we should be able to critique homonationalism without disregarding the work – whether gay or queer, liberal or radical – that the festival also performs. In the sections that follow, I analyse the way that individual performances aesthetically interact with homonormativity and homonationalism, creating a portrait of a festival which, like the LGBTQ community, encompasses much political diversity.

Confessional Aesthetics: Queer Solo Performance A clear aesthetic trend in the festival is towards solo performance and solo autobiographical performance in particular. Merriman notes as much in Wilde Stages, remarking that of the approximately 100 submissions he receives annually, a significant number are autobiographical, with a high preponderance of ‘coming out’ stories from the US. He remarks that it is fraught to turn down plays of this sort, as people don’t like to be told that their personal experiences do not make good theatre.26 Nonetheless, at the 2019 festival, 9 out of the 19 plays programmed were solo performances and 8 of these were autobiographical or semi-autobiographical. There are pragmatic reasons for this – solo shows are cheaper and less complicated to produce, which partially explains their ubiquity at international Fringe festivals. The IDGTF is not a Fringe Festival, insofar as its programme is curated, and it understands itself to represent a professional endeavour. However, artists are not supported at professional rates. They have their venues paid and get 70% of the box office.i But the solo phenomenon at the festival is not just about economics. As documented by David Ramon and Holly Hughes, solo performance emerged in the ‘90s as a predominant mode of expression within the LGBTQ community.27 Here, I want to use the plays of the 2019 festival to explore what it is about the solo aesthetic that lends itself to the project of queer liberation. In particular, I want to explore the resonances of this form for the anxieties outlined above around homonormalisation and homonationalism. Solo Performance is paradoxical. It highlights the performer/audience relationship – the desire for communication, the desire to speak and to listen;

i One of the artists I spoke to in writing this chapter described the set up as ‘too good to be true.’ The IDGTF simply doesn’t have the funding of something like the Dublin Theatre Festival, but artists are offered terms which they can accept or refuse. I mean, I would happily have PAY ARTISTS tattooed across my forehead, but I also recognise that a lot of theatre gets made for love, not money, and that a lack of adequate support is not particular to the IDGTF.

The International Dublin Gay Theatre Festival 101 simultaneously, it foregrounds solitude and isolation, as a body alone on a stage speaks to a shadowy mass, seeking its approval. Autobiographical performance, Deirdre Heddon reminds us, has its roots in the second wave feminist movement, the artistic embodiment of the slogan, ‘the personal is political.’ Heddon shows that autobiographical performance has long foregrounded the constructed nature of identity as well as inserted marginalised voices into artistic spaces historically closed to them.28 For David Roman, Queer visibility has been a political necessity as, over the last 50 years, gay lives have emerged from shame and shadow: queer solo performers are engaging in activism and community building.29 Cormac O’Brien, in his analysis of the politics of queer testimonial on the Irish stage, locates the power of testimonial in its ‘potential to reverse the discourse of shame.’30 He links the form to the Yes Equality campaign, which fought for a yes vote in the 2015 Marriage Equality referendum. Testimonial gay theatre mirrors the dynamics of a referendum in which gay life narratives ‘marred by troubled pasts’ were performed to the public on doorsteps and social media.31 For O’Brien, the form, while powerful, echoes ‘as does the very phenomenon of “coming out as gay,” the confessional of Catholicism: the damaged, sinful subjects confess their faults to a benevolent authority and are thus permitted (re)entry into society.’32 Interestingly, the performance artist Holly Hughes identifies a similar dynamic in Solo Queer Performance in the US; she says the work is rooted ‘in a particularly American tradition of testifying, of witnessing history in the first person,’ citing African-American church testimonial and second-wave feminist consciousness raising as examples. 33 The impetus to confess, argues O’Brien, constitutes a state- and culturally sanctioned entry into normative society. The queer testimonial on stage is potentially a conservative statement of ‘we can be just like you.’34 However, O’Brien continues to see radical potential in the form – by telling queer stories in ways that challenge the ‘ just like you’ ethos of homonormativity, queer testimonial performance can ‘trouble the safe conclusion […] that awareness of queer issues actually equates with acceptance.’35 How do the aesthetics of the eight (semi)-autobiographical queer performances at the 2019 IDGTF speak to the tension O’Brien locates between dispelling shame and homophobia and participating in homonormativity? Merriman says that audiences for the festival are approximately 50% LGBTQ and 50% heterosexual. And, this, I think makes a significant difference when we are considering the aesthetics of solo autobiographical performance. It’s not the case that performers are speaking to an assumed straight majority and asking for acceptance. The solo body on stage – which I note above is paradoxically symbolic of the desire for communication and of isolation – resonates differently in the context of a gay festival. The queer performer is alone, but not alone. David Ramòn says that ‘Queer Solo performers trouble the comfort of community even as they invest in it.’36 And certainly, many of the solo performances at the 2019 festival, when read

102  The International Dublin Gay Theatre Festival alongside one another, seem to be doing something more complex than dispelling homophobia and far more radical than telling the straights that the gays are ‘ just like you.’

O Solo Homos US performer Woody Shticks’ Schlong Song is high energy, sexy, comedic, and confessional. In her essay from 1964 ‘Notes on “Camp,”’ Susan Sontag draws on Oscar Wilde’s aestheticism to define the sensibility of something which, a little like beauty, we tend to know when we see. Camp is about artifice, exaggeration, and extravagance; it’s a way of seeing the world in terms of style. Sontag distinguishes between pure camp, which is dead serious, and an intentional mode of camp (camping, she calls it), which is less emblematic of the aesthetic form.37 Schlong Song, with its dick fitness aerobics routine and treatises on ‘bro whispering’ is certainly of the intentional, knowing kind. The piece takes us through the performer’s escape from a fundamentalist Christian upbringing and onto a sustained programme of radical sexual experimentation stemming from a commitment to becoming ‘good at sex with people who are good to me.’ It’s playful, with sexy dance numbers, 80s sweatbands and FAME institute high kicks. It underscores Sontag’s observation that camp proves ‘one can be serious about the frivolous, frivolous about the serious.’38

Figure 3.1  In a crop top reading ‘Hard Core Swim Team’ and a pair of booty shorts, Woody Shticks regales his audience. He wears a wry, humorous expression Photo by permission of Peter Davies

The International Dublin Gay Theatre Festival 103 Shticks tells an anecdote about his experience seducing ‘straight men,’ advising us that the trick of the bro whisperer is never to move too quickly, as you might startle the bro and he will bolt. It’s explicit and funny, until at the end of the encounter the bro wipes down and unceremoniously leaves, telling Shticks he can finish himself off. The energy changes. The campy rampage stills. Queers of all colours led us to revolution and to liberation And we showed you what a complex life looked like We showed you what good sex looks like And you loved it You took our drugs, and you fucked your neighbours, and you blew your own minds And you participated with us in the experiment of radical sexuality And it was awesome and so hot and so hard And then when a disease called AIDS started to mysteriously kill us You left us there to die You told us we deserved it And when we asked you for help you said maybe But only if we look less scary to you If we started to wear khakis, and cut your hair, and dance behind you in music videos If we started to uphold family values And now we can’t tell the difference between what we need and what you want Because you’re still insisting that we be reasonable by being more like you And that is a colossal waste of time Why would I fight for equality when I come from a heritage of excellence?39 Shticks is not at the Dublin festival to reassure straight audiences that he is just like them; he roundly rejects the contract of homonormativity. The testimonial aesthetic is there in Schlong Song, but the dynamic is reversed. Shticks is not asking for absolution. He’s the priest and pastor. The Double Billj of Ty Autry’s A Southern Fairytale and Simon Murphy’s The Number makes an interesting comparison to Shticks’ shtick. Autry’s coming out ‘fairytale’ is based on his religious upbringing, with some fictional elements built in. His character is called Alex, not Ty, but the story follows his own life experiences closely. He begins by telling the audience three things about himself – that he’s from small town Southern USA, that he’s a Christian, and that he’s gay. In the version Autry has posted online – but not, I believe, in the version I saw at IDGTF – he assures the audience this won’t be another gay show with a man stripping on stage to make a cute but weirdly sexual point. And he goes on to perform a story that involves

j The festivals’ Double Bills pair 40–50 minutes pieces with 15–25 minute ones. They’re a lovely way to get some shorts into the festival, as well as to see how similar concerns play out in different national contexts.

104  The International Dublin Gay Theatre Festival getting kicked out of multiple Christian high schools, being sent to conversion therapy, and learning to stand up to his homophobic father. In the end, his relationship with God and his mother intact, Alex/Ty finds true love and marries his prince charming. It’s a show that makes you feel the aesthetic intimacy of the solo performer’s address. And at the festival, my audience was inclined to talk back to Ty, which is testament, I think, to his stage presence. Clean cut, smiley, and cute as several buttons, Ty is good company on a profound emotional journey. And yet, in many ways, although from a Southern US as opposed to a rural Irish context, A Southern Fairytale seems to perform the kind of homonormalising testimonial acceptance seeking that O’Brien critiques. It’s a story with goodies and baddies, appealing to an audience wary of those nude and rude gay shows.k It allows little complexity to its fairytale villains. And here there’s a shortcoming of the autobiographical solo style – the human tendency to see things only from our own perspective is exacerbated as we present our experiences to an audience, seeking validation and absolution. Simon Murphy’s The Number is a quiet, thoughtful short, in which Murphy performs the semi-autobiographical story of 18-year-old Phillip’s first broken heart: a holiday on the continent, a tent, a beautiful Dutch boy, a seduction of body and soul: then *poof* his love disappears forever into the swelter and haze of an early ‘90s summer. Philip’s broken heart is placed in the political context of Ireland’s decriminalisation of male homosexuality. Bereft, our narrator skims the headlines of a newspaper that reports the landmark change, made possible – just like his recent loss of virginity – by the influence of Europe. But he cannot see anything of relevance to him in the words on the page. His heart has been broken. That’s all that matters. The tightly written piece gives us a portrait of a young man before he jumps off into the unknown, unaware how vital gay politics and gay community will be to his life. All he knows of the identity he has yet to embrace is the allure of a beautiful rake putting the sexual in European Union and his obsession with the phone number of a gay and lesbian hotline listed at the back of Hot Press magazine. Teenage Phillip has memorised ‘the number’ but never called. A quarter of a century later, he can still recite it. Murphy’s piece is gently evocative of a time and place, and of the strange ability of the young to miss the forest for the trees. Murphy performed it himself and brought much sincerity to the role. He’s clearly not a professional performer, and – at the level of delivery and gesture – the aesthetic felt unpolished. I liked this – it gave the sense of a real story, told by a regular

k While I’m locating the play as homonormative and, potentially, homonationalist, I am also arguing with myself. Because is the only valid gay experience, the only true radical queerness, the naked, camp, fuck your rules kind? Some gay people want the Disney fairy tale. Who am I, with my mortgage and my partner and my kids, to say Disney isn’t radical enough? Wow, aesthetic criticism is hard. No wonder Wilde kept doing it in dialogue.

The International Dublin Gay Theatre Festival 105 person. And even though the festival programme does not specify that it’s semi-autobiographical, I knew it was. (Murphy confirmed this for me in an e-mail exchange.) Thalia Gonzalez Kane’s A Drunk Lesbian Love Affair40 describes an experience that many queer women can relate to: falling into a romantic relationship with a friend who can’t come to terms with her sexuality. Interspersed with good contemporary dance sequences that take over when the central character can no longer find the words for what she’s experiencing, the piece takes us on a journey from drunken hook ups and denial, to love, to disappointment, and a years’-long cycle of separation and reconnection. The play is heartfelt, witty, and engagingly performed. In an e-mail conversation with Gonzalez Kane, she told me that one of the greatest challenges of solo (semi)-autobiographical practice was coming face to face with words and feelings that were inherently hers, but within the context of the show were also independent. As I’ve discussed, solo performance is often used with LGBTQ activism as visibility tool or a tool for community formation. But it is also, of course, a tool for self-knowledge and self-actualisation, and one that comes with a host of vulnerabilities attached. Like Autry’s, the play suffered a little from the constraint of solo performance that I describe above – that we’re often getting one side of a story. We never learn much about our protagonist’s drunk lesbian lover other than that she’s adorable and her skin is soft and her laugh is gorgeous and being around her makes our narrator feel good. The drama between the two women, in many ways he centre of the piece, doesn’t comes into focus, and instead we’re left with the protagonist’s inner conflict, her journey from denying her feelings to embracing them. For me, this is less theatrical than the messy thing that might happen when two queer characters with conflicting life experiences and relationships with the closet try to communicate and defend their perspectives. But I also see the necessity of it, and that necessity is a clue to why solo performance has been so integral to queer artistic expression. There’s a whole world out there telling you it’s not okay to be gay or bi or trans; there’s an inner world of internalised phobia telling you that too. The solo form allows a counter-cultural narrative, where being out and proud is right. There’s no need to hear the voice of the characters we’re in conflict with: they’re loud enough already. Any queer woman can tell you exactly what they’ve said. Julie Gieseke’s Borderline Asshole41 is about love, grief, and mental health – trifles like that. In the aftermath of Gieseke’s mother’s death, her girlfriend suggests that she undergo therapy for Borderline Personality Disorder. Whether Gieseke has BPD or not remains ambiguous, but Gieseke ensures we can see her girlfriend’s point of view, even while there’s an implicit critique of wielding the language of mental health to sweetly bludgeon people. Gieseke plays the lovable curmudgeon to great effect, and Borderline Asshole is funny and deep. It also made me cry and I’m not a big crier. While the couple at its heart is gay, Borderline Asshole is about things that happen to

106  The International Dublin Gay Theatre Festival everyone – losing a parent, addressing mental health issues, trying to make a relationship work. Sure, you could say this feeds a normalising ‘just like you’ confessional aesthetic. But it’s equally the case that in the nuanced treatment of how personality disorder diagnoses can be used to profoundly help people or horribly pigeonhole them there’s an expansively queer push that lines up with what Ed Madden calls the ‘broader anti-normative imperatives’ of the Irish queer project. Part stand up, part cabaret, John Best’s The Little Pink Book of Masculinity is a campy personal experiment in gender expectations. Twenty-three-year-old Best is a charismatic Mancunian with an irresistible accent. He signs up for gay dating apps and tries to navigate their strict codes of gender, as potential suitors declare themselves masc4masc, and display – as Best’s critique soon implies – a discomfort with femininity in other men that hides a fear of femininity in themselves. Comic highlights include his coming out to his mother (she is less than surprised) and a silly dance in stockings and suspenders to Salt n Peppa’s What a Man. Best’s piece is deceptively light, keeping an audience laughing with the rules of masculinity to be gleaned from his little pink book, even while he pillories some toxic elements of gay culture. The Little Pink Book of Masculinity does feel somewhat testimonial, as Best performs his failure to live up to the masculinity standards of the Grindr scene to an audience that validates his transgressions. But the campy character of the piece undermines this dynamic – we know that Best is not really conflicted in his rejection of the internalised homophobia so suffocating his potential dates. In an interview about the piece for the Manchester Fringe, Best says that he wrote this play on encountering conversations at University about modern masculinity. The opening image for a presentation he attended was of a man holding a spanner in one hand and a baby’s bottle in the other, looking mightily confused. The conversations we have around masculinity are often heteronormative. Best saw a set of gendered problems that affects gay men specifically, and so he made his piece.42 There’s plenty in the play that straight people can relate to, but it’s not for them. On a double bill with Best was Gavin Roach’s The Measure of A Man, an intimate play about Roach’s sexual anxieties – most specifically the size of his penis – and how they interact with some of the (you guessed it) more toxic elements of gay culture. Australian Roach is dressed in only a denim jacket and briefs, fooling the audience into thinking we’re getting comedy, but though Roach is funny in that dry in-yer-face way I (stereotypically?) associate with Aussies, the subject matter isn’t played for laughs. There are crushing stories of hook ups in clubs in which men sigh and desert him having dropped their hands to find out what’s in his pants. There are tortured sexual encounters with loving partners in which he just can’t get out of his own head, experiences that leave him feeling broken. In The Measure of a Man, Roach is sometimes an asshole, taking his insecurities out on other queer men rather than dealing with them, and – acting from deep shame – reacting unkindly to those who treat his sexual anxieties with care. Like

The International Dublin Gay Theatre Festival 107 Gieseke’s piece, this was, for me, a very accomplished example of the solo autobiographical aesthetic. I mean this in terms of the performance skill and evident experience of the artist, but also, in how it disrupted the dynamic of telling one side of the story. Watching Best and Roach in tandem gave me some insight into the role of the festival. Walsh, in his 2007 Irish Theatre Magazine piece, questions the siloing effect of a gay theatre festival, echoing a contribution from the late, great Alan Sinfield at the festival’s academic panel – Sinfield said that any political movement that doesn’t engage its opposition will fail. Walsh notes that homophobic policy makers are unlikely to show up to gay theatre. That resistance to siloing is shared, I think, by many gay artists. For example, at the same time as the IDGTF was happening in the city centre, another accomplished work of queer theatre was playing at the Clontarf Playhouse: The Morning After the Life Before, by Ann Blake. The play is also autobiographical, though a two hander. When I asked Ann (who is a friend) if she had considered submitting the piece (which had already won numerous international awards) to the IDGTF programme, she expressed support of the festival as an endeavour, but said she didn’t want her work to be pigeonholed for gay audiences. She wanted to speak to people who – like her parents in the play – needed to be convinced. This makes me think about the self-selecting bias of the work that does travel specifically to take part in a gay theatre festival. It’s reasonable to think that artists who want to be part of the IDGTF have something particular to say to their community. Maybe Best and Roach chose the IDGTF as the venue to artistically engage with unhealthy elements of gay and bisexual male culture because it was a productive place to do that work. The homonormalising dynamic that O’Brien sees in testimonial queer performance changes in this context. The mode of address becomes less confessional, more conspiratorial, less about acceptance, and admission to normativity, more about issues that affect queer lives. Velvet by Tom Ratcliffe is a semi-autobiographical solo piece, drawing on Ratcliffe’s experiences as a young actor who has an inappropriate relationship with a senior industry figure. It’s more heavily fictionalised than, say, Autry’s piece, with a keen writerly and dramaturgical eye that foregrounds dramatic structure. Hooked into the cultural moment of #metoo, Ratcliffe’s story performs similarly to Best’s by taking a social conversation limited by heteronormative paradigms and exploring its effects on gay men. In the larger space of Trinity College’s Players Theatre, and with some snazzy visual effects – and perhaps amplified for this Irish woman by Ratcliffe’s nice, middle class English accent (What? English people sound like they’re on the telly. There, I said it…), it felt less intimate than the solo pieces I’ve discussed above. And, because a good deal of the script is directed to the absent industry predator as opposed to, us, the audience, I found myself watching it without that usual sense of personal address that the solo performer evokes. This worked well with the themes of the piece, as Tom acts

108  The International Dublin Gay Theatre Festival in increasingly demeaning ways in exchange for the promise of fame held out by his abuser and becomes isolated in his secret. Though it garnered its first successes at Fringe festivals, this is a slick, well-directed, tightly written, and impressively acted piece. Bingo by Alan Flanagan – the only straightforwardly fictional solo performance at the festival – was simply staged with minimum props and an everyday Joe costume. The role of Cormac was competently performed by Flanagan himself, who doesn’t appear to be a trained actor, but is natural and compelling on stage. Flanagan has a wonderful ability to conjure up complex visual images using the power of description. This was helped by his script, because Bingo is a brilliant piece of writing, full of lots of fun structural play. Particularly memorable is a drunken fight with Cormac’s sister recounted in a series of unchronological flashes that alternate between profound revelations and childish wrestling on the front lawn. It has some deliciously drawn secondary characters (such as a hijabi doctor with a penchant for weekend BDSM parties) and an ingenious play within a play in the form of a television series that Cormac watches. It offers genuinely affecting insights into the absence of self-care that can lead some gay men to engage in the high-risk sexual behaviours that leave Cormac with – Bingo! – an STI Full House. Flanagan’s piece, with its chemsex orgies and melt downs over Transport for London giveaways, can’t be accused of playing it straight to win social acceptance. In fact, if anything, it’s the straight characters within the drama that take inspiration for sexual liberation from the dysfunctional Cormac, creating unlikely friendships. Thinking about how Bingo would play outside the IDGTF, I can see the freedom of being an insider. Anywhere else, Flanagan would be an ‘other’ addressing society at large and Bingo would be gay theatre; at the IDGTF, it is just good theatre. In this as in other plays, the solo aesthetic interacts with the nature of the festival to complicate some of its narrative limitations and compensate for the potentially homonormalising effect of testimonial. That brings us to the end of the festival’s solo performances. Notice anything? Sort of a demographically homogenous set of individuals. Seven out of nine men. Eight out of nine white Western people.43 Everyone, to the best of my knowledge, cis (but then I tend not to run around insisting that people reveal their assigned sex at birth to me). As we’ll see in the next section, women are well-represented in the rest of the festival programme. However, the over-whelming whiteness of the event is a constant that deserves note both in terms of the international scope of the festival and in terms of an Ireland that is no longer a homogenously white place.l Looked at individually, as I

l According to the 2016 census, over one in 20 people living in Ireland are members of ethnic minorities. Central Statistics Office, “Chapter. 6: Ethnicity and Irish Travellers,” cso.ie, 2016. https://www.cso.ie/en/media/csoie/releasespublications/documents/population/2017/ Chapter_6_Ethnicity_and_irish_travellers.pdf

The International Dublin Gay Theatre Festival 109 hope the above analysis shows, the festival’s offerings are often performing important anti-oppressive work, rejecting the contract of homonormativity, and yet when we zoom out there’s still homonationalism at play – less in what is said than in what is not said; represented less by the people on stage than by the people who are absent.

Professional Aesthetics; Amateur Aesthetics The 11 remaining plays at the 2019 festival represent a wide variety of forms, from double acts to ensemble work to cabaret, from naturalist drama to experimental performance. They represent a wider diversity of artists than the solo pieces, with just under half by female writers/creators, one (The Baby Monitor) co-authored by a Latino man and featuring a multicultural cast, and another with a woman of colour in a main role (The Obligatory Scene). The variety of material on offer shows that while the testimonial appeal of solo performance might be an aesthetic strategy in queer theatre, LGBTQ artists are not limited by it. In this section, I’m going to hone in on the aesthetic quality of the material under discussion, to get to the heart of some of the questions about community, aesthetic standards, and the relationship between politics and art raised by a gay theatre festival. As I snootily opined in the introduction to this chapter, in terms of production values and aesthetic quality the festival is a mixed bag. Some of the material is professional and some is amateur and some is good and some is bad. But I can’t just throw terms like professional, amateur, good, and bad about, can I? I’m an academic. I must overthink. A little like beauty, a little like camp, we tend to know a professional aesthetic when we see it. To me, it means production values – careful attention to set, lighting, costume, tech; it means the kind of acting that says a performer has not only talent and presence but also professional training and experience. It means tight writing, a convincing dramatic structure, confident direction. Polish. Money can certainly help to achieve a professional aesthetic – but I’ve seen low budget plays that look very professional and high budget ones that don’t. Sometimes the amateur look is due to a lack of resources and sometimes it’s an intentional choice – perhaps experimental or avant-garde – made because a professional aesthetic wouldn’t suit the piece. Collette Conroy’s work complicates these intuitions. Writing about disability theatre, she points to formal innovations created by Firebrand, a company of artists with intellectual disabilities. Conroy describes a riotously enjoyable evening at the theatre with a company that has an extraordinary ability to ‘subvert the habitual expectations of audience and performer.’44 But reading the work as avant-garde would run ‘problematically counter to the intentions of the performers.’45 They’re not trying to develop an experimental style – they’re putting on a piece of canonical theatre. Firebrand’s work ‘is not, for example, of professional quality, in that it does not look or sound like professional theatre,’ and so it’s easier for people to discuss it ‘in terms of inclusion or

110  The International Dublin Gay Theatre Festival diversity than as an aesthetic object.’46 But it is clear – from Conroy’s description – that it remains aesthetically accomplished: it’s good theatre. Erin Walcon and Helen Nicholson, in their study of the aesthetics of sociability involved in making amateur theatre, stress that the amateur theatre makers they study are serious artists who strive for high production values and enjoyable, meaningful audience engagement. They are clear that ‘rather than seeing amateur theatre as the incomplete or inauthentic other of professional theatre’ they ‘recognise its multiplicity and plurality as well as its long and vibrant history and heritage.’47 For some of the performances I discussed in the last section, like Shtick’s for example, the skill and production values are there, but the campy aesthetic keeps a certain amateurism. I follow Walcon and Nicholson’s lead in refusing the dismissive connotations that accompany the word amateur. Etymologically, an amateur is a lover of something, and the word implies someone who creates for reasons of passion (but pay artists please). When I say Shtick’s play has an amateur aesthetic, I don’t mean that it’s the opposite of professional, what I mean, rather, is that it intentionally resists theatre as industry and leans towards its other functions – beauty, community formation, consciousness raising, fun in performance and process, and, of course, showing audiences a good time. Above, I discussed some political reasons that may inform the underrepresentation of the IDGTF in Irish theatre scholarship. But another reason is the perception that, though it proclaims to be a professional festival, its programmes do not consistently represent high aesthetic values. Certainly, Fintan Walsh’s review of the 2007 festival recommends that if the festival is to be attended for its art as well as its politics, aesthetic standards would have to improve. In comparing my experiences in 2019 with his in 2007, I think it’s fair to say that this has happened. However, unlike attending something with a big budget like the Dublin Theatre Festival, However, unlike attending something with a big budget like the Dublin Theatre Festival, you can’t be assured on buying a (much more affordable) ticket for the IDGTF that you’ll be seeing something with a professional aesthetic, nor with a knowing avant garde rejection of aesthetic standards. It’s also true that unlike traditional Fringe festivals,48 which are open access, the curated nature of the IDGTF sieves out the bulk of theatre nightmares that all Fringe goers have paid a fiver to endure at least once in their lives. In short, at the IDGTF, you’re likely to find some pieces that are main stage ready and some that would simply never proceed to a more professional rung of the theatre industry ladder. But this leaves me asking if the aesthetically professional pieces are necessarily better than the aesthetically amateur ones? I often appreciate ramshackle productions, and have certainly sat through immaculately acted and beautifully designed plays bored off my tits and dreaming of the pub. Sometimes I see something that I know is never going to hit a national stage, but that leaves me thinking for weeks afterwards. In their analysis of amateur theatre aesthetics, Walcon and Nicholson follow a sociologist of sociability (who in turn follows Kant because everybody follows Kant) called Georg Simmel. I haven’t read Simmel (although I guess I

The International Dublin Gay Theatre Festival 111 will if my manuscript reviewers make me?), but Walcon and Nicholson say that he conceives of a ‘pure’ sociability with an aesthetic dimension, in which participants creatively engage with each other without the encumbrance of social norms.49 Leave your inhibitions at the door, friends, its theatremaking time! As came as no surprise to me reading Walcon and Nicholson, the social autonomy theorised by Simmel has met with exactly the same critical challenges as aesthetic autonomy in Kant – because you can’t assume a universal base for social interactions any more than you can assume one for aesthetic experiences. Still, as a theatre-maker, I know what Walcon and Nicholson are talking about when they use Simmel to think through the playful, intensely social world-within-a-world that exists in a rehearsal room. Walcon and Nicholson make the case for the aesthetic dimensions of this process. Maybe some of that aesthetic sociability – that uninhibited, communal, creative buzz – leaks into the performance space. There, it encompasses the audience too. And, within the community frame of the IDGTF, where you can easily end up chatting to the artists over pints or tea, the effect is magnified. In the introductory chapter, I spoke about Janet Wolff, whose concept of an aesthetics of uncertainty proposes that aesthetic value is neither relative (in the eye of the beholder) or universal (a quality of certain objects) but rather consensus based – something we create and define and redefine as members of communities.50 Maybe there is something about amateur theatre that elevates sociability as an aesthetic value, and maybe the frame of the festival itself – its political and community qualities – forms part of the aesthetic experiences we have when we’re there. Taking this frame into account might further uncouple the distinction between professional aesthetics and amateur aesthetics from the one between good theatre and bad theatre.

Pros and Lovers Merriman’s own play, Party Boy, tops the programme. It’s a high-energy three hander which tells the (based on a true) story of Patrick (Dave Flynn), a young Irish man who works as an international go-go dancer, which is a poetical way of saying that he does live sex shows as well as a shit-ton of drugs. The pace is relentless, from Patrick’s emergence from the closet as a beautiful young man on the Dublin scene, an early abusive relationship that models the violent and erratic involvements he’ll have later on the continent, and the glamour and chaos of his life as an, um, go-go dancer. The safe haven in the story is his Irish Mammy (Maria Blaney), whose unconditional love is a buoy when the life he has chosen threatens to sink him. At the end of the play, Patrick, no longer the fresh young thing of the story’s beginnings, contemplates a new chapter, a ‘normal’ life, but a text from a wealthy London sugar daddy is too exciting to resist and Patrick’s manic energy returns as he throws himself, without thought for consequence, into the next anchorless adventure. Merriman understands the play to be working through themes of excess; he talks about rates of suicide for men in their thirties who have outgrown a party scene but failed to cultivate anything else.51

112  The International Dublin Gay Theatre Festival It’s a fun piece, well performed in a madcap style, and with Merriman’s skill and experience as a director on full display. I love physical, fourth-walling ignoring modes of performance, in which actors switch characters and complex events are told in cleverly stylised ways. I thought Party Boy needed work at the level of the writing and the story, as it felt narratively thin and skated close to a homonormative morality tale against the ills of sex work and the party lifestyle. As I’ve said, the acting was committed. Blaney as Mammy was great. The night I went, Colin Malone, who played a host of lovers and friends in Patrick’s life, fell during a physical sequence, and still managed to heroically limp through the remaining action. Still, the casting was a little off. It was hard to buy Dave Flynn as an international adult performer, in spite of his chemistry with the other actors and the great energy he brought to the role. Party Boy is the first production in the IDGTF 2019 programme; it had the Player’s stage for the 7.30 evening slot and 4 pm Saturday matinee for the first week of the festival. It was an enjoyable night at the theatre, but it had neither a professional aesthetic nor the amateur rejection of those standards in favour of other modes of value that I discuss above. I do wonder if it would have been granted its prominence if it wasn’t Merriman’s own play. Still, there was a real buzz around the piece, perhaps testament to the aesthetic sociability of the theatremakers that Walcon and Nicholson theorize seeping into the atmosphere of the festival. The Baby Monitor, playing at The Teacher’s Club, had a traditional dramatic structure and also a moral complexity which, I note, was somewhat rare at the 2019 festival. One of the few plays to touch on the intersections of race, class, and sexuality, the piece told the story of a gay couple, Damon (David Stallings) and Philip (Héctor Matias), who are fathers to a two-yearold boy called Caleb. Caleb’s biological mother is Soledad (Greta Quispe), a woman who grew up alongside Philip in the Dominican republic. However, despite the language, heritage, and childhood experiences Soledad and Philip share, there’s a class divide between them. Soledad was the child of Philp’s nanny, and, having been paid to carry his son, is now paid to look after him in Boston, while her own daughter and mother live in New York with the money she sends. Despite her role in the family’s life, Soledad is not comfortable with gay parents, and this is exacerbated by the resentment she feels towards Philip’s affluent lifestyle. When she comes home unannounced to find Damon and Philip having sex in the living room while Caleb naps in an adjoining room, her homophobia morphs into an unfounded concern for Caleb’s well-being and finds company in the barely concealed bigotry of Claire (Amanda Jones), Damon’s cousin, who makes a report to child welfare. Staged with a naturalist, sitting-room set, unobtrusive lighting, and low key costumes, the acting, writing, and firm direction shine, while the depth of characterisation stops this from feeling like an ‘issues’ play. The relationship between Damon and Philip was very convincing, perhaps because, as I learned later, the writer-director pair are married. Jones as Claire was a performance highlight of the festival. In a role that could have been played for villainous boos, she found the paradox of the bigot and led me to a greater

The International Dublin Gay Theatre Festival 113 understanding of how apparently tolerant family members harbour prejudices that make them dangerous to LGBTQ people, in spite of the genuine love they often bear for the people they hurt. Certainly you could read this play as a plea for heteronormative inclusion in the heterosexual model of the nuclear family. But it also critiques the racial and classed exclusions upon which Damon and Philip’s happiness is built, and it reminds us that for vast segments of society, gay fathers are still a radical proposition. In spite of the space it was afforded at the Teacher’s club, with its school chairs pressed in tight rows, and a creaky makeshift stage, it maintained its professional aesthetic.

Figure 3.2  A manda Jones as Claire clutches her hands together in the foreground, her gaze downcast, communicating internal struggle. Hector Matias (Philip) and David Stallings (Damon), out of focus, hold each other in the background Photo by permission of Michael Dekker

114  The International Dublin Gay Theatre Festival The same creaky stage and school chairs hosted Revolting Women – A Rebel Cabaret, written and directed by Sonya Mulligan. The set was simple – an old-fashioned fringed lamp and some fairy lights, designed to create bohemian charm. It was a gallop through the history and present of Irish activist and feminist women. Told through short acts in mixed forms including song, dance, video, drama, and spoken word, it recovered neglected women’s histories – such as the story of Grace Plunkett, known commonly as the wife of 1916 martyr Thomas Plunket, but actually a badass in her own right, or the strategies of the sex workers of Dublin’s Monto district at a time when colonial power was shifting to Church power in the newly formed Irish Free State. There were skits about Irish class relations, video shorts about the pressures on mothers, and rousing songs on the rejection of purity standards for queer women. It was also bad. And by bad I don’t mean that it didn’t have a professional aesthetic – which, it didn’t – I mean it was clumsy. The writing was weak, the dancing poorly choreographed and executed, some of the solo singers couldn’t sing, and the segues between acts hadn’t been (adequately?) rehearsed. There were some individually talented performers – particularly BeRn, whose song ‘No Star Lesbian’ was great – and the subject matter was my incontrovertible bag, but the piece as a whole looked like something a few mates put together in someone’s bedroom for a laugh and ran through once or twice. It did not look like a piece of theatre at an ostensibly professional theatre festival. And I say this not (only) to be a bitch, but also because this section is supposed to be exploring aesthetics and sociability and I have to be honest. I’m going to suggest something. I think most of us can quite easily distinguish between agreeing with the politics of a piece of art and thinking it’s aesthetically accomplished. I think part of the reason scholars are so confused on this point is that people don’t want to be meanies. I know I don’t. And so they don’t say that something is bad when earnest artists have poured their energy into making it. They say they enjoyed it. Which might well be true. There was a lot to enjoy about Revolting Women. That social buzz between performers that Walcon and Nicholson talk about was palpable in the theatre. The audience gave a lot of love – it was like being at a feminist rally, where not everyone is a great public speaker, but anyone can have a turn at the mic. But I don’t think anyone could truly have considered it an aesthetically accomplished performance. However, if you read the reviews of the show, you might fall prey to the illusion that they did. Even reviewers, whose actual job it is to tell audiences whether the show they’re interested in is any good, baulk at holding theatre with activist aims up to high aesthetic standards. Nobody wants to go to a show by Victorian orphans raising funds for the preservation of endangered bunnies and pen a column opining that little Oliver had a lot of difficulty with projection and the rabbit costumes were shoddily constructed. But that doesn’t mean they can’t tell that the urchins are incomprehensible and the bobtails keep falling

The International Dublin Gay Theatre Festival 115 off. It doesn’t mean they think those things add to the aesthetic quality of the show. And does the aesthetic sociability theorised by Walcon and Nicholson compensate for poor quality? You know, I’m not sure. I’ll return to this question in the final section of this chapter. Katherine Smith’s prize winning All I See is You, directed by Ben Occhipinti, is the tale of two English men who fall in love in the 60s, when their relationship is illegal and homosexuality heavily policed. Ralph is a serious, studious young man, the first in his family to go to university. Bobby is a larger-than-life chatterbox, who loves working on the record counter at Woolworths, and finds it hard to hide who he is. Christian Edwards (Ralph) and Ciarán Griffiths (Bobby) bring the characters to life with such warmth that it’s impossible not to fall in love with them as they fall in love with each other. It’s also impossible not to feel the horror of that time for gay men. Occhipanti’s sensitive direction alternated gentle exchanges with exciting physical sequences – like the discovery of a gay bar or running to evade the police. It played on the difference in energy between the lovers, allowing us to see how they balanced and completed each other. Yes, it had the professional aesthetic I have described above. It had been produced by a professional theatre, with trained actors, a career director, and an award-winning script. And while, as I’ve stated, a professional aesthetic doesn’t necessarily mean a good aesthetic, there are times when it helps. With this intimate and characterbased piece of period writing, the skill in bringing us into the historical moment with characters that feel so robust is helped by training, experience, and a bit of cash to spend on costumes, set, lights, and dramaturgy. Gertrude Stein and A Companion by Win Wells, here directed by Christopher Weare, was one of two Stein-themed offerings at the festival. The capable production of a classic from the international queer repertoire tells the story of the decades-long love between Stein and Alice B Toklas. It begins with Stein’s ghost returning from beyond the grave to keep her lover company. Its fragmented narrative flits between Stein and Toklas’s heyday at the centre of a Parisian art scene that included Picasso, Hemmingway and Matisse, and Toklas’s lonely later years. This production, which travelled from South Africa, was immaculately performed by Shirley Johnson and Lynita Crofford, who seemed absolutely in tune. Interviews with the pair reveal they are veteran actors and close friends who have worked together frequently. They were both nominated for best actress at the festival, and Crofford, as Toklas, took the prize. The costumes were thoughtful and understated, the set minimal but effective – a desk, a typewriter – and really the production just got out of its own way and allowed Wells’ writing and characterisation to carry. I read this play as a grad student, and loved it, and really appreciated the chance to catch such a solid production of it at the IDGTF. The festival’s second Stein and Toklas themed piece was a 15-minute short adapted by Lynn C. Miller from Stein’s Miss Furr and Miss Skein, which is a word portrait or prose poem. The word-whatsit is about the relationship between Stein and Toklas’s friends, artists Ethel Mars and Maud Hunt; it’s is

116  The International Dublin Gay Theatre Festival famous for using the word ‘gay’ about 50 million times – and for being the first documented use of the word to mean homosexual in print. This US production did some interesting work with a very tricky script – it’s endlessly repetitive as per Stein’s lyric signature. Lynda Sturner and Jane Macdonald embodied a Miss a piece and engaged in a repetitive choreography, echoing Stein’s unnatural language. The delivery was deliberately rigid – bright, with a note of falsehood. The affection between the two was similar – doll-like, they bent to peck each other cheeks. The love, like the love in Stein’s word portrait, is proclaimed plainly over and again, and yet strangely invisible. Like Stein’s use of the word gay to mean sex same love the relation between the characters is plausibly deniable. The production was a valuable artistic undertaking, with a stumble here and there in delivery on the night I saw it that didn’t detract from its overall quality. I See You Tom Kennedy52 by Tom Noone is a naturalist piece in which a retired Garda sergeant, Sean Flanagan, makes contact with a gay ex colleague he bullied and outed many years ago. The ex-colleague, the eponymous Tom Kennedy, is living his best life out foreign and generally amenable to the call until he hears what Sean is apologising for. Learning that it was Sean that outed him, he refuses forgiveness – it’s not his job to assuage Sean’s conscience. Sean, in turn, becomes angry – can’t Tom see what an effort he’s making? After the call, he works through his anger with his gay daughter, who reminds him that Tom doesn’t owe him anything. Just as Sean comes to understand this, Tom calls back. He’s cooled down and decided to recognise Tom’s contrition. The play works as a metaphor for a society hurt by the divisive 2019 Marriage Equality referendum, staging the difficult emotions of people overcoming homophobia own and other, and modelling ways forward. I only had access to a working script, which gave hints of nice dialogue work and some interesting tech play (we meet Tom through a video call). The writing is unlikely to win a Tony, but, in context, its message was important, and I found a lot to relate to in the story as I struggle to reconcile relationships with loved ones who opposed Marriage Equality and the movement to Repeal the 8th. In Carolyn Gage’s The Obligatory Scene, directed by Amelia Cain, two grad students, Vivey (Carli Rhoades) and Dru (Alice Sia Kabia) argue over what some might dismiss as ‘lesbian bed death’ – the lack of sex in their formerly smokin’ relationship. The play opens in loved up bliss as the two women move in together, constructing their apartment, and – centre stage – their bed. Their easy, joyful physicality is apparent. We leap forward in time, and physical and emotional distance is just as palpable. A disagreement begins over Shakespeare’s The Taming of the Shrew, with Dru arguing against Vivey’s feminist interpretation of Petruchio as patriarch, and, instead, for an oblique reading that positions him as a clandestine saviour, who uses a façade of public humiliation to deliver Katherine to a life as his wife that is free from any sexual expectation. It’s quite the reach, but Dru – studying law – argues it passionately. We begin to realise she’s not really talking about Shakespeare

The International Dublin Gay Theatre Festival 117 at all. Dru is a survivor of childhood sexual abuse, in a process of recovery, and, for her, all sex, even sex with her loving, long-term partner, is polluted by a culture that fetishises rape and dominance. In a society obsessed with partnered sex as a social and individual good, she argues for her right not to be sexual, yet still loved. For Vivey, hurt by refusals of intimacy, the situation isn’t healthy. So what’s the obligatory scene going to be? A sex scene? Or a break up scene? I could have done without all the bickering over Shakespeare, but this delicate, difficult piece is immensely rich. It brought me from an instinctive sympathy for Vivey – that I came to interrogate as a product of the socially inculcated belief that we have a right to sex with our partners – to deep empathy for Dru, for her process of recovery, and the time and space she needs to not be fine, to not be the only survivor of sexual abuse we want to listen to: the one who picks herself up and keeps on keeping on. The acting was passionate and physical without losing its naturalism, and the actors made the characters so much their own that I find it hard to picture the piece without them. In terms of its critique not only of the monsters of rape culture, but of the way we all – queer women included – accept and enact the scriptures of patriarchy in intimate ways, this was one of the most radical pieces at the festival. I was looking forward to David Donovan’s Monastic, inspired by the real life story of the Maynooth seminary Grindr scandal of 2016. Context for my international readers: Irish tabloid newspapers went wild on learning that the next generation of would be priests was allegedly having gay sex and using hook up apps. Some seminarians talked to the press to decry a subculture of homosexuality at Maynooth, and Diarmuid Martin, archbishop of Dublin, said he would no longer send vocations from his Parish to Ireland’s oldest seminary, due to ‘Strange Goings On.’53 In Donovan’s play, three young seminarians wrestle with faith and sexuality. Ian (Kit Geraghty) and Harry (Connor Molloy) are out to each other, and active on gay dating apps. They both seem lost, and it’s hard to understand what they’re doing in the seminary. Ian, one might venture, is trying to hide from his sexuality in a spiritual place; certainly, he feels conflicted by his inability to live a priestly life. Harry’s faith, on the other hand, seems incidental to his decision to enter religious life. He mocks the truly faithful – like his naïve fellow seminarian Jack (Brian Briggs) – and revels in the mischief of breaking the rules. He’s like a gorgeous gay Father Dougal. Jack is the born priest of the trio. Oblivious to the bedhopping among his brothers in Christ, he spends much of the play scratching his chin and pondering ecumenical matters. He’s an empathetic listener and all round gentle soul. When Ian, struggling with the artifice and lies that pervade the seminary, relieves Jack of the illusion that his co-vocations are upholding church teaching on sexuality, it sparks an identity crisis. Jack is forced to grapple with his desires. When feelings kindle between Jack and Ian, Harry, jealous, makes a salacious Grindr account for Jack, which ends up all over the papers. The result: godly Jack leaves the seminary, while

118  The International Dublin Gay Theatre Festival manipulative Harry and conflicted Ian continue their training. And yea is the church impoverished: the internalised homophobia of its future priests doomed to damage its culture for years to come. A checkered floor and a neon crucifix hanging upstage set the scene somewhere between convent kitchen and nightclub – an effective set design. The writing, I felt, would have benefitted from more subtlety – the character of Harry was off. You could argue that it’s off in general that so many gay men are attracted to roles within an institution that considers them disordered, but, still, I don’t think many seminarians are there because they’ve mistaken the place for an adult cruise. The problem was compounded by Molloy’s interpretation. There was little attempt to differentiate between a young man whose vocation necessitates that he hide his sexuality and a flirty hotty on a night out at the George. The direction should have had the confidence to smooth out this characterisation and align it with the timbre of the other performers. Overall, the acting was amateur, but good – Briggs brought much charm to the role of Jack. Like Orpheus,54 written by Brett Dahl and performed by the Canadian company Theatre Outré, was a two-person experimental piece about sexual assault and post-traumatic responses, told through verse like prose and contemporary dance. Our double narrator moves between worlds, between the techno beat of a gay club where hook ups and drugs create a sensuous haze, and the edge of a forest, quiet and menacing. We circle around and replay an almost memory, something that happened to the narrator or that he saw happen to someone else, until finally he can look back, like Orpheus, and see the reality. In the original myth, to look back meant to lose everything; here, that moment of loss is necessary. Without it, our narrator can’t leave the underworld. Interspersed with mini lectures on the brain science of fight, flight, and freeze or the fragmenting of memory that happens following trauma, this performance poem stages the unsayable – the workings of the body and brain to protect and destroy us after sexual assault. Skilfully performed by two good dancers, this richly symbolic and emotionally intense piece resists simple interpretation and I found it profoundly affecting.

Reflections At the Gala night that closes the festival, and at which ‘Oscars’ (statuettes of Oscar Wilde) are awarded to participants, Carli Rhoades from Obligatory Scene stood up to give a passionate speech against the co-option of queer identities by violent state actors, critiquing the newfound enthusiasm of the NYPD for Pride events at the height of Black Lives Matter activism. Her critique was grounded in the kinds of fears of pinkwashing and homonationalism as well as dedication to solidarity with other marginalised groups central to Irish queer scholarship. I wondered if she was aware that some of those present would not share her politics. Merriman, for example, commenting on the Stonewall riots, says: ‘Too often, of course, police are blamed, or held

The International Dublin Gay Theatre Festival 119 responsible for the laws they have to implement’ and ponders ‘If there had been effective community policing in 1969, then perhaps the riots would not have happened that night?’55 I tell this story to illustrate that the homonationalism that might partly explain why Irish queer theorists and theatre scholars have been reluctant to study the festival is anathema to many of the artists who fundraise and rehearse and expend considerable resources to partake in an event which provides a cultural space for LGBTQ art, politics, community, and conversations. It’s likely also illegible to many of the artists, volunteers, and audience members who have kept this festival afloat for so many years. Above, I analysed the solo pieces, reflecting on the limitations and advantages of the solo autobiographical form for telling LGBTQ stories, and also considering the relationship of the individual pieces with homonormalisation and homonationalism. Here I want to observe that the diversity of radical versus homonormative politics I flagged in the solo section was also visible in the rest of the programme, with some pieces bolstering ‘just like you’ narratives and others shaking heteronormative complacency. Like the LGBTQ community, the IDGTF encapsulates diverse political standpoints. However, Obligatory Scene and The Baby Monitor notwithstanding, the overarching whiteness of the festival was a staple and compounds concern about the solidarity the festival offers to migrants and people of colour. This notwithstanding, the communal event Merriman has helmed since 2004 continues to be a backbone of Ireland’s process of representing and interrogating LGBTQ rights, identities, and lives. It gives Irish audiences the chance to see some cracking LGBTQ work. It scores big on both performance and politics. Aesthetic snobbery in relation to the festival is largely misplaced. The IDGTF sits somewhere between a professional theatre festival and a fringe. It offers a host of high-quality theatre and the stuff that’s aesthetically lacking isn’t necessarily a curation fail – it tends to be doing something important in its social context. This chapter wrestled with ideas of professional and amateur aesthetics, and how they map onto good or bad artistic outputs. I played around with the idea that the community function of the festival forms part of our aesthetic experience as theatregoers and with the concept of sociability as an aesthetic value. Look, I’ll level, I have written and rewritten this part of the chapter conclusion many times, and I remain conflicted. All I have to offer is a delineation of my confusion. As I hope some of my analyses have shown, politics or community form part of our aesthetic experiences – they can lead makers to exciting forms and innovations; they can create atmosphere and buzz that add to affect, enjoyment, and beauty. But – and here’s where my mind gets murky – I don’t think they prevent us, most of the time, from experiencing and recognising the levels of aesthetic achievement on display. Perhaps, more often than is admitted, our political commitments prevent us from adequately expressing our aesthetic experiences.

120  The International Dublin Gay Theatre Festival It’s hard to talk honestly about the aesthetic standard of activist work on professional stages. The overarching argument of this book is that activist intent often creates exciting aesthetic forms and affects. But sometimes conviction outshines artistry. That’s easy for me to say. I’m writing an academic book not a theatre column, and no one reads academic books, except you, you nerd. Still, I think anxiety about the sidelining of aesthetic standards in socially engaged art might be partly offset by the simple recognition that audiences probably can differentiate between the social and aesthetic achievements of a work much of the time, and that sometimes community feeling stops them from saying what they really think. ‘Brilliant isn’t the word!’ my friend Allan used to say when someone asked him what he thought of their lousy show. Community feeling can both add to our aesthetic experiences in powerful ways and remove some of our freedom to express them. Is there space within a professional festival for work that is aesthetically weak but that ticks important activist boxes? Merriman was interesting on this question in our interview. He talks about the first production at the festival to centre trans identities. Theatrically, he admits, it was awful, but it had beautiful moments, such as an original song by a teenage boy called As the Hammer Falls that articulated something about trans experience with great profundity. A critic wrote an accurate review, and the artists were upset. Merriman, however, feels that every play he programmes has its artistic merits, and even if something might seem bad on the surface, in the context of the overall festival, it will have a role and a purpose. People obviously use art in different ways. They use it to socialise, to express their politics, to perform community. But do these uses add to the aesthetic? Er, sometimes? Not necessarily? Maybe for some people? Look, I’m not sure. If in the African aesthetic philosophies I discussed in the first chapter, these social functions are integral to an art object’s aesthetic and can’t be detangled without risking ‘artistic decapitation,’56 in the Western tradition maybe this relationship is more clunky. Drawing on Jan Mukařovský, Conroy argues that aesthetic norms help to create our attitudes to reality and determine our responses to the world.57 Whether I like it or not, the aesthetic norms of Western philosophy have trained me (and you?) to siphon off the social from art. And, while I can and do try to deconstruct these norms, they’re still probably at play when I distinguish between a piece of theatre at which I’m having a good time and nodding along and one I think is aesthetically impressive. They’re part of how I experience the world: what Pierre Bourdieu might call my aesthetic habitus. There’s great value and pleasure in theatrical experiences that might be aesthetically less impressive, but when a singer’s off key, no amount of feminism’s going to convince me otherwise. I think part of my cognitive dissonance here is that I want to believe that sociability is an aesthetic value. It’s such a nice thing to believe. But I can’t unsee bad acting, can’t unhear the bum note, and I have zero desire to swap this discernment for more forgiving eyes and ears, because the discernment is the basis of my aesthetic pleasure.

The International Dublin Gay Theatre Festival 121 Overall, if you want to catch a ‘good play’ at the IDGTF (and don’t pretend you don’t know what I mean, you polite obfuscator) then one of the festival’s international offerings is a safer bet. I guess if you’re willing to do the fundraising and logistics of getting your play to Dublin, you’re probably also willing to make sure it’s practiced and perfected. Also, the international pool of LGBTQ artists is wider than the Irish pool. And, finally, in Ireland, I think, the festival still has a reputation for being about politics above performance. Maybe this is a hangover from its earlier days, when, if Fintan Walsh’s 2007 review is anything to go by, aesthetic standards were less impressive. Based on my conversations with some of the international artists, the politics above performance idea of the IDGTF doesn’t travel. It’s seen as a cool, legitimate, (semi) professional festival, and one at which many artists are proud to perform. Maybe you don’t want to catch a good play. Plenty of people going to the IDGTF don’t go because they want good theatre – they go because they want gay theatre. And they want gay theatre on the social themes that are relevant to them – like Ireland’s queer activist women or the emotional aftermath of the Marriage Equality referendum or the Maynooth Grindr scandal. They go because they want to support their friends. They go because they want the chat at the Teacher’s Club afterwards, and we all know that theatre talk is even more fun when you’ve been to see something rubbish. As the festival continues to grow and thrive – as I hope it does – it needs to make space for more LGBTQ migrants, people of colour, and trans people. And if submissions from these demographics are not forthcoming, then some outreach is needed to encourage a more diverse selection of artists to stand up and tell their stories. Merriman has, for many years, touted his desire to step down as artistic director. When he does, his work for the IDGTF will certainly have earned him a bouquet. I hope that whoever comes next can nourish the space – artistic and communal – that he has created and sustained, while also envisaging a radically anti-oppressive future for this very special festival.

Notes 1 Brian Merriman, Wilde Stages in Dublin: A Decade of Gay Theatre (Dublin: The International Gay Theatre Festival Ltd, 2013), 94. 2 When I started writing this chapter, it seemed like academic gold that Wilde, the mascot of the IDGTF, is an aesthetic theorist himself, and so I spent weeks, WEEKS, reading and condensing Wilde on aesthetics and attempting to apply his aestheticism to the work at the festival. The results were, to use the accepted scholarly term, total wank. I did manage to get a nice little essay out of it all for a literary journal called Mirror Lamp Press, so if you’re interested in my thoughts on Wilde, you can check it out. O’Toole, Emer. “Oscar Wilde: The Critic as Performance Artist,” Mirror Lamp Press 5 (2022): 53–65. 3 Ibid, 6. 4 Petra Kuppers, Disability Culture and Community Performance (London: Palgrave Macmillan,2011), 36.

122  The International Dublin Gay Theatre Festival 5 6 7 8

Ibid, 36. Ibid, 36. Fintan Walsh, “The Politics of Desire,” Irish Theatre Magazine 27 (2004): 32. Brian Merriman, “The International Dublin Gay Theatre Festival,” in Deviant Acts: Essays on Queer Performance, Ed. David Cregan (Dublin: Carysfort, 2009), 98–99; Brian Merriman, Wilde Stages in Dublin: A Decade of Gay Theatre (Dublin: International Dublin Gay Theatre Festival Ltd, 2013), for example, 120; 124; 146; 151; 159; 166–167; 242; 244–245; 253. 9 Fintan Walsh, Queer Notions: New Plays and Performances from Ireland (Cork: Cork University Press, 2010), 9. 10 David Cregan, Ed. Deviant Acts: Essays on Queer Performance (Dublin: Carysfort, 2009). 11 Paul J. Halftery, “Performing Politics: Queer Theatre in Ireland, 1968–2017.’ The Palgrave Handbook of Contemporary Irish Theatre and Performance (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018), 191. 12 Cormac O’Brien. “Queering the Irish Stage: Shame, Sexuality, and the Politics of Testimonial,” in Perspectives on Contemporary Irish Theatre, Ed. Thierry Dubost and Anne Etienne (Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017), 251. 13 McMahon Report, “Report to Government Working Group on the Protection Process on Improvements to the Protection Process, Including Direct Provision and Supports to Asylum Seekers, Final Report, June 2015,” Justice.ie, 2015. http://www.justice.ie/en/JELR/Pages/Working_Group_on_Improvements_ to_the_Protection_Process 14 Irish Times, “Lives in Limbo,” Irish Times, 8–12 August 2014. https://www. irishtimes.com/news/lives-in-limbo 15 See https://www.asylumarchive.com 16 Emily O’Reilly. “Annual Human Rights Lecture – Law Society of Ireland – “Human Rights – an Ombudsman Perspective”.” Ombudsman Europa, 2015. https://www. ombudsman.europa.eu/mt/speech/en/60087 17 Department of Children, Equality, Disability, Integration and Youth. “Minister O’Gorman Publishes the White Paper on Ending Direct Provision,” Gov.ie, 26 Feb 2021. https://www.gov.ie/en/press-release/affd6-minister-ogorman-publishes-the-whitepaper-on-ending-direct-provision 18 Sorcha Pollack and Mark Hillard, “Direct Provision: Senior Official Disagreed with Payment Rise Proposal,” Irish Times, 19 Nov 2019. https://www. irishtimes.com/news/social-affairs/direct-provision-senior-official-disagreed-withpayment-rise-proposal-1.4087017 19 Brian Merriman, “Personal Tweet,” Twitter.com, 07 Jun 2021. 20 Jasbir K. Puar, Terrorist Assemblages: Homonationalism in Queer Times (Durham: Duke University Press, 2007). 21 Ed Madden, “Queering, Querying Irish Studies,” in The Routledge International Handbook of Irish Studies, Ed. Renée Fox, Mike Cronin, and Brian Ó. Conchubhair (Oxon; New York: Routledge, 2020): 245–259. 22 Walsh, Queer Notions, 4. 23 Ibid, 4. 24 Ibid, 4. 25 L. Duggan, “The New Homonormativity: The Sexual Politics of Neoliberalism,” in Materializing Democracy: Toward a Revitalized Cultural Politics, Ed. R. Castronovo and D. D. Nelson (North Carolina: Duke University Press), 175–194. 26 Merriman, Wilde Stages, 117. 27 David Roman, O Solo Homo: The New Queer Performance, Ed. Holly Hughes and David Roman (New York: Grove, 1998). 28 Deirdre Heddon, ‘Introduction,’ & ‘Chapter One’ Autobiography and Performance (Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), 1–19; 20–52. 29 Roman, O Solo Homo, 1–16.

The International Dublin Gay Theatre Festival 123 3 0 O’Brien, “Queering the Irish Stage,” 258. 31 Ibid, 251. 32 Ibid, 263. 33 Holly Hughes, O Solo Homo, 2–3. 34 Ibid, 264. 35 Ibid, 265. 36 Roman, O Solo Homo, 5–6. 37 Susan Sontag, “Notes on “Camp,”” in Essays of the 1960s and 70s, Ed. David Rieff (N.Y.: Library of America, 2013): 259–274. 38 Sontag, “Notes on “Camp,”” 271. 39 Woody Shticks, “Bro Whisperer from Shlong Song,” Youtube, 01 May 2018. https:// www.youtube.com/watch?v=5b-qri98aG8 40 Video kindly provided by Gonzalez Kane. 41 Video kindly provided by Gieseke. 42 Manchester Fringe, “John Best on The Little Pink Book of Masculinity,” Youtube.com. May 6 2019. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wufa–6hjjs 43 Thalia Gonzalez Kane is half Ecuadorian, half Canadian. 44 Colette Conroy, “Editorial: Aesthetics and Participation,” Research in Drama Education: The Journal of Applied Theatre and Performance 20:1 (2015): 9. 45 Conroy, “Aesthetics and Participation,” 6. 46 Conroy, “Aesthetics and Participation,”10. 47 Erin Walcon and Helen Nicholson, “The Sociable Aesthetics of Amateur Theatre,” Contemporary Theatre Review 27.1 (2017): 19. 48 The Dublin Fringe Festival is not open access – it is also a curated programme. 49 Walcon and Nicholson, “Sociable Aesthetics,” 20. 50 Janet Wolff, The Aesthetics of Uncertainty (New York: Columbia University Press, 2008). 51 Merriman, “Interview,” 2019. 52 Accessed through script, kindly provided by Noone. 53 Paddy Agnew, “Martin Moves Priests Out of Maynooth Over ‘Strange Goings-On,’” Irish Times, 01 Aug 2016. https://www.irishtimes.com/news/social-affairs/religion-andbeliefs/martin-moves-priests-out-of-maynooth-over-strange-goings-on-1.2741555 54 Accessed through video, kindly provided by Jay Whitehead. 55 Merriman, Wilde Stages, 32. 56 Dele Jegede, “Art for Life’s Sake: African Art as a Reflection of an Afrocentric Cosmology,” in The African Aesthetic: Keeper of the Traditions, Ed. Kariamu Welsh-Asante (Connecticut: Greenwood Press, 1993), 245. 57 Conroy, “Aesthetics and Participation,” 8.

Bibliography Agnew, Paddy, “Martin Moves Priests Out of Maynooth Over “Strange Goings-On,”” Irish Times, 01 Aug. 2016. https://www.irishtimes.com/news/social-affairs/religiona nd-bel ief s/m a r t i n-moves-pr iest s- out- of-m ay nooth- over- st ra nge-goi ng son-1.2741555 Central Statistics Office, “Chapter. 6: Ethnicity and Irish Travellers,” cso.ie, 2016. https:// www.cso.ie/en/media/csoie/releasespublications/documents/population/2017/ Chapter_6_Ethnicity_and_irish_travellers.pdf Crawley, Peter, “Absolut Gay Theatre Festival Dublin: The Time Keepers,” The Irish Times, May 06 2010. https://www.irishtimes.com/culture/stage/absolut-gaytheatre-festival-dublin-the-time-keepers-1.661521 Cregan, David, ed. Deviant Acts: Essays on Queer Performance (Dublin: Carysfort, 2009).

124  The International Dublin Gay Theatre Festival Conroy, Colette, “Editorial: Aesthetics and Participation,” Research in Drama Education: The Journal of Applied Theatre and Performance 20.1 (2015): 1–11. Cussen, James, “At the End of the Rainbow: “Yes Equality” Come Again No More,” Oireachtas Retort, 2016. https://oireachtasretort.ie/2016/05/24/at-the-end-of-therainbow-yes-equality-come-again-no-more Department of Children, Equality, Disability, Integration and Youth, “Minister O’Gorman Publishes the White Paper on Ending Direct Provision,” Gov.ie, 26 Feb 2021. https://www.gov.ie/en/press-release/affd6-minister-ogorman-publishes-the-whitepaper-on-ending-direct-provision Duggan, Lisa, “The New Homonormativity: The Sexual Politics of Neoliberalism,” in Materializing Democracy: Toward a Revitalized Cultural Politics, Ed. Russ Castronovo and Dana D. Nelson (Durham; London: Duke University Press, 2002), 175–194. Halferty, J. Paul, “Performing Politics: Queer Theatre in Ireland, 1968–2017,” in The Palgrave Handbook of Contemporary Irish Theatre and Performance, Ed. Eamonn Jordan and Eric Weitz (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018), 181–199. Heddon, Deirdre, ‘Introduction,’ & ‘Chapter One,’ Autobiography and Performance (Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), 1–19; 20–52. Hughes, Holly and David Ramon, eds. O Solo Homo: The New Queer Performance (New York: Grove, 1998). Irish Times, “Lives in Limbo,” Irish Times, 8–12 August 2014. https://www.irishtimes. com/news/lives-in-limbo Jegede, Dele, “Art for Life’s Sake: African Art as a Reflection of an Afrocentric Cosmology,” in The African Aesthetic: Keeper of the Traditions, Ed. Kariamu WelshAsante (Connecticut: Greenwood Press, 1993), 237–247. Kalb, Jonathan, “Documentary Solo Performance: The Politics of the Mirrored Self,” Theater 31.3 (2001): 13–29. Kuppers, Petra, “Community Arts and Practices: Improvising Being Together,” in Disability Culture and Community Performance (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), 36. Lentin, Ronit, “Where Are the Migrants? White Supremacy and the 2015 Marriage Referendum,” RonitLentin.net, 12 May 2015. https://ronitlentin.net/2015/05/12/ where-are-the-migrants-white-supremacy-and-the-2015-marriage-referendum/ Luibhéid, Eithne, “Same Sex Marriage and the Pink Washing of State Migration Controls,” International Feminist Journal of Politics 20.3 (2018): 405–424. Madden, Ed., “Queering Ireland, in the Archives,” Irish University Review 43.1 (2013): 184–221. ––––––, “Queering, Querying Irish Studies,” in The Routledge International Handbook of Irish Studies, Ed. Renée Fox, Mike Cronin and Brian Ó. Conchubhair (Oxon; New York: Routledge, 2020). Manchester Fringe, “John Best on The Little Pink Book of Masculinity,” Youtube.com, May 6 2019. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wufa–6hjjs McMahon Report, “Report to Government Working Group on the Protection Process on Improvements to the Protection Process, Including Direct Provision and Supports to Asylum Seekers, Final Report, June 2015,” Justice.ie, 2015. http://www.justice.ie/ en/JELR/Pages/Working_Group_on_Improvements_to_the_Protection_Process Merriman, Brian, “The International Dublin Gay Theatre Festival,” in Deviant Acts: Essays on Queer Performance, Ed. David Cregan (Dublin: Carysfort, 2009), 98–99. ––––––, Wilde Stages in Dublin: A Decade of Gay Theatre (Dublin: The International Gay Theatre Festival Ltd, 2013). Mulhall, Anne, “Camping Up the Emerald Aisle: “Queerness” in Irish Popular Culture,” in Irish Postmodernisms and Popular Culture (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), 210–222.

The International Dublin Gay Theatre Festival 125 ––––––, “Queer in Ireland: “Deviant” Filiation and the (un) Holy Family,” in Queer in Europe: Contemporary Case Studies, Ed. Lisa Downing and Robert Gillet (Farnham: Ashgate, 2011), 99–112. ––––––, “The Republic of Love,” Bully Bloggers. https://bullybloggers.wordpress. com/2015/06/20/the-republic-of-love/ ––––––, “What’s Eating Victor Cusack? Come What May, Queer Embodiment, and the Regulation of Hetero-Masculinity,” Éire-Ireland 48.1 (2013): 291–293. Neary, Fiona, “Civil Partnership and Marriage: LGBT-Q Political Pragmatism and the Normalization Imperative,” Sexualities 19.7 (2016): 757–779. O’Brien, Cormac, “Queering the Irish Stage: Shame, Sexuality, and the Politics of Testimonial,” in Perspectives on Contemporary Irish Theatre, Eds. Thierry Dubost and Anne Etienne (Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017), 251. O’Kelly, Emer, “Absolut Gay Theatre Festival,” Irish Independent, May 16 2010. https:// www.independent.ie/incoming/absolut-gay-theatre-festival-26655603.html O’Reilly, Emily, “Annual Human Rights Lecture – Law Society of Ireland – “Human Rights – An Ombudsman Perspective,”” Ombudsman Europa, June 5th 2015. https:// www.ombudsman.europa.eu/mt/speech/en/60087 O’Toole, Emer, “Asylum Seekers in Ireland Are Intimidated into Silence Over Their Poor Treatment,” The Guardian, 10 May 2019. https://www.theguardian. com/commentisfree/2019/may/10/asylum-seekers-ireland-intimidated-inhumanedirect-provision O’Toole, Emer, “Oscar Wilde: The Critic as Performance Artist,” Mirror Lamp Press 5 (2022): 53–65. Puar, Jasbir K., Terrorist Assemblages: Homonationalism in Queer Times (Durham: Duke University Press, 2007). Shticks, Woody, “Bro Whisperer From Shlong Song,” Youtube.com, 01 May 2018. https:// www.youtube.com/watch?v=5b-qri98aG8 Sontag, Susan, “Notes on “Camp”,” in Essays of the 1960s and 70s, Ed. David Rieff (New York: Library of America, 2013), 259–274. Walcon, Erin and Helen Nicholson, “The Sociable Aesthetics of Amateur Theatre,” Contemporary Theatre Review 27.1 (2017): 19. Walsh, Fintan, “Homelysexuality and the “Beauty” Pageant,” in Crossroads: Performance Studies and Irish Culture (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), 196–209. ––––––, Queer Notions: New Plays and Performances from Ireland (Cork: Cork University Press, 2010). ––––––, Queer Performance in Contemporary Ireland: Dissent and Disorientation (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016). ––––––, “The Politics of Desire,” Irish Theatre Magazine, 27 (2004): 32. Wolff, Janet, The Aesthetics of Uncertainty (New York: Columbia University Press, 2008).

4

Art and the 8th The Feminist Aesthetics of Tara Flynn, Jesse Jones, and the Suffragettes at the Galway Races

Smoke and Mirror Up to Nation The campaign to achieve abortion rights for Irish women, trans men, and non-binary people was theatrical. Protest marches have dramaturgies – costumes, choreographies, choruses.1 Each act of leaving the house in one of Anna Cosgrave’s iconic REPEAL jumpers – braving hissed disapproval and murderous glares – constituted a personal political performance. Many have noted that the act of personal storytelling was essential to Repeal’s success. 2 This too has its theatrics – whether the stories were woven into column inches by writers like Róisín Ingle, 3 Kitty Holland,4 or Lynn Enright 5; proclaimed from the national stage by (my dear friend) Susan Cahill 6; or shared through initiatives like the X-ile Project, In Her Shoes, or Terminations for Medical Reasons Ireland, there was a dramatic frame, deeply considered, to the way personal testimony was shared. Mainstream Irish theatres and companies might have been reluctant to stand for abortion rights, but that didn’t stop the movement for Repeal deploying an activist aesthetics. In a 1995 article that became more pertinent as the 21st century progressed and Irish abortion law did not, Ruth Fletcher puzzled over the lack of participation in Ireland’s lengthy abortion debates by women who’d had abortions. She concluded that, ‘exploring the reasons for Irish women’s post-abortion silence reveals a cycle whereby a political discourse which has evolved without acknowledging women’s experiences then becomes instrumental in silencing those experiences.’ 7 Miriam Haughton’s work on theatre and trauma illuminates the way this cyclical political discourse works. Haughton explores how the abuse of women was hushed up in Ireland not through silencing exactly, but through ‘shadowing’ – by which she means women’s experiences of harm were not censored per se, but, rather, relegated to a less urgent, less important rung of the political and social ladder, and associated with threat and danger, tainting anyone or anything that interacted with them.8 Certainly, this is true of women’s experiences of the 8th amendment. Sometimes, the traces of those experiences could be found hanging on walls, seen and DOI: 10.4324/9781003205708-5

Art and the 8th 127 unseen,a or between the pages of books, almost yet not quite spoken.9 And yet, as Eric Oland argues, before the concerted feminist campaign that led to the 2018 referendum, personal narratives about abortion were almost absent from Irish public discourse.10 Ireland’s theatre culture had a role to play in these mechanisms of shadow and shame – certainly, mainstream Irish theatre companies and institutions produced very little explicitly pro-choice art. By the second decade of the 21st century, the shadows were filled with women’s anger. So, when Ireland set out to culturally commemorate the centenary of its revolutionary period, many Irish women were faced with complex experiences of national belonging and identity. In 2016, Fiach McConghaill, then artistic director of The Abbey Theatre, announced the ‘Waking the Nation’ programme, a series of plays intended to mark the centenary of the 1916 Easter Rising, and thus the proclamation of the Irish Republic.11 McConghaill promised that the programme would ‘interrogate rather than celebrate the past’ and encourage Irish people, ‘in a year of national introspection,’ to ‘ask urgent questions about the safely guarded narrative of our nation.’12 90% of the plays were written by men; 80% were directed by men. And women in Irish theatre were indeed encouraged to ask an urgent question, namely: What the Fuck. As columnist Úna Mullaly wrote in the Irish Times, If the Abbey Theatre announced that 90 per cent of its 2016 programme was made up of plays written by women it would be viewed as extraordinary. It would be a ‘statement.’ Yet when the national theatre announced its programme celebrating the 1916 centenary, 90 per cent of the plays programmed are by men. That is not a ‘statement,’ it’s just the norm.13 The Abbey clearly did not care to interrogate the theocratic patriarchy that dashed the feminist dream of a revolutionary independent Irish state, but, to be fair, it didn’t distort reality either. You could say it was enacting a particularly passive version of its traditional role as ‘a mirror up to nation.’ Ireland was a country where women’s questions about the safely guarded narrative of nationalism were hidden and hushed, where women were rarely centre stage. Consider, at the time the Waking the Nation program was announced, 84% of Dáil Eireann consisted of men; 72% of voices on current affairs radio a Suzanne Chan’s gorgeous self-reflective article on her abortion art, “The Fish Weren’t Missed” is a critical reflection on how, in Ireland, abortion stories were all around us, hanging on the walls, but somehow culturally misrecognised. Chan, part of the feminist campaign to repeal the 8th since 1992, painted an abstracted but very legible (and beautiful) work representing her choice to terminate and her lack of regret. It was acquired by the University College Cork in 1995, and, in 2017, it was hanging in University College Cork’s Granary Theatre. Chan’s story was publicly told, yet silent. In plain sight and unseen. In the essay, she considers yet seems to reject the feminist strategy of silence in abortion activism. Chan, Suzanna, “Speaking of Silence, Speaking of Art, Abortion and Ireland,” Irish Studies Review 27.1 (2019): 73–93.

128  Art and the 8th programmes were male voices14; over 90% of board members of Irish private companies were men15; men comprised 79% of broadsheet byline writers16; 82% of those at professorial level at University were men17; 87% of produced screenplay writers in the Irish film industry were by men18; and men, of course, comprised 100% of bishops in the Catholic church, an organisation that continued to have immense influence over Ireland’s education and health sectors as well as much prominence in the Irish media. One hundred years since the Republic was proclaimed, and the gendered reality of Ireland remained a far cry from the egalitarian promises of the 1916 Proclamation, which, claiming the allegiances of Irishmen and Irishwomen guaranteed ‘religious and civil liberty, equal rights, and equal opportunities to all its citizens.’ The Waking the Nation programme did not interrogate this sexism; it simply reproduced it. When McConghaill was first questioned on the exclusion of women from his centenary programme, he infamously responded: ‘Them’s the Breaks.’ He tweeted: ‘All my new play choices are based on the quality of the play, form, and theme.’ Further, he claimed that decisions were not based on gender, but, rather, on, ‘who [he] admired and wanted to work with.’19 And why were so few of the playwrights he admired and wanted to work with women? Mathematically speaking, the probability that a gender selection of 90% men would occur at random is very tiny.20 We can’t pretend The Abbey’s exclusion of women was just a weird anomaly. It was a perfectly representative part of an Irish theatre scene in which men dominate the main stages and festival line ups, as well as an Irish public sphere in which men dominate media, politics, the arts, the academy, religion, and just about everything else. And it highlighted one of the great frustrations of the movement for Repeal: namely, how can women he heard when men are doing all the talking? The anger started to seep. Lian Bell, a freelance Dublin-based theatremaker, issued a clarion call to women and allies on social media. Maeve Stone, associate producer of Pan Pan Theatre Company, coined the hashtag #WakingtheFeminists (#WTF). Women with media platforms, such as Úna Mullaley, Belinda McKeon, Sara Keating, and Aoife Barry amplified the message. Celebrities around the world posed with signs showing their support. On social media platforms, on the airwaves, and in public discourse, the conversation and frustration continued to grow. In response to this furor, McConghaill and The Abbey apologised for the initial reaction, admitted that the 2016 program did not represent gender equality, and offered its stage for a public meeting to discuss the marginalisation of women in Irish theatre. Five hundred tickets were sold in under 10 minutes – the fastest selling show in Abbey history. At the meeting, which I write about in detail elsewhere,21 many of the speakers wore ‘Artists Repeal the 8th’ badges, and made explicit links between the ways in which Irish women were denied access to both the national stage and their reproductive rights. Ruth Fletcher frames a cyclical conundrum whereby a political discourse which evolved without acknowledging women’s experiences became instrumental in silencing those experiences. The same can be said of Irish theatre culture. How can women’s experiences, voices, or stories be recognised as of national importance when our cultural institutions pretend they don’t exist?

Art and the 8th 129 In this chapter, I’m going to look at some of the aesthetic strategies adopted by theatre and performance artists working for Repeal. I’ll argue that the aesthetics of previous waves of feminism were of particular importance to Ireland’s campaign for abortion rights. First, I’m going to look at Tara Flynn’s autobiographical one-person show, Not a Funny Word (2017), revisiting some of the ideas about solo and autobiographical performance discussed in Chapter 3, and thinking about how the solo autobiographical form helped Flynn navigate the net of shame and shadow cast over Ireland’s abortion discourse. I’ll argue for the aesthetic throughlines between Flynn’s play and the autobiographical theatre and performance art of pioneering US second wave feminists. Next, I’ll analyse Jesse Jone’s Tremble Tremble (2017), an art installation, performed by legendary dancer Olwen Fourère, that adopts an avant-garde aesthetic to imagine an ancient feminine law with precedent over all others. I’ll consider the figure of the witch in Jones’ work and ask why witch symbolism appears so frequently in abortion activism. If in Chapter 2, I talked about how the avant-garde can arise as a response to activist commitments, here I’m going to explore experimental aesthetics as a strategy in response to a society that shadows women’s rights. Finally, I’ll discuss a performance carried out by three Galway women – Mary McGill, Sarah O’Toole, and Elaine Mears – in 2015. The performers went to Ladies Day at the Galway Races as suffragettes, with sashes reading ‘Repeal the 8th’ and ‘What Century Are We In?’ Pictures of the action went viral online, representing another means through which performance created space for women’s issues outside of the shadow casting Irish public sphere. Throughout this chapter, I’ll focus on aesthetic strategies for insisting on female presence, female significance, and female authority in a context in which female absence, peripherality, and untrustworthiness was so deeply culturally inscribed. At the time of writing, women in Northern Ireland are still struggling to access abortion in spite of legalisation. In the USA, Roe vs Wade has been overturned. It’s my hope that, in naming some aesthetic strategies used in Repeal, in highlighting their connection to the feminisms of the past, this chapter can provide inspiration to feminist artists still struggling to be seen. Not a Funny Word (2017) Comedian and Actress Tara Flynn first shared her abortion story publicly at the Electric Picnic music festival in 2015. Her bravery in putting a face to the narrative of abortion meant that she became an unofficial figurehead of the Repeal campaign. In interview, when I asked her about the decision to take on this activism, she said: Sometimes you’re just up. You have the platform, you have the life experience. And when you’re up, you’re up.22 The sharing of personal abortion stories – anonymously or otherwise – is widely acknowledged to be a significant part of how Repeal was won. Clara Fischer writes that, during Repeal, Irish women ‘aired their often devastating stories concerning the most intimate and private parts of their lives in

130  Art and the 8th order to redress public policy failures.’ She argues that emotional personal narratives cut across public and private spheres, redefining what was private and what was public, and deflecting shame away from women who needed abortions and onto the state whose policies had harmed them.23 Katherine Side’s work argues that the Irish state used privacy as a mode of reproductive control, framing enforced secrecy and shame as a personal right. She traces how personal narratives reversed the direction of this shame, but with careful attention to the great cost borne by those who self-disclosed.24 Flynn was up. Her answer to why she decided to speak about her experiences is self-effacing. Many thousands of women in Ireland had the life experience and many had platforms, but not everyone was able to take the next step. There are social repercussions, professional repercussions, and sometimes mental health repercussions to becoming, as Flynn joked in our interview, ‘the face of abortion.’ Clark Baim, in his book, Staging the Personal, analyses how and why ‘Contemporary theatre has crossed boldly into therapeutic terrain and is now the site of radical self-exposure,’ arguing that what he calls the ‘theatre of personal stories’ is now a genre in itself.25 Baim is focused on the therapeutic effects of the theatre of personal stories, and he keeps a keen eye on the risks involved when difficulties are unresolved or performers are vulnerable. This insight is important in the context of Repeal, because many people publicly performing their abortion stories were hurt by the experience. But for Flynn, a target for much viciousness, her theatre piece provided respite. Her abortion story had been circulating publicly for two years before Not a Funny Word staged. That’s a long time to have the anal retentive fruits of a recovering Catholic nation flung at you. Flynn never set out to be a lobbyist. She says in interview with The Independent, ‘I am just a fecking eejit actor comedian who had a crisis pregnancy.’26 Staged near the end of a long campaign that had taken a significant emotional toll, Flynn told me that Not a Funny Word was her treat, her healing, and a space to be herself. This made me think of THEATREclub, who, as I discussed in Chapter 2, built a therapeutic process into their work. It made me consider how sometimes the art itself – its making, its performance – can provide the joy, community, and creativity needed to keep activists healthy and determined. How sometimes it can be part of the self-care or epimelesthai sautou so essential to carrying on. Though a solo performance, Flynn’s play was developed in collaboration with director Philly McMahon of THISISPOPBABY and composer Alma Kelleher. It was performed as a work in progress from 11 to 13 May 2017 at The Abbey’s Peacock Theatre, and embarked on a short tour in 2018, strategically just in advance of the referendum. The play is a comedy. And a musical. It’s a musical comedy about abortion. It begins, ‘Hello, my name is Tara, and I’m a filthy slut,’ before breaking into a song on shame, Irish women are saints, if they’re your mother Whores or virgins, one or the other

Art and the 8th 131 Fáile, Fáilte, Céad Míle Fáilte, 100,000 ways to fault you27 Recognising and then resolutely refusing the stigma that Irish society has for so long heaped on women who chose abortion was important to Flynn. The play seems to epitomise the redirection of shame that Fischer and Side write about. Of her opening, Flynn says: ‘People call me shameless. A shameless hussy. I wanted to reclaim that, that’s why the first line of the show is “I am Tara and I’m a filthy slut.” Like let’s just get this right out there. This is what the show is going to be. And it goes then to shame-less, ending with [the song] “Ride for Ireland.” My subtitle: Fuck Shame.’28 Flynn brings us on a journey that many have taken before her, a journey that starts with bad sex on a bean bag, then walks to a pharmacy for the morning after pill, runs through the cold realisation – writ by heavy limbs and nausea – that Plan B has failed, cycles through the knowledge that one does not want to be a parent, drives through furtive online research, through secrets, through telling no one, flies to Holland, where the abortion procedure is performed just as, irony of ironies, Desirée’s 1998 pop hit Life plays on the radio.

Figure 4.1  Tara Flynn curled up under a black coat on an airport chair Photo by permission of Luca Truffarelli

132  Art and the 8th In spite of the anger at social hypocrisy and sexism that bubbles under Flynn’s humour, Not a Funny Word is a surprisingly gentle piece. I argued in Chapter 3 that Solo Performance is a medium with a paradox at its heart. Its direct mode of address highlights the performer/audience relationship, the desire for connection, the need to speak and to listen, but it also emphasises the performer in her solitude, isolation, and loneliness. This is part of why, as argued by theorists such as Jonathan Kalb,29 David Román, Holly Hughes,30 and Deirdre Heddon,31 solo performance, and solo autobiographical performance in particular, has often been used to create space for marginalised constituencies. In a rare joke free passage, Flynn confesses I felt locked out of my most trusted relationships, but I couldn’t risk testing them when I was already so vulnerable. I want to visit my own doctor. I want my mum. But I don’t know what she’ll say. We’ve never had this discussion. It never came up. When people talked about it, they used Going-to-England euphemisms with sighs of relief that it wasn’t happening to them. So mostly, the subject was avoided like the plague. What if my loved ones turn on me when I’m already on the floor? I want someone to give me a cuddle. I want someone to put me to bed. I want my head to stop boiling and my heart to stop pounding. I want someone to tell me everything will be alright, that they don’t judge and here’s a cup of non-judgmental tea.32 The audience is at once that longed for ear and witness to the absence of anyone to listen. Though not usually based on personal stories, a related theatre form, monologue theatre, became the predominant mode of new Irish theatrical writing, particularly by men, during the Celtic Tiger period. Monologue theatre consists of one or more characters speaking directly to the audience rather than to each other. Eamonn Jordan thinks that the confessional direct address characteristic of the genre coincides with Irish social alienation from traditional community and family. People were spending increasing time alone – in single bedrooms, on the internet, consuming globalised cultural products. There was an Oprahfication of society – rewards and praise for the public sharing of personal trauma for therapeutic purposes. All this was expressed culturally in the monologue form.33 In Jonathan Kalb’s work on solo performance, he builds on the ideas of Zymunt Baumanb to draw similar lines between socio-economic forces and

b Bauman says, ‘The way individual people define individually their individual problems and try to tackle them deploying individual skills and resources is the sole remaining “public issue” and the sole object of “public interest.”’ Zymunt Bauman, Liquid Modernity (Polity: Cambridge, 2000), 72.

Art and the 8th 133 aesthetic forms. He says that, in a capitalist culture focused on the individual above collective social issues, ‘However little we may really be interested in anyone else, we do seem willing to listen to people’s individual stories as possible keys to our own individual development – and that is the narrow political opportunity the solo performers exploit.’34 Along with Jordan and Kalb, I am interested how solo and monologue aesthetics in theatre seem to arise from social, political, and economic pressures. I’m also interested in the strategic activist use of the individual story as a hook to raise awareness of wider demographic trends. But I wonder if solo performance and monologue theatre don’t also arise at times when public dialogue isn’t getting us anywhere. Maybe they’re a response to media landscapes where certain issues are, in Haughton’s terms, shadowed, and where, when they do make the airwaves, they are unsatisfyingly framed as fractious debates between two poles.c This antagonistic format is ostensibly to preserve impartiality. But it’s also, I think, because producers underestimate audiences, believing they want dog fights more than nuanced discussion.d Dialogic public debate structures, for all their human contact, are strangely more sanitised than one person’s story; there is no space within them for vulnerability, for cognitive dissonance, for conflicting emotions, for messy lived experience. Flynn’s thoughts on her play’s activist intentions seem to bolster this intuition, The abortion debate was always held in one space – which is the debating space – you know: fecking college lads, point of order, all that. It was always held in that way. But now people are talking about this in a very human way. They are talking to their friends about how they got pregnant: ‘was it your man,’ ‘oh my god,’ ‘how did it happen?’ Those conversations weren’t happening with a podium and a gavel and I wanted to help them to happen. So if there was any strategy to the work it was ‘can we please speak about this like we’re fully-rounded human beings?’35 In this respect, the way Flynn uses solo autobiographical performance bears more resemblance to the work of second wave feminist theatre and

c Even the Irish Citizen’s Assembly on Abortion, Praised by many as an example of democracy in action, adhered to this structure. As Katherine’s Sides work on the assembly shows, even when personal stories were allowed within the information given to the assembly, they were framed in a for and against fashion, from three people who had chosen abortion and three people who had not. Side, Katherine, “‘Changed Utterly’: The Citizens’ Assembly on the Eighth Amendment,” Feminist Encounters: A Journal of Critical Studies in Culture and Politics 6.1 (2022): 1–12. d Or maybe it’s because someone at RTÉ genuinely believes that a pundit from the Iona institute is uniquely qualified to offer the Irish public valuable factual information on any and every social issue.

134  Art and the 8th performance artists than it does to the more contemporary monologue work of the Celtic Tiger period studied by Jordan, Brian Singleton,36 and Claire Wallace.37 In the ‘60s and ‘70s, US feminists used autobiographical performance as, to quote Deirdre Heddon, ‘a means to reveal otherwise invisible lives, to resist marginalisation and objectification and to become, instead, speaking subjects with self-agency.’38 In short, they used autobiographical performance for the core second wave feminist task of insisting on the personal as political. For example, in Carolee Schneeman’s landmark solo performance art piece Interior Scroll (1975), she pulled a scroll from her vagina and read a response to sexist criticisms of her work, I met a happy man a structuralist filmmaker -but don’t call me that it’s something else I dohe said we are fond of you you are charming but don’t ask us to look at your films we cannot there are certain films we cannot look at the personal clutter the persistence of feelings the hand-touch sensibility the diaristic indulgence the painterly mess the dense gestalt the primitive techniques39 Schneeman responds to an artworld and public sphere that tells women their experiences are of only peripheral cultural importance, that shames them for centring their lived experience, their emotions, and their bodies. Like Flynn’s claim that she’s a filthy slut, Schneeman’s use of her body and personal narrative reverses the direction of shame in the way Side implies. It is now the artworld excluding and belittling Schneemann that seems primitive and cluttered with (patriarchal) ideology. Mierle Laderman Ukeles’ now canonical performances Maintenance Artworks (1973) responded to the fact that as a mother of young children in a heterosexual relationship she spent all day cooking, cleaning, and caregiving, and had no time to make art. So, she performed maintenance work in a gallery, and she demanded that it be read aesthetically. In the 1969 manifesto that laid the foundation for these performances, Laderman Ukeles communicates her anger at the boring, invisible, low status, uncompensated work that occupies her days as a married woman and mother. She points to

Art and the 8th 135 the hypocrisy that within the avant-garde art world repetition and systems are worthy of aesthetic consideration, but the systemic, repetitive work of maintenance – whether women’s domestic labour or the low-paid work of public sanitation – is unseen.40 Like some of the feminist aesthetic theorists I discussed in the introductory chapter, she critiques the very privileging of creation in art. What labour is going to maintain that creation? Laderman Ukeles steps out of the shadows and onto the front steps of the art gallery, where she performs drudgery aesthetically, painting designs in water with a mop on the paving stones, art that will disappear almost as soon as she creates it. She complicates Marcel Duchamp’s famous theory of the artistic readymade. For Duchamp, any ordinary object can be elevated to the position of art through the choice of the artist. Laderman Ukeles shows that so too can the artist’s actions, even if those actions are ones that – due to systemic inequalities based on class, race, gender, or ability – have not been freely chosen. She reveals how the work of the female artist is excluded from the avant-garde and centres the aesthetics of her experiences, and, by extension, women’s experiences. While autobiography had of course been used in theatre and performance before the second wave, Heddon argues that the movement’s insistence on the place of women’s explicitly personal everyday experience in the realm of the aesthetic, in the realm of contemporary art and theatre, was a new and radical political gesture.41 For me, Flynn’s aesthetic rendering of her abortion story sits firmly within this tradition. Where abortion, a common female experience, was invisible, mention of it indulgent at best and immoral at worst, Not a Funny Word placed it unapologetically at the centre of aesthetic practice. The second wave of feminism split and disintegrated in part because of its failure to adequately address problems with essentialism. Its categorisation of woman obscured differences of class, race, and, to a lesser extent given the prominence of lesbian women in the second wave, sexuality. This critique can also be levelled at solo autobiographical performance itself. Whether the performer intends it or not, Heddon cautions that speaking as a member of a marginalised group can often be read as speaking for that group. She notes that the power of the performer’s real body, enacting the performer’s real story in real space creates an illusion of truth and authority that belies the editing and invention of the artistic process. Flynn’s story is not every woman’s story; she has, by her own account, been hit pretty hard with the privilege stick, being able-bodied, cisgendered, straight, white, and from Cork. But hers was also an important type of abortion story to tell – the ‘non-sympathetic’ kind; the consensual casual sex without sufficient contraceptive vigilance kind; the most stigmatised kind in the Irish context. By this I by no means imply that sharing the more ‘sympathetic’ abortion stories involving rape or fatal foetal abnormality was less difficult. You only need to listen to, for example, Siobhán Whelan’s account of what she went through when she found out her pregnancy couldn’t survive42 to imagine the toll of reliving that trauma over and again publicly in the name of Repeal.

136  Art and the 8th These stories were of immense strategic value too, highlighting the myriad unseen harms of the 8th amendment. Flynn’s story was strategic in a different way, because Repeal was fighting for abortion rights not only in the case of FFA, and it was important to be able to counter anti-choicers who claimed that allowances could be made for FFA without legislating for elective abortion. Her name is Tara, and while she might have the privilege to be able to say that she’s a filthy slut, she’s still, in the eyes of many, a filthy slut. If you’re paying close attention to the humorously recounted beanbag scene, you might note that Flynn’s charming impregnator catches her somewhat unawares, and that his free range premature ejaculation was not something she had expected or would have consented to. But you’d need to be paying attention, because this isn’t emphasised by the script or dramaturgy. When I asked Flynn about this, she said she was aware of the dubious nature of her consent in the scene – and in real life – but that she didn’t want to highlight it. She wanted ‘to help people understand that just because it’s non-sympathetic abortion, it doesn’t mean it’s not a crisis.’43 Autobiography is always selective, and that selectivity often has a politics. Heddon, while acknowledging the dangers of essentialism in second-wave feminist autobiographical performance, says: ‘that the bios of women’s lives were represented at all seems politically significant, particularly given that to this point all women had been so markedly invisible.’44 I feel similarly about Flynn’s work in the context of Irish women’s shadowed reproductive lives; while it does not and cannot represent the struggles of more marginalised women, it still performs enormous work in advocating for reproductive rights that benefits those demographics. And just because it was easier for Flynn to speak, doesn’t mean it was easy. It was not easy, either, to he heard in the entrenched social context where abortion stories were siphoned off from mainstream public discourse. Getting Not a Funny Word staged was a challenge. The Peacock programmed it as work in progress, although it was far more polished than manys a work out of progress I’ve seen in that same space. Testament to the reluctance of mainstream Irish theatre venues and institutions to engage with Repeal that I flagged above, by Flynn’s account, it was extremely hard to book the play around the country. The creative team even had venues cancel on them due to the politics of the piece. It is something of a theatre tragedy that this pivotal piece of autobiographical Irish theatre has, to date, only been performed ten times. When Jordan, Kalb, and others speak to the Oprahfication of society, in which unequal social structures remain unexamined while people receive attention and social cachet for sharing individual traumas and histories, I broadly agree with their analysis, but I do have to ask who has the opportunity to exploit the ‘limited political window’ that Kalb identifies.45 In Ireland, due to shame and shadow, those telling their abortion stories were very certainly not feted for talking to our nation’s Oprahs. However, social media in the context of feminist activism provides a post-Oprahfication effect: it allows women to join the dots between their individual experiences and structural oppression.

Art and the 8th 137 This was the mike to be grabbed. This was what enabled the grassroots to grow, eventually convincing some state institutions, such as The Abbey, to make small gestures in support of Repeal. But putting women’s experiences centre stage, battling the shadowing, shaming, silencing effects of Ireland’s entrenched, religiously inscribed patriarchy, was never as simple as calling Joe Duffy’s Liveline. Feminists had to fight for access to the limited political window of personal narrative, just like the second-wave feminists did before them. Flynn’s Not a Funny Word serves an evident activist purpose, and I find it immensely interesting that in using her art to help achieve abortion rights for Irish people, she alighted on many of the same aesthetic techniques as the US second wave feminists used in their flight for abortion rights 50 years previous – she cut through masculine epistemologies of assumed objectivity and rational debate with her personal clutter, persistence of feeling, and diaristic indulgence. She insisted on the place of her intimate experiences in the space of the national theatre. Those experiences, it turns out, were of immense national importance. Tremble Tremble (2017) In the introductory chapter, I noted that feminist aesthetic scholars are often cautious in their taxonomies. Carolyn Korsmeyer, for example, warns that it’s impossible to define a specific feminist aesthetic, as feminist work is so heterogenous.46 Rita Felski, argues that you can’t talk about a feminist or gendered aesthetic because there’s no legitimate case for classing any style as feminine.47 It’s a little like Fintan Walsh’s argument, which we spoke about in Chapter 3, that it’s disingenuous to speak about gay theatre, because gay is a subject position, not a genre.48 Felski calls for attention to the social, historical, and cultural contexts of production and reception of women’s work and admonishes against chasing some elusive ‘feminist aesthetic.’ Felski’s work was pioneering, and she is a master, I mean mistress, I mean girlboss of juicily contextualised feminist literary analysis. Still, I’m not entirely satisfied by abandoning the hunt for feminist aesthetics. I agree that reading art in its social and cultural context is absolutely the most fun academic thing to do with art, and, more, along with Janet Wolff, I think that these contexts create aesthetic communities that shape our sense of beauty, artistic production, and artistic reception. However, I also think it’s possible to look at the feminist art that arises from a particular time and place or in response to a particular issue (like, for example, abortion rights) and see common aesthetic themes, forms, strategies. For one thing, there will be stories, subjects and other content broadly of interest to people within a specific activist movement, and, more, as I demonstrated more fully in Chapter 2, when you’re using art in an activist way – to create social progress for marginalised groups – the aims and objectives of the activism can lead to particular aesthetic forms and strategies. I think the autobiographical consciousness raising I just analysed in terms of Flynn’s theatre is a good example of this. Korsmeyer says, ‘what feminist artists do share is a sense of the historic subordination of women and an awareness of how art practices have perpetuated

138  Art and the 8th that subordination.’49 What I’d like to show in relation to Tremble Tremble, is that this sense of injustice, this recognition of an ideologically curated absence, this awareness of the lady-shaped gap in our art history books and on our stages, these things, when imbued with activist intent, can create aesthetic throughlines in both form and content. For example, one of the characteristics I observe in feminist art, and feminist art that takes aim at reproductive justice in particular, is a return to the past, both to the political strategies and aesthetics of previous waves of feminism and to reclaimed, rediscovered, or reimagined women’s histories and mythologies. In some ways, this is counter-intuitive. The narrative of feminist progress – and I don’t want to be too postmodern by saying narrative, because I mean not just the narrative but the actual, demonstrable political and material advancement of women that has been achieved through feminist action – means that most women know and appreciate that we live in a time with more gender justice than the witches burned in the 16th and 17th centuries, the women who became property of their husbands after marriage in the 18th, the women who couldn’t vote in the 19th, or the women consigned to lives of domestic drudgery in the first half of 20th (and beyond!) – and yet it’s to the past that feminists often look for inspiration, for figures of resistance, and for models of the future. And that’s not unique to the current wave either. Veteran feminist theatre scholar Sue-Ellen Case remarks of the second wave that ‘at first it seemed as though visions of the future were to come from the past.’50 Still, in another way, the backwards lens makes sense – it’s insisting on presence where our culture tells us there is only absence (and Them’s the Breaks). It’s a logical corrective to the shared feminist sense Korsmeyer articulates that women have had some systematically sucky experiences and wow art has done some of the sucking. Rediscovering, reclaiming, and reimagining the past is a way of saying that we are here because they were there. And we know, deep in our bones, that they were there, because, well, here we are. Jesse Jones’ work is emblematic of this reaching into the past to create alternative presents and futures. As Sarah Kelleher says, ‘she has garnered an international reputation by developing a practice which focuses on excavating and re-articulating the embedded political and social history of everyday life.’51 She’s a conceptual artist, an avant-garde one, and someone whose work is underwritten by Marxist and feminist commitments. For example, a previous exhibition, No More Fun and Games (2016), created a feminist parasite institution within its host, Dublin’s Hugh Lane Gallery. Jones, alongside her collaborators, unearthed some of the gallery’s forgotten artworks by women. Visitors were guided by a gigantic hand with a pointing finger (that of Jones’ mother, in fact) printed on a long curtain that wove on a track through the gallery. The hand led to an oil painting by Isobel Gloag, last displayed in the 1930s, called The Woman with the Puppets (1915). In it, a naked woman lies back, carelessly trailing marionettes from her fingers.52 There is a man-doll in wig and gown, and two little fellows in evening wear, their attire symbolising position and influence, yet this power neutralised by the scale of the woman, by the fact that they are flaccid bodies, given life only by their

Art and the 8th 139 gigantic mistress, I mean master, I mean whatever. Lisa Godson draws on the theory of Susan Stewart53 to argue that when faced with giants – such as the hand guiding visitors through the gallery or the puppeteer in relation to the men – we can’t apprehend or understand the figure in its entirety, but rather we understand it in parts; we have a sense that it reaches outside of the sphere of our consciousness. In this way, the gigantic works as a metaphor for the abstract authority of the state.54,e And the female gigantic, in a state like Ireland that diminished women legally almost since its inception, creates an alternative authority, an alternative history, and an alternative reality. Jones feels that intergenerational memory and empathy are key to feminism. She says, ‘Something about feminism that’s really important to me is to not think of things in terms of first wave, second wave, third wave feminism – to go deeper and actually think about how a woman might have felt in 16th century France or in 1930s Ireland. To have that intergenerational empathy is a really important act of political solidarity and it’s very hard to do that in a tangible way, except through art or culture.’55 This commitment seems especially relevant to abortion activism, because in countries where abortion is illegal, women are shamed and stigmatised into silence. In Ireland, at least 168,703 Irish women are recorded as having travelled to the UK alone to terminate pregnancies between the years of 1980–20165,6f but, during the same period, abortion stories were all but absent from the public realm: shadowed, in Haughton’s term. Under these conditions, thinking – deeply – about what it feels like to be a woman who needs an abortion in the context of criminalisation, stigma, and shame is all we have to stand in place of a reliable historical record, all we have to counteract the legal fiction of an abortion free Ireland. Tremble Tremble is a ‘bewitching of the judicial system.’ Jones collaborated with legendary dancer Olwen Fouère, curator Tessa Giblin, Sound Designer Susan Stenger, and a host of film production and technical experts. The production programme also credits – among other professionals – object fabricators, research advisors, and production advisors from diverse disciplines, which should give a sense of the intermediality of the piece and also of the depth of expertise that informed it. Jones created an immersive experience

e This reading is really nicely complemented by Dorothy Hunter’s review. Hunter observes that each piece of work in Jones’ exhibition, ‘is a fragment of practice, a vague suggestion of something concealed and revealed in equal measure, through abstract painting, suggestive place, and myth or imagination. In this way, art functions like a film still, or isolated phrase of music: ungrounded and endlessly suggestive for it.’ Hunter, Dorothy, “Jesse Jones: No More Fun and Games,” Sculpture.org, May 11 2016. https://sculpture.org/blogpost/1860259/349372/ Jesse-Jones-NO-MORE-FUN-AND-GAMES f This statistic gives a sense of how common an experience abortion was for Irish women during criminalisation but is also a significant under-estimation of the women who had abortions during the period, as many women who accessed terminations in the UK would not have given their Irish address, and with the availability of medical abortion many women illegally procured abortion pills and carried out their own terminations at home. It also fails to represent women who, like Flynn, went to countries other than the UK to access abortion. Finally, it only represents women travelling from the Republic of Ireland, and not from The North, where abortion was also illegal.

140  Art and the 8th blending video art, dance, sculpture, sound art, and performance. Live, the piece was activated by female invigilators moving curtains and performing rituals within the space; in Dublin, Jones herself invigilated. The piece has evolved from its original format at the Irish pavilion of the Venice Biennial in 2017, and, wherever it has exhibited, Jones has worked something of the place and space into the artwork. For example, in Edinburgh, it included a ‘scold’s bridle,’ an artefact reminiscent of the city’s witch trials. In Singapore, it included a burning table, a tool for burning offerings – usually money and paper – to honour those who have come before us, and on which Jones burned a copy of an Irish 1821 bill to repeal existing witchcraft laws. In Dublin, where the piece exhibited one week after the referendum to Repeal the 8th was won, she incorporated a millstone, on which the slow grind of the law was enacted symbolically by the invigilators. And, of course, the only thing that I could feel walking into the sonorously echoing, cave-like embrace of the installation was the energy of Repeal, a sense of feminist power at the heart of Dublin city, at the heart of a social movement now loud and unabashed where it had been silent and shadowed for so long. If Dele Jegede observes that African art objects taken from the social contexts and displayed in museums are emblematic of artistic decapitation,57 similarly, there was no way for me to experience this work outside of the feminist and legal context that had inspired it. This art was part of a body, part of a feminine authority evoked by the towering, gigantic Fouére. I was part of that body too. Tremble Tremble encloses you in a womb-like lair, bounded by swathes of fabric, upon which giant arms guide us, define the space, and embrace those within. At a central point, the hands join, creating a cyclical feeling, like the space itself is subtly dancing. The millstone, for me, evoked the magic of holy wells. Within the stone sat a sculpted bone. I didn’t know when I attended the exhibition that the bone is modelled on that of Lucy, a 3.2 million-yearold female ancestor of humanity, whose remains are a key to our history, and also a reminder of female presence within that history. Fouère narrates the imagined death and preservation through millennia of Lucy, her body killed and cocooned by the earth. The sculpture is also supposed to evoke the Ishango bone, a Paleolithic artefact, found in the Congo, and thought to be over 20,000 years old. The man-made markings on the bone might represent the birth of mathematics, or they might represent lunar and menstrual cycles.g Not knowing this context didn’t make the sculpture and the ritual surrounding it any less resonant for me. It felt ancient, feminine, and intrinsically about the body, what we inscribe on it and how central it is to natural and social orders. The soundscape complements this – it echoes, exaggerates and distorts nature. It evokes rocks and water moving like slow machines.

g I personally don’t see how the two ideas are opposed – couldn’t observation of the menstrual cycle have contributed to the birth of mathematics? Girls invented math, okay? That’s just archeology. Don’t @ me.

Art and the 8th 141

Figure 4.2  Tremble Tremble. Two giant arms embrace a black box space swathed in dark curtains Photo by permission of Ros Kavanagh

This uncanny, out-of-time space is the realm of the witch, the giant. On two projection screens, Olwen Fouère’s hypnotic body – strong, sinewy, towering above us – moves in ways that Tessa Giblin writes are also influenced by the elements of nature.58 As Shonagh Hill, the scholar who has written most extensively on Fouère’s contribution to Irish theatre and performance, explains, ‘[Fouère’s] distinctive and vigorous physical performance style underscores the ways in which limiting myths of femininity are inscribed on, and resisted by, the embodied experiences of women. […] [Her] performances intervene in a body of cultural myths which depend on repetition to achieve their force and perpetuate their meanings; meanings which are inscribed on and silence female bodies.’59 Fouère’s physical dominance in Jones’ piece is an extension of this work – she stands against the patriarchally constructed mythology of female absence. As Hill’s work implies, she is in dialogue with the female presence of the past and yet contributing to new and evolving mythologies of woman and of nation. Fouère’s gravelly, resonant voice recites a text that includes pastiche from the Bideford Witch trials of the 17th century – Did I disturb ye good people, I hopes I disturb ye…Have you had enough yet? Or do you still have time for chaos – and from the Malleus Maleficarum, a 15th century text by Catholic clergyman

142  Art and the 8th and inquisitor Heinrich Kramer, which functioned as a ‘how to’ guide for identifying and exterminating witches right into the 17th century.h Fouère’s long grey hair and the texture of her skin also make a cultural absence present – that of the power and beauty of an older woman. And it seems important to me, in this piece about female reproductive power in particular, that Fouère’s physicality does not evoke cultural ideas of maternity and fertility. Fouère uses language that mimics that of the legal system, even while her gigantic body empties its symbols of their power. She articulates a new law, one based on the female body and its power. This is the law of Utera Gigantae: Whereas, from the moment a human begins to take its place of dwelling in the maternal belly, it lives inside a giant. The state acknowledges and affirms that the life of the giant, in virtue of her status as the origin of all life, shall be protected and vindicated before all other emerging lives she may generate. The law of In Utera Gigantae is antecedent and superior to all manmade law. Be it ordained and enacted that the giant from which life emerges possesses an inalienable and imprescriptible power to create and to destroy the life she carries. This power is the care of the giant exclusively and shall not be cognisable by any laws of man. The state accordingly guarantees to pass no law attempting to infringe upon the fundamental rights of In Utera Gigantae.60 At times, Fouère’s mouth, enlarged and displayed vertically, enunciates this first, feminine law, evoking that most terrifying of female monstrosities – vagina dentata. At others, with movements that, like the soundscape, echo rivers, mountains, rocks, seas, Fouère toys with the wooden furniture of a colonial courtroom, pushing it, upturning it, staring at it as it lies tiny and inconsequential in her hands. It feels as though she is playing with the artefacts of an interesting but ultimately inconsequential civilisation. Máiréad Enright, who acted as a research advisor to Jones, helping her to find a legal language for her concept, sees the work as part of a possible foundational future legal order and a counter-point to the ‘cautious moribund legalism’ that so long defined the Irish state response to abortion. It replaces this stale and immovable legal monolith with a ‘vibrant, dispersed and woman-centred productive power.’61 In interviews, Jones is very explicit about the relationship of the piece to Irish abortion law; she talks about Tremble Tremble mobilising the energy

h Okay, this story is too good not to footnote. Kramer was expelled by the local bishop from Innsbruck, where he was originally tasked with finding and trying witches. He got kicked out because of his pervy obsession with the sexual habits of a woman he was investigating for witchcraft, Helena Scheuberin. Kramer then scuttled off to Cologne and wrote the Malleus Maleficarum in defense of his methods. It was wildly successful – only the bible was more widely read in the 15th century. So you could say – if you were feeling uncharitable – that the most influential text on finding and killing witches in history was written in vengeance for an unrequited boner.

Art and the 8th 143 of Repeal as a work of imagination, estranging and abstracting the law.62 And, in some ways, it is very strange that a piece so critical of the country it represented should have been chosen as Ireland’s contribution at the Venice Biennial. Certainly, it must have been uncomfortable for the Irish ambassador standing on the stage with Giblin and Jones at the opening of the event when Jones spoke about Savita Halappanavar, about her conflicted relationship with national identity, and asked the question, ‘How can I represent my country when my country does not represent me?’63 Tessa Giblin, who commissioned and curated the piece, explains, ‘there is no getting around the fact that the artist is working from a specific place, activating an artwork in what feels much like a temporary embassy on foreign soil.’64 Giblin talks about ‘Jones’ determination to create an alternative site of state, emerging from the very real social change that has been sweeping Ireland in recent years.’65 In a lecture given in 2020 for the Bik Van der Pol summer school, Giblin explains how she encouraged the presence of the Irish President, Michael D. Higgins, at the Biennial. He accepted – the first sitting president to attend the event – and speechified, as only our adored hobbit leader can, about the alchemy of art and the political. This was significant, because, while Michael D’s longstanding commitment to women’s reproductive rights before his presidency is well documented,i the Irish presidency is constitutionally a neutral role, and sitting presidents are not supposed to comment on matters of political dispute. And so Michael D’s support of this feminist project at Venice was, arguably, the closest thing to solidarity with Repeal that he could express, particularly because he attended the exhibition enroute to visit the pope, a gesture which Giblin describes as ‘an act of political theatre.’66 The avant-garde nature of Jones’ practice helped to make such theatre possible. There’s a plausible deniability regarding what Fourère’s witch, incanting the law of the gigantic uterus through her vagina mouth, might symbolise. (I mean, you’d have to be some eejit to find it convincing, but it doesn’t need to be convincing – only plausible.) Alongside Repeal, Jones cites the work of Italian feminist Silvia Federici as a major impetus for Tremble Tremble. Federici was once an activist in the Italian feminist second wave. The Italian Wages for Housework movement also attempted to upturn patriarchal structures by invoking powerful and

i In February 1983, when the 8th amendment had yet to go before the electorate, Michael D, then Mayor of Galway, called the speeches in the Dáil ‘monumental in their hypocrisy,’ and cited the words of Land League activist Michael Davitt 100 years previous: if the Irish had a weakness worse than drink it was moral cowardice. Of the proposed amendment he said, ‘It expresses no concern for the thousands of women who begin a lonely journey on the boat to England.’ He called the referendum ‘callous’ and said, ‘The people behind it are mounting campaigns that are sinister and undemocratic and only half above the surface.’ Needless to say, these opinions were not popular ones in the early 1980s, and Higgin’s outspoken anti-8th views likely contributed to the loss of his Dáil seat in 1982. Finlan, Michael, “O’Higgins Says Amendment Wording Crazy,” Irish Times 14 Feb 1983. P.7

144  Art and the 8th magical female figures from the past, with its famous rallying cry, Tremate, Tremate, Le Streghe Son Tornate (Tremble Tremble, The Witches Are Back). In her now classic 2004 Marxist feminist text, Caliban and the Witch, Federici shows that the development of capitalism was based on the subjugation of women’s social power, institutionalising women’s unpaid domestic labour as an unseen grid to support the industrial exploitation of the male worker. She explores the witch trials of the 16th and 17th centuries as an integral part of this capitalist patriarchal process.67 In Federici’s essay to accompany Tremble Tremble, she speaks of how the body has long stood as a limit to a capitalist order, saying ‘our body is a receptacle of powers, capacities, and resistances, that have been developed in a long process of co-evolution with our natural environment, as well as intergenerational practices that have made it a natural limit to exploitation.’ For Federici, this natural limit is not just about individual decisions or social processes but also about the needs and desires created in us by ‘millions of years of material evolution,’ including ‘the need for the sun, for the blue sky and the green of trees, for the smell of the woods and the oceans, the need for touching, smelling, sleeping, making love.’68 This return to the body as a challenge to capitalism and patriarchy, as its own kind of law, is central to Tremble Tremble, as is Federici’s insistence on our physical connectedness to the past, and the body as a site of knowledge about unwritten history. I can see how Jones has learned to think of feminism not in terms of waves, but in terms of what she describes as a ‘sedimentary, layered way that feels prehistoric and continuous.’69 While Jones is emphatic that her relationship with the past is more than an engagement with different waves of feminism, it’s interesting that the iconography and slogans of the second wave are so central to Tremble Tremble. Especially because a major aim of the second wave in Italy – the legalisation of abortion – was also the aim of the Repeal movement. And it wasn’t only in Italy that witches surfed the second wave. In the US, Robin Morgan’s performance protest group W.I.T.C.H (Women’s International Terrorist Conspiracy from Hell) dressed up in pointy hats and black robes and pulled anti-capitalist and anti-patriarchal stunts. They turned up to the Wall Street stock exchange, demanding they be allowed to speak to Satan. They released white mice into a bridal fair. Laisa Schweigert 2018 Master’s thesis traces the revival of W.I.T.C.H. (although the T now stands for Troublemaker, which is a crying shame) during the Trump presidency.70 The witches reappeared when, through Trump’s Supreme Court appointments and an emboldened Christian right, women’s reproductive rights, and specifically the right to abortion guaranteed by Roe vs Wade in 1973, were made so precarious. In Ireland, We Face This Land, an art video by Sarah Maria Griffin and Dave Tynan,71 featured over 30 Irish women on a beach, entering the sea, reciting a poem by Griffin which begins, Centuries ago, Women accused of witchcraft faced, amongst other ordeals,

Art and the 8th 145 Trial by water Tied to a chair or run under a boat If she survives the drowning and floats She’s a witch. If she dies, she’s a woman We are not witches but if the church and state insists Then let us be the descendants of all the witches they could not drown This heirloom of trauma, this curse This agony of water in order to hold agency over our bodies Not all of us have survived, the waves do not part There are no miracles here 72 Griffin’s poem, and Griffin and Tynan’s film – in which 30 black clad women framed by the elements create a coven-like effect – tell us something about why the figure of the witch lends itself aesthetically to art that is also abortion activism. These works evoke female power and anger, but also female persecution. The women, like the witches drowned and burned in the past, are the victims of men who believe themselves righteous. One of the challenges of abortion activism – in Ireland, as elsewhere – is the search for symbols to represent the movement. This is part of why personal narratives are so important – they allow nuance, narrative, they can’t be reduced to a soundbite. But in public campaigning, a visual language is necessary, but the fundament of women’s choice, women’s agency is hard to translate in this way. The anti-choice crowd have co-opted foetuses and pregnant bellies (the latter also beloved of people choosing stock photos for articles about abortion, even though by the time you’re really showing you’re at a stage of pregnancy where abortion is illegal in almost all circumstances almost everywhere in the world). Foetal imagery completely erases women and their many complex reasons for choosing abortion. Even the coat-hanger, adopted by pro-choice activists to represent the dangers backstreet abortions pose to women has been re-appropriated by anti-choicers as a symbol of female barbarity towards innocent unborn life. I think part of the problem is that abortion activism has two opposing assertions with two very different kinds of affect. The first is that women and pregnant people are victims and survivors of a violently patriarchal system that would rather we died than exercised control over our fertility. The second is that the power to reproduce is just that – a power – and a sovereign power, not to be dictated by church, state, husband, father, or anyone but the women/giantess wielding it. This second assertion, proclaimed in second wave slogans such as ‘my body, my choice’ or ‘abortion on demand and without apology,’ is less palatable to a patriarchal system than the idea of abortion as a crisis measure in relation to rape, fatal foetal abnormality, or threat to the pregnant person’s life. And, in some contexts, like the US in the 70s, where a judiciary accustomed to protecting the rights of the individual needed to be convinced, it made sense to emphasise the inviolability of women’s power over their own bodies. But in Ireland, where a majority of the electorate

146  Art and the 8th needed to agree to the idea of the individual woman’s sovereign power over her uterus, and where, as Mairead Enright points out, the government was fond of stressing the democratic, communal origins of the 8th amendment,73 pro-choice campaigners tended to stress not feminine sovereignty but cases of female victimhood.j What lies between persecution and power? The witch! She can get busy in this symbolic space. When Jesse Jones evokes the witch trials of the 16th and 17th centuries, she is invoking a history of patriarchal, capitalist injustice, both religious and legal. The violence of witch burnings and drownings, the injustice of them, the stupidity of them, the patriarchal righteousness of the people who so fervently rooted out and destroyed any woman with traditional medical knowledge, with book learning, with blasphemous beliefs, or who was just a bit odd – all of these things chime with the zealotry, religiosity, and misogyny of many anti-choice actors. But the witch is not just a symbol of oppression and persecution. She is also a symbol of power and knowledge. She is threatening to a patriarchal order. She is scary and you better not fuck with her. While some dismiss the witch trials as a hunt for boogey women, a hunt which invented a subversive female culture in order to rid society of troublesome females, Margaret Alice Murray’s work from the 1920s challenged this. She argues that the consistency in the accounts of women persecuted as witches, especially at a time when the state of print media would have made it difficult to share knowledge widely, points to an underground network of women’s knowledge and spiritual practice. In short, she holds that many of those persecuted as witches were in fact witches, practicing witchcraft.74 While Murray’s scholarship has faced much deserved critical scrutiny in the years since its publication, it nonetheless helped to inspire the emergency of Wicca in the 20th century – a modern form of witchcraft which lays claims to supposedly ancient origins. In other words, whatever the historical truth of the thing, witches have come to represent not only women wronged, but also the untold histories of female power. In Jones’ work, it’s this symbolism that affronts the patriarchy implied by the courthouse furniture. Fouère’s witch, imposing in proportion, elemental in her movements, proclaims the law of in Uterae Gigantae as a thing prior to and superseding any man-made law. As giant arms engulf us, rituals surround us, and Fouere’s body and voice mesmerise us, there is nothing if not presence.

j In many ways, this is why Savita Hallapanavar’s image became so central to the Repeal campaign. See Orla Fitzpatrick, “Remediating Family Photography: Savita’s Image and the Campaign to Repeal the 8th Amendment,” Feminist Encounters: A Journal of Critical Studies in Culture and Politics 2022 6.1 (2022): 08. https://doi.org/10.20897/femenc/11752; and Godson, Lisa, “Solemn and Bedazzling,” Visual Artists’ Newssheet 06 (2017) November/ December.

Art and the 8th 147

What Century Are We In? Suffragettes at the Galway Races (2015) In 2015, while Ireland’s political elites were still publicly anti-choice, lauding their own unfit for purpose ‘Protection of Life During Pregnancy Act’ and claiming there was no democratic appetite for a referendum on Repeal, three women – Mary McGill, Elaine Mears, and Sarah O’Toole – decided to do some theatrical troublemaking at the Galway Races. They dressed as suffragettes, with Feeney in Victorian mourning costume, and O’Toole and McGill in long, light gowns that would have been considered rebellious at the turn of the 19th century. Their sashes, in authentic Suffrage white, purple, and green, read ‘Repeal the 8th’ and ‘What Century Are We In?’ Mears carried a period travelling case.k And then off the suffragettes went to Ladies’ Day – an event in the racing social calendar where the glamorous and glamorous-adjacent women of Galway and beyond get very, very dolled up indeed to watch the horses and be watched themselves. Some are hoping to catch the eye of the judging committee and earn the coveted title of ‘Best Dressed.’ Others are taking advantage of the only social occasion other than a wedding at which you can break out a fascinator. But none of them, presumably, are intending to throw themselves in front of King’s horse.l From the perspective of academic objectivity, I probably shouldn’t write about the Suffragettes at the Races as the final case study of my book. This is because Sarah (henceforth ‘O’Toole’ for purposes of propriety), while an accomplished theatre professional, also happens to be my dear cousin, and Mary (henceforth McGill), while a renowned feminist theorist, is someone I got to know while at the National University of Ireland on a fellowship in 2017 and like immensely. At least I’ve never met Elaine (henceforth Mears) and can retain some credibility that way. But I’m going to write about the time travelling Suffragettes in spite of the fact that my official academic interview with O’Toole and McGill (Mears was not available) included wine and ended in girltalk. I want to pay homage to some of the excellent activist ‘mischief ’ (to use O’Toole’s words) going on in my hometown in the name of Repeal, and I’m proud of my cousin and her co-conspirators. And who doesn’t want to read about the boldness of Galwaywomen contemporaneously skewering misogyny and drinking wine from teacups. The races – and Ladies’ Day in particular – provided a very particular canvas for this performance. There’s a lot of class tension chasing around

k This foreshadowed the 2016 suitcase protest that would take place outside London’s Irish Embassy to highlight the plight of the women forced to travel for abortions. See Sydney Calkin, “Healthcare Not Airfare! Art, Abortion and Political Agency in Ireland,” Gender, Place & Culture 26.3 (2019): 338–361. l Suffragette Emily Wilding Davidson threw herself in front of the king’s horse in 1913 to draw attention to the urgency of politically enfranchising women. She died of her injuries.

148  Art and the 8th the tracks at the Galway Races. The event is at open to all comers and, at about €25 admission, an affordable day out if you bring your own sammiches. It is also the site of ostentatious displays of wealth and symbolic of the political cronyism that precipitated the financial crash. The Fianna Fáil ‘fundraising’ tent at the races was famously a place where businessmen paid hundreds of pounds/euro a head for the privilege of dining and socialising with government ministers. Taoiseach Brian Cowen abandoned it in 2008 as his disgraced predecessor, Bertie Ahern, lied his way through a tribunal into the relationship between politicians and property developers, including, when backed into a corner about unaccountable deposits to a building society account, claiming to have won the money on horses.m The races remained nationally symbolic of the arrogance and privilege of the bankers, developers, and politicians whose combined greed led to the financial crash. This context was a primary motivation for O’Toole, who wanted to access those exclusive spaces and show that something was rotten in the state of Denmark. For McGill, Ladies Day symbolised the kinds of femininity and expression allowed to and encouraged in Irish women, who were still being denied their reproductive rights. She was also interested in how money insulates Ireland’s better off from ever having to think about the real-world effects of discriminatory law and policy. In Ireland, Repeal was a class issue – people who could afford to travel had abortions in England; people who couldn’t had babies. O’Toole told me that Ladies Day is also a complex space in terms of gender and class, because there’s a very popular pastime of mocking women whose skirts are too short and fake tan too bright and who might have had a bevy too many by the end of the day. These women are compared unfavourably to those in Phillip Tracey hats in the Killanin Stand. So the women decided to infiltrate. They fully expected to get thrown out (and, in fact, had a plan for how to swing the social media optics if they did). They were prepared to experience some of the aggression that met prochoice views online. But that isn’t what happened. Instead, the races surprised them. The first surprise was that their protest – in spite of the feminist imagery, the history of suffragettes and race horses, and the words ‘Repeal the 8th’ emblazoned across their costumes – wasn’t immediately legible to all or even most racegoers. They had numerous people approach with lines like ‘oh, ye’re real ladies,’ and reading their performance as a critique of the women who choose to attend Ladies’ Day with skin on show. McGill found it incredible that this Victorian idea of what constitutes acceptable

m The cronyism did not end there, with Ahern booking two €4000 tables at the tent formerly known as the Fianna Fáil tent that same year. Turner, Lorraine and Conor Humphreys, “Former Irish PM Ahern Lied Over Finances – Inquiry,” Reuters, 22 Mar 2012. https://www.reuters. com/article/uk-ireland-report-ahern-idUKBRE82L0P220120322; Ronald Quinlan, “Bertie Makes His Own Pitch for the Banished Galway Races Tent,” Irish Independent, 01 Jun 2008. https://www.independent.ie/irish-news/bertie-makes-his-own-pitch-for-the-banishedgalway-races-tent-26450691.html

Art and the 8th 149 womanhood was still so present. And O’Toole points out that there’s some complex misogyny going on when performances of women who would have been shamed as inappropriate and unladylike in their own day are now used to shame women as inappropriate and unladylike. There were also, by O’Toole and McGill’s accounts, plenty of people who didn’t know what ‘Repeal the 8th’ meant. In 2015. In Galway. In the town where Savita died. It just seems unbelievable to me, but is testament, I think, to just how astute Miriam Haughton’s account of the ‘shadowing’ of women’s issues was in Ireland. Rendered untouchable by public figures and institutions, siphoned off from public discourse, it was possible, in the only country in the democratic world with a constitutional ban on abortion, in a country in which activists, artists, and protesters had been shouting about reproductive rights with renewed anger and confidence since 2012, in a county where the 8th amendment had, just three years previous, killed a woman, to not know what Repeal the 8th meant. And – though neither McGill nor O’Toole were comfortable in our interview making any claims for the political efficacy of their mischief – it’s also, in my view, a testament to just how important these kinds of live and interactive performance actions can be in the process of getting Irish feminism out of the shadows and into everyone’s understanding of what it means to be an Irish lady. There were other kinds of surprises. Having sashayed their way into The Guinness tent, a security guard approached. ‘Oh here we go,’ thought McGill, braced for trouble. ‘Don’t go throwing yourselves in front of any horses now,’ said the guard, in on the joke. Or, a woman from a privileged milieu came over to speak to them about her great-grandmother, a suffragette and activist who was trapped in Dublin’s Gresham hotel during the Easter Rising, with much apparent pride for that radical legacy. Instead of the anticipated aggression, people queued up to have their pictures taken with the time-travelling visitors to Ladies Day – and, again, unexpectedly, there was little overt interaction, whether support or condemnation, with the political message about Repeal that the artists had intended to insert into the day’s festivities. Instead, they had great craic, performing their roles, chatting with anyone and everyone, and having their photo taken a million times. You can’t deny the races are a great day out. Now, who says I don’t do my bit for Galway tourism? But the day’s event, and the warmth and fun it generated, was only half the performance. When the photos made their way online, they entered a social discourse where it would be impossible to misrecognise what a suffragette at the Galway Races with a sash reading ‘What Century Are We In?’ and a travelling case reading ‘Repeal the 8th’ symbolised. The stunt, or photos of it, went viral, and one of the surviving monuments to the piece exists on The Journal, an online Irish news-source, where a photo and short write up of the performance was viewed more than 40,000 times and where the comments section should be forever archived as evidence of the madness, machismo, and misogyny that standing for Repeal evoked in Irish discourse in 2015.75

150  Art and the 8th

Figure 4.3  L -R Sarah O’Toole, Elaine Mears, and Mary McGill as suffragettes at the Galway Races. Mears is dressed in Victorian mourning costume and O’Toole and McGill in long dresses and sashes Photo by permission of Sarah O’Toole

Niamh Nic Ghabhann, in her examination of the creative strategies used in Repeal protests between 2015 and 2017 observes that campaigners ‘used carnivalesque protest aesthetics, social media and the occupation of public space in order to amplify their message.’76 The Suffragettes did all of these things, turning the class and gender dynamics of the races and of ladies’ day upside down, marching right on into symbolic public spaces, and judiciously interacting with social media to give the performance a life outside of the moment. Mears, McGill, and O’Toole purposely performed not under the mantel of a performance group but just as three friends doing a thing. They largely refused to give their names to photographers and turned down invites to discuss the performance on national radio. Sharing images on social media but not giving interviews or attributing the work to any group – letting the

Art and the 8th 151 work speak for itself – was a savvy strategy for overcoming the shadowing that Haughton calls characteristic of women’s rights issues in Ireland. If, when you try to speak, you are not quite silenced so much as trivialised and positioned as irrelevant to the serious, masculine business of nation, then it makes sense to choose a different mode of communication. Nic Ghabhann also notes the aesthetic strategy in Repeal activism of using symbols to align contemporary protest with iconic protests of the past.77 Suffragette iconography was used in the context of Repeal by activists other that McGill, Mears, and O’Toole. O’Toole cites a Speaking of IMELDA action in which the performers handcuffed themselves to the railings outside the GPO, evoking both women’s suffrage and Irish republican history, as part inspiration for the Ladies’ Day performance. Later, the group Time-Travellers for Choice, as part of the Abortion Rights Campaign, used the same iconography of period dress and suffrage sashes in their photogenic performance and media stunts, such as walking to the Dáil to deliver Reproductive Justice themed Valentine’s Day cards to TDs and Senators. In analysing Tremble Tremble, I suggested that aesthetically invoking the past is characteristic of feminist art, a trend which Sue-Ellen Case remarks in relation the work of the Second Wave. Case talks about the imagined utopias created by this feminist reworking of ‘matriarchies, amazons, and goddesses along with the secret lives of the few women history has managed to recognise.’78 She talks of how the second wave feminists displaced history with cultural memory, allowing a kind of slip-streaming and wriggling through the wormholes of time. In doing so, the second wavers imagined ‘hopes for the future, embedded in the past.’79 But the flip-side of feminists having, as Case puts it, their way with time, is that without chronology ‘no development or progression could be marked’ and the feminist future remains ‘as old as Medea (to slipstream back to the past), the woman terrorist who poisoned the state and murdered its future, who escaped by chariot into the utopic heavens, while the rebellion brims, stirred in large cauldrons by witches and vampires, visible, like those secret signs of the underground movements, agitating, remaining behind masks, in the dark hole of aporias, never really to actualise, be recognised, punished, or tamed.’80 Emily Wilding Davison was a Medea, a woman terrorist poisoning the state and leaving rebellion brimming after her ascension. And the rebellion remains unfinished, as McGill, Mears, and O’Toole slipping through the stuff of time to inhabit her image proves. Today, the suffragettes are ‘real ladies’; they’ve been symbolically neutralised by patriarchy. Now that the question of whether women should be allowed to vote seems so ridiculous, the suffragettes are historicised as a rational, necessary feminism that happened before the shrill man-haters of today went too far. But, of course, in their own time they were the desexed harpies, the ones overstepping, shadowed, failing to understand that their concerns were not urgent, not irrelevant to the important, masculine business of state; they were the ones graffitiing, laughing as they followed Churchill around with a bell, going to the races. McGill,

152  Art and the 8th Mears, and O’Toole revive this radicalism in their imagery, and the picture of them smiling in sashes, unsure of what century they’re in, reminds me that feminism has never been popular, has always involved fear, and risk, and bravery, as well as comedy, creativity, and fun. Three years after the referendum, as Irish politicians such as Leo Varadkar and Micheál Martin try to take credit for the success of a grassroots feminist movement that they joined at the 11th hour on realising that people on the doorstep simply didn’t agree with them anymore, the performance stands as a reminder that the aesthetics of feminism can be co-opted and neutralised if we allow, if we forget to inhabit the symbols of the past in imagining the future, if we don’t keep stirring our cauldrons, sipping our wine from teacups, and causing mischief.

Reflections This chapter set up a conundrum which might be most succinctly expressed as ‘how can feminism win under patriarchy?’ How can women be heard when men are doing all the talking (yes, yes, not all, you pedants, only – as I demonstrated – upwards of 75% of the talking in most major public institutions). How can women’s private experiences be publicly represented in a manner that will win hearts and minds when the very act of representing those experiences comes with shame and stigma? Repeal was fought and won on many fronts – legal, political, journalistic, domestic. It was also fought and won aesthetically. If, as I argued in the above section on Tremble Tremble, anti-choice actors often find it easier to nail campaigning soundbites and symbols, art seems to be largely the purview of pro-choice activists. In the context of Repeal, certainly, while anti-choice campaigns rolled out graphic banners of purportedly aborted foetuses, the aesthetic interventions of feminists were complex and layered, eschewing moral sterility, circumventing what Tara Flynn defines as the point of order college lad debating context, that had, previously, characterised the conversation. Clara Fischer argues that personal stories used emotion to cut across divides between Irish women’s private experiences and Irish public life; I’d like to build on this idea to suggest that aesthetic interventions did so too, using affect to pull the issue down out of the lofty sphere of philosophical debates about the personhood of the foetus and into that other space that art allows: a space that can hold more than one truth, that is corporal and sensory, that is affective and emotional, and that can help us to reason in a holistic, human, and feminist way. In this chapter, I explored some aesthetic strategies employed by Repeal artists, finding links between their choices and the aesthetics of previous waves of feminism. While Felski may be right that any hunt for an all-encompassing feminist aesthetic is futile, I think it’s valuable to look at art that agitates for a particular activist cause and find the strings that bind. Thinking about Jones’ use of avant-garde symbolism and the plausible deniability this created for the Irish president to align himself with abortion rights, I see a model for other

Art and the 8th 153 activist artists working in the shadows. And I wonder if in feminist activism and art the aesthetic habit of finding the future through the past works to remind us that feminism can and does win under patriarchy. As the overturning of Roe vs Wade reminds us so brutally, this is not a linear progression. My hunt for these intergenerational aesthetic threads has an activist intent of its own. If witches, suffragettes, and second wavers provided inspiration to Repeal, maybe Ireland’s activist artists can inspire the feminists on our island and around the world still fighting for access to free, safe, and legal abortion.

Notes 1 Read Baz Kershaw, David Graeber, Sophie Nield, or Kate O’Neil on the use of performance as strategy within modern protest movements. Baz Kershaw, “Fighting in the Streets: Dramaturgies of Popular Protest, 1968—1989.” New Theatre Quarterly (NTQ), 13.51 (1997): 255–276; David Graeber, “The New Anarchists,” New Left Review 13.6 (2002): 61–73; Sophie Nield, “There is Another World: Space, Theatre and Global Anti-Capitalism,” Contemporary Theatre Review 16.01 (2006): 51–61; O’Neill, Kate, “Transnational Protest: States, Circuses, and Conflict at the Frontline of Global Politics,” International Studies Review 6 (2004): 233–251. 2 See, for example: Katherine Side, “‘A Hundred Little Violences, A Hundred Little Wounds”: Personal Disclosure, Shame, and Privacy in Ireland’s Abortion Access,” Éire-Ireland 56.3 (2021): 181–205; Clara Fischer, “Feminists Redraw Public and Private Spheres: Abortion, Vulnerability, and the Affective Campaign to Repeal the Eighth Amendment,” Signs: Journal of Women and Culture in Society 45.4 (2020): 985–1010; Niamh McDonald, Kate Antosik-Parsons, Karen E. Till, Gerard Kearns, and Jack Callan, “Campaigning for Choice: Canvassing as Feminist Pedagogy in Dublin Bay North,” in After Repeal, Ed. Kath Browne and Sydney Calkin (London: Zed, 2019); Anne Enright, “Personal Stories Are Precious Things: They Made a Difference,” The Journal.ie, 28 May 2018. https://www.irishtimes.com/opinion/anne-enright-personalstories-are-precious-things-and-they-made-the-difference-1.3510189 3 Róisín Ingle, “Why I Need to Tell My Abortion Story,” Irish Times, 12 Sept 2015, 12. https://www.irishtimes.com/life-and-style/people/roisin-ingle-why-i-need-totell-my-abortion-story-1.2348822 4 Kitty Holland, “Abortion Movement Has Been Hijacked By the Middle Class,” Irish Times, 1 May 2017. https://www.irishtimes.com/opinion/abortion-movement-has-beenhijacked-by-the-middle-class-1.3066835 5 Lynn Enright, “What’s Really at Stake in the Irish Abortion Referendum,” Vogue, 24 Apr 2018. https://www.vogue.co.uk/article/the-story-of-us 6 Susan Cahill, “My Abortion Was Not Remotely Traumatic. I Have No Regrets,” Irish Times, 21 Feb 2016. https://www.irishtimes.com/life-and-style/people/susancahill-my-abortion-was-not-remotely-traumatic-i-have-no-regrets-1.2542740 7 Ruth Fletcher, “Silences: Irish Women and Abortion,” Feminist Review 50.1 (1995), 44–66. 8 Miriam Haughton, Staging Trauma: Bodies in Shadow (London: Palgrave, 2018), 5. 9 Like in June Levine’s autobiography. Levine, June. Sisters (Dublin: Ward River Press, 1982). 10 Eric Oland, “Repealing a ‘Legacy of Shame’: Press Coverage of Emotional Geographies of Secrecy and Shame in Ireland’s Abortion Debate,” in After Repeal, Ed. Kath Browne and Sydney Calkin (London: Zed, 2019), 174–188. 11 The following three paragraphs are derived, in part, from my article published in Literature Interpretation Theory on 01 June 2017, available online: http://www. tandfonline.com/10.1080/10436928.2017.1315549

154  Art and the 8th 12 The Abbey, “Waking the Nation 2016 at the Abbey Theatre,” Www.abbeytheatre. ie, Oct 2015, Web, Accessed 10 Jan 2017. 13 Úna Mullally, “Abbey Theatre Celebrates 1916 Centenary with Only One Woman Playwright,” Irish Times, 02 Nov 2015. https://www.irishtimes.com/opinion/ una-mullally-abbey-theatre-celebrates-1916-centenary-with-only-one-womanplaywright-1.2413277 14 Kathy Walsh, Jane Suiter and Órla O’Connor, Hearing Women’s Voices: Exploring Women’s Under-Representation in Current Affairs Programming at Peak Listening Times in Ireland (National Women’s Council of Ireland & Dublin City University, Nov 2015). 15 Ursula Barry, Policy on Gender Equality in Ireland Update 2015. Policy Department C: Citizen’s Rights and Constitutional Affairs (Brussels: European Parliament, Sept. 2015), 11. 16 Lughan Deane and Patricia O’Mahoney, “Diversity Audit of Irish Front Pages,” IMPACT, Impact.ie, Sept 30 2016, Web, Accessed Jan 10 2017. 17 Pat O’Connor, Management and Gender in Higher Education (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2014), 24–25. 18 Susan Liddy, “‘Open to All and Everybody’? The Irish Film Board: Accounting for the Scarcity of Women Screenwriters,” Feminist Media Studies 16.5 (2016): 903. 19 Fiach MacConghaill, “Personal Tweet,” Twitter.com, 29 Oct 2015, Web, Accessed 10 Jan 2016. 20 Aanand Prasad, “Conference Diversity Distribution Calculator,” Aanandprasad.com, N.d. Web, Accessed Jan 10 2016; Martin, Jennifer L. “Ten Simple Rules to Achieve Conference Speaker Gender Balance,” PLoS Computational Biology 10.11 (2014): 1–3. 21 Emer O’Toole, “Waking the Feminists: Re-imagining the Space of the National Theatre in the Era of the Celtic Phoenix.” Lit: Literature Interpretation Theory 28.2 (2017): 134–152. 22 Tara Flynn, Interview with Author (Dublin, 08 Jun 2018). 23 Clara Fischer, “Feminists Redraw Public and Private Spheres,” 998. 24 Katherine Side, “A Hundred Little Violences.” 25 Clark Baim, Staging the Personal (Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2020), 1–3. 26 Maggie Armstrong, “I’m Not a Lobbyist, Just an Eejit Comedian Who Had a Crisis of Pregnancy,” The Independent, 11 Feb 2018. https://www.independent.ie/irish-news/ news/im-not-a-lobbyist-just-an-eejit-comedian-who-had-a-crisis-pregnancy36583892.html 27 Tara Flynn, Not a Funny Word, Unpublished Script (2018), 2. 28 Tara Flynn, “Interview with Author.” 29 Jonathan Kalb, “Documentary Solo Performance: The Politics of the Mirrored Self,” Theater 31.3 (2001): 13–29. 30 Holly Hughes and David Roman, Eds. O Solo Homo: The New Queer Performance (New York: Grove/Atlantic, Inc., 2007). 31 Deirdre Heddon, Autobiography and performance: Performing selves (London: Macmillan, 2007). 32 Flynn, Not a Funny Word, 16. 33 Eamonn Jordan, “Look Who’s Talking, Too: The Duplicitous Myth of Naïve Narrative,” in Monologues: Theatre, Performance, Subjectivity, Ed. Clare Wallace (Prague: Litteraria Pragensia, 2006), 125–156. 34 Kalb, Solo Documentary, 16. 35 Flynn, Interview. 36 Brian Singleton, Masculinities and the Contemporary Irish Theatre (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), 70–94. 37 Clare Wallace, “Monologue Theatre, Solo Performance, and Self as Spectacle,” in Ed. Clare Wallace (Prague: Litteraria Pragensia, 2006), 1–16. 38 Heddon, Autobiography, 3.

Art and the 8th 155 39 Schneemann Carolee, “Interior Scroll,” 1975. Tate London. Tate.org. © ARS, NY and DACS, London 2021. https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/schneemanninterior-scroll-p13282 40 Mierle Laderman Ukeles, “Manifesto! Maintenance Art – Proposal for an Exhibition. “Care”” (Mierle Laderman Ukeles, 1969), QueensMuseum.org. https://queensmuseum. org/wp-content/uploads/2016/04/Ukeles-Manifesto-for-Maintenance-Art-1969.pdf 41 Bain’s work also locates the theatre of personal stories within this timeframe – kicking off in the 60s, and accelerating and proliferating in the 90s. 42 Paul Cullen, “Irish Abortion Law Violated Woman’s Human Rights, UN Says,” Irish Times, 13 June 2017. https://www.irishtimes.com/news/health/irish-abortionlaw-violated-woman-s-human-rights-un-says-1.3118145 43 Flynn, Interview. 44 Heddon, Autobiography, 29. 45 Kalb, Solo Documentary, 16. 46 Carolyn Korsmeyer, Gender and Aesthetics: An Introduction (New York: Routledge, 2004), 118. 47 Rita Felski, Beyond Feminist Aesthetics: Feminist Literature and Social Change (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989). 48 Fintan Walsh, Queer Notions: New Plays and Performances from Ireland (Cork: Cork University Press, 2010), 4. 49 Carolyn Korsmeyer, Gender and Aesthetics, 118. 50 Sue-Ellen Case, “The Screens of Time: Feminist Memories and Hopes,” in Feminist Futures? Theatre, Performance, Theory, Ed. Elaine Aston and Geraldine Harris (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), 105–117. 51 Sarah Kelleher, “Ireland at Venice,” Irish Arts Review (2002-) 34.1 (2017): 74–75. 52 Lisa Godson, “A Finger, a Handbreadth, a Span, a Foot,” in Tremble Tremble, Ed. Tessa Giblin (Dublin; Milan: Project Press and Mousse Publishing, 2017), 51–62. 53 Susan Stewart, On Longing. Narratives of the Miniature, the Gigantic, the Souvenir, the Collection (Durham: Duke UP, 1984). 54 Godson, 55. 55 Rachel Donnelly, “Artsdesk: Embraced by a Giantess – Jesse Jones,” Totally Dublin, 8 May, 2017. https://www.totallydublin.ie/arts-culture/arts-culture-features/ artsdesk-embraced-by-a-giantess-jesse-jones/ 56 Based on UK Department of Health Statistics from 2017, as reported by the Irish Family Planning Association. IFPA “Abortion Statistics Show 3,265 Women Abandoned by the Irish State,” IFPA.ie, 13 Jun 2017. https://www.ifpa.ie/ abortion-statistics-show-3265-women-abandoned-by-the-irish-state/ 57 Dele Jegede, “Art for Life’s Sake: African Art as a Reflection of an Afrocentric Cosmology,” in The African Aesthetic: Keeper of the Traditions, Ed. Kariamu Welsh-Asante (Connecticut: Greenwood P, 1993), 239. 58 Tessa Giblin, “Tremble Tremble,” in Tremble Tremble, Ed. Tessa Giblin (Dublin; Milan: Project Press and Mousse Publishing, 2017), 17–30. 59 Shonagh Hill, Women and Embodied Mythmaking in Irish Theatre (Cambridge; New York: Cambridge University Press, 2019), 214. 60 Jesse Jones, Tremble Tremble (Dublin; Milan: Project Press and Mousse Publishing, 2017). 61 Máiréad Enright, “Four Pieces on Repeal: Notes on Art, Aesthetics and the Struggle against Ireland’s Abortion Law,” Feminist Review 124.1 (2020): 105. 62 Studio International, “Jesse Jones, interview | Tremble, Tremble | Pavilion of Ireland, Venice 2017.” https://vimeo.com/225677676. 15 July 2017. Accessed 29 July 2021. 63 These events are as described in Tessa Giblin’s lecture, “On the Unmuting of Art,” https://www.trg.ed.ac.uk/event/lecture-tessa-giblin-un-muting-art. 7 Oct 2020. Accessed 29 July 2021.

156  Art and the 8th 6 4 Tessa Giblin, “Tremble Tremble,” 19. 65 Ibid. 66 Tessa Giblin, “On the Unmuting of Art.” https://www.trg.ed.ac.uk/event/lecturetessa-giblin-un-muting-art. 7 Oct 2020. Accessed 29 July 2021. 67 Silvia Federici, Caliban and the Witch: Women, the Body and Primitive Accumulation (New York: Autonomedia, 2004). 68 Silvia Federici, “In Praise of the Dancing Body,” in Tremble Tremble, Ed. Tessa Giblin (Dublin; Milan: Project Press and Mousse Publishing, 2017), 37. 69 Studio International, “Jesse Jones, Interview | Tremble, Tremble|Pavilion of Ireland, Venice 2017,” https://vimeo.com/225677676. 15 July 2017, Accessed 29 July 2021. 70 Laisa Schweigert, WITCH and Witchcraft in Radical Feminist Activism (Tempe: Master’s Diss., Arizona State University, 2018). 71 Sarah Marie Griffin and David Tynan, We Face This Land (MDV and Warrior Films, 15 Sept 2016). https://vimeo.com/326838359. Accessed 29 July 2021. 72 Sarah Maria Griffin, “We Face This Land,” Irish Times, 21 Sept 2016. ht t ps://w w w.i r isht i mes.com /cu lt u re/ book s/we -f ace -t h is-l a nd- a-poemby-sarah-maria-griffin-1.2799708 73 Máiréad Enright, “Four Pieces on Repeal: Notes on Art, Aesthetics and the Struggle against Ireland’s Abortion Law,” Feminist Review 124.1 (2020): 105. 74 Margaret Alice Murray, The Witch Cult in Western Europe: A Study in Anthropology (Oxford: Clarendon, 1921). 75 Rónán Duffy, “These Three Women Used Galway Races Ladies Day to Make a Point about Abortion,” The Journal, 30 Jul 2015. https://www.thejournal.ie/ pic-of-the-day-galway-races-2245331-Jul2015/ 76 Niamh NicGhabhann, “City Walls, Bathroom Stalls and Tweeting the Taoiseach: The Aesthetics of Protest and the Campaign for Abortion Rights in the Republic of Ireland,” Continuum 32.5 (2018): 553–568. P.554. 77 NicGhabhann, “City Walls,” 560. 78 Case, Sue-Ellen, “The Screens of Time: Feminist Memories and Hopes,” in Feminist Futures? Theatre, Performance, Theory, Ed. Elaine Aston and Geraldine Harris (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), 105. 79 Ibid 105. 80 Ibid 115/116.

Bibliography Armstrong, Maggie, “I’m Not a Lobbyist, Just an Eejit Comedian Who Had a Crisis of Pregnancy,” The Independent, 11 Feb 2018. https://www.independent.ie/irishnews/news/im-not-a-lobbyist-just-an-eejit-comedian-who-had-a-crisis-pregnancy36583892.html Baim, Clark, Staging the Personal (Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2020). Barry, Ursula, “Policy on Gender Equality in Ireland Update 2015,” in Policy Department C: Citizen’s Rights and Constitutional Affairs (Brussels: European Parliament, 2015), 11. Bauman, Zymunt, Liquid Modernity (Polity: Cambridge, 2000). Calkin, Sydney, “Healthcare Not Airfare! Art, Abortion and Political Agency in Ireland,” Gender, Place & Culture 26.3 (2019): 338–361. Case, Sue-Ellen, “The Screens of Time: Feminist Memories and Hopes,” in Feminist Futures? Theatre, Performance, Theory, Eds. Elaine Aston and Geraldine Harris (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), 105–117. Chan, Suzanna, “Speaking of Silence, Speaking of Art, Abortion and Ireland,” Irish Studies Review 27.1 (2019): 73–93.

Art and the 8th 157 Cullen, Paul, “Irish Abortion Law Violated Woman’s Human Rights, UN Says,” Irish Times, 13 June 2017. https://www.irishtimes.com/news/health/ irish-abortion-law-violated-woman-s-human-rights-un-says-1.3118145 Deane, Lughan and Patricia O’Mahoney, “Diversity Audit of Irish Front Pages,” IMPACT, Impact.ie, Sept 30 2016, Web, Accessed Jan 10 2017. Donnelly, Rachel, “Artsdesk: Embraced by a Giantess – Jesse Jones,” Totally Dublin, 8 May 2017. https://www.totallydublin.ie/arts-culture/arts-culture-features/ artsdesk-embraced-by-a-giantess-jesse-jones/ Duffy, Rónán, “These Three Women Used Galway Races Ladies Day to Make a Point about Abortion,” The Journal, 30 Jul 2015. https://www.thejournal.ie/ pic-of-the-day-galway-races-2245331-Jul2015/ Enright, Anne, “Personal Stories Are Precious Things: They Made a Difference,” The Journal.ie, 28 May 2018. https://www.irishtimes.com/opinion/anne-enright-personalstories-are-precious-things-and-they-made-the-difference-1.3510189 Enright, Máiréad, “Four Pieces on Repeal: Notes on Art, Aesthetics and the Struggle Against Ireland’s Abortion Law,” Feminist Review 124.1 (2020): 105. Federici, Silvia, Caliban and the Witch: Women, the Body and Primitive Accumulation (New York: Autonomedia, 2004). Federici, Silvia, “In Praise of the Dancing Body,” in Tremble Tremble, Ed. Tessa Giblin (Dublin; Milan: Project Press and Mousse Publishing, 2017), 37. Felski, Rita, Beyond Feminist Aesthetics: Feminist Literature and Social Change (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989). Finlan, Michael, “O’Higgins Says Amendment Wording Crazy,” Irish Times, 14 Feb 1983, 7. Fischer, Clara, “Feminists Redraw Public and Private Spheres: Abortion, Vulnerability, and the Affective Campaign to Repeal the Eighth Amendment,” Signs: Journal of Women and Culture in Society 45.4 (2020): 985–1010. Fitzpatrick, Orla, “Remediating Family Photography: Savita’s Image and the Campaign to Repeal the 8th Amendment,” Feminist Encounters: A Journal of Critical Studies in Culture and Politics 6.1 (2022): 08. https://doi.org/10.20897/femenc/11752 Fletcher, R., “Silences: Irish Women and Abortion,” Feminist Review 50.1 (1995): 44–66. Flynn, Tara, Interview with Author (Dublin, 08 Jun 2018). Flynn, Tara, Not a Funny Word, Unpublished Script (2018). Giblin, Tessa, “Tremble Tremble,” in Tremble Tremble, Ed. Tessa Giblin (Dublin; Milan: Project Press and Mousse Publishing, 2017), 17–30. Giblin, Tessa, On the Unmuting of Art (University of Edinburgh, 7 Oct 2020). https:// www.trg.ed.ac.uk/event/lecture-tessa-giblin-un-muting-art. Accessed 29 July 2021. Godson, Lisa, “A Finger, a Handbreadth, a Span, a Foot,” in Tremble Tremble, Ed. Tessa Giblin (Dublin; Milan: Project Press and Mousse Publishing, 2017), 51–62. Godson, Lisa, “Solemn and Bedazzling,” Visual Artists’ Newssheet 06 (2017) November/ December. Graeber, David, “The New Anarchists,” New Left Review 13.6 (2002): 61–73. Griffin, Sarah Marie and David Tynan, We Face This Land (MDV and Warrior Films, 15 Sept 2016). https://vimeo.com/326838359. Accessed 29 July 2021. Haughton, Miriam, Staging Trauma: Bodies in Shadow (London: Palgrave, 2018). Heddon, Deirdre, Autobiography and Performance: Performing Selves (London: Macmillan, 2007). Hill, Shonagh, Women and Embodied Mythmaking in Irish Theatre (Cambridge; New York: Cambridge University Press, 2019).

158  Art and the 8th Hughes, Holly and David Roman, Eds. O Solo Homo: The New Queer Performance (New York: Grove/Atlantic, Inc., 2007). Hunter, Dorothy, “Jesse Jones: No More Fun and Games,” Sculpture.org, May 11 2016. https://sculpture.org/blogpost/1860259/349372/Jesse-Jones-NO-MORE-FUNAND-GAMES IFPA, “Abortion Statistics Show 3,265 Women Abandoned by the Irish State,” IFPA.ie, 13 Jun 2017. https://www.ifpa.ie/abortion-statistics-show-3265-womenabandoned-by-the-irish-state/ Jegede, Dele, “Art for Life’s Sake: African Art as a Reflection of an Afrocentric Cosmology,” in The African Aesthetic: Keeper of the Traditions, Ed. Kariamu WelshAsante (Connecticut: Greenwood P, 1993), 239. Jordan, Eamonn, “Look Who’s Talking, Too: The Duplicitous Myth of Naïve Narrative,” in Monologues: Theatre, Performance, Subjectivity, Ed. Clare Wallace (Prague: Litteraria Pragensia, 2006), 125–156. Kalb, Jonathan, “Documentary Solo Performance: The Politics of the Mirrored Self,” Theater 31.3 (2001): 13–29. Kelleher, Sarah, “Ireland at Venice,” Irish Arts Review (2002-) 34.1 (2017): 74–75. Kershaw, Baz, “Fighting in the Streets: Dramaturgies of Popular Protest, 1968—1989,” New Theatre Quarterly (NTQ) 13.51 (1997): 255–276. Korsmeyer, Carolyn, Gender and Aesthetics: An Introduction (New York: Routledge, 2004). Laderman Ukeles, Mierle, “Manifesto! Maintenance Art – Proposal for an Exhibition. “Care”” (Mierle Laderman Ukeles, 1969), QueensMuseum.org. https://queensmuseum. org/wp-content/uploads/2016/04/Ukeles-Manifesto-for-Maintenance-Art-1969.pdf Levine, June, Sisters (Dublin: Ward River Press, 1982). Liddy, Susan, “Open to All and Everybody”? The Irish Film Board: Accounting for the Scarcity of Women Screenwriters,” Feminist Media Studies 16.5 (2016): 903. MacConghaill, Fiach, “Personal Tweet,” Twitter.com, 29 Oct 2015, Web, Accessed 10 Jan 2016. Martin, Jennifer L. “Ten Simple Rules to Achieve Conference Speaker Gender Balance,” PLoS Computational Biology 10.11 (2014): 1–3. McDonald, Niamh, Kate Antosik-Parsons, Karen E. Till, Gerard Kearns and Jack Callan. “Campaigning for Choice: Canvassing as Feminist Pedagogy in Dublin Bay North,” in After Repeal, Ed. Kath Browne and Sydney Calkin (London: Zed, 2019): 124–143. Mullally, Úna, “Abbey Theatre Celebrates 1916 Centenary With Only One Woman Playwright,” Irish Times, 02 Nov 2015. https://www.irishtimes.com/opinion/ una-mullally-abbey-theatre-celebrates-1916-centenary-with-only-one-woman-playwright-1.2413277 Murray, Margaret Alice, The Witch Cult in Western Europe: A Study in Anthropology (Oxford: Clarendon, 1921). NicGhabhann, Niamh, “City Walls, Bathroom Stalls and Tweeting the Taoiseach: The Aesthetics of Protest and the Campaign for Abortion Rights in the Republic of Ireland,” Continuum 32.5 (2018): 553–568. Nield, Sophie, “There Is Another World: Space, Theatre and Global Anti-Capitalism,” Contemporary Theatre Review 16.01 (2006): 51–61. Oland, Eric, “Repealing a ‘Legacy of Shame’: Press Coverage of Emotional Geographies of Secrecy and Shame in Ireland’s Abortion Debate,” in After Repeal, Ed. Kath Browne and Sydney Calkin (London: Zed, 2019), 174–188.

Art and the 8th 159 O’Connor, Pat, Management and Gender in Higher Education (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), 24–25. O’Neill, Kate, “Transnational Protest: States, Circuses, and Conflict at the Frontline of Global Politics,” International Studies Review 6 (2004): 233–251. O’Toole, Emer, “Waking the Feminists: Re-Imagining the Space of the National Theatre in the Era of the Celtic Phoenix,” Lit: Literature Interpretation Theory 28.2 (2017): 134–152. Prasad, Aanand, “Conference Diversity Distribution Calculator,” Aanandprasad.com, N.d. Web, Accessed Jan 10 2016. Quinlan, Ronald, “Bertie Makes His Own Pitch for the Banished Galway Races Tent,” Irish Independent, 01 Jun 2008. https://www.independent.ie/irish-news/bertie-makeshis-own-pitch-for-the-banished-galway-races-tent-26450691.html Schneemann, Carolee, “Interior Scroll,” 1975. Tate London. Tate.org. © ARS, NY and DACS, London 2021. https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/schneemann-interiorscroll-p13282 Schweigert, Laisa, WITCH and Witchcraft in Radical Feminist Activism (Tempe: Master’s Diss., Arizona State University, 2018). Side, Katherine, “‘A Hundred Little Violences, a Hundred Little Wounds’: Personal Disclosure, Shame, and Privacy in Ireland’s Abortion Access,” Éire-Ireland 56.3 (2021): 181–205. Side, Katherine, “Changed Utterly: The Citizens’ Assembly on the Eighth Amendment,” Feminist Encounters: A Journal of Critical Studies in Culture and Politics 6.1 (2022): 1–12. Singleton, Brian, Masculinities and the Contemporary Irish Theatre (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011) Stewart, Susan, On Longing. Narratives of the Miniature, the Gigantic, the Souvenir, the Collection (Durham: Duke University Press, 1984). Studio International, “Jesse Jones, Interview | Tremble, Tremble | Pavilion of Ireland, Venice 2017,” https://vimeo.com/225677676. 15 July 2017, Accessed 29 July 2021. The Abbey, “Waking the Nation 2016 at the Abbey Theatre,” Www.abbeytheatre.ie, Oct 2015, Web, Accessed 10 Jan 2017. Turner, Lorraine and Conor Humphreys, “Former Irish PM Ahern Lied over Finances – Inquiry,” Reuters, 22 Mar 2012. https://www.reuters.com/article/ uk-ireland-report-ahern-idUKBRE82L0P220120322 Wallace, Clare, “Monologue Theatre, Solo Performance, and Self as Spectacle,” in Monologues: Theatre, Performance, Subjectivity, Ed. Clare Wallace (Prague: Litteraria Pragensia, 2006), 1–16. Walsh, Fintan, Queer Notions: New Plays and Performances from Ireland (Cork: Cork University Press, 2010), 4. Walsh, Kathy, Jane Suiter and Órla O’Connor, Hearing Women’s Voices: Exploring Women’s Under-Representation in Current Affairs Programming at Peak Listening Times in Ireland (Dulin: National Women’s Council of Ireland & Dublin City University, Nov 2015). Wolff, Janet, The Aesthetics of Uncertainty (New York: Columbia University Press, 2008).

Reflections On Art That Is Activism

Reflections Bisi Adigun, frustrated with one-dimensional representations of black characters, used canonical Irish texts on being an outsider to put the experience of Africans centre stage. THEATREclub, feeling there was a story people didn’t understand about public policy and drug addiction, created a dramaturgy that doomed itself to failure, echoing the architecture of addiction. Woody Shticks, camp and political, seriously frivolous, reversed the dynamic of queer confessional, holding his Dublin audience to account for homonormativity. Tara Flynn, sick of fleshless ‘point of order’ debates about abortion, intervened in the discourse with a personal story, beautifully told. In the introduction, I laid out the question of whether political, ethical, social, and economic concerns threaten the aesthetic. I feel reasonably confident that anyone who has read this book will answer the question ‘can activist theatre be good theatre?’ in the enthusiastic affirmative. What’s still fuzzy for me at the end of this process is the extent to which theatre makes for effective activism. As I noted in the introduction, it’s very hard to measure the social effects of art empirically. Still, I thought that by now I’d be leaning one way or the other. I don’t have the optimism of someone like Jill Dolan,1 for whom theatre creates ephemeral communal utopias; nor have I the scepticism of Jacques Rancière, for whom the potential of performance to do anything other than make you think is overblown by luvvies.2 I guess, if you’re going to force me into a corner, you bullies, having watched the ways my case studies intervene in their social contexts, I think art contributes to an overall political foment using the particular tools available to it, which, in the case of theatre includes liveness and presence. I think there are lots of different ways for theatre to be political, some of which constitute activism. And I think art is a better way to try to change the world than many others. For Rancière, theatre is words. Words on a page can change the world, of course (which is part of Rancière’s point), but, be that as it may, theatre isn’t reducible to the page – it’s a communal art form, aesthetically experienced live in shared space. Some productions privilege a script delivered in silence. DOI: 10.4324/9781003205708-6

Reflections 161 Others push and pull at the possibilities of the form. I don’t think it’s an accident that the latter are often the ones trying to do activist work. Rather, I think, as Grace Dyas suggested,3 that with concrete political objectives comes formal innovation. Such innovation, in turn, leads to different kinds of aesthetic experience. For example, activist theatre consistently plays with distinctions between art and the everyday, between representation and ‘the real’ – Arambe’s Kings of the Kilburn Highroad or THEATREclub’s HISTORY are good examples. Or, queer and feminist work has a tendency to highlight the performeraudience address and use lived experience as a hook for wider structural issues – the solo autobiographical performances in Chapter 3 stand testament to this. Or, avant-garde abstraction allows activist artists to approach controversial themes with a productive ambiguity – as illustrated by Jesse Jones’ Tremble Tremble or THEATREclub’s The Game. You don’t like that kind of messing and malafoostering? You want a fourth wall? Okay. Just buy a different ticket. We’re not experiencing some kind of fourth wall shortage. In the context of the productions I discuss here, dismissing the live, or adopting a default skepticism towards overt political radicalism or formal experimentation – i.e., thinking of theatre as words to be interpreted – tells you really very little about what the medium of theatre is being used to do. Consider the phenomenological jar Arambe creates with its unconventional casting; the improvisation and ambiguity manifested by THEATREclub’s game-like structures; the paradoxical effect of a solo body, isolated, appealing to its silent audience; the buzz of aesthetic sociability leaking into the performance space at the IDGTF; or the awe created by Olwen Fouère’s giantess towering above and around you in Tremble Tremble: clearly the matter and energy of performance can be bent to social metaphors and activist work in ways unlike other artforms. The disjuncture between how the suffragettes were experienced live at the races and how they signified online is particularly telling here. When their medium was no longer, to quote phenomenologist Bert O States, ‘things that are what they seem to be,’4 the interactive mischief, fun, human warmth, and open discussion that characterised the piece in performance disappeared and was replaced by the hard political lines of the Irish abortion debate. Online, you were for it or against it; at the races, you were in it. I’d like to qualify that I don’t think art needs to be activist to be political or valuable, and I think that artists are entitled to reject any stipulation that their art must do something. I remain wary, for example, of the suggestion by Elliott, Silverman, and Bowman that because art is social, artists are obliged to work towards a social good. Elliott et al. use the roots of music in social cohesion to argue that, as our prehistoric ancestors used art to form community, this, and not individual appreciation, is its core function.5 Core Shmore – I’m not doing the Paleo diet and I’m not doing the art must strengthen social bonds thing either. I just want carbs, okay? But, to indulge the thought experiment with less frivolity, I wonder if humans, long in the

162  Reflections past, had a sense of the tension between art’s autonomy and its heteronomy that is so central to contemporary aesthetic debates? I think they did. Show me a human society that doesn’t like a good yarn, that never jokes, that can’t distinguish between a story and a lie. We’re not Houyhnhnms. We can say the thing that is not. Art plays pretend. It gives us a space to explore difficult stuff, because the things that happen to pretend people are lower stakes than the things that happen to real people. My good friend Bo thinks that, in our age of surveillance and social shaming, art is the only place we have left for complex social and political conversations.6 I think about that a lot. Media, social or mainstream, are not amenable to nuance. The university classroom is not the place of intellectual freedom many of us wish it were – it’s curtailed by the economic and political facts that the teacher needs the job and the student needs the grade. But art offers an arena for ideas, for ambiguity, for cognitive dissonance, for fights to happen, for dreams to blossom and crumble. It’s discursive: characters can disagree within it and audiences can disagree about it. And theatre and performance in particular are close to life, made from the medium of it, yet independent in the strange way that I’ve played with throughout this book. Art allow us, when things get too real, to shout, hey, hey, calm down, it’s just a play. And there is a challenge to this aesthetic arena of creation and appreciation when our lives are wrapped up in what’s on stage. But maybe that’s okay? For example, I think THEATREclub’s The Game exemplifies par excellence the ability of art to represent moral ambiguity and social complexity. Yet, when it came into contact with the real lives of sex workers, whose livelihood and safety depend on the debates being staged, it was ascribed a side, a clear politics. Aesthetically speaking, it was, in my opinion, reduced unfairly to something it was not. Some might read this as proof we need to be doubly protective of the aesthetic space – of its freedom and autonomy – to ask that, even given its political and social weave, art resists ethical analysis. But that’s going to be too much to ask of someone whose rights are wrapped up in the representation. Sometimes, it’s okay to say, fuck aesthetics, I hate this; it’s okay to say, screw your art, this is my life. Hey hey, calm down, it’s just a play. (Did you notice this section is called Reflections? I never seem to be able to conclude anything. Maybe I too have an ambiguous aesthetic.) Having marinated in the anxieties that the very idea of art provokes, I remain fascinated by the extent to which people believe there’s a correct way for art to interact with society and politics and a correct was to experience it doing so. That’s not to undermine the uneasiness in analyses by Bourdieu, Yùdice, Harvie, Wickstrom, Bishop, and others about the use of arts and culture by capitalist and neoliberal actors.7 It’s not to ignore the special place of the arts in pink-washing, homonormalisation, and homonationalism. It’s rather to be upfront about the fact that the potential for instrumentalisation is there the moment we move away from Kantian aesthetic autonomy. By

Reflections 163 admitting the aesthetic critiques of modernism, post-modernism, postcolonialism, Marxism, and feminism, by conceiving of art – like African cultures do – as something social, communal, and contingent, by honouring its connection to life, we also, indirectly, acknowledge that it can be and is used for social, political, and economic ends. In the contemporary Western moment, I’d argue that art isn’t autonomous or contingent, but both. Its autonomy or contingency is on a spectrum, in motion with intention, social context, framing, and reception. Recognising that, it’s obvious that some people will try to use art to achieve certain material goals. And others won’t and will get angry if someone tries to make them. They’ll say that beauty is end enough. And it is! Beauty is enough! And then, in their frustration at being bossed about, they might counter that the attempt to make art do work is anti-aesthetic. But it isn’t. The reality that art can do non-aesthetic stuff isn’t an inherently anti-aesthetic or neoliberal idea. It’s a neutral one. It’s what you do with it that counts. Look around. There’s art with regressive social messaging, and there’s art that, intentionally or unintentionally, intervenes in oppression. We’re right to be sceptical, like Wickstrom, of cries of social change that only benefit elites. But shouldn’t the fear of ‘progressive’ art being used for neoliberal ends actually give us renewed faith in the idea of using it to achieve more worthy goals? One of the challenges of going all in on the ‘let’s use theatre to change the world’ front, is that theatre is mercurial, and the question of what it ‘does’ beyond entertain and delight us is not a simple matter of intention, action, and consequence. For example, think about how Adigun’s The Butcher Babes mirrors the structure of African ritual at the same time it evokes the Bacchus and the origins of Greek theatre in religious rites. These are two distinct traditions. Where, for the Greeks, theatrical catharsis would heal the body politic, Adigun’s use of African ritual is intended to set Swaleh Noor’s spirit free, not to absolve and assuage Irish society. I don’t know if Swaleh Noor’s spirit was released by the play (spirits being notoriously reluctant to participate in academic research) and I don’t know if Adigun’s play – despite its powerful critiques of Irish racism – could avoid the cathartic tendency of laughter and song to relieve tension around the taboo. But I have no trouble seeing that the piece functioned both spiritually and politically, guided by its artists’ beliefs and intent, in an alchemical freeplay with two aesthetic traditions and with the community feeling and individual consciousnesses of the audience. All this to say, art is never going to be a science. The truth is, the world changes and we don’t fully understand why. It changes in seismic upheavals; it changes in baby steps. It changes in individual epiphanies; it changes in fractious communal decisions. I refuse to be blasé about progress, about the life changing achievements of human rights movements, about the fact that for each marginalised constituency identified in this book, progress has been made. And progress, until it sediments, is fragile. I feel, at base, about those who deny theatre and performance a communal political

164  Reflections efficacy the same way I feel about those who tell protesters they’ll never achieve anything out marching in the streets. We use what we have. Our bodies. Our voices. And, sometimes, if we’re artists, we use art. It’s always something of an act of faith. But it’s activism. And, sometimes, it’s beautiful.

Notes 1 Jill Dolan, “Performance, Utopia, and the “Utopian Performative”, Theatre Journal 53.3 (2001): 455–479. 2 Jacques Rancière, “The Emancipated Spectator,” Artforum, March 2007, 271–280. 3 Grace Dyas and Emer O’Toole, “An Interview with Grace Dyas,” in The Winter Pages, Eds. Kevin Barry and Olivia Smith (Dublin: Curlew Editions, 2015). 4 Bert O. States, Great Reckonings in Little Rooms: On the Phenomenology of Theater (Berkeley: U of California P, 1985), 20. 5 David Elliott, Marissa Silverman, and Wayne Bowman, Eds. Artistic Citizenship: Artistry, Social Responsibility, and Ethical Praxis (New York: Oxford University Press, 2016), 7. 6 Bo Martin and Emer O’Toole, “Conversations with Beer,” Parc LaFontaine, 2013-present. 7 Pierre Bourdieu, Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste, Trans. Richard Nice (Harvard: Routledge, 1986); George Yúdice, The Expediency of Culture: Uses of Culture in the Global Era (Durham: Duke University Press, 2003); Maurya Wickstrom, Performance in the Blockades of Neoliberalism: Thinking the Political Anew (Basingstoke: Palgrave McMillan, 2012), 92; Claire Bishop, Artificial Hells: Participatory Art and the Politics of Spectatorship (London; New York: Verso, 2012).

Bibliography Bishop, Claire, Artificial Hells: Participatory Art and the Politics of Spectatorship (London; New York: Verso, 2012). Bourdieu, Pierre, Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste, Trans. Richard Nice (Harvard: Routledge, 1986). Dolan, Jill, “Performance, Utopia, and the “Utopian Performative,” Theatre Journal 53.3 (2001): 455–479. Dyas, Grace and Emer O’Toole, “An Interview with Grace Dyas,” in The Winter Pages, Ed. Kevin Barry and Olivia Smith (Dublin: Curlew Editions, 2015), 111–116. Elliott, David, Marissa Silverman and Wayne Bowman, eds. Artistic Citizenship: Artistry, Social Responsibility, and Ethical Praxis (New York: Oxford University Press, 2016). Rancière, Jacques, “The Emancipated Spectator,” Artforum, March 2007, 271–280. States, Bert O., Great Reckonings in Little Rooms: On the Phenomenology of Theater (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985). Wickstrom, Maurya, Performance in the Blockades of Neoliberalism: Thinking the Political Anew (Basingstoke: Palgrave McMillan, 2012). Yúdice, George, The Expediency of Culture: Uses of Culture in the Global Era (Durham: Duke University Press, 2003).

Index

#WakingtheFeminists 128 the 8th Amendment 1, 7, 126, 133nc, 136, 143ni, 146, 149 1916 59; 1916 Proclamation 128; Easter Rising 71–72, 95, 114, 127 2004 Citizenship Referendum 5, 26 2018 Abortion Referendum 1, 7, 127 Abbey Theatre 3, 36–50, 59, 127–130, 137; Waking the Nation 85, 127–128 abortion 1, 7, 126–127, 129–137, 139–153, 75–76; the 8th Amendment 1, 7, 126, 133c, 136, 143i, 146, 149; 2018 Abortion Referendum 1, 7, 127; Abortion Rights Campaign 7, 126, 129, 145; Fatal Foetal Abnormality 135, 145; Roe vs. Wade 129, 144, 153 Abortion Rights Campaign 7, 126, 129, 145 addiction 14, 58–59, 65–67, 76, 79, 82, 84, 160 Adigun, Bisi see Arambe Productions Adorno, Theodor 18, 61–63 A Drunk Lesbian Love Affair 105 aesthetic relativism 11–12 aesthetics of sociability 111–112, 114–115, 119, 161 aesthetics of the oppressed 73ni, 74nk Afrocentrism 29 Agit Prop 2–3, 60 Ahern, Bertie 148 Akujobi, Gabriel 48 alienation effect 28, 132 All I See is You 115 amateur theatre 109–112, 118–119 Amnesty International 77, 82 ancient Greece 8–9, 13nk, 47, 70 Appiah, Kwame Anthony 12, 17, 29 applied theatre 15

Arambe Productions 5, 25–51, 160, 163; The Butcher Babes 27, 45–49, 163; Kings of the Kilburn Highroad 27, 31–36, 42, 44, 46, 50, 161; Once Upon a Time and Not So Long Ago 25, 27–30, 39–40, 47; The Playboy of the Western World 27, 36–40, 42, 44–47, 50 Artistic Citizenship 11, 14, 161–162 Asante, Molefi Kete 29 Asylum Archive 97 asylum seekers 5, 26, 40; Direct Provision 5, 26, 96–99; MASI 97; Mosney 97 A Southern Fairytale 103–104 austerity 5, 70 autonomy 10, 13, 15–16, 69, 78, 111, 162–163 Autry, Ty see A Southern Fairytale the avant-garde 15, 60, 62–66, 69, 71, 75, 80, 84–85, 109, 129, 135, 138, 143, 152, 161 The Baby Monitor 112–113 The Bacchae 47, 163 Baim, Clark 130 Ball, Angeline 37 Ball, Mieke 33 beauty 1–2, 8–18, 41, 60, 102, 109–110, 119, 137, 142, 163 Bell, Lian 128 Best, John see The Little Pink Book of Masculinity Bingo 108 Bishop, Claire 14–16, 17, 29, 69, 117, 128, 142nh; the social turn 14–16, 29 Black Lives Matter 64, 118 The Blacks 46 Blaney, Maria see Party Boy

166  Index Boal, Augusto 72–73, 75; aesthetics of the oppressed 73ni–74nk; Theatre of the Oppressed 72 Borderline Asshole 105, 107 Bourdieu, Pierre 12, 16, 18, 60, 63–66, 71, 120, 162 Brecht, Bertolt 28–30, 43, 50, 72–73 Briggs, Brian see Monastic The Butcher Babes 27, 45–49 Byrne, Shane Daniel see THEATREclub Cain, Amelia see The Obligatory Scene camp 102–104, 106, 109–110, 123, 160 the Canon 10–13, 16–17, 37, 40–44, 59, 85, 109, 134, 160 capitalism 6, 13nk, 14, 61, 69, 72, 144 Catanese, Brandi Wilkins 34 Cathleen Ní Houlihan 71nh, 72 the Catholic church 4, 6, 7, 77, 128 censorship 11, 15, 126 the Celtic Tiger 4, 6, 25–27, 32, 36, 49–50, 58, 132, 134 Chan, Suzanne 127na Coady, Doireann see THEATREclub Coca Cola 64 Collins, Gemma see THEATREclub colonialism 3, 5nd, 11–13, 16–18, 27, 33, 39, 41–42, 48 communism 62, 65; Communist Party of Soviet Russia 2 community 6, 38nd, 58, 72–75, 81, 83, 93–101, 104–105, 107, 109–111, 119–120, 130, 132, 161, 163 Conroy, Collette 109–110, 120 consciousness raising 8, 62, 72, 101, 110 Conway, Thomas 7, 59 Cosgrave, Anna 126 Council of Europe Human Rights Commissioners 9 Crofford, Lynita see Gertrude Stein and A Companion the Culture Industry 61, 64, 72 Dahl, Brett see Like Orpheus Dáil Éireann 127, 143ni, 151 Death and the King’s Horseman 46, 48 decriminalization (of sex work) 1, 6, 77–78, 81–83, 104 de Faoite, Mia 79 determinism 16 de Valera, Éamon 68 Direct Provision 5, 26, 96–99 Dolan, Jill 14, 44, 151, 160

Donovan, David see Monastic Douglas, Robert 30 Doyle, Roddy 37, 38nd, 39–50 Druid Theatre Company 7, 37 Duchamp, Marcel 64, 135 Duffin, Mary 48 Duggan, Lisa 99 Dyas, Grace see THEATREclub Dying to Survive 59 economic recovery 6 the Economy of Cultural Practice 63–64 Edwards, Christian see All I See Is You the Enlightenment 8, 11, 13nk Enright, Máiréad 142, 146 epimelesthai sautou 70, 130 European Court of Human Rights 6 European Union 4, 104 The Expediency of Culture 13, 15 experimental theatre: The International Dublin Gay Theatre Festival 4, 7, 44, 82, 93–121, 138; THEATREclub 6, 58–86, 160–162 expressionism 8 The Family 60–61, 67–69 Fanning, Bryan 5nd, 26 Fanon, Franz 41nf Fatal Foetal Abnormality 135, 145 Fay, Jimmy 39 Feagin, Susan L. 72 Federici, Silvia 143–144 Felski, Rita 137, 152 Female Absence 12, 129, 140–141, 142, 146 feminism 7, 120, 129, 135, 138–139, 144, 149, 151–153, 163 feminist aesthetics 8, 12–13, 17–18, 76, 126, 129, 135, 137–138, 151–153 Fianna Fáil 148 Field Day 3 Firebrand 109 Fischer, Clara 129, 131, 152 Fitzgerald, Francis 77 Flanagan, Alan see Bingo Fletcher, Ruth 126, 128 Flynn, Dave see Party Boy Flynn, Tara 126, 139nf, 152, 160; Not a Funny Word 8, 129–137 formalism 8 Foucault, Michel 50ni, 61, 70 Fouère, Olwen 139–142, 146, 161 the Frankfurt School 61, 64, 67, 72 Fricker, Karen 42

Index 167 Gage, Carolyn see The Obligatory Scene the Galway Races 8, 129, 147–150 The Game 76–83, 162 Genet, Jean see The Blacks Geraghty, Kit see Monastic Gertrude Stein and A Companion 115 the Gigantic 138–143, 145–146 Giblin, Tessa 139, 141, 143 Gieseke, Julie see Borderline Asshole Gilbert Helen 38nd Gloag, Isobel see The Woman with the Puppets Godson, Lisa 139, 146nj Gramsci, Antonio 62 Griffiths, Ciarán see All I See is You Gregory, Augusta 3, 71nh Grene, Nicolas 3 Griffin, Sarah Maria see We Face This Land Halappanavar, Savita 7, 143, 146nj, 149 Halferty, J. Paul 96 Halliwell, Stephen 8, 8nf, 11 Harvie, Jen 15, 162 Haughton, Miriam 126, 133, 139 Heddon, Deirdre 101, 132, 134–136 HEROIN 58–60, 65–67, 69, 79, 84 heteronomy see autonomy Higgins, Michael D. 143 Hill, Shonagh 141 HISTORY 71–72, 75–76, 161 homelessness 5–6 homonationalism 95, 98–100, 109, 119, 162 homonormativity 99–101, 103–104, 109, 112, 119 Hughes, Holly 100–101, 132 human rights: Council of Europe Human Rights Commissioners 97; direct provision 26; European Court of Human Rights 6; sex workers rights 76–83; United Nations Human Rights Committee 97 Husserl, Edmund see phenomenology the Immigrant Council of Ireland 77 improvisation 66, 83, 161 infrastructural politics 69, 81 interculturalism 27, 29, 40–41, 43, 47 the Interior Scroll 12, 134 International Dublin Gay Theatre Festival 4, 7, 44, 82, 93–121, 138 I See You Tom Kennedy 116 Jackson, Shannon see infrastructural politics

Jastrow, Joseph 34–35 Jegede, Dele 29–30, 120, 140 Jenner, Kendal 64 Johnson, Shirley see Gertrude Stein and A Companion Jones, Amanda see The Baby Monitor Jones, Jesse 126, 146; No More Fun and Games 138–139; Tremble, Tremble 8, 129, 137–144, 151–152, 161 Jordan, Eamonn 132–134, 136 the judgment of taste 9–12, 60, 63–64, 74 Kabia, Alice Sia see The Obligatory Scene Kalb, Jonathan 132–133, 136 Kane, Thalia Gonzalez see A Drunk Lesbian Love Affair Kant, Emmanuel 8–15, 18, 29, 34, 42, 60–61, 72, 74, 110–111, 162; the judgment of taste 60, 63–64, 74 Kaur, Jasbir 98 Kelleher, Sarah 138 Kelly, Gerard see The Family; HEROIN Keogh, Rachel 59, 66 Kiberd, Declan 36 Killers: Sisters 49, 54, 57 Kim, Young Yun 27 King, Jason 5, 27, 32, 34 Kings of the Kilburn Highroad 27, 31–36, 42, 44, 46, 50, 161 Klaic, Dragan 38 Knowles, Ric 42ng Korsmeyer, Carolyn 12–13, 137–138 Kramer, Heinrich 142 Kuppers, Petra 94 Laderman Ukeles, Mierle see Maintenance Artworks Ladies’ Day see the Galway Races Larkin, Lauren see The Family; The Game; HEROIN; THEATREclub Lenin, Vladimir 2 Lentin, Ronit 32, 34, 42, 49, 99nh, 151; McVeigh, Robbie 26, 44 Lewis, Louise see The Family Like Orpheus 118 The Little Pink Book of Masculinity 106 Lonergan, Patrick 3, 59 Lorde, Audrey 71 Macdonald, Jane see Miss Furr and Miss Skein Madden, Ed 98–99, 106 Mahon, Christy see The Playboy of the Western World

168  Index Maintenance Artworks 134–135 Malleus Maleficarum 141, 142nh Malomo, Christopher 39 Malone, Colin see Party Boy Marriage Equality Referendum 6, 94, 96, 98–99, 116, 121; Yes Equality 101 Martin, Micheál 152 marxism 8, 12–13, 16–18, 28, 61–64, 73, 84, 138, 144, 163 MASI (Movement of Asylum Seekers in Ireland) 97 Matias, Héctór see The Baby Monitor Maynooth Grindr Scandal 117, 121, 123 Mazama, Ama 29 McConghaill, Fiach 127–128 McGill, Mary 8, 129, 147–150 McGrew, Kate 79 McIvor, Charlotte 25–27, 32, 34, 44; Matthew Spangler 25 McMahon Report 26na, 97 McVeigh, Robbie 26, 44 Mears, Elaine 8, 129, 147–150 The Measure of a Man 106 Merriman, Brian 93–101, 111–112, 118–121 migration 4–5, 32–34, 38–39, 43, 50–51, 98–99nh Miller, Lynn C see Miss Furr and Miss Skein mimesis 8 Miss Furr and Miss Skein 115–116 Molloy, Connor see Monastic Monastic 117–118 Monologue Theatre 132–133 Mooney, John 49 Moran, Rachel 79 Morash, Christopher 3 Morgan, Robin 144 Mosney 97 Mulhall, Anne 98ng, 99nh Mulhall, Charlotte see The Butcher Babes Mulhall, Linda see The Butcher Babes Mulhall, Kathleen see The Butcher Babes Mullaly, Úna 128 Mulligan, Sonya see Revolting Women – A Rebel Cabaret multiculturalism 26–27 multidominance 30–31, 47 Murphy, Ciara 60, 85 Murphy, Colin 50 Murphy, Jimmy 31 Murphy, Simon see The Number Murray, Alice Margaret 146 Musca, Szabulcs 38

Nedeljković, Vukašin see Asylum Archive Negra, Diana 4 neoliberalism 4nc, 11, 14–15, 69, 74, 86, 99h, 162–163 Nic Ghabhann, Niamh 150–151 Nicholson, Helen 110–112, 114–115 No More Fun and Games 138–139 non-conforming casting 34 Noone, Tom see I See You Tom Kennedy Noor, Farrah Swaleh see The Butcher Babes the Nordic Model 76–78, 82–83 Norris, Rufus 46 Not a Funny Word 8, 129–137 The Number 103–105 The Obligatory Scene 116–117 O’Brien, Cormac 96, 101 Occhipinti, Ben see All I See is You O’Connor Barry see THEATREclub Oland, Eric 127 Once Upon a Time and Not So Long Ago 25, 27–30, 39–40, 47 Orientalism 43 O’Toole, Fintan 40–42, 84 O’Toole, Sarah 8, 129, 147–150 The Paddies of Parnell Street 32 participation 65, 72–73, 80–81, 83, 85 Party Boy 111–112 Pepsi 64 Phenomenology 34–35, 42, 46, 81, 161 The Playboy of the Western World 27, 36–40, 42, 44–47, 50 Pollock, Griselda 12 postcolonialism 3, 8–9, 11–13, 16–18, 27 postmodernism 8–9, 11–13, 16–17, 29, 41–42, 47, 138 Professional Theatre 27, 95, 100, 109–115, 119–121, 147 the pure gaze 11; see also the judgment of taste Quispe, Greta see The Baby Monitor radicalism 70, 72, 74, 84–86, 152, 161 Rancière, Jacques 15–18, 73–75, 83, 160 Ratcliffe, Tom see Velvet Rebellato, Dan 9h recession 94 Reinelt, Janelle 74–75 the Renaissance 12–13 Repeal the 8th 1, 7–8, 116, 126–130, 135–137, 140, 143–144, 146–153

Index 169 Rhoades, Carli see The Obligatory Scene Roach, Gavin see The Measure of a Man Robinson, Mary 39 Roe vs. Wade 129, 144, 153 Roman, David 101 Rotimi, Ola 28 Revolting Women – A Rebel Cabaret 114 Said, Edward see Orientalism Samuels, Andrew 43nh Sanders, Teela 80 Schechner, Richard 41ne Schlong Song 102–103 Schneeman, Carolee see The Interior Scroll Schweigert, Laisa 144 Schticks, Woody see Schlong Song Scissor Sisters see the Butcher Babes Second Wave Feminism 7, 101, 129, 133–139, 143–145, 151, 153 secularisation 4 self-care 65, 69–71, 108, 130 sex trafficking 77 sex work 58; The Game 76–83 shadowing 126, 137, 149 Shakespeare, William 8, 116–117 shame 7, 101, 106, 127, 129–131, 134, 136, 139, 149, 152 Share, Sarah see Killers: Sisters Side, Katherine 130, 133nc silence 7, 67, 74, 97, 126–127, 139, 141, 151, 160 Simmel, Georg 110–111 Singleton, Brian 42, 134 Smith, Katherine see All I See is You the social turn 14–16, 29 social work 14–15, 18, 95 solo autobiographical performance 95, 100–109, 119, 129–130, 132–135, 161 Sontag, Susan see camp Soyinka, Wole 28, 46, 48 Stallings, David see The Baby Monitor States, Bert O. 34, 161 Stein, Gertrude 63, 115–116 Stenger, Susan 139 St. Michael’s Housing Estate 71 Stone, Maeve see #WakingtheFeminists Sturner, Lynda see Miss Furr and Miss Skein Suffragettes 8, 126, 129, 147–150 SWAI (Sex Workers Alliance of Ireland) 78 Synge, John Millington 36–38, 40–45

Taylor, Roger 63 Testimonial 28, 49, 96, 101, 104, 106–109, 126 THEATREclub 6, 58–86, 160–162; The Family 60–61, 67–69; The Game 76–83; HEROIN 58–60, 65–67, 69, 79, 84; HISTORY 71–72, 75–76, 161 theatre of personal stories 130, 133nc Theatre of the Oppressed 72 Theatre Outré see Like Orpheus THISISPOPBABY 58, 130 Time-Travellers for Choice 151 Total Theatre 30 Tremble, Tremble 8, 129, 137–144, 151–152, 161 Trump, Donald 144 Tynan, Dave see We Face This Land United Nations Human Rights Committee 97 universalism 8, 11–13, 15, 18, 32–33, 41nf, 74 Unyulo Onyemaechi, Paiche 49 Urban, Eva 27 utopia 14, 44, 151, 160 Varadkar, Leo 152 Velvet 107 Venice Biennial 140, 143 Wages for Housework 143 Walcon, Erin 110–112, 115 Walker, Clarence 29 Wallace, Clare 134 Walsh, Eileen see The Playboy of the Western World Walsh, Fintan 6, 95–96, 98–99, 107, 110, 121–122, 137 Walsh, Ian W. 58 Waking the Nation 85, 127–128 Ward, Eilís 58, 77 Weare, Christopher see Gertrude Stein and A Companion We Face This Land 144–145 Wells, Win see Gertrude Stein and A Companion Welsh-Asante, Kariamu 29 Whelan, Siobhán 135 whiteface 46 Wickstrom, Maurya 15, 162–164 Wilding Davidson, Emily 147, 151 Wingo, Ajune 29

170  Index Winning, Eoin see THEATREclub W.I.T.C.H. (Women’s International Terrorist Conspiracy from Hell) 144 witch 8, 129, 138–146, 151, 153 Wole, Soyinka see Death and the King’s Horseman Wolff, Janet 17, 111, 137

The Woman with the Puppets 138 Wylie Gillian 58, 77 Yeats, William Butler 3, 36, 71nh Yes Equality 101 Young, Yun Kim 27 Yúdice, George see The Expediency of Culture