Irish Theatre (Routledge Studies in Irish Literature) [1 ed.] 1032017929, 9781032017921

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Irish Theatre

This book on modern and contemporary Irish theatre traces how social, cultural and economic capital are circulated in order to demonstrate complex and often contradictory outlooks on equality/inequality. Individual chapters analyse property ownership and inheritance; wealth acquisition; employment conditions; educational access; intercultural encounters; sexual intimacy and violation; and acts of resistance, protest and solidarity. This book addresses complex intergenerational, intercultural, racial, sectarian, ethnic, gender and inter- and intraclass dynamics from the perspective of ranked, objectifying, exploitative and coercive relationships but also in terms of commonalities, complicities, reciprocations and retaliations. Notable are the significances of wealth precarity and shaming; the consequences of anti-materialistic dramaturgical leanings; the pathologising of success; the fraught nature of solidarity; and the problematics of merit, divisive partitioning and muddled mésalliances. Ultimately the book wonders about how Irish theatre distinguishes between tolerable and intolerable inequalities that are culturally and socially but principally economically derived. Eamonn Jordan received his B.Comm, M.A. and Ph.D. from the University College Dublin, Ireland, where he is currently Professor in Drama Studies at the School of English, Drama and Film. His previous publications include The Feast of Famine: The Plays of Frank McGuinness (1997), Dissident Dramaturgies: Contemporary Irish Theatre (2010), From Leenane to LA: The Theatre and Cinema of Martin McDonagh (2014), The Theatre and Films of Conor McPherson: Conspicuous Communities (2019) and Justice in the Plays and Films of Martin McDonagh (2020). He has edited/co-edited numerous collections, including The Palgrave Handbook of Contemporary Irish Theatre (2018).

Routledge Studies in Irish Literature Editor: Eugene O’Brien Mary Immaculate College University of Limerick Ireland

Ageing Masculinities in Irish Literature and Visual Culture Edited by Michaela Schrage-Früh and Tony Tracy Austerity and Irish Women’s Writing and Culture, 1980–2020 Edited by Deirdre Flynn and Ciara L. Murphy Space and Irish Lesbian Fiction Towards a Queer Liminality Amy Jeffrey Feminist Discourse in Irish Literature Gender and Power in Louise O’Neill’s Young Adult Fiction Jennifer Mooney James Joyce’s Mandala Colm O’Shea The Irish Short Story at the Turn of the Twenty-first Century Tradition, Society and Modernity Madalina Armie Seamus Heaney’s American Odyssey Edward J. O’Shea Seamus Heaney’s Mythmaking Edited by Ian Hickey and Ellen Howley Irish Theatre Interrogating Intersecting Inequalities Eamonn Jordan For more information about this series, please visit: www.routledge.com/Routledge-Studiesin-Irish-Literature/book-series/RSIL

Irish Theatre Interrogating Intersecting Inequalities Eamonn Jordan

First published 2024 by Routledge 605 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10158 and by Routledge 4 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon, OX14 4RN Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2024 Eamonn Jordan The right of Eamonn Jordan 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. ISBN: 978-1-032-01792-1 (hbk) ISBN: 978-1-032-01793-8 (pbk) ISBN: 978-1-003-18007-4 (ebk) DOI: 10.4324/9781003180074 Typeset in Sabon by Apex CoVantage, LLC

Contents

Acknowledgementsvi Introduction

1

1 Methodology: Pivoting Intersections of Gender, Sectarianism, Ethnicity, Race and Class Towards Inequality

23

2 Property Matters

48

3 Everyday Entrepreneurial Capital

72

4 Embodied Labour

96

5 Knowledge Economy

120

6 Sexual Encounters, Intimacies and Violations

144

7 Intersectional/Intercultural Conflicts, Mésalliances and Irreconcilabilities

170

8 The Solidarity Paradox: Inter-Meshing Cultural and Social Capital in Lieu of Economic Capital?

196

Conclusion

221

Works Cited 239 Index252

Acknowledgements

The first step towards this book began with an invitation from Michael Pierse to write an essay for A History of Irish Working-Class Writing (2016). That challenge gave me the impetus to think more critically about how inequality, class and capital are accounted for in contemporary Irish theatre. Eoghan Smith and Simon Workman’s invitation to submit an essay to Imagining Irish Suburbia in Literature and Culture (2018) led to thinking about suburbia, sex and economic capital that informs a couple of the chapters. Chiara Sciarrino’s request to submit to the special issue on Irish theatre for the journal InVerbis (2021) resulted in shaping the ideas for this book’s critical methodology. An offer from Gloria McMillan to submit an essay to The Routledge Companion to Literature and Class (2022) helped me consolidate some of my arguments around property, inheritance and class in modern Irish plays. Lisa Fitzpatrick and Mariá Kurdi’s invite to write about some of Deirdre Kinahan’s shorter plays for ‘I Love Craft. I Love Word’: The Theatre of Deirdre Kinahan (2022) led to a critical focus on intersectionality and its potential application to Irish theatre more broadly. Over the years, I have worked with many scholars as a contributor and editor/co-editor to different publications, so numerous people have profoundly influenced my thinking and are too many to name. But I want to give a particular shout-out to UCD colleagues, current and past: Emma Bennett, Catherine Casey, Finola Cronin, Enrica Cerquoni, Fiona Daly, Dan Farrelly, Anne Fogarty, Paul Halferty, Kellie Hughes, Cathy Leeney, Joseph Long, Clara Mallon, Pedzisai Maedza, P.J. Matthews, Christopher Murray, Cormac O’Brien, Redmond O’Hanlon, Mark O’Halloran, Nicolas Pallai, Emilie Pine, Anthony Roche, Andrea Scott, Ashley Taggart, Jeanne Tiehen and Ian Walsh. As a postgraduate supervisor I have learned so much from the following Ph.D. candidates: Maha Alatawi, Susanne Colleary, Finola Cronin, Annetta Kavanagh, Audrey McNamara, Michael Maguire, Iris Park, Salomé Paul, Noelia Ruiz, Anne O’Reilly, Eva Urban, and current PhDs Jason Byrne,

Acknowledgements  vii Rachel Feehily, Francis Schürmann, Helena Young and Justine Zapin. That is not to mention by name the many M.A. thesis students I supervised or the various graduate and undergraduate students I have worked with over the years, whose almost always refreshing and thoughtful work demanded careful attention. My thinking has benefitted hugely from the critical contributions of so many other colleagues in the field of Irish theatre studies, especially members of the Irish Society for Theatre Research (ISTR), some but not all of whom are cited in this book. Thanks to Eugene O’Brien, the series editor for the Routledge Studies in Irish Literature, for his support, guidance and advice, and to the commissioning staff at Routledge, especially Bryony Reece for her dedication and professionalism. To Claire, Finn, Kian and Pat, you all are great allies in life. And, as always, I  am so indebted to Marian, Roisin and Ian. If you only knew the extent to which I depend on you all for support, encouragement and inspiration. Finally, there is Roisin and Liam’s wonderful daughter, Éabha.

Introduction

There are many explanations as to why modern and contemporary Irish theatre have had such a substantial impact on theatre internationally. From the late nineteenth to the mid-twentieth century, playwrights like Oscar Wilde, George Bernard Shaw, William Butler Yeats, Lady Augusta Gregory, John Millington Synge and Sean O’Casey and later Samuel Beckett and Brendan Behan have been variously feted as figures of major importance, relevance and influence, even if the Irish backgrounds of Shaw, Wilde and Beckett are sometimes ignored, overlooked or repressed. Even today, the number of international productions of plays by these writers is astonishing. Their ongoing relevance is due not only to when and why they wrote their works but also to the complexities of their varied and distinctive dramaturgical practices. Crucial but lesser-known playwrights began writing for theatre in the early to mid-twentieth century, including Padraic Colum, Teresa Deevy, St John Ervine, Denis Johnston, Maura Laverty, Mary Manning, Edward Martyn, Rutherford Mayne, Dorothy McCardle, Alice Milligan, Lennox Robinson, George Shiels and many others. The late 1950s/early 1960s witnessed the emergence of figures like Brian Friel, John B. Keane, Thomas Kilroy, Hugh Leonard, Tom Murphy, Máiréad Ní Gráda, Carolyn Swift and Sam Thompson. Those that started playwriting careers in the 1980s and after, such as Sebastian Barry, Dermot Bolger, Marina Carr, Anne Devlin, Roddy Doyle, Bernard Farrell, Stacey Gregg, Nancy Harris, Declan Hughes, David Ireland, Marie Jones, Deirdre Kinahan, Pat Kinevane, Tom Mac Intyre, Owen McCafferty, Martin McDonagh, Lisa McGee, Frank McGuinness, Conor McPherson, Stewart Parker, Christina Reid, Graham Reid, Billy Roche, Mark O’Rowe, Ursula Rani Sarma, Abbie Spallen and Enda Walsh, are variously viewed as eminent writers, if some are far better known and more frequently performed than others. It is a complex tradition of writing that has been systematically analysed from multiple perspectives.1 To this body of work, I  take an all-island DOI: 10.4324/9781003180074-1

2  Introduction approach and focus on how writing practices consider issues of equality/ inequality, injustices, exploitations, discriminations and prejudices, without suggesting that these plays function exclusively to reinforce, mediate or moderate the values of an elite/ruling class or that spectators are acted upon in ways that position them as docile, passive or ideologically uncritical.2 I work more from texts to contexts rather than contexts to texts; if I rely on historic facts and contextual details to give some necessary background, this is not to imply some twin-track, interchangeable approach between cultural expression and socio/political contexts. In examining the various circulations of social, cultural and economic capital, I wish to demonstrate how various class, gender, intercultural, ethnic, sectarian and race inequalities are generated.3 However, Mike Savage cautions that the term inequality ‘has also become massively overloaded, piled with more freight than it can possibly bear. We may have grasped the scale, but we have not yet understood the full nature of the challenge that inequality poses’ (2021, 2).4 Savage sees the stuff of inequality: ‘poverty, domination, exclusion, institutional racism, patriarchy, class exploitation, stigmatization, and marginalization; the systematic ways that many lives are stunted while a few enjoy bloated privilege’ (2021, 104). In Capital and Ideology Piketty claims to use ‘ideology’ in a positive and constructive sense to refer to a set of a priori plausible ideas and discourses describing how society should be structured. An ideology has social, economic, and political dimensions. It is an attempt to respond to a broad set of questions concerning the desirable or ideal organization of society. Given the complexity of the issues, it should be obvious that no ideology can ever command full and total assent: ideological conflict and disagreement are inherent in the very notion of ideology. (2020, 3) Out of this ideological complexity, Piketty argues: ‘Every human society must justify its inequalities: unless reasons for them are found, the whole political and social edifice stands in danger of collapse’ (2020, 1). He continues: ‘Every epoch therefore develops a range of contradictory discourses and ideologies for the purpose of legitimizing the inequality that already exists or that people believe should exist’ (Piketty 2020, 1). Consequently, ‘Out of the clash of the contradictory discourses – a clash that is at once economic, social and political – comes a dominant narrative or narratives, which bolster the existing inequality regime’ (Piketty 2020, 1). This ‘inequality regime’, he argues, encompasses ‘the political regime and the property regimes, and relies on fiscal, legal and education systems to

Introduction  3 maintain inequalities and the privileges of the ruling classes (Piketty 2020, 6). For Piketty these hyper-capitalist narratives also rely on particular attitudes towards ‘entrepreneurship and meritocracy’ (2020, 1).5 Inequitable regimes redefine and reinvent themselves; are anticipative more than passive; utilise or threaten to deploy considerable violence; and rely on a ‘set of discourse and institutional arrangements intended to justify and structure the economic, social and political inequalities of a given society’ (Piketty 2020, 2). Many cultural texts consciously or unconsciously reinforce such regimes; many contain various degrees of ideological complicity, normalising inequalities and injustices, and one wonders about the degree to which inequalities are acceptable, bearable, unchangeable or inexcusable.6 These regimes can also be coerced into change throughout history. However, what if the dialectic between the various ‘contradictory discourses’ anomalously amplifies the paradoxes and declines to bolster a regime, and that is not to suggest the regimes are independent of one another? What if narrative or dramaturgical attempts to justify inequalities fall short, intentionally or otherwise? What if there are insubstantial or excessive reasons flaunted for holding the ideological line? What if the case is over-made towards the avoidance of political collapse? What if a narrative accommodates multiple viewpoints, and none serves to cohere into a whole? What might be made of a theatre tradition that was sometimes ambivalent, irresponsible and divisive, neither blatantly hostile nor demonstratively supportive of a regime or various ruling classes across history?7 And what of a theatre practice that was in but also out of step with a regime’s view on poverty, property and merit, and if its views on race, gender, sectarianism, ethnicity and class were discommoded by accommodating prejudices but also by saying something about oppression, agency, resistance or social mobility – upward and downward – that was inimical to prevailing viewpoints? These are some of the anomalous positionings that Irish theatre sometimes takes. The contradictions are sometimes augmented, magnified or erased as acts of intended and unintended dissent. That said, not all texts are harbingers of change or anticipate something better or utopian.8 Some theatre texts are innately conservative and others more radical, and this has nothing to do with form or genre. Texts are never simply seen as entirely independent or as simply representative of a context. Dominant, hegemonic ideology openly and self-assuredly declares itself, encourages value and belief alignments, meshes contradictions, deceives and deludes, or is the counter-hegemonic more than just what is licensed by a ruling class?9 As substantive ideology evolves by embracing change, it can always punish and silence those that are truly aberrant, especially when they refuse to justify inequalities.

4  Introduction Methodology: Pivoting Intersections of Gender, Sectarianism, Ethnicity, Race and Class Towards Inequality Chapter  1 offers an overview of the diverse critical approaches to Irish theatre, acknowledging how criticism can be complex, persuasive, vigorous, well-informed, privileged, siloed, selective, narrow, reprimanding and as ideologically driven as any script. Criticism needs to be aware of the challenges set by notions of objectivity, impartiality, diversity and bias and cautioned by the fact that criticism can date badly. As Thomas Postlewait observes: ‘What we know is also constrained by how we know’ (2009, 22). My reflections on historiography acknowledge only some of the many figures that have evaluated Irish theatre from postcolonial, neo-colonial, liberal humanist, cultural materialist, feminist and classist viewpoints. Feminist scholarship currently dominates critical practices and has been alert to the religious, social, cultural, economic, political, constitutional and legal imperatives that have shaped unequal gendered relations across the jurisdictions on the island of Ireland. Feminism marks how women and men are differently treated, positioned, adjudicated, marginalised, rewarded, demeaned, surveyed, mythologised and valued under patriarchy. Amia Srinivasan remarks that Feminism begins with a woman’s recognition that she is a member of a sex class:10 that is, a member of a class of people assigned to an inferior social status on the basis of something called ‘sex’ – a thing that is said to be natural, pre-political, an objective material ground on which the world of human culture is built. (2021, xi) Additionally, she argues, if it is a male-dominated world, women have contested these rules: ‘in much of human history their dissent has been private and unsystematic: flinching, struggling, leaving, quitting. More recently it has been public and organised’ (Srinivasan 2021, 21). Traditionally, across the island, very conservative viewpoints led to extensive restrictions on women’s rights and freedoms,11 sexual expression, body autonomy, employment practices, domestic duties, contraception, divorce and abortion that the Women’s Liberation Movement articulated internationally in the 1960s,12 followed by the Irish Women’s Liberation Movement’s manifesto launch of Chains or Change in March 1971, which was a game-changing intervention (Fitzpatrick 2013, 3).13 There is a long tradition of Irish playwriting being patriarchal in orientation. Theatre boards, artistic directors and commercial producers, sponsors, funders and other adjudicators colluded in the fundamental marginalisation and silencing of the work of plays by many women for decades, an imbalance that is currently being addressed.

Introduction  5 In Northern Ireland, in contrast, tensions between a Protestant/Unionist majority and a Catholic/Nationalist minority played out most egregiously from the establishment of the Irish border under the Government of ­Ireland Act (2020), which came into being in May 2021, persisted, then strengthened during ‘The Troubles’ period (1968–1998). The view that Northern Ireland was a ‘Protestant Parliament for a Protestant People’, as James Craig claimed, would ensure there was no myth of unity to which the whole population could subscribe; instead, it was a view that rationalised dominance and exclusion, reinforced by inequitable socio-political practices. Tom Maguire’s approach is to disaggregate Northern Irish plays from ‘mainstream Irish theatre history’ (2006, 8). Mark Phelan notes: ‘the dominant critical analysis of the Troubles emphasises the ethnonational over class dynamics of the conflict’ (2018, 348). Victor Merriman remarks how ‘class positions are obscured, dislocated, avoided and even denied in Ireland’ (2018, 320). And Michael Pierse observes: ‘Class is at the heart of Irish society, its apparatuses, privileges and anxieties, whatever the failures of academic scrutiny in this regard’ (2018a, 20–21).14 Performance/liveness muddies the notion of class further,15 and there is also the issue of a writer’s class background and what that might pose in terms of analysis. Irish theatre criticism has always signalled class but is often hesitant about class-inclined analysis, partly because categorisations are sometimes problematic and partly because of a socio-political disinclination to deal with or acknowledge class-related issues, especially from the perspective of inequality.16 Historically, class dynamics in Ireland were seldom consistent with the international practices of heavily industrialised and urbanised European nations and were further complicated by the lengthy period of British colonisation, especially around the suppression of political and property rights.17 Social class is variously aligned with wealth, income, occupation, where and how one lives, educational attainment, social status and the accent one utilises, in addition to how one dresses, holds oneself (deportment) and positions oneself (defensively or assertively); tastes in foods; the leisure activities one pursues; and the networks to which one belongs. In  addition to life opportunities and chances, health outcomes and life expectancy are impacted by class.18 As John Kirk notes: ‘Class is always in some sense present: whether in our refusal to accept it, our inclination to acknowledge it or insist on it or as in some cases, our being privileged enough not to have noticed it’ (2009, 1, cited by Pierse 2018a, 20).19 Gloria McMillan remarks: ‘real class struggles create pain in the macro-level through full-scale armed conflicts. Micro-level class struggles go on daily, more or less peacefully, if annoyingly’ (2022, 2).20 Often it is easier to say to which of the class categories one does not belong rather than to identify the category one thinks one might be placed within.21

6  Introduction Traditionally, as a categorisation, clustering and identifier, social class was identified as a tripartite, adversarial model, with distinctions between an elite/aristocratic/ruling class; second, an upper-, middle- and lower-­middleclass;22 and third, a working-class/welfare cohort,23 comprising pr­o­vi­ders of manual, skilled and semi-skilled labour and the long-term unemployed, workless and/or welfare-reliant.24 Based around the BBC’s Great British Class Survey, the recent model proposed by Savage and his team identifies seven distinct class categories in contemporary British society.25 I am less concerned with these new categories and more interested in how they are shaped by the intersections of different types of capital, namely social (friendships, networks and associations), cultural (tastes, interests and activities) and economic (wealth and income) (Savage 2015, 4).26 Savage observes: ‘expanding economic inequalities are associated with class divisions more broadly’ (2015, 5), adding ‘class is fundamentally tied up with inequality. But not all economic inequalities are about class’ (2015, 45).27 Savage explains: ‘Inequality is multidimensional and operates across several planes, it does not simply map onto income inequality, or indeed onto economic inequality more broadly. Cultural tastes, practices, and lifestyles can also be unequal’ (2021, 58). While it is sometimes easier to be aware of economic inequalities, it is also vital to see cultural and social capital deficits as inequalities but also as opportunities.28 Irish theatre has always engaged with the work of other cultures; sometimes it is a conscious reflection on and engagement with dramaturgical and performance practices and traditions, or sometimes intercultural encounters inspirationally trigger further creativity, within and outside of conscious awareness.29 The process has been predominantly one way, with only a few like O’Casey, Friel, McGuinness or Carr significantly impacting work elsewhere. The Greeks, especially Sophocles and Euripides, and later Shakespeare, Chekhov, Churchill, Ibsen and Brecht have variously inspired Irish playwriting. The commissioning of Irish writers to adapt works makes those connections more concrete. Companies and figures like 7:84, Eugenio Barba, Pina Bausch, Anne Bogart, Romeo Castelluci, Etienne Decroux, Footsbarn, Roy Hart Company, Jerzy Grotowski, Joint Stock, Tadeusz Kantor, Jacques Lecoq, Monstrous Regiment, Nôh Theatre, Robert Wilson, Second City and the Wooster Group are some of the many performers/theatre makers that have influenced the performance practices of Barabbas, Big Telly, Blue Raincoat, Brokentalkers, Calypso Productions, Charabanc, Corn Exchange, Corcadorca, Fishamble, Loose Canon, Tinderbox, Pan Pan and Rough Magic.30 Many scholars have reflected on theatre and interculturalism more broadly (Pavis 1996; Knowles 2010), and in the instance of Irish theatre, Charlotte McIvor’s intercultural assessments are instrumental (2011,

Introduction  7 2016). McIvor sees Irish interculturalism ‘as a social and aesthetic formation’ (2016, 2). Race is an interrelated matter. John Brannigan cautions: ‘[Bryan] Fanning’s pioneering sociological study has done much to show that racism has a longer history in the Irish state and society than media representations in the 1990s would suggest’ (2009, 3, reflecting on Fanning 2002). Brannigan reminds us: ‘The citizenship amendment [2004 Referendum] established racial identity as the foundation of Irish citizenship, and arguably lent credence and legitimacy to racist attacks upon immigrants, refugees, and minority groups in Irish society’ (2009, 224).31 The issues of race and interculturalism feature towards the end of this book, yet they are variously acknowledged across other chapters by way of their intersectional significances and attendant inequalities. As Patricia Hill Collins notes, those applying an intersectional evaluation ‘seek compelling, complex analyses of how colonialism, patriarchy, racism, nationalism, and neoliberal capitalism, either singularly or in combination, inform their realities’ (2019, 5).32 Hill Collins advises that: ‘Gender, race, ethnicity, nation, sexuality, ability, and age are not just categories designed to make intersectionality more user-friendly for academic research’ (2019, 88). Moreover, any critical interconnecting of class, gender and race demands nuanced analysis, a great deal of qualification33 and a need to avoid the ‘mono-categorical thinking’ and work with particulars as much as commonalities (Hill Collins 2019, 25). Class, gender, race, ethnicity and sectarian issues are identified, not to prioritise one over the other and not to say they are complementary injustices shared by all categories. There are commonalities, there are particulars, but it is vital to work with their distinctiveness and differences by way of their intersections. At times, if there is a greater visibility given to any one category, it is to foreground these specific inequalities. As Hill Collins and Sirma Bilge argue, ‘Capital is intersectional. It always intersects with the bodies that produce the labour. Therefore, the accumulation of wealth is embedded in the racialized and engendered structures that enhance it’ (2020, 21). Accordingly, my interfacing of race, sectarianism, gender, ethnicity and class in terms of the circulation of the three different types of ­capital – social, cultural and economic – attempts to look at discriminations, ­victimisations, struggles and antagonisms, as would be expected in any consideration of inequality. However, it would be remiss to capture not just hierarchies and conflicts but also the significance of various intersectional reciprocations, commonalities,34 conciliations, accommodations, provocations, as well as the importance of retaliation, resistance and solidarity in the face of and response to inequalities. While I use some broadstroke socio-political details by way of establishing context, there is not enough specificity to ground the argument historically. Although I heavily

8  Introduction rely on the specificities of plays, I  do not interlink such details with the wide-reaching complexities of such texts. Both inclinations combined ensure that I have no claim that this work is either a theatre history or one substantially grounded socio/politically. Property Matters Contested territories, evictions, agitation and disputes about land ownership and tenancies and the constitutional right to private ownership mean that property is always political, especially in the context of colonialism. Chapter 2’s focus is on different types of property holdings across a range of plays, not just big houses but also tenancies and small holdings, and the various ways that inheritances, marriages, dowries and divorce impact asset consolidation, destruction and dissipation. If the first plays evaluated emerge from the early to mid-twentieth century, I then include more recent plays, but not in a way that presupposes a coherent dramaturgical evolution. Property retention and consolidation between big house heir Hugh O’Cahan and Peggy Scally, daughter of the new aspiring landholder class, is linked to marriage in Shiel’s Professor Tim (1925). Delia Duffy and Denis Geoghan’s union in Robinson’s The Whiteheaded Boy (1916) brings a degree of coercive closure in part by way of the threat of a non-bourgeois alternative for the newly wed couple. Robinson’s The Big House (1926) captures the demise and expulsion of the Anglo-Irish Alcock family, alongside the tenacity of Kate to hold firm, after the estate house is burned down by Republicans. In Deevy’s Katie Roche (1936) marriage is an oppressive institution; Stanislaus’s claims over Katie are patriarchally licensed and proprietorial. In Synge’s The Playboy of the Western World (1907) Pegeen and Christy’s potential marriage sits alongside the various grotesque unions referenced throughout the work. The threat of plenty serves as a caution about growing bourgeoisification. In Ní Gráda’s On Trial (1966), an English version of the Irish-language play An Triail (1964), oppressive social forces lead to the death of a child and the suicide of her unmarried mother, who has been banished from a comfortable family home, having been romantically misled by a married lover. Friel’s Aristocrats (1979) revisits the big house demise amongst a Catholic rather than Anglo-Irish aristocratic household. Resilience offsets degeneration. Carr’s By the Bog of Cats . . . (1998) asks questions about parenting, familial obligation, destiny and choice in a chaotic world brought into being by Carthage and Caroline’s marriage and the jilting of Hester. Legal obligations fail to lure Hester away from where she belongs.

Introduction  9 The Lambroke’s inability to pay staff for over a year, Hannah’s marriage to someone not in love with her and the ultimate loss of ownership of their big house and lands prompt complex questions about gender and class dynamics in Conor McPherson’s The Veil (2011). The play’s setting in 1822 is haunted by the economic precarities and austerities of Ireland’s post-Celtic Tiger period (2008–2015), when Ireland temporarily lost economic sovereignty. Elaine Murphy’s Shush (2013) dramatises the impact of marital separation on asset division. Parker’s Pentecost (1987) reflects on the idea of inheritances and contested territory in sectarian Belfast in 1974. Apart from the disclination of many characters to wonder about how their wealth advantages materialise, this chapter also wonders why so many working-class characters are so acquiescent towards and tolerant, if not outright allies, of rank and why so few plays accommodate criticisms of wealth inequality. There is a recurring trope of wealth precarity; accumulated wealth is not easily passed on intergenerationally. Especially interesting is the omerta around wealth’s longevity. Marriages signal little possibility of future progeny as is the case with traditional comedies; instead, many plays rely on dead or institutionalised children for effect. If women characters are seen as an inevitable part of the patriarchal exchange, many of these plays obfuscate that reality, less by expressing dissatisfaction with marital inequalities, norms, conventions and expectations and more by the fact that many women characters are major holders and beneficiaries of asset inheritance/gifting. Everyday Entrepreneurial Capital For centuries Ireland’s political, cultural, social and economic realities were shaped by British imperialism. The impacts and vestiges of revolutionary cycles across the period of colonisation (including revolts in 1798 and 1867), the 1916 revolution, the establishment of the Free State (1922) and the division of the island (1921) had various political and economic effects.35 Ulster was more progressively industrialised compared to the more agriculturally focused southern part of the island. It would only be with the Celtic Tiger (1993–2008) that the Republic began to outperform economically Northern Ireland,36 having shifted economic policy in the late 1950s away from self-sufficiency towards attracting foreign businesses.37 Between the 1920s and the 1990s, the Great Depression (1929–34) and the Second World War (1939–45) and mass migration from the 1940s forward heavily shaped both economies. Britain and Ireland’s memberships of the EEC in 1973 brought significant change. The economic impacts of the Troubles (1968–94) on businesses were significant, when the conflict impacted infrastructure, consumer confidence and entrepreneurship. After

10  Introduction the Good Friday Agreement (1998), a devolution of powers to Stormont, investment and the economic dividends associated with the peace process changed the Northern Irish economy.38 Both jurisdictions were hit by the economic devastation brought about by 2008’s global financial crisis, the period of austerity that followed differently impacting property prices, employment and bankruptcies. Post-2015 has seen both economies improve again, albeit welfare dependency remains higher in Northern Ireland, and the many high-paid jobs in the foreign direct investment (FDI) companies in the Republic are not to be found to the same extent in Northern Ireland.39 Despite ongoing customs issues caused by Brexit, in many sectors trade has thrived on both parts of the island of late. That said, the chapter on capital acquisition and consolidation is not about accounting for the island’s socio-economic history but evaluates the responses of a range of plays to wealth, investments, income and how male and female characters engage with the notion of meritocracy and social mobility.40 Rags to riches narratives are scarce; corruption and collusion play a significant role in commercial success. In Friel’s Philadelphia, Here I  Come! (1964) there is a degree of economic security for the O’Donnell household, but social and emotional capital deficits overwhelm Gar. The responses to and consequences of communities under financial pressures are seen in Anne Devlin’s After Easter (1994), which questions the excessive profiteering of a working-class parent in Belfast during the Troubles. The confident, risk-positive entrepreneurial characters in Hughes’s Shiver (2005) are not seen as corrupt, just unlucky. Tom Murphy’s The Wake (1998) shows a middle-class extended family’s ruthless dealings with one another as they battle over inheritance. Bernard Farrell’s Forty-Four, Sycamore (1992) and Dermot Bolger’s The Consequence of Lightning (2008) demonstrate the gains and losses associated with social mobility. Consequence’s Frank champions the can-do meritocratic mentality of neoliberalism, disguising the fact that his success, although not ill-gotten, is not exemplary but more an anomaly.41 Leonard’s The Patrick Pearse Motel (1972) captures the essence of corrupt and hypocritical business practices amongst an emerging suburban nouveau riche. Gerard Stembridge’s That Was Then (2002) foregrounds shady property dealings that are reliant on corrupt planning decisions and political interference. If Carr’s Ariel (2002) captures sleaze in the spheres of business and politics, Stembridge’s The Gay Detective (1996) is one of the few that illustrates the crooked connections between the business, politics, policing, legal and cultural spheres, where assaults, murders and sexual scandals are met with coercive silencing. Stella Feehily’s Duck (2003) demonstrates how relationships can draw characters into criminal underworlds that are unsafe. Martin McDonagh’s The Lieutenant of Inishmore (2001) looks at the connection between paramilitarism and what funds

Introduction  11 its violence, namely drug dealing, extortion, racketeering and much more besides. If Ireland’s ruling class was once happy to circulate a fantasy of frugality,42 it leaves one to wonder about the general unease with and even disparagement of wealth in Irish plays that I  have already mentioned in relation to property, which recurs again in this chapter. Wendy Brown’s point is that ‘the paradox of neoliberalism’ is that it is ‘ubiquitous and omnipresent, yet disunified and nonidentical with itself’ (2015, 48). She argues that neoliberalism is ‘undoing’ the basic tenets of democracy through ‘vocabularies, principles of justice, political cultures, habits of citizenship, practices of rule’ and imperilling more ‘radical democratic imaginaries’ (Brown 2015, 17–16). If neoliberalism sees financial gain as a reward for virtue (Sandel 2020, 25), very few Irish plays see capital gains as honourable or deserving.43 Is it easier to say that wealth is corruptly accrued than to represent wealth that is fairly gained through hard work, invention, or good fortune? Why is there so little said about the relationship between wealth accumulation and income inequality? Many plays deal with such complexities. Embodied Labour Much analysis distinguishes between capital and labour, waged or salaried, management or workforce.44 Some believe any profit, not just excessive profit, is extracted unfairly from those who work. For others, profit is an essential driver of further risk, innovation, entrepreneurship and investment. Today, the neoliberal viewpoint is exceptionally positive about the merits of the marketplace and the rewards it brings for inventiveness and competition but is also negative on employees more broadly, who are often seen as lazy, inefficient and greedy for more. While many more people than ever have secure, well-paid jobs on the island, it is not just precarity that is troublingly consistent for a large cohort of people or that they worry about not earning enough to be able to cover their costs of living, but also, there is an increasing awareness that income inequality is more rampant than ever: the ‘visceral inequality’ that Savage identifies (2021, 197). Chapter 4 deals with different forms of human labour: domestic, migrant, child, unemployed, physical, sex trade, performative, intellectual and cultural labour. Gender and class are linked not just in terms of visibility or in the valuing of some types of labour over others but in terms of coercive labour. Domestic chores carried out predominantly by women characters gain little recognition, and even less emotional reward is evident across this whole tradition of writing, even if many characters are house proud.45 In Laverty’s Tolka Row (1951) characters have different types of jobs; the domestic responsibilities of and demands on Rita are one thing, but as matriarch, mother and daughter, she faces a harrowing choice.

12  Introduction Migrant and alienated labour feature in Murphy’s A Whistle in the Dark (1961), where gainful employment is not good enough for Des, who is prompted by his father’s delusions of grandeur and where Harry and Iggy’s lines of business are prostitution and shady employment practices. Sectarianism complicates trade union accord on the Belfast docks in Thompson’s Over the Bridge (1960). McGuinness’s The Factory Girls (1982) dramatises the tensions between women workers and male trade union leader and factory manager. Employment is precarious in light of globalisation. Bolger’s The Lament for Arthur Cleary (1989) is about industrial decline, migration, unemployment and the middle-class exploitation of the poor. Kinahan’s Bé Carna (1999) exemplifies how economic lack impacts those working in prostitution. For some commentators sex work is never a form of labour but abuse, while for others, it is as legitimate as any other form of work if chosen without coercion. Exploited child labour features in Brokentalkers’ The Blue Boy (2011). The Artane Boys marching band’s cultural labour is based on intimidation and social accolades; the making of rosary beads in Goldenbridge under sweatshop conditions exemplifies some of the many cruelties institutionalised children suffered. Another approach to cultural labour takes the form of an interrogation of the terrors of coercive performance in Walsh’s The Walworth Farce (2006) and of the relationship between acclaimed art, wealth and trauma in Harris’s The Beacon (2019). Knowledge Economy Education is differently structured in Northern Ireland compared to the Republic.46 Free access to second-level education and the provision of scholarships and grants to support third-level study have made education more widely available in both jurisdictions.47 Not only is educational achievement predominantly linked to parental/guardian employment h ­istory, economic capital, cultural practices and social networks of one’s family, education impacts career choices, job prospects and likely future earnings. Friendships made and networks to which one has access impact social capital formation.48 Kathleen Lynch and Margaret Crean caution in relation to education that ‘meritocracy is an unrealisable myth in an economically unequal society’ and argue against equality as access or opportunity but one of condition (2018, 140). Chapter 5 unpacks the different ways that characters, male and female, rich and poor, are marked by educational experiences. In Friel’s Translations (1980), set in the 1830s, the hedge school system is to be displaced by the new all-island national school system, which has English as the language of instruction. Graham Reid’s The Hidden Curriculum (1982), set in a working-class loyalist community in Belfast in the 1970s, demonstrates

Introduction  13 the inadequacy of the curriculum relative to the socio-economic circumstances of its students. Sectarian tensions, gender inequalities and class disparities are evident in Christina Reid’s Joyriders (1986), based in a training scheme established for early school leavers and those who have been before the courts for lower order offences. Murphy’s A Whistle in the Dark (1961) captures the intimidation and humiliations doled out by a teacher and their longer-term impacts. Iseult Golden and David Horan’s Class (2017) questions how class biases might persist in a primary school system and wonders if more equitable pupil-teacher encounters are possible. Shaun Dunne’s The Waste Ground Party (2014) examines the thirdlevel student bullying and internal class barriers faced by Gary, an innercity working-class background character. Kinahan’s The Unmanageable Sisters (2018), a version of Michel Tremblay’s Les Belles-Soeurs (1968), taps into the ways educational attainment is championed, opposed or ambivalently supported in a working-class community. Farrell’s The Last Apache Reunion (1993) examines the dreadful impact of peer bullying on a vulnerable pupil. Across these plays, poverty, family problems, neurodiversity, sectarianism, pupils’ disinterest in school, unhelpful curricula and biased or unmotivated teaching serve as some of the barriers to educational attainment. Some suggest someone cannot be what they cannot see or that pupils are not inclined to go after what they cannot or are unlikely to achieve, but educational attainment in both jurisdictions has been a vital influencer in shifting expectations, attitudes and career outcomes, despite multiple inequalities.49 Sexual Encounters, Intimacies and Violations Chapter 2 looks at the connection between property, marriage and asset consolidation and the implications for gendered relationships. I  return in Chapter 6 to the specifics not just of acts of sexual expression, desire, energy and intimacy but also sexual violations and assaults.50 If across the whole island of Ireland sex acts were for a long time linked to morality, shame and repression, even damnation, it has changed significantly over this book’s period of study. The association between sexual activity, disease and death has been broken by medical science; contraception and abortion altered the connection between sex and pregnancy. In any context, sexual transactions are as much about the physical act as about emotion and the mind, shaped by desire, fantasy and play; the charge of the moment; and power dynamics in which encounters take place. Trust, caution, risk, adventure, consent and trial and error can be rewarded by joy and marked by regret. The plays in this chapter deal with heterosexual and same-sex erotic desire, privilege, rank, consent, violation

14  Introduction and inequality. Monogamy, infidelity, exclusivity, casual sex and polyamory are referenced. For Srinivasan: ‘There is nothing so riven with politics yet so inviolably personal’ as sex (2021, 88).51 Thomas Kilroy’s Christ, Deliver Us! (2010), set in a Kilkenny Diocesan College in the late 1940s and early 1950s, demonstrates the more regressive and repressive aspects associated with sexual knowledge and confused embodiment. However, thwarted expression, ignorance and repression do not make sexual assault any less indefensible. Kinahan’s BogBoy (2010b) addresses the impacts on child sexual abuse, addiction, poverty and prostitution. O’Rowe’s Our Few and Evil Days (2014) deals with the incestual spectral assault of a mother by her son, and Neil Watkin’s Years of Magical Wanking (2011) reflects on child abuse, sexual addiction, BDSM and lingering trauma. Spallen’s Pumpgirl (2006) features a gang rape in a post-conflict Northern Ireland, and Phillip McMahon’s Come on Home (2018) deals with the legacy of clerical sexual abuse on a divided family. Complex questions about gender inequality, intimacy, desire and monogamy are posed by Deevy’s The King of Spain’s Daughter (1935). Keane’s Sive (1959) exemplifies a changing attitude to romance, sex and intimacy; an attempted arranged marriage ends disastrously. A cluster of plays set in predominantly middle-class suburbia bring together issues of wealth, reproduction, romance, fantasy, intimacy and adultery. Infidelity, fantasy and compulsion feature in Carr’s Marble (2009), Bolger’s The Passion of Jerome (1999) and Amy Conroy’s I ♥ Alice ♥ (2010). Harris’s No Romance (2011) and O’Halloran’s Conversations After Sex (2021) offer a surprising frankness on intimacy. Whether it is straight, gay, bi or trans sex, issues of consent are complicated by the power dynamics between those involved and if drugs or alcohol are consumed. Is it possible for there to be consent between unequal parties to a sexual encounter? Intersectional/Intercultural Conflicts, Mésalliances and Irreconcilabilities None of the chapters are conflict free, but Chapter 7 specifically focuses on intra- and interclass, inter-ethnic, intergenerational, sectarian and intercultural conflicts by way of exploring how plays address compound inequalities. Conflicts oblige characters to rise to challenges or deal with insurmountable odds, often resulting in outcomes that accentuate unjustness. A toxic interclass disposition is central to Yeats’ Purgatory (1936). O’Casey’s Juno and the Paycock (1924) is not just about the Irish Civil War; it is about trade union strikes, attitudes to work, the impacts of poverty on life and ill-luck, impacted by Bentham’s professional failure to record a will

Introduction  15 correctly. Hugh Leonard’s Da (1973) captures complex intergenerational and interclass tensions in a family shaped by subsistence living. Jimmy Murphy’s Brothers of the Brush (1993) dramatises how conflicts between union members play out as a battle between individual self-­ interest and collective bargaining. Paula Meehan’s Mrs  Sweeney (1997) captures interclass divisiveness, as well as the supports and hostilities experienced by those living close to the Sweeney household. Murphy’s The House (2000) unpacks class tensions via Christy’s class hatred and revenge, while the matriarch of the middle-class de Burca family is generous to a fault. Elaine Murphy’s Little Gem (2008) offers a more benign viewpoint on familial and interclass relationships: an employer is supportive of Lorraine during a trauma, and a lover from a different class background is equally sympathetic. Behan’s The Hostage (1958) co-mingles diverse and incompatible gender, sexual and political views in a rundown Dublin house that revels in chaos. Rosaleen McDonagh’s Walls and Windows (2021) deals with traveller experiences of ethnic conflicts in relation to housing, itinerancy, employment and gender expectations, and relationships with the settled community are seen as generally exploitative and prejudiced. Bisi Adigun’s Once Upon a Time (2005) and Not So Long Ago (2006) exemplify the intercultural challenges and opportunities faced by migrants, asylum-seekers and mixed-race characters, who form relationships, gain employment and experience casual and systemic racism in their everyday existences. McCafferty’s Quietly (2012) points towards some symbolic closure by way of a handshake as it deals with the horrors of sectarian conflicts. The Solidarity Paradox: Inter-Meshing Cultural and Social Capital in Lieu of Economic Capital? My final chapter wonders how and if theatre really can hold society to account; touch the ideological nerve; and propose ways of doing things better, fairer and more compassionately by way of giving expression to collective action, common aspiration, campaigning, protest and solidarity across the political, cultural, economic, employment and environmental spheres. This chapter focuses on how solidarity is theatricalised, not on theatre being part of a wider social movement, of which there are many international examples. If solidarity needs a wrong to be addressed, an injustice, an enemy, a plan of action, it also requires commitment, shared objectives, collectivised spirit and common purpose.52 Solidarity is not just about talking back to power; it is often about waiting on and dealing with the response of power. An abundance of Irish plays foreground individualised character actions pitched against various injustices, exploitations and

16  Introduction inequalities. Non-compliant, disruptive, rebellious, resistant and dissident actions are clearly motivated not just by inequitable constraints but also by outrage. Collectives might be families, extended families, friendship groups, communities, workforces, sectarian and paramilitary units that are bonded by social/political capital. But to what extent do alienation, repression, disaffection and trauma hyper-individualise rather than collectivise protest? The chapter wonders if there is an excessive questioning or distrust in collective action, and if so, how might it be explained? To what extent might this tradition be labelled as solidarity fraught, even phobic one? Or does this writing tradition move towards a ‘discourse of resistance’ that Helen Gilbert and Joanne Thompkins identify in post-colonial writing (1996, 35), towards the ‘resistant knowledge’ that Patricia Hill Collins deems essential to intersectionality (2019, 10), the subaltern’s ‘disruptive power’ that Paul Murphy emphasises (2008, 18) and the ‘advance vital performances of resistance’ that Fitzpatrick and Hill see in Deevy’s work (2022, 4)? In Gregory and Yeats’s Cathleen ní Houlihan (1902) revolutionary sacrifice is expressed as the great exemplary nationalist fantasy of solidarity. In McDonagh’s The Pillowman (2003) familial solidarity is consolidated by way of murderous deeds, mercy killing and fraternal sacrifice. Keane’s The Field (1965) is marked by complex kin and neighbour networks; a collective silence about a murder is a collusive defiance of the middle-class order. McGuinness’s Carthaginians (1988) in part transposes a collective trauma associated with Bloody Sunday (1972) by way of character participation in a transgressive play-within-a-play. Written collaboratively by Martin Lynch and the Charabanc Theatre company, Lay Up Your Ends (1983) reaches for workplace solidarity despite various gendered and classed obstructions. Kinahan’s The Unmanageable Sisters (2018) negotiates a complex dialectic between division and unity in an adaptation of Tremblay’s play, moved from a working-class district of Montréal to Ballymun Towers. Hughes’s Digging for Fire (1991) explores complex middle-class friendships formed during college years and how collegiality is corroded by time. Roche’s The Cavalcaders (1993) demonstrates how communities of different classes, lower-middle and the aspirational working classes, are bonded and blinded as much by communal and cultural purpose, respect, tolerance and kindness as by transgression, disloyalty, betrayal and refusal to be obligated by reciprocity. McPherson’s The Weir (1997) disrupts the growing hold of economic capital over communities during the Celtic Tiger period by overshadowing it with solidarity founded out of intermeshing cultural and social capital amongst diverse class-background characters with variable levels of

Introduction  17 wealth. The successes of film extras in making a film in Jones’s Stones in His Pockets (1999) relies on the out-Hollywooding of Hollywood, a carnivalesque fantasy of excess, inversion, reversal and meritocratic enablement and emboldening. More broadly, as Yuval Noah Harari notes, ‘Large numbers of strangers can cooperate successfully by believing in common myths’ (2014, 27). Accordingly, trading, alliances, information exchange, celebrations, play, competition and coinage bind and can also divide (Harari 2014, 186). My conclusion is not simply an attempt to summarize the individual chapters; instead, it is an endeavour to cross-relate ideas that may have been isolated by any one chapter’s particular focus. For some commentators, the dominant dramaturgical instinct of Irish theatre is to support, if not all out affirm the ‘inequality regime’ (Piketty 2020, 1). For others, theatre is seen as a cultural intervention that challenges inequality at almost every turn. And for others, theatre is trapped by its own false sense of importance and jaded radicalism. I am more interested in teasing out the ambivalences and contradictions of this Irish theatre tradition, where there are objections to and resistances of ideological norms but also a holding back, marginalising or a reigning in of condemnation. Across all chapters, I  ask what values are undermined, underwritten and underscored by plays; what is normalised or precarious; where is the misdirection and elusiveness; and what might be hiding in plain sight.53 Additionally, no chapter deals with any form of capital singularly, as it is the interdigitation of economic, cultural and social capital that is vital. Out of the discussions on anomalies, mixed signalling and mesalliances found in most work, there is something comprehensive to say about injustices and inequality. In terms of inequality, what does an Irish dramaturgical tradition find emotionally fraught but intellectually acceptable? What does it find counter-intuitive, disturbing, irreconcilable and intolerable about inequality? Analysis is not just about oppression and victimisation but also opportunity; not just about passivity but agency; not just about hierarchy but dialectical and reciprocal relationships; and not just about disenfranchisement, prejudice and complicity but also about striking back. In the context of Irish theatre, it is important to tease out the notions of equality that democracy fosters54 and how distinctions between disadvantages and disparities and between equality and discrimination are variously treated. Let us see how inequality is intersectional and ideological. Notes 1 This book is not an all-encompassing history of Irish theatre from the 1890s onwards, as first, there is not the necessary coverage, and second, the analysis is too particular about each work, not accounting for other aspects of the plays beyond that which serves my argument.

18  Introduction 2 I use the term ‘Northern Ireland’ throughout. Work from Northern Ireland all too often gets ‘ignored’, apart from single chapters in many essay collections, as Tom Maguire cautions (2006, 7). See work by Coleman Coffey (2016), Foley (2003) and Urban (2011). 3 For John Baker et al.: ‘Basic equality is the cornerstone of all egalitarian thinking: the idea that . . . all human beings have equal worth and importance, and are . . . equally worthy of concern and respect’ (2009, 23). Baker et al. distinguish between an equality of opportunity and an equality of condition. 4 Mike Savage summarises: ‘As a label, inequality proliferates across so many axes, in such varied contexts, that it can degenerate into a relentless listing exercise. Far from being productive, this can then lead to an infinite regress toward a fatalistic pessimism: Inequality is so entrenched, it’s everywhere, so what can we do about it?’ (2021, 2). 5 Owen Jones remarks how ‘Meritocracy ends up becoming a rubber stamp of existing inequalities, re-branding them as deserved’ (2012, 97). 6 If texts are seen as simply determined by the contexts in which they were premiered, revised and academically considered, that is to ignore genre expectations, conventions and breaches. 7 Catherine Belsey distinguishes between declarative, imperative and interrogative texts (2002, 75). 8 Raymond Williams’s distinction between dominant, emergent or residual ideologies prompts me to ask how various ideologies shape, drive, certify and substantiate a writing tradition over an extensive period of time (Williams 1978, 121–127). 9 John Brannigan defines Gramsci’s term ‘hegemony’ as ‘the way in which a dominant class or group in society makes compromises, forges alliances, exerts moral and intellectual leadership and creates a network of institutions and social relations, in order to create a basis for the consent of the people from all classes and sections of society’ (1998, 5). The proletarian become submissive and complicit in their ‘own domination’ (Brannigan 1998, 5). 10 Amia Srinivasan calls it the ‘originary division’ (2021, xi). 11 As Lisa Fitzpatrick and Shonagh Hill note: ‘In 1925 the right of women to sit all civil service examinations was curtailed; the 1927 Juries Bill excluded women from jury service unless they specifically applied; and in 1932, compulsory retirement on marriage (the “marriage-bar”) was imposed on all female teachers and later extended to the entire civil service’ (2022, 1–2). 12 In the Republic, Fintan O’Toole notes what women could not do in 1971: ‘sit on a jury’, keep a job after marrying, ‘buy contraceptives’, ‘collect the state allowance paid to help her raise her children’; she ‘could not get a barring order in court against a violent husband’, a man could sell the family home at any time ‘without her consent’, even if she had paid for it, ‘could not refuse to have sex with her husband’ and could not get paid the ‘same rate for a job as a man’ (2021, 209). 13 Melissa Shira notes, ‘The ‘National Council of Women, the Joint Committee of Women’s Societies and Social Workers, The Irish Countrywomen’s Association and the Irish Housewives’ Association enabled some sense of a collective identity and outlet for women’ (2007, 88). 14 Michael Pierse asks, because of ‘mobility, slippage, and contradictory class locations,’ how can ‘stratification analysis stand?’ (2011, 6). 15 In theatre, there is seldom a need for characters to declare their class identities to other characters or to audiences; class characteristics are communicated by how actors interact, speak and present themselves.

Introduction  19 16 When class is afforded critical consideration, it is about how working-class writing is deemed to be absent from or underrepresented in literary histories or how work set in working-class environments is marked by stereotypes and offensive representation rather than by class struggle, as in Michael Pierse’s work (2011, 2018). 17 I cannot engage here with a labour/capital history, nor with Ireland’s governance and industrial changes over a 100-year plus period. 18 Today, life expectancy in Ireland, as a measure of lifestyles and public health policy, is exceptionally high. To be a working-class Irish woman or man in 1920 is very different to a contemporary working-class equivalent. To be a middle-class woman in 1920 is to have much but not everything in common with a female working-class equivalent. 19 There are commonalities around how elites consolidate power and resources and how the poor are treated. Today, transnational similarities around poverty, low income, precarity and workplace insecurity, education, rights, discriminations, prejudices and injustices can be easily articulated and identified. But the diversity and differences of contemporary local and globalised intra- and interclass relations and their power relationships with and dependency on global capital disavow a simple articulation of interconnections, commonalities and solidarities of experiences across nations, communities and cultures of those that experience inequality. 20 Paul Murphy notes: ‘One way to reconfigure class-based analysis is to reconsider class as performance, not so much in the way that Butler reconfigures gender but more in the way that Bourdieu emphasizes the multidimensionality and relationality of class’ (2012, 55). 21 Mike Savage notes: ‘It matters more which class you do not belong to, rather than which one you think you do belong to’ (2015, 366). In their survey, Savage notes how ‘more than two-thirds of people resist class identification’ (2015, 367). Internationally, different cohorts of citizens choose to see themselves in different ways. Take America and Canada, where people are more inclined to self-identify as middle-class. 22 There is great variation between upper, middle and lower middle-classes, between those labelled as elite, bourgeois, commentariat, political, chattering, ruling and coping classes. Individuals can move between classes or co-exist in more than one class category, often by having capital/resources/merit associated with different classes. Within family units and friendship networks, there may well be members with different class affiliations. Should right-wing middle classes and left-leaning middle classes be differently categorised? 23 Words like proletarian and subaltern resonate with a fuller sense of inequality, while underclass and lumpenproletariat do not. The ‘precariat’ consists of about ‘15 per cent of the population’ (Savage 2015, 171). 24 This tripartite model was variously unpacked, elaborated upon and nuanced, as Michael Pierse shows (2011, 6–9). Today’s profit-share, share options and bonuses in work cultures complicate that relationship between labour and capital. 25 Savage’s categories are Precariat, Traditional Working Class, Emergent Service Workers, Technical Middle Class, New Affluent Workers, Established Middle Class and Elite (2015, 96). 26 To these we can add property, equity, cash, investments, dividends, savings, royalties, pension rights, future potential inheritances and net borrowings.

20  Introduction 27 Savage remarks: ‘classes are the product of myriad processes of accumulation and sedimentation. They form in combination with other inequalities, such as those which exist around age, gender, race and ethnicity, as distinctive crystallisations of advantage, derived from the accumulation of these different capitals’ (2015, 52). 28 Additionally, as the current culture wars progress, class is now being presented as an increasingly diluted, nebulous, even empty signifier of sorts. It is ideologically beneficial for populist and neoliberal ideologues to neither envision nor address class-based differences and inequities. Instead, it is easier to perpetuate false perceptions of victimhood, of the public being conned by some liberal cabal, as many right-wing propagandists have done of late. Categorical divisiveness and tensions are clearly stoked by agitators, who delight in playing people off each other while downplaying mutual concerns and marginalising potential solidarities. 29 If there are intercultural relationships, these are dependent on the status of the partners, whether there is transactional reciprocation, an exchange between equals, or worse, one of exploitation. 30 Many non-Irish born theatre makers have made significant contributions to Irish theatre, including, Kunle Animashaun, Selina Cartmell, Hilton Edwards, Hugh Hunt, Elizabeth Kuti, Micheál Mac Liammóir, Patrick Mason, Annie Ryan and Joe Vaněk. 31 Works like Angela Y. Davis’s Women, Race & Class (2019) reflect wider societal and historical race experiences in America. When an Irish context is considered, currently it seems scant by way of comparison. 32 Intersectionality was first outlined by black feminist lawyer Kimberlé Crenshaw. 33 In post-colonial contexts, Ania Loomba demonstrates how stereotypes of women were extended to the poor and those of a different race – that is not to say they were the same (1998, 107). 34 Srinivasan argues that focusing only on commonalities amongst diverse oppressed groups best serves ‘those who are least oppressed’ (2021, 17). 35 In Europe, after the Second World War, the concept of the welfare state and the necessity of social intervention took root. 36 If the region of Ulster and later Northern Ireland was traditionally associated with agriculture and manufacturing, including textiles, rope and shipbuilding, now the economically productive areas include aerospace, precision medicine, cybersecurity, creative technology, financial services, manufacturing, agriculture and engineering (See Invest in Northern Ireland 2023, Web). Britannica notes that an estimated two-thirds of employment is public sector (health, education, administration, security), 75 per cent in services overall (Britannica, Web). 37 Government thinking that moved away from isolationism and protectionism and self-sufficiency was shaped by T. K. Whitaker’s interventions, Has Ireland a Future? (1957) and Programme for Economic Expansion (1958). Foreign direct investment saw major growth in manufacturing, engineering, pharmaceuticals, digital technology and financial services, especially during the Celtic Tiger years. 38 Since the 1980s governments in the Republic have been variously slightly right and left of centre, whereas in Northern Ireland the right-wing views of various conservative governments under Margaret Thatcher, John Major, David Cameron, Theresa May, Boris Johnston, Liz Truss and Rishi Sunak have dominated

Introduction  21 policy and are different to the more left-leaning approaches of New Labour under Tony Blair and Gordon Brown. 39 In the Republic low corporation tax rates and tax breaks incited many companies to locate their intellectual property in Ireland by way of maximising shareholder wealth. 40 Michael Sandel puts it decisively: ‘One of the most striking tendencies of our time is the expansion of markets and market-oriented reasoning into spheres of life traditionally governed by non-market norms’ (2009, 263). 41 Savage notes ‘Insofar as it was possible for anyone to succeed, inequality was not necessarily a problem in itself’ (2015, 398). Savage adds: ‘this meritocratic ethos displaced a more egalitarian politics which insisted that equality itself was an issue’ (2015, 398). 42 In the much-quoted President Éamon de Valera’s 1943 St Patrick’s Day radio address, he lauded: ‘people who valued material wealth only as the basis of right living, of people who were satisfied with frugal comfort and devoted their leisure to the things of the spirit,’ while applauding the ‘cosy homesteads’ that were ‘joyous with the sounds of industry, with the romping of sturdy children, the contests of athletic youths and the laughter of comely maidens’ (Moynihan 1980, qtd. in Murphy 2018, 285). Frugality and austerity are lauded, and abundance and plenty championed only in relation to the common good and social harmony. Notions of citizenship are prompted by a fallacy of frugality, a near-perfect ideological ploy to encourage the vast majority to settle for less, but those same aspirations were not inculcated equally across all classes. 43 For Manfred B. Steger and Ravi K Roy, Neoliberalism manifests as ‘(1) an ideology; (2) a mode of governance; (3) a policy package’ (2009, 11). Expressed differently, David Harvey explains that ‘Neoliberalism is in the first instance a theory of political economic practices that proposes that human well-being can best be advanced by liberating individual entrepreneurial freedoms and skills within an institutional framework characterised by strong private property rights, free markets, and free trade’ (2005, 2). Neoliberalism posits notions of low regulation, low tax, barrier free social mobility and meritocracy, that the only hindrance to one’s successes and ambitions is oneself. A neutral view on the marketplace and a prioritisation of effort, graft, persistence, aspiration and competition places undue responsibility on individuals and communities who face considerable disadvantages, economic, cultural, social and political, and little obligation on political systems to address inequities. Neoliberalism is increasingly comfortable with a hostility towards the notion of wider wealth redistribution, unless it is towards fewer and fewer individuals, and sees taxation as a misappropriation or confiscation of wealth. 44 The base/superstructure arrangement of an older Marxism is now redefined as a dialectical relationship between capitalist practices and the circulating ideology that re-affirms it. Culture reinforces the norms of the dominant class. If culture is submissive and complicit, where is the room for resistance? 45 Considerations of domestic labour can be seen in other works across this publication from Katie Roche to Kathleen ni Houlihan, from Sive to Lay Up Your Ends, and from The Unmanageable Sisters to Aristocrats. 46 See Emer Smyth et al.’s ESRI Report on differences in educational outcomes between North and South (ESRI 2023). 47 In both jurisdictions disparities remain. Those from middle-class backgrounds are more likely to gain places in high-demand courses like medicine, law, dentistry, pharmacy, architecture, actuarial, engineering, science and business,

22  Introduction even if various access programmes have attempted to address deficits in terms of diversity and inclusion, with some success. In Britain there are many not quite closed shop professions, but they are severely regulated. (Savage 2015, 131). Savage notes, ‘This class ceiling is very evident in law, finance, the security services, and medicine, and then rapidly falls off elsewhere’ (2021, 226). 48 Exam orientation; the streaming of children and young adults; and the regimes of assessment, discipline, penalties and punishments tend to have their own implicit biases against genders, races, classes and abilities, particularly those that are not neurotypical. Traditionally, gender bias has been very evident in subject choice and career advice offered to pupils. 49 Kathleen Lynch and Margaret Crean note: ‘In contrast to liberal equality of opportunity, promoters of equality of condition claim that inequality is rooted in changing and changeable social structures, and particularly in structures of domination and oppression. Equality of condition refers to the belief that people, individually and collectively, should be as equal as possible in relation to the central conditions of their lives, particularly in terms of their material conditions and the exercise of power. It is not about trying to make inequalities fairer, nor is it about giving people a more equal opportunity to become unequal; it is about ensuring that all of humanity have roughly equal prospects for a good and decent life’ (2018, 152). 50 Lisa Fitzpatrick notes, ‘As rape changed from being a crime against property to a crime of violence against a person the defining issue became consent, which is problematic for representation since so many cultural factors collide at that point’ (2018, 24). 51 As Srinivasan notes on sex: ‘the roles we play, the emotions we feel, who gives, who takes, who demands, who serves, who wants, who is wanted, who benefits, who suffers: the rules of all of this were set long before we enter the world’ (2021, xii). 52 Solidarity is countenanced by means of rebellion, sedition, sacrifice, objection, protest, petition, boycott, obstruction, strike, go slows and non-compliance. 53 Writing about Ireland’s socio-political reality, Fintan O’Toole’s ‘unknown known’ is pertinent: ‘Ours was a society that had developed an extraordinary capacity of cognitive disjunction, a genius for knowing and not knowing at the same time’ (2021, 168). Gender, sectarianism, class, ethnicity and race are part of that ‘unknown known’, that double take on reality. 54 Wendy Brown notes how democracies vary: ‘social, liberal, radical, republican, representative, authoritarian, direct, participatory, deliberative, plebiscite’ (2015, 19).

1 Methodology Pivoting Intersections of Gender, Sectarianism, Ethnicity, Race and Class Towards Inequality

Introduction: Critical Practices The function of criticism is to observe, analyse, research, explain, crossrelate and contextualise work. Of a piece of writing, criticism might note major and obscure patterns, tropes, attitudes, inclinations, sleights-of-hand and the interconnections and interactions of various ideologies and the ways power is leveraged. Metaphorical, symbolic, analogical, intertextual, extratextual and co-textual indicators can be drawn upon as part of critical explication. Communities of critics are like groups of people who have connections, loyalties, conflicts, rivalries, strengths, flaws, awarenesses, intuitions, blind spots and beliefs often riven with contradictions and that rely on practices that have evolved through custom and tradition that may be less than fit for purpose. Critical practices exist within and are codependent on a network of other ideological discourses. Some commentators marshal evidence very broadly and some very selectively to sustain an argument and influence their readers. Some critics try to be exceptionally clear in their writing and can be combative and assertive; others are more cautious, hedging their bets, while others again obfuscate to the point of futility. You should never have to ask what someone is really saying, follow crumb-like clues or read between the lines for the unsaid. Other commentators fail to declare openly an ideological standpoint, endeavouring to hide a political position in plain sight. Defiantly accusative, excuse-heavy or defending indefensible critical practices must be seen for what they are. Critical writing is sometimes not necessarily open to seeing how an argument might be partial, flawed, limited and open to dispute, and above all, analysis often ages badly. Off-putting is criticism that is overly self-congratulatory, flush with its own certainty, dismissive of other viewpoints. As Ronald Barthes cautions: ‘Better the illusions of subjectivity than the impostures of objectivity’ (2011, 3, cited by Belsey 2013, 117). However, Catherine Belsey notes: ‘the choice between the illusions of DOI: 10.4324/9781003180074-2

24  Methodology subjectivity and the impostures of objectivity is not a happy one. Interpretation always involves an interpreter, however unprejudiced or clearminded’ (2013, 117). Belsey reminds the reader that: ‘We think,’ as Jean-François Lyotard notes, ‘in the already-thought, in the inscribed,’ and it is difficult to hold an idea in abeyance, ‘so that what hasn’t been thought yet” ’ (2013, 124, citing Lyotard 1991, 20). It is even more difficult for a critic to substantiate an argumentative viewpoint when there are doubts about who poses the questions and who licenses and legitimises those inquiries.1 Then there are issues surrounding critical advocacy, privilege, aggrandisement and virtue signalling and questions about whether there are limits to what one can and cannot write about, especially if one has not got similar experiences to what one is analysing. If one can only write about what one knows, does it start determining what one might read and watch as well? Privilege anxiety can be a form of luxurious self-indulgence.2 Sometimes criticism can be comfortable countering the argument of others, while their own views remain unburdened by the same level of critical scrutiny. Perhaps the first cage critics might rattle is their own?3 (For elaboration on this argument, see Jordan 2021, 25–50.) Building on Irish Theatre Historiography In Irish theatre historiography, there have been substantial critical interventions that offer large-scale analysis, reviewing decades and centuries of work, writing on the outputs of specific theatre companies; playwrights; and tangential, thematically related or paradigm-clustered projects – interculturalism, globalisation, ageing, performance studies, memory, ­ sexualities, violence, trauma, violation, masculinities, femininities, devised work, rehearsal practices and non-traditional theatre-making. Having engaged with and responded to much of this significant volume of scholarship, this criticism has informed and filtered into my own thoughts; ­sometimes I am very aware of the origins of a source idea, sometimes less so. In that way, I  write consciously and unconsciously palimpsest-like within and in response to various critical discourses, benefitting hugely from the critical enterprises/labour of others, and for that I am indebted. There are distinctive critical strands and approaches, none of which I  will unpack here sufficiently, as I  have previously done so (see Jordan 2016, 673–695). Nevertheless, broad distinctions can be made between cultural materialist (Pilkington 2001), post-colonial (Cairns and Richards 1988; Kiberd 1995) and neo-colonial (Merriman 2011) strands. In such writings, imperial power and indigenous state elites/ruling classes coerce, intimidate, undermine and discriminate in the name of political, propertied, professional, enterprise and ruling elites. A  critical disposition that

Methodology  25 could be loosely described as liberal-democratic in orientation was the dominant mode of Irish theatre criticism for a considerable time. (Murray 1997; Grene 1999; Roche 2013; Lonergan 2019).4 Such work champions socio/political progress, based on reform and the evolution of rights and the corrections of wrongs while also lauding diversity; applauding freedom, choice and social mobility; and holding a generous disposition towards the marginalised.5 If scholarship were traditionally male dominated, the larger percentage of recent scholarship is written by women and is invariably more female oriented, counter-canonical, restorative6 and gender-inequality focused. Heteropatriarchy is the target from a justice and rights-based analytical perspective. Works by Susan Cannon Harris (2002), Lisa Fitzpatrick (2013, 2018), Imelda Foley (2003), Miriam Haughton (2018), Shonagh Hill (2019), Mária Kurdi (2010a), Cathy Leeney (2010), Helen Lojek (2011), Anne O’Reilly (2004), Melissa Shira (2007, 2018), Bernadette Sweeney (2008), Rhona Trench (2010), Mary Trotter (2008) and Clare Wallace (2006) have hugely informed my thinking on gender. Feminism prioritises the commonalities of women’s experiences of inequality without either universalising or ahistoricising them.7 As Melissa Shira remarks: ‘the social and cultural position of women has historically been one of symbolic centrality and subjective disavowal as both colonial ideology and nationalist movements promoted feminised concepts of nation, while subordinating women in everyday life’ (2007, 1). In relation to patriarchy, Miriam Haughton remarks: Patriarchy is traumatic for women and men, children and adults, the domestic and public spheres. It is visible and invisible, insidious in all networks and communities, so that all networks and communities continue to reproduce its strategies and hierarchies, under the guise of rationality, empowerment and social protection. It demands that male privilege, most commonly white, heterosexual, and middle-class remains the ruling class, whether led by corporate, aristocratic or ascendency dynamics. Patriarchal concerns condition cultural and social rites of passage as well as political and economic policies; indeed, patriarchy is a performative, ritualistic, self-sustaining act. Patriarchy is inherently traumatic in its consequences for the majority, most acutely experienced by women . . . as an extraordinary everyday experience. (2018, 217) Writing about Augusta Gregory, Eva Gore-Booth, Dorothy Macardle, Mary Manning and Teresa Deevy, Cathy Leeney remarks how women playwrights ‘resorted to codified representations of the unsayable and the unacceptable, obliquely expressing the gender restrictions of their world,

26  Methodology and the powerful patriarchal hegemonies then so firmly, and defensively in place’ (2010, 197). She adds: ‘The cost to Irish women of the oppressive 1930s and 1940s was their virtual invisibility as contributors to the cultural life in the 1950s and 1960s’ (Leeney 2010, 201).8 Critical reflections on masculinity, in the context of patriarchy, have been keen to differentiate between males of different rank, sexualities and marginal positioning, thereby outlining how the dividends of patriarchy accrue and circulate unequally amongst different categories of males, and by implication females. Brian Singleton’s approach is to ‘deconstruct both the representations and interventions of masculinities on the Irish stage, and to expose how particular masculinities also succumb to the oppressive drives of hegemonic forms of masculinity performed as patriarchy’ (2011, 1). Using R.W. Connell’s Masculinities, Singleton distinguishes between hegemonic, and non-hegemonic, subordinated and oppositional masculinities (2011, 77) and reflects on ‘the protest, toxic, queer and strategic masculinities that contest hegemonic representation,’ utilising lenses of class, race and sexuality (Singleton 2011, 3). In his framing of masculinity Cormac O’Brien’s objective is to ‘intersect several nodes of thinking about Irish drama – postcolonial, gender, queer, and biopolitical’ (2021, 5). While there has never been a taboo on class-based thinking, not much evidence of class-styled exclusionary analysis has emerged and little that could be regarded as entirely class-blind criticism or class-washing. Many critics have broached the subject of class, often in terms of colonial practices and outcomes of imperial rule, outlining that when a degree of Irish political independence was achieved, resources and privileges were exchanged from one elite to another, and ranked relationships were maintained.9 Paul Murphy and Michael Pierse have carried out ground-breaking work in relation to class.10 Murphy and Pierse have consistently and differently foregrounded class dynamics from very substantial theoretical perspectives and whistle-blow on the Irish class system and how it is written about. Drawing on the writing of Peter Beresford Ellis, Pierre Bourdieu, Terence Brown, Terry Eagleton, John Fordham, Brian Garvin, Richard Hoggart, David Llyod, Serge Mallet, Sally R. Munt, Erik Olin Wright, Jacques Rancière, Helena Sheehan, E.P. Thompson, Raymond Williams and numerous others, Michael Pierse’s Writing Ireland’s Working Class: Dublin After O’Casey (2011) is neo-Marxian in approach. The book addresses capital/ labour relationships; structural inequalities; and class prejudices, segregations, conflicts, exclusions and protests.11 For Pierse class is ‘an indispensable tool in attempting to delineate the exploitative social relations and polarised cultural positions which characterise, spatially and socially, the contours of modern Irish society’ (2011, 4).12 ‘Class is an organic, mutual concept, shifting according to the vicissitudes of historical change, but nevertheless charting a solid continuity of

Methodology  27 human affairs under capitalism’ (Pierse 2011, 5). Pierse adds ‘Being working class is not the same as being a passive victim of powerful social forces; it is part of a collective and active, organic and historical process of identity formation’ (2011, 9). In the ‘Introduction’ to A History of Irish Working-Class Writing (2018a), Pierse outlines what he sees as the distinctive tradition and challenges of working-class writing in terms of genre, recognition and publication and how it attests to class difference and struggle across novels, ballads, poems and plays crafted by men and women. As a counter-cultural strategy,13 working-class writing is seen as bearing the realities of migration, poverty, exclusion, marginalisation, of being othered, where ‘tensions between content and form – and between the middle-class gaze and the worker’s refusal to be defined or ignored by it – are at the heart of . . . discussions’ (Pierse 2018a, 4–5). Pierse proposes that working-class writing deals with ‘unrecorded lives’ (2018a, 5), the ‘recovering experiences of those discursively othered’ (5), where tensions are between ‘pushing back,’ (4) and ‘selling out’ (12), ‘resistant,’ (6) and ‘interruptive’ (8) ideas and actions and that which is ‘appropriated’ (Pierse 2018a, 8). Working-class writing is seen to be marked by unpretentiousness, by way of offering ‘legitimacy’ to experiences (Pierse 2018a, 9).14 Various writing strategies can assert ‘agile, agential subjectivity,’ including playfulness, ambiguity, torsion and allodoxia (12) and later ‘de-crownings, [and] infelicities’ (17), by way of unsettling the ‘fixity of what is exalted and what is abject’ (Pierse 2018a, 17). Pierse surmises: ‘Working-class writing makes curiosity accessible, while also ‘alert to the contradictions that arise in relation to class and cultural capital’ (2018a, 14). Building on the work of Jacque Lacan, Antonio Gramsci and Slavoj Žižek, Paul Murphy argues that there is a ‘consistent link between political hegemony and its ideological legitimation through the essentialisation of subordinate or, to use Gramsci’s term “subaltern” class and gender groups’ and how these function as ‘fantasy objects’ (2008, 2, 12).15 Murphy sees the status of the classed and gendered subaltern as ‘socially subordinate but symbolically central’ in the work of many early Abbey Theatre playwrights, like Synge, Gregory, Yeats and O’Casey, and this disrupts ‘the prevailing ideologies in which they are situated’ (2008, 2), even as they are differently constructed. Murphy notes, as Gramsci highlights in Selections from the Prison Notebooks (1971), that ideological dominance is achieved by way of manufacturing ‘popular consent’ (2008, 5), – there is also a case to be made for popular dissent – in terms of the counter-hegemonic. As wife, mother or fallen woman, Murphy notes, ‘The essentialist universalisation of the Irish women functions as the symbolic centre of patriarchy, while at the same time subverting that patriarchy with the contradiction of their subordinate status’ (2008, 13).

28  Methodology Murphy and Pierse’s class-based analyses have been hugely influential on my thinking.16 If Murphy and Pierse view the Irish dramatic writing tradition from how working classes, men and women, represent themselves or are represented by non-working-class writers, I  also want to foreground the interclass and intraclass acrimonies, conflicts and struggles, mutualities, interests, co-dependencies and subserviences and consider less class polarities and more the subjugated, oppressive, hybrid and resistant nature of class dynamics, with such classed relationships also vectorised by race, sectarianism, ethnicity and gender. This is by way of foregrounding the particulars, the interactions, of the three different types of capital that Mike Savage’s work dutifully unpacks. As already intimated in my introduction, inspired by Pierre Bourdieu’s theoretical thinking, Savage’s work on Britain’s social classes regards class as ‘a crystallisation of different kinds of capital’ brought about by ‘the interplay between economic, social and cultural capital,’ of which people can have high, medium or low levels (2015, 180). Savage notes that class has age and a ‘geographical,’ dimension (2015, 261); thus intra-regional and intra-urban inequality must be accounted for (2015, 272). For Savage, measures of economic capital are predominantly seen in terms of wealth (resources, assets, investments and property) and are shaped but not exclusively by employment type. Some people are exceptionally asset/income rich, bringing security and comfort to their lives, and many people have just more than adequate resources to get by, while others face hardship, precarity and poverty in ways that impact lifestyle, life choices and opportunities. The emphasis on accumulation of economic capital over time is central to Savage’s argument. Social capital accrues from family, extended family, friendships and acquaintances but also benefits from leisure, educational, voluntary and professional networks, associations or alumni allegiances.17 Savage summarises: Your social background shapes whom you socialise with, and whom you socialise with in turn shapes your opportunities to maintain or improve your social position. Social capital also matters, not just for your own life outcomes, but also influences how you think about your class position, and the political power you feel you have. (2015, 158)18 Savage adds: Although there are tendencies towards selective social networks, this should not detract from the fact that nowadays most people have

Methodology  29 wide-ranging ties. This is a very different situation from fifty years ago, when classes and their cultures would have been more sealed off from each other. There is no class apartheid at work. (2015, 143) That said, some networks are more closed shop than others, so someone might be on the fringes of a group, allowed to tag along, but neither central nor influential. Importantly, Savage proposes that ‘networks are socially differentiated and convey different kinds of advantages’ (2015, 143). He mentions simple things like ‘school-gate’ networks but most crucially the power of ‘weak ties’ as being very important, not necessarily the strong ties one might assume to be of greater significance (Savage 2015, 133). Savage remarks: ‘This is the range and nature of people’s social networks, which can affect people’s life chances. Here again, contacts can accumulate over time, and may be a resource which can be mobilised to gain information’ (2015, 51). Savage concludes, ‘It is the elite occupations which are most socially exclusive’ (2015, 145). Cultural capital is associated with cultural knowledge, taste, expression and different modes of cultural engagement. Those with high levels of cultural capital have the capabilities to acknowledge and determine what is deemed culturally valuable and what is less worthwhile. Cultural capital generates social advantage. For Savage, Bourdieu sees cultural capital as a recognition of what is deemed to be ‘legitimate culture,’ that ‘which is respectable and socially approved, being consecrated in public forums such as museums, galleries and in the educational system’ (2015, 97–98). He distinguishes between ‘high-brow’ and ‘emerging cultural capital,’ adding ‘where our display of taste is paramount and mundane’ (Savage 2015, 45). Savage mentions how age has ‘a huge impact on cultural taste’ (2015, 112), adding ‘culture becomes a wider social currency in which people differentiate between those with it, and those without it – and who could do with more of it. Rather like money’ (Savage 2015, 100–101). Savage argues that, as Bourdieu sees it, it is better from an elite point of view that its cultural capital advantages remain invisible; otherwise they become contestable. However, ‘Emerging cultural capital’ is not just about differentiating high-brow from more eclectic tastes, as it is not just what culture one consumes; it is how it is consumed.19 Savage combines popular culture with emerging culture incorrectly. As Pierse and many others have pointed out, the working classes have alternative forms of counter-cultural capital, shaped in part by how it is talked about and enjoyed but also what it means individually and collectively. Meaning is central, and if there is irony, it is not kitsch-like but more about signalling possibility alongside

30  Methodology improbability. Popular culture as a counter-hegemonic force will be essential to my chapter on solidarity.20 Savage’s analysis is very attuned to Britain’s unique history of imperialism, urbanisation, early industrialisation and contemporary lived realities. Contrast these to Ireland’s colonial history, extraction of resources, displacement of peoples, issues of property ownership and troubles with landlords, slower industrialisation and urbanisation, apart from in Ulster, and the preponderance of rural employment because of its dependence on agriculture suggests that any establishment of direct class correspondences between both islands is not always helpful.21 In the Republic, The Equal Status Acts 2000–2018 ‘prohibit discrimination in the provision of goods and services, accommodation and education’ under ten grounds. These are: gender, race, marital status, family status, age, disability, race, sexual orientation, religious belief and membership of the Traveller community. In Britain, equality legislation covers similar ‘protected characteristics’, without mention of the Travelling community (Equality Act 2010) The fact that class is not a type of discrimination for which one can be found to be in breach of the law has repercussions. Is class not grounds upon which to discriminate because ranked societal structures are taken as unsaid democratic principles?22 Is it an implicit recognition of the impossibilities of policing class discriminations if class is nefarious or something one can self-declare? Is it because class is predominantly thought of in terms of money/employment only and not the intersection of different types of capital? Is it because class as an outcome of ideology and capital is an acceptable inequality? Ireland’s history of colonisation and lack of sovereignty, and the fact that it did not directly partake in imperialist practices as a nation-state, its island location on the edge of Europe, its temperate climate and most of all poor economic conditions throughout most of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, meant that the island was marked far more by patterns of external than internal migration.23 If Paris was emerging as a multicultural city in the 1920s, Dublin and Belfast were only beginning to be so from the mid-1990s.24 As John Brannigan suggests: the Irish state has never been a “monoculture”, immune from racial conflicts, not least in relation to its ‘internal others’, especially Protestant, Jewish, and Traveller peoples. Racism did not simply arrive with the immigrants in 1996, but emerged in different forms, and in response to different contexts and anxieties, long before. (2009, 3) That said, in an Ireland of the 1950s, with 98 per cent of the population Catholic and white, for playwrights, race and ethnic diversity were seldom matters of major significance.25 By 1996, only 5 per cent of the

Methodology  31 population was foreign born, but by 2011, 17 per cent of the population was born elsewhere (McIvor and Spangler 2014, 5).26 Social Justice Ireland notes that the ‘Census 2016 also asked people to identify their ethnicity and cultural background. 681,016 people identify themselves as other than “White Irish”, of whom 234,289 identify as Black, Asian or other people of colour’ (Web 2023). Across the 1990s, Irish theatre’s representation of economic migrants, refugees and asylum seekers could be seen as tentative, especially if there was a caution about dramatising a community to which one did not belong.27 Importantly, Charlotte McIvor and Matthew Spangler’s collection brings together plays that deal with interculturalism and ‘translational migrancy,’ where ‘inward migration’ comprises ‘refugee, asylum seeker, seasonal worker, undocumented, trafficked, and students’ as forms of ethnopluralism (McIvor and Spangler 2014, 3–5). They include interviews and plays by a range of writers operating in the intercultural space, including Bisi Adigun’s Once Upon a Time (2005) and Not So Long Ago (2006), Nicola McCarthy’s Cave Dwellers (2001), Rosaleen McDonagh’s Rings (2012), Paul Meade’s Mushroom (2007), Donal O’Kelly’s The Cambria (2005), Charlie O’Neil’s Hurl (2003), Ursula Rani Sarma’s Orpheus Road (2003), and Mirjana Rendulic’s Broken Promised Land (2013). McDonagh’s focus on the Travelling community as ‘indigenous minority’ is welcome (McIvor and Spangler 2014, 14). Rani Sarma is of mixed-race heritage, Indian-Irish, and Adigun is Nigerian in origin. The Cambria features the renowned abolitionist Frederick Douglass, written and first performed by Donal O’Kelly. From an intercultural perspective Cathy Leeney’s critical analysis reflects on productions by Calypso Theatre, Aramabe, Camino de Arula and the Polish Theatre Company, and she comments on ‘participatory events like the ‘Experience Japan’ (Leeney 2018, 533) and on ‘cultural appropriations’ by Yeats’s inclusion of Nôh theatre elements, his collaboration with Michio Ito or Augusta Gregory’s absorption of commedia elements from Goldoni and Molière (Leeney 2018, 528). Leeney also reflects on Nervousystem’s Weaving the Cry (2010), a Galician version of Synge’s Riders to the Sea (1904), and various adaptations of The Playboy of the Western World, including Pan Pan Theatre’s all-Chinese cast production that premiered in Beijing (Leeney 2018, 527–545). Eva Urban’s intercultural analysis evaluates Giania Cãrbunario’s Kabab (2007), Stacey Gregg’s Shibboleth (2015), Gavin Kostick’s This Is What We Sang (2009), Elizabeth Kuti’s The Sugar Wife (2005),28 Owen McCafferty’s Quietly (2012), Paul Meade’s Mushroom (2007), Donal O’Kelly’s Asylum! Asylum! (1994) and Mirjana Rendulic’s Broken Promise Land (2013) (Urban 2018, 555–573). Michael Pierse notes: In representing the ethnic or racial other, the importance of intersectionality, particularly as we consider who is writing Irish drama on

32  Methodology ethnicity, race, and inward migration, and for whom, is key. Too often, laudable attempts to challenge racism through theatre are subtended by unwitting class and native prejudices. Oftentimes, representations of the racial or ethnic other construct Ireland’s newcomers in accordance with ideologies of deservingness and victimhood. Repeatedly, they appear in opposition to Ireland’s other others – the poor or the provincial. (2020b, 40) Across this tradition of intercultural writing, if there is evidence of ethnic and race stereotypes, white saviour–led dramaturgy or some ill-thought out positionings, there is none of the ‘animalistic primitivism’ that Harvey Young cautions about (2013, 28). If Brannigan argues ‘The “Other” is always constructed as a partial presence within the authoritative ideological discourse’ (2009, 171), in Irish theatre the racial, ethic, gender ‘other’ presence often relies on an excess of dependency, trauma, hardship, ‘deservingness’ and goodness, as Pierse notes. Systemic racism is a feature almost the world over. And for Harvey Young, there is the hailing, socialisation and habitus enactments of racist actions (2013, 3–5). Young notes being aware of racial differences is acceptable, and it is not necessary to appreciate different customs, practices and beliefs. However, discrimination enters the frame when behavioural expectations and rank are ascribed to any cohort based on skin colour, when prejudices start to pre-determine assumptions and decision-making and when bad behaviours and injustices towards minorities are rationalised; then racism pollutes interpersonal dynamics, misshaping inequalities between individuals and communities.29 Importantly, discriminations are prompted by slavery and the multiples of investors and benefactors of its practices. As Savage establishes, inequalities ‘form in combination with other inequalities, such as those which exist around age, gender, race and ethnicity, as distinctive crystallisations of advantage, derived from the accumulation’ of different types of capital (2015, 53).30 The establishment of the Irish Literary Theatre in 1899 by Augusta Gregory, Edward Martyn and W.B. Yeats; the founding of Inghinidhe na hÉireann/Daughters of Ireland in 1900 by Maude Gonne; and the establishment of the Ulster Branch of the Irish Literary Theatre by Bulmer Hobson and David Parkhill in 1902, reconstituted as the Ulster Literary Theatre in 1904, are important moments of theatre history. In 1904, the Abbey Theatre, the Irish National Theatre Society, was set up by Gregory and Yeats. While the Abbey Theatre produced work by Augusta Gregory, Edward Martyn, Sean O’Casey, J.M. Synge, W.B. Yeats, the Northern Irish playwrights worth noting from this early period include Joseph Campbell, Alice Milligan, George Shiels, St. John Ervine, Rutherford Mayne, Gerald

Methodology  33 MacNamara and Joseph Tomelty. (The eventual founding of the Lyric Players Theatre in 1951 by Mary O’Malley in Belfast was also a significant initiative.) The relationship between Ulster and the rest of the island was long problematic. After the formation of the border in the early 1920s and the establishment of the six county states of Northern Ireland and after intermittent periods of violence with plays like Sam Thompson’s Over the Bridge (1960) and Brendan Behan’s The Hostage (1958), set as the IRA border campaign escalated. From the 1920s, Catholics and nationalists were discriminated against when accessing healthcare, education, employment and social welfare provision. The practice of gerrymandering saw a rigged political system with political boundaries drawn up in unionist favour. The Civil Rights Movement of the late 1960s protested against such injustices. The major turning point of course would be ‘The Troubles’ period (1968–1998), which brought the thousands of deaths, injuries and horrors. The Downing Street Declaration of 1994 and the Good Friday Agreement of 1998 ensured ceasefires from Loyalist and Republican paramilitaries, the decommissioning of weapons. The dividends of peace were considerable, even if tensions remain to this very day, especially around issues of responsibility, truth and reconciliation, and justice. Tom Maguire discusses distinctions between and usage of the terms Ulster, the North and Northern Ireland (2006, 6–7). Many of the plays of this period highlight the sectarianism that existed, with writers like Anne Devlin, Brian Friel, Marie Jones, Martin Lynch, Frank McGuinness, Christina Reid, Graham Reid and Stewart Parker to the fore. Sectarianism is a complex blend of tribe, community, solidarity and myth. In Frank McGuinness’s Observe the Sons of Ulster Marching Towards the Somme (1985), sectarian bonds are driven by a combination of friendship, community, bravery and a dark blood lust in the sacrifices unionist soldiers make. Anne Devlin blends class, sectarianism and gender in Ourselves Alone (1985). Across the book, there is not a distinctive chapter on Northern Irish sectarianism, but instead it is discussed across a range of sections. Although Anne Devlin’s After Easter (1994) is in a chapter that deals with class and wealth accumulation, it has the presence of the British Army as an occupying force, as does Christina Reid’s Joyriders (1986), a play that is in the chapter on education, sitting alongside Graham Reid’s The Hidden Curriculum (1982), a play in which sectarian violence is omnipresent within the loyalist community, where violence towards Catholic communities is not opposed, even by a middle-aged female remedial teacher. Martin McDonagh with The Lieutenant of Inishmore (2001) links paramilitarism with kangaroo courts and drug dealing. Abbie Spallen’s PostPeace process play Pumpgirl (2006) deals with sexual assault, and Deirdre

34  Methodology Kinahan’s Bogboy (2010) in part about the disappeared, complicating class and gender by way of violence. Sectarian conflicts are very evident in Owen McCafferty’s Quietly (2012), in which a character attempts to account for his role in the sectarian killing of another character’s father, when both were teenagers. (Later, English background writer Jez Butterworth would set The Ferryman (2017) in 1981 during the Hunger Strikes.) These plays variously bring to light the major sectarian divisions, the anger, rage and hatred fuelled by grievances and subjugation on the Catholic/Nationalist/ Republican side, claiming to be responding to violence as one of last resort, and an instinct to protect and maintain from a besieged, defensive and victimised Loyalist/Protestant/Unionist side. As Mark Phelan notes, if dramas about the Troubles have ‘been largely defined by the expectation that artists deal with the conflict, perhaps post-conflict theatre in the North can be similarly defined by an expectation that it should play some sort of role in the processes of truth and reconciliation’ (2016, 384). (Teya Sepunick’s Theatre of Witness project is a pertinent example.) Sectarian binaries were never as clear cut as they were made out to be. Intersectional theory speaks especially well to these interdigitations and ‘crystallisations’ that Savage mentions.31 For Patricia Hill Collins, intersectionality redresses ‘the limitations of mono-categorical thinking, regarding race and gender’ (2019, 25). Hill Collins cautions: ‘the category of class has been often mentioned within intersectionality yet less often treated as an analytical category that is equivalent to race and gender’ (2019, 40). Intersectionality’s de-prioritisation of class as a category is something to be cautious about, as is a growing tendency towards class amnesia. Ultimately, it is that sense of the particulars and non-monological thinking that drives my specific analysis of dramaturgical representations in Irish theatre of multiple race, ethnic, sectarian, gender and class relations in the context of the circulation of the three different types of capital and how they determine dramatisations of inequality.32 And to reiterate, many individuals in society and characters in plays suffer compound inequalities. Additionally, it is better to think about the possible heterogeneity or hybridity and not homogeneity of any one class, sectarian cohort, ethnicity or race. Likewise, characters like people can belong to multiple categories simultaneously. Racism is not the equivalent of sectarianism, antisemitism, islamophobia or discriminations based on ethnic, gender, class and sexual orientation. While it might be sometimes better to disavow or shy away from asserting tiered positions, there can be a contextual need to emphasise hierarchy, particularly when the discriminations are vast, impactful and painful, especially when contrasted with lower order inequalities. The focus is on the cross-constituted realities of different inequalities, with the awareness that all three forms of capital are not independent of one another but are mutually reinforcing, unequally distributed and battlegrounds of sorts.

Methodology  35 Play Selection and Chapter Structure Because texts are dialogical, in that they often include multiple character views and interactions in complex situations, then plays can simultaneously include and exclude, centralise and marginalise, reinforce and contest various ideological positions, offering contradictory and inconsistent insights on capital, gender, race, sectarianism, ethnicity, class and inequality. There is as much analytical merit to be found in that which is subtextual, muted, vanished, almost unrepresentable or unsayable in plays. The best theatre writing has less fear of its own internal contradictions and can revel in them, even if paradoxes remain subtextual or beyond conscious awareness.33 In getting down and dirty with texts, my task is not a demolition, dismantling, accusative one but more about exploring what I can say about these works in relation to this book’s disposition. This selection of plays discussed here is reasonably extensive; most have been published, many have had multiple productions locally and internationally and many would have been translated and adapted. Generally, I am unwilling to unravel the significance of the class affiliations,34 sexual orientations, genders, ethnicity, sectarian or race backgrounds of writers and theatre makers involved in the making of such work.35 Nor will I discuss audiences as part of my argument.36 Plays in individual chapters are not positioned chronologically, they are situated where they seem most likely to best enhance the argument. I am discussing many of these works for the first time, but some I have written about previously from a different perspective or have a sort of palimpsestlike connection to that prior analysis, whereby I inflect, reinforce, contradict, expand and overwrite. There is also some analysis which I developed in more recent publications, and I include some of it again, but most has been adjusted to serve this more extensive argument. There are specific aspects of the plays that I foreground and isolate, without interconnecting these details with the work in its totality, and, as I said in my introduction, this disbars this project from being perceived as an attempt at a comprehensive theatre history.37 There are many Irish plays that I have not seen or read and many plays that I did not follow up on the basis of reading other scholarship, not for fear that an excluded work might undermine my argument; rather it was to do with what was most likely to be most beneficial to the argument made here. And for works not included, I  can but apologise, hoping that my critical approach here might be considered when others think about these plays. Most of the plays discussed I have seen in performance,38 and my responses to and readings of them are undeniably shaped by such encounters. Specific performance analysis is avoided.39 And in my prioritising of

36  Methodology the text, I am more than aware of the complex relationship between text, performance and reception as argued by Pavis (2004), McAuley (2000), McConachie (2008) and many others. At this point it is pertinent in terms of a methodology to outline some questions as starting points by way of nuancing discussions about inequality. Fifty Working Questions: Intersecting Economic, Social and Cultural Capital in Relation to Inequality   1) Why, despite the multiplicity of positive changes including reductions in global poverty and enhanced civil rights throughout the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, are income inequality and income insecurity again on the rise?   2) How does inequality incessantly and differently impact gender, race, sexualities, age, ability, sectarianism, ethnicity and class?  3) Do capital, technology and the marketplace predetermine all such relationships and are class, gender, ethnic and race-based economic inequalities not so much a necessary evil as an inevitable by-product of global capital?   4) Why is it unproblematic for many to allow the marketplace to determine economic activity?   5) What mechanisms determine the practices of the accrual, accumulation and distribution of wealth?   6) Is one of the many consequences of neoliberal capitalism that more wealth than ever is consolidated in the hands of fewer and fewer people?   7) How does elite rule construct itself to be potent, dominant, necessary, knowledgeable, actionable and simultaneously visible and invisible, transparent and concealing, rational and irrational and accountable and non-accountable?  8)  How is power flexible enough to accommodate/facilitate dissent, afford change, reproduce itself and evolve comfortably, not seamlessly but chaotically?   9) Is power more exposed by its reflexes, kickouts, pushbacks and misdirectional intent? 10) What is the role of meritocratic values to the doctrine of neoliberalism? 11) Why is the notion of the common good so difficult to achieve? 12) Is all competition good and the marketplace the best allocator of resources? 13) Would the world be a better, more humane place with a more equitable distribution of wealth? 14) Are social protections and marketplace interventions part of the obligations of a state?

Methodology  37 15) Why do people think that anything more than minimal state interference in society is unwelcome and that a welfare-inclined state disincentivises productivity and work? 16) Is state intervention very often marked by cronyism, poor value for money and the allocation of funds to projects not based on merit? 17) Should scarce and essential resources, like fuel, energy, water, transport and technological infrastructure, be in the hands of private companies or held by the state? 18) If unnerved by the cruelty of conservative, neoliberal thinking, should one be equally suspicious of radical left-wing thought, prompted by a disinclination to address the global failures of previous attempts at communism? 19) Do the histories of socialist state enterprises to date only imply that the common and greater good invariably ends up serving very few? 20) Is Neo-Marxism intolerant of criticism and unwilling to see beyond the destruction of capitalism? 21) Why must alternatives to the current hyper-capitalist model not conceal the cost of change and admit that improvements and transformations are sometimes difficult to realise in practice? 22) How do people benefit from the disadvantages of others? 23) In what ways do class, gender, race and ethnic experiences shape outlooks towards economic capital, how it is held and spent and how might wealth shape attitudes towards other groups? 24) Are corporate elites and ruling classes generally unconcerned with, unburdened by and unreflective of their own privilege and without any obligation to justify or attribute their successes to anything other than effort, talent and tenacity? 25)  If elite and middle classes do not quite monopolise opportunities within their networks, how do they hog and gift as them they see fit and make space for social mobility? 26)  Does it seem plausible that those maltreated, marginalised and oppressed are the main or only source of radical energy and the only driver of genuine revolt? 27) Is it the case that the targets of an oppressed group are often another disadvantaged community, different by way of national, ethnic, sectarian, religious or race backgrounds? 28) Should the biases and discriminations evident in some working-class, ethnic or race communities be heavily discounted? 29) Are the working-classes tolerant, envious of, enraged by or too passive towards the opportunities afforded the middle classes? 30) How might anger, indifference, the lower order of sympathy or lack of empathy for those that possess more or less than one owns be addressed?

38  Methodology 31) When there are attempts to differentiate between who is acted upon and who can act, is it all too easy to see the working classes as acted upon and the middle classes as agential? Are the middle classes also not acted upon by larger forces? 32) How do notions of choice and agency determined by economic freedoms become complicated by trauma, pressure, discouragement, encouragement, assertiveness, aggressive and self-sabotaging inclinations? 33) How might race, gender, sectarian, ethnic and class competitiveness and take-no-prisoner attitudes be addressed? 34) Why submit to an order that least benefits one’s community? 35) If the working classes and minorities function as a primitive other, are ruling elites ‘othered’ as well? 36)  Are social and cultural networks class exclusive or inclusive? Are working-class, gender, sectarian, ethnic and race networks different? 37) How might individuals be hegemonic in some aspects of their lives and non-hegemonic in others? 38) Can individuals have contradictory values; can they be culturally and aspirationally liberal but in their everyday life less so, or may they be liberal around one set of rights but not about another, say, in relation to being supportive of marriage equality yet hostile towards migration or economically liberal but socially conservative? 39) Is the political correctness associated with the ruling classes anything more than virtue signalling? 40) Why might it be that analysis built only on conflict and unbridgeable oppositions and fundamental polarisation between genders, classes, sectarian groupings, ethnicities and races only gets one so far? 41)  Is class-, sectarian-, gender-, ethnicity- and race-inclined thinking always a false consciousness, masquerading as different but knowing its place because of oppression? 42) Are class, ethnicity, gender, sectarian and race learned and imposed behaviours, produced by discourses and epistemologies and rooted in language and bodies? If identities are ascribed and imposed, rather than willed, can they also be contested and inverted? 43) Are the ruling classes invariably indifferent to the suffering of others? 44)  Might class, race, ethnic, sectarian and gender categorisations and denominations not only be rigid, fluid, complex and stereotypical but also serve as rudimentary traps of sorts across epochs and in different jurisdictions? 45) Can something that is progressive in terms of culture also be simultaneously conservative in terms of social and economic capital? 46) In terms of cultural taste, is it the case that those with working-class backgrounds can be more traditional in what they purchase and

Methodology  39 consume? Do the middle classes consume goods and services any more conspicuously? 47) How does oppression shape cultural experiences and inhibit cultural engagement and expression? 48) Is it necessary to avoid the polarisations and essentialisations tooled to incite both sides of the political debate, left and right wing? 49) Are money and wealth the master narratives and the dismissal of such a fundamental reality delusional? 50) Why is it so important to think about the historic and the durational aspects of wealth? Fifty Provocations About Dramaturgy and Representations of Inequality   1) To what extent is theatre a validator of dominant ideology and best viewed as a predominantly high-brow, bourgeois artform?   2) How much rank, authority and power does the theatre itself accommodate and negotiate with?   3) To what degree is protest fetishised, simplistic, delusional, licensed and permitted if funded by the very ideology that theatre makers seemingly disavow?   4) Can radical arts practices be more elitist than established commercial theatre that is reliant on hefty admission prices?   5) Why is it necessary in theatre and other art forms in the cultural sector to trace the relationship between different types of labour: expensive, cheap, invisible labour, profit-share and free/goodwill labour?   6) Why is it that theatre and life, while co-dependent and co-related, are not necessarily interchangeable?   7) Can we assume from any play that the dramaturgical dispositions and outcomes reflect a writer’s beliefs?   8) Do plays circulate rival systems of consciousness and pose questions about political authority and governance?   9) Are inconvenient dramatic situations, outcomes and textual anomalies amplified or marginalised in work? 10)  Is a drama’s socio/political status quo seen as permanent or provisional? 11) Does a play’s dramaturgy justify, normalise, reinforce, contest or undermine inequalities, or do many of these things exist simultaneously? 12) If injustice oriented, does the dramaturgy signal the causes or simply the consequences of inequality? Put differently, is there too much emphasis on subjective inequalities and not enough reflection on systemic inequalities?

40  Methodology 13) How might various prejudices, oppressions and lack of opportunities be dramaturgically deflected, disguised or evaded by way of fantasy, characters forgoing wants, undue optimism or eccentricity? 14) Can a dramaturgical attitude towards justice and change be effectively signalled by disaffection and non-realisation? 15) Why is wealth precarity/shaming so often dramaturgically indulged, and why is privilege so undeserving? 16) Why is a cultural disdain towards the notion of embourgeoisement so easily accommodated in writing? Is there much evidence of the giving, generous, conscientious, hardworking, honest middle classes? 17) How frequently do plays rely on a rags-to-riches format? 18) How is wealth viewed, accumulated, managed, distributed and fairly or unfairly achieved? 19) Does poverty always beget poverty? If so, is there a form of poverty shaming? 20) Do plays represent non-hegemonic, subaltern or marginalised figures as victims or as a source of revolt? 21) Have characters displayed an effort to make sense of another’s viewpoint or experiences? 22) To what extent is character articulacy essential to the naming of circumstances? Maybe inarticulacy or inaccuracy is more important? 23) Are characters given a strong sense of individual and/or collective purpose? 24) Is protest individualised or collectivised? Is there ever a shared sense of a common enemy? 25) How do intergenerational, inter- and intraclass, gendered, ethnic and raced characters relate to, cooperate with, compete with and negotiate hierarchies? 26) How does work demonstrate the ways that classed, gendered and racial identities are ascribed, imposed, contested and inverted? Are some sectarian groups, classes, genders, ethnicities and races more readable? 27) Are different classes, genders, ethnicities and races variously scapegoated? If so, how and why? Or is a dramaturgy prone to sectarian-, gender-, ethnic-, race- and class-washing? 28) What are the generic expectations in terms of different classes, genders, ethnicities and races and how are they reinforced or undermined? 29) Are class, gender, sectarian, and race characteristics stereotyped, essentialised or performed, and if so, to what purpose? 30) How significant are dramatic reversals and unanticipated outcomes in relation to the class, gender, ethnicity and race of characters? 31) How do plays deal with the radical and conservative aspects of all groupings? 32) What are the ways by which sectarian groups, classes, ethnicities, genders and races are segregated and group thinking polarised in relation to inequality?

Methodology  41 33) How are class, gender, sectarian, ethnic and race aspirations represented, or are such desires mocked or pathologised? 34) How might genre complicate class, ethnic, gender, sectarian and race relationships through irony, comedy, tragedy or tragicomedy? 35) Do plays recognise how dramatic families and friendship groups can include members with diverse allegiances? How do plays deal with the fact of there being classes within classes? Does class migrancy make traditional class-based analysis more complex? 36) Is there class, gender, sectarian, ethnic and race marginalisation or invisibility, vanishment or erasure? 37) Are elite/middle-class characters invariably more discreet, presumptuous, ruthless, cunning, pragmatic? 38) Why are marginalised, minoritised, and ‘othered’ characters more easily eliminated and disposed of and characters not born in Ireland seen as exotic? 39) Are self-sabotaging, greed, self-interest and dishonesty sectarian, class, race, ethnicity and gender specific? 40) Why does it matter who has and who has not, who accumulates and who goes unrewarded in theatre? 41) How detached are characters from the pain of inequality and precarity suffered by others? 42) Is it reasonable to expect class-critical or at least class-questioning views of all classes to exist in dramatic writing? 43) In whose best interests is it to have elite and middle-class characters demonised and marginalised ones endowed with decency, ordinariness and simplicity? 44) Is analysis that downplays, excuses or ignores either the ruthlessness, intimidation or dishonourable actions by those of all communities disingenuous? Should there be get-out-of-jail-free cards for any one person or community? 45) Is reading or responding to plays as if text and context are almost interchangeable, while disowning theatrical conventions or genre framing, a substantial mistake? 46) Are there dramatic moments that refute the passivity of the oppressed and insist on articulacy and resistant knowledge? 47) Do dramaturgical/theatre practices tell and un-tell, account for and distort gender, race, ethnic and working-class traumas, inequalities, hierarchies and dilemmas and simultaneously shy away from such traumas if the context is elite or middle class? 48) How often are women or minority characters only defined in relation to men? Do working-class male characters have more agency relative to middle-class female ones? 49) Are expressions of inequality in theatre equivalent to an ethical social stance, and are artistic propositions ever actionable?

42  Methodology 50) To what degree is it difficult to consider sectarian, race, gender, ethnic and class inequalities as prompted by an intersection and vectorisation of social, cultural and economic capital? Conclusion My analysis unpacks the dynamics that make a play ambitious and ambivalent, assured and uncertain, contradictory and self-affirming in the intentional and unintentional sabotaging of its own clarity and coherence. Critical analysis needs to repurpose the multiple dramaturgical binaries associated with class, gender, ethnicity, sectarianism and race: privileged/underprivileged, elite/ subordinate, entitled/unentitled, profiteering/exploited, radical/conservative, victim/perpetrator, conspiratorial/collegial, submissive/resistant, contributing/freeloader, self-determining/non-determining, decadence/precarity, pride/ shame, principled/unprincipled, regulated/dysregulated, served/serving, dispo sable/40indispensable,41 surplus value/surplus to requirements,42 stratification/ tolerable rank, hypocrisy/honourable, adversarial/non-competitive, atomicity/solidarity, appearing/disappearing,43 hegemonic/non-hegemonic, plenty/ lack, subject/object, agency/abjection, vile/virtuous, impulsive/controlled, greedy/generous, kind/ruthless, assertive/aggressive, cold/empathetic, benign/ corrupt, honest/deceiving, clean/dirty, mannered/crude, trustworthy/untrustworthy, decent/unruly, singularly focused/­collectively oriented, purposeful/ scattered, honourable/deviant, rational/emotional, discreet/loud, slacker/ grafter, motivated/underachieving and collectivised/individualised identities. I have purposefully blended these key words so that the first in the pair is not associated with any one race, gender, sectarian, ethnic or class category. It is important to question the ideological leanings of writing – without necessarily trying to establish a writer’s motive or intent – but one needs to remain acutely attentive to the masquerades of radicalism in the face of ‘inegalitarian ideologies’ (Piketty 2020, ix).44 As I reflect on different types of capital, class, sectarian, gender, ethnicity and race, I acknowledge that nobody is ever as inconvenienced as by the injustices and inequalities that they themselves experience, and seldom do we admit or act upon the realities that our own equalities are superior to many or that we just might as a consequence contribute towards the inequality of others. Notes 1 Catherine Belsey argues that the ‘object of the critic, then, is to seek not the unity of the work, but the multiplicity and diversity of its possible meanings, its incompleteness, the omissions which it displays but cannot describe, and above all its contradictions. In its absences, in the collisions between its divergent meanings, the text implicitly criticizes its own ideology, it contains within itself the critique of its own values, in the sense that it is available for a new process of production of meaning by the reader, and in this process, it can provide a real knowledge of the limits of ideological representation’ (2002, 109).

Methodology  43 2 Criticism when governed, informed or enabled by academia is never as independent as it might like to claim; yet academia is more diverse and inclusive than stereotypical representations would often suggest. 3 As a critical subject with a past, evolved over a particular cultural and socio/ political timeframe, there is no singular, non-evolving consciousness but an array or a palimpsest of different identities/subjectivities and rival and contradictory consciousnesses and impulses, in the here and now and continuously and discontinuously over time. Rather than categorising my own critical perspective as singular, uniform and coherent, I see it as a palimpsest-like process, shaped by multi-locationality, multi-perspectiveness and polyvocality – following Avtar Brah’s discussions in relation to a diasporic consciousness (1996, 181–196). 4 Patrick Lonergan sees Irish theatre as not simply holding up ‘a mirror to its society: it is often an agent not just a reflection of change’ (2019, 6), and his aim ‘has been to show how theatre matters in Ireland: it is a driver of change, a source of consolation and entertainment, and a reflection on the country’s best and worst elements’ (2019, 204). See Clare Wallace’s unpacking of frictions between the status quo, change and transformation in relation to three plays set in Northern Ireland (2021, 227–240). 5 Emilie Pine cautions that theatre can ‘over-emphasise change’ (2020, 8). 6 Feminist scholarship has deliberated on the attitudes, biases, blind spots, successes, failures, inclusiveness and exclusiveness of the literary and theatrical canons more broadly; what, when, how, where and why whose work gets performed, revived, published or not. 7 Feminist psychoanalytical readings informed by the writings of Helene Cixous, Julia Kristeva or Luce Irigaray are less present than feminist analysis informed by the writings of Sarah Amhed, Elaine Aston, Judith Butler, Catherine Belsey, Sue-Ellen Case, Una Chaudhuri, Simone de Beauvoir, Elin Diamond, Jill Dolan, Gail Finney, Lizbeth Goodman, Elizabeth Grosz, Lynda Hart, Helene Keyssar, Gay McAuley, Janelle Reinelt, Hanna Scolnicov, Elaine Showalter and Lib Taylor. 8 Recent collections like the two-volume The Golden Thread: Irish Women Playwrights (2021) and Plays by Women in Ireland (1926–33): Feminist Theatres of Freedom and Resistance (2022) are further attempts to address deficits. 9 Both Pilkington’s cultural materialist approach (2001) and Merriman’s (2011) neo-colonial one embed class analysis. Nicholas Grene looks at gender, class and space in relation to O’Casey’s early work (1999, 110–135); James Hickson considers contemporary plays set in Dublin by Sebastian Barry, Mark O’Halloran and Amy Conroy and work by Anu and Corn Exchange (2013, 137–156); Helen Heusner Lojek examines class and power in a range of McGuinness plays (2004, 1–47). Cathy Leeney and Deirdre McFeely look at gender and class in Maura Laverty’s work (2021, 233–256), Anthony Roche examines O’Casey and working-class urban drama (2015, 119–138), Tom Maguire looks at gender, space, violence class and precarity (2018, 160–175), and Fintan O’Toole offers a class-based analysis, particularly of Tom Murphy’s A Whistle in the Dark (1994, 57–93). 10 See also Clara Mallon and Salomé Paul’s forthcoming edited collection WorkingClass Women in Irish Literature and Theatre: Emerging from Silence (London: Routledge, 2024). 11 In his discussion of fiction and plays, Pierse covers work by the following playwrights, only some of whom will feature in my work: Brendan Behan, Dermot Bolger, Roddy Doyle, Lee Dunne, Mannix Flynn, Ken Harmon, Maura Laverty,

44  Methodology James McKenna, Paula Meehan, Paul Mercier, Heno Magee, Joe O’Byrne, Sean O’Casey, Jim and Peter Sheridan and Enda Walsh. 12 Pierse notes how ‘Class’s invocation in contemporary academic discussions is thus hedged with apprehensions surrounding its rationality’ (2011, 3). 13 In the earlier book, Pierse sees the working classes as represented as an ‘alienated cohort’, (2011, 252) that is ‘counter-hegemonic’ (49) and ‘counter-cultural’ in orientation (2011, 54). 14 Pierse’s focus is ‘concerned with writing about the working class, regardless of its provenance, rather than what is often a more narrowly defined and divisive concept of an organic “proletarian literature” ’ (2011, 30). 15 Murphy’s work deals with Deevy, Gregory, O’Casey, Shiels, Synge and Yeats, whose work I will also discuss, but he also considers many that I cannot cover here, including Frank Carney, Padraic Colum, Louis D’Alton, George Fitzmaurice, St. John Irvine, Margaret O’Leary, Walter Maken, M.J. Molloy and T.C. Murray. 16 In a recent essay Pierse ‘prioritizes the intersectionality of class and ethnicity/ race in considering how ethnicity and inward migration in Ireland, north and south, have been depicted onstage since the 1990s’. He adds: ‘those depictions that fail to attend to this intersectionality not only miss a key facet of immigrant and ethnic-minority experience but also, firstly, risk compounding the discrimination suffered by migrants in Ireland by silencing their intensely classed experiences and, secondly, tend to develop questionable binaries between the working-class indigenous Irish and newcomers. The intersectional reading of the plays that follows complicates what are too often simplistic and obfuscating plot resolutions in recent Irish theatrical treatments of migration and ethnicity/ race’ (Pierse 2020b, 26). 17 Humnath Bhandari and Kumi Yasunobu define social capital as: ‘a collective asset in the form of shared norms, values, beliefs, trust, networks, social relations, and institutions that facilitate cooperation and collective action for mutual benefits. It is a complex multidimensional concept having different dimensions, types, and levels of measurement. Common types of social capital include: structure and cognitive; bonding, bridging, and linking; strong and weak; and horizontal and vertical. It can be measured and analysed at individualand collective-levels in terms of social perspective and micro-, meso- and macrolevels in terms of geographic perspective. The properties of social capital, such as capacity to appear in as an explanatory variable in the production function, accumulation over time, capability of improving economic performance, investment with expected future returns, convertibility, and the need of maintenance, make it qualify as a form of capital, though there are some criticisms about the use of the term “capital” in social capital’ (2009, 480). 18 Savage notes: ‘Some social capital is random, people plead encounters with all classes, but it is not as democratic as one might like to think, hierarchies of reliance and exploitations, some for fun, some for the money’ (2015, 130). 19 Savage adds: ‘There is a knowingness to emerging cultural capital, a delight in eclectic tastes, in the hipster ‘obscure’, with engagement often ‘more ironic and playful than sincere’ for example, how someone listens to country music (2015, 115). He adds, thus ‘It is marked less in terms of the actual activities people enjoy, but more in the way that they enjoy them, and talk about them’ (Savage 2015, 126). 20 On the basis of such intersections and accumulations of these different types of capital, Savage comes up with seven class categories I mention in my introduction.

Methodology  45 21 An early twentieth-century working-class woman employed as a domestic servant is very different to a woman of the same era accessing third-level education. A male docker in the early part of the twentieth century is different to a rural cottier or an artisan tradesperson in a medium-sized town. 22 Perry Share et al. mention a general perception of an ‘informality’ and ‘egalitarian ethic’ characterising Irish social life that somehow gives the impression of a ‘classless society’ (2007, 170). That perception could not be further from the truth. 23 Brian Singleton notes ‘the exclusion of Jewish settlers earlier notwithstanding’, ‘the state opened its borders for Hungarians feeling a Soviet crackdown in 1956, Vietnamese boat people in the 1970s, Iranian Bhai in the 1980s and Bosnians fleeing ethnic cleansing in the former Yugoslavia not long after’ (2011, 129). 24 This is not to dismiss the role of the Irish in the slave trade, owning and running plantations, or the particular hostilities of certain Irish migrants shown to people of colour in places like America or Britain, even when depravation, exclusions, prejudice and social status gave many marginalised groups multiple commonalities, shared grievances and visible and invisible oppressors. Bad behaviours are explained sometimes as the targeting of those weaker to save themselves from being in that subjugated position; on that line of argument, I remain unconvinced. 25 One could signal Brendan Behan’s The Hostage (1958), which includes a mixedrace character; then there was the premier of Richard Cork’s Leg (1972) – a text completed by Alan Simpson – at the Abbey Theatre that featured Barney McKenna, best known as a member of The Dubliners, playing a black character, Bonnie Prince Charlie. As Brannigan notes: ‘reviewers did not comment, however, on the incongruity of a white man acting the part of a black character’. The Royal Court production had Nigerian actor Olu Jacobs in the role (Brannigan 2009, 202). 26 The Northern Ireland Statistics and Research Agency (NISRA) has estimated between 2000 and 2020, international inflow was 250,890 and outflow 207,894 (2021, Web). The CSO in the Republic of Ireland tells us: ‘In April 2016, there were 535,475 non-Irish nationals living in Ireland, a 1.6 per cent decrease on the 2011 figure (544, 357). The proportion of the population who were non-Irish nationals has also fallen from 12.2 per cent in 2011 to 11.6 per cent in 2016. This fall in non-Irish nationals can in part be explained by the rise in the number of those with dual Irish nationality, who are classified as Irish in the census’. Persons with dual-Irish nationality increased by 87.4 per cent to 104,784 persons in 2016. The largest proportion was Irish-American, which accounted for 16.8 per cent of all dual nationalities, followed by IrishUK (14.7 per cent) and Irish-Polish (8.8 per cent). Just twelve countries, each with over 10,000 residents [America, Brazil, France, Germany, India, Italy, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Romanian, Spain, UK], accounted for 73.6 per cent of all non-Irish nationals in 2016. In the next category thirty-two countries with between 1,001 and 10,000 residents accounted for a further 19.7 per cent of the total, with the remaining percentage made up of persons from 156 different countries’ (CSO 2016, Census Web). Estimates based on the 2022 Census are 703,700 (13.6 per cent) non-Irish nationals (CSO, 2022, Estimates, Web). 27 Anglo-Irish and British characters appear or are referenced in work like The Big House (1926), The Hostage (1958), Translations (1980), Joyriders (1986), After Easter (1994) or That Was Then (2002). 28 The play is set in 1850, amongst Dublin’s Quaker community, and features a former African-American slave, Sarah Worth.

46  Methodology 29 Savage notes that ‘Race was the primary classic categorical divide at the onset of imperial modernity. This was most evidently marked by the inhuman institution of racialised slavery and the brutal treatment of indigenous populations. It continues to be the most obdurate categorical division. Racial inequalities have in some spheres become more prominent. This is therefore different from class and gender, where economic inequalities have become more attenuated. Whereas the relative gender pay gap has substantially reduced, the racial pay gap has changed little, if at all’ (2021, 215). 30 Thinking in terms of class hybridity, someone might be middle class in terms of income and where they live, working class in terms of cultural tastes and social capital, even if the leisure they pursued was golf and football. So how do traditional class categories deal with such people? Is it better to think about the possible heterogeneity and not homogeneity of any one class? Should a claim on being third-generation working-class be taken seriously? 31 Devon W. Carbado captures and then challenges the more negative, often dismissive viewpoints offered around intersectionality and posits a rich analysis of the following terms: gender, religion, sexuality, colour, and class-blind approaches (2013, 811–845). 32 Sirma Bilge cautions about the ‘whitening of intersectionality’(2013, 405). White scholars of Irish theatre would not want to see their approaches as either a ‘whitening’ form of critical plundering, encroachment or as a form of gendered de-politicising, especially given Ireland’s first world economic status and relative wealth. 33 See Ian R. Walsh’s emphasis on experimental non-mimetic drama and its historiographic marginalisation, including work by Donagh MacDonagh, Maurice Meldon, Una Troy and Jack B. Yeats (2013). 34 Some critics have taken delight in class-outing of writers in a way that they would not do around someone’s sexual orientation. 35 Many have embraced the notion of colour-blind or colour-sensitive casting, but few sexual orientation–blind or gender-blind casting, and what about classblind casting? 36 I will say there are working-class background writers writing about different classes, and likewise middle-class background writers writing plays in working class contexts, women writing male characters, straight writers writing gay characters and vice versa and Caucasian and Black writers writing for mixedrace casts, and I do not want to probe work as if it is somehow problematic if people are not ‘staying in their own lane’. 37 Likewise, analysis is not driven by reflections on the canonical merits, inadequacy, datedness, revivability or un-revivability of works, more the pertinence of its details in relation to the argument I am trying to establish. 38 If a play has a long production history, class representations and nuance can become less visible or apparent over time. Internationally, a play can be seen as typically or notionally ‘Irish’, and class structures and dynamics might not be afforded in performance the significance initially intended. In theatre the performance of class becomes especially complex: working-class actors playing Shakespearean roles in non-received pronunciation is one thing; actors become associated with working-class roles, then when they start playing middle-class characters, it can seemingly be off-putting for some. What about middle-class background actors playing working-class heroic or villainous roles? Is this an unacceptable type of classing-down? Also, class can be played with a lack of awareness or a heightened self-awareness, delivered almost in Brechtian quotation marks.

Methodology  47 39 Additionally, there is not enough space to reflect on the substantial contributions of directors, actors, administrators, dramaturgs and theatre designers to the way that a script might evolve through drafting and rehearsal, especially any performance of new work. To what extent is the class background an audience member significant? 40 During the Covid-19 pandemic, Amia Srinivasan argues that key workers were ‘essential and disposable’ (2021, 75). 41 James Moran adopts Georges Bataille and Julia Kristeva’s notion of the abjection and applies it to O’Casey’s work through notions of performance of class and disenfranchisement, with the disenfranchised seen as marginal, dehumanised, ‘excremental and abject’ (2018, 159). 42 Pierse discusses the concept of the ‘necro-political’, applying it to class erasure; as Achille Mbembe argues, differentials between ‘valued and devalued bodies’, and the rationale for their deaths (2018, 170). Pierse thinks through ‘the dispensability of working-class lives’, especially in plays that feature ‘scab’ figures (2018, 174). 43 See Owen Jones on Britain and class (2012, 248). 44 Although Savage argues that ‘Class is more about ‘accumulation, rather than transactions or relationships’, I  would challenge that perspective, as I  think transactions and relationships shape capital accumulations and deficiencies (2015, 48).

2 Property Matters

Introduction Historically, Britain’s conquest and colonisation of Ireland impacted issues of independence, land and asset ownership. Under the Penal Laws it became illegal for members of the Catholic faith to own lands. The Catholic Emancipation Act (1820) rectified that exclusion. In the aftermath of the Great Famine (1845–49), the Irish population was decimated by deaths caused by disease, starvation and mass emigration. The Land Wars (1879– 82) brought agrarian agitation to the fore. Later, the Ashbourne Land Purchase Act (1885), Wyndham Land Act (1903) and Encumbered Estates Act (1904) provided tenants with the financial support to purchase land from landlords.1 Diarmaid Ferriter notes: More important . . . was the changing rural class structure, a reluctance to subdivide larger farms, and the land war of the 1870s and 1880s which ultimately led to an almost universal shift to peasant proprietorship in the early twentieth century – all of which were crucial in changing attitudes to marriage. One farm in four disappeared as a result of the Famine, the decline being concentrated in holdings of less than 15 acres. The ‘cottier’ class – that is, those on the lowest rung of the social ladder – were virtually wiped out. (2009, 19) Across the island, apart from Ulster, which was more industrialised, there remained a significant economic dependency on agriculture, even as there were population rises in many urban centres, with commercial activities increasing, leading to more publicans, grocers, drapers and various trade and service providers. Banking, medical, engineering, architectural, legal and accounting services expanded, as did artisan trades like carpentry, baking, butchers and construction. Income and profits from such enterprises enlarged and enriched the middle classes, both Protestant and increasingly Catholic.2 DOI: 10.4324/9781003180074-3

Property Matters  49 This belated embourgeoisement of rural and urban life brought to the fore issues of owership, inheritance, money and class, and these would be further complicated by Home Rule agitation, the revolution in 1916, the economic and political costs associated with the War of Independence (1919–21) and Civil War (1922–23).3 The partition of Ireland under the Government of Ireland Act 1920 allowed six of the nine counties of the province of Ulster to remain part of the United Kingdom, which came as a result of political agitation by Unionists and gave significant political power to their six-county majority. The 1937 Free State constitution would express a territorial claim over the whole island, revoked by amendment in the aftermath of the Good ­Friday Agreement (1998).4 Not just are territory and property always political, but as Piketty argues, ‘every inequality regime, every inegalitarian ideology, rests on both a theory of borders and a theory of property’ (2020, 5), and this chapter is about how Irish theatre negotiates with property ownership and borders.5 Many of the plays in this chapter demonstrate various attitudes to wealth, economic plenty and subsistence living, asset transfer, complex gendered relationships and class hierarchies. The role of marriage in asset consolidation and the reinforcement of gender norms is especially complex, often incompatible with the seemingly conservative disposition of their times. Again, I caution, these plays loosely speak to the eras in which they are written and set, but do not serve to represent with accuracy and completeness dominant views of people in any moment in time. The Playboy of the Western World: The Calamity of Mergers John Millington Synge’s tragicomedy The Playboy of the Western World (1907) offers peculiar and anomalous representations of ownership, gender, marriage, class and inequality. Synge’s play is a repository of memories about land struggles and agrarian unrest, and the law is seen as a renegade force; the state’s upholding of proprietorial landlord rights is found wanting. Tenant evictions may have had the law behind them but not popular support. Set in a shebeen, the play opens with Pegeen drafting an order for drink, clothing and shoes in preparation for her wedding to Shawn Keogh, a match not made in the comic-genre heavens, but based on a bargain, asset transfer and the potential consolidation of social and economic capital. Attractiveness is seen in terms of material worth, a viewpoint countered by multiple narratives about an array of local grotesques, whose transgressive, mischievous and taboo-breaking behaviours are acknowledged in terms of surplus and heightened cultural and social capital. Fugitive Christy Mahon flaunts his alleged economic capital but soon realises that the social and cultural capital that his story of patricide accrues

50  Property Matters is more advantageous. Pegeen wanting her father to employ Christy to work under her supervision is a vital gendered assertion. If Christy’s initial story brings him acclaim, it is Pegeen’s licensing of Christy to imagine, articulate, find purpose in narrative expression, free from fact that is game-changing. Despite previous life disappointments, Pegeen reassures, ‘It’s near time a fine lad like you should have your good share of the earth’ (Playboy, 189). Financial and material inducements offered by Shawn for Christy to leave, the bargain struck between the Widow Quin and Shawn and the agreement between the Widow Quin and Christy all demonstrate a willingness to strike material deals for relational gain. In full knowledge of his father’s aliveness, Christy wins all before him on sports day; marriage to Pegeen will be Christy’s ‘crowning prize’ (Playboy, 217). Christy’s next striking of Old Mahon with a loy is based on an intention to bring a more decisive conclusion to his story. For his deception, Pegeen incites a baying mob to destroy Christy. In his ‘Preface’, Synge claims when writing The Shadow of the Glen (1903) that he ‘got more aid than any learning could have given’ him ‘from a chink in the floor of the old Wicklow house where I was staying, that let me hear what was being said by the servant girls in the kitchen’ (Preface, 174). A rich and living language inspires writing that differentiates itself from the work of Ibsen and Zola and their dealings ‘with the reality of life in joyless and pallid words’ (Preface, 174). His elaboration also divorces such peasant worlds from the harshest of material effects; social/cultural capital can be read as forms of compensation, diluting harsher material realities. Accusations of class voyeurism, misappropriation and exoticism can easily follow. Materiality is inbuilt into language as forms of social and cultural reserves; his play does something far more unnerving with words when words veer towards fantasy. Language is not simply compensatory, not only about possibility, articulacy and defiance but also about mutuality, self-assertiveness and self-fabrication. Simultaneously, Playboy threatens not only a consolidation of all three forms of capital, by uniting farmer and publican families, however dubious Christy’s claims on wealth are.6 Essentially, these intersecting surpluses of capital are compounded by sexual/erotic capital, and that is not necessarily monogamous in orientation. Nicholas Grene identifies the ‘animal physicality’ and that the ‘drift of females in their shifts were scandalously erotic’ (1999, 81–83). The various expressions of the grotesque and the transgressive are linked to pagan impulses; that jouissance contravenes the moral capital associated with Fr Reilly. The audience revolts which greeted the play’s first staging have had many explanations, none better than Paul Murphy’s, who is alert to Synge’s ‘contempt for the upwardly mobile Catholic nationalist’, the challenges to national stereotypes, fostered and performed values, Catholic mores about

Property Matters  51 ‘sexuality and female propriety’, the insecurity of a newly emerging bourgeois cohort, ‘apropos of their peasant ancestry’ (2018, 277). Professor Tim: Worthy Serfs Set in Ballykennedy,7 County Antrim, prior to the auction of the O’Cahan estate, Rush Hill, ‘the large and comfortably furnished’ Scally family home, is visited by James Kilroy, a rural councillor and his son Joseph in George Shiels’s comedy Professor Tim (1925) (Professor, 67). There is a heightened class-awareness and self-consciousness evident in Mrs Bridget Scally’s remarks: ‘If their grandeur frightens you, it doesn’t frighten me. Go out and meet them and take them up to the hall door. And no scraping or touching your hand to them. Don’t be a serf’ (Professor, 74). Kilroy proposes the purchase of Rush Hill for Joseph and Peggy Scally to live in, once married, now that Joseph has come into an inheritance. The Scallys agree to stock the land, but the marriage offer is dependent on a side-deal with Mrs Scally that her husband will serve as bailsman, go guarantor for the purchase. Kilroy notes: ‘With our own two farms and Rush Hill all lying in together, we practically own the landscape ’ (Professor, 118). While locals have threatened to boycott the auction of the repossessed lands, Kilroy sees it as a situation that will keep the price low.8 Peggy declines the offer, remarking: ‘I was engaged to Hugh O’Cahan when he’d plenty. Now I’m going with him when he’s nothing’ (Professor 122). Rush Hill is in decline, impoverished and indebted; the stairs have been burnt down for firewood. Reputationally, Hugh is more interested in horses and gambling. Servant Paddy has prompted the boycotting of the sale and dresses up like a country squire to bid up the price. Moll, another servant, promises to break every pane of glass, tear down curtains and remove the plaster from the walls. Indeed the new owner will be lucky if she does not burn the place down. Uncle Tim is a much-anticipated visitor, but in appearance he seems less a scholar and more a drunkard and vagabond. Tim becomes an unwanted intruder, even evicted from the Scally home. However, Tim has accrued significant wealth, and his disguise as a vagabond was merely a ruse. Buying Rush Hill, Tim gives the deeds and papers to Peggy, reaffirming that Peggy will be ‘the undisputed boss’ (Professor 128). O’Cahan agrees to submit to her authority, but Peggy asks Tim if she can pass the papers over to Hugh. Acts of unconditional generosity towards Tim are rewarded handsomely and disproportionately to Peggy and later Paddy. Although Councillor Kilroy is banished along with his status-seeking wife, even Mrs  Scally, despite her characterisation as being a tough, demanding, scheming and hostile one, is embraced by patrician Tim. Her behaviour is excusable, motivated by straitened times. Tim sees John as the

52  Property Matters ‘domestic serf’ (Professor, 107), warning Bridget that her ‘despotic reign is over. Johnny’s cock of the walk’ (Professor, 121). Peggy’s non-appearing siblings are destined to take their place in the queue; neither their reservations nor demands are articulated.9 If land-grabbing impulses are reprimanded, the play affirms the legitimacy of wealth finding its way into the appropriate hands.10 The wealth that accrues to Tim because of his educational, professorial and performative capital is uncontested and sufficiently contrasted to Kilroy’s reliance on shady deals to keep the price of distressed assets low. Shiel’s play enacts a particular fantasy of comeuppance against the most avaricious while normalising congenial, progressive forms of wealth consolidation. The Whiteheaded Boy: Keeping It Local Robinson’s satirical comedy The Whiteheaded Boy (1916) is not reflexively hostile towards wealth accumulation or asset transfer and uses the working classes as a disquieting foil.11 The Geoghegans are Protestant, and their home and some land were ‘bought for’ Mr Geoghegan by his wife before he died (Whiteheaded, 65). Denis, the ‘whiteheaded boy’, is costing the family to keep him studying medicine in Trinity College (never mind his gambling, drinking and spendthrift nature), and the allocation of relatively sparse resources is impacting the needs and aspirations of his siblings. Kate lost out on a previous relationship match and is now unlikely to marry. Jane is waiting on a dowry so she can marry Donough Brosnan. Baby wants to go to Dublin for bookkeeping and shorthand training, and Peter is impatiently awaiting his life chance. George, who runs the grocery business, controls the purse strings. Having repeatedly failed his exams, Denis’s engagement to Delia Duffy is to be broken off, and Denis is to be sent to Canada, under George’s instructions. Delia’s father, chairman of the district council, multiple business owner and a ‘member of every committee and every league in the village’, threatens to sue for ‘breach of promise’, enough to bankrupt the Geoghegans (Whiteheaded, 87). Denis and Delia’s hasty, riposte marriage, and his acquiring of a job working on the roads, scupper Duffy’s attempts to cash in from the side-deals variously made to withdraw his threat to sue. Denis’s appearance in work overalls marks his transition from career doctor to road repairs, the swapping of big urban house-type living for two rooms in Nolan’s cottages. Downward social mobility is the appalling vista, a counter-move that forces Duffy, George, Mrs. Geoghegan and Aunt Ellen to make fresh offers of accommodation. Duffy proposes the role of tuberculosis officer for Denis; monies pledged to Duffy will be handed over to the newlyweds, and Aunt Ellen agrees to champion Denis and Delia as managers of the new co-operative shop. Ellen

Property Matters  53 also decides to leave her lands to Denis, reneging on a promise previously made to Peter. Ellen, who owns a couple of hundred acres and three small houses, remains unmarried because she has ‘too many notions’, according to the play’s not necessarily reliable narrator (Whiteheaded, 70). Ellen appears to be a risk-taker, ahead of her time, and has been mainly successful in her enterprises. The co-operative movement proposes a rival business model to the sole trading grocer, and for some it is seen as the ‘salvation of Ireland’ (Whiteheaded, 71), but for George, the ‘foolish, contrary people’ setting up such shops come from a class that ‘is as thick as thieves and lavish with the money’ (Whiteheaded, 86). Denis substantiates that critique: ‘Co-operation?  .  .  . That’s the latest Sir What’s-his-name, the hairy poet chap and all the rest of the gang’ (Whiteheaded, 78), implying the activities of Sir Horace Plunkett and colleagues. While Ellen is ideologically opposed to the co-operative movement, if its collective approach results in disaster, then businesses would resort to being sole traderships; the failure of this alternative, romantic and more socially oriented capital (if driven by old Anglo-Irish Ascendancy money) means opportunity. Ellen is a schemer; Baby’s final line: ‘God help you, John Duffy’, whom Ellen has agreed to marry, suggests as much (Whiteheaded, 117). Despite the humorous intent surrounding the lengths to which the ­characters will go to avoid shame and disgrace, and despite the critical disposition of the narrator’s voice-overs, engagements with wealth merely signal caution, encouraging and facilitating asset transfers according to the logic of cunning, pretence, gambling and risk-taking, without rewarding or consideration of decency, courage or virtue – a dramaturgical approach seldom mimicked. For those that lose out, the shared middle-class–related pragmatism suggests that a surrender to the greater good of their own class is to be read more as a submission to that will than as any indictment of class practices. If inequalities amongst the family are seen as an irrevlance, larger societal inequalities are immaterial. Yeats’s contempt for the ‘greasy till’ expressed in the poem ‘September 1913’ is much critically referenced, but the donning of the ‘greasy cap’ by Denis and the level of disdain it accrues has not attracted adequate scrutiny (Whiteheaded, 112). The Big House: ‘Monstrous Evictions’ Located in Ballydonal House, Lennox Robinson’s tragic drama The Big House (1926) opens in 1918 on Armistice Day, moves to 1921 during the Irish War of Independence and ends with two scenes set in 1923, during the Irish Civil War. The Anglo-Irish Alcock family have held ownership of the estate going back three to four generations, and while Mrs Alcock associates with an English/Protestant identity, the family does its best to fit

54  Property Matters in with the local community. Murphy describes the Ascendency class as a ‘colonial class’ (2018, 271). Money is not available to maintain the standards of yore, and the house has been partially asset stripped to cover daily expenditures. By the play’s end, the Alcocks only employ two servants, have closed many of the rooms and are unable to afford the heating. There are ‘no hunters in the stable’, no card playing, subscriptions are unpaid, no claret, their Romney painting is gone and their Steinway piano is damp and out of tune. First Reggie, then Ulick and finally Kate were set to inherit the estate, but the two sons lost their lives fighting for the British Army. If Ulick’s ghost haunts the play, Kate is the play’s central figure, and a marriage proposal from the recuperating Captain Despard early in the play is repeated later. Now an officer with the Auxiliaries, he suggests that she either accept his hand in marriage or his soldiers will destroy the village: ‘spare the damned village’ is a curious and perverse marital proposition (House, 171). The Alcocks are given five minutes to vacate the premises before it is to be destroyed by explosions ordered by local Republicans.12 The family is disconcerted by the realisation that Annie, their servant, had known of the plan to torch their home in advance and had remained silent. Mrs Alcock sees their home as having been a ‘white elephant of a house’, and in some ways she is glad to be rid of it (House, 193). The targeting of the house has more to do with its symbolic rather than its true significance, given that in the aftermath of the Anglo-Irish Treaty, British rule had effectively ceased. Mr (St. Leger) Alcock is struck by the realisation that by sitting on various committees, writing of character references, their sense of belonging and mutuality are invalidated by their accents, beliefs and vast differences in resources. The Alcocks had deployed decency and obligation as Ascendancy markers of moral distinction but failed to acknowledge the inequalities upon which their privileges rely. A combination of snobbery, decency and self-justification normalised their sense of entitlement and are merely deluded imperial/colonial performances of connection and common interest. Despite accounts of mixed marriages and assimilation, there is little to unite the Ascendency elites and locals. Describing house burnings as ‘monstrous evictions’ (House 188), Mrs  Alcock fails to connect their present circumstances to the mass evictions of the Irish that gave rise to largescale land agitations and eventual political change. Prior to 1923, tenants had stopped paying the Alcocks rents, and some were now driving cars as markers of newfound social status. These big houses are destined to be sold to priests and nuns, who will go on to reinforce another hegemony. In Kate’s regarding politics as a ‘nuisance’ (House, 154), there is summary dismissal of any impetus towards political freedom.

Property Matters  55 Kate is hanging on, attempting to re-purpose and re-articulate the significance of her class and the matrilineal line, but it is an ambition that seems hardly fit for purpose. Kate’s stance is not only a gendered one but also captures the defiance of a disappearing class. Kate’s claim that Ireland is ‘no more theirs than ours’ is an important declaration (House 196). Kate also asserts that they ‘still mattered’ (House, 195), their targeting is a perverse affirmation of their status, that ‘they are afraid of us still’ (House, 195). Recognising the impossible binaries she faces, Kate’s re-affirmation of the status of her own class is somewhat self-deceiving, ill-conceived and self-serving. Regardless, Kate is determined to remain and rebuild, starting out by making what remains of the servant’s quarters her base. Katie Roche: Constitutional Internment Teresa Deevy’s quasi-realist Katie Roche (1936) is set in Lower Ballycar, rural Ireland, and raises very complex issues around homeplaces, class, entrapment, illegitimacy, gender inequality and interclass marriage. Katie works as a domestic servant in the Gregg household. Keen to be compliant with Catholic Church teachings, Katie considered entering a convent, but things change after an out-of-the-blue marriage proposal from architect Stanislaus Gregg, a much older man. Katie feels obliged to accept, even if Katie is different to him by way of background, education, circumstance, age and disposition. Stan admits to being attracted to Katie’s mind and heart, not her physical appearance, and his revelation that he was previously in love with Katie’s mother is further convoluted by his sense of authority over women. During Act Two, Katie flirts with Michael Maguire and locks a door to suggest the concealment of something illicit in an attempt to force S­ tanislaus to be more attentive. The fraught lack of intimacy between the newlyweds is much to Katie’s distaste. Katie has surrounded herself with religious iconography to prompt normative behaviours but realises: ‘I’m not like them. They’re not like me . . . I thought in my mind – wouldn’t God like what we like ourselves’ (Katie, 112). Gendered expectations that Katie should be loyal, honest, virtuous, sensible, patient and modest are consistently undermined by her spontaneity, questioning, defiance, exuberance and vibrancy that are not so easily suppressed. Amelia, Stanislaus’s sister, offers a degree of empathy to Katie’s dilemmas, whereas Katie’s other sister-in-law, Margaret Drybone, calls her ‘A girl like that’ (Katie, 87). Margaret promotes acquiescence to the limited, unequal roles offered to women, demonstrating an internalisation of patriarchy. Katie distinguishes between ‘for want of a name’ and what ‘good is’ the name of many locals (Katie, 61). Despite having no birthright, Katie has ambition, so when Reuben, a wandering mystic, tells her that her

56  Property Matters bloodline is that of a wealthy family, the Fitzsimons of Kylebeg, owners of a grand house, Katie latches onto its significance. Katie states: ‘Didn’t I  always know I  came from great people’, adding, ‘I’m done with humble. I was meant to be proud’ (Katie, 50). It is this vivacity and intuitive insight, alongside Deevy’s canny use of the laughter associated with Katie, that ensure Deevy’s challenges to the conservative-laden values of the Irish state. There is nothing vile about Katie, but figures like Reuben would want her to be perceived that way. Indeed, Reuben is Katie’s father and feels free to strike her with a stick when he witnesses her kissing Michael. Stan is threatened by Katie’s vitality and what she demands of him, yet he ardently kisses her by the play’s end, but it is passion in the context of the plans he has made for them, without her input. It would be brave of her to accept her banishment from her homeplace, according to Amelia. Katie agrees to be courageous and make it grand, re-framing it so that she will have something ‘great’ to do, when gender equality is impossible (Katie, 122). Desire, in its multiple forms, sexual, social and cultural, is discommoding to a conservative value system, and its banishment or exile are the go-to ideological strategies. In contrast, Frank Lawlor’s belated and measured marriage proposal to Amelia makes no demands. Amelia’s acceptance of Frank’s proposition is driven by mutual need, less about intimacy, and has nothing to do with procreation. Equally, Frank states that Stanislaus is treating Katie badly, not only chiming in with Amelia’s own criticism of her brother, but Frank’s awareness suggests that there is no blanket value system shared by the community’s males. Anthony Roche articulates the multiple power inequalities across the play, whereby marriage re-affirms woman as the token of exchange within patriarchal practices (2013, 167–174). Interclass marriage complicates matters further. Article 41.2 of the Bunreacht na hEireann or Irish Constitution of 1937 asserts that the common good is dependent upon a woman remaining within the home, her labour confined to housework and ­child-rearing.13 This retrograde article contrasts sharply with the egalitarian values of the Proclamation of 1916 and Article 3 of the 1922 Free State constitution, where, as Melissa Shira reports, ‘every person, without distinction of sex, shall . . . enjoy the privileges and be subject to the obligations of such citizenship’ (2007, 2). In Katie Roche, marriage serves as a reinforcement of gender alienation, acquiescence and servitude; yet freedom, dignity, aspiration and defiance remain, even within such fraught and disadvantageous circumstances. Yet for Jacque Rancière, a process of political subjectivation is evident in ‘the action of uncounted capacities that crack open the unity of the given and the obviousness of the visible, in order to sketch a new topography of the possible’ (2009, 50). As Katie’s gendered and class-informed agency, inequality and fatalism collide, her subjugation is intolerable but her objections accounted and made visible.

Property Matters  57 By the Bog of Cats: Material and Matrilineal Mésalliances Marina Carr’s mythic/realist By the Bog of Cats . . . (1998) is one of the most analysed and revered Irish plays, with much focus on the play’s gender dynamics and its indebtedness to Euripides’s Medea. The matrilineal forms part of Hester Swayne’s emotional, psychological and symbolic inheritance and legacy issues (see Shira’s comprehensive analysis of the matrilineal, empowerment and exile (2018, 1–11, 117–147). What Hester inherits from her mother, Big Josie, is problematic, based on her abandonment and longing for her mother’s return and the pain caused by extreme neglect and precarious nurturing. There is also her mother’s gift, which is song stitching. Hester is an outsider, a Traveller woman, also a homeowner, but does not own land. She is attached to her homeplace, mainly because of its location by the Bog of Cats and because of her association between place and her mother. She has agreed to a ‘settled’ life of sorts when living with Carthage. Financially induced to vacate the home Hester once shared with Carthage, her lover of fourteen years, now that he is about to marry Caroline Cassidy, Hester has second thoughts. A  home in the town has been purchased and furnished for her. Willing to renege on her legal obligation, she sees a contract as just paper. Hester feels Carthage should honour his vow made to marry her on the birth of their child, Josie, and believes that Carthage is putting wealth before such promises. Hester believes that Carthage has progressed in life because of how she built him up but, more importantly, their dark secret. Carthage purchased his first piece of land not by borrowing or savings but using blood money tied to murder. He watched Hester kill her brother Joseph and then helped with the body’s disposal. Joseph had travelled to share an inheritance with her. Moreover, if Hester intuits that her destiny is linked to place, she also has a sense of foreboding that others also feel, including Catwoman and Monica Murray, each of whom has little by way of material goods but much by way of social or spiritual capital. The grotesque realism and the carnivalesque mésalliances of Act Two during the wedding reception deliver incongruous stories; a proliferation of brides; and bizarre guests, including Catwoman, a ghost and Father Willow. The wedding day that Caroline had imagined, at her mother’s prompting, proves to be nothing like that fairy-tale fantasy. Father Willow calls Caroline ‘Hester’ during the wedding reception, and mother of the groom Mrs  Kilbride comically inserts herself as the centre of attention. Hester attempts to intrude on the wedding to lure Carthage away, wearing the wedding dress Carthage had previously purchased for her. Carthage and Caroline’s marriage is linked to the promises of Xavier Cassidy to sign over land. The wedding date is chosen because it has tax-saving implications.

58  Property Matters Xavier has little time for romance, believes that land is the only measure of worth and has classist notions, regarding Carthage as a ‘scrubber boy’ (Cats, 332). There are different moments in the play when Hester is presented with money so that she will leave. Caroline offers to hand over the inheritance she received from her mother’s will, which was released by Xavier on the day of her wedding, and Xavier offers a wad of money. Earlier Carthage offers to repay the money taken from Joseph’s remains. If property ownership is complex, and money is mainly ill gotten, Hester’s burning down of the house and torching of the shed, leading to the killing of the forty calves inside, adds another layer of complication. While a criminal act, this is also a crime of passion. Under the legal doctrine of mens rea/actus reus or guilty mind/guilty act, the mind and deed need to be at one. Is Hester of sound mind? There is a rage towards injustice almost beyond comprehension, beyond the material, which possesses Hester. Like Catwoman, Hester is tuned into a different rhythm, giving depth and meaning to actions and choices that a material or transactional consciousness does not accommodate. Hester kills young Josie to set her free, but for those characters looking on, there is something darker in Hester’s actions. The play’s unequal material reality is tempered by notions of prediction and destiny, by the presence of ghosts and ghost fanciers and the idea that the world does not yield easily to human wishes. On Trial: Gendered Eviction and Bogus Sacramental Vows In Máiréad Ní Gráda’s On Trial (1966), an English version of her Irish language play An Triail (1964), an expressionistic, speculative trial, but not an inquest, adjudicates on Maura Cassidy, who has murdered her child, Kathleen, and killed herself. Prosecution and defence questioning combine with a series of flashback scenes whereby gender disparities, unplanned pregnancy, single motherhood and the framing of sexual desire in negative terms are used to signal the hold conservatism and Catholicism had over characters and demonstrate how various figures have internalised negative dispositions towards women. Maura is from a middle-class background, with one brother destined for the priesthood and another to inherit the farm, and she was seen as someone who could be a nun. Shame, disgrace and unchasteness prompt a willingness to punish pregnancy outside marriage, and an attempt is made to give her alcohol to trigger the abortion of the foetus by her widowed mother. She justifies it: ‘It’s neither a sin nor a crime to get rid of an unholy thing that was accursed at its making by both God and man’ (Trial, 14). Rejected by her family, Maura runs away and leaves rural Ireland for a

Property Matters  59 job as a domestic servant and minder of five children in suburban Dublin, where she is underpaid and later sacked by Mrs  Morris, who fears that neighbours might suspect that the child is her husband’s. After giving birth to Kathleen in a refuge for unmarried mothers, Maura is surrounded by working-class women. Social worker Anna Brazil tries to persuade Maura to have the child adopted and to make a fresh start. Anna tempts her with the fact that the child would go to a worthy, respectable family; that she can get her old job back as a domestic servant; and that marriage is a firm possibility without a child in tow. Anna wants to believe that she has Maura’s best interests in mind but is simply doing the go-between work between middle-class couples who cannot conceive and a socio/political reality that wants not just to hush up out-of-wedlock pregnancies but to monetise misfortune. Adoptions carried a price and were done, as Fergal Whelan notes, ‘with the illegal, but well-structured, connivance of the clergy, social services, and individuals within An Garda Síochána’ (2021, 261).14 The child’s father, teacher Kevin O’Clery, is married to an older woman, and Maura is sworn to silence about the affair. Earlier, to seduce Maura, Kevin stated: ‘With this ring I  thee wed’ (Trial, 16). For her, ‘The night you married me. You took the ring off your finger and put it on mine . . . with this ring you made me yours. The gates of paradise opened before me that night’ (Trial, 58). The corrupt version of the marriage sacrament that Kevin performed has no legitimacy; it is merely a deceptive way of gaining trust and her consent. An encounter with Kevin in the brothel where Maura has found sanctuary after the tenement in which she was staying collapsed prompts a false belief that Kevin has sought her out. The trauma of banishment from her family, running away, getting sacked, giving birth in a refuge and the collapse of the building that miraculously did not harm her child is just an onslaught of circumstances that Maura faces down. Maura’s logic, via a spectral presence or testimony of sorts, is simple: ‘I killed my child because she was a girl. . . . She is free’ (Trial, 5). Death is a release from gendered subjugation, marginalisation, alienation and inequality. The play ends with a chorus of voices, almost all of which are heavily invested in their own conservative positioning, not impartial witnesses. Apart from Johnny the Van, Molly and the working-class women, choric statements by Maura’s mother, brothers, factory line manager, Mrs Morris and social worker, are notable for their refusal of responsibility and the compassion they espouse as part of their religious beliefs is not proffered to Maura. Kevin relies on secrets, silences and collusion to keep him out of the testimonial/interrogative frame. It is not Maura but broader patriarchal society that is indicted.

60  Property Matters Aristocrats: Decline and Resilience Brian Friel’s tragi-comic Chekhovian-inspired Aristocrats (1979) is set in the mid-1970s in Ballybeg Hall, ‘a large and decaying house’ (Aristocrats, 251), where the head of the household is a former district judge and part of the Catholic aristocracy. Although confined to bed, this former judge’s vocal presence is established through a newly installed baby alarm system that captures not only his post-stroke ramblings and his once-professional authority but also the terror he can incite in his son, Casimir, who is based in Germany and allegedly married with children. Ballybeg Hall is in disrepair, the servants are long gone, the family cannot afford heating bills and the bank manager will not grant an overdraft to repair storm damage. The family has been downwardly mobile, from Lord Chief Justice to Circuit Court Judge, from District Court Judge to Casimir, who is a failed solicitor and now is a sausage factory employee.15 Judith looks after their father; Alice married Eamon, the grandson of one of their servants. Eamon and Alice live in London and are in a dysfunctional relationship, marked by alcohol dependency and violence. In her twenties and reliant on sedatives, Claire is to about marry Jerry McLaughlin, a fifty-nine-year-old widower and move in with his four children and sister; this sister actually owns the house, even if Jerry is a very successful greengrocer. Otherworldly eccentricity is present through the figure of Uncle George. Friel does not want to pitch Casimir in a similar vein; a stage direction foregrounds Casimir’s uncouthness, peculiarity, ‘erratic enthusiasm’ and ‘exaggerated mannerisms’, but Casimir is neither a ‘buffoon’ nor ‘disturbed’ (Aristocrats, 255). Casimir recollects his father’s remark: ‘ “Had you been born down there,” Casimir would have become the village idiot; however, “You were born here and we can absorb you” ’ (Aristocrats, 310). That notion of class absorption is important, as are the recognition of considerable class differentials and outcomes. Casimir is a complex repository of family lore, linking the house and particular antique objects to famous figures, including Cardinal O’Donnell, G.K. Chesterton, George Moore, Count John McCormack, Daniel O’Connell, Gerard Manley Hopkins and W.B. Yeats.16 Indicators of cultural and social capital reinforce the family’s standing. If it is a family mythology much in need of collective debunking, its notoriety attracts the Chicago-based academic Tom Hoffnung, whose research project is based on the impact of Catholic big houses on the local community, on the Protestant Ascendancy class and on politics, particularly post-Catholic Emancipation. Tom gains access to the family records, estate papers and old diaries, but the play itself attempts to unravel what Eamon suggests to be the gap between the family’s ‘phoney fiction’ and Tom’s ‘bogus thesis’ (Aristocrats, 278). Eamon

Property Matters  61 was nurtured on the mythology of the big house’s events, ceremonies and traditions, the life of ‘quality’ (Aristocrats, 276). Rather than writing a family history, Eamon proposes that Tom writes a romantic fiction ‘Ballybeg Hall – From Supreme Court to Sausage Factory’ – across four generations (Aristocrats 294), whose subject should be about a ‘family without passion, without loyalty, without commitments’, as it administered the law in instances of war, famine and civil strife, ­cultivating artists for its occasional brush against reality. The family is additionally resilient and tenacious – motivated by ‘a greed for survival’ (Aristocrats, 294), prompted by ‘discipline; or self discipline – residual aristocratic instincts’ (Aristocrats, 324). Eamon speculates that the ‘shabby and greasy peasant in the Irish character finds a house like this irresistible and an aspiration’ (Aristocrats, 318–319). Eamon concludes that once Judith leaves, ‘thugs from the village will move in and loot and ravage the place within a couple of hours’ (Aristocrats, 318). If there is some truth to such claims and expectations, Eamon’s belief that such a mindset makes the Irish ripe for colonisation is more problematic; imperialism is an expression of dominance, seldom wish-fulfilment. Although Alice and Casimir are willing to sign away their share of the house to Judith and Claire, upon their father’s death, Judith cannot maintain the house without her father’s pension. Willie Driver wants Judith to move into a mobile home with him outside of Bundoran, but he does not want her child, currently held in an orphanage, an arrangement forced on her by her father. The belated return of Judith’s child, the children for whom Claire will now be their stepmother, Casimir’s children in G ­ ermany who may or may not be imagined and George moving to London to become Eamon and Alice’s adult/child are the unlikely and anomalous signs of regeneration and attest to a relative abundance of children, at odds with many of the other plays discussed in this book. If the characters survive, based on various complex couplings and reunions, then the house will not have the same fate. The cultural, social, material and symbolic capital worth of the property ebbs away impacted by time, downward mobility and changing circumstances. Pentecost: Who Owns What? Stewart Parker’s visionary/realist Pentecost (1987) is set in 1974 Belfast during the Ulster Workers’ Council (UWC) strike,17 in the working-class haunted home of the recently deceased Protestant Lily Matthews. Lenny inherits, from his Catholic aunt, the one home that remains inhabited on the street that serves as a dividing line between both Catholic and Protestant communities.18 Despite the house now being ‘shabby, musty, threadbare, it has all clearly been the object of a desperate, lifelong struggle for

62  Property Matters cleanliness, tidiness, orderliness-godliness’, with its contents all ‘from the first half of the century’ (Pentecost, 171). Lenny’s Catholic ex-wife Marian has sold her antiques business and wants to buy the house and moves in before contracts are signed, much to the disapproval of Lily’s ghost. Marian’s Protestant friend Ruth stays with her after she flees a domestic abuse situation; her husband, a police officer, took a truncheon to her. Ruth describes Lenny’s house as a ‘condemned slum’ (Pentecost, 190). Architect Peter, son of a Methodist minister, is Lenny’s friend, home from Birmingham, and also finds shelter there, and after Lenny deserts his homeplace following a burglary, all four characters must endure each other under the one roof. Marian is rebuked and assaulted by Protestant neighbours after she tries to retrieve her car from a barricade. Women attacked her ‘shrieking and squealing and scrabbing’, exclaiming, as Marian tells it: ‘ “that Fenian hoor of a squatter,” – that’s what they actually think we are – squatters’ (Pentecost, 222–223). Bombs explode off-stage, and this cordoned-off Belfast is a hell of sorts, currently in the control of Loyalist paramilitaries and fellow traveller protesters, using a labour dispute as a way of objecting to the Sunningdale Agreement (1973), which planned for a power-sharing Executive for Northern Ireland and a cross-border council. The police and army stand aside as the streets fall under mob rule. Peter summarises: ‘This is no strike. (Paisleyite voice) This is a constitutional stoppage!’ (Pentecost, 201). In the past, Lily recalls how Marian’s ‘crowd burnt it down around us’, having beaten Alfie senseless, and destroyed all they possessed (Pentecost, 182). A  quick-acting fire brigade saved her and the building itself; during the blitz the next street to Lily’s was fully destroyed, so these current times are not unique for destructiveness. Marian’s initial intent is for the National Trust to preserve the house as a more meaningful record of how people lived, unlike the big houses of the landed gentry, like the Earl of Enniskillen’s estate, the type that usually falls under the Trust’s remit. Catholic ownership of the house with a former Protestant tenant serves by way of symbolic disruption, the notion of the Protestant claim on the Northern Irish state, which is additionally ironised by the fact that the once-Marxist Lenny would have agreed with the notion that all property is ‘theft’, as Marian is keen to remind him (Pentecost, 174). In Harold Wilson’s 25 May 1974 radio broadcast, he accuses the striking community as undermining the state, adding ‘They (the British taxpayer) see property destroyed by evil violence and are asked to pick up the bill for rebuilding it’ (Pentecost, 214). Property destruction and costs associated with repair are central to his reprimand. Belfast is not a place where children prosper. Marian’s discovery of Lily’s diary, her ‘private property’ (Pentecost, 230), leads to the revelation that Lily’s husband was impotent after he returned from the First World War,

Property Matters  63 that she had a baby with their tenant, which she put up for adoption; her husband, who was away working for a year, never knew about it. Moreover, Marian and Lenny had lost a child, Christopher, who lived for five months, Ruth has had three miscarriages, one at least brought about by a beating from David, suggesting that the play is also haunted by absence, the death of potential new life and renewal. Ondřej Pilný summarises Parker’s dramaturgical challenge as consisting ‘in the compulsion to incessantly struggle with the past embodied in spectral shapes’ (2006, 141).19 If Peter sees Lenny as incapable of leaving, claiming ‘your life’s locked in and the key surrendered’ (Pentecost, 242), Lenny states to Marian: ‘I want to live now. I want this house to live’ (Pentecost, 244). By way of an alternative ending, the play reaches out in different directions: first, the Pentecostal notion of resurrection is drawn upon; second, Marian changes her mind about her National Trust preservation initiative: instead, the home needs ‘air and light’ (Pentecost, 238); and third, there is the idea raised by Lenny and his colleagues, who were planning to dump a large quantity of LSD into the Mourne Mountains water reservoir that feeds Belfast homes so that the acid experience might shift the sectarian consciousness – thanks to a ‘messianic impulse’ (Pentecost, 235). Marilynn Richtarik argues that for Parker, ‘the play’s spiritual dimension came to supersede the political in importance, based on associations of renewal, of division transcended by a unifying spiritual message’ (2012, 310). Tom Maguire remarks that Pentecost ‘was one of the few Troubles dramas to draw directly on a Christian myth other than the sacrifice of Jesus’ (2006, 84). Anne O’Reilly suggests that the play ‘draws attention to the power of the imagination to imagine the yet unimagined’ (2004, 269). Ownership, tenancy, squatting, outsiders, refuge and sanctuary are terms all contested not just by those on opposing sides of the sectarian divide, but there is the issue of uninhabitableness as well. Despite the shabby nature of the space, its struggle for order and cleanliness, the house must be aired out, light let in, a new sensibility which LSD and the consciousness of Pentecostal transformation might trigger, a move away from a destructive funerary conscious towards something optimistic. By the end, the Sunningdale Agreement has collapsed, the opportunity for political power sharing was destroyed and what was to follow would be over twenty more years of conflict until the Downing Street Declaration of 1994. Shush: Dividing Assets and Negative Equity Elaine Murphy’s post-Celtic Tiger realist Shush (2013) marks the occasion of Breda’s birthday. Suburban neighbour Ursula and friends Irene and Marie, plus Marie’s daughter Clare, drop in unannounced to celebrate. Vast volumes of alcohol and chocolate are consumed, whilst discussions

64  Property Matters focus on family, work, money and broken relationships, especially cheating partners, predominantly male. Sex proves problematic in a variety of ways, not as an act that generates intimacy and joy but instead becomes a source of betrayal, fear and distrust. Breda’s husband Tommy is a serial cheat. When the first affair that she discovered ended, her taking him back was as if she was granting him a ‘licence’ (Shush, 36). Now that Tommy has eventually moved out and renovated his mother’s home (added a cobble-lock driveway, with a fountain and marble statue of an intertwined couple [Shush, 42]), he wants to sell the home he once shared with Breda. Breda comments: ‘If he thinks he’s selling my house to fund fucking Southfork he’s another thing coming’ (Shush, 46). An account of a drunken raid on Tommy’s property opens Act Two, which captures Breda’s anger and vulnerability. Marie had an affair in the past, giving rise to her husband’s constant suspicions. Breda’s neighbour, Ursula, is viewed as posh and ‘affected’ (Shush, 9), as she dislikes public transport and has never eaten chips from a bag. Ursula gets chlamydia after her partner Max has an affair with an office temp. Ursula admits that at one time, she thought that if she discovered he was cheating on her, he would be out of their home; however, the reality of the situation proves more complicated. Ursula’s family is also under huge financial pressure – they are in negative equity, ‘broke, not destitute’ (Shush, 55). Clare has a new four-bedroom home but is also an accidental landlord, owning an apartment that has been on the market for fifteen months. Gendered relationships, infidelity, work, family and financial problems are interconnected under the corporate motivational picture of an eagle with the phrase ‘Dare to Soar’ (Shush, 3), which hangs on Breda’s wall. (At work, Breda has been pressured into taking early retirement.) The Celtic Tiger was a period of growth in private home ownership, newfound freedoms and access to divorce. Ursula stays put in a situation she had imagined to be a red line issue; Breda is faced with the reality of financial insecurity. Notions of legal entitlement are inflected by the consequences of asset division, accidental landlordship and negative equity that troubled the austerity years after the Celtic Tiger. The Veil: 2011/1822 and 1822/2011 First performed in 2011, Conor McPherson’s gothic supernaturalist The Veil is set in 1822 in Mount Prospect, near Jamestown, where the Ascendency family the Lambrokes, Grandie, Madeleine and Hannah, live.20 Their home is in major disrepair, paint is peeling from crumbling walls, staff are not paid wages, tenants cannot pay rents and Madeleine is reliant on the credit extended to her by Colonel Bennett, who eventually buys the

Property Matters  65 place. When guests Reverend Berkeley and Audelle arrive from England, old standards of hospitality are impossible to achieve. Seventeen-year-old Hannah is to be married to the Marquis of Newbury, but she is variously reluctant because of his reputation and because he does not seem attracted to her. If Hannah is matched with the son, it is a letter from the elderly Lord Ashby that betrays the undue and somewhat perverse fascination he has for Hannah. Marriage has economic protections, but it will also take Hannah from the homeplace that unnerves her, related to the lingering psychic energies associated with her father’s suicide. A séance results in the appearance of a dead child, which Hannah wrongly views as a prediction of her future, whereas Audelle believes the child to be the one he had abandoned. Grandie is a persistent but regularly silent presence in the play, who on occasion disrupts and comments on matters interpersonal, none more so than in her narrative about St  Patrick being a prospector, who sold the local population on his ideas of Christianity while dispossessing them of their gold (Veil, 63), a story told to her by a king with mirrors rather than eyes. Another of Grandie’s narratives is about migrant farmers who displaced indigenous hunters; these farmers were set on land ownership in contradistinction to the older practices of the material resources being communally shared, with nobody holding proprietorial claims. Land agitation is rife, the British Army numbers increase in the locality and there are raids on the homes of the gentry. Local children are dying from hunger and scarlet fever. When the living quarters owned by the estate of the local poor collapse, many die, and more are trapped in the rubble, including children. If The Veil is a Gothic-inspired play, it has its roots in reflections on the duties communities have towards each other.21 The horror of starving people shoving almost-dead children into a passing carriage is horrific; the beating James Furay gets from Fingal is also appalling, which is inconsistent with the care he had offered James previously and motivated to satisfy Madeleine by finding someone to blame as to why two horses were lame. Housekeeper Mrs  Goulding despises her own; Fingal is ashamed but also abused by locals because of his role as an estate manager. The play’s emphasis on property acquisition, money, borrowing and the extensions of credit, bankruptcy and how the characters seem to have privileged expectations and are inclined to live beyond their means suggest that this play is about the 1820s and the cyclicality of economic patterns of boom/bust but also the Celtic Tiger period and the economic crash that followed (2008–2015).22 Piketty’s term ‘neo-proprietarian ideology’ is a useful way to think about the linkage between the neoliberal capital project and property investment in Ireland that ended so abruptly with the recession of 2008 (2020, 20).

66  Property Matters Cross-Connections If land is about assets and making a living out of agriculture, property is associated with wealth, old and newish money, and both are linked to inheritance. Marriage, as we have seen in work by Robinson and Shiels, begets property consolidation. In contrast, disrupted wedding plans feature in Gregory and Yeats’s Cathleen Ni Houlihan (1902), where prosperity is forfeited for a greater good; the Old Woman’s elite status trumps Delia’s petit bourgeois standing. Wedding-day cold feet feature differently in Edward Martyn’s Maeve (1899). The rejection of an unaffectionate marriage by Maeve is a personal but also a political one. Maeve has an offer of marriage to a Englishman, and this marriage will solve her family’s financial difficulties and restore its reputation. Maeve declines and dies, lured by an intense but ambivalent vision of beauty and elsewhere in Tir na nŌg. It would not be until McGuinness’s Dolly West’s Kitchen (1999) and Gates of Gold (2002) or Amy Conroy’s I ♥ Alice ♥ (2010) that dramatisations of marriage/vows/civic partnerships move beyond heteronormative frames. Few plays see big houses thriving; in McGuinness’s Dolly West’s Kitchen, the West household flourishes. There is a different type of dispossession in McGuinness’s Greta Garbo Comes to Donegal (2010), where an Irish Catholic family is forced to sell everything to an Englishman, and they become his servants. Later analysis of Yeats’s Purgatory (1936) will demonstrate how the demise of the big house is perceived as the outcome of toxic interclass-relationships, and in Carr’s Ariel (2002), the Fitzgeralds occupy a big midlands home because of economic prosperity, but political success is achieved by a dastardly pact. Tom Murphy’s The House (2000) captures the destructive need of Christy to take possession by any means necessary of a largish local house whose occupants have been compassionate towards him. In Anne Devlin’s After Easter (1994), Rose’s Catholic family were evicted by sectarian agitators. In John B. Keane’s The Field (1965), the gap between a fair and the best price for a small piece of land leads to tragedy. Gerard Stembridge’s That Was Then (2002) raises the spectre of planning corruption in relation to property development. Property also serves as a symbol of social mobility in Bernard Farrell’s Forty-Four, Sycamore (1992) and Bookworms (2012) and as a marker of suburban claustrophobia and ennui in Carr’s Marble (2009). In contrast, owneroccupied cottage spaces as markers of subsistence living appear in John B. Keane’s Sive (1959), Tom Murphy’s Bailegangaire (1985) and Martin McDonagh’s The Beauty Queen of Leenane (1996). Overcrowded tenements feature in various works of O’Casey. The return of a married couple from Liverpool in Maura Laverty’s Tolka Row (1951) triggers displacement from an over-occupied corporation-built family home. Publicly

Property Matters  67 built Ballymun’s towers feature in Dermot Bolger’s The Passion of Jermone (1999); while such spaces were initially seen as very decent, the lack of facilities and other community services meant that the apartments were not fit for purpose. In Christina Reid’s Joyriders (1986), there are the insanitary, infested, cramped, asbestos-laced environmental conditions of the social housing in Belfast’s Divis Flats, in addition to war on the streets, army raids and paramilitary punishment beatings. Rosaleen McDonagh’s Walls and Windows (2021) is initially set on an overcrowded halting site and later in a hotel occupied by the homeless. In Sebastian Barry’s The Steward of Christendom (1995), Thomas Dunne ends up in the County Home in Baltinglass, having once served as chief superintendent of the Dublin Metropolitan Police. If property is invariably under threat, facing foreclosure and dilapidation, it must also be seen in the context of homelessness; Pat Kinevane’s Silent (2011) deals with the horrors of homelsessness, where trauma, addiction and mental health are shaping behaviours. Homes that are variously haunted are seen in works as diverse as McPherson’s Shining City (2004) and Mark O’Rowe’s Our Few and Evil Days (2014). In The Birds (2009), a version of Daphne du Maurier’s novella, McPherson’s characters take sanctuary in an abandoned house, boarded up against marauding birds. In McPherson’s Girl from the North Country (2017), set in Duluth, Minnesota, in 1934, the Laine family faces bank foreclosure and eviction from their boarding house and an attempt to arrange a marriage between the young adult African American Marianne and an elderly widower, Perry, whereby monies would change hands to help the Laines go some way towards saving the business. Conclusion This chapter is less an economic history of Ireland in terms of ownership, eviction, asset transfer and marriage and is more about how plays deal with such matters across over a one-hundred-year period. There are obviously points of contact between the particular dramaturgical contexts suggested by the writing and the historic moments to which they reference, without implying that one is simply reflective of the other. Melissa Shira notes: The recurring interior of the home on the Irish stage has come to signify an enduring association and conflation of family and nation. What ideals of family were promoted in the cultural life, ‘home’ in Irish drama remained a precarious space, denoting a lack of security and prone to invasion and penetration. (2007, 2–3)

68  Property Matters Many plays discussed here capture that nation/home conflation, particularly the way that homes are gendered. Home spaces are less ones of sanctuary and more associated with eviction, banishment, intrusion or the unheimlich (unhomely). As these plays demonstrate ownership, occupancy can be variously contested because of occupation, sectarianism and classism but also in terms of gender. In Irish plays, the property is more likely to be overcrowded, in disrepair or facing repossession or dispossession. Those non-propertied characters include Katie Roche and the servants in The Veil, but in Professor Tim, the servants are offered a cottage by Tim if they marry. Servants possess an uncanny false sense of stakeholdership. There may be a hostility towards wealth but less towards characters that are upholders or representative of it. Notable are the numbers of middleclass women characters who are owners and likely inheritors. In The Playboy, Pegeen is an only child; in The Whiteheaded Boy, Mrs Geoghan paid for the family home, and Eileen is a wealthy entrepreneur and property owner. In Professor Tim, Peggy is handed the deeds to the big house, opting to transfer it to Hugh. Maura’s mother is a widowed landowner in On Trial. In Aristocrats, Casimir and Alice offer to sign the house over to Judith and Claire; Claire’s fiancee, Jerry, does not own the home he shares with his children; it belongs to his sister. Madeline is head of household in The Veil, and Hester is propertied in By the Bog of Cats . . . . Breda is a home-owner threatened by the division of assets in Shush. This is a notable gendered trend, but ownership is not to suggest a discernible pattern or justification or riposte to patriarchy. It is simply not an anomaly but a complicator. From the turn of the twentieth century, the Anglo-Irish Ascendancy’s ownership of lands would dwindle, and its economic, social and cultural power base would be seriously eroded. Emigration has always dampened the demand for housing in both jurisdictions, and in Northern Ireland the allocation of social housing became grounds upon which the Nationalist community would have a particular grievance. The Troubles period would see sectarian-motivated threats, attacks on property, burn-outs and evictions. If too much housing was built and speculated upon during the Celtic Tiger years, leading to the ghost estate phenomenon in the Republic, by the 2020s again there is not enough housing to meet demand. Property and ownership must also be seen in terms of population changes: from the 1960s, the population of the Republic was 2.8 million and has jumped to currently 5 million, and in Northern Ireland the population now stands at closer to 2 million, having jumped up from close to 1.5 million in 1971.23 Savage remarks, based on Piketty’s work, that across the twentieth century, there is ‘the profound shift in the organisation of capital towards residential property and away from agricultural land’ (2015, 297).

Property Matters  69 Savage notes, ‘For much of human history, inheritance has involved the passing over of economic capital to one’s kin: property, savings, tools, heirlooms’ (2015, 49). Like all wealthy classes, the Anglo-Irish Ascendancy class had ‘stored historical baggage and the accumulation of advantages over time’ (Savage 2015, 46). Savage adds: ‘As Bourdieu and Piketty remind us, accumulation is a long-term process’ (2015, 74) More recently, Savage revisits the idea: ‘Estimates now suggest that in most developed nations, a staggering proportion of over half of aggregate wealth is now inherited, a marked rise from only fifty years ago, and this trend is common across all wealthy nations’ (2021, 82). Yet so many of the plays within the Irish tradition of writing dealing with this wealthy cohort are more inclined to strip away advantages, highlight grievances and bemoan losses than extend that accumulation. The durational aspect to wealth is side-lined in two ways: one by decline and decimation and two by the fact that recent capital acquisition is always concerned with its temporariness, as we will see in the following chapter. The precarity of fixed asset property in Irish plays is unusual, as is the idea of wealth precarity, because neither is in line with how wealth is secured and passed on intergenerationally. The unwillingness to address the durational and transfer aspects of property is a major deficiency. Materially and symbolically, property can be variously viewed as entitlement, exclusionary,24 a marker of social progress, a display of success, a private space or theft. Because of colonisation, capitalism and patriarchy, lands and property are always contested and gendered spaces, complicated by the arrangements and legal standing of marriage.

Notes 1 Because of these tenant purchase schemes, backed by ‘government-assured loans,’ Paul Murphy observes; ‘The changes in property rights and agribusiness consigned the small farmers, landless workers and itinerant labourers to the lower rungs of the new social order’ (2018, 272). 2 For some the decline of the Ascendancy class was a bitter reality; for others it could not have happened soon enough. It is a class that in part symbolised British imperialism and the denial of indigenous ownership of lands; the class in part blamed for the Great Famine, many members of which evicted tenants for rents they could not pay, exploited the produce of land itself because of short termism and exported goods from a country as millions starved and died. 3 Conflict as a consequence of the latter would blight politics, personal, communal and familial relationships for decades. 4 Article 43 of The Irish Constitution (1937) stresses the right to private ownership. 5 Not least is the fact that ‘the right to vote’ was ‘historically associated with property ownership’ (Savage 2021, 183).

70  Property Matters 6 Paul Murphy points out that Old Mahon is described as a ‘squatter’ (Playboy, 173) by Synge (2008, 37); therefore Christy is lying when he claims to be the son of a ‘strong farmer’ (Playboy, 181–182). 7 Paul Murphy gives the location as ‘Ballykennedy Co. Antrim,’ (2008, 82) based on the Three Plays edition, but that is not mentioned in the more recent Selected Plays (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 1925), 41. 8 The rise in the number of big farmers is discussed by Murphy (2008, 91). 9 Joseph Kilroy agrees to marry another of Peggy’s sisters, and Tim promises to ‘furnish a cottage’ if Paddy marries Moll (Professor, 128). 10 Christopher Murray notes that in the new Free State society, ‘for the progressive, acquisition of more property was the badge of modernity. But it was a competitive business and to the artistic mind disdainful.’ (Shiels 2008, ‘Introduction’, Selected Plays, xvii). 11 Although first performed on 13 December 1916, apart from one moment later on, the play says little about the revolutionary activities of those times. 12 See Clair Hughes on big house fires (1995, 119–128). 13 According to the Constitution: ‘the State recognises that by her life within the home, woman gives to the State a support without which the common good cannot be achieved.’ (41.1) It adds: ‘The State shall, therefore, endeavour to ensure that mothers shall not be obliged by economic necessity to engage in labour to the neglect of their duties in the home’ (41.2). 14 Fintan O’Toole expresses it differently: ‘After 1952, it was against the law for any adoption to be arranged without a court order. But the system was above the law. For the right clients, documents could be faked to show the adoptive mother as the birth mother, erasing the latter entirely’ (2021, 205). 15 Eamon, who is married to Alice, remarks: ‘If we had had children and they wanted to be part of the family legal tradition, the only option open to them would have been as criminals, wouldn’t it?’ (Aristocrats, 295). 16 Anthony Roche notes ‘Yeats’s myth of the Protestant Big House is challenged by Casimir’s counter-mythologizing, where the great figures tend to be Catholic with papal associations’ (2011, 79). 17 CAIN Web Service, Ulster Workers’ Council Strike, https://cain.ulster.ac.uk/ events/uwc/sum.htm [Accessed 25 September 2022]. 18 Lenny has a solicitor uncle, and his barrister father advises Republicans how best to evade the rigours of the law, according to Ruth. Catholicism is unusually linked to privilege and ownership but also to paramilitarism. 19 Ondřej Pilný claims the play ‘gestures firmly towards the future, without any nostalgic tendency to resuscitate an unequivocal past’ (2006, 153). 20 On Gothic Irish big houses more generally, see McCormack (1991, 831–854). 21 On supernaturalism, see Susan Cannon Harris (2014, web). 22 The Celtic Tiger saw an uptick in Ireland’s economic circumstances. A bettereducated workforce, increased foreign direct investment and a strong global economy led to better pay and work conditions and a greater demand for houses but also nearly to the elimination of the building of social housing provision. Speculative activities and investments in construction led to massive price increases, huge increases in supply and a property crash from 2008, with prices in 2022 only returning to those peak values. The banking system came close to collapse. The Republic of Ireland needed the intervention of the European Commission, European Central Bank and International Monetary Fund, who offered financial support and imposed an austerity package that led to the short-term loss of Ireland’s economic sovereignty. The property bubble

Property Matters  71 was driven by many things – increasing population, huge demand, government tax breaks, low interest rates, regulation not being enforced and rogue banking practices (Kelly 2009, 2010). Property development and speculation rather than productivity as a driver of economic growth was going to end one way. International forces were also at play, triggered by subprime lending and the collapse of Lehmann Brothers in 2008. There was also the notion of alchemy, no-risk investment and substantial rewards by get-rich schemes that fed off neoliberal fantasies that turned out in some instances to be no more than a Ponzi scheme. Northern Ireland’s property values saw somewhat similar rises and collapses. Negative equity has haunted a generation of homeowners. 23 Currently, in early 2023, the demand for property has never been so high. The ongoing issue of Direct Provision accommodation; refugees fleeing the war in Ukraine, homelessness; slow supply-side increases; developers sitting on tracts of land; potential housing not having the associated infrastructure; objections to housing, called Nimbyism (not-in-my-back-yardism); and poor planning processes are impacting housing supply hugely. 24 A married man could sell the family home, even if his wife owned it, without her consent, until the Family Home Protection Act (1976).

3 Everyday Entrepreneurial Capital

Introduction Corporate investment, research and technology and commercial activities in the trading of goods and services all generate economic activity, which creates employment, generates profit, encourages consumer spending and funds taxes to support state services and capital projects. Growth is seen to be vital to an economy; otherwise there is stagnation, recession and less employment. Economic growth in and of itself shows no cognisance of environmental impacts, resource exploitation or sustainability over the longer term. In a globalised world, goods and services are traded internationally, governed by trade agreements, national laws, regulations and standards that protect corporations, employees, consumers and citizens to varying degrees. From Piketty’s viewpoint, if percentage returns on investments outperform growth, it leads effectively to more and more resources falling into the hands of fewer and fewer people. Mike Savage summarises: Piketty’s argument is captured in his famous formula r > g, namely, that returns to capital will exceed the growth rate – and therefore, that more growth will only enhance the relative gains of those with the most capital, leading to enhanced inequality and a vicious and reinforcing circuit. (2021, 19) Twentieth-century, profit-oriented capitalism has morphed into neoliberalism. A neoliberal, libertarian core concept is the effectiveness and neutrality of the invisible hand of the marketplace, and the lower the government involvement in society, the better, whereas a more democratic social outlook sees its interventions as a reallocation of resources in the ways that markets will not deliver on services that citizens need. Despite the marketplace’s claims on neutrality, global capitalism is anything but squeaky clean. Not only are there increasingly fewer players in major areas like food, energy production, technology and banking DOI: 10.4324/9781003180074-4

Everyday Entrepreneurial Capital  73 controlling the supply and distribution of goods and services, the danger is global monopolies of key products, against which antitrust legislation does not seem to be effective. Also, the flows of capital associated with this global world have been increasingly shaped by shady, ruthless and corrupt deals.1 Wendy Brown remarks how neoliberalism ‘would inaugurate democracy’s conceptual unmooring and substantive disembowelment’ (2015, 9). Of late, journalists have exposed how political regimes accommodate all kinds of complex financial transactions intended to minimise the payment of taxes via the holdings of intellectual property rights, offshore accounts, trust funds and offshore shell companies supported by a bewildering network of legal and financial advisers for fraudulent and tax avoidance purposes.2 Thanks to apps, more and more people have access to the buying and selling of shares. The financial marketplace is increasingly complex, including crypto currencies, NFTs, spread betting, libor rates, hedge funds and multiple other financial instruments. There are also the black markets. David Harvey remarks how extra-legal forms of capital ‘are fundamental rather than peripheral to capitalism, namely drugs, illegal guns and human trafficking’ (2011, 44). The plays in this chapter are clustered to address the issue of capital and assets, what is done to achieve them and how they are accumulated and shared. If extensive wealth is linked to a bourgeois consciousness and identity, it is also performed through culture and taste, not just by how but also where one lives. Greater capital resources allow a degree of social mobility, but with costs attached. Trappings of exclusivity can also be mimicked by criminals, who aspire to the consumerist norms and conspicuous performances of wealth they see around them and use money to differentiate themselves from the communities they control. While the emphasis of Chapter 2 was on capital, land and predominantly property as expressions of wealth, and how these were acquired and transferred, this chapter looks at other plays to consider how they negotiate with modes of capital accumulation and posit various values around earnings, profit, risk and affiliate lifestyles. Philadelphia, Here I Come!: Affirmative Embourgeoisement Brian Friel’s Philadelphia, Here I  Come! (1964) deals comprehensively with the impulse and terrors of emigration and bears an acute awareness of interclass bourgeois tensions. Ballybeg is shaped by money and social rank. The division of the play’s main character into Private/Public Gar O’Donnell gives access not only to rival and contradictory systems of values and awarenesses but offers alertness to how characters present

74  Everyday Entrepreneurial Capital themselves as performative. Invisible to every other character but Public Gar, Private Gar is ‘the unseen man, the man within, the conscience, the alter ego, the secret thoughts, the id’ (Philadelphia, 27). Even though Public talks occasionally to Private, he ‘never sees him, and never looks at him’ (Philadelphia, 27). The family’s retail business relies on them having a ‘finger in many pies, ‘dry goods’, ‘patent drugs’, ‘dehydrated fish’, sweets and weedkiller (Philadelphia, 35–36). Gar’s plans to marry Kate Doogan are not realised. Her father is a lawyer and senator, and her parents treat Gar as Kate’s friend rather than marriage material. Earlier Gar and Kate discussed his income, plus his eggselling side hustle. Kate reprimands: ‘We could never live on that’ (Philadelphia, 40). Instead, Kate marries Dr Francis King. Doogan and King’s father were ‘class fellows at school’ and attended university together ­(Philadelphia, 43). As Gar readies to leave for America, Kate drops by, a moment tainted by a sense of what might have been. Kate’s aspirations are for him to do well: ‘make a lot of money and come back here in twenty years’ time, and buy the whole village’ (Philadelphia, 78). Gar knows economic capital trumps the emotional and erotic capital in his locality.3 In the stories about Gar’s dead mother, Maire, there is the sense that she had the interest of many males and that when she got married at nineteen to the middle-aged S.B., it was a marriage of convenience. Gar’s friends ‘The Boys’ are invited over by Madge; otherwise Gar’s leavetaking would have gone unmarked. ‘The Boys’ like to give ‘the impression that they are busy, purposeful, randy gents about to embark on some exciting adventure’ (Philadelphia, 69). Instead, these young males struggle not only with emotions and celibacy but with homosocial bonds. Ned gives Gar his own belt/buckle, and although second-hand, it is personal, as if there were nothing else pre-planned to mark the occasion. Gesturally, it is symbolically resonant by way of its oddness and the uneasiness associated with the moment itself, which hints at the darker anxieties of emigration, the impact it has on friendships and the inability to commit collectively to a moment that is affecting and poignant for all. The merits of social capital are evident in the inability to articulate commonality, mutuality, shared feelings and reciprocity. With neither Gar nor S.B. able to sleep, a pre-dawn moment in the kitchen just might be a final opportunity. Conversations about headaches suggest a degree of concern. Listing outstanding workplace tasks and explaining where things are stored is how Gar communicates his concern for his father, the jobs that he did that went unacknowledged, but also that S.B. needs to plan for his absence. But neither S.B.’s thinking, feelings or anticipations, nor the consequences to Gar’s leaving, are openly acknowledged. S.B.’s memories of him resisting school, wanting to work behind

Everyday Entrepreneurial Capital  75 the counter in the family business and wearing a sailor suit are disputed by Madge, who has no recollection of that clothing. Memory goes without cross-affirmation. S.B. is described as ‘a responsible, respectable citizen’ (Philadelphia, 34), affirming his earnings are achieved by hard, honest endeavour. By way of self-interrogation, Gar asks why he is leaving the place of his birth to go to somewhere where the ‘devil himself holds sway’, a ‘profane, irreligious, pagan country of gross materialism’ (Philadelphia, 32). In Ballybeg, the embourgeoisement of Ireland has taken root, but economic security is poor or no compensation for social lack and more repressed social capital, and ‘gross materialism’ is a future worth fretting about. After Easter: Opportunistic Versus Exploitative Capital Set in Belfast, Anne Devlin’s After Easter (1994) deals with multiple conflicts, including sectarian, class, gender and relational dynamics in the Flynn family. Issues of infidelity, seduction, mental health, postnatal depression, rebirth, religious mysticism, political protest and migration combine to inflect the more realist aspects of the dramaturgy. The play structures itself around the significance of Easter within Christianity, marking the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ.4 Rather than deal extensively with the Troubles or the mystical aspects of the play and in particular their significance in relation to Greta’s acts of protest,5 I focus on the play’s intersections of social, cultural and economic capital. Matriarch Rose is a complex character, and her relationship with her husband Michael is fraught. Because he led fishermen into a dispute with the eel fisheries, it cost him his livelihood. Michael’s left-leaning philosophies mean that he was a thorn in various sides, including both Protestant and Catholic faiths. Their children benefited hugely from his equality agenda. Rose’s relationship with her children is complex; she somehow paranoidly views the bond between Greta and her father as incestuous, and there has been regular violence doled out in her rearing to some, Greta and Manus, but not to Aoife or Helen. Most of the offspring are financially secure but insecure about other aspects of their lives. Manus is a jobbing musician, without much success, and he sleeps on the floor of friends. Aoife and Greta are teachers; Aoife’s husband is a farmer, and Greta’s is an academic in Oxford with socialist beliefs. Helen lives in London in an expensive loft apartment and has acquired an American accent because that accent serves her well in business. Helen’s financial success is complicated by her claims that she took revenge on her father: ‘I became a capitalist in the most intimate sense: I only come if there’s money’ (Easter, 73). Her career move prompts guilt: ‘I took my gift which was very powerful and I used that power to seduce and dominate. When I should

76  Everyday Entrepreneurial Capital have used that power to create and free’ (Easter, 73). Helen is silent on the generosity she shows to kids in the orphanage. Rose has been the family’s chief breadwinner, selling first communion dresses and knitted garments. While she has failed to get contracts to supply school uniforms, she believes her husband has purposefully cost her by writing letters to the papers demanding integrated education just at the point when tenders were being processed. Members of the community have very little financially but feel obliged to mark the sacrament of communion with expensive dresses. Rose steps in by lending money and profiting, much to the embarrassment of her children. The clothing that Greta delivers to the orphanage on Rose’s behalf is called her ‘conscience money’ by Manus (Easter, 30). When Greta hands out stolen, unconsecrated communion hosts at bus stops and issues a press release opposing non-integrated education, Rose reprimands: ‘Are you trying to put me out of business?’ (Easter, 49). Greta’s dismissive response is: ‘I don’t give a toss about your business’, to which Rose replies, ‘you are a chip off the old block, you got his perversity towards me’ (Easter, 49). As a child, Manus felt bad because he was ‘the money lender’s son’ (Easter, 63). Rose reminds him that such monies paid for his music lessons; economic and cultural capital interlock. For Rose, hers is a rag-tosome riches narrative, after she arrived in Belfast with little, and she claims that she made her money ‘fairly and squarely’ (Easter, 64). Even if Rose sees the material aspects of their lives and defends herself, Manus says that locals are in an impossible position: it is ‘either a new communion dress or damnation and your interest rate stood between them and their souls’ (Easter, 64). Manus believes that Rose worried Michael into an early grave with ‘her grubby till and her money problems’ (Easter, 64). It is not the bourgeoisie that maltreats the proletariat but intraclass opportunism.6 Rose’s cottage industry exposes a multiple of class dilemmas around earning, exploitation, resourcefulness, necessity and the collective good. Forty-Four, Sycamore: Signing on Fee Bernard Farrell’s comedy Forty-Four, Sycamore (1992) is about entrepreneurship and class mobility. The housing estate in which this play is set brings together characters from three different social strata, the elderly and old-monied Prentice, who lives in the original farmhouse that remains intact on the new estate; the young working-class–born couple Joan and Vinny (Mr Fix-It); and the middle-class Derek and Hilary, who occupy one of ‘the detached open-plan bungalows with the double garages’ (Sycamore, 52). Hilary invests heavily in the fallacy that Derek is seen to be a doctor by all who interact with him and that his medical interventions are miraculous;

Everyday Entrepreneurial Capital  77 she has him saving their child from a vegetative state during the birthing process. Hilary’s foisting of the doctor persona on her husband relates to the fact that she was once engaged to a doctor, but an affair with Derek and a pregnancy led to their marriage. Derek uses first aid training as his excuse to meet up with his mistress. He relies on Hilary’s money and could not survive without her. Vinny has his own successful home security business, with two branches. (Joan likes to call him a security engineer.) An evening of drinks is Vinny’s opportunity to impress his neighbours with the latest gadgetry installed in his house, comically guaranteed to malfunction. Joan has had two phantom pregnancies and is over-dependent on her mother, and she and Hilary connect over a desire for Battenburg cake. The inability of Vinny and Joan to correct their own grammar and turns of phrase are part of their ongoing class anxieties. The darker sides of contemporary living take the form of Derek and Vinny’s aggressive behaviours towards Prentice; after Prentice blacks out, they assume him dead. Prentice intends to oppose the compulsory purchase order of his land so that the housing estate can be extended, unless the shady business deal that Derek and his cronies struck with Prentice’s mother is addressed and monies rightly owed paid back. Developers and solicitors are behind the deals, and Derek is lined up to carry out the advertising for the estate’s expansion. Thanks to a combination of compulsory purchasing orders and inappropriate pressures, Prentice’s mother signed away the land, then committed suicide soon afterwards, hanging herself on the big sycamore tree that remains outside Prentice’s home. Derek’s mistress, Patti Mooney, lives in the nearby council estate, yet her family once owned the farm upon which Sycamore Crescent is built. Derek remarks: ‘we’re too close to those bloody council houses for safety’ (Sycamore, 33). Security systems are designed to keep out the delinquent classes but not the white-collar dinner party invitee criminals. It is Vinny’s ability to cover things up and to keep the deals of the middle-classes secret that will further his social advancement. (From the late 1980s, with social mobility on the rise thanks to growing education and employment opportunities, banks adjusted their lending practices; more than ever, workingclass people could get mortgages and purchase a home.)7 Moving ‘up in the world’ has its costs, rewards, advantages and disadvantages (Sycamore, 15). Apart from Patti’s downward social mobility, Sycamore dramatises how housing serves as a key indicator of social progress while hinting not only at the ranks within estates but also the fraudulent planning origins of many homes, built on land that was rezoned under corrupt practices. The finger is pointed here at lawyers, developers and advertisers but not politicians, who would be the focus of later tribunals of investigation, including the Mahon Tribunal (2007–12), which

78  Everyday Entrepreneurial Capital found against senior politicians, some of whom were jailed, and the thenTaoiseach Bertie Ahern was forced to resign. The Consequences of Lightning: Loud and Not Proud Dermot Bolger’s realist play with flashbacks The Consequences of Lightning (2008) is the final part of his Ballymun Trilogy. Here Bolger dramatises the costs and consequences of social mobility. The play is set in 2007, when the high-rise flats in Ballymun are about to be demolished fifty years after being constructed. Built in response to the decaying, dangerous tenements of Dublin’s inner city in the 1960s, the towers proved no great longterm solution.8 If the flats had failed many, some were enabled.9 Frank grew up in Ballymun and succeeded by ‘hustling a buck’ by getting his ‘hands dirty, by doing any jobs that paid’ (Consequences, 200), ending up self-made, owning multiple properties and living in Castleknock, married to a woman from a wealthy background. Driven by a can-do philosophy, he is sick of sob stories and excuses, tired of people ‘thinking the world owed them a living. I don’t believe in stories. I believe in bricks and mortar’ (Consequences, 200). Links to his past include a Jesuit priest, Martin, and former girlfriend, Katie. Frank suspects that he might be the father of Katie’s daughter, Annie. Katie did carry his child but miscarried. Frank does not know how to accommodate his past in the present but wants to think that he has a tenacity that he does not see in his father, but it is a trait that others do see in Sam. Frank longs for something that material comforts cannot bring, but he gets no deathbed scene of reconciliation with his father. Sam self-explains: ‘I gave them everything except comfort, because I  knew none’ (Consequences, 233). Sam also talks about giving his sons neither hope nor shame. Hope motivates, but shame can also. On his father, Frank remarks that ‘His horizons were beaten into him from birth’ (Consequences, 238). Frank’s views are limiting: ‘Anyone not burning out a car or sticking a needle in their arms is considered a success. We rewrite the rules so we can pat ourselves on the back’ (Consequences, 238). With the particular inhibitions and constraints that poverty incites, the strong may survive, the frail less so. The following exchange is important: Frank: Poverty isn’t just about money; it’s about horizons and confidence. It’s about standing outside a café, recounting coins, knowing you have enough but still afraid to enter in case there’s an extra charge you haven’t seen, in case you get caught out for being where you don’t belong.

Everyday Entrepreneurial Capital  79 Martin: People in Ballymun don’t feel that way anymore. Besides you were never that poor: your father had a job, a rare enough thing back then. Frank: I was brought up to think poor – to settle for second best. (Consequences, 237–238) For Martin, Ballymun can be viewed from different perspectives: as ‘an unmitigated disaster or the scene of thousands of daily unseen victories’ (Consequences, 290). Frank is neither comfortable in the home of his ­childhood nor in the dwelling he shares with his wife: dislocated and disoriented, as he still has not grounded himself appropriately and has not integrated or accommodated the various aspects of himself. Katie’s life is marked by a key transitory moment when, during a lightning storm, she had sex with Frank. She saw him temporarily without a mask, and that encouraged her own sense of liberation. It is the potential not so much of lightning striking twice but the consequences that such an awareness brings of the possible vitality when fear is stripped away. Katie has marked time and knows that she needs to do things differently. Annie may not have the certificates and degrees of her peers in the hotel business but believes that her tenacity will see her through. Her belief that others ‘have never had to sweat’ (Consequences, 221) may give her an edge, but it is a false if self-motivating class bias. Yet it is the mindset of class defiance and resoluteness that the play cogently articulates based on interclass perception, even if biased, around work and effort. If Frank raises the issue of language poverty, of not being able to express what he thinks or feels, by the play’s end, Annie and Katie’s articulacy and imagination concoct a celebratory evening together for themselves that involves two bottles of Blue Nun and pancakes, items associated with Annie’s conception. Katie admits: ‘Sometimes, in town, when I  see girls in posh school uniforms, it stabs at my heart because that’s what I wanted for you’ (Consequences, 294). If Katie does check Annie, reminding her not to ‘get above’ herself (Consequences, 221), still she asks: ‘Promise you’ll go far, spread your wings, because mine got clipped’ (Consequences, 300). Not wanting your children to repeat what you have experienced is a gift, but wanting something different for them, sacrificing things for it to be so: that is the power of deeds, mindset and the imagination to think and do things differently, trying to be what someone does not necessarily see. In the licence and possibilities that Katie offers to her daughter, in encouraging her to move away, to reject the imperatives that dampen if not contrive against victories against the odds, there is something liberating.

80  Everyday Entrepreneurial Capital Shiver: Speculative Capital Declan Hughes’s Shiver (2003) is set just after the dot-com market collapsed in 2002, a market that had grown rapidly from 1995 to its peak in 2000 based on the early growth of the internet. The play demonstrates not only just how feckless capital can be but also how dreams of material success can have a destructive hold over life. Shiver’s locale is an unspecified but exclusive development of five houses, sitting at the base of an old quarry in affluent suburban south County Dublin. One home is occupied by Marion and Kevin: he is a teacher and currently a stay-at-home parent, and she is employed as creative director of a graphic design consultancy. Her Irish company has been taken over by an American conglomerate, NPK, which rationalises the Irish branch so much that it loses much of its core business. When NPK illegally takes money from its employee pension funds to ‘divert money into failing wings’ of the company and to fund disastrous dot.com investments, the business collapses (Shiver, 61). After Marion loses her job, money pressures appear to put even greater strain on her and Kevin’s relationship. The insurance payment that follows Kevin’s death allows Marion and their two kids to remain in the family home, mortgagefree. It is unclear whether Kevin’s death is an accident or a suicide staged to look like one. Another home is occupied by the gung-ho, ultra-positive, entrepreneurially inclined Richard and Jenny, who have moved back to Ireland from America, determined to establish a cutting-edge dot.com company (51st State), an online platform with original content catering to contemporary consumers. They have rejected the ‘tweedy’ nature of cultural capital in entrepreneurial Ireland. Despite a 500,000 (currency unspecified) investment from the Georgia real-estate tycoon, the various high-quality technical inputs from an array of individuals and the award-winning nature of the company, this business fails to attract other seed investments or to generate enough income for the venture to survive. As neoliberalists, Richard and Jenny see themselves as post-history, as globalised citizens, fixated on transnational connections, empowering consumers and content users and ‘bypassing governments’ (Shiver, 14). The cautionary impulse of the work is balanced by the fact that although Richard and Jenny have their home repossessed and now live in a bedsit above a kebab shop, and although Richard finds no way back into the accountancy world that once offered him financial success, the couple start up another business venture, preparing and delivering upmarket food. A  full dinner-party order for sixteen people takes Richard to the new home of former friend Michael and his family in Killiney. The home is gated, the gravel drive is ‘eucalyptus and palm tree lined’ and maids are

Everyday Entrepreneurial Capital  81 uniformed (Shiver, 78). Richard’s friends Michael and Gerry provided legal and accounting advice to Jenny and Richard’s company without upfront payment, but they did not invest. Both Michael and Gerry benefit by inheriting family businesses, which are effectively successful. Shiver does not replicate the trope of seeing out the demise of a middle or elite class, nor does the work regard wealth simply in pejorative terms, ill-gotten, a burden or legacy trauma. Business failure is the prompt to go again; there is no shame in failure or wanting more. Shiver, it can be argued, resists the neoliberal ideology underpinning both the ‘financialisation of everything’ (Harvey 2005, 33), as well as the presumption that the market serves as an appropriate ethical guide. Marion is persistently troubled by the feeling that she has sold out, having once worked for a design co-op aspirationally named Better Ways (Shiver, 28). This cooperative as an alternative is only mentioned in passing, without giving deals as to how it operates. The Patrick Pearse Motel: Patriotic, Crony Capital Set in 1966, fifty years after the Easter Rising, Hugh Leonard’s Feydeauesque farce The Patrick Pearse Motel (1971) establishes complex dynamics between three couples, Dermod and Grainne Gibbon, Fintan and Niamh Kinnore and James Usheen and Venetia Manning. The Gibbons’ living room in Foxrock is an ‘object lesson in gracious living’ (Motel, 89). Grainne’s direct address to the audience allows her to boast about her kitchen, home office, sunken bath and sauna. Marble bathroom floors are imported from Hong Kong, and a swimming pool is under construction. (Usheen admires the Gibbons’ Paul Henry painting but notes that he has the original, so not everything is as it seems). By falsely accusing of tax fraud the intended purchaser of a plane that the Department of Defence had for disposal and the Department of Agriculture wanted, the Gibbons got wealthy from its sale. Dermod and Grainne were originally reared in social housing. However, a stage direction notes that the Gibbons ‘might have been born for affluent living; there is no trace of the parvenu about either of them’, whereas for the Kinnores, ‘prosperity sits on them both like a donkey on a thistle’ (Motel, 90). In farce, sexual desire offsets societal pieties with a degree of disbelief, and in this work, female sexual desire, in particular, is framed by patriarchal demands, but Leonard treats such desire in a way that foregrounds the pretence and hypocrisies needed to maintain vestiges of decency, but the reality of female desire in the play is unconventional. Leonard breaches traditional binaries of heterosexual relationships, notably and implausibly, the passive woman versus the constantly desiring

82  Everyday Entrepreneurial Capital male, male articulacy of want contrasted with females camouflaging needs and being surreptitious with expectations. Niamh is the faithful partner whom Fintan finds to be erotic, threatening, dangerous. As his untrue suspicions about Niamh’s infidelity mount, she is more a projection of his repressed imagination, jealousies and anxieties than anything else. If Fintan rages when he discovers a hotel booking that Grainne has made in Niamh’s name, Fintan might kill her but chillingly has the influence to have it ‘hushed up’ (Motel, 105). Dermod and Fintan’s trip to Cork to resolve some outstanding business issues provides Grainne with the opportunity to link up with former boyfriend and now television star Usheen, who is recovering, having recently split up with, Venetia Manning. Venetia is a divorced woman, who turns out to be the newly appointed motel manageress and she is someone in whom Dermod develops more than a passing interest. Grainne pleads sexual neglect, complaining that ‘he sits on his bed totting up figures and looking at me as if I were the Man in the Iron Mask’ (Motel, 107). From a position of ambivalence, subjugation, disloyalty and irresponsibility, Grainne claims that in Ireland ‘women are bond-slaves’ (Motel, 100) but also that she is on for ‘harmless innocent adultery’ (Motel, 101). There are many risqué comments and insights with regard to sexual consent and desire and the sense that many expressions of middle-class morality are self-serving, pretentious virtue signalling. The deceptions and deviousness around sex mimic those about capital. Fintan boasts: ‘We decided . . . to run our motels on patriotic principles as a tribute to the men who died for Ireland. We owe it to them’ (Motel, 98). This sentiment is simply a marketing strategy, as it is a business with no concern for history, sacrifice or the loss of life, only in exploiting historic/ heritage capital. Act Two moves from the home to the hotel, supervised by ironically named night watchman Hoolihan, who fought during 1916. Hoolihan is first coerced to use an outside toilet, and later he is to be sacked – so much for icons and sacrifice. The hotel offers the rooms, wardrobes, bathrooms, under-bed locations and corridors that provide the necessary entrances, exits and places for characters to be out of sight as essential farcical prerequisites. The coverup explanation for the various acts of sexual deception suggests that James goes to the hotel with Grainne merely to inspect the premises in advance of generating some television publicity, with an arranged appearance on English television that will set Fintan and Dermod up for life. Miss Manning claims that she and James were married the previous day, and she is his only desire, by way of entrapping him. Miss Manning spins the lies to which they are all obliged to submit. Warmed by the web of delusionary deception, Fintan offers Usheen an investment opportunity in their new Cork hotel, the Michael Collins.

Everyday Entrepreneurial Capital  83 Leonard’s play blatantly signals how a hegemonic value system is reinforced and robust not by way of substantiating its merits or status but more in exposing how and what demands it makes. There is no guilt about money, no sense of wealth being imperilled. Likewise, there is no guilt about sex, just cover ups. In the absence of any form of comeuppance, surrendering to a narrative of convenience is clearly what Leonard wants audiences to experience. The nation’s delusion is that it is a community bonded by the sacrifices and suffering of history, whereas such narratives disguise transactions of wealth. If under neoliberal capitalism wealth is both the marker and signal of one’s virtue, Leonard has little time for that. While Leonard is happy to rehash the trope of wealth as being unfairly, corruptly or undeservedly enriched, he also reinforces the comforts of capital. Exposed but not found out, the disclosure of their shenanigans is the threat, but its resolution is a bourgeois reassurance of sorts. The middle-class social order is founded on the tipping of the hat in relation to politics, morals and values, but its business practices are based on insider dealing, short-cuts, trade-offs, collusion and corruption. That Was Then: Seed Capital Gerard Stembridge’s comedy That Was Then (2002) starts with two couples preparing for the arrival of guests in two different locations: one in Dublin (the home of May and Noel) and another in London (the home of June and Julian), and consequently requires innovative staging. Two different time frames also run concurrently. Once a labourer on the building sites in London, Noel’s success in developing apartment blocks has been aided by favourable planning decisions. May and Noel’s dinner partycum-‘hello session’ has been prompted by a government minister who wants June and Julian to facilitate an illegal cash payment to ensure planning permission for a new shopping centre that Noel wants to build. Five years later, and in response to Julian’s dinner invitation to their London home, Noel turns up with his new partner, April – a charity correspondent with a national broadcaster, whom he met at an AA meeting. Noel has diversified his interests into a boy band, a television channel and the latest Michael Flatley dance extravaganza. Although June and Julian have compromising information on Noel, he refuses to help them defraud the Irish Revenue, but he does offer them money, conditional on the surrendering of their lease and vacating their apartment early. Noel wants their home to be his London base – he also happens to be the owner of the apartment complex. The play not only includes blackmail, dubious capital transfers and offshore accounts but also flags the willingness and practices of developers,

84  Everyday Entrepreneurial Capital financial advisers, politicians, councillors and planning officials in Dublin Corporation to facilitate illegality. The play suggests that legal constraints are merely limiting factors to be overcome, and ethics has no power in business transactions. It is not simply the impartiality and competitiveness of the free market that matters, but corruption invariably holds the key to success. Stembridge’s play offers the view that it is the state that legislates to improve the advantages of some and that the competitive market is seldom free but is rather stacked by illegal backhander activities and insider dealings. Ariel: ‘The Pipe Dreams of the Self-Med’ Marina Carr’s Ariel (2002) piggybacks on Greek tragedy, especially The Oresteia, where characters seek retribution for various murderous deeds, a cycle triggered when Agamemnon sacrifices his daughter Iphigenia so that the gods will generate the winds that will allow the army to sail into battle.10 In the past, Fermoy Fitzgerald initially had an affair with Frances, whose husband took his own life, and her child James accidentally died playing hurling while Frances and Fermoy honeymooned. Their own children Ariel, Stephen and Elaine grew up in the shadow of James’ passing. Frances and Fermoy started with very little, a lorry and cement; their business has now grown into something extensive. Frances chides Stephen: Me and your father built thah cement up from wan lorry smuggled in from England, an auld shed and the lase of a quarry. Cement built this house, cement gev ya your education, your fast car, your designer clothes, your foreign holidas. Cement finances your arty films. (Ariel, 67) Political rival Hannifin describes the house the Fitzgeralds live in as: ‘the big house wud the Grake columns and the fountains goin full blast and the lions roarin on the gates and the money pourin in from the cement and gravel’ (Ariel, 32). Hannafin threatens to make Fermoy’s past an election issue, to which Fermoy responds: ‘We new wans comin up judge a man for whah he is in heeself, noh where he cem from. We judge a man these days be hees own merit, as if he’d ne’er a smithy bar God heeself.’ Hannifin replies: ‘The pipe drames of the self-med. You were forged in a bloodbah, Fitzgerald’ (Ariel, 33). Fermoy’s father killed his mother, and as a child Fermoy was obliged to help with the disposal of the body. The father implicates the son in the action with the remark, ‘Time to be turnin ourselves in’ (Ariel, 36). Even Frances wants to disavow any culpability for the seven-year-old. However,

Everyday Entrepreneurial Capital  85 Fermoy cannot disassociate himself from the deed, accepting a degree of culpability that is frightening, inconsistent with how the law dealt with him. Hannifin also queries the business practices upon which Fermoy and Frances have been successful. Fermoy counters with the accusations: ‘new asbestos plant, there’s noh a lake or river we can swim in any more, thanks to you. And thah piggery, who’s been fundin thah all these years? There’s lots a questions to be asked concernin you if ya want to play ud thah way’ (Ariel, 34). Shortcuts, illegality and suspect funding sources surround the political classes. The suicide of Hannifin allows Fermoy to take a parliamentary seat. Frances accuses Fermoy of killing Hannifin ‘Wud black thinkin and wishin him away’ (Ariel, 28–29). Ten years on since Ariel’s vanishing, Frances and Fermoy have grown apart and cannot abide one another. He admits to affairs, and so does she. Frances remains suspicious of Fermoy’s role in the disappearance of Ariel. Confiding his dark deed to Elaine, Fermoy claims to honour his God, to place his trust in the divine, and like Abraham, who was willing to sacrifice his son Isaac, Fermoy’s absolute belief in divine order is based on sacrifice/ destiny, a combination of Greek and Christian beliefs. Ambition is freed from the reality of murder by the nature of this divine perspective. Fermoy progressed through three government ministries, Arts and Culture, Education and Finance, and is on the cusp of becoming the next Taoiseach. ­Current incumbent Dudley is supposedly Fermoy’s puppet figure, and now Fermoy is ready for the leadership role, having been accused of being behind the no-confidence motion on the last Taoiseach.11 Two months later, the admission by Fermoy as to where he disposed of Ariel leads to the recovery of remains and a belated funeral. Having killed Fermoy, Frances plans to plea insanity to avoid a criminal sentence, and Elaine’s connection to her father ensures that the cycle of murder will be extended, fulfilling the threat she made earlier: ‘Ud was murder. Cold-blooded murder, and if you geh off on insanihy I’ll open me own cuurtroom here’ (Ariel, 64). Elaine believes there is a distinction ‘between a crime of eternihy and a low, blood-spahhered, knife-frenzied revenge’, without ‘a whiff of the immortal in ud’ (Ariel, 64). Money has nothing to do with it as Elaine fulfils her evolutionary destiny. Once Stephen inherits, he will sell up. The Wake: Matrilineal Inheritances Tom Murphy’s family tragicomedy The Wake (1998) offers a distinctive take on gender, wealth, class, inequality and inheritances. The play’s time is not given in the script, but one assumes it is the late 1990s. Cunning, astute and hard-nosed, Tom, Mary Jane and Marcia O’Toole have their own business enterprises. Theirs is a family with a long history of deals, an

86  Everyday Entrepreneurial Capital eye for opportunity and asset accumulation.12 After the O’Toole siblings’ father died without a will, a fear of dying intestate prompts Uncle Stephen to divide up his assets. Tom got Stephen’s house; Mary Jane got the Odeon cinema and the Magnet, a nearby shop; Marcia got the Shamrock Ballroom; and when Vera declined the offer of the Wool Store, Tom got that as well. Tom and the others agreed to reimburse their mother for the work she had done on their behalf, but the agreement was not honoured, so on her death she leaves the family hotel/home, ‘the jewel in the crown’, to Vera (Wake, 109). Mary Jane’s objective is clearcut: ‘We want the hotel. We want to get our sister out of that place’ (Wake, 107). Tom plans to buy it, renovate it with the help of Tourist Board grants and then sell. (Tom already has a deal in place to give Mary Jane the Wool Store if Vera agrees to his scheme.) Vera has just returned from New York, where she works as a call girl, after she belatedly hears about the death of her grandmother, Winnie Lally. The O’Tooles draw on various local resources available, namely the church, medical profession and police, so they have Vera temporarily institutionalised. The arrival of her other siblings to the hotel allows Vera to initiate a wake/ party that allows characters to give expressions to emotions suppressed, to connect with cultural and ritualistic practices surrounding grieving with which they had lost touch. The songs, stories and poems give access to ways of thinking almost alien to them. References to loss, betrayal, hunger and starvation filter awarenesses that counter their excesses and jostle thinking about wealth and assets. Vera becomes the dominant figure, setting the tone, triggering character behaviours, eventually slipping out without either announcing her intentions or having given her siblings the opportunity to propose a deal. Vera returns to America with a debt owing to a pimp hanging over her. If the play establishes greed as a uniting and defining principle of the family, it also foregrounds matrilineal inheritances, through Vera’s mother, Vera’s grandmother and Vera’s inheritance of the hotel/home. Duck: Crimes With Fringe Benefits In Stella Feehily’s social/realist Duck (2003) Sophie and Catherine (Cat) are two young women with backgrounds that appear working class. Sophie’s mother Val works in Spar, Marion’s, Cat’s mother’s cultural references are ‘Catherine Cookson and Harold Robbin’ (Duck, 41). After Cat comes across her father’s payslip, she notes how she earns as much as him as a hostess in a wine-bar/club (the Numero Uno) owned by her drug-dealing boyfriend Mark. Sophie lives at home while attending University College Dublin and has a tempestuous relationship with Val, who speaks to her

Everyday Entrepreneurial Capital  87 daughter coarsely and at one point wallops her. Sophie strikes back and intimidates her mother. Sophie has various addictions to laxatives and cough medicine, Benylin. (Cat’s mother Marion is inclined to reject the vulgar language that Val uses. Both parents know each other.) If there is gendered violence in Sophie’s homeplace, in their wider world, violence is omnipresent. As the play opens, Sophie and Cat are accosted by two working-class males, but the males fail to overpower them; Sophie cuts both with a broken bottle, and only on leaving the scene, and after Sophie has disarmed herself, does she get a bloodied nose. Mark is a coercive controlling figure. He is demanding of Cat, intimidates her and even offers her to Eddie, a friend of his just out of prison. At the same time, he expects her to prepare food and be sexually available, and the phone he gives her is so he can track her. Mark jokes about ‘housetraining’ Cat (Duck, 14). After his jeep is torched, Mark initially suspects the head of a rival gang; the response of Eddie, is: ‘We’ll fuck him up the arse’ and ‘We’ll rape his family’ (Duck, 20). The belated discovery that Cat is the culprit after the insurance report identifies that purple knitwear was used to set the vehicle alight leads to Mark’s vicious interrogation, when he pushes Cat’s head repeatedly under water as she bathes. Wearing balaclavas and armed with a handgun, Eddie and Mark attack both Cat and Jack Mullen, the elderly playwright with whom she is having a short-term affair. (Jack’s work is studied in school, and he lives in a home with a gardener employed to maintain the grounds.) Mark is as much put out by her burning of the jeep as he is by his perception that she has sexually betrayed him. Worse, Cat’s burning of the jeep not just drew the attention of the police, who already suspect Mark of being involved in crime, but also the Criminal Assets Bureau (CAB), who will look into his income streams.13 Cat’s initial motive for burning the car was because Mark had left her waiting for him in the vehicle for three hours as he dealt in an estate nicknamed ‘Beirut’ (Duck, 5). If arson is her protest, it links to the broader notion of remonstration that Sophie locates historically. Researching a college essay leads Sophie to reflect on how women in the seventeenth century and beyond historically used arson as ‘a common means of revenge’ (Duck, 57). First, she talks about Eleanor Markley’s capacity to scold and second how a ‘ducking stool’ was used to punish women, as happened in 1618 Calne, Wiltshire, to Thomas Wells’ wife Agnes. Both stories are taken from Keith Thomas’s Religion and the Decline of Magic (1971).14 Sophie summaries: ‘Arson and scolding appeared to offer a dramatic form of protest to the poor and rejected, enabling them to vent an inarticulate rage against the hopelessness of their condition’ (Duck, 58–59). Tina Roddy’s dad was jailed for setting fire to his girlfriend’s house (Duck, 5), but Cat evades prosecution for her arson. Of course, it was Mark who

88  Everyday Entrepreneurial Capital ducked Cat, less the rage of the marginalised and more the wielder of criminal power. Scolding features as a parental strategy, particularly of mothers, but is also evident in how Sophie and Cat deal with and respond to their worlds. Mark also refers to various state tribunals and to the criminality of the political classes, remarking: ‘Everyone is fucking someone else up the arse. Ya see these boys swanning around in their state cars giving the auld wink and a nod. . . . The only thing that’s criminal is getting caught’ (Duck, 49). There is something self-serving in the spreading of blame. Yet Cat is not intimidated by this world, enjoys getting tables in clubs when with Mark, has no objection to his line of business and lives in relative affluence off the limited proceeds of crime, even if she is regularly short on cash. Mark’s activities are not drug cartel territory, more a mid-ranking enterprise with access to guns; Cat is complicit in Mark’s criminality to a point, ensuring that she is not quite a passive, exploited, gendered or class victim. By the play’s end, Cat and Sophie leave home, with no great plans, with few resources, but they have no option other than to flee current circumstances. The Lieutenant of Inishmore: Paramilitary Cuts In Martin McDonagh’s The Lieutenant of Inishmore (2001), Padraic tortures drug dealer James Hanley because he deals across the sectarian divide; James should not be selling marijuana to nationalists because it makes them too placid. Further, Padraic is on an Irish Nationalist Liberation Army (INLA) hit-list because he cut the nose off Skunk Toby, who has been giving a share of his income to the paramilitary group. Padraic is now a ‘valid target’ because of his inability to differentiate between James and Toby. Mairead blinded cows to distort the meat trade but no longer holds the view that they are a valid target. It is not just the issue of money that is confusing for Padraic; across the play, his and the paramilitary motivations of others are represented as incoherent, futile, irresponsible, reprehensible. Irish Republicanism relies on self-justification by claiming it is a violence of last resort. Its solidarity functions on the basis of a common just cause, its need to defend and defeat an enemy, whether that is Loyalism/Unionism or the occupying British state. McDonagh affords his characters no ideological cohesion; they are prone to the sentimentalisation of violence, to illogical justifications for their actions; rely on intimidation that is inconsistent with the purity of the tradition; and, rather than being a cohesive community, are prone to violent internal disputes. If they fight injustices, the injustices they perpetuate face little scrutiny. The kangaroo court system central to Padraic’s interrogations/torture of drug dealers mimics the harrowing realities of executions, disappearances and maimings meted out in the name of neighbourhood

Everyday Entrepreneurial Capital  89 policing. Where was the right to a fair trial, appropriate defence, right to an appeal, the notion that justice is objective, proportionate, timely, fair: the punishments doled out hardly ever fitted the crime? Victims of sexual abuse were denied state justice to protect Republican elites. Then there is the issue of child/teen soldiers, like Mairead, who by inclination, idealism and sadism is happy to support reprehensible deeds. In the survival of Wee Thomas, a cat, a remarkable form of perverse provocation emerges through the unwillingness of Donny and Davey to harm him. McDonagh was variously taken to task for his reprimanding of Republicanism. Firstly, here is a creative freedom to be able to focus on one side of the conflict without a play being obligated to be some objective history lesson. Secondly, he is entitled to condemn violence and what it relies on, the tacit support and the monies that fund it, especially funds collected in Britain and America amongst an Irish diaspora. Further, he does not stand accused of being misinformed or need to be lectured by apologists, sanitisers, ideologues, justifiers and perpetrators of paramilitary violence. Indeed, Republicanism silences former combatants who no longer believe in or question the necessity of the violence of last resort to which the tradition lays claim. Being aligned with a paramilitary cause has its other drawbacks, including defending the indefensible or being missioned to carry out atrocities, sometimes against one’s will. All paramilitaries rely on funds to support their cause: they can be donated or stolen by way of bank robberies or by means of extortion; prostitution; money laundering; illegal gambling; diesel washing; livestock smuggling; and the running of property rentals, pubs, betting shops, currency exchange kiosks, scrap and waste management. And loyalist and republican paramilitaries engaged in all of this and more besides to fund their campaigns of terror.15 Paramilitaries remain hushed about the criminal elites within their own ranks, whose material gains are not divvied up and whose actions have remained long after the cessation of violence brought into being by the Good Friday Agreement (1998). The Gay Detective: Collusion in High Places Set in early 1993, prior to the decriminalisation of homosexuality later that year, Gerard Stembridge’s The Gay Detective (1996) does many things: it examines same-sex desire in a complex way in terms of how culture/politics can be intolerable of gay sex but also links sex, violation and financial corruption. It is a work that demands scene change fluidity and actors playing multiple roles, making the work not only highly theatrical but also episodic, almost cinema-like in its switching of character exchange and location. With the exception of Pat, the gay detective of the play’s title, and Ginger, his partner, most of the play’s other characters are named from

90  Everyday Entrepreneurial Capital the animal kingdom and are doubled up: Bear/Wolf, TD/Badger/Snake and Pig/Bull. After a TD (Irish member of parliament) is killed in a gay sauna, Pat is tasked by his commanding officer, Bear, to go undercover and to investigate the crime, leading him to another murder and conspiracy, the death of Rat, about which the TD was out to make trouble. Male figures from the arts, law, business and political worlds, namely Snake (violinist), Pig (criminal lawyer), Wolf (regional businessman) and the TD invite young males to sex parties in rural Ireland. ‘Wolf killed him (Rat) during a forced sadistic sexual encounter. And Snake and Pig covered for him and got rid of the corpse’ (Gay, 75). Inadvertently, Rat led the police to a dealer bringing in drug shipments via West Cork. Later a violent rape perpetrated by Wolf on Pat demonstrates his perversion and violence, and as he does so, he places a photo of his wife on the bed, liking the thought of her watching. Money is handed over after this assault, with plans to dump Pat twenty miles away. The establishment figures are content to violate and cover up but also to ring fence sadistic behaviours, pass them off as once-off, an error; therefore, the law’s involvement is unnecessary. Mouse leads Pat to where the body of Rat is buried, resulting in Pat offering Mouse a way out from servitude, tendering him safe passage to England and agreeing not to identify him as the person who poisoned the TD in the sauna. The circumstances of Rat’s death, his class background and his rent-boy status afford him little standing to someone in Bear’s position. Bear remarks: ‘Are you being deliberately stupid? Do you seriously think we’re going to arrest three distinguished citizens for the murder of a little shit, a little pansy rent boy?’ (Gay, 76). The play takes gay sex into places of dark desires but, more importantly, where sexual exploitation in terms of payment for the sexual services of rent boys is only the surface inequality. These young men are noted for the dirt under their nails, their impoverished status. Pig calls Rat ‘Cheap trash’ (Gay, 60). It is also a world where gay bashing is commonplace, where various members of the social collective express derogatory slurs about homosexuality unapologetically and without censure. If Pat explores his sexual orientation lovingly and in a complicated fashion with Ginger, Pat’s reluctance to stay with him on discovery of his HIV diagnosis is partly how Stembridge complicates Pat’s character. The play’s intention is not to smear the gay community and not to taint in any way same-sex desire or to mystify the issue of consent. Moreover, it is about how power shapes sexual relationships or connections and how those in power collude to protect each other. Murderous actions are not enough to oblige the law to act. The TD’s death trumps Rat’s; the law is not just classist and homophobic but

Everyday Entrepreneurial Capital  91 selective, non-objective, non-impartial in its application of justice. The dark aspects of the interlocking economic, cultural and social capital are seen in light of the legal system’s priorities and that to which it is willing to turn a blind eye. In its interlacing of the criminalisation of homosexuality, HIV, rent boys, casual sex, policing, politics, business, the arts and criminal justice, the aggressive, violatory, non-consensual aspect of sex complicates same-sex desire, class and inequality issues simultaneously. Cross-Connections Shiels’s Professor Tim (1929) distinguishes between Tim’s honourable and Kilroy’s dishonourable approaches to capitalism. Carr’s characters in By the Bog of Cats . . . (1998) rely on inheritances, shady deals and ‘blood money’ to keep capital running smoothly. Later I will discuss how in Laverty’s Tolka Row (1951), the grandfather’s selling of a property was an error with huge consequences, Bentham in Juno and the Paycock (1924) fails in his professional duties by not completing the will correctly, but incompetence is simply negligence, not professional corruption, and anticompetitive, capital-defiant modes of transacting feature in McPherson’s The Weir (1997). In Farrell’s post-Celtic Tiger comedy Bookworms (2010), Larry’s father was a milkman, but Larry made his fortune as a builder and is self-made, but now Robert, the local bank manager, wants him to meet formally and to address the issue of the outstanding loans which Robert had approved. Robert’s bank manages the widowed Dorothy’s accounts and her investment portfolio, and ultimately it is her threat to withdraw this business from the bank that will force alpha-male Robert to back down. Dorothy does so not for Larry but for Ann, who had offered Robert sex in an attempt to ensure a short-term loan for Larry and had carelessly entered the details of their dalliance in a diary, which she lost. In Tom Murphy’s Conversations on a Homecoming (1985), Tom chides Liam by exclaiming: ‘You’re only a fuckin’ bunch of keys’ (Conversations: 109). Such a dramaturgical disposition could be categorised as jealousy, reprimand or a perverse form of wealth-shaming that serves an ideological viewpoint that is unintentionally consistent with frugality that de Valera attempted to essentialise. In Kinahan’s The Unmanageable Sisters (2018), Patsy has taken personal and economic risks, shown initiative and chased after the money that the nightclub business she sets up with Charlie brings in. With them no longer a couple, Patsy has been left penniless and homeless, as the legal system does not offer her co-habiting status any entitlement. In Conor McPherson’s The Night Alive (2013), Tommy borrows from the bank to invest in a live gig-rig business he imports from Belarus that attracts lightning and breaches health and safety standards.

92  Everyday Entrepreneurial Capital This investment serves as a synecdoche for housing investment, which was seen as either a get-rich-quick scheme or as a naive form of alchemy. His employee/friend, Doc, is paid less than the minimum wage and is encouraged to take stale cigars in lieu of wages. Tommy rescues Aimee from a brawl with her pimp/boyfriend Kenneth, which leaves her bloodied. Aimee ends up staying with Tommy, exchanging sexual services for rent. Earning by way of criminal activity appears in many works, including Declan Hughes’s Twenty Grand (1998) and Bisi Adigun and Roddy Doyle’s 2007 version of Synge’s The Playboy of the Western World (1907), which re-locates Synge’s play to a gangland pub in suburban West Dublin.16 Mark O’Rowe’s Made in China (2001) shows how consumption, privileged living and gangland violence interconnect. Colin Murphy’s Guaranteed! (2013) tells of the political machinations that led to the notorious bank guarantee in light of the global crisis of 2008, and decisions are less about corruption and more about the desperation to offset a doomsday banking crisis. In Conor McPherson’s This Lime Tree Bower (1993), Simple Simon McCurdie is an oppressive councillor, bookmaker and money lender. The political and higher-echelon business, entrepreneurial, managerial classes appear in many Irish television series, often facilitated by corrupt politicians and members of the police, but in writing for stage, this is seldom the case. Tom Mac Intyre’s Only an Apple (2009) and Sebastian Barry’s Hinterland (2002) are two pertinent examples of work that dwells on the significant political agents of the state. Conclusion Since the formation of the Irish Free State and the state of Northern Ireland, neither part of the island was particularly wealthy by first world standards, even if Northern Ireland with its traditional industries did have more wealth. It would not be until the early 1970s when that began to change, as outlined earlier. Acquiring, accumulating and maintaining capital through assets and earnings has always been something that is quizzed by plays in the Irish tradition. There is no questioning the financial/mercantile integrity of S.B. in Philadelphia, even if he declines to give Gar more than wages due as he leaves for America, and although Shiver is not quite neutral in its engagement with local and global capital, the corruption of the globally reaching, asset-stripping NPK serves as a caution. In The Wake and After Easter, capital is gendered in ways not done traditionally in Irish society and extends the thinking on the earlier point made in the chapter on property about the extensiveness of female ownership/inheritance. FortyFour, Sycamore affirms that wealth is divisive in class terms. Class mobility is viewed as a complex reality, less a moving on from, more a flitting inbetween, but not grounded in any one class, evident in The Consequences

Everyday Entrepreneurial Capital  93 of Lightning. Social mobility is less a reward or unqualified success for the aspiring working classes. Mobility is not simply about escaping class with an intention to offend those that do not.17 Mobility can be linked to the ideas perpetuated by neoliberalism about opportunity, merit, talent, hard work, competitiveness and reward.18 Educational opportunity has sparked remarkable social mobility, as will be discussed later. The fallacies/tyrannies of merit have been rightly confronted by Michael Sandel (2020) and others. By emphasising, effort, talent, persistence and a world without impediments, neoliberal ideology muddies a multitude of inequalities and declines to see systemic power, exploitation or rank in the invisible hand of the market. Is upward social mobility the carrot, failure the stick and downward mobility the omnipresent admonishment? It has been a major failure of the Left and some politically correct thinking to make competitiveness a blanket dirty word, likewise aspiration. Based on Piketty’s analysis, Savage notes ‘This trend, for wealth inequality to be more concentrated than income inequality, is nearly universal’ (2021, 78). In The Wake, Vera remarks: ‘The rich will always be with us’ (Wake, 92), and so will be the many more multiples of the poor – the marketplace unfortunately is reassured by that, as wealth finds a ‘worthy’ home. Any kicking back against wealth is not simply a riposte to a neoliberal virtual signalling/reward structure. In That Was Then, violence lurks beneath the ‘meet and greet’, and the dark matter of capital is even more explicit in The Gay Detective. Criminality and paramilitarism are variously linked to even more brutal violence in Inishmore. With few exceptions, these Irish plays seem out of step with the state of British plays of the 1960s–1990s by the likes of Howard Brenton, Caryl Churchill or David Hare that are not just written from a left-liberal perspective or inimical to the inadequate distribution of resources, but corporations,19 and the institutions of state are variously held accountable for inequality and injustices.20 Regularly in Irish plays there is a failure to dwell sufficiently on the ‘objective violence’ (Žižek 2009, 1) that steers global capitalism. Is that incompetence, disinterest or too big a challenge?21 Money can energise and motivate, but one would not think that from Irish plays. Irish plays invariably oppose corruption, but is that the easy option? It is easy to see money as associated with Yeats’s ‘greasy till’ or the ‘grubby till’ of After Easter, yet it is difficult for plays not to be stereotypically negative about wealth or crony capitalism. If greed is not admonished, excess greed is frowned upon, yet there remains much confusion as to the approach writing takes towards capital accumulation that is not corrupt. If the reprimanding of wealth runs as the simplistic option, is that ideologically licensed or indulged? Being wealth critical is not the same as positing, supporting or signalling alternatives. That said, few plays make the case

94  Everyday Entrepreneurial Capital for more income equality, and even fewer for a more equitable distribution of assets. This chapter reinforces Wendy Brown’s claim: ‘inequality, not equality, is the medium and relation of competing capitals’ (2015, 38). Notes 1 From the 1960s forward, in the ROI, there were major scandals around wealth and tax, including offshore, non-resident accounts illegally facilitated by Irish banks; scandals about political corruption; and state tribunals established to investigate the Irish beef industry, land planning and zoning scandals, and the awarding of mobile phone licences. 2 See Swiss Leaks and The Panama Papers, 2016, www.theguardian.com/news/ series/panama-papers [Accessed 10 November 2022]. 3 Cultural capital takes the form of escapism: music is central, from Mendelssohn’s violin Concerto to Ceilidh and Irish ballads and from American pop cultural expression to a mantra associated with Edmund Burke used fill the silences, to stop thoughts progressing: ‘It is now sixteen or seventeen years since I saw the Queen of France, then the Dauphiness at Versailles’ (Philadelphia, 36). 4 See Imelda Foley’s reflections on After Easter, gender, religion, sectarian and psychoanalysis (2003, 93–105). 5 See the following analysis for alternative viewpoints: (Fitzpatrick 2005, 320– 333; Kurdi 2010b, 58–67; O’Reilly 2004, 258–267). 6 When members of the British Army end up in the Flynns’ backyard, they are on edge because they are facing redundancy and because they are from the part of England where two children have just died, having been caught up in Republican bombs, assumed to be a reference to the Warrington bombing (30 March 1993) that had left many wounded and two children, Jonathan Ball, 3, and Tim Parry, 12, dead. 7 Concurrently, successive governments during the Celtic Tiger period effectively stopped the building of social housing and provided allowances to those on welfare and lower wages (income supplements) to live in rental accommodation, thus serving the private market and a newly emerging landlord class. Equally, some people in council estates started the process of buying properties from the council. People in good employment were often quick to leave and get mortgages to move from social housing and live in private estates. Many of the council houses on the periphery of cities remained under-occupied, even during the mid-to-late 1980s. 8 Ballymun Towers had become both emblematic of a ghettoisation of social problems but also symptomatic of a lack of leisure amenities, community facilities, business and health services and general community resources. The joyriding, the robberies, the vandalised call boxes, the beatings, the addicted and the depressed plunging to their deaths were some of the legacies of the flats. 9 Bolger’s From the Green Heights (2004), also in the Trilogy, deals with social mobility, collective protest and various forms of agency. 10 Salomé Paul notes: ‘Ariel is a feminist retelling of the myth of the Atrides. Carr draws plot lines and characters’ portrayal from several classical tragedies dealing with the myth of that family, namely Sophocles’s Electra and Euripides’s Iphigenia at Aulis, in order to reshape Aeschylus’s The Oresteia’ (2021, 496). 11 Fermoy had talked to Elaine about cleaning up politics: ‘He was goin to cahapult the whole nation ouha sleaze and sentimentalihy and gombeenism’ (Ariel, 63).

Everyday Entrepreneurial Capital  95 12 Vera was fostered to her grandmother for eleven years, supposedly to ­counteract loneliness but mainly so that the O’Tooles get to inherit the farm. When the grandmother declines to come through on their expectations, Vera is taken back home; the needs of the developing child are a poor second when it comes to asset accumulation. 13 Set up in 1996 in response to the murder of investigative journalist, Veronica Guerin, the Criminal Assets Bureau has the power to investigate suspected or unexplained income, particularly belonging to those associated with criminal gangs. 14 See Hester’s burning the house and sheds in Carr’s By the Bog of Cats .  .  . (1998). 15 The IRA was accused of the training of FARC guerrillas in bombmaking in Colombia for payment. 16 Brokentalkers’ The Examination (2019) asks very difficult questions about the notion of criminality, revenge and punishment and connects crime to social deprivation rather than being a simple law-and-order matter. 17 Savage notes ‘the strong retention of a working-class identity among many upwardly mobile respondents’ in those surveyed (2015, 215). 18 By the time of the Celtic Tiger, private home ownership was no longer the privilege of the middle classes – the tiler, chef, plumber or hairstylist could earn as much as the dentist or pharmacist; they could live in the same area but not necessarily share the school run. 19 Many Hollywood films focus on corrupt corporations and governments with ambitions for global dominance and the subservience of the wider populace, but these invariably get found out. 20 Television-wise, a series like Jed Mercurio’s Line of Duty (2012–) deals with corrupt politics/policing and moneymaking. 21 Lucy Prebble’s Enron (2009) is a good retort to the challenge to capture complex corporate and institutional activity.

4 Embodied Labour

Introduction The economic relationships between wealth/capital and different types of labour serve as a defining consideration not just of what was traditionally seen as class struggle but as the major determination of income inequality. Since industrialisation and mass production, the division of labour and capital is beset by great conflicts. Today, the flow of global capital in a competitive marketplace makes the issues of labour/capital more complex again, particularly the ability of capital to move and source cheap labour. On the island of Ireland, with the exception of Ulster, which was far more industrialised, the island’s economy has been traditionally overdependent on agriculture. Even an administrative capital like Dublin did not see a major growth in industry. In addition, much of the labour force migrated to other economies, permanently or seasonally. Michael Pierse remarks: By 1913, the mortality rate in the city [Dublin] was the highest in Europe, and greater than that in Calcutta, and the city boasted little heavy industry and few factories. Apart from Guinness’s brewery, Jacobs’ biscuits and a number of distilleries, there was scant large-scale manufacturing. (2011, 12) The emergence of trade unions in the early twentieth century was important.1 Later, the women’s liberation movement across the island campaigned for greater workplace equality.2 Economic growth, government spending, legislation,3 education, training and foreign direct investment would all impact the nature of employment and unemployment, gender pay gaps, work stoppages, recruitment practices and work satisfaction. The non-inclusion in the economic output of domestic labour, voluntary or caring work provided by families that saves the state, is significant, in part to do with difficulty in putting a value on such work, but also hidden work is disregarded. DOI: 10.4324/9781003180074-5

Embodied Labour  97 Most people accept as legitimate and reasonable a sense of rank built into labour/capital relationships and different pay for different roles, and once paid well, an employee is due no more, and companies are shareholder obligated to maximise profit.4 Others believe that labour needs to control the means of production, simply because inequality and exploitation are at the core of the relationship between labour and capital, which is legitimised by ideology, governance, taxation and the law.5 Others again argue that labour needs to access a fairer share of capital.6 Too often, when labour objects to pay and conditions, it is seen as being opportunist and illegitimate, prompted by the sentiment that workers should be content with their lot.7 What does the notion of income equality mean? Globalisation and neoliberalism have opened up economies, created jobs; today’s top 1 per cent of earners now control financial wealth the way that countries once had dominion over empires. (Recent developments in AI will fundamentally alter the nature of labour.) Again, for some that is how global economies should be, but others fundamentally disagree. To unravel or to keep track of all these variables would be insurmountable. Instead, my focus is on how Irish theatre is inclined to represent labour/ capital relationships. Each play considered reflects on different types of labour, set in very different eras and locations. Tolka Row: Chored Out Maura Laverty’s Tolka Row (1951) is a realist piece with flashbacks8 about a working-class extended family’s day-to-day life; about different types of work, domestic labour and work outside the home; and how work and earnings are linked to class and gender aspirations and values. The Nolans live in a small northside rented house built as part of a slum clearance scheme by Dublin Corporation, a huge improvement on the tenements of Clanbrassil Street. Peggy is a tobacconist’s assistant, Jack is a fitter and Sean an apprentice fitter, and Jack’s sister, Statia, is a laundry worker, and each hands over money weekly to cover household expenditure. Homemaker Rita is described as being ‘a woman who is over-­conscientious about her family duties and the care of her home, a woman who never has enough time for all she would like to do’ (Tolka, unpublished). Rita’s domestic work comprises cleaning, polishing, sweeping, ironing and cooking; she watches food and water usage, budgets, allocates sleeping space, assigns chores, is a peacekeeper between the others and performs eldercare. As manager of money, Rita wonders: ‘Where does the money go’ (Tolka, unpublished). Jack complains: ‘Of course I don’t count. I’m only the poor gom who sweats blood all day trying to earn what’ll keep all of you in style’ (Stops) (Tolka, unpublished). Peggy remarks to her mother: ‘To listen to you, anyone would think my father was the boss of this house’

98  Embodied Labour (Tolka, unpublished). This is not to downplay patriarchy but to highlight more nuanced gendered relationships, especially if women controlled the monies in households and men got a weekly pocket money. As Angela Y. Davis notes: woman’s maternal duties are always taken for granted, her never-ending toil as a housewife rarely occasions expressions of appreciation within her family. Housework, after all, is virtually invisible.  .  .  . Invisible, repetitive, exhausting, unproductive, uncreative – these are the adjectives which most perfectly capture the nature of housework. (Davis 2019, 200) Neighbour Mrs  Feeney, in addition to the usual domestic chores, has childcare duties, the feeding, educating and socialisation of her offspring. And between chores, the domestic space accommodates neighbourly conversation, one of which is about sex, family planning using the rhythm method. Mrs Feeney admits to staging late-evening rows so that there will be no possibility of sex.9 Her man contributes minimally if occasionally to domestic chores and childminding. Everything is financially tight; there is enough for going out to the cinema, dances and hobbies like fishing. Work is seen as ‘slavery’ (Tolka, unpublished), but it is also a world of opportunity and promotions. Most characters have ambitions and aspirations to earn more and to progress socially. If Rita’s home is a ‘little palace’ (Tolka, unpublished), it is already at overcapacity. Statia had to move into Peggy’s room with the arrival of Dan, Rita’s father, from rural Ireland after he sold the small family home. Statia’s mother welcomed Ruth into her home when she married Jack, and that gesture is reciprocated for Statia, a Sodality woman, keen to preach the gospel. Sean sleeps in a pull-out bed in the kitchen.10 A series of character exchanges demonstrate how class differentials are identified, based on differences between rough and coarse, loud and refined, respectful and not greedy. There is a great deal of class policing around language. When Peggy argues with Sean, she accuses: ‘(losing her veneer) Clanbrassil Street to the life! You’ll never improve yourself (Pause) big ignorant corner-boy!’ (Tolka, unpublished). Here improvement is important but also the sense that Peggy has a class veneer that can be lost at a moment of passion. That sense of class performance can be seen in the self-correction: ‘Peggy: Oh, not at all. I’m swea . . . perspiring too’ (Tolka, unpublished). Further, there is a strong sense of class competitiveness, each watching what the other has, each measuring themselves against others. Dan resents his grandson for ‘having progressed beyond him’ (Tolka, unpublished). Characters forfeit on immediate consumption, preferring to hold out for

Embodied Labour  99 longer-term gains. Peggy talks about dancing in Kenilworth Tennis Club as being ‘in the company of good-class people,’ Fonsie is described as having a ‘Refined way of speaking’ (Tolka, unpublished) and has attended acting classes to achieve his objective. Eileen had emigrated to succeed but lied about her life in Liverpool. She blames her mother for pressuring her: ‘(with some bitterness) “Because I didn’t want to let you down – that’s why! Weren’t you forever dinning it into us about bettering ourselves? Didn’t you fill me up with notions about myself till I thought I was better than Princess Elizabeth?” ’ (Tolka, unpublished) When Eileen leaves her husband in Liverpool, there will now be three adult women sharing the middle room. When Paddy agrees to return home to Ireland and get reinstated in his old job, there is not going to be enough space for everyone. Rita has to make the toughest of calls. Rita’s plan to ship Dan off on holiday for two weeks is linked to a longerterm one that envisages him moving in with a relative, Mary Loughlin. Mary cuts a deal, in part because her son has married and his weekly contributions to the home’s upkeep are no longer coming in, and second, the expectation is that Rita will subvent Dan’s stay, in addition to Dan handing over most of his pension. However, if illness strikes, he will be put into the Mullinagarry Union. Two letters arrive from Mary to Rita, one inviting him to holiday, the other outlining the terms and conditions of the arrangement. All the characters, apart from Statia, conspire to plot Dan’s eviction. Dan thought he was doing the right thing by selling his cottage in Ballyderrig, but there were no contingencies built in. Tragically, Dan seals his own fate by taking his own life.11 Rita’s willingness to cut him loose is linked not just to her relationship with him, but the most onerous of chores falls to her. Over the Bridge: Subordinated Labour Sam Thompson’s tragi-realist Over the Bridge (1960) is set predominantly in the drawing office of a Belfast shipyard, and there are two scenes in the home of Davy, the trade union leader. For many years Davy has led his union and has been regarded as a troublemaker/agitator by the foreman, Fox. Previously, Fox recruited workers on a daily basis; people gathered outside, and he beckoned in those he wanted to work. Davy’s daughter, Marian, talks about men coming back over the bridge on those mornings who were not selected, not just as an expression of their precarity and consequent difficulty in feeding families but also about the power of the foreman to decide which of the ten out of a couple of hundred workers he would offer work. Absent from the play are owners and managers; only the foreman, promoted from within the working class, Fox, does the dirty work. Widower

100  Embodied Labour Davy had to leave for a year to find work and left his daughter behind. Within the working classes there are those more highly regarded, based on respect, reputation, successes and less on intimidation, and Davy is one of these. The union has built up a power base over time, and the rulebook, which Rabbie frequently cites, determines customs and practices. Now only union members can be employed, no blacklegs; business is good, and arrangements in place ensure that employees have overtime restrictions and that the recruitment of unemployed union-affiliated workers must happen to fulfil man hours beyond those overtime limits. Davy is about to leave his union role but believes he is leaving the workforce in a better place. Keeping everyone on board is difficult. One member, Billy Morgan, wants to leave the union because of religious convictions and relies in part on some selective biblical quotations to self-justify. As a consequence, Fox tells him that he can no longer be employed as a non-unionised employee. Davy’s brother, George, has been fined by his own union for exceeding overtime limits, and if he declines to pay, then he will be ejected. George has earned well enough to pay for him and his wife, Nellie, to leave their old abode, and they now live in relative affluence in a villa in the suburbs (Bridge, 57); his wife is happy for him to defy his union’s rules, seeing his individual rights and his willingness to work and earn additional pay as more important than solidarity. Nellie mocks the union, advocates a survival-of-the-fittest model of relationality and takes pride in their economic success and social mobility: Nellie: I am ashamed of nothing. I had it as hard as the rest of you when I  lived in this slum of a street. But I  learnt my lesson all right. When it’s a case of the weakest going to the wall, I  take damn good care I’m one of the ones that’s pushing them agin’ it. Marian: What a philosophy to live by – no interest in anyone who can’t benefit them in some way. (Bridge, 60) If the union has problems keeping its members on side, sectarian tensions between employees are heated. Catholics constitute 25 per cent of the membership, Protestants the remainder, and in the past, there have been sectarian tensions, with Catholics intimidated and excluded, especially around the Great Depression. Now Peter O’Boyle and Archie Kerr are initially in conflict, Archie telling the apprentices not to provide Catholics with tea during breaks. Catholic workers are advised not to attend the workplace after an explosion caused by a device planted by the IRA has left one worker dead. In defiance of that order, Peter faces down a mob, with only Davy standing by him.

Embodied Labour  101 The play captures clearcut sectarian divisions amongst a workforce on the shipyards and the non-uniformity amongst the workforces. Davy had done the most to advance the rights of worker-colleagues, but Loyalist sectarianism fails to legitimise equally the rights of their Catholic/Nationalist brethren. The word ‘brother’ is thrown around in the context of union discussions and communications, but the play features the de-legitimisation of fraternity, the deep divisions and near-irresolvable fractures within communities of workers, supposedly united by the conflict between labour and capital. The gains that unionisation offers workers in terms of collective bargaining, workplace safety and earnings are clearly articulated, but those are sacrificed in order to maintain sectarianism, with Davy’s death exemplifying that sacrifice. George cautions Davy: ‘You’ve squandered your life fighting for people who would sink you in the tide’ (Bridge, 62). As Pierse remarks in relation to union strike actions across a range of plays, ‘the rhetoric of class unity is continually confronted with contradictory realities’ (2018b, 178). A Whistle in the Dark: Migrant Labour Tom Murphy’s tragic naturalist A Whistle in the Dark (1961) is set in Coventry. All of the Carneys, a Mayo family, apart from the mother, end up in the home of reluctant hosts, Michael, who had left home years previously, and his English wife, Betty. Betty is constantly pressured by the brothers’ mocking, riling and undermining of her. Multiple battles play out: between Michael and Dada over the future prospects of youngest son Des; between tradition and modernity; between a clannish, inward-looking notion of family, masculinity and the faction fighting it champions and Ireland’s increasing embourgeoisement, sharp elbows and class sleights. Less articulated but essential tensions are linked to different types of labour – much of it migrant – different means of making money, legally or illegally, and the opportunities that new-gained wealth affords.12 Formerly a police officer, Dada is now employed as a travelling salesman.13 Dada drinks with the social elites at the golf club but is humiliated when offered a job as a caretaker, prompting him to steal and discard a member’s coat, resulting in him being barred. As I  will additionally reference in the education chapter, the son of Pookey Flanagan, a road cleaner, trained to be an engineer; another attends university, and a daughter joins the nuns, ‘All of them from the dirt of the roads’ (Whistle, 134). The Flanagans also have a new home. However, social change must be tempered by the Carney tag-along, sycophant Mush’s comment: ‘Holy Marys pulling strings, and talking about merit’ (Whistle, 105), suggesting a society’s lip service to meritocracy is illusionary, or is that how the progressives are framed?

102  Embodied Labour Des does not fancy a job in the local factory, as it does not pay enough, and ‘There’s too many bosses.  .  .  . Slavedrivers. You don’t have to lick no one’s shoes over here’ (Whistle, 120). Des’s deluded notions are reinforced by Dada: ‘I don’t want people, twopence-halfpenny guys, ordering a son of mine, a Carney, to clean up after them’ (Whistle, 120). If Michael wants Des to do well, Harry snidely asks: ‘A doctor, maybe?’ or ‘A solicitor, maybe?’ (Whistle, 108). Harry and Iggy turn to pimping and extortion and by so doing exploit the working-class labourers and women for their own gain. Michael steals from his employer. Michael points out that Dada’s big shot friends laugh at Dada, that his mother works as their cleaner, scrubbing floors, while he drinks brandy and smokes cigars with them. Dada’s response is not to address the accusation: ‘We want for nothing at home’ (Whistle, 112). If Dada rhetorically espouses honour, bravery, courage, duty, opportunism and respect, these qualities serve as increasingly empty signifiers as the play progresses. By way of motivating the fight between Des and Michael, Dada calls out words like dirt, filth, muck, trash, scum, tinkers (Whistle, 184) as a type of class-related sledging. After Des’s death, Dada is left standing on a chair, declining to address his patriarchal accountability in a world where the response to shame, downward class mobility and low communal status is to indulge in the fantasy of king Carneys and the celebration of marauding faction fighting. In Michael’s earlier comments to Betty that ‘They never got a chance’ (Whistle, 99), there is sympathy, a passive fatalism and a denial of how others made more of their lot, turned the fruits of their labour to garner better outcomes for their offspring, even if the costs and benefits of social mobility are not espoused. The Factory Girls: Fast Labour and Faster Capital Frank McGuinness’s notionally naturalistic The Factory Girls (1982) offers a male perspective on the issue of gendered, working-class exploitation, fast, routinised labour in the context of mobile global capital, where industry ekes out the cheapest means of production in order to maximise profit and shareholder value, even if, today, globalised manufacturers are alert to social obligations, driven by green/environmental impact agendas, employee well-being, global social impact initiatives and more inclusive HR workplace policies.14 This play’s shirt-making business was once owned by the Buchanans, who bled it dry, and now is managed by the inexperienced Rohan and run on an order-to-order basis, resulting in some three-day weeks. Near-­ impossible productivity targets are set, and reaching these still would not

Embodied Labour  103 hold off this industry’s decimation. Few men work in the locality, and women are expected to do the majority of the domestic chores. Union representative Andy Bonner is ineffective, almost compliant, if not complicit, to the extent that he is willing to facilitate proposed changes in working conditions without opposition or negotiation. Vera’s vision is suffering, and she sees what they do as ‘rotten work’ (Factory, 8) or ‘slave labour’ (Factory, 33). Rebecca does hairdressing on the side, remarking ‘If I didn’t do it, I would not have the living of a dog’ (Factory, 23). Faced with new rates and job losses, the women live up to the stereotypical views of them as a ‘Pack of hyenas’ (Factory, 37) or ‘unpredictable wildcats’ (Factory, 40). Ellen, Una, Vera, Rebecca and Rosemary are from the same socio-­ economic class; are of various ages, marital statuses and sexualities; and have different life experiences and ambitions and diverse interpersonal connections with each other. Their collective response to the new work targets and planned wage reductions is to occupy the management offices without a definitive plan or much hope of a victory. They are work, community and world aware, not ignorant of the oppressive forces that collude against them. In terms of social capital, these characters are sometimes funny, assertive, articulate, canny and wise. They are sharing, encouraging, enabling and protective, and simultaneously, they confront, insult, gossip, mock, intimidate, exclude, challenge, thwart, oppose and put each other down. Ellen wants revenge at all costs, yet she has no monopoly on motivation or oversight. Neither Una nor Rebecca would work for nothing to make a point. Ellen’s position is that she is ‘A nobody that has nothing, beaten the day she walked into this factory’ (Factory, 87), and she fears being scapegoated by locals. Importantly, the general self-esteem of other characters is not fundamentally fettered to shame or a fatal passivity. Rebecca starts to chip away at Ellen’s dominance. Instead of giving in, they will do, in Vera’s words, the ‘foolish thing’ (Factory, 87) for now. Rather than offering a victory against the odds, McGuinness prioritises existential advantages and licences freedoms through fantasy and the recalibration of their popular and cultural capital. If cultural capital is associated with what elites deem legitimate culture, normally high over low art, classical over popular, and if Savage contrasts high art only to emerging cultural capital, McGuinness here and elsewhere deploys popular culture as a form of legitimate working-class expression, linking it to enhanced self-knowledge and self-direction. There is validation, insight, self-recognition and accusation to be drawn from popular culture more broadly, whether it is in identifying the attractiveness of celebrities, using ballads and contemporary songs

104  Embodied Labour to communicate or identifying with the journeys of character in popular expression. These women characters cross-connect different popular cultural strands, namely magazines, poems and songs of celebration, regret, loss and protest. More importantly, it is their transactions, enactments and exchanges of cultural capital that help the characters to better interact and to bond with each other, which is also the case with Someone Who’ll Watch Over Me (1992a). The singing of songs from The Wizard of Oz establishes a harmonious mood and ensures a degree of collective joy and purpose. Transposed or transitioned cultural capital also takes the form of Rosemary scoring out the character name Sonja in the Bunty magazine and replacing it with her own. Rosemary identifies with an oppressed gypsy character, Sonja, who does all she can to be near her horse bought from her by a rich girl by getting a job in the stables. Rebecca’s subsequent call to Rosemary ‘to steal a horse and release the gypsy in your soul, Sonja’ is a resonant one (Factory, 45). ‘Steal a horse and get out. Get away as far as you can’ is another invitation made by Rebecca (Factory, 88). The characters also establish a level of mutual connection through laughter, joy and defiance. They do not experience the world from a position of submissiveness and compliance but from one of confrontational engagement. Rebecca displaces the notion of stalemate or a doomed-to-fail collective protest with notions of freedom and awakenings.15 Victory comes about in the form of assertiveness based on being awoken to a higher dimension of being, with an insistence on the need to fight, to contest, to oppose. The verification of oppositionality, regardless of the odds, even impossible ones, is crucial to this play’s dramaturgy. It is not a postponed ending, not an empty victory or a poetic, delusional or moral one but more the realisation of collective purpose, initiated by the communal outrage shared by these women. Mood and disposition trump economic reality. Sick of being ‘Walked on’ (Factory, 47), these workers opt for something else. Yet their actions, withdrawing their labour, are without any naïve sense of radicalisation or any indication that, alone, the working classes are the inevitable drivers of social change. That is a courageous, uncanny, complex and ultimately generous disposition from which to write. McGuinness never absolves, indulges or apologises for the class backgrounds of his characters, whatever their class happens to be, and invariably establishes his women characters in relation to the work in factory, domestic, cultural, business and academic settings.16 The Lament for Arthur Cleary: Precarious Labour Dermot Bolger’s The Lament for Arthur Cleary (1989) is a highly stylised and innovatively theatrical piece. As the play starts, Arthur is already dead, having returned to Dublin after years of working in Europe.17 The new

Embodied Labour  105 everyday of working-class Dublin is at odds with Arthur’s remembrance of both the city’s intimate spaces and how people lived together. Despite poverty, there was a sense of community, and despite dire economic circumstances, there were many jobs. Buildings are now derelict, and factories that traditionally employed the working classes have their roofs caving in. Despite Arthur’s intense feeling of freedom, the Dublin of this play is a decaying, suffocating one: flat complexes are in disrepair, and the ‘Pushers’ are dealing heroin (Lament, 52). The dole payments offer less than what would amount to subsistence living. People are desperate to work, and many when younger move overseas to make a wage. Arthur’s recollection of Turkish migrant workers in Germany has them longing to go back home, and this mimics his own sense of home and belonging. The figure bridging past and present is Larry Deignan. His mother was the local shopkeeper that gave a Traveller child a firelighter to eat. The child thought the firelighter was a piece of coconut and lost his ability to speak. ‘It will teach his sort a lesson, your mother always said’, is how Arthur reports the incident (Lament, 42). Teenager Larry stole sweets from his mother’s shop and sold them on at half price; he then sold condoms and later conned middle-class kids with a concoction of ‘herbal tobacco and loose shag’ they thought to be cannabis (Lament, 49). Larry is now a landlord with multiple properties and an unscrupulous money lender. Deignan’s perspective is as follows: Ask yourself what bank wants to know people here? If it wasn’t for me, Arthur . . . there’d be nothing bought . . . no furniture, no clothes at communion time, no presents at Christmas, ESB cutting off people. We’re talking about people nobody gives a shite about, we’re talking about providing a service. (Lament, 63) Obviously, the comments are self-serving, but banking practices are part of any larger discussion about lending to working-class communities. Arthur’s confrontation with Deignan leads to his death, leaving Kathy, his newish girlfriend, with only the memories of his love and defiance. Kathy’s belief that Arthur’s name serves as some private aspiration is evident in the frontier guard’s comment: ‘She taught them (her children) your name like a secret tongue’ (Lament, 67). The play ruthlessly exposes the way that the likes of the Deignan family exploit the poor but also highlights a set of traditional working-class values that appear to be on the wane, partially so oppressed by living conditions, economic circumstances and mainly widespread unemployment, that would be even higher without wholesale migration. The alternatives to labouring hard for a living are painted in the most drastic of terms:

106  Embodied Labour ‘Mortgages, ulcers, overdrafts’ (Lament, 30) or: ‘What’s a real life; a clean job, pretending you own some mortgaged house on an estate, death from cancer at forty’ (Lament, 44). As Bolger’s characters assert subject positions, there is some romanticising of traditional working-class traits and even Arthur’s passions, compassion and values are seen to be peculiarly out of time. Bé Carna: Sex Labour? 1999s Bé Carna (Women of the Flesh) grew out of Deirdre Kinahan’s work with the Ruhama Women’s Project, which provided educational support for women working in prostitution and evolved from the workshopping of testimonies that some women provided.18 Sophie Bush differentiates between the more general term ‘prostitution’ rather than the more contemporary term ‘sex work’, in keeping with Amnesty International’s guidance that the latter term should only be used to describe ‘the exchange of sexual services (involving sexual acts) between consenting adults,’ and not to describe situations ‘[w]here consent is absent for reasons including threat or use of force, deception, fraud, and abuse of power or involvement of a child’ ([Bush, 206, 67], citing ‘Amnesty International Policy’ 2016, 3–4). However, some commentators object, stating that very few people opt into prostitution with unfettered freedoms, and there is a distinction to be made between consenting and desperately opting to do something from a palette of very limited alternatives. For some it is difficult to see prostitution in terms of sex labour, where sex is merely a commodity for sale like anything else, which groups like the Sex Workers Alliance in Ireland would espouse. Amia Srinivasan, when discussing sex work or actresses in the porn industry, remarks: ‘if someone says that is a choice, and find it and if even it is not enjoyed, it is emancipatory, and part of a “feminist praxis,” for a feminism that trades too freely in the notions of self-deception is a feminism that risks dominating the subjects it presumes to liberate’ (2021, 82). There is also, as Michael Sandel would argue, the issue of the common good and how it can be enhanced or diminished, as well as the collective duty of care around the things that money should not necessarily buy, especially in relation to fairness, degradation and consent (2012, 110–113).19 Kinahan’s script talks about prostitution rather than sex work; how it meshes with patriarchal power and economies of exchange; and how the purchasing and or selling of sex is nearly always linked to class and poverty, destitution, desperation and addiction and frequently connected to personal histories of gross neglect, coercion, physical and sexual abuse. Bé Carna opens with a litany of words and fragments of thoughts given choric expression that affirm the commodification of women’s bodies

Embodied Labour  107 and that serve as the basis of a perverse rationale for gender violations. Dead sisters, infringed bodies and ideological pressures and perspectives designed to oppress, inhibit, deny and subvert sit alongside notions of pain, punishment and sin. The five different narratives that follow intersect with each other, thereby elaborating, reinforcing, affirming and complementing experiences of dominance, subjugation and objectification. As part of Jonathan’s agency, Teresa is seemingly protected from the violent or addicted by his vetting processes. Teresa seeks out self-empowerment: ‘The tables are turned now, I choose who I fuck with. I say Yes or No. I see that hungry look and I decide, I put a price on it and I take control. I no longer have to fear the sun, I can stay where I am, I can BE ME’ (Carna, unpublished). If Teresa expresses the conviction that she is the one with power, her admission: ‘Daddy was my first client’ unsettles (Carna, unpublished). Rachel’s friend, Roisin, who is also on the game, has gone missing. Sandra has her face slashed with a Stanley knife by a punter. Narrators do not reveal a singular, communal class-inflected, gendered viewpoint that unites them. What they do share are experiences of poverty, hardship and violation; what binds them are the bad behaviours of various abysmal male partners, associates and clients. Sandra’s partner Jamie purposefully crashes her car, Ger is assaulted by her partner, Teresa is sexually abused by her father, Rachel tells of a punter who wants to have sex while his child is in the back seat of his car or the youngster spitting at and assaulting Ger after she tries to empathise with him. Prostitution is not simply work where there are contracts, regulation and health and safety inspections. If each of these five narratives is told in two parts and, as the script suggests, there is no recommended order to their telling, such tales are complemented and substantiated by ‘a compassionate female chorus’ (Carna, unpublished) whose function is to complicate the personal stories, to give wider expression to individual realities and to connect the characters and experiences of working-class women across space and time.20 Here, the chorus serves an unusual and additional purpose, ranging from the provision of provocative words or concepts to providing a safety net for the stories themselves. It also serves as a form of collective remembering about those who have lived lives like this before in Ireland and elsewhere. Sadness is shifted by a laughter that is both celebratory and oppositional in almost all of the stories. It is the defiant and ambiguous laughter of the underprivileged, the disenfranchised, alert to their circumstances, fluent enough to articulate what they see and embedded enough in the compromises they face daily for them not to be in denial of life’s ironies and ambiguities. There is a playfulness here, a mining of defiance, with laughter functioning as a form of communal connection, countering the realisation that little else unites them in terms of what they can agree upon, even if

108  Embodied Labour their class-based, gendered realities of prostitution are relatively and unfortunately consistent. Srinivasan’s argues that prostitution must be seen as the ‘distillation of women’s condition under patriarchy, women’s subordinate status’, and the john, exemplifies ‘male domination’ (2021, 151). She also discusses the criminalisation of the buying rather than the selling of sex but points out that under ‘none of these criminalising regimes are sex workers, as a class, better-off’. She also suggests that for many sex workers, the anti-­ prostitution efforts of some ‘make their lives worse off, not better’ (Srinivasan 2021, 152). She points out that for some sex workers, ‘the choice bet­ ween men’s punishment and their own survival is all too clear’ (Srinivasan 2021, 53). The Blue Boy: Child Labour Co-written and co-directed by Feidlim Cannon and Gary Keegan, Brokentalkers’ post-dramatic The Blue Boy (2011) is a response to industrial and reformatory schools, as captured by the Report of the Commission to Inquire into Child Abuse (The Ryan Report) (2009), focusing on Dublin’s St. Joseph’s Industrial School, Artane and St. Vincent’s Industrial School, Goldenbridge.21 The piece combines disembodied witness testimony, music, masked performances, popular cultural songs, cartoon animation, journalistic commentary, video of gymnastic displays, media recording and political apologies in relation to the Ryan Report. Keegan’s grandfather was an undertaker, whose experiences Gary exploits to introduce the piece by way of leading into a discussion about a wooden stick used to measure dead children in order to make appropriately sized coffins. Coffin-making for dead children is another type of unnerving labour. Central are the testimonies about children’s experiences within such institutions. Out of this textually layered and interdigitated complexity, I am isolating two aspects: first, the horrific account from a female survivor as to the daily tasks she faced in order to make rosary beads that were then sold to members of the Catholic faithful and second, the cultural exploitation of the industry of Artane Boys band members and those who encountered, referenced and treasured their public performances. In Goldenbridge, under sweatshop conditions, children were obliged to make sixty pairs of rosary beads per day to earn their keep. The labour was difficult, and fingers bled. Children ate beads to offset hunger but knew that if they ate more than a small quantity, they could die. As the story is narrated via a disembodied aural recording, a pair of adult hands completing the detailed task of bead-making plays as a backdrop. When the witness left the school, she stole some pliers by way of memento. This work was part of a wider regime of discipline, washing, learning and sleeping.

Embodied Labour  109 Uniformity, conformity, silencing and severe punishment were the order of the day. Artane Boys was well known for its marching band that performed at various public events, including Gaelic Athletic Association’s (GAA) All-Ireland finals. They played for multiple visiting dignitaries, including American presidents John F. Kennedy, Richard Nixon and Bill Clinton, and welcomed a range of celebrities to Ireland. (Cultural performances of prowess were also linked to gymnastic displays.) In a frighteningly telling video clip from a 1976 RTÉ show, Trom Agus Eadrom, hosted by Liam O’Murchú, the band performs ‘A Nation Once Again’. An interview between the host and band leader, Brother Joseph O’Connor, follows. ‘Brother Joe’s’ modesty is foregrounded; he is treated as an unsung national hero for working with such care and dignity with the poor and marginalised by O’Murchú. Education and cultural opportunities are gifts to the less fortunate. On the matter of O’Connor’s reputation as a disciplinarian, there is unease signalled by tense studio laughter, prompting the interviewer to move things on. ‘Brother Joe’ offers views on the differences between lazy and busy hens. His hens are kept keen by feeding them less, forcing them to forage more and producing almost enough to be best in national class. Then ‘Brother Joe’ turns the conversation back to the interviewer: did he see laziness in the eyes of his wife, and how easy is it to spot such weakness? It is not to imply that O’Murchú was in any way complicit, but the intended soft focus of the interview so easily goes off script and reflects the broader contentment to champion the cultural successes of the institution and not to question what was also known about the place. The unsaid is the abuse, starvation and neglect of children. As the interview ends with Brother O’Connor indulging in a round of almost maniacal self-applause, the audience is scanned. Captured earlier was the almost terrified looks of applauding band members, and now, unimpressed younger women are unsure as to how to respond to the insinuations around gender norms and perhaps disbelieving as to why this educator could be so lauded. Toxic lies and cover-ups relied on religious orders remaining unchallenged and clerics, priests, sisters, brothers celebrated for their dedication to the poor and the ill, a labour prompted by vocational service. (After his death, Brother O’Connor has been variously accused of serial violations, but this has not been established by a court of law and remains disputed by some family members.) Either abandoned, having suffered the death of a parent or sent to industrial schools by the courts, repetitive negligence, suffering and hunger were practised alongside routine physical and sexual assaults, which the Ryan Report uncovered. Perpetrators needed an acquiescent array of administrators, medical professionals, police, social workers and educational

110  Embodied Labour inspectors to allow practices to continue unchecked. Tellingly, one survivor talks about going to the police to relate his story, only to be beaten and brought back to Artane. The gap between public knowledge, knowing, not knowing and dis-knowing was one all too easily exploited, as was the anticipated wrath if anything was done to bring the Catholic Church into disrepute. Using the highly visible cultural labour of a marching band as a smokescreen is horrific by way of intimidatory and coercive cultural expression. The making of rosary beads by children under such conditions is all the more appalling given the value placed by this faith’s pronouncements by Jesus Christ on the cherishing of innocence and vulnerability of children. The Beacon: Esteemed Labour Nancy Harris’s realist/symbolic The Beacon (2019) is set on an island off the West Cork coastline. Renowned Irish artist Beiv Scanlon is visited by her software engineer son, Colm, and his new wife, Bonnie, who had dropped studying art for psychology. There is no sense of intergenerational precarity, as offspring like Colm are as likely to be successful professionally and financially secure, even if there are still complexities around childhoods, witnessing rage, shame and multifaceted expressions of desire. Colm’s relationship with his artist mother is complex, compounded by the fact that his father, Michael, disappeared ten years previously at sea, and his body was never recovered. Beiv is the subject and object of community gossip, curiosity, revulsion and voyeurism, compounded by the latest attempts by a podcaster, Ray, to investigate Michael’s disappearance. Suspicions are complicated by the fact that despite being divorced, Michael had left everything to Beiv in his will, written shortly before his disappearance. As Beiv made art, Michael worked as a successful solicitor, and this double income afforded them a home close to the sea in Sandymount and the rural retreat from which they sailed. Michael’s disappearance is linked to Nuala O’Neill’s young son, who died at sea. This child’s death may have been as a result of an underlying heart condition, as a coroner’s inquest found it to be or as the consequence of the young boy going limp, having been repeatedly denied re-entry to a boat after swimming, and after he had his head persistently pushed under water by a group of boys, close in age. Artistically and socially, Beiv turns that gendered surveillance, monitoring, prurience and accusation on its head by knocking out all dividing walls in her home and installing large windows, making her internal presence ­visible. In the exposure and or disclosure of the domestic space, there is not only the challenge posed to the gendered associations of women with interior locales and the repressions, suspicions and inscriptions associated with it,

Embodied Labour  111 but also in that de-walled and multi-windowed home affords a spectacular version of gendered and cultural labour and performativity. It is art that affords Beiv self-expression but also a means of making significant money. Beiv used this cottage retreat to form a community/commune and took women lovers, and the place was seen to be the locale for multiple orgies. The commune was set up while Colm was doing his Leaving Certificate, leading Beiv to admit belatedly: ‘I was a ferociously selfish mother’ (Beacon, 43), her parenting approach inconsistent with the type of helicopter/ snowplough parenting styles currently associated with the middle classes. Amongst this cultural elite, characters seem comfortable discussing various sexual preferences without fear of judgement. Colm’s admission that he vaguely remembers that he was sent to school in a dress by Beiv, seeing the gesture not necessarily as a challenge to norms but her not wanting him to be ‘stifled’ by his gender (Beacon, 83). For Bonnie, ‘There’s masculine and feminine energy in all relationships, it’s not about gender or whether someone’s gay or straight or trans, it’s about the characteristics of the person, how they are in the world’ (Beacon, 49). Bonnie marries, aware of Colm’s bisexuality and his sexual history, willing to agree or consent to an open relationship, but seeing Colm and local neighbour Donal together shatters that illusion of gratuitous exclusivity. One of Beiv’s canvases is central to the play: it is ‘predominantly red, pink and purple paint’ (Beacon, 9). Beiv claims the canvas is simply a representation of a ‘blood orange’ (Beacon, 9). Bonnie responds differently: You can really see the female rage. Like I’m instantly getting menstrual blood, the blood of childbirth, genital mutilation, haemorrhaging – pretty much all female suffering. Abortion is in there obviously . . . and repression and shame. But there’s also something really tender too. Like there, in those softer shades, I  see a vulva. And the clitoris, and this really female desire for pleasure, for sexual intimacy but also for like a really fucking explosive orgasm. (Beacon, 9) Bonnie’s interpretation foregrounds a gendered, bodily aware, sexually oriented perspective – a jouissance-like consciousness. Colm responds differently again: ‘Splodges of red. . . . And splodges of sea. And splodges of land. And splodges of trees. And splodges of tears. And splodges of hair. Splodges of black hair. . . . And a hand’ (Beacon, 115). Art can reveal and conceal, be almost anything one wants it to be. As partner, parent, but most of all an artist or female cultural labourer, Beiv is a complex character, admired by Bonnie and many more besides. Beiv calls people out, is aggressive, controlling, manipulative and suspicious while also assertive, grateful, tolerant and generous, seen in her offer

112  Embodied Labour to cover some of Donal’s expenses so that he can return to college in London. Sexual liberation, sufficient wealth and a healthy awareness of the merits and esteem of her work internationally grants Beiv a heightened degree of subjectivity and self-value. Artistic reputation and profit do not always go hand in hand, as they do here. Beiv’s artistic labour is embedded in workday cultural capitalism and linked to class, gender and sex. Do Beiv’s desire or dark secrets find expression in her complex gendered labour? The Walworth Farce: Cultural Busy Work In Enda Walsh’s meta-farce The Walworth Farce (2006), Dinny keeps his two sons, Sean and Blake, imprisoned in a fifteen-story council flat on Walworth Road, London, that once belonged to his brother, Jack, and wife, Vera. In a dispute over a will, Dinny killed Jack and Vera on the day that they buried Jack and Dinny’s mother. Daily, the family coercively enact a farce that accounts for their presence and dislocation in London. Cultural labour becomes both a form of play, busy work, misdirection and familial indoctrination. Only Sean leaves the space daily, visiting a local Tesco to buy the essential food and alcohol that co-function as household provisions and props in their meta-drama. In the farce, both sons play multiple parts, and Blake gets the female roles. Dinny is writer, director, prompter, stage manager and lead actor in the farce that constantly stops and starts. This farcical re-enactment of an alternative family history is absurd, cruel and horrifying in many respects. In the convoluted, rival narrative construction, Dinny, a painter/decorator, takes Jack and Vera to the posh home of a Cork client, the Cotters, in Montenotte, so he can pretend that he has done well. Although an early school-leaver, a basic brain surgery course has allegedly set Dinny on an alternative career path. Jack is unemployed and lives in abject conditions in London. The Cotters, Jack and Eileen, and her brother, Peter, return home from their attempts to lay to rest their father, having failed like Dinny’s family to bury their deceased. Eileen and Peter’s 90-year-old father died in what seems like an accident; however, he was murdered. Peter and Jack’s search of the house has unearthed no cash, but Dinny’s wife Maureen discovers the hidden loot in a pillow in the coffin – scripted as ‘monopoly money’ (Walworth, 39). From Jack’s viewpoint, ‘there is a coffin of money that needs liberating’ (Walworth, 74). After Vera is lusted after by Peter, Paddy declares: ‘The wife’s turned, Dinny. Turned from me with that knobber Peter’ (Walworth, 81). ‘Knobber,’ meaning snob, is vital to his description of Peter, because Paddy sees infidelity partly through the lens of class. Jack, Peter, Eileen, Vera and

Embodied Labour  113 Paddy variously die, and the money, which Eileen had promised by way of compensation for the death of Dinny’s mother, is found and ends up with Dinny and Maureen. As Eileen dies, she also sees her loss of life in terms of theft: ‘A woman to be robbed of what the world has to offer’ (Walworth, 82). This is additionally complicated by Eileen’s summary: ‘And never a better man has profited from death’ (Walworth, 82). Justifying his financial gains through such highly calculated lines, Dinny foregrounds death and his money obsession. Dinny summarises: ‘So away to London I am. Away to treble my new-found wealth and build for us a castle to overlook the English scum . . . a bit of Cork up there in the sky’ (Walworth, 82–83). The arrival of the African-British Tesco shop assistant Hayley, with whom Sean has formed a connection, spins the play out of control. Crudely, she is white-faced by Dinny as she is inducted to play Maureen. While the play’s farcical mayhem needs acknowledging, as do the various roles the characters play across the piece, Sean and Blake are under Dinny’s rule, power and surveillance. Despite the persistence of the messaging and the pressure to conform to Dinny’s account, the concocted farce and cultural distortion of the facts do not speak to the reality as Sean remembers it. Trauma is both distorted and displaced by cultural labour, but it cannot be entirely negated. While Dinny delights in exposing Cork’s rebel spirit, the victories, the veniality of the murderous middle-classes, what he conceals are his own dark deeds. If what Dinny culturally creates is self-justifying, Walsh’s play is an indictment of greed while also exposing how class disparities regulate the circulation and division of money.22 Cultural labour might not be so enabling after all. Even when the performative as cultural labour is foregrounded, entrapment, subjugation, attempts at blanking memory or establishing false memories are the order of the day. It is a theatrical form of Stockholm Syndrome. Coercive, forced cultural labour is manipulative, intimidating, vengeful but also terrorising. Cross-Connections There is a strong sense of the subservience associated with domestic labour in Katie Roche (1936), and becoming a wife changes little for Katie. In Máiréad Ní Gráda’s On Trial (1966), the line manager justifies paying women a great deal less than their male counterparts, as it ‘would impose an undue burden on the industry’ (Trial, 43). Poor wages leave Maura with three pounds a week for her ten hours’ work as a toilet cleaner, with which she has to cover living, food and childminding. As I will discuss later, in Gregory and Yeats’s Cathleen ni Houlihan (1902), Bridget Gillane, as wife, mother and farmer, talks about the necessity of working hard and demanding little. In O’Casey’s Juno and the Paycock (1924), Juno runs a household

114  Embodied Labour with real difficulty, managing people, food and money under precarious circumstances. In Keane’s Sive (1959), Mena bemoans the relentlessness of farm and domestic labour for little return. Maimie Flanagan has childminding, home upkeep and a role in the family business in Keane’s The Field (1965). Sinead in Spallen’s Pumpgirl (2006) reflects negatively on routinised washing, tidying and minding children (Pump 37). Ger’s daily routine in Deirdre Kinahan’s Unmanageable Sisters (2018), a version of Michel Tremblay’s Les belles-soeurs (1968), is based around ‘Scrubbin,’ ‘slaving’ and never asking ‘for anything’ (Unmanageable 11). Collectively, Gabby, Rose, Yvonne and Lilly outline their routines from Monday to Sunday, again stressing the cleaning and scrubbing, protesting against ‘This dreary, rotten life’ (Unmanageable, 15). The women characters are obliged to fulfil domestic duties, rear children, visit in-laws and subjugate their desires and needs at every turn, never self-prioritising. Lisa, as representative of the younger generation, remarks: ‘I want a proper life, not stuck workin’ in the chipper shovelling up greasy fish to drunks till two in the morning. I want more. . . . I’m going to be somebody’ (Unmanageable, 67). A lack of economic reward is also foregrounded by the coercive nature of the evening’s voluntary, unreimbursed labour, the licking stamps and putting them into booklets. In Hugh Leonard’s Da (1973), much to Charlie’s chagrin, his father remains uncritical of the benefits and golden handshake he gets on retirement, deluded by a patrician trust and respect for his employer that is not mutual. In Christina Reid’s Joyriders (1986), Kate’s employment as a social worker on a training scheme is hoped to be an aberration by her mother before she opts for serious work. In Billy Roche’s The Cavalcaders (1993), work is defined by its unhurried, leisured speed, and employee/employer relations are more equal than most. Fraught labour relations in workplaces will be discussed later in relation to Jimmy Murphy’s Brothers of the Brush (1993). The foreman in Kinahan’s Embargo (2020) demonstrates how labour recruiting power can be used ruthlessly by those who are working class. And in Martin Lynch and Charabanc’s collaboratively written Lay Up Your Ends (1983), the strike action by women millworkers brings some success, if opposed by their male class equivalents. In Mark O’Rowe’s sequential monologue Howie The Rookie (1999), Howie Lee and Rookie Lee are unemployed. They are connected by a series of violent events; their shared surname links both to the martial artist and film action hero Bruce Lee. The absence of work is countered by cultural embellishment and incorporation that gives meaning, however fanciful. It is one of the great Irish plays about poverty and economic precarity, yet there is no character reflection on either. Migrant, alienated and precarious labour feature in Paul Meade’s Mushroom (2007), a play set on mushroom farm in Monaghan.

Embodied Labour  115 Frank McGuinness’s Innocence (1986) has a cardinal paying rent boys for sex, and Gerard Stembridge’s The Gay Detective (1996) also captures the relationship between male characters who sell sex to elites where there are major disparities in terms of power and choice. McPherson’s Shining City (2004) features an unequal relationship between young, impoverished rent boy, Laurence, and intellectually and socially endowed male character Ian, who has left the priesthood. Unusually, in Mark O’Halloran’s Trade (2011), a young man sells sex and had been only fourteen when he was first paid for sex. Vera in Tom Murphy’s The Wake (1998) is a sex worker who comes from a bourgeois background and inherits significant wealth. THEATREclub’s piece The Game (2015) deals graphically with class, prostitution and murder and relies on audience participation. Like The Beacon, there are many plays that feature writers, artists, poets, performers, writers of history and social history, each with a need to articulate world views. In The Shadow of a Gunman (1923), poet Donal Davoren exploits how he is perceived as a resistance fighter and gets Minnie killed.23 Declan Hughes’s Digging for Fire (1991) emphasises cultural labour, in that Danny’s exceptionalism does not bring the success he allows others to think he has achieved. In Kinahan’s Moment (2009), a successful artist got training in jail after his murder of his sister’s friend. In Stella Feehily’s Duck (2003), Feehily’s renowned playwright, Jack Mullen, is not very honourable. Different types of cultural labour are the focus of Marie Jones’s Stones in His Pockets (2000), where the per day rate for extras on a film set is nothing like what stars get for their work contribution, yet those paid a daily rate think the project is great to work on, while those earning millions have nothing but disdain for the industry. Brokentalker’s Masterclass (2021) wonders about the merit of art when determined by male creativity under patriarchy, but few take such a staunch position. Seldom is the artist presented as visionary; artists are no more informed than anyone else. Yes, art is seen as a form of radical cultural labour, but it is blindsided by ideology as much as everything else. As we will see later, one may gain directly from one own’s labour, as in Keane’s The Field (1965) or be self-employed as Ray is as a barber, or Brian whose income is from the scrap metal business in Philip McMahon’s Come on Home (2018), but there is no guarantee of financial security or the absence of lack. Conclusion If many contemporary working relationships between employer and employee are more complex than the traditional waged labour/capital model, this chapter looked at different types of work, domestic, emotional, workplace, migrant, cultural labour, sex work and unemployment, by way

116  Embodied Labour of exploring relational hierarchies and asked questions about work and reward. No writing argues for labour to control the means of production, and none sees the providers of labour as a genuine source of revolt. No play set out arguments as to what more progressive or egalitarian alternatives there might be to capitalist or neoliberal norms, nor how that might be brought about.24 In Over the Bridge, sectarianism can interfere in unionised labour, and a community can be lacking support for those on strike in The Factory Girls. Cultural labour might not be as rewarding or enabling as it is imagined to be; indeed it can be exploitative. The debate between prostitution and sex work is never just about what is legal or moral when safety and violation are so close at hand, including sex abuse and the violence towards and disappearance of women selling sex in Bé Carna, and economic precarity drives a great deal of such activity.25 Exploitative child labour and violation cross-connect in The Blue Boy in ways that are a national scandal. Most of the plays are about subsistence lifestyles, in-work poverty or, as Savage puts it, marked by: ‘the inability to make work pay’ (2015, 344).26 Labour is connected to class and gender by way of precarity. Most plays are convincing as to how capital alienates, oppresses, exploits, objectifies and depersonalises labour, and although capital has a reliance on labour, the plays invariably assert that the inclination of capital is to only pay what it can get away with.27 There is no writing that considers gender or class pay gaps or labour in relation to work-life balance, where employment is seen to be meaningful, purposeful, challenging or rewarding in and of itself.28 Few plays include characters who have a place around the boardroom table, with Carr’s Marble (2009) an exception that proves the rule.29 In the plays in this chapter, places of employment are where social and cultural capital blend with economic capital in ways that expose inequalities differently, if consistently. Notes 1 Victor Merriman remarks that the 1913 Lockout ‘constitutes, not least in its performative iconicity one undeniable moment of Irish class struggle’ (2018, 323). 2 In the Republic, gendered labour was shaped by the public sector marriage ban that would end in 1973. Edel Coffey notes how: ‘women who worked in the civil service were forced to give up their jobs upon marrying. It sounds like something out of a Grimm’s fairytale, doesn’t it’ (2022, Web). Coffey continues: ‘While most women knew they would have to stop working when they got married, they could not have guessed at the many insidious downsides their new status of wife would bring; the status of children, wards, people of no status. These only became apparent when they tried to do something like lodge a cheque made out to them to their own bank account or borrow a sum of money in their own name from their own financial institution. All of these things, and

Embodied Labour  117 many more, needed the approval, in person, with a signature, of their husbands’ (2022, Web). 3 Of course, across the island, British and Irish employment legislation and greater employee rights brought in by EEC membership changed workplace relationships, affording rights that previously did not exist, including improved employment protections, health and safety regulations, superior maternity and parental leave, holiday, sick-pay and pension rights. 4 Employees in some companies get performance-related bonuses and share options on top of salaries, incentivising overall business success, complicating labour, management and owner divisions. 5 Mike Savage notes: ‘For Marx, capital differs from money because of its capacity to accumulate: Capital is money put to work to generate more money. This accumulation of capital can only take place through the exploitation of workers, who produce more value through their labour than is returned to them in their wages. This exploitation therefore generates a surplus, which allows capital to reap profit and thereby accumulate.’ (2021, 73–74). 6 Today, it is important to differentiate between urban and rural labourers, semiskilled and skilled labour, factory workers, service labour in call centres and gig economy, tradespeople and independently employed trades people. Precarious wages, zero-hour contracts, living wage and average industrial wage all need nuancing and contextualisation. 7 Current right-wing views of labour have hardened around seeing the workforce as inflexible, ill-disciplined, ill-mannered, unnecessarily militant and unwilling to work hard enough. This perception of less cooperativeness and undermotivated labour justifies the querying of welfare spending investments, and the rights of workforces to strike. 8 The play’s success at the Gate Theatre led to an invitation from (R)TÉ to Laverty to write Ireland’s first working-class soap opera with the same title (1964–1968). 9 As Cathy Leeney and Deirdre McFeeley note: ‘Not only was contraception unavailable, the publication of information about contraception was banned under the Censorship of Publications Act 1929’ (2021, 244). 10 The neighbours, the Feeneys, are even more under space pressure, having eight young girls under 14. 11 Anu Productions’ Laundry (2011), The Boys of Foley Street (2012) and Vardo (2014) and Grace Dyas’s Heroin (2011) offer dismal outcomes for some workingclass characters. 12 Amia Srinivasan argues that Marxist feminists of the 1970s pointed out the ‘unwaged labour of women in the household. Working class women .  .  . not only birthed, clothed and fed male workers, but also soothed their egos, absorbed their frustrations and created homes that offered them some respite from alienated labour’ (2021, 175). 13 That Dada’s brother, Kevin, is a priest in the foreign missions and his sister can pay for Michael to attend secondary school reinforces his middle-class background. 14 In the 1960s many textile and clothing businesses set up in Ireland and utilised skills already embedded in those communities, and by the 1980s many began to re-locate elsewhere. One of the costs of first world freedom, progress, better living conditions and enhanced consumer choices has been fast labour, rights suppression, resource exploitation and the manufacture of goods that are often produced in a non-environmentally friendly or sustainable way.

118  Embodied Labour 15 Hiroko Mikami teases out the three different published endings to the play and the significance of a passage by Olive Schreiner that served initially an epigraph in the 1982 and 1988 publications of the play, lines which are later incorporated as dialogue in the 1996 version found in Plays 1. (See Mikami 2002, 130–131.) 16 In The Factory Girls, the working-class women characters have less in common with the high-income, well-educated, independent women characters that populate some of McGuinness’s later plays, like restauranteur Dolly in Dolly West’s Kitchen (1999); Margaret, an academic in There Came a Gypsy Riding (2007); or Greta Garbo, the Hollywood star, who appears in Greta Garbo Came to Donegal (2010). The working-class women characters in Girls have much more in common with Lena in Innocence (1986); Greta, Meala and Sarah in Carthaginians (1988); the two Burns sisters in Mary and Lizzie (1989); or Sal, the single parent factory worker in The Match Box (2012), where the absence of justice in relation to her daughter’s death perhaps prompts Sal towards absolute revenge. 17 The intertext is Eibhlín Dubh Ní Chonaill’s traditional Irish keen Caoineadh Airt Uí Laoghaire (c. 1770), a poem of anger that is based around Art’s resistance to power. 18 In 1999, solicitation was illegal in Ireland. Recent legislative changes under Section 4 of the Criminal Law (Sexual Offences Act) 2017 have decriminalised solicitation and criminalised the purchase of sex once someone is working independently and not functioning as part of a brothel or escort agency. 19 There is far less debate about men who purchase sex from other men or the increasing, if small, numbers of women who pay for sex. 20 Choruses in theatre more broadly function as observers, commentators, adjudicators, advisers, prompters, defenders, interrogators or empathy providers. 21 In Northern Ireland, there were scandals like the Kincora Boys Home, with abusers prosecuted, but also accusations of cover ups. 22 The wrecking of the living space, symbolically at least, can be read as an anarchic anti-property gesture of sorts. 23 Csilla Bertha reflects on the significance of visual artists, musicians and writers in work by Marina Carr, Brian Friel, Thomas Kilroy, Frank McGuinness, Jim Nolan, Mark O’Rowe, Enda Walsh and W.B. Yeats (2018, 637–656). 24 Furthermore, there has been a growing unwillingness amongst some of the wealthy to see taxation as a commitment to services and welfare, as a route to the better distribution of wealth; tax is increasingly viewed as a confiscation of wealth, with many preferring philanthropy to progressive taxation. 25 For Amia Srinivasan, third wave feminists see sex work as work that ‘can be better than the menial work undertaken by most women’ (2021, 83). It is in the context that men are overwhelmingly the purchasers and women who do it. All work is ‘sexed’ (Srinivasan 2021, 83). 26 Piketty notes that: ‘Over time, however, it has become increasingly common to blame the poor for their poverty’ (2020, 710). 27 There are many well-paid, pensionable jobs with bonuses and share options. Plays generally decline to immerse themselves in such workplaces. Think of Industry (2020–) on the BBC in contrast. 28 Esther Perel notes that work is ‘no longer simply a place where you make a living, to put food on the table’, rather work is ‘the place where you develop a sense of identity, the place that will help you become the better version of yourself, the place that gives you purpose and meaning. When you move across

Embodied Labour  119 continents for a job, you bet that people at work become your primary social network, especially now that we defer marriage by ten years. Work is the place where you are going to have the people with whom you celebrate many transitions of your life. Often there is nobody else around – our families are thousands of kilometres away’ (cited by Conroy 2021). 29 Savage notes that ‘many extremely well-paid people can feel undervalued, marginalised, and excluded. It is also true that people who are relatively badly paid can actually feel well off and able to lead a fulfilling life’ (2021, 52).

5 Knowledge Economy

Introduction When children are born, they are utterly dependent, yet exceptionally open to many potential experiences, initially determined by evolution and later the contexts in which the child grows up. A child bonds and communicates needs and fears; observes; mirrors; mimics; acquires language; and absorbs the dispositions, feelings, feedback and influences of those most immediate, becoming more independent and self-sufficient over a long period of time. Yuval Noah Harari argues: Most mammals emerge from the womb like glazed earthenware emerging from a kiln – any attempt at remoulding will only scratch or break them. Humans emerge from the womb like molten glass from a furnace. They can be spun, stretched and shaped with a surprising degree of freedom. This is why we can educate our children to become Christian or Buddhist, capitalist or socialist, warlike or peace-loving. (Harari 2014, 10) Specifically in terms of education, John Baker et al. note that: The right to education is articulated in several international legal instruments including Article 24 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (1948). Education is valued because of its intrinsic worth for all human beings and because it is indispensable in achieving other human rights, including the right to economic well-being and good health. (2009, 141) Societies, communities and families all shape an individual’s disposition towards knowledge and learning, and in most countries, education is structured from early years to third level.1 From a contemporary neo-liberal, marketplace perspective, education is increasingly aligned not just with

DOI: 10.4324/9781003180074-6

Knowledge Economy  121 learning in and of itself but more with the needs of the workplace. Education is seen as a means of enhancing employability and productivity. Learning can foster insight, curiosity, discipline, an ability to question and problem-solve. Having mentors and role models matters in terms of a student’s commitment to education, as does the employment and ­educational qualifications of one’s parents, particularly a mother/female guardian. Mike Savage notes how ‘Well-educated parents pass on to their ­children – knowingly or not – the capacity for them to succeed at school and university, and thereby get the sort of qualifications which help them to move into the best jobs’ (2015, 49). This he terms ‘educational endowment’ (Savage 2015, 49).2 Later he revises the point: ‘Parents influence the adult socioeconomic attainment of their children through two types of pathway: endowments and investments. Thus, there is a process of cumulative causality that comes together in household relations, not a single categorical position, like household wealth’ (Savage 2021, 223). For some, education and intellectual activity and engagement are aspects of cultural capital, but to my mind education is as much about economic and social capital. Property is important, but education has also played a central role in the history of inequality regimes and the evolution of social and economic equalities both within and between countries (Piketty 2020, 513). For some critics, education is mind-controlling, mind-numbing, an effective means by which a dominant ideology infiltrates a consciousness, subjugates and disciplines.3 For others education is seen as imbricated in the perpetuation of privilege,4 especially if education is linked to merit, in ways that disguise the reliance on and the banking and build-up or accumulation of privilege.5 On the other hand, figures like Jacques Rancière give emphasis to the enabling aspects of education. In The Emancipated Spectator, Rancière posits the notion of ‘intellectual equality’ (2009, 1). Education can be empowering and enabling. Sandel notes: But today, the countries with the highest mobility tend to be those with the greatest equality. The ability to rise, it seems, depends less on the spur of poverty than on access to education, health care, and other resources that equip people to succeed in the world of work. (2020, 23) Various types of social, cultural and economic capital are circulated and encountered over a sustained period by all that are schooled. This chapter teases out the circulation of economic, cultural and social capital within a range of plays, some historic, some contemporary, where tensions between educational encouragement and discouragement, opportunities and restrictions collide and the implications it has in relation to equality and engaged

122  Knowledge Economy citizenship, without attempting to account for the histories of education in both of the island’s jurisdictions. Translations: The (Un)Emancipated Classroom Brian Friel’s history play Translations (1980) is set in the 1830s, where a father and son, Hugh and Manus, run a hedge school. Fees per subject are paid by pupils, who range from the youthful Sarah, who is supported to overcome a speech impediment by Manus, to the elderly Jimmy Jack, who is obsessed with and takes refuge in Latin and Greek, and from Doalty, who attends class for the fun and is a poor scholar, to Maire, who wants to be taught English so that she can gain work in America.6 Hugh is highly regarded for his knowledge and writing skills and is a published writer, yet fails with his application to be appointed as the head of the new national school. Manus is dependent on monies given to him by his father. Manus’s brother Owen has numerous business successes in Dublin and is employed as a translator for the British Army’s cartography unit, who wish to map the locality and anglicise place names. The Ordnance Survey’s mapmaking amounts not just to a re-naming of places but to the suppression of indigenous, epistemic knowledge embedded in traditional Irish names. English is also to be the language of instruction in the new nationwide primary schooling system, leading to a de facto displacement of the Irish language from daily life.7 Agents of the British state encourage acceptance of the place name revisions, as it should lead to lower taxes. Some locals are more accepting than others, as it is both an attempted material and epistemic eviction from the markers and identifiers of knowledge, place and discourse. The dramaturgical conceit of the play is that the indigenous characters are talking in Gaelic, but as performed, they speak Hiberno-English, whereas the English characters speak standard English. Accordingly, the British officer, Lancey, needs to have his words translated by Owen. As interpreter and intermediary, Owen summarises and translates in ways that downplay the language of imperialism, its threats, oppressions and negative attitudes towards the locals and Lancey’s expressions of power that are as deliberate as they are instructive. Further, in the play’s seminal moment, a romantic scene between Maire and Lieutenant Yolland thrives on their inability to communicate in a shared language, but they are still afforded the opportunity to convey their desires. After Yolland disappears, Manus, as chief suspect, flees and holds off on a job offer to run an isolated hedge school, and Lancey uses the most intimidating of language, demanding information and threatening reprisals. Lancey terrorises Sarah back into silence, and Owen cannot positively spin or downplay Lancey’s threats. Christopher Murray notes ‘loss is poignantly implicit in the ramshackle cultural chaos of Hugh’s schoolroom’ (2014, 110).

Knowledge Economy  123 By the play’s end, the drunken pair of Hugh and Jimmy Jack indulge themselves by reciting a passage from The Aeneid; cultural knowledge is not power and not quite gibberish or consolatory, but forgetfulness and stupefaction are responses that link both characters back to the ending of Sean O’Casey’s Juno and the Paycock (1924), where Joxer and Captain Jack Boyle drunkenly deliberate on ‘that o’ . . . chassis!’ (Juno, 86), unaware that Mary and Juno have left their home or that Johnny has been executed by his comrades. It is the weakest student, Doalty, who makes best sense of what needs to happen: ‘I’ve damned little to defend but he’ll not put me out without a fight. And there’ll be others who think the same as me’ (Translations, 441). The Hidden Curriculum: Patenting Failure Graham Reid’s realist-leaning The Hidden Curriculum (1982) is set in a ‘secondary school’ (Hidden, 109) in a working-class Loyalist area of West Belfast in the mid-to-late 1970s, when there was an uptick in paramilitary actions by Loyalists and Republicans.8 The play dramatises how teaching practises influence pupils and how education inequalities impact experiences and outcomes in the lives of former and current pupils, their families and acquaintances. Individual teachers offer various standpoints on education, whether education is crucial, inhibitive or a box-ticking exercise. Because few students progress from O to A levels, many end up unemployed or are teenage parents, and those who get jobs find them hard to keep. More so, sectarian attitudes towards the killings of Catholics are disturbing; remedial teacher Winifred rationalises such murders. Tricksterlike David, a former pupil, challenges how the school is run, objects to the opinions of ‘semi-illiterate parents talking rubbish’ (Hidden, 114), riles subject heads, declines discussion and reprimands the work that Winifred does with her students. David speaks in ways that are misogynistic and objectivising, and Winifred regards him as ‘coarse’ (Hidden, 118), snapping back that no wonder his marriage broke down. After David calls Winifred a ‘fucking old reprobate’, the following exchange takes place: Frank: Wonderful language. . . . You should be round at the incinerator cadging cigarettes with the rest of the thugs. David: Someday those thugs might discover how you’ve conned them. . . . Then they’ll feed you into that bloody incinerator. Frank: I’ve conned nobody. It’s through the efforts of the likes of me that pups like you ever made it to this side of the staffroom door. David: So I’m the token ni**er . . . what do you want, a medal . . . or will you settle for a bottle of scotch? (Hidden, 117)

124  Knowledge Economy Tony asks David to put a stop to the ‘corner-boy language’, to which David replies ‘It would take a Charles bloody Darwin to convince you that the people you teach belong to the same species as yourself’ (Hidden, 118). David demonstrates no gratitude for the tokenistic nature of his success, expressed disproportionately and inappropriately in racist terms. If David is disinclined to award homework to his classes, in face-to-face encounters with pupils, he is most encouraging and supportive. Head of English Tony has students writing about Wilfred Owen’s poem ‘Dulce Et Decorum Est’ and tries to arouse curiosity by linking this war poem to the personal family histories of his pupils, relations that died with their ‘sashes singing orange songs, or shouting “No Surrender” ’ (Hidden, 103). Tony fails to realise how sectarianism within this community thrives on the regurgitation of such views. By reputation, Tony is regarded as an impressive enough teacher, partly because of his capacity for violence. Expupil Allen remarks: ‘You [Tony] taught me that you work hardest for the people who hit you the hardest. The hard men are the ones you don’t mess about. They’re the ones you keep quiet for’ (Hidden, 131–132). (The laws of the classroom and streets are not so different.) A suspected informer is interrogated and then executed in a local club in front of an invited and captive audience, experiencing a ‘lesson’ nobody will forget (Hidden, 129). Fear and intimidation infiltrate the mindsets of the local youths, who realise that they are either inside or outside the paramilitary tent. Young males fall in line, cooperate, fulfil intimidatory roles and grasp the sense of belonging afforded them by paramilitaries. At the top of the current blacklist is ex-paramilitary commander Eric Alexander, who lives with Ruby; both fear for their lives after it emerges that Eric had informed on his own son, Roy. The once educationally promising, shy former student Roy has been jailed for the killing of four Catholics. Tony sees paramilitaries as ‘killers, gangsters’ (Hidden, 131), not as freedom fighters or community protectors. Hearing about Roy’s imprisonment, Tony realises the need for change. Tony’s visit to Eric and Ruby’s home does not get the response he wants – that is the chance to help Roy pursue education while in prison. Eric remarks: ‘Oh aye, never much time for schoolteachers myself. Clever asses the lot of you. Think you know it all’ (Hidden, 149), and continues: ‘Stick your books where the English stuck our constitution’ (Hidden, 150). Eric adds ‘Prying and preaching .  .  . perfect people and the rest of us scum’ (Hidden, 151). Tony’s summation of that encounter is laden with privilege and patrician values: ‘They live like animals, and they seem to think the same way’ (Hidden, 153). In contrast, both of Tony’s children have gone on to third-level education; his daughter is studying medicine (Queens) and his son history (Oxford), supported by his and his wife Agnes’s influences: she is a primary school teacher.

Knowledge Economy  125 If Tony earlier remarked teaching is ‘like trying to feed slices of roast beef to a crocodile, by hand’ (Hidden, 153), he shifts perspective: ‘The pupils were our victims. Any blame rests very clearly on us’ (Hidden, 155). In Tony’s proposed curriculum revision, he wants to abolish individual subjects for the first three years and teach a humanities course that combines English, history and geography; moral philosophy would replace ‘Religious Education’ (Hidden, 158). All teachers would engage in actions that are oriented towards remedial support. Tony’s ultimate belief astonishes: ‘This school mass-produces semi-illiterate morons. Multiply this by the thousands of others and you have a compulsory education system that patents failure’ (Hidden, 160). As Tony implores: ‘We’ve got to do something’, David’s provocation is: ‘Rifle ranges? Lessons in unarmed combat?’ (Hidden, 142). Indeed, David sees Tony’s crusading position as something that drove former teacher Fleming to a mental breakdown. If David mocks, he also praises Tony’s conscientiousness, but neither David nor Tony is the maverick/saviour type.9 Tony’s curriculum changes proposed to colleagues are rejected, ridiculed and marginalised, undermined by the principal. If education segregates according to religion, then paramilitarism does likewise. Poverty and wealth define outcomes of children more than talent, ability, effort or resilience. The lack of internal community investment in education is a vital awareness; education is seen as an imposition, and there is a defensive unwillingness to engage with its curriculum, what is taught and how, or if the outcome is unemployment, then it becomes pointless. Hill Collins’s ‘resistant knowledge’ is not a priority (2019, 10); more it is how to remain safe within the tribe and what behaviours keep you that way. Joyriders: ‘Askin’ Changes Nuthin’ Christina Reid’s episodic tragi-comic play Joyriders (1986) is set around a youth training programme populated by early school leavers or those handed down suspended sentences by the courts for minor offences. Trainees incur only one-tenth of the cost by keeping them out of prison; only 10 per cent gain employment. The programme is housed in an old linen mill, where Sandra and Maureen’s grandmothers got badly paid and did not live long enough to enjoy the benefits of retirement because of lung disease or lead poisoning. Joyriders combines gender, class and sectarianism in complex ways in the context of Belfast in the throes of ‘The Troubles’. It is a world of poverty, unemployment, family dysfunction, glue-sniffing addiction and various forms of antisocial behaviour, where riots, police brutality, army patrols and raids on houses, arrests, boys antagonising the police by throwing milk bottles and paramilitary kangaroo courts are commonplace.

126  Knowledge Economy Middle-class, social worker Kate is plunged into the troubled world of her trainees; her life sees far less of the direct impacts of the Troubles, even if it does more immediately at the hospital workplace of her doctor boyfriend, who treats casualties. Radicalised by the Northern Irish Civil Rights movement, Kate longs for change, freedoms, equalities, yet she is alert to the ambivalence of her presence in a working-class community, fostering notions of change through skill acquirement and keeping out of trouble while having to stay within budget and tolerate privileged visitors and assessors. Teenagers Sandra, Maureen, Arthur and Tommy come from the poorly constructed high-rise apartments, the Divis Flats. Their verbal exchanges and their songs of protest capture details of ten family members in a threebedroom home, damp and mould on the walls, infestations of rats and cockroaches, overflowing toilets and rubbish chutes that do not work in an asbestos-laced environment. The poor are maltreated, expendable, with limited life chances, opportunities, expectancies. These teenagers interact aggressively with one another, challenge each other’s thinking and dampen ambition while regularly declining opportunities to be empathetic towards each other. Whatever Kate does to nurture and protect Maureen, her challenges are overwhelming; Maureen’s mother was institutionalised with PTSD following a traumatic experience with shooting soldiers; her brother, Johnnie, sniffs glue, uses cocaine and joyrides. Sandra’s wish to train as a mechanic is seen as gender inappropriate: sewing and hairdressing are the prescribed careers. Sandra’s remarks about a school careers officer are telling: ‘They ask ye what ye wanta be, and then they tell ye what yer allowed to be’ (Joyriders, 175). Sandra tampers with the knitting equipment, hoping that she will get to work on cars. Sandra’s disruptive voice, sense of her own agency and purpose are hard-nosed and sit uneasily alongside Tommy’s worldview. Tommy is of mixed-race background, and his thinking is inspired by Republican Marxism and by his own instinctive class values; Tommy sees the Troubles less as a product of sectarianism and more an outcome of class oppression and inequalities, identifying that the courts are not independent but adept at justifying army actions. Having brought them to see a production of Sean O’Casey’s A Shadow of a Gunman (1923), Kate encourages them to think critically about art and dramaturgical matters. The trainees feel uncomfortable, that such cultural capital, as Tommy remarks, ‘was not for the likes of’ them (Joyriders, 110), but each responds divergently to the performance. Tommy receives the play in light of British imperialism and a revolutionary imperative in the face of oppression, remarking: ‘I don’t mean the great religious political con. I mean the true history of the division of the workin’ classes by

Knowledge Economy  127 the owners, the capitalists’ (Joyriders, 127). Tommy presses Sandra on the need to ask ‘why’ (Joyriders, 129), and in response, she states, ‘I’m forever askin’ why I’m stuck in this hole. Askin’ changes nuthin’ (Joyriders, 130). Sandra wants soldiers gone from the streets without needing to know what put them there. Tommy’s rhetoric has a vitality, if limiting. His justifications for taking paint and provisions from the centre are challenged by Kate; stealing impacts those that might benefit from the opportunities provided. When Kate asks for Tommy’s help with the younger kids, he will not oblige; neither will he hinder. After Kate says that many trainees have teachers who show a genuine interest in them, Tommy takes offence, seeing it as a need for the poor to be grateful for a wage that is just more than the unemployment rate. For Tommy, education is a ruse. Arthur is well versed in culinary possibility, and the programme suits his curiosity and skillset. A  serious injury suffered during army gunfire results in Arthur getting significant compensation, and he plans to buy a local restaurant/chipper. He hopes to reorient its bill of fare; food becomes his opportunity, by way of training and compensation. Sandra warns that Arthur’s father will clean him out, that the locals will not buy into the concept of French food and that he does not have the toughness to make the business succeed. Food and taste are classed and monied. A party to mark Arthur’s success in court leads to invitations to Kate’s home. Maureen notes there are ‘No army or police’ about Malone Road; Tommy adds that they ‘don’t make petrol bombs roun’ here, just money’ (Joyriders, 145). The event is less about Kate gently exposing her own private life and more an attempt to be more open, inclusive and inspirational. Arthur relates positively to Kate, remarking: ‘You don’t try to be what yer not’ (Joyriders, 132), unlike the accent-feigning, dirty-jeans-wearing social workers who try to fit in. For Arthur, Kate is ‘as near as makes no difference’ (Joyriders, 150). However, Kate sees herself as persistently compromised, ‘a shadow of a Socialist’ (Joyriders, 132), an authority figure who opposes rank. Patron Lady Summerville was inspired to donate knitting machines by local village girls who would use equipment to make ‘garments for the poor’ (Joyriders, 121). There is kindness and generosity, but her actions are spurred by charity and not entrepreneurship. Furthermore, Councillor Margaret Anderson tries to make trouble by discovering the numbers/ ratios of Catholics and Protestants on the scheme and may insinuate that Protestants who transferred out were driven out by sectarianism. When unable to buy a new outfit to meet the international student who has got her pregnant, Maureen steals ill-fitting clothing from Marks  & Spencer’s. Maureen had seen a mother and teen daughter purchase clothing and shoes seemingly without a concern for cost. Envy is classed and relationally determined. Initially Kate thinks that if she had been asked, she

128  Knowledge Economy would have lent something to Maureen. Self-correcting, Kate realises the things she takes for granted are not accessible to others. There are nuggets of truth in all character standpoints, especially when the characters are challenged by others or as they become more mindful of the contradictions in their own thoughts and behaviours. Earlier Maureen had asked Sandra to go into business, and her response was ‘Nobody is ever gonna give us nuthin’’ (Joyriders, 121). Arthur had remarked: ‘Nobody ever helped me’ (Joyriders, 117). Kate does more than help, and does give, less out of a sense of needing others to be grateful but out of civil responsibility. Education holds open possibilities, despite the unenviable context. A Whistle in the Dark: Stamped by Authority Complex reflections on education occur in Tom Murphy’s A Whistle in the Dark (1961), one of the two plays considered in more than one chapter in this book. Mush remembers schoolteacher McQuaide calling people morons, commenting on dirty knees that had not been washed since baptism. Harry Carney takes a knife to Mush’s head and ‘lifts locks of Mush’s hair’ (Whistle, 136), mimicking McQuaide checking for lice. Harry recalls the teacher’s breath in his ear, the munching of nuts. Not prompted by care or curiosity, McQuaide asks what Harry had for dinner. When the teacher asks all the pupils what they wanted to do in life, he remarks to Harry: ‘I suppose, Carney, you’ll be a Jewman? (Pedlar)’ (Whistle, 137). A question becomes an accusation, even as Harry admits to wanting to be a priest. The teacher’s response is to laugh, resulting in Harry being enraged but not shamed. Michael tries to justify unsuccessfully why a teacher would do such a thing but also admits that he suffered accordingly, even if Harry suggests that Michael never faced that treatment. Dada boasts to Betty about the merits of reading and mentions the value of education, but it is in his usual delusional and self-serving manner. For the Carneys, education is associated with subjugation, insult and class-based intimidation and humiliation. Michael had two years in secondary school, paid for by an aunt: ‘I don’t want to be what I  am. I  want to read.  .  .  . I  could have been a teacher. I had the ability’ (Whistle, 152). When Harry confronts Michael, his line of attack is especially interesting. Harry: ‘Yes, we’re so thick, stupid, twisted, thick! Oh, Michael, you are such a bright boy’ (Whistle, 175). Harry adds: ‘There’s been so many good intelligent blokes for so long explaining things to thick lads’ (Whistle, 176). The attack progresses with Harry accusing Michael of being ashamed of him and thinking that: ‘Thick lads don’t feel, they can’t be offended’ (Whistle, 177). This is complex fraternal, emotional,

Knowledge Economy  129 educational territory; shame is projected, and insensitivity is seen as a slight because it is based on being stupid. Earlier Michael had asked Harry if he still saluted McQuaide. I did salute McQuaide once. But I’m not still tearing the head off myself pulling off my cap to salute them shams. They kick, you salute, and then they pray for you. Pray for the poor dirty pigs over here, now and at the hour of our death. (Whistle, 177) Education and religion meld to reinforce social rank and superiority. Dada calls Michael ‘Mister intelligent sneerer’ (Whistle, 184). After the fight with the Mulryans, Harry mocks Michael’s progressive values, with an account of the future in which Des is going back home, Hugo to university with Harry paying his fees, Dada off killing communists and Harry to join the nuns (Whistle, 170). Continuing, Harry accuses Michael of apologising for him to people with ‘white collars,’ of admitting his inferiority, ‘Yes, sir, I’m a pig, sir, if you say so, sir’ (Whistle, 177). Educational outcomes are different for their neighbours: the son of Pookey Flanagan, a road cleaner, becomes an engineer, a daughter joins the nuns, while another attends university, ‘All of them from the dirt of the roads’ (Whistle, 134), as Michael puts it. Class: Greeting the Parents Co-written by Iseult Golden and David Horan, Class (2017) is set in a primary school classroom and features a series of encounters between the parents of Jayden, Brian and Donna and teacher Ray McCafferty. (Actors playing both parents also play pupils Jayden and Kaylie in separate encounters with McCafferty.) Test results provisionally indicate Jayden’s need for an assessment by an educational psychologist: Jayden might have dyslexia, which his mother has. Class conflicts emerge between the initially earnest Ray, whose middleclass background, dress, accent, officiousness and political correctness contrast with the ways that the more casually dressed Donna and Brian speak and think. While the trope of the passionate, exceptional saviour/maverick teacher intervening positively in the lives of the underprivileged is at play, something more complex emerges. Donna and Brian bring to the meeting not just their concerns for their son but also their own experiences and dispositions towards learning itself, having been previously educated in the same school. Although both have served apprenticeships, in hairdressing (Donna) and car mechanics (Brian),

130  Knowledge Economy schooling had been unduly negative, and although both were schooled in a post-corporal punishment era, they believe that they have been intimidated, undermined and discouraged by their experiences, especially in how they were negatively perceived, labelled and pigeon-holed as ‘thick’ or ‘trouble’ (Class, Kindle Edition). Having taken a year out to help with her ailing father, Donna was put into a special class, resulting in her ‘feeling like an idiot’ and ‘just trying to not be noticed’ (Class, Kindle Edition). Although intimidated to a degree by the process, Donna and Brian speak assertively, precisely and confrontationally, even if they are seldom at one. Matters turn uglier when Ray raises the issue of Jayden’s more recent behaviours: he punched a fellow pupil who had laughed at his reading aloud and glued a girl’s dress to a chair. Ray finds such actions indicative of something distasteful and troubling, but from Brian and Donna’s perspective, anyone laughing at Jayden’s reading deserves all they get. Equally, Donna cannot stop herself laughing at the dressgluing prank, refusing to see it as inappropriate gendered behaviour. Ray’s remarks that Justin, their other son, is ‘not showing any of the signs of delinquency that we’re starting to see in Jayden’ becomes a trigger (Class, Kindle Edition). In allowing himself to describe Jayden’s behaviours in terms of ‘delinquency’, Brian suspects the word tracks the teacher’s deeper attitudes towards their son and the broader community to which they belong. Professional veneers and lip-service comments of educationalists can disguise a view that a community is ultimately regarded as unworthy, underprivileged and undeserving of the equitable and proportionate dividends of society’s democracy, as they are too unruly, vile, antagonistic, trouble and troubled. Brian’s overriding sentiment is: ‘You see our kids as scum’ (Class, Kindle Edition). The politically correct middle classes, who would be appalled at other forms of prejudicial language in relation to race, sexuality and gender, may be less sensitive around the usage of words like ‘Scum’, ‘Knacker’ or ‘Scobie’. If Donna challenges Brian: ‘I don’t think he’s [Ray] like that though’, Brian responds, ‘He thinks he isn’t, but he is’ (Class, Kindle Edition). Ray accuses Brian of challenging behaviour, of not helping with homework, of sabotaging his child’s future, and finds offence in Brian’s use of language. Swearing is the class card played by Ray, which Brian finds oppressive. Both male positions are easy reflexes and simplistic dialectics, and class biases can run both ways. Class also proposes what an interventionist educational model might look like for pupils like Jayden and Kaylie. In short after-school scenes that are interspersed throughout the play’s action, Ray is open, attentive and engaging, and most importantly, by way of a bargain, he agrees to allow Kaylie and Jayden to teach him something about which they may

Knowledge Economy  131 know a lot – dance routines, spitting (gullier) and keepie-uppies – but that are outside his own competencies. Ray badly performs a routine based on Kaylie’s choreography and in so doing exposes his lack of mastery. Later Kaylie demonstrates a touching, tapping rap routine which she devised with her grandmother, moves that go ‘with all the “IGH” pictures’ (Class, Kindle Edition) to help memorise words, a system Ray praises her for and genuinely thinks he might be able to use as an approach with others. By tapping into creativity, curiosity, mutuality, difference, collective bartering or exchanges of learnings, education is shown as a way of inspiring enthusiasm by way of reciprocation. Talking about his book, The Ignorant Schoolmaster, based on the work of Joseph Jacotot, Rancière posits the idea that Jacotot ‘created a scandal in the early nineteenth century by claiming that one ignoramus could teach another what he himself did not know, asserting the equality of intelligence and opposing intellectual emancipation to popular instruction’ (2009, 1). For Rancière, For, in truth, there is no ignoramus who does not already know a mass of things, who has not learnt them by herself, by listening and looking around her, by observation and repetition, by being mistaken and correcting her errors. But for the schoolmaster such knowledge is merely an ignoramus’s knowledge, knowledge that cannot be ordered in accordance with the ascent from the simplest to the most complex. (2009, 8–9) For Rancière, to this practice of stultification he (Jacotot) counter-posed intellectual emancipation. Intellectual emancipation is the verification of the equality of intelligence. This does not signify the equal value of all manifestations of intelligence, but the self-equality of intelligence in all its manifestations. (2009, 10) When Kaylie asks Ray to intervene so that she can stay with her grandmother and not move in with her mother, who has been offered new housing by the local authority, Ray cannot support her in that request. Kaylie provides him with a justifiable, pleading rationale as to why he should get involved. No wilful efforts of concentration, no exciting learning methods or outcomes or no thirst for knowledge will overcome the fact that when a pupil’s life-problems are significant and life changing, education takes a back seat; equality and emancipation function as lower order considerations.

132  Knowledge Economy The unprovoked blows Ray rains down on Brian do not directly trigger the brain haemorrhage that kills Brian but do result in Ray leaving his job. The fact that Ray and Donna may have been seeing each other in part explains Donna’s siding with Ray in the aftermath of the violence. Class exposes Donna and Brian’s distrust in an education system that claims to be fair, supportive and enabling while disguising or covering up how education can be also inhibiting, prejudicial, biased and unfair, especially when there is little of one’s own life reflected back by the curricula, the implication being that it is not entirely for or relevant to everyone. This reality of unfairness stultifies, inhibits and discourages, but it also sets aspirational limits that can become intergenerational.10 This is not to demean teaching in any blanket fashion, as most teachers work heroically with the resources and facilities available, and most aspire to have good relations with their pupils. Better state interventions help ­somewhat but invariably cannot offset each and every socio-economic and cultural deficit and hindrance. If Class appears reluctant to see outside of a lose-lose class binary that the dramaturgy predominantly proposes, relegating the beneficial possibilities of education may well be its provocative intention. The Unmanageable Sisters: ‘Unbearable’ Notions In 2018 the Abbey Theatre staged Deirdre Kinahan’s slice-of-life The Unmanageable Sisters, a new version of Michel Tremblay’s Les BellesSoeurs (1968). (See Fogarty 2021; Koustas 2021; Ruane 2022 on the adaptation process.) Kinahan transfers Tremblay’s text from a workingclass district of Montréal to Dublin’s Ballymun Towers in 1974, the social housing complex of high-rise flat/apartments constructed in the 1960s.11 Kinahan’s world is neither a world of extreme poverty nor destitution but one where subsistence living is a norm. After she has won one million Green Shield Stamps that will allow her to claim as prizes domestic furnishings and appliances that will transform her home into being ‘like a hotel’ (Unmanageable, 13), Ger Lawless organises a ‘stamp-licking party’ (Unmanageable, 10). The evening allows fifteen women characters to reflect on contraception, abortion, the Women’s Liberation Movement, sexual desire, relationships, domestic chores and childrearing; there are intergenerational as well as interpersonal tensions, disagreements, rivalries and resentments. The unambiguous and forceful interferences of the Catholic Church in almost all civil and social matters, as seen in education and the arts, is my focus. Raymond, Gabby’s son, has shown a talent for music, yet she sees the outcome of his efforts as resulting in: No respect! Sure I’m driven mad by our Raymond since he started that music programme for the gifted down at the Holy Spirit School.

Knowledge Economy  133 Unbearable he is, I’m telling you, you wouldn’t know him! He goes around the flat humming Mozart. Mozart! For fuck’s sake, and with his nose in the air an’ all. And now he’s taken to answering me back in Latin! Latin! And then he starts playing that violin they gave him. . . . Jesus, it’s like a bag of drownin’ cats and then he wants to watch these music programmes on the telly . . . BBC2 if you don’t mind and sometimes in the middle of the afternoon! And if there’s one thing I  can’t stand it’s that classical music . . . all that bangin’! (Unmanageable, 26) Gabby finds classical music/education to be off-putting, pretentious and unrelatable and is discommoded by his interests and achievements. She affords Raymond educational and cultural opportunities but does less to support them. The mixed messaging is the crucial observation of the writing, proposing that education can be encouraged and distrusted within working-class environments. Classical culture, in contrast to most popular culture, can be inconsistent with class-awareness, localised knowledge and epistemic aspirations. As Gabby sees it, Raymond is using education and music to initiate and identify with that which gives expression to a reverse form of ranked-class relationship based on exclusivity and exclusion. Rose, as ever, is forthright: ‘Yeah, it’s not good for them is it? Too much education. Didn’t the bishops warn us! Too much education will give the kids notions’ (Unmanageable, 26). Again, it is in contradiction to the role the Churches (Catholic and Protestant) played more broadly in education, which was and is on very many occasions exceptionally positive, especially when politicians had little interest in educating the poor. Gabby chimes in with: Of course, Raymond says we just don’t understand it. We’re not ourtistic! As if he’s better than us. Better than his own mother and father! Well I didn’t send him to that special class so he could look down on us, I’ve a good mind to pull him out and get him a job with the maintenance like his brother. (Unmanageable, 26) Gabby’s additional putative, egregious comments are revealing, particularly how she pronounces ‘ourtistic’ as a middle-class pronunciation of ‘artistic’, thereby essentialising the role accent plays in class demarcations. Punishment for Raymond’s transgressions is to threaten to withdraw cultural opportunities and to coerce him to follow in his brother’s footsteps. Patsy’s brightness in school and the skillset and intelligence she possesses lead to an entrepreneurial endeavour that is successful, but she loses out not because of her skills but because of how her boyfriend Charlie maltreats

134  Knowledge Economy her, evicting her from their shared home. The play’s younger women characters refuse traditional career pathways and options like Linda. Janet attends University College Dublin with help from a Corporation grant; she is someone for whom education is a way of transforming class norms and opening up opportunity.12 Indeed, Janet’s family is an outlier; her father and brothers help with household chores; she does her domestic tasks before heading to college and then stays late in the library to address the demands of her studies. Rose’s discouragements are telling: ‘Well, isn’t it well for some. I  don’t know how you stick all that book-reading all the same. I can’t imagine it’s good for you’ (Unmanageable, 69). Education is deemed by some to be debilitating and transgressive and is discouraged, whereas Patsy, Raymond, Linda and Janet signal the importance of curiosity and investment in education in a play to which I will return. The Waste Ground Party: Punching Up and Dumping Down Shaun Dunne’s quasi/magic realist The Waste Ground Party (2014) is set in an unspecified Dublin inner-city housing estate. Intra- and interclass conflict is a defining feature of the play’s consciousness. Characters have very few material goods; a waste ground area has been turned into a playground, and for its opening, locals are organising a party to mark the transformation. The unwillingness or inability of some neighbours to pay for their rubbish collection results in the outside of an elderly neighbour’s house becoming a dumping ground for waste, which is then symbolically reinforced by bin bags intermittently being dropped onto the stage from overhead. What the infestations of rats represent and what the accumulation of waste symbolises variously reflect on uncertainty and mystery on the one hand but also, on the other, how neighbourhoods lack the proper sanitary conditions; some of it is down to the contributions of the inhabitants themselves refusing to pay refuse charges and illegal fly-tipping by non-locals, and some of it is due to inadequate state services, of which bin collection is but one function. Two friends, Martin and Gary, want to form a football tournament in the new space. Martin has lost his apprenticeship after a fight with a supervisor, claiming it was a row about overtime, but Bernie, Gary’s mother, points out Martin was always late. Gary has particular troubles; he lives on campus during the academic year and has gained admission to third-level education through an access programme. He is uncertain about continuing his studies; a fellow student from the country had mocked his accent, generating laughter amongst his peers, and Gary struck him, aggrieved not only by the ridiculing of his accent but also by its class-exclusionary tactics. Mike Savage notes ‘extensive studies of upwardly mobile working-class students feeling like “fish out of water” at elite institutions’ (2021, 220).

Knowledge Economy  135 Bernie does not want Gary hanging around with Martin, as she feels Martin brings him down. Martin’s mother Tina has had a longstanding conflict with Bernie: Martin: And I think my ma might think that your ma’s a bit . . . a bit of a snob . . . a bit snobby like – Gary: She’s not a snob now – (Party, 18) Here there is the notion of internal class differentials but also how ­aspirations are seen in terms of snobbery: ambition is to be dampened, discouraged, even repressed within a socio-economic group, and how status differentials can be sources of conflict, far more nuanced than traditional class categorisations might propose. Education not only blurs these intraclass distinctions, but educational engagement suggests that characters can operate within and without different class positions, notionally middleclass in terms of cultural and academic knowledge, without the enabling school/college networks and connections associated with it. Education has given Gary an opportunity, but his insights and the language that he now uses attract negative attention within his own community. Martin saves him from a conflict that develops with another young male, and later a row in a pub leaves Gary with a bloodied mouth. There is a sense that Gary’s education attainment/capital antagonises others. When Gary and Martin discuss the origin of Gary’s conflict with the local youth, Gary sees himself as ‘having a conversation’, whereas for Martin, Gary was ‘getting smart’ (Party, 5). ‘Getting smart’ is a loaded summation, also a demonstration through language that knowledge or perspective are deemed inappropriate and threatening; ‘smart’ also has pejorative connotations, implying a challenging and superior disposition that can be frowned upon in working-class contexts – as if above his station. Such class tensions explain in part why Bernie gets irate with Gary after she discovers that he was beaten up in the pub: ‘Gary – don’t make a thick out of me. . . . If you want to throw away everything you worked for – grand! . . . You can do it in a place of your own –’ (Party, 38). Bernie wants to empower her son and is proud of his achievements but is also keen to challenge him, declining to be treated as if she is not savvy, astute or worldly, that she does not possess different types of knowledge capital. Denise also advises Gary to go back to college,13 remarking: ‘Give anyone around here the option . . . they’d all be gone tomorrow. Don’t be the thick who didn’t take his ticket’ (Party, 52). There is a sense, as expressed by Denise, that anyone in the neighbourhood that has the opportunity to leave takes it. Those who are successful do not remain on to inspire or lift others. The locality is not of anyone’s

136  Knowledge Economy choosing.14 Denise emphasises doing the wrong thing is a matter of thickness: any anxieties and uncertainties must be overcome. That said, Denise is also sensitive to intellectual differences, putting Gary in his place: ‘We do know some things, Gary’ (Party, 51). Martin asks Gary if he considers him ‘thick’ (Party, 55), a ‘scumbag’ (Party, 57) or a ‘knacker’ (Party, 57), all class-loaded concepts. If being ‘thick’ is variously reinforced by many of the characters surrounding Gary, Martin evokes the more pejorative terms that are class associated. Gary’s educational advantages give him little credibility amongst those from which he came. The play does not delve into the other aspects of third-level education that might be more challenging for Gary because of his class background, such as teaching styles, research methodologies, module and curriculum design and learning outcomes, expectations around class engagement and contribution or the neo-liberal shaping of third-level curricula and strategy. The crucial thing is whether Gary will find the wherewithal to return and open up possibilities for himself or whether he will be discouraged, fearful, unnerved by his class origin and the outsider status it foists on him, partly because how he speaks locates and distinguishes him classwise, partly because education situates him liminally within his own community and partly because he cannot overcome his own ambivalences and uncertainty. For some students, not having an immediate road map, role model or specific target in sight makes it more difficult, especially if choices are made blind or instinctively – more trial and error. Someone who is from a working-class background is most likely going to have to work as hard if not harder than most others in university – those with mental health, disabilities or educational challenges aside. It might mean having less access to money, a longer commute than most or part-time jobs that tire a student out or not having every book or up-to-date technology/computer, and it may require a sacrifice of aspects of friendships and leisure. They may not have an entire family or community behind them, as The Unmanageable Sisters and The Waste Ground Party propose. The play closes with the waste ground cleared by a Corporation staff member, the two young men gone, and with that, ‘The sun begins to rise’, and the distant sound of children playing is heard (Party, 66). The playground signifies improved leisure facilities and new possibilities; these children are another generation in need of intervention and investment. Education, as Savage notes, ‘as a means of encouraging social mobility and addressing class inequalities have considerable limitations in the face of the growing inequalities witnessed in recent decades’ (2015, 401). The relationship between education and dominant ideology, capitalist or libertarian neoliberal, and the fallacy of merit needs consideration. Opportunities and support do bear fruit.

Knowledge Economy  137 The Last Apache Reunion: Bonds and Intimidation Educational environments are not just about schools, curricula and teacher/pupil dynamics; they are also about complex social relationships amongst student peers. Educational environments can lead to lifelong friendships, access to networks and wider community affiliations. Rivalries can flourish, as can the most distressing aspects of bullying. Cyberbullying can now be added to the list of verbal, physical, sexual, gestural, symbolic, subtextual, threatening, ostracising, exclusionary and violent tactics of those inclined to intimidate others. While schools generally have comprehensive policies and stances on bullying, sometimes bullying is difficult to police inside and outside school, as sometimes there is not enough concrete evidence or resources to investigate accusations of bullying. In Bernard Farrell’s get-together play, The Last Apache Reunion (1993), fifteen years from leaving school, five former friends and two of their partners reunite for drinks and reminiscences not in a pub or a home but in a classroom of their former school, a building awaiting demolition. While the school they attended is unnamed, and it is not clarified as to whether it is fee-paying, the fact that it is a Dublin rugby-playing school suggests that it might well be.15 During schooldays these characters were a tight-knit group, known for spreading fear in fellow pupils, bonding around the idea of them being Apache Indians – falsely legitimising themselves as outsiders, boisterous and transgressive. Contemporary exchanges capture the innate rivalries, confrontations, insults, undermining, status and rank pulling of their interactions. Career-wise, Harry, Jimmy, Paudge, Maurice and Nick are variously successful: Harry has a travel business, Paudge inherited a sizable farm in Tipperary, Maurice is employed in insurance and Nick works in the fashion business alongside his wife Jackie, who previously had a relationship with Paudge. Jimmy is from Sallynoggin, a notable working-class area in South County Dublin, and he has a career in pest control, while his partner Deirdre is a nurse. If all are variously successful by fair and foul means, Jackie seems to be the most successful one. These former friends do not seem to have much in common, not enough for them to maintain ongoing friendships even amongst one or two of them. Their lack of connection beyond school has been impacted by their bullying of a young vulnerable schoolmate, Gregory, who was two years below them, who has taken his own life. Maurice had read the diaries Gregory left behind and was also the one who filmed the aftermath to a particularly nasty assault. The others escorted Gregory to the woods, tied him to a tree, cut the braces on his trousers, forced him into wearing a dress and used a crayon to give the impression of lipstick.

138  Knowledge Economy The impact of this intimidating and inappropriate feminisation and sexualisation of Gregory is evident in his final diary entry: ‘I am not’ (Last, 170). That the assault left Gregory distraught is unquestioned; given that the nature of his despair is based on the labelling of him as ‘queer’, it is less a vulnerability about sexual uncertainty and much more about how unprotected Gregory is. As voyeur and documenter of the group, Maurice is least directly culpable, but as he did not intervene, he was called a pervert by Gregory. Whatever this group of male characters do to deny what transpired, to suppress or destroy the details, the truth wins out, as Maurice’s recordings provide ‘unassailable evidence’ of their attempts to ‘capture the little fairy’ (Last, 169). It is a society where male homosexuality remained illegal until 1993. It also relates to the larger expressions of homosexual assault seen in Aodhán Madden’s Sea Urchins (1988), which drew on Declan Flynn’s murder in Fairview Park in 1982, and all five perpetrators found guilty were given suspended sentences (Halferty 2018, 187). Eventually, the characters accept a degree of culpability, but nothing by way of accepting that what they did may have indirectly led to Gregory’s suicide. Jackie and Deirdre’s siding with truth-telling may be seen as dramaturgically simplistic but is complicated by the nuanced subjectivity that Deirdre affords herself, by Jackie’s assertiveness around Paudge’s claims on paternity and how he thinks that simple reminiscences about how they once were together will be enough to win Jackie over again. However, it is not just single-sex male schools, especially those keen on promoting sport, where bullying is most likely to reside. Bullying is often a legacy issue of school days, which are not the best days of one’s life for some but traumatically opposite. Cross-Connections So many Irish plays touch on education directly or tangentially. Sometimes it is educators in non-educational contexts, like disgruntled teacher Tom in Murphy’s Conversations on a Homecoming (1985) or Master Boyle in Friel’s Philadelphia, Here I Come! (1964), who drops over to gift Gar a self-published collection of poetry and borrows ten shillings, which will go un-repaid. Boyle marks out Gar’s intellectual ordinariness yet shows him more emotion than his father. Greta and Aoife are teachers in Anne Devlin’s After Easter (1994), but they have little to say about the educational system, other than Greta protesting against educational segregation on religious grounds, as her father had. Knowledge acquisition and cultural engagement are problematised, as in Sean O’Casey’s Juno and the Paycock (1924), where poverty ensures that certain types of learning are in short supply, especially when one’s survival

Knowledge Economy  139 is at stake. Trade union activist Mary Boyle is on strike, and she is associated with reading Ibsen’s work. As O’Casey insinuates, Mary’s individual thirst for such knowledge can only have negligible impacts. And qualified national schoolteacher and trainee solicitor Bentham’s intellectual overconfidence leads to a failing to properly complete a will that deprives the Boyle family of an escape from poverty. Popular cultural knowledge by way of history, literature, folk tale and song are evident in the exchanges between Jack Boyle and Joxer Daly. In Hugh Leonard’s Da (1973), Da reprimands Charlie for reading ‘curse-o’-God books’ in the lavatory (Da, 167). When Charlie makes references to Dickens’s Mr Micawber in a letter to Da’s employer, his mother forces him to tear the letter up and start again: he was not to set himself ‘up to be something’ he was not (Da, 202). Paula Meehan’s Mrs  Sweeney (1997) marks class disparities in the context of community education initiatives, where training schemes are variously overseen by priests, nuns and middle-class steering groups, and training does not lead to improved job prospects. In Kinahan’s Bé Carna (1999), school is a happy place for Sandra’s son, Daragh, when contrasted with Sandra’s own educational experiences: ‘They’re lucky kids. I  can’t remember any colour in school, I don’t remember that buzz of work and fun. Maybe it was there but I don’t hear it’ (Bé Carna, Unpublished). There are character expectations that training and education will deliver on change for two characters currently working in prostitution. In Rosaleen McDonagh’s Walls and Windows (2021), Traveller children experience discrimination in schooling; they finish the day early and have teaching assistants appointed to support them. The day after Charlene finishes her Leaving Certificate, she is to be married against her wishes. There is also the more traditional Traveller community’s distrust in and suspicion of education more broadly, seen in the numbers who do not complete secondlevel education; education is often resisted, as it is sometimes viewed as either unnecessary or a bridge into a settled life; however, those perspectives seem to be changing quickly. Kilroy’s Christ Deliver Us! (2010) links education with repression and violence, and Gerard Mannix Flynn’s autobiographical James X (2002) demonstrates how city-based policing, social services, the church, the legal system, middle-class health professionals and educators combine to justify, facilitate and cover up the physical and mental violations of predominantly working-class children in industrial schools, in this instance Letterfrack, run by Christian Brothers. In Lisa McGee’s Girls and Dolls (2006), Claire and Emma have praise for their teacher Mr Rice, who ended up being asked to leave after he was overheard intimidating a pupil. In Owen McCafferty’s Quietly (2012), Jimmy’s intention to do his A  levels alter in the aftermath of his father’s sectarian murder, forfeiting his plans to go to university. Instead, he trains as an electrician. Ian, who found himself

140  Knowledge Economy in prison for his role in the killing of six people, including Jimmy’s father, gets a degree behind bars. In Conor McPherson’s monologue Rum and Vodka (1992), the unnamed, married narrator has encounters with the friends of Myfanwy, a university student, with whom he is having an affair. Her friends take offence at his racist jokes, while he finds their reflections on French films and Greek theatre to be lacking insight and believes their cultural discussions are attempts to exclude and to marginalise him, based on snobbery. In Emmet Kirwan’s Dublin Oldschool (2014), Jason’s estranged brother Daniel is a workingclass, third level–educated figure who is now homeless because of heroin addiction but remains proud of his educational achievements. In most plays, seldom is education connected to privilege and opportunity. In ­Friel’s Aristocrats (1979), education is linked to privilege via boarding schools for all offspring and finishing schools for the women characters. In Declan Hughes’s Digging for Fire (1991), university-educated characters have careers in the arts, business, the law, education and medicine and regard educational progression as being very formative and normal.16 Conclusion This chapter’s focus has not been to any significant extent about offering analysis of credentialization, educational funding, curricula, teaching practices, educational facilities, career guidance, grade inflation, streaming, screening, neurodiversity, different types of intelligences, student retention, subject choice, return to education, internships, peer-to-peer learning, gender segregation or non-integrated education on religious grounds, let alone maverick educators or the decolonisation and de-sectarianisation of the curriculum or the role schooling plays in reinforcing gender norms. The plays discussed demonstrate that education is not just about knowledge, skills, teaching and learning; education is imbricated in classed, gendered, ethnic and sectarian power relationships and in epistemic understandings of self and other within communities. Education is not just a matter of intellectual capital; it is about attitude, questioning, open-mindedness, tolerance and emotional and intuitive intelligence and how external realities impact.17 Education is not just an aspect of social capital, but educational experiences combine the economic, cultural and social, and education can be weaponised, repressive and enabling, often simultaneously. Speaking about Britain, Diane Reay argues that occupation and educational qualifications only half the story of class experience in education. They are more completely understood in terms of confidence and entitlement in relation to education, the amount of knowledge and information about the school

Knowledge Economy  141 system that families have, the social networks that families have access to, wealth or lack of it: but also whether you come to school with a family history of educational success and recognition, or with a sense that education is not something you and your family are good at. (Reay 2017, 180)18 Reay’s view is the that ‘most working-class children and young people experience education as failure’ (2017, 176). That seems to be what Irish plays are more inclined to propose, yet there is a troubling other dramaturgical awareness: why are more successful families like Whistle’s Flanagans destined to remain in the diegetic space? After all, as Piketty notes: ‘To believe that human progress exists, it suffices to look at statistics for health and education worldwide over the past two centuries’ (2020, 16). Educational access and opportunity have countered disadvantage, but only to a point, and clearly not for everyone. Piketty remarks Emancipation through education and diffusion of knowledge must be at the heart of any project to build a just society and participatory socialism. History shows that economic development and human progress depend on education and not on the sacralization of inequality and property. (Piketty 2020, 1006) Education is instrumental less as a means of social mobility and more in terms of self-awareness, knowing the thoughts one thinks with and allowing better questions to be asked of the worlds in which people exist. Education should offer teacher, pupil and co-pupil opportunities to connect with the most curious aspects of themselves, where they feel most alive by the impulse to engage with others and their sense of self, to self-validate as much as self-critique and to situate themselves within their different communities of knowledge and power. If the plays variously suggest that education is instrumental in the lives of characters and that the educational playing field is not level, there is less about what might change.19 Given the extensive educational inequalities, no work holds out the expectation and prospect of fairness. Likewise, few plays feature docile characters uncritically absorbing ideology or what is said about them specifically. While the plays might decline to substantiate the myths of meritocracy, no play suggests that working-class students might not be committing enough to education. Notes 1 A school’s budget; facilities; geographic location; ethos; traditions; alumni; resources; leisure and cultural pursuits; sports activities practiced; career guidance; subjects offered; and the quality, dedication, turnover and pay of teaching staff additionally shape any pupils’ encounters with education. In Britain, elite

142  Knowledge Economy schools lead to high levels of students taking places at elite universities, leading to elite occupations and fast-tracked career prospects, as Mike Savage has noted (2015, 324). 2 Vikki Howard et al. coined the term ‘educational capital’ to reflect how home and school interact but how essential, enriched and enlightened categories of engagement might enhance educational capital (1996, 135–152). 3 John Baker et al. remark: ‘Schools and colleges were not principally designed therefore as institutions of liberation and enlightenment, although that was clearly one of their purposes from the perspective of egalitarian educators. They were primarily designed to be agents of social control, to regulate citizens, to socialize people into particular religious beliefs and into particular gendered, ethnic and sexual identities. They were also assigned the task of selecting, labelling and stratifying students by age and level of attainment’ (2009, 141). 4 Writing about the current British examination system, George Monbiot discusses the mental health impact of an exam-focused education system, what its rationale is and who benefits. The system discourages originality and critical thinking and rewards rote learning and exam technique while also ignoring different types of intelligences. For him, the punitive system ‘pathologizes diversity’ and ‘ensure(s) that the curriculum is narrow and compartmentalised, sealing testable knowledge into artificial boxes’, thereby advantaging social elites, who can access grinds and are better drilled/prepared in terms of exam technique. The government has turned ‘education, which should be rich with the joy of discovery, into an instrumental misery’. Ultimately, his argument is ‘So what are exams for? Preserving privilege. Privilege loves competition because it can always be rigged’ (Monbiot 2022). 5 Despite claims on the fairness associated with the anonymous marking of terminal exams, by accessing fee-paying schooling, the sequestering of additional resource provision, paying for grinds, music tuition, summer schools, foreign study opportunities and so on, the middle classes can easily assert and re-affirm their advantages. The welfare dependent and the majority of the working and lower middle classes do not have the disposable incomes that allow them to match those practices. 6 The play is set after Catholic Emancipation (1830). The illegal hedge school system was a means of defiance of and resistance towards British Rule. Friel was variously accused of romanticising the hedge school system for a particular political agenda, one that chimed with the pro-Republican Field Day project more broadly. 7 The demise of hedge schools was followed by the near extinction of the Irish language in many areas, and it was not until the end of the nineteenth century when the language regained some of its lost ground through initiatives like the Gaelic League (1893). 8 The early part of the decade was marked by the Ballymurphy killings by the British Army in 1971, Derry’s Bloody Sunday in 1972, Belfast’s Black Friday (1972) and Belfast’s Loyalist Workers strike (1974) in addition to Internment, Diplock Courts and the collapse of the Sunningdale Agreement. 9 See James Trier on the representations of maverick teachers in Hollywood films and in The Wire (2010, 179–200). 10 Kathleen Lynch and Margaret Crean note: ‘The moral justification for unequal outcomes in education is provided through widespread allegiance to a liberal code of equality of opportunity’ (2018, 147). Instead, they push for an ‘equality of condition’ (Lynch and Crean 2018, 147).

Knowledge Economy  143 11 Initially seem as a welcome response and solution to the slum/tenement ­conditions in which many working-class families found themselves living in Dublin’s inner city, the poor maintenance of the towers and their lifts; the social isolation they prompted; and the unemployment, squatting, suicide, crime and addictions they fostered combined with the lack of social infrastructure, including the poor provision of shops, banks, leisure and health facilities that people needed, resulted in the state-built suburban dream straying into darker territory for many. 12 Second-level education was free from 1947 in Northern Ireland. In 1967, the then Irish Minister for Education Donogh O’Malley’s introduction of Free Secondary Education and grants to support third-level study came in under The Local Authorities (Higher Education Grants) Act 1968. Until then, fee-paying second-level education was the preserve of the middle classes, apart from the odd scholarship. 13 Denise is a little older than the two males; has a young daughter, Sophie; and is short on cash. Schooling places demands for personal contributions towards the costs of trips and other things that Denise can ill afford. 14 While only 10 per cent of pupils transferred from second- to third-level education in the 1980s, by the 2000s, up to 65 per cent did so in the Republic. This is in part down to the increased places offered by universities but also thanks to a system of Regional Technical Colleges, later Institutes of Technology (now almost all are Technological Universities) that offered certificate, diploma, ordinary and higher degree programmes in science, technology, engineering, business and later the humanities. Further, as a result of regional foreign direct investment (FDI) and the expansion of local business enterprises and spin-off companies, there was demand for graduates with skills in pharmaceuticals, technology, computing and financial services on a level previously not seen. 15 Teachers are given nicknames and not suggested to be brutal figures. 16 This play is different to the representations of second- and third-level education as found in Sally Rooney’s Normal People (2018), where class offers little impediment to the educational progress of Connell, who is from a workingclass, single-parent family. 17 Savage remarks how cultural capital gives an educational advantage: ‘it follows that those steeped in this culture are better placed to understand their school curriculum and are trained in the skills of abstraction, which might help them to get better qualifications which can also be a platform for more successful careers’ (2015, 97). 18 Michael Pierse remarks ‘education is continually linked with feelings of shame, inadequacy and alienation in the literature of working-class Dublin’ (2011, 24). 19 Sandel notes: ‘If my success is my own doing, their failure must be their fault’ (2020, 59).

6 Sexual Encounters, Intimacies and Violations

Introduction All interpersonal spaces including households, workplaces, friendship groups and leisure and recreation spaces allow complex interfaces of cultural, social and economic capital. Some of my focus has been on the dynamics of patriarchally determined households, sibling rivalries, familial inclusions and banishments, departures and homecomings in relation to the occupancy of homeplaces and the presence/absence of collective spaces. Here my focus is on personal and interpersonal sexual expression, sensuality, energy, mystery, intimacy, attachment and desire as vital indicators of complex, transactionality or relationality that are variously public and private, gendered and classed, short or longer term. Sex acts are not just about pleasure, seduction, frisson, comfort, respect, debauchery, freedom and consent, but also boundaries, fear, experimentation, anxiety, failure, rejection and sexual illiteracy. Sex is about bodies, desire, attraction, hormones, emotions and minds, fantasies and projections. Sex is linked to biology, gender identities, sexual orientation, asexuality, socialisation, pregnancy, surrogacy, sexual health, age, divorce, life-stage, separation, bereavement and addiction, as well as non-sexual forms of affection. Intimacy means different things to so many people, but amounts to expressions of sexual need and aliveness. Additionally, sex is also linked to objectification, harassment, coercion, exploitation and violation.1 The rape of adults and children remains an alltoo-common violation, linked to dominance, subjugation and entitlement. (Abuses linked to various state and religious-run institutions have been variously horrific.2) Rape is vastly underreported.3 Court cases can have evidence excluded and disputed, and the accuser, challenged, interrogated, disbelieved and shamed, resulting in re-traumatisation. Throughout the twentieth century and across both jurisdictions on the island of Ireland, various mechanisms of governance and the influence of religious teaching delivered and maintained a stance on body autonomy, DOI: 10.4324/9781003180074-7

Sexual Encounters, Intimacies and Violations  145 desire, sexual health, reproduction and contraception that was puritanical and repressive.4 Morality was invariably anti-body, with sexual intimacy and self-pleasure linked to concepts of sin, immorality, shame and damnation. Pregnancy outside of marriage was a major transgression.5 Treatment of single/unmarried mothers who were forced to emigrate, sent to Magdalene laundries or mother and baby homes was also marked by coercive/ forced and mainly illegal adoptions on both sides of the border.6 Regimes of oppression were stacked against working-class women.7 Access to contraception and divorce was different in both jurisdictions, whereas abortion was not legally available until very recently.8 Many illegal abortions were also performed. Homosexuality was variously criminalised. Brian Singleton notes ‘The Offences Against the Person Act and the 1885 Criminal Law (Amendment) Act brought into being by the UK parliament were eventually repealed in 1967, but still lingered on in the Republic of Ireland until 1993. Northern Ireland only repealed the law [in 1982] after a long and bitter oppositional campaign entitled ‘Save Ulster from Sodomy’ (Singleton 2011, 96). The long history of same-sex discrimination is not merely a legacy issue but remains deeply embedded in the everyday lives of many. A 2020s understanding about sexual orientation, sexual and gender identities and approval of and respect for various forms of sexual expression/desire is very different to 1960s Ireland,9 even if there remains an absence of quality sexual health guidance or educational support for teenagers, and much homophobia and transphobia linger within culture. There is now little that can be categorised as forbidden or taboo amongst consenting adults.10 Notions of freedom are complicated by image-based violence, coercive control, by the ways that rough/violent sex in pornography camouflages complex issues around consent and offers poor templates for intimacy and signals unrealistic expectations and by the fact that many sexual transactions take place with some degree of inequality. Gender-wise, there remain differentials in sexual outcome, those that please or that are pleasured; neither mutuality nor reciprocation are as commonplace as one might expect, some accounting of orgasm gaps/pleasure gaps is needed. Acknowledgement that sexual preferences and gender identity may be fixed; nuanced; fluid; diverse; and to what extent choice, unconsciously driven need or genetics shape longing. Accordingly, as Diarmaid Ferriter remarks: A history of sexuality raises questions not just of religion and morality but also about public health, the attitude of the medical profession to reproduction, the operation of the criminal law system, the application of legislation, the age of consent, demographics, living standards and

146  Sexual Encounters, Intimacies and Violations conditions, education, the role of the family and patriotism, and ultimately the uses and abuses of power. (2009, 5) It would be inaccurate to suggest that modern Irish playwriting was unduly reticent if not silent on sexual desire and attraction. True, many plays deployed successful sleights-of-hand and are cleverly and distinctively marked by erotic energy by way of suggestivity, innuendo, subtext or analogy. Others were far more forthcoming. Across the tradition, especially in more recent work, Irish theatre gives complex expression to different sexual desires and orientations and has much to say about pregnancy, intimacy, pleasure, celibacy, commitment and consent. It is also more transparent than it is on wealth on relational power dynamics, sexual harassment and sexual violence.11 It is worth pursuing why, how and to what extent consent and violation,12 objectification and subjectification, legal and illegal, equal and unequal are problematised by the following clusterings: heterosexual/ same-sex, binary/non-binary, sexual/asexual, gender identity/sexual orientation, casual/committed, pain/pleasure, taboo/taboo-free, intimate/ non-intimate, committed/non-committed, voluntary/involuntary celibacy, present/virtual, rough/soft, trust/distrust, solo/mutual, exclusive/open or polyamorous, fidelity/infidelity, freedom/repression, safe/unsafe, satisfaction/no release, pleasured/pleasuring, harassment/encouragement, compatible/incompatible drives, dominant/submissive, playful/self-conscious and inhibited/disinhibited. Sex, especially when exploitative, is difficult and shocking to stage and often depends on modes of representation that do not rely on a rudimentary realism: distancing devices are not just there to insulate audiences but performers as well.13 Christ Deliver Us!: Gendered and Class-Based Violations Thomas Kilroy’s expressionistic Christ Deliver Us! (2010) is set in the late 1940s/early 1950s in a Kilkenny Diocesan school and is a radical adaptation of Frank Wedekind’s Spring Awakening (written 1891, first performed 1906). Kilroy’s version centres around education, religious teaching and social instruction, dealing with teenage male suicide and the deaths of a teenage girl and her foetus, as she gives birth alone after having conceived during a sexual assault.14 Characters are obsessed with sex.15 Gender, class and social oppressions link with the dominance of Catholicism as a policing force of bodies, the destructive role of religious orders in education and reformative systems. Characters have minimal access to knowledge about bodies, reproduction, intimacy and heterosexual and homosexual desire. One offstage character fantasises about their mother

Sexual Encounters, Intimacies and Violations  147 during masturbation, another tears nude images from an art book, another creates diagrammatic representations of copulation and another finds pleasure in pain. Waltz training for an upcoming dance leads to an intimate liaison between two boys. Only Fr Seamus finds church teachings hypocritical. Michael Grainger rapes Winnie Butler, despite her screams; rape is not an outcome of sexual repression but of patriarchal dominance and class entitlement. Winnie is to be sent to a convent in Waterford, with Michael’s parents covering the costs. Michael’s father’s dramatic choice, with the tacit support of the local district judge, is to send Michael short term to a reformatory school where he is forced to share living space with workingclass boys that his mother generally regards as ‘riff-raff’ and degenerates (Deliver, 53). Young males in the reformatory perform a circle masturbation; the winner being the first one to ejaculate on a coin that is on the ground, foregrounding money in anomalous ways. As Michael dies, he is haunted by the ghost of Winnie; she is the gendered and classed sexual assault victim of his patriarchal and class-laced privilege. BogBoy: Emulated Intraclass Violations Deirdre Kinahan’s BogBoy (2010b) was first written as a radio play (2008, RTÉ). There are three timeframes: Brigit’s time in Navan while she recovers from addiction; Hughie’s prior partaking in the burial of one of the disappeared, Gerard Robbins; and the present reality in which Brigit consults her social worker and writes a letter to Gerard’s sister with information about the location of his remains. Remembrances are not staged realistically. The play combines character exchanges but also direct audience address (See O’Brien’s review, 2010.) Brigit is undergoing methadone treatment, has worked in prostitution, no longer has access to her daughter and has tried to rebuild her life on multiple occasions. During her pregnancy with Kaylie, Brigit stayed off drugs (‘smack’), relapsed and contemplated killing herself and her child. Darren, Kaylie’s father, has custody and depends on his mother for backing. Supported by her care worker, Annie, Brigit moved to a house six miles outside of Navan, was left to run her own home independently, gained work experience and sought to avoid Dublin’s drug culture. During a supervised visit with Kaylie, Darren is crude, unhelpful and angry. He knows how to destabilise Brigit and allows the encounter to be a trigger event for himself. If Darren appears un-empathetic, it can be viewed in the light of Brigit’s attempt to kill their child: ‘Off your face as always Brigit weren’t [you] and dangling her . . . dangling Kaylie . . . like she was a rat!’ (BogBoy, unpublished). In Brigit’s perception of herself as a ‘disaster’, there is trauma, selfdestruction, chaos, self-blame, fear, anger, shame and self-sabotage

148  Sexual Encounters, Intimacies and Violations (BogBoy, unpublished). The chaotic supervised visit coincides with Hughie burdening Brigit with a secret that further unnerves. Brigit has more than enough secrets, including sexual abuse by her father. Gerard went missing from Belfast in 1972. Hughie and his friend Conor helped with the burial but were not involved in Gerard’s execution and were participating because they thought they were helping to hide munitions. Despite strenuous and heart-breaking attempts by families and friends to find closure for those taken, usually young, male and working class, to be interrogated, tortured and forced to sign confessions before execution by paramilitaries, their remains were ‘disappeared’, leading to the denial of funeral rites. The disappearances were licensed by army councils, overseen by either Kangaroo Courts or ‘Nutting Squads’ and were part and parcel of a broader ‘community policing’ strategy that sat alongside intimidations, ‘punishment beatings’, now named ‘paramilitary style beatings’ and banishments, and these occurred for decades in both Unionist/Loyalist and Nationalist/ Republican communities and remain part of the repertoire of community control and oppression, even if incidents have dropped significantly today. Mark Phelan sees the lifting, torturing and executions of ‘the disappeared’ as a different form of performance (2011, 285–316). Kinahan interrogates Hughie’s guilt for his role in abetting the activity and the impact the revelation and the holding on to Hughie’s secret because of loyalty has had on Brigit. She notes: ‘I stood there ages Bernie. . . . I suppose I  feel disappeared (my italics) meself sometimes. No wonder they drove Hughie mad’ (BogBoy, unpublished). However, Brigit misperceives Gerard’s reality while coalescing her sense of self with his: ‘Isn’t he well away from the shite that brought the IRA to his door’, ignoring that he may have done nothing to deserve his fate (BogBoy, unpublished). Lisa Fitzpatrick associates those disappeared by paramilitaries with ‘other impromptu burials, both real and metaphoric: of unmarried mothers and their babies, of the poor, the mentally ill, and the rebellious in the name of respectable Catholic Independent Ireland’ (2022, 133). The play title could easily be BogGirl, as it is about Brigit’s disappearance and resurrection of sorts. Brigit’s berating of Hughie links Hughie to the other males in her life: Darren and her sexually abusive father. For her, these male characters become uniform, undifferentiated, signifying the melding of patriarchal abuses, routines, strategies, initiatives and impulses. The collective consciousness of patriarchy becomes transparent through Brigit’s encounters with such male figures, and her class background exacerbates her circumstances. Working-class Belfast, with its sectarian violence, interlocks with Bridgit’s working-class Dublin reality, marked by poverty, trauma, the selling of sex and bodily violation. If Brigit sees herself in Gerard’s erasure, she also differentiates in terms of her own survival.

Sexual Encounters, Intimacies and Violations  149 The Year of Magical Wanking: Abuse and Solace The Year of Magical Wanking (2010) is a one-person performance predominantly written in rhyming verse, in which writer/performer Neil Watkins reflects on aspects of his life history as he moves through his daily routines and professional worlds, marked by sex, porn and drug addiction. Cormac O’Brien remarks how the play ‘unhides the ways in which HIV-stigma in Ireland is an extension of queer shaming and the pathologisation of queer sex and sexualities’ (2021, 247). Watkins’s details of numerous sexual acts, alone and with others, all seem to turn away from pleasure, satisfaction and release and more towards pain, distress and absence. (Watkins was Alternative Miss Ireland as Heidi Konnt and is living with HIV.) He announces: I am Neil Martin Watkins and I am A sex and love addicted innocent. There’s patterns I’ve adopted that would taint the Love of Saints. I wank, therefore I slam. (Magical, 293) But following lines are harrowing: I’m into every act the mind can dream. But intimacy isn’t on the list. For me to cum, I’m either stoned or pissed. So I’m not really there to hear my screams. (Magical, 293) Violation and humiliation give particular sexual highs in a suspended space of enveloped pain. Some might argue that the intimacy-averse nature of his sexual encounters seems to be ways of partially re-connecting or reinhabiting, even re-enacting the traumas of sexual abuse, which becomes a little unnerving by his admission that even in this abuse situation, although molested at 8, perhaps raped, he expresses the complicated impulse that he ‘wanted more’ (Magical, 310). Watkins talks about the ‘Four cigarette burns on his arms, scars as a consequence’ (Magical, 319). Alternatively, O’Brien suggests that although advised by therapists that his BDSM practices ‘stem from childhood sexual abuse at the hands of a sports coach’, ‘his vocal delivery during these sections of the performance implies that he is not fully invested in the counsellors’ take on BDSM’, arguing, Watkins comes close to embracing BDSM as a radical form of queer resistance and, crucially, as a non-shaming sexual practice; one which

150  Sexual Encounters, Intimacies and Violations would allow him not only to explore new paradigms of queer pleasure but also to explore the self and sexual empowerment inherent in his submissiveness. (2021, 309) Drugs are relied upon to alter his consciousness, as does an encounter with an Indian shaman (white witch doctor) and later an embrace from Amma ‘The Hugging Saint’ (Magical, 326). A vision of Amma and Jesus Christ ends the play on a possible note of repose, a wish for life rather than the inclination for encounters with death or near death that stalks the whole play. For Watkins’s work, both sacrifice and pain are ways of making sense. Sex is complex and troubled, neither guilt-free nor innately pleasurable. Watkins’s drama is a complex exploration of desire, destabilised by rape, fantasies and sexual history. Come on Home: Betrayal, Sexualities and Inheritances Set in an unspecified small town ‘far from the city’, Phillip McMahon’s Come on Home (2018) is a rich, complex work that deals with inheritances, betrayals, homosexual and heterosexual couplings and clerical abuse (Home, 7). Three brothers, Brian, Michael and Ray Donnelly, respond very differently to their mother’s death. A pregnant Aoife wants to relocate with Ray to Manchester. For her, ‘There’s no shame in wanting to feel like you’re worth something? That your child and your husband are worth something’ (Home, 31). Ray, who is addicted to gambling, is reluctant to go, even if the family barbering business is loss-making. Brian is in the scrap metal business; his expressions of rage and his desire to inherit whatever is left of his parents’ assets are linked to a number of issues, including sexual abuse by Christian Brother McCarthy. After being anally raped, Brian came home to find the brother lodging complaints about him with his father. Instead of cutting his throat, the father gives the brother a free haircut and then beats the child. Brian’s father declining to side with his son mimics the old-world order wherein, to preserve the Catholic Church’s standing, truths were not only denied in terms of sexual desire more broadly, but it is how the paedophilic criminal acts were concealed behind Canon Law, behind the denial, repression and challenging of victim statements and how communities and the police kept victims hushed. Such silencing and repression relied upon fear, intimidation, communal and collective collusion in the denial of justice. For Brian, pain, trauma, rage and shame are legacy issues. Although their father believed Brian, he sent him back to school, ‘To be raped. Spoiled me they did. Ruined me. She’ll (Martina) tell ya’’ (Home, 90). Although his father did nothing to protect him, he forfeited his faith. Martina’s remark

Sexual Encounters, Intimacies and Violations  151 is telling: ‘Anyway – if we’d a policy of not marrying anyone diddled by the local priest we’d have a small pot to choose from’ (Home, 98). Brian and his father hated Michael for joining the seminary. Brian also tells now teacher Michael: ‘You shouldn’t be let near kids. . . . Not even the junked up fuckin’ no hope ones. That’s prob’ly the draw, is it? The vulnerable ones. An easy touch’ (Home, 61). Vulnerability and rage drive Brian’s unsubstantiated accusations. Michael’s encounters with a former lover from twenty years ago, Fr Aidan Cleary, now a curate in their hometown, are a way of dramatising the denial and exclusion of same-sex passions in a bygone era, which becomes ever more pronounced after the legalisation of same-sex marriage in 2016. Having left the seminary for London, Michael accounts for multiple sexual encounters in clubs, saunas, back rooms and alleys; sex is less about joy and more its darker aspects. In contrast, Aoife convinces Ray that their child was conceived during a night of drunken passion, and both talk about their sexual desires in a humorous fashion. Aoife notes: ‘Well the grief’ll have you scratchin’ an itch I have on me later’ (Home, 21). Pumpgirl: Raw Deals Abbie Spallen’s Pumpgirl (2006) is set in an unspecified location, across the border in Northern Ireland. A series of three interlocking monologues by Pumpgirl (Sandra), Hammy, her part-time casual lover, and Sinead, his wife, expose a complex world of money, culture, leisure and connection. This is post-conflict Northern Ireland where visible traces of political strife are seen in abandoned army watchtowers, the remains of a new hotel that was bombed in 1994 and memories of locations where people were murdered – ‘two Prods were took and killed about fifteen years ago’ (Pump, 12) – and prisoners are released as part of the negotiated peace process. But the play is not directly a legacy play, even if first staged in 2006. Pumpgirl, who works in a petrol station, is described as ‘a butch girl’ (Pump, 1). Men and women take opportunities to mock her appearance. After buying petrol, women customers callously wonder aloud if she is a man or woman (Pump, 5). Hammy’s hobby is stock car racing. His relationship with Sinead is troubled and bitter, and he works in the local chicken hatcheries while also signing on the dole, and she works in the home. For Sinead, in town ‘you’re either a slut or a snob, no in-betweens’ (Pump, 19). Popular cultural references litter the play; sport stars like decathlete Daley Thompson and celebrities remarked on include Michael Caine and partner Shakira, Liberace, Lawrence of Arabia, John Wayne, Lady Diana, Mel Gibson, Eddie Ervine, Marilyn Manson, Chris Tarrant and actors, Richard Gere and Jodie Foster in reference to Sommersby. Also mentioned are members of pop bands, pop albums and country music, and snippets of

152  Sexual Encounters, Intimacies and Violations lyrics from songs suffuse the play’s cultural landscape, including references to Queen, Supertramp, AC/DC and Glen Campbell. Pumpgirl also references popular home improvement shows like Home Front and Changin’ Rooms. In addition, references to consumer culture recur again and again, whether it is well-marketed toys like Bratz Dolls or franchise Spiderman products targeted at young children. Newry Market as well as the Buttercrane Centre are also points of reference. Allusions to film and television are particularly pertinent, including Zombie and Hammer House of Horrors movies and films and shows like The Matrix, Lethal Weapon, Bridge over the River Kwai, Spiderman, The Simpsons, Dr  Zhivago, Captain Marvel, Fantastic Five and Close Encounters of the Third Kind. Each work is referenced by way of contextualisation and a registering of emotion associated with the work, providing a form of common cultural currency by way of difference. Savage notes how the nature of cultural capital has altered, ‘so that it now takes cosmopolitan and ironic forms which appear to be pluralist and anti-elitist’ (2015, 51). There is none of this ironic cultural capital in Pumpgirl. Hammy’s friend, ‘Shawshank’ McCabe, is nicknamed after The Shawshank Redemption (1994), but he did not escape from prison and is out on release because of his born-again religious status and has been successful in the scrap business, owning the three-storey home that Pumpgirl refers to as a ‘palace’ (Pump, 22). Shawshank uses a quotation from Francis Bacon as part of his seduction of Sinead, and later Hammy highlights its source – a book of quotations that he owns. ‘Whosoever is delighted in solitude is either a wild beast or a god’ (Pump, 19) is attributed by Shawshank to Bacon, but he fails to mention it as a paraphrase of Aristotle. In this instance, classical or high art are used for seductive purposes, but Sinead does not want or notice his intent. Sinead is deprived of marital intimacy and cheats seemingly as a consequence. Later Sinead’s pregnancy is not something that Shawshank wants to know about, and he violently ejects her from his car. Hammy does not return home on the night of his birthday; drinks out are followed by a visit to Shawshank’s house which leads to the gang rape of Pumpgirl by Shawshank, McManus, Doot and Hammy. The last to rape her is Hammy, and if she whispers in his ear ‘It’s okay’, nothing is ‘okay’ about the situation (Pump, 27). This is gender and class-based violence perpetrated by males of the same class. Act Two sees Hammy trying to process his guilt, repairing his relationship with Sinead, and thinking about having another child. Pumpgirl’s instinct is to stalk Hammy when he stops calling by. Fiona Coleman Coffey notes: ‘Pumpgirl’s unsettling acceptance of the rape is rendered even more unsettling by her sudden feminine dress’ (2016, 166). Pumpgirl kidnaps Hammy and Sinead’s children from school,

Sexual Encounters, Intimacies and Violations  153 but they are returned home unharmed, while Hammy takes his own life on the poultry farm. Earlier, Hammy had burned Shawshank’s flatbed truck with kerosene, exclaiming ‘Some people just get a raw fuckin’ deal in life. And amn’t I the fuckin’ master-dealer? Shufflin’ away like a bastard and flickin’ them rawdeal cards in the Pumpgirl’s face?’ (Pump, 32). Hammy has punished himself for what he did; the other rapists are not revealed to be remorseful, and the legal system remains untriggered by the assault, reflecting the low incidences of reportage, let alone the even lower rates of successful prosecutions of perpetrators. Our Few and Evil Days: Uncanny Spectral Desire Mark O’Rowe’s Our Few and Evil Days (2014) is set in Margaret and Michael’s renovated family home which they share with their daughter, Adele, and where they have lived for over thirty years. Sex is a relationship dilemma for Adele’s friend, Belinda, who kills herself; no longer able to deal with the insults, abuses, humiliations and infidelities of her boyfriend, Gary, whose most recent proposition was that she might agree to an open relationship. Adele’s current boyfriend Dennis is only dating Adele so that he can connect with Margaret. Dennis expresses a need to seduce Margaret, to be her confidant, to awaken, heal and save her – a woman he barely knows and who could be his mother. However, if Dennis’s convictions appear dysfunctional and his motives suspect, it is the historical rape of Margaret by her 11-year-old son, Johnathan, that serves as an extreme expression of sexual violation, revulsion or horror. The agreed story is that Jonathan ran away many years previously but the play makes it clear that he was murdered by Michael. Margaret and Michael’s bond is a co-dependent and co-destructive one and no longer sexual. Margaret sleeps nightly on the pull-out sofa bed, a bottle of whiskey by her side; many reasons might be offered for her behaviour, an unlikely one would be that she waits nightly to endure a paranormal sexual assault. She never stays away from home, for fear that Jonathan’s ghost will not re-appear. Dennis’s final remark to Margaret at the end of Act One is: ‘Why can’t you decide to love me?’ (Few, 63). This line eerily echoes the play’s final two lines, delivered by Jonathan: ‘Why don’t you love me, Mammy?’ This line is repeated without the word ‘Mammy’ (Few, 125). The play is not some reflection on Oedipal desire, an uncanny extension of a realist genre or an invocation of a spectral consciousness. This family in O’Rowe’s play is determined by a moment of horror that recurs in a way that is almost Yeatsian in its dreaming back. The family is terrorised by its dysfunctionality, very different to the intergenerational abuse that haunts Carr’s On Raftery’s Hill (2000).

154  Sexual Encounters, Intimacies and Violations The King of Spain’s Daughter: Non-Monogamous Intraclass Desire Teresa Deevy’s one-act naturalistic play The King of Spain’s Daughter (1935) opens with council workers Peter Kinsella and Jim Harris carrying out road repairs. Peter’s daughter, Annie, has been watching the latest town wedding, is distracted by an encounter with Roddy Mann and is late with her father’s food. The wedding is a deal done without the groom ever having set sight on the bride; money is the inducement. Peter strikes Annie because of her lateness and plans to punish her further by forcing her to sign up for work in a nearby factory. Jim notes: ‘Tis a shame you’d madden him. He’ll harm you some day, and all your own fault’ (Daughter, 27), an observation that demonstrates not only the omnipresence of male violence but how brutality is not seen as a criminal act but as parental entitlement. With some money saved and a home that Jim now owns – currently shared with his two sisters, Molly and Dot, whom he plans to evict – he again proposes to Annie. Annie rejects Jim’s plan to evict his sisters, wants away from the locality and dreams of better things but still agrees to his proposition. The world-weary Mrs  Marks suggests their arrangement is toxic in nature, but ‘A man who might cut your throat’ is deemed a good catch by Annie (Daughter, 38). After a romantic evening out with Jim, Annie links up with Jack Bolger and clearly flaunts her intimacies with Roddy, unsettling the patriarchal view that Annie is a ‘bold wild thing’ (Daughter, 2), a force needing to be contained or banished. Through the play’s title and Annie’s reference to the King of Spain’s daughter, Deevy signals Annie’s desire for change, even as Annie settles for less in a world that affords her little. Her frankness, sexual allure and unwillingness to comply with gender norms and expectations and her disinclination to observe either a doctrine of virginity or monogamy are textual markers intended to unsettle conservative decorums, not in keeping with the dominant ideology of their times. Sive: Sale Disagreed In John B. Keane’s melodrama Sive (1959), for Sive, relationships are about connection and intimacy, and for Mena, her guardian, sex and relationships have little or nothing to do with love, bonds or bourgeois-informed romantic aspirations. Mena and matchmaker Thomasheen Seán Rua see money as the grease that eases relationship formation. If they can persuade Sive to marry, Sive will not need a dowry, and the elderly Seán Dóta (a 55–70-year-old) will pay Mena 200 sovereigns and Thomasheen 100, which will allow him propose to a widow. The matchmaking is complicated by the fact that Sive was born out of wedlock and is motherless.16

Sexual Encounters, Intimacies and Violations  155 There is the sense that Sive is being purchased, without her claims on body autonomy. Her love for her young lover Liam is dismissed by Mena, her education and career plans compromised by the need for others to take possession of her body. Mena’s desperation is material, prompted by a fear that Sive will not be wanted: ‘Who will take her with the slur and the doubt hanging over her’ (Sive, 25) but also a need to be rid of her responsibility for Sive and Nanna, whose omnipresence means that alone time with her husband is infrequent. Mena believes the deal she creates is a win-win for everyone; the elderly groom will not last long, and Sive then is simply sacrificing and postponing her freedoms. For Mena, Sive will have no enemy and will have ‘the name of money’ (Sive, 55). For Thomasheen, both he and Mena ‘will be in the middle of plenty’ (Sive, 80). Mike and Mena’s relationship has not resulted in children, and Nanna mocks her, accusing her of being infertile; simultaneously the terror of conception outside of marriage is omnipotent. The play’s material consciousness and imposed gender norms are stalked by a different ideology associated with a changing Ireland; wandering Travellers Pats Boccock and son Carthalawn, whose views are delivered through rhyme and song, offer reprimand and praise. They bring accounts of a modifying countryside, moving from lack to relative plenty: ‘There is moneymaking everywhere. . . . The likes of him [Seán Dóta] will be the new lords of the land. God help the land’ (Sive, 84). The marriage serves as an expression of mesalliance, and the melodramatic nature of the play will see Sive’s drowned body as a revocation of the patriarchal exchange, whose only opponents are Nanna and Liam. The punishment that melodrama promises is for the proponents of the ­ill-matched arrangement. Through incompatibility and the abjection of male sexual desire, the potentially unsavoury, grotesque union is deprived of its patriarchal expectation and commodification. The Passion of Jerome: Classing Intimacy In Dermot Bolger’s heightened realist The Passion of Jerome (1999), Jerome is married to Penny: she is from wealthy Protestant stock who own a big, dilapidated house; land; and other properties. Jerome maintains a particular shame about his working-class background in Carlow. According to Jerome, Penny’s fantasy when marrying him was for her to be ‘painting in her sunlit studio’, with him upstairs at his drawing board, ‘designing mould-breaking housing schemes for the poor’ (Passion, 9). He is no longer an architect; instead he is an affluent marketing executive, composing advertising jingles. The trauma associated with the death of Penny and Jerome’s child, Felicity, who lived for eight days, overwhelms both. Penny refuses to become

156  Sexual Encounters, Intimacies and Violations pregnant by anyone other than her husband, who is effectively infertile. Jerome conducts an affair with a colleague, Clara, in a corporation flat in the working-class high-rise suburb of Ballymun that is rented by his brother’s family. The working-class characters that live here are aggressive in their non-acceptance, even despising the rank and privileges associated with the middle classes. Clara’s class background adds another layer of complication: she grew up in a house in the Dalkey area that ‘anyone would envy, white pillars, electronic gates, a chauffeur taking’ her to school (Passion, 61). The house belonged to plastics magnate Hugh Jeffers and his wife. Her father was a ‘facilitator’ for the Jeffers, ensuring that the husband could bring various women to the family home and the wife could bring home her toy boys with both paths orchestrated never to cross. Jerome’s opening scene is deceptive; it appears as if the sex between Clara and Jerome is compatible, pleasurable, passionate and a risk-taking venture. Clara is comfortable talking about her sexual desires, happy to progress the relationship on her own terms, without commitment or favours, and she is also playfully assertive. Clara refutes the label ‘mistress’, happier with the term ‘lover’ (Passion, 63). Neither is involved enough to take the relationship further. Jerome and Clara have sex three times on the one evening. Only later does it become apparent that virility seems to be his response to his infertility and larger life-problems. Furthermore, uncomplicated pleasure transforms into something else when the cocaine that Clara provides results in Jerome having a vision of a boy who has hung himself in the flat, and he wakes up in hospital with stigmata marks on his hands. Nothing seems capable of staunching the wounds. Jerome is possessed by the boy’s ghost, who asks him to ‘play Jesus’ for him (Passion, 83). In hospital, Jerome wishes to heal the young girl, Jacinta, who suffers from cystic fibrosis, to take away her pain and take it upon himself. Infidelity is a red-line issue for Penny. If trust is perceived to be a major marker of many cohesive relationships, then humiliation, betrayal, lies and deceit undermine that. Infidelity is given broader analogies by Jerome’s comment: ‘Not even screwing Clara was an escape, only part of the same routine, life by numbers. Fiddle the books, fiddle the taxman, fiddle the wife. Fiddle yourself into believing you’re still alive’ (Passion, 43). Cheating on society, cheating on a partner and self, cheating on life raise the question of what might be its opposite? The exhaustion, panic, phobias and pressures of work are clearly articulated in the commercial advertising world. Clara sees it as ‘a fuck or be fucked world’ (Passion, 9). The idea that Jerome only finds life when he both risks and loses everything is the dramaturgical note upon which the play ends.

Sexual Encounters, Intimacies and Violations  157 Marble: Transfixed Monogamy Marina Carr’s Marble (2009) undermines the idea of stability, conventionality, security and happy-ever-after living in bourgeois suburbia. Anne and Art and Ben and Catherine’s worlds are turned upside down when Catherine and Art, who are not even on reasonably familiar terms, start to dream, simultaneously and erotically, about each other. Ecstasy is envisaged by both as them being intimate in a marble room. The dream space of marble is complemented by the dark symbolism associated with De Chirico’s paintings. As Carr explains: ‘De Chirico’s painting “Melancholy and Mystery of a Street” is the mood and landscape I would like to catch’ (Marble, 8). In terms of staging, it is envisaged that both couples utilise the same impressive suburban space as their individual family homes, like with Hughes’s Shiver. Both males share a longstanding friendship, and they have professional longevity and success. Anne is alcohol dependent and increasingly indifferent to life. Catherine feels stifled and suffocated: [I]t’s the prose of living I can’t take much longer. I look around me and everything is irregular, irrational, opaque is what seems beautiful to me now. What are these senseless rules we live by? Who decided them and why? And the minute I assert any personality I’m rejected by you. Any whiff of the essential me is off. I’m so tired behaving myself. (Marble, 32) The material benefits of success are underwhelming, the compromises suffocating, the routine stultifying. Having few concerns about money is not providing any of the characters the time and space to be at ease, let alone self-actualise; instead, vitality is eroded over time. Rhona Trench argues that Marble’s characters ‘display a composite sense of emptiness, depicted by the dissolution of subjectivity, and the play dramatises how the emptiness becomes more manageable’ (2010, 281). Fear of purposelessness and the ‘dissolution of subjectivity’ cannot be downplayed, and the eruption of desire cannot be so easily contained. The uncanny nature of the simultaneous dreams incites havoc and chaos. Initially, Art and Catherine resist the temptation to initiate a relationship, but they cannot remain undrawn by desire and its potential, however much carnage they might leave in their wakes; yet only the funerary dimension of desire seems transformative. I ♥ Alice ♥: Affirming Queer Desire The inciting incident in Amy Conroy’s I ♥ Alice ♥ (2010) is a spontaneous kiss between two retired women in Tesco’s, in Crumlin Shopping

158  Sexual Encounters, Intimacies and Violations Centre, which is witnessed by a theatre director, who then invites Alice Kinsella and Alice Slattery to tell their tale of love in a piece of theatre that is supposedly a form of documentary drama. Theirs is a 28-year relationship that started out as a childhood friendship and blossomed into a longstanding partnership. They live in suburban Dublin, marked by places of work, pubs, cinemas, grocery shops and various shopping centres. The broader context is social justice, human rights, civil partnerships and marriage equality. Paul Halferty contextualises the play in relation to Senator David Norris’s support for civil partnership and the work of Katherine Zappone and Ann Louise Gilligan’s advocacy initiatives (2022, 176–177). There is something extraordinary in the ordinariness of their day-to-day living and something vital and purposeful in the normality of their differences, conflicts, mutual likes and dislikes, shared and unshared passions. Alice Kinsella has the ‘Mother and Child’ painting she bought in a London market. She comments: ‘I know she thinks I keep that picture just to annoy her, but it’s really not like that. I do love it, and in all its tacky splendour, but I suppose I think of it as a totem, an anchor or link to another time and place’ (Alice, 208). Apart from a major illness, again it is infidelity that puts their relationship under strain; Alice Kinsella had an affair with an American intern in the mid-1980s. The elderly couple evolve from a situation where they feel uncomfortable with public displays of affection towards an elimination of any sense of anxiety or shame about their relationship and towards expressions of confidence and pride in what unites them. Their objective is not the civil partnership available to same-sex couples at the time of the play’s first performance but a right to marriage that became realisable after 2016’s equality referendum. By the play’s end, however, the convention of documentary theatre is exposed as a ruse, making distinctions between fiction and truth unessential. Theirs is a suburbia which is not simply heteronormative, even as the characters’ sense of inequality and caution obliges their relationship to be somewhat invisible. This gay couple faces the conflicts and challenges of many couples, whilst the state, at that point, was unwilling to address the inequalities they suffered or legislated for the basis of their union. (Belatedly, there is a line of thought that argues that the marriage referendum was simply to co-opt the gay community to heteronormative norms, to generate a degree of complicity and contrivance with broader culture that undermined the subversiveness of gay culture more broadly.) Although male homosexuality is no longer illegal, and marriage equality has shifted perspectives, that does not mean that gay, intersex, trans, bisexual or sexually fluid individuals are not haunted by past inequalities and injustices around sexual orientation or troubled by current biases and prejudices.

Sexual Encounters, Intimacies and Violations  159 No Romance: Almost Anything Goes Nancy Harris’s No Romance (2011) does something different to most other writing in terms of intimacy, desire and the unconscious and in terms of how what is real, imagined and projected are differentiated. Set in three different locations: an apartment in Dublin’s city centre, a suburban Dublin funeral home and a West Cork cottage, the play dramatises complicated sexual interactions of different couples. Laura wants an erotic photo for Simon prior to her breast cancer treatment. Gail, who is renowned for taking photos of hermaphrodites, transsexuals and women in red-light districts, is distressed because her doctor partner, Sarah, has started an affair and wants to be with this new woman. In scenario two, Joe is perturbed by his daughter posing at a wet T-shirt competition. He calls her ‘an internet trollop’ (Romance, 45). Carmel confronts Joe about his hypocrisy and him emailing women and his purchase of a fetish item (worn stockings) from Abbi, as they stand around the coffin of his mother. Joe follows an erotic blog that Laura also likes, with him assuming the author to be a New York university professor. As Carmel affirms, people involved in internet sex are hardly the consenting adults that Joe thinks them to be. During the final scenario, the spectator discovers that this blog is the work of an elderly woman, Peg, who embeds fantasy, erotic and traumatic life experiences into her quasi-mythic narratives. The stockings that Joe gets in the post may well belong to her, rather than the young woman from whom he imagines them to be. Previously, Peg has been a victim of domestic abuse, and her husband repressed his same-sex passion for his friend. Peg’s new-age neighbours offer an alternative way of living, including polyamory. Peg’s advice to her grandson is significant: ‘Desire keeps the spirit alive. A great passion should be an all-consuming furnace tearing through your body like a forest fire. Making you shiver. Making you ache’ (Romance, 89). This is based on her belief that: ‘Just because you have a tragic life doesn’t mean you have to have a tragic story. We make our own stories’ (Romance, 98). In Harris’s play, issues of infidelity, duty, decency, inhibition, aberration, repressed same-sex desire and dark sex come together to complicate matters of partnership, love, consent and agency. The pressure to co-exist and cohabit spaces is marked by issues of commitment, deception and delusion. If coupled relationships remain the aspiration of many, but clearly not everyone, the play demonstrates they are exceptionally complex to establish, maintain, renew and evolve. Conversations After Sex: Casually Single Over a period of a year, Mark O’Halloran’s multi-scene Conversations After Sex (2021) maps a number of mostly sexual encounters between a

160  Sexual Encounters, Intimacies and Violations woman, SHE, and a series of male characters, listed as A, B, C, D, E, G, H, I and J, some of whom she meets more than once – all are written to be performed by one actor. O’Halloran’s writing gives a subjectivity to SHE in ways that complicate issues of uncertainty, pleasure, assertiveness, joy, consent and no-strings intimacy.17 SHE has a degree in marketing; inherited a house after her father, whom she looked after, died; and has some money to tide her over. SHE is ‘blessed’ (Conversations, unpublished). Across twenty-six scenes, SHE embarks on a spree of sexual encounters in the aftermath of the suicide of her partner. There are no drinks, coffees, walks, meals out, seduction, romance or flirtation, just hook-ups, mainly organised via dating apps. Nobody is interested in anything other than a short-term encounter. Sex is frequent and varied and rewarded by the freedoms of non-committal or non-exclusive intimacy. There is pleasure without shame or the label of promiscuity, even little need to discover the name of a temporary partner. SHE has no interest in their relationship statuses. If O’Halloran is comfortable in dramatising SHE’s multiple encounters, intentionally the male characters do not possess her complexity, even if they are of diverse ages, backgrounds, wealth, nationalities, life experiences and relationship status. Some are more interested in their own satisfaction than hers, but not all of them. A stag trip to Vilnius is described as: We were all too mad for pussy to go sightseeing. The lads. A  mostly married crew. And Paul. Who was soon to be. Shackled. The fat fuck . . . he’s there, in full view, pulling the box off this young one. Really hurting her. Doing a free fucking show. The stupid tart. (Conversations, unpublished) Away trips are seen as an opportunity for married friends to have sex, and the dance floor performance is crude and violatory. For SHE, sexual desire is motivated by her biological, physical, social and cultural needs. In the broader social context of the play, there appears to be nobody stepping forward to question her choices or curiosities or inhibiting how she transacts. SHE’s sister, F, admits: ‘I’ve only ever fucked three men in my whole life’, to which SHE replies: ‘I once fucked three men in an afternoon’. SHE adds: ‘I like fucking. I won’t apologise’ (Conversations, unpublished). F has her own relationship issues, as her husband is having an office affair that he thinks she does not know about. F is enraged by her husband’s cheating: ‘He’s fucking someone else, apparently. One of those skinny vampires in his office. The treacherous c**t’ (Conversations, unpublished). SHE’s casual sexual encounters are offset by F’s need for exclusivity. What appears absent from the script are the social capital

Sexual Encounters, Intimacies and Violations  161 friends might offer; only F visits SHE to offer some degree of comfort, and that is belated. None of SHE’s sexual partners stay over, nor she with them. A few get to know something about her and she a little about them. Does this sexual freedom give clarity, does sex give temporary purpose or is it simply sex for sex’s sake? After having sex on one occasion, SHE admits that she does not care that the curtains remained open: ‘No one saw us, I’m saying. Or I don’t give a fuck anyway’ (Conversations, unpublished). SHE is curious, humorous, inquisitive, indifferent and ‘messy’ and is alert to her own safety: ‘Women have to worry more, don’t they? For their own safety’ (Conversations, unpublished). Yet, having taken speed or coke, SHE overlooks her normal caution and takes risks going to parts of the city she would normally avoid. A  rough sexual encounter does not put SHE off further hook-ups. When SHE takes acid with G, SHE begins to see the ghost of her dead lover, and her distress becomes apparent. SHE’s sexual desire is not necessarily motivated by trauma, as many critics saw it. If subjectivity in Irish theatre more broadly has been linked more to divided or split, fractured or a multiplicity of subjectivities, SHE is a coherent subject, and it is the various male characters with whom she interacts that are inconsequential, insubstantial to a point. Some of the males are vulnerable, despairing, lacking, while others are crude, cruel and insensitive. Collectively, they sometimes offer access to something that she cannot necessarily reach by herself. This is an interesting take on the traditional Irish play where male playwrights are reprimanded for allowing female characters to provide access to thought and feeling that males have had little or no access to from a position of subordinate/supplementary roles rather than as equals. On the issue of agency and consent, Becca Rothfeld wonders why: There are vanishingly few contemporary contexts in which women are taught or encouraged to demand electrification, or indeed, to want actively at all. In the public imagination, they figure at best as passive consenters, acceptors or rejectors of male propositions, at worst as the hapless prey of nefarious lechers. In this picture, sexual agency is mostly reserved for male philanderers and predators. It is telling that #MeToo has focused not on women asserting but on women assenting (or failing to assent). (2021, web) Rothfeld extends the point: ‘No doubt for partially strategic reasons, the movement’s proponents have rarely asked what good sex – by which I mean not virtuous but delicious sex – would look like for women, and under which conditions it might be realized’ (2021, web).

162  Sexual Encounters, Intimacies and Violations O’Halloran’s piece is less focused on ‘assenting’ and more on assertiveness; SHE philanders, without accounting for her preferences, but she is not a predator, someone for whom consent is implicitly and explicitly expressed. SHE is neither inclusive nor exclusionary in her pursuit of desire. For SHE, it is not that casual sex is either indifferent or electric; it is opportunistic. Not all pleasure is obliged to be as intense as Rothfeld signals, neither does it have to be something just beyond poor, satisfactory or bland. Rothfeld cautions that women are ‘forced to pursue what passes for pleasure under patriarchy’ (2021, web). In Conversations, there is little as to how patriarchy oppresses and represses women and places them second in the hierarchy, where women are there to serve, seldom to be served. But if sex is not independent of patriarchy, thus is all sex over-determined by a patriarchal economy? The play does not unpack the implication of alcohol and drug-fuelled sex in the context of questions about active and full consciousness of consent. The accusation that promiscuous females and excessive sex positivity fulfil patriarchal need is not considered. As Amia Srinivasan remarks, ‘It would be too easy, though, to say that sex positivity represents the co-option of feminism by liberalism. Generations of feminists and gay and lesbian activists have fought hard to free sex from shame, stigma, coercion, abuse and unwanted pain’ (2021, 82). In Conversations After Sex, casual sex may be different to what might be perceived as exclusive and committed-coupled sex: it is stigma and pain free, there are risks and dangers, but no less hit and miss. O’Halloran’s play suggests that coupling up is increasingly not the objective of many; more and more people are happy to be single, committed only to the now. Cross-Connections In The Plough and the Stars (1926), Jack Clitheroe’s preference for the lure of revolutionary violence to Nora’s sexual advances serves as one of O’Casey’s indictments of revolutionary ambition. In Friel’s Philadelphia, Here I  Come! (1964), young adult male characters discuss sex in ways that are as ridiculous as they are gender oppressive. The ‘boys’ brag about ‘hot courts’ and the lustful, forthright and sex-positive young women they attract, hiding the fact that they are all virgins (Philadelphia, 51). Gar’s fantasies are about how America is free around sexual matters, where there is a confidence and assertiveness and no barriers to sexual freedom or expression. Private Gar exaggeratedly talks about himself being a ‘sex maniac’ (Philadelphia, 51), the opposite of his celibate state. During the flashback to Aunty Lizzy’s visit, accompanying her are both her husband, Con, and their friend, Ben Burton. Although merry and touchy-feely, and the touching is ‘disquieting’ to Gar (Philadelphia, 60); there is a sense

Sexual Encounters, Intimacies and Violations  163 that there might be something going on between Lizzy and Ben, with or without Con’s approval. In The Unmanageable Sisters (2018), Kinahan’s women characters feel obliged to fulfil the sexual needs of partners, and it is clearly of its time, 1974, when consent was not a legal requirement within marriage.18 Synge’s In the Shadow of the Glen (1903) ends with wilderness-bound lovers, ejected from the home, after Dan feigns death to expose the affair between Nora and Michael Dara. In Keane’s Big Maggie (1969), matriarch Maggie seduces her daughter’s potential boyfriend to put a stop to any budding relationship, because she has such disdain for men, who exploit and treat women badly. Ann’s willingness to sleep with the bank manager in Farrell’s Bookworms (2012) suggests how sex, money and pragmatic deal-making connect. The hotel manager in Rosaleen McDonagh’s Walls and Windows (2021) is sexually exploitative. Darker sex is evident in Billy Roche’s Cavalcaders (1993), when Nuala has sex with Poe, the undertaker, in the basement surrounded by coffins, in a space where his father died. Terry is broken-hearted by his wife’s infidelity, and he sleeps with his uncle’s wife. In Michael West’s Freefall (2010), a post-coital moment twelve years on from their first meeting between A and B has B remarking on the ‘worst sex I have ever had, anywhere, at any time. Including college. Including you’ (Freefall, 39). They cannot spice up their sex life, as she sees him incapable: ‘Love, you couldn’t do sexy if your life depended on it’ (Freefall, 40). That remark is followed up with ‘It’s like we’ve become brother and sister. We don’t have a normal sexual relationship, just a slumbering, over-familiar one that sort of sadly strays over into mild incest every month or so. Or longer’ (Freefall, 40). But A’s response: ‘I wouldn’t mind if it turned out you were my sister’, is troubling (Freefall, 40). A  has a real longing to discover what has happened to his sister, and as B is adopted, he often thinks that she could be his sister. In Eugene O’Brien’s Eden (2001), fantasy, desire, sexual realisation, intimacy and lust are connected in complex ways. Billy is intent on sleeping with a younger woman, Imelda, but he may also be sexually impotent. Billy’s wife, Breda’s, sexual fantasies are about harems and intense lust with Billy as voyeur. Breda has lost weight and has planned an eventful night out with Billy, but she ends up sleeping with a putting green salesman. Ernie Egan chats at the golf club bar, while ‘Evonne’s outside with the Boylans and the inside of their Hiace will witness the sights and sounds of a fiftyfive-year-old mother of four, and a pair a twenty-somethins ridin’ like the clappers’ (Eden, 3). There are numerous plays that deal with male same-sex desire, fewer with same-sex female attraction. Thomas Kilroy’s The Death and Resurrection of Mr Roche (1968) and Brian Friel’s The Gentle Island (1971) are

164  Sexual Encounters, Intimacies and Violations seen as ground-breaking in terms of articulating same-sex desire, but, as Cormac O’Brien notes: ‘these plays examine how heterosexual men react to queerness, rather than place the queer characters central to the dramas’ (2021, 52–53). Frank McGuinness’s Observe the Sons of Ulster Marching Towards the Somme (1985) maps the emerging relationship between two soldiers, Pyper and Craig, both from different social classes, but also the acceptance of their alliance by other soldiers, who had initially responded negatively. Pat Kinevane’s Silent (2015) captures the brutal community treatment of a gay man in Cobh, which ended with his suicide. McGuinness’s The Factory Girls (1982) variously codes Rebecca’s lesbianism and hints at a sexual relationship between Rebecca and Vera, the latter a married woman with children, something later productions of the play confidently foregrounded. Emma Donoghue’s I Know My Own Heart (2001) is loosely based on Anne Lister’s (1791–1840) diaries that account for the Yorkshire heiress’s three same-sex relationships over a tenyear period. Karen Cogan’s Drip Feed (2018), set in 1998 Cork, offers a reflection on intimacy in a culture where same-sex passions are sometimes mocked and reviled by some members of the community in which the character exists. Harris’s The Beacon (2019) is comfortable with the idea of sexual fluidity, with the bi-sexuality of mother and son; there are no justifications or explanations needed for gay couplings. Lesbian orgies are also referenced. Panti’s A Woman in Progress (2009) deals with growing up in Ireland in the late 1970s, the period after the decriminalisation of homosexuality, underground gay culture and realising that being gay was ‘a gift’ (2010, 252). She adds: My generation was the generation who came of age under the shadow of AIDS. We grew up with sex and death inexorably linked. AIDS was here to kill us for going against nature, to punish us for our promiscuity. And we adapted. We had ourselves tested and watched friends die, but we never turned against sex and the liberation it had brought us. Sex defined us – and why not? Sex defines us all. (2010, 259) Stacey Gregg’s Scorch (2016) deals with the issue of ‘gender fraud’ within the context of the current British legal view, where it is an offence to deprive a partner of the knowledge if one’s biological sex differs from one’s gender identity. The play’s expectation is that such a legal perspective, particularly in relationship to a teenager’s sexual discovery, is an inadequate one, but it did not stop some responders associating the play more with a gender-critical viewpoint and as less supportive of trans rights.19

Sexual Encounters, Intimacies and Violations  165 Clerical abuse features in McPherson’s Come on Over (2001), where a priest, Matthew, abuses an 11-year-old girl, Patience, in Africa, while he serves on the missions. Brokentalkers’ The Blue Boy (2011) captures the sadism, physical and sexual abuses carried out by clergy in Artane Boys School in Goldenbridge. Mannix Flynn’s James X (2003) features the sexual abuse of young boys in reformatory schools, but Flynn also links abuse to social class and criminal justice, medical and welfare systems. The narrator in McPherson’s Rum and Vodka (1992) has sex with his wife while she sleeps, and in This Lime Tree Bower (1994), a teenager is initially accused of a rape which was the deed of a friend. In Behan’s The Hostage (1958), sexual curiosity rather than repression is foregrounded; there is openness rather than a disavowal that allows a libidinal energy to run riot across the work. In McCafferty’s Quietly (2012), a young woman is told to engage sexually with Ian not by choice but by way of reward for his part in an atrocity. But it is women playwrights who have most consistently processed the connection between rape cultures and patriarchal power. Marina Carr’s On Raftery’s Hill (2000) maps out the dynamics and consequences of intergenerational abuse. Kinahan’s Rathmines Road (2018) deals with outcomes of rape and how a violator refuses to accept responsibility for his actions and, not only that, is able to live untouched by the trauma he caused. Kinahan’s Embargo (2020) links sex with privilege, power, assault and abuse within a working-class community, and in Our Saviour (2021), female pleasure is foregrounded, but what the play’s central widowed character does not realise is that her partner’s role in her sexual satisfaction is a ruse to gain access to children. Kinahan’s Outrage (2022) explores rape as a weapon of the Irish Civil War that is seldom discussed. Written by Mary Coughlan and Brokentalkers (Feidlim Cannon and Gary Keegan), Woman Undone (2018), inspired by Coughlan’s autobiography, maps the sexual violations that renowned jazz/blues singer Coughlan suffered during childhood and teenage life. Apart from Gina Moxley’s Danti-Dan (1995), where Cactus sexually exploits and then incites Dan’s death, and Carmel Winters’s B for Baby (2010), where a female care worker has sexual relations with a male character with an intellectual disability, all of the plays mentioned here deal with male assault. Fitzpatrick argues that sexual violence repels and horrifies, but it also captivates, noting however that: representational strategies that use rape and sexual violence to communicate an idea or message that may have little to do with rape per se. These include the silencing of the victim’s voice, the erasure of her subjectivity, the use of her body as a site for the enactment of conflict between male protagonists, and the use of rape as a metaphor (for war,

166  Sexual Encounters, Intimacies and Violations defeat, political oppression, colonization, and so on), that frequently displaces the ‘realness’ of rape as a lived, personal, embodied experience. (2018, 2) Most of the plays mentioned here avoid the allegorical framing that Fitzpatrick cautions about and see assault from the perspective of embodied and memoried traumatic experiences. Abusers do not differentiate between classed and gendered bodies, but at the same time, it is working-class women’s bodies, followed by those of working-class males, that are most vulnerable. Violators are variously classed across the plays. Conclusion Across the twentieth century in Ireland, attitudes to sex, pleasure, intimacy and connection were complex; often there were different views expressed in public than in private. Across both jurisdictions, Church and state policed sex in crude, threatening, oppressive and hypocritical ways. If gay men were prosecuted for their sexual acts, many women were sent to laundries for transgressing norms and more again fled via emigration to avoid persecution, there was also very little prosecution of those who raped and assaulted within institutions, educational settings and family and community spaces. If conception was one outcome of unprotected sex, the other was the horrors associated with Magdalene laundries and mother and baby homes and forced adoptions that are repeated in so many plays, including Máiréad Ní Gráda’s On Trial (1966), Patricia Burke-Brogan’s Eclipsed (1992) and ANU Production’s Laundry (2011).20 Srinivasan notes, ‘Sex is no longer morally problematic or unproblematic: it is instead merely wanted or unwanted’ (2021, 82) It would be utterly reductive to suggest that it is a switch from sexual punishment and shaming towards something that is simply sex positive that captures the degree of change. Culturally, to think that ‘Slut shaming’, ‘prudery’ or offensive comments about same-sex passions have gone away would be an error. There remains much that is unsettling: the absence of good sexual education, pressures to conform and uncertainty around consent; it is more complex than being about wanting. The notion of consent obliges one to unpack attraction, seduction, temptation, comfort, manipulation, misunderstandings, deception and communicative short-hands. If one runs with the idea that consent is some form of self-deception given different levels of power, status and knowledge, then that has huge implications. Consent is even more problematic when there are fears of the consequences of saying no, when there are major mismatches in age/power/authority, where boundaries, hierarchies are blurred through pressure, grooming, virtual stalking, drugs and alcohol.

Sexual Encounters, Intimacies and Violations  167 Sex is complicated further by participation in group sex, voyeurism, exhibitionist thrills, humiliation, rough play, cutting or asphyxiation: pleasure/ endorphins are sought in many forms; the crossover between pleasure and pain works for many and can be very unsettling if linked to prior violations. Some people take pleasure from complex expressions of dominance and submission and have sex based on a thrill derived from unequalness that may seem inconsistent with a view on equality. Too often the subordination of women is invariably eroticised. Sex acts are additionally made problematic by the fact that they often include a degree of political incorrectness. Esther Perel remarks, ‘Ironically, some of America’s best features – the belief in equality, consensus-building, fairness and tolerance – can, in the bedroom, result in very boring sex’. Perel adds. ‘Sexual excitement is often politically incorrect; it often thrives on power plays, role reversals, imperious demands and seductive manipulations’. She concludes, American therapists ‘are often challenged by these contradictions’ (Perel cited by Conroy 2021, web). Disconcerting might be the realisation that much about desire and attraction is outside of conscious awareness, and to what extent do ideology and culture prompt what is deemed desirable or not, imagined, fantasised? Whatever one’s desires, preferences, prejudices, Srinivasan concludes: ‘no one is under any obligation to have sex with anyone else’ (2021, 86). Across the sample of plays discussed here, and apart from the plays that deal with violation, contemporary Irish dramaturgy is more comfortable with sex in ways unimaginable a hundred years ago. Sex as one expression and outcome of complex social, eroto-cultural and economic capital is a vital awareness, and Irish theatre does well on that front, foregrounding or nuancing far fewer inequalities than one might expect but, around sexual violation is more unyielding and assertive on accountability and injustices in the way that wider society often is not.21 Sex becomes an expression of presence, opportunity, risk, provisionality, aliveness and possibility rather than one of subjugation and repression, more an enabling form of joyous reciprocation and mutuality, than one of manipulation and exploitation. Violation requires the full force of the law, and the two jurisdictions on the island need to lean in more than they have in the past. Theatre has done especially well on that front, in the calling out of rape, abuse and sexual violation. Notes 1 Lisa Fitzpatrick distinguishes between rape and sexual violence. She notes how rape as a legal term is slightly differently determined in the United Kingdom, Ireland and the United States. ‘Sexual violence’ is the term used to ‘cover a wider set of criminal and abusive behaviour’, and is defined by the Rape Crisis Network Ireland to include ‘rape, sexual assault, child sexual abuse, sexual

168  Sexual Encounters, Intimacies and Violations harassment, rape within marriage/relationships, forced marriage, so-called honour-based violence, female genital mutilation, trafficking, sexual exploitation, and ritual abuse’ (www.rcni.ie)’ (2018, 37). 2 Miriam Haughton mentions the State Report into the Kilkenny Incest Case (1993), Commission of Investigation: Report into the Catholic Archdiocese of Dublin July 2009 (The Murphy Report), the State Report into the Roscommon Child Care Case 2010, the Commission to Enquire into Child Abuse: Publication of ‘Ryan Report’ May  2009, Report by Commission of Investigation into the Catholic Diocese of Cloyne (The Cloyne Report) (2011) (see Haughton 2018, 77–78). In Northern Ireland, the Inquiry into Historical Institutional Abuse Bill was passed by the Assembly in December 2012. (Haughton 2018, 127). 3 Amia Srinivasan wonders about the dilemma of the law: ‘to wrongly punish’ or ‘wrongly exonerate’, so for this reason ‘the burden of proof rests with the accuser, not the accused’ (2021, 9). 4 As Fintan O’Toole points out, in the absence of contraception, many doctors prescribed the pill as a period regulator; packaging removed any reference to the medication for contraception purposes (2021, 168). 5 Many males absconded on their duties to financially support their offspring. ‘Deserted wives’ was a term flung about insensitively. 6 Set in a Magdalene laundry, Patricia Burke-Brogan’s Eclipsed (1992) captures the horrors of such institutions. 7 Diarmaid Ferriter notes: ‘There was no adoption legally available in Ireland until 1952; in 1940, 2,349 children between the ages of 2 and 15 were boarded out to foster homes around the country’ (2009, 251). 8 Contraception was illegal in the Republic until the Family Planning Act of 1979. The National Health Service (Family Planning) Act 1967 made contraception freely available in the United Kingdom, prior to which contraception was only available to women whose health was at risk because of pregnancy. Diane Urquhart notes: ‘In England, which included Wales in its jurisdiction, divorce moved to a court-based process as a result of the 1857 Divorce and Matrimonial Causes Act. Ireland’s exclusion from this legislation meant that it alone in the United Kingdom continued with the practice of parliamentary divorce until 1922. With the partition of Ireland, divorce law further diversified. Northern Ireland adopted the parliamentary system of divorce before moving to a court-based process in 1939. By comparison, there was no mechanism to divorce in independent Ireland, a position reinforced by the 1937 constitutional ban. Divorce was only legalised in the Republic of Ireland in 1996 with the first divorce in this jurisdiction granted in the following year’ (web). Abortion was legalised in Northern Ireland in October 2019 under the Health (Regulation of Termination of Pregnancy) and under the Health Act 2018 in the Republic. 9 The sexual revolution of the 1960s and the advances of the women’s movement changed many outlooks around sexual freedom and knowledge; sex was decoupled from pregnancy with contraceptive and morning-after pills, abortion became available in many countries and sexual diseases that once were lifethreatening or life-ending could be easily treated with antibiotics. The availability of divorce internationally also changed interpersonal dynamics, as did increasing numbers of women in the workforce, challenging traditional roles. 10 Porn, dating apps, kink, fetish, BDSM, chemsex, sauna sex, sex robots and swingers clubs are all part of the erotic landscape. There is greater commodification

Sexual Encounters, Intimacies and Violations  169 of sex through Fans Only, phone sex, cam sites and virtual sex. Sex sells is an old adage, but today sexual wellness is increasingly monetised. 11 Irish theatre has less time for unrequited love or muddled lovers eventually finding each other, unless it is doomed love across the sectarian divide, what Christopher Murray refers to as ‘The Romeo and Juliet typos’ (1997, 192–194). 12 For Srinivasan, consent is ‘too narrow a parameter’ (2021, xiii). 13 In the staging of On Raferty’s Hill (2000), Fitzpatrick argues Red’s ‘stabbing the knife into the table communicates the pain and shock of penetration, so that although the audience does not see the rape performed, it is represented for them through the semiotic substitution of the knife and table for the bodies of Red and Sorrel’ (2018, 129–130). 14 José Lanters notes how the play draws on ‘the harrowing details of the Kerry Babies case [Joanne Hayes], the death of Anne Lovett [the 15-year-old schoolgirl gave birth in a grotto and both died] and the X case [a pregnant 14-year old rape victim was allowed to travel outside the country to seek an abortion], all of which involved young women and crisis pregnancies’ (2018, 8). 15 For Fintan O’Toole, when matters are not open, they become ‘hyper-sexualized. There is no proper arena for sex, no place in which to contain it. So it could bleed out of everything. . . . Precisely because of its own success in keeping sex out of the public arena, Irish Catholic conservativism was forced to become deeply Freudian, to read everything as an expression of hidden libidinal desire’ (2021, 200). 16 The Prevention of Cruelty to Children Act, which came into operation in 1904, deemed it illegal ‘to cause or encourage the seduction or prostitution of a girl under 16 years of age’ or ‘to reside in or frequent any disorderly house’ (Ferriter 2009, 45). 17 The two narrators in Mark O’Rowe’s Howie the Rookie (1999) spout misogynistic ideas and have crude, objectivising and inappropriate views on women’s bodies and their desires, to a degree that there is a gendered type of sex shaming that says more about the ways that the characters view their worlds. 18 Fitzpatrick notes that ‘Marital rape has been recognized as a crime since 1982 (Scotland), 1990 (Ireland) [Section 5 of the Criminal Law (Rape) (Amendment) Act], and 1991 (England and Wales)’ (2018, 37). 19 Transgender issues are becoming better articulated; in 2018, Kinahan’s Rathmines Road (2018) was the first Irish play to feature a trans character, Dairne, played by a transgender actor. Amy Conroy’s Luck Just Kissed You Hello (2015) was performed at the Peacock in 2022. Una McKevitt’s The Big Deal (2011) is a ‘verbatim play that charts the experiences of two trans women’ and was first performed by two ‘cisgender women actors’ (Halferty 2018, 193). 20 Miriam Haughton notes that ‘10,000 women entered the laundries between 1922 and 1996, though the first laundry opened in 1767. Many who entered these places never left them, but died in forced slavery and incarceration, unaware they had the legal right to leave. Some were buried on convent grounds in mass graves without public ceremony. Their identities were removed on arrival, as was their freedom and if pregnant, eventually, their babies’ (2018, 124). 21 Surprisingly, there is very little evidence of interclass desire; in Murphy’s The Wake (1998), Henry’s father had died having sex with a working-class woman with an allegedly dubious reputation.

7 Intersectional/Intercultural Conflicts, Mésalliances and Irreconcilabilities

Introduction In the Irish Free State and Republic (1949), despite the factional nature of Civil War politics, the mantra of one nation and one religion was an agreed fiction to which most signed up. Interclass and intraclass conflicts were side-lined socially, culturally and politically, and theatre has been especially reticent in dramatising them. In Northern Ireland, as my introduction suggested, there was nothing like a myth of unity but one of irreconcilable division. A minority Catholic cohort would suffer multiple discriminations and a Unionist majority would believe their union with Britain was under constant threat. The Civil Rights protests of the late 1960s would be followed by The Troubles period (1968–1998), with the negotiated settlement of the Good Friday Agreement of 1998 alleviating most of the violence, with power sharing, however uncomfortable for many, the new order. In both jurisdictions, the requirements of the middle classes and ruling elites trumped most else, as they set the values, beliefs and political agendas. In both jurisdictions, there were always differences between urban and rural ways of life, between the salaried and waged, between living in private versus social housing, in the academic attainment of different social class categories, in the appreciation of cultural expression and of course in terms of economic capital. Post-peace process and during the Celtic Tiger period, migration changed the social dynamics in both jurisdictions. Identities were not just predominantly Irish or British or Northern Irish, but people living on the island were American, Brazilian, Polish, Spanish, Lithuanian, Italian, Romanian, ­Chinese and from many other countries across Asia and Africa. This chapter deals with intercultural, sectarian, intergenerational, ethnic and inter- and intraclass conflicts while giving voice to diverse viewpoints on gender, ethnicity, class and race hierarchies and inequalities. Such conflicts are invariably marked by a range of discriminations; some are challenged, some are resisted, some invariably remain unsaid. Hostilities and DOI: 10.4324/9781003180074-8

Intersectional/Intercultural Conflicts  171 incompatibilities return to arguments made in previous chapters. Division, disgust, despair and the irreconcilable are seldom lightened. Battles between groups, whether classes, races, ethnicities or genders, are always relational, combining economic, social and cultural capital in complex ways. Purgatory: Class Contamination and Dissolute Progeny In W.B. Yeats’s dramas, reality is seldom just the immediate present; past traumas and transgressions are not left behind by time. Souls of the dead re-live and re-enact suffering within a purgatorial-like sensibility. With a bare tree as a backdrop, Yeats’s Purgatory (1936) is set outside a ruined house, the threshold of which has been removed to ‘patch a pigsty’ (Purgatory, 255). Exchanges between an Old Man and his young son lead to reflections on death and loss, how the past invades the present and most of all what is intergenerationally exchanged. The Old Man’s mother came from a wealthy background, married a stable groom far beneath her class and died during childbirth, with her husband bringing ruin to the big house. The Old Man’s mother is compelled to relive her transgressions, despite her remorse. Lust, pregnancy and death result in the property finding itself in the wrong hands and ensuring devastation. The house was not just lost but was burnt down. The Old Man is now a peddler and his son the outcome of a sexual encounter with a traveller in a ditch. The play appears not only cautionary about interclass relationships but warns that given access to privileges, the poor are likely to destroy the rich. The Old Man establishes the house’s social, political and symbolic importance: ‘Great people lived and died in this house; magistrates, colonels, members of parliament, captains and governors, and long ago men that had fought at Aughrim and the Boyne’ (Purgatory, 257). The young boy does not have a problem with his grandmother marrying down, stating: ‘What’s right and wrong? My grandad got the girl and the money’ (Purgatory, 256). While fixated on the moment of his conception, as it is re-enacted in another dimension, the Old Man faces down his son as the son attempts to steal his money, what the son believes to be his entitlement. The Old Man slays his son with the same knife that he had already used to kill his father, bringing an end to his line. The play’s final lines: ‘Release my mother’s soul from its dream! Mankind can do no more. Appease the misery of the living and the remorse of the dead’ serve to summarise the negligent ramifications of a woman marrying outside her social group, again prompted by wayward sexual desire (Purgatory, 262). Suggested is that working-class infiltration rather than assimilation with the indigenous population is seen as central to the demise of the Ascendency class, who did no wrong and acquired no wealth or resources other than by fair means as was their entitlement because of their greatness and right.

172  Intersectional/Intercultural Conflicts Across simultaneous time frames, murder, pollution, repetition and purification are gender and class inflected, with the play serving as a form of ‘ethnic cleansing’ (Murray 1997, 32) or as symbolic of class cleansing/ erasure. The Old Man’s bringing of the hereditary line to an end serves as a kick-back against the demise of the Ascendancy class; there is nothing natural or remedial about its decay and grieves that there is nothing of its social and cultural capital to be preserved, as it is cross-class breeding, the contamination of a gene pool, arson and murder that accelerate its demise. For Lionel Pilkington, the early Abbey Theatre’s work was fundamentally ‘an act of quasi-Ascendancy philanthropy’ (2001, 10), intent on ‘moderating the traumatic prospects of majority rule’ (2001, 4) but also a paving of the way for a new Catholic elite. Yeats’s keenness to offset the demise of the Ascendency class has at its core a disinclination to countenance contributory actions by the Anglo-Irish themselves and a willingness to blame the dissolute working-classes, not the emerging Catholic elite. Juno and the Paycock: Class, Factions and Betrayal Sean O’Casey’s tragi-comic Juno and the Paycock (1924) is set in 1922 during the Irish Civil War (1922–23) when rival factions Free Staters (ProTreaty) and Die Hards (Anti-Treaty) fight each other as a consequence of the Anglo-Irish Treaty. The calamitous nature of Civil War politics is captured by Johnny Boyle’s betrayal of a former friend and neighbour, Robbie Trancred, and in Johnny’s later execution. The Boyles live in squalid conditions; tenement living was shaped by the needs of landlords to maximise occupancy and profit; privacy, security, sanitation, maintenance and safety were lower-order considerations. Money is tight; matriarch Juno does her best to keep her family afloat. Work-shy Captain Jack Boyle is motivated more by alcohol consumption than by any need to earn money. Jack’s acquaintance, Joxer Daly, is a broke, cunning, conniving, disloyal and parasitic character, desperately living from hand to mouth, truly the poorest of the poor. Mary Boyle is an intelligent trade union activist but has no wage, as she is on strike. Johnny is incapacitated by his disability. Fortunes appear to change when Mary’s new boyfriend, Bentham, announces that Jack is to inherit a substantial sum of money. By Act Two, Jack in particular performs a version of what he thinks it is to be middle-class, overly keen to demonstrate a knowledge of the business world, taking delight in the signing of documents and discussing consols [a debt instrument], and he sheds much of his anti-Catholic Church rhetoric. The Boyle household is ‘dressed up’ to look more bourgeois, a visual disconnect arises between the delipidated nature of the space now overlaid with the conspicuousness of its newfound content. Neighbours

Intersectional/Intercultural Conflicts  173 pawn possessions so that the Boyles can have immediate access to cash; suppliers of furniture and clothing provide goods on credit. A celebratory party is interrupted by Tancred’s grieving mother, and the partying serves as evidence of unneighbourly insensitivities, as well as signalling the play’s grotesque and carnivalesque intent. Moreover, the precarity and transgression of their world is later captured by the capacity of figures like tailors, furniture removers and the mobiliser (Republican operative) to encroach on the family space.1 Juno is marked by dramaturgical disdain towards the mercantile middle-classes; Needle Nugent is a tailor and undertaker, profiting from making police uniforms and the provision of burial shrouds. Bentham’s ineptitude in the writing of the will makes the document invalid; he forgot to mention Boyle by name, merely listing him as Mr. Addison’s first cousin. While working-class characters are more in awe of than antagonistic towards Bentham in their interclass exchanges, all his talk of theosophy and personal values suggests that his beliefs are not only a luxury item, ones to be conspicuously performed, but unactionable. Bentham’s more senior professional colleagues are also in dereliction of their duties, offering no oversight of their trainees’ work. The failed or ‘fake’ will, ill-recorded bequest and unrealisable inheritance can also be read analogously as consequences of revolution and selfgovernance, hinting at the broken promises of better living conditions and enhanced rights for the very large cohort of Irish working classes constitutionally enshrined in 1922 and central to the values of the 1916 Proclamation. If social elites, including the upper and middle classes, were in receipt of the power and authority transferred from the British to the new Irish state, the dividends of independence were not shared more broadly (see Merriman 2011, 4–17). The working poor are not treated as legitimate stakeholders. The impact of a relentless daily grind has O’Casey suggesting that Juno’s life force is one of ‘mechanical resistance’ (Juno, 6), that poverty has aged her, yet she is also the most focused and defiant of those around her. Mary is keen to understand her world; a collection of Ibsen’s plays is associated with her. O’Casey suggests that while Mary is enabled by her cultural capital projects, she is weakened by the social and ideological blind spots of her own class loyalties and under-acknowledgement of the precariousness of its cohesion, mutuality and solidarity. In O’Casey’s work, although social and cultural capital are compensatory and part of character aspiration, they are never a surrogate for various lacks. The resistance and agency afforded Mary and Juno, in that they abandon their home to move in with Juno’s sister, needs both acknowledging and deeper consideration. It is their commitment to co-parent Mary’s unborn child – another form of labour – that is deemed an essential opposition to the laziness of Jack Boyle and the unreliability of male inputs more broadly.

174  Intersectional/Intercultural Conflicts Multiple scholars have castigated O’Casey’s dramaturgy for variously undermining the poor, ignoring ideas, sentimentalising victimhood and creating characters akin to jabbering leprechauns (Kiberd 1995, 218–238). Paul Murphy accuses O’Casey of advancing eccentricities and subordinating pain (2008, 69),2 and Seamus Deane of dismissing and repudiating politics (1985, 108). For Pilkington, O’Casey discredits militancy (2001, 94). Contrastingly, for Christopher Murray, Juno espouses ‘practicality over ideology’ (2000, 66). It is Juno’s view that Johnny lost his best principle (his ability to work) when injured fighting for Ireland’s independence. The tragi-comic impulse of the writing does not disguise the terrors and fundamental impacts of poverty; rather the genre’s associated excesses outlandishly foreground the horrors of necessity in relation to labour, impoverishment and hunger. A notional national solidarity is jettisoned by civil war. Moreover, O’Casey’s radicalism is to divest his characters of simple belief systems, to find the contrary in them and to identify that the working classes are not merely the reactive victims of the dominant class. Trade unionism and worker resistance are as marked as much by solidarity as by vested interests. In a situation of destitution, political leadership/militancy, church, landlords and the legal profession are found wanting in their duties and obligations towards the poor, who are also found wanting towards each other. Da: Intergenerational Antagonisms In Hugh Leonard’s expressionistic tragicomedy Da (1973), Charlie comes back to Ireland to bury his father and re-experiences key moments in his past by way of flashback. Exchanges with the ghost of his father, Da, and interactions with his younger self allow Leonard to raise issues of ­adoption, education, rank tolerance, gender roles, class mobility and antagonism, especially intergenerational differences. It is also a play about manners, poor knowledge, labelling, surveillance, sexual repression and flawed common sense.3 Adapted by the Tynans after his mother tried to abort him, Charlie faced constant reminders of his ‘illegitimate’ status and is reared in a house rented from the corporation in a family with extraordinarily little, where there are few treats. Charlie got a scholarship to complete second-level education, and Drumm offers Charlie employment after he leaves school. Drumm is a troubled, difficult, pragmatic, assertive, curmudgeonly and insistent role model. Drumm is also a cynic, remarking: ‘From people too ignorant to feel pain, may the good God deliver us!’ (Da, 187). Drumm is different to the Hitler-admiring Da, who is seen as backward, a bit ignorant and subservient. Charlie remarks: ‘Blessed are the meek: they shall inherit the dirt. The shame of being ashamed of them was the worst part’ (Da, 179).4

Intersectional/Intercultural Conflicts  175 Da is employed by the Jacobs, a Quaker family, for fifty-eight years. For Charlie, Da is an over-accepting, ‘ignorant, wet, forelock-tuggin old crawler’ (Da, 220). In addition, Jacob wills Da thirty-plus pairs of melted glasses that he retrieved from the San Francisco earthquake of 1906. Da sees the heirloom as significant, whereas Charlie sees no merit in sentimental value. Charlie remarks: ‘You worked for fifty-eight years, nine hours a day, in a garden so steep with a pension of ten shillings a week you did handsprings for joy because it came from the Quality’ (Da, 183). (There is also the gratuity of 25 pounds.) But Da reminds him that if the Jacobs were patrician and respectful and had traditions around Christmas and holidays, however meagre, the new Catholic occupants of the house would be more demanding, less easy to work for: ‘Catholics with money, letting on they’re the Quality’ (Da, 216). ‘Enderley’ is the appropriate name of the Jacob’s home.5 The marriage between Charlie’s mother and father was arranged behind her back by way of dowry, leaving her feeling short-changed, given she did have a boyfriend, and Da was threatened by the fact that their relationship did not grow out of dating and romance. She suffered several stillbirths. The Mother’s remarks are insightful: ‘A body’s not put into this world to pick and choose and be particular’ (Da, 200), and it will be the next world ‘when everything will be made up to us’ (Da, 200). This is a great example of internalised values in the face of poverty; there is tolerance based on the delusion of celestial payback. Religion gives purpose and meaning to inequalities, traumas and indignities. Suffering is less a burden if afforded such a framework. Charlie is angered by how poverty shapes a consciousness, as he sees it as a consequence of snobbery, inequality, division and internalised oppression, but there are other viewpoints that challenge this perspective. Charlie is aggrieved to discover that the money he had sent Da over the years had been put aside so that Charlie can have an inheritance. Even as Charlie destroys the heirlooms, keepsakes and the memorabilia, all the physical traces of lives past, he is still not free of his father’s ghost, who pursues him to England. The play ends with Da singing ‘The Waxy Dargle’, a song about an excursion to the seaside and not having the money to go, the final line of which is ‘Sure I haven’t got a farthin’’ (Da, 232), one that reiterates a defiant, humorous and celebratory nature to working-class culture in the face of having very little, something that Charlie does not fully grasp, a triumph that trumps Charlie’s sense of class antagonism, criticism and shame. Mrs Sweeney: Intraclass and Interclass Incompatibility Paula Meehan’s quasi-realist play Mrs  Sweeney (1997) is set in the near past in the Maria Goretti Mansions in the Sweeney home. It is a community

176  Intersectional/Intercultural Conflicts negatively determined by poverty, destitution, unemployment, premature deaths of the young, addiction, trauma, marginalisation, intimidation, anti-social behaviour and domestic abuse. Pit bull terriers run about freely, pensioners are robbed of welfare payments, cats are hung from lampposts, drug pushers and junkies are attacked and grandmothers are raped. The police do not intervene, and vigilantism is prominent. Lil’s daughter Chrissie died from an AIDs-related illness, brought on from using infected needles. Her husband has been found catatonic amongst his dead beloved pigeons, and their flat has been broken into on four occasions in the past month.6 Lil remarks: ‘What they got here wouldn’t fix them up for a day. You’d think they’d go out to Howth or Rathgar or. . . . Preying on their own people like animals’ (Sweeney, 400). If looting, ransacking and defecating on the floors of your own neighbours signals no sense of community cohesion, there is a sense that addiction and social disadvantage drive such behaviour. Intraclass and inter-gender rivalries and disputes rather than accord and connection are exemplified by Lil’s relationship with Mrs  Earwig Mack, who lives overhead and bangs on her floor. Lil’s reflexive rage is in response to her neighbour showing no compassion when Chrissie was ill. Mack’s new bedroom carpets and kitchen are seen as conspicuous displays of wealth and betterment, intended to antagonise others, yet funded by her son’s drug-dealing. Frano’s husband beats her, prompted by alcohol and his patriarchal demand for respect. Such violatory actions are multi-generational. Priests, social workers and community activists are keen to provide training and to keep people busy, but only one local has gainful employment in the community centre, as a cleaner. Fr Tom is aware that his good intentions are hard to realise, acknowledging the necessity of pragmatism over idealism – as Kate does in Joyriders – but he also admits that he learned more about love in the flats than during his ‘entire formation’ (Sweeney, 445). The locals tolerate his interventions not out of respect for the cloth but out of kindness. When a job comes up in community development, it goes to an outsider, a middle-class nun. Middle-class professionals, doctors, police, teachers and psychiatrists are not trusted to intervene appropriately. The bird-like Sweeney has been nesting under the table in a pile of shredded newspaper; although he cannot speak, he enacts with Lil a ‘formal mating dance’ (Sweeney, 435). Although Lil is enraged with Sweeney, she allows him to comfort her, ‘enfolded in his wings, cooing, soothing her’ (Sweeney, 447), signalling her need to connect and belong. While bonfires blaze outside and loud music plays on this Halloween night, inspired by moonshine made from blackberries (Chateau Maria Goretti), and wearing the costumes of ‘exotic birds’ (Sweeney, 457), Frano, Lil and Mariah transform themselves. Oweny Burke is also included.7

Intersectional/Intercultural Conflicts  177 By singing popular ballads with lewd lyrics, they harmonise, mesmerising ‘themselves by their own voices’ (Sweeney, 457). These working-class Dublin songs are not just rude, crude and funny, but also, in the mentioning of the Monk in Glendalough, who ‘fucked boys and girls with propriety’ (Sweeney, 408), there is an articulation of the clerical abuse of children. Most significantly, the stage is dressed in ‘an extraordinary assortment of colourful buntings, recalling juggernaut adornments, ship pennants’ and ‘flags of undreamt republics, textless banners for libertarians’. The bunting draped about the set ‘should be like the ceiling of the flat opening up to the sky’ and includes ‘blue stuff’ from ‘Chrissie’s kimono’ (Sweeney, 452–453). Despite this transformation of space, a ‘sense of entombment’ grows ‘throughout this act’ (Sweeney, 434). Lil is invited to tell their fortunes; accordingly, Fr Tom will go to Peru, to save ‘the savages from Coca Cola’ (Sweeney, 460); Oweny will grow a beard; Frano will get a new house, new child and a beating that will leave her with a limp and an inability to have another baby; Mariah will find herself back on the gear; and Sweeney will be dead within a year, having been hospitalised and straitjacketed. Lil can’t see her own future. If this is a bleak reality facing the characters, Lil drinks to her daughter, a dead soul, on Halloween night. She recalls their last morning outside, pigeons sweeping overhead, appearing and disappearing. ‘Magic’ was the last word Chrissie ever said (Sweeney, 462). ‘Magic’ cannot be a riposte to the damage done by living under inhospitable conditions, but the awareness of the transformative is invaluable. Shonagh Hill notes ‘Mrs Sweeney closes with doom and fragmentation, but the process of acknowledging past traumas holds the promise of hope and community’ (2019, 83). Lil’s predictions are less an expression of passivity and acquired helplessness and more a provocation. If audiences have their own views about the society in which they prefer to exist, about that which is socially acceptable and intolerable, they must also be attuned to Lil’s class-related fears: ‘Do you see that new barbed-wire stuff they’ve put on the wall between us and the houses? The flats look like one of those concentration camp films in the moonlight. They’d gas us if they could, Mariah. Seal up the flats and pump in the gas’ (Sweeney 432). This terror of extinction and erasure, exaggerated or otherwise, haunts this work. Brothers of the Brush: Having Your Own Back Jimmy Murphy’s realist Brothers of the Brush (1993) is set at a time when the 1980s recessionary period begins to end and there are the first signs of the emergence of the Celtic Tiger. Three painters, Lar, Heno and Jack, are working in a basement of an old house in the city, without heat or proper toilet facilities, and rats are eating their food. The house is to be minimally

178  Intersectional/Intercultural Conflicts repaired; landlords are not willing to spend beyond that for housing they themselves will not live in. Jack is close to retirement and wants to be the foreman on the next job, as he needs the additional money to cover a new credit union loan. That role is being offered to the younger Lar, who has a mortgage and is barely making ends meet, as he has been out of work for some time. Heno works while still claiming the dole. Their employer, Martin, claims that he is pricing jobs for middle-class–run businesses, landlords and factory owners, with very tight margins so that he can get the work. Martin refuses to pay proper social insurance and will not pay the wage that would allow his workers to leave the welfare system. If workers sign off, they then lose medical cards and local authority rents jump, one conundrum of labour in a low-pay economy. After Jack and Heno withdraw their labour with trade union support, Lar, who has a long tradition of union activism, fails to stand by them. Lar desperately wants not to go back to the flats where he once lived, having invested in the suburban dream; a strike is a luxury he cannot afford.8 Factory owner Rogers, who is now facing a union-backed strike on his business premises, forces Martin to reach a deal. Such is the power of capital to leverage compromise when it sees fit. In this dog-eat-dog world, notions of intraclass solidarity and decency get lost. Heno’s ruthlessness and lack of empathy for Lar’s position are frightening: Heno: Lar: Heno: Lar: Heno: Lar: Heno:

Did you get too good for the flats? I decided to move out when a child in a pram asked me for a light. All lace curtains and cushions, huh? Best thing that ever happened to me. I bet you’ve a little dog, a little poodle called Curly or something. Great big garden too. Roses on the front and tulips out the back. It’s far from roses you were reared. Cabbages and piss-in-the-beds more like it! (Brothers, 73)

In Heno’s comment: ‘At least I stood me ground, didn’t get too good for myself and move out’ (Brothers, 117), there is evidence of the hindrances, disablements and lack of respect for those who leave or aspire differently. The interlinking of different sorts of residential accommodation further complicates the play’s dilemmas of labour/homeplace. There is the old house in the city that they are minimally renovating, the inner-city flat complex where the three painters grew up and where Jack still lives, the predominantly working-class suburb of Ballyfermot where Heno lives with a partner and five kids in a two-bedroom flat, Lar’s suburban home which

Intersectional/Intercultural Conflicts  179 faces repossession and finally the apparently affluent but not specifically located suburban home in which Martin lives. As we saw with Over the Bridge (1960), unionisation might bring ­workplace gains, but it is difficult to maintain collective bargaining when individuals self-prioritise and when sectarianism differently divides workingclass employees. Trade unionism, as Michael Pierse has noted, has always faced a degree of scepticism and distrust amongst working-class communities, those who might benefit most from cooperative, collectivised stances. Pierse notes how Brothers ‘articulates a depressing commentary on phoney class solidarity’, part of a wider irony of ‘union politics cultivating division and disenchantment in working-class life’ (2011, 18). The working classes seem so compromised, pressured to protect themselves and only those closest to them, and to give up on the rest. Lift others while you rise serves as a fractious myth. The House: Outrageous Mésalliance Tom Murphy’s history play The House (2000) is set loosely in the 1950s in an unspecified location, but assumed to be Tuam, Co. Galway. The de Burca home, Woodlawn House, a four- or five-bed accommodation with three acres, faces challenges in terms of upkeep. A  parting wall has collapsed, the driveway is in disrepair and there are outstanding debts. Nicholas Grene notes ‘this is not a Big House, of which there are so many in Irish Literature, the eighteenth-century Palladian mansion so familiar in various stages of decay from Maria Edgeworth to Somerville and Ross and Jennifer Johnston’ (2017, 102). Mother’s financial position is difficult but not disastrous; the sale of the house will be enough to stabilise matters, not having left things until they are too far gone. Mother, who is a TB convalescent, is genuine, honourable, tolerant, supportive and not intimidating towards her three daughters, Marie, Louise and Susanne. Susanne lives in England, and her lifestyle is supported by her rich boyfriend, but she feels generally excluded from the family decision-making. Mother challenges her stance, stating that financial decisions were communicated to her in letters, and belated conversations are pointless. Claire has her own pharmacy, and Mother can live over Claire’s business. Louise is married to a local, whose drinking and poor business acumen are seen as a drain on their resources. Christy Cavanagh’s mother had been a cleaner in the de Burca home, and after she died, Mother looked out for him, even offering to take him in, a proposal rejected by Christy’s father. Mother reminds Christy about his childhood wish to be absorbed within its family unit. When Mother asks him about home, it is Woodlawn House that he thinks of as his home, ‘at

180  Intersectional/Intercultural Conflicts least subconsciously’ (House, 187). Christy has various types of relationships with all three sisters; he has an affair with Louise, Claire wants to be with him and Susanne is seductive towards him, even if she treats him with some suspicion, familiar with Christy’s pimping. Christy clownishly remarks that he makes money by ‘all means possible’ (House, 206). Christy coerces Kerrigan, a friend from his youth and now local solicitor, to reveal the auction reserve price. Christy wants to lay out his stall to those who might brief Mother in advance of his bid. Kerrigan has progressed from living in Barrack Street to now having his own home, someone with a private practice and who also operates as a prosecuting state solicitor. It is a town that does its business sometimes not based on the law but on the basis of favours, tit-for-tat reciprocation, a mode of relationality that Christy is all too keen to exploit. To gain ownership of the house is an act of possession, a class-inclined demonstration of his newfound affluence as much as it is an object of desire.9 Christy’s killing of Susanne and his purchasing of the house cannot be seen as simply prompted by class revenge; there is his need to subjugate women. Christy profits from prostitution, victimising women from his own class. He funds the purchase the house almost exclusively in cash. In addition, there is the callous way that Christy informs Mother about Susanne’s death, after having been told she died accidentally, knowing just how hurtful it will be to hear that he killed her. Nicholas Grene sees Christy as obsessively ‘attached to the house’, and by the play’s end, he ‘has destroyed everything that gave it meaning for him. He is trapped in the shell of his own fantasy’ (2017, 102). If traditional class conflict is modelled on oppressor and victim, dominant and the dominated, the exploiter and the exploited, Murphy’s work rejects that binary. There is no bourgeois hostility to Christy taking ownership and no sneering associated with his ambition. That does not make the play cautious about working-class aspirations, nor does it slight the ambitions of migrants or disrespect a way of life of those who return on holiday, flash the cash and drink themselves silly over the period. It would be futile to read Christy’s need to sexually possess and materially dispossess from a position of class deprivation and a striking back. Neither class rage nor shame can be regarded as the motivators of the ruthlessness and vengefulness that Christy possesses. Class and gender are muddied by obsession, rage, revenge and punishment for those who either cared for Christy or long to be with him. Christy is no working-class victim; indeed, he is more a beneficiary of middle-class compassion, empathy and generosity. Little Gem: Benign Relationality Elaine Murphy’s hugely successful overlapping monologue Little Gem (2008) asserts class troubles and differences but also similarities by

Intersectional/Intercultural Conflicts  181 complicating intra- and interclass dynamics. In a series of sequential monologues told by three different generations of women – mother Kay, daughter Lorraine and granddaughter Amber – the play captures their responses to work, family and life challenges, framed by the ongoing illnesses and eventual death of Kay’s partner, Gem (James) and the birth of Amber’s son, another Gem. (‘Gem’ is a colloquial term to express the high value placed on an individual.) The characters, who work in shops and factories, make the most of social occasions. Young women take Hummer vehicles to their debs; indulge in messy sex, heavy drinking, pot smoking and cocaine; and take romantic trips to Paris. Amber discovers that she is pregnant after her debs, and her boyfriend Paul ends up in Australia. Lorraine finds love with Niall, a businessperson and separated father. Niall treats Lorraine well, unlike her previous partner, Ray, also Amber’s father. Ray is long gone, is drug addicted and lives on the streets of Dublin. Gem’s stroke impacts the couple’s sex life, and although in her 60s, Kay’s sexual desire remains. A sex toy is purchased from Ann Summers. Kay’s consideration of the vibrator’s potential for pleasure and sexual release takes place close to the moment of her husband’s death, and the toy returns as a subject of conversation during the ultimate moments of the play, on the night of Gem’s funeral, when all four generations of the family share Kay’s bed.10 The language of the characters is clearly indicated to be working-class Northside Dublin. Lorraine’s new man Niall is ‘well spoken,’ according to Kay: but there is no class animosity in the references towards him or his accent (Gem, 34). The more affluent in Little Gem are kind and considerate. Rather than sack or reprimand Lorraine, her sympathetic bosses provide her with counselling support after she has a run-in with a customer who intentionally un-tidies the shop displays. Lorraine’s remark about her father is telling: ‘He hasn’t made a fortune but he’s been careful, and financially they’ll be grand’ (Gem, 26). Although these are women characters with life problems, they can tough it out; they have little time for self-blame and a good deal of self-restraint. This is not simply a working-class environment of consistent poverty or subsistence living; there is an emphasis on hard graft, hanging tough, persisting. The playwright suggests these characters are the sorts that neither lost nor gained during the Celtic Tiger period but are: ‘hardworking, not particularly rich or poor, ignored by the Celtic Tiger, and the recession probably won’t make much of a difference to them either, you know, women like us, getting on with it’ – an optimism that did not hold for many during the recession of 2008 forward (Gem, Foreword). So rather than embedding class conflicts, a work like this does something more complex, and while her husband is not good for Lorraine, her new partner is not a burden in the way the male characters are Juno or in Kinahan’s The Unmanageable Sisters (2018).

182  Intersectional/Intercultural Conflicts The Hostage: Accommodating Diversity and Stoking Division Brendan Behan’s The Hostage (1958) is an English-language version of An Giall (1958)11 and is set in an ‘old house in Dublin that has seen better days’ (Hostage, 129). Owned by Monsewer, an upper-class English figure who has taken up the cause of Irish freedom, the home is run by caretakers Pat and Meg as a boarding house but also as a brothel. Pat observes: ‘Hiding hunted Republicans was all very well, but it didn’t pay the rent, so in the end we had to take in all sorts of scruffy lumpers to make the place pay’ (Hostage, 147). Put differently: ‘This noble old house, which housed so many heroes, was turned into a knocking shop’ (Hostage, 147). The space accommodates Monsewer, Pat and Meg, the cleaner, Teresa and a whole host of characters, including the religiously fixated social worker, Mrs Gilchrist; civil servant Mulleady; Rio Rita, who is a gay navvy; and Princess Grace, Rita’s ‘coloured boyfriend’ (Hostage, 128). Collette and Ropeen are two prostitutes, and a Russian sailor is there as a john. In response to the planned execution of a young republican volunteer in Belfast, Leslie Williams, a British soldier, is lifted from Armagh and held in this Dublin house. The mix of nationalities, genders, sexualities and classes brings a chaotic and anarchic spirit to the accommodation, but more than that, imperialism, religion, republicanism, morality and heteronormativity and multiple other ‘agreed’ social values are unnerved by the uncanny and carnivalesque and by an eroticism that destabilises almost everything. It is a house that hosts as much political, sexual and race diversity as perversity. Through the use of a range of songs, some religious, some local ballads, some English and Irish, and through the awareness and self-consciousness that selfreferentiality brings, the play foregrounds its own theatricality but also the performative nature of politics, religious and sexual subjectivity while also drawing attention to the challenges set to a censorial Lord Chamberlain. Rio Rita and Princess Grace, along with Mulleady, all sing a pro-gay song and gyrate. The ease signalled by which Leslie might be seduced into a gay affair is telling and provocative. Leslie may form a romantic connection with Teresa – both are orphans – but he has Meg offering sexual services for free and Mrs  Gilchrist persistently attempting to draw his attention towards her. The performative anarchy unleashed in this complex space disarms and unnerves. John Brannigan notes ‘Thus empire loyalism and militant republicanism, stage-Irishry and Cockney buffoonery, are roles and masks as phony and effective as each other, which blur the boundaries of the theatrical and the political’ (2002, 124). The two IRA volunteers overseeing Leslie’s captivity are not enough to defend the space or protect the hostage. Mulleady is not the decaying civil servant but an undercover police officer, and the Russian sailor is a police spy, and when the building is raided, instead of freeing the hostage, Leslie

Intersectional/Intercultural Conflicts  183 is killed accidentally. Leslie is collateral damage in the new round of IRA (Border Campaign 1956–62) activity against the British occupation of Northern Ireland. If revolt is unfinished business, republican ideology is severely contested: Pat’s stories of his revolutionary actions are inconsistent and questioned by Meg. Monsewer’s switching from the community into which he was born to the Irish side is riven by delusions of honour and justice. His perceived authority and power are propped up by all that share the space with him, who are willing to deceive him into thinking that they are volunteers under his command. Monsewer ‘still thinks he is fighting in the Troubles or one of the anti-English campaigns before that’ (Hostage, 129). Further, Monsewer’s offer of life-long accommodation to a rogue to ‘billet’ free for the rest of his life, whom he believes to have been jailed fighting for freedom, is part of Monsewer’s comedic framing (Hostage, 140). (Leslie believes that Monsewer has the same face and voice as his colonel.) Towards the end of the second act, as a melee ensues and a cacophony of voices has ‘Free-Staters against Republicans, Irish against English, homosexuals against heterosexuals, and in the confusion all the quarrels get mixed up and it looks as though everyone is fighting everyone else’. Mrs Gilchrist sings ‘Land of Hope and Glory’, the Russian sailor sings the soviet anthem, Princess Grace carries a banner ‘Keep Ireland Black’, a fight becomes a ‘wild dance’ (Hostage, 204–205). Accordingly, Michael Pierse argues that the play’s message is ‘vehemently decolonial’ and that the play’s brothel/lodgings/safe house ‘is an emblem of failed freedom – its denizens mostly neither “upright” nor “free”, their home hardly fit for habitation’ (2022, 82–83). The ‘outcasts of this world’ are anything but united (Hostage, 226).12 The decrepit accommodation can be read as symbolic of a divided nation and various occupants as a slight on the heteronormative, mono-racial and mono-religious perspective of the Irish nation, peddled by politicians, religious leaders and cultural elites running institutional theatres. Walls and Windows: Inter-Ethnicities and Hostile Classed Relationships Rosaleen McDonagh’s Walls and Windows (2021) is the first play to be staged on the Abbey stage written by a member of the Travelling community. The play’s complex dramaturgy gives the work an episodic feel that relates to the lived experiences of its characters, precarious, with little by way of causation and continuity.13 McDonagh’s programme note suggests ‘what has gone before me by way of Traveller representation did not come from an authentic place. Artistic endeavours without Travellers being at

184  Intersectional/Intercultural Conflicts the centre can and do become a racist typology’ (2021, Web), something she also argued earlier (2018, 435–442). Without unravelling other representations of Traveller characters to see how they might fall short, it is better to reflect on what this work communicates about many of the daily dilemmas faced by members of the Travelling community.14 With ill health; mental issues; high incidence of suicide; problems with housing, educational attainment and employment, and with life expectancies far below the national average, the Travelling community faces these encumbrances and wider social discriminations.15 Travellers have their own ethnic status, are keen to self-differentiate as a community and are a cohort against which one cannot discriminate under equality legislation. Equally, many members of that community have much in common with the experiences of the working classes more broadly, but that fact is often not given much credence by certain advocates.16 The play traces the many complex relationships Travellers have with the settled community, police officers, landlords and hotel managers in their everyday accessing of services and resources. The drama is also about work, homelessness, addiction, how indebtedness reaches a variety of characters, about gender violence more broadly and the systemic exploitation of the poor. In terms of education, there is no longer the practice of putting Traveller children in special classes, but in assigning teaching assistants to all Traveller pupils and in allowing pupils not to complete the full school day, going home at noon, there is a different type of monitoring and discrimination. Within the Travelling community itself there is sometimes a reluctance to support schooling but also sometimes a pattern of running down those who have educational ambitions.17 Julia’s sister-in-law Charlene is seventeen; the afternoon after she sits her final Leaving Certificate examination, she is to be married. It is not just that Charlene does not want to be pressured to go through with the traditional Traveller marriage; moreover, she wants to be with a woman. That same-sex desire is not followed through in relation to the remainder of the play’s arc, although there is a lesbian couple. Deirdre and Michelle are staying in hotel accommodation; they lost their home after bank re-possession after Michelle got sick and could no longer work. Julia remarks to Deirdre: It’s hard for all women. . . . The Traveller women you see are on the telly. They’re the ones that have made something of their lives. It’s women like me, the failures, we bring shame. . . . It’s funny. My generation, me and my sisters, my cousins, we only ever met women like you in refuges. . . . Never in school, never in work. . . . Do you know what I’m saying? My kids are different. They’re always talking about a Nigerian friend, the other lad’s from Zimbabwe. (Walls, 33)

Intersectional/Intercultural Conflicts  185 Traveller characters in the play generally oppose the settled way of life and living in houses, preferring the freedoms of a nomadic lifestyle that their tradition aspires towards and romanticises. Initially, John and Julia live on a halting site designed for one caravan, but there are six caravans there, and it is the matriarch, Nancy, who asks John and Julia to move on. There is resistance to the eviction notice served by a member of the police force, who has been friendly with the Traveller family; indeed, he carried the coffin of one of Nancy’s dead sons. Nancy remarks: They can do all the wantin’ in the world but we’re not moving. There’s nowhere to go and I’m not going into a house. Your father pulled us in here fifteen years ago and the council kept on promising us water and toilets and the electrics. They should’ve told us no in the first place. (Walls, 15) Eviction is not only about being forced to leave a halting site, but it is also the place where Nancy believes that the ghosts of her dead sons hover. When touring does not work out, the house that John and Julia rent is anything but ideal, and they easily fall behind with the rent. For John and Julia and their two children, the windows and walls of the house are not just symbolic of a system of confinement and regulation but also a forfeiting of their own traditions. Equally, the play indicts the lack of social housing and exploitative landlords. After the death of her husband and her descent into alcohol addiction, Julia eventually acquires accommodation in a hotel, one step up from a hostel, is seventy-seventh on the social housing waiting list and no longer has daily contact with her children. As a marginalised, ethnic minority figure, Julia’s decency is apparent. Her singing had marked her out as different, but she lost the will to sing, telling her husband to switch on the radio if he wanted to hear a song. Media outlets, traditional and online, frequently carry stories and host videos of Travellers fighting at weddings and funerals or racing horses illegally on public roads and relate reports of Traveller gangs terrorising and stealing from rural communities or involved in criminal feuding or drug distribution. There are also stories of Travellers taking multiple welfare payments from the state and generally not paying their way. This play’s dramaturgy moves away from and challenges such sensationalising and stereotyping. It is a world where Traveller families feel obliged to use names associated with the “settled” community in order to book hotels for wedding receptions, where Africa-originated Sonam is sacked for taking a booking for a Traveller wedding. If aspects of working-class hostilities towards the Travelling community are not addressed here, it is the systemic impacts of figures like an exploitative hotel manager or racist landlord that

186  Intersectional/Intercultural Conflicts are held to account. The hotel manager sexually exploits staff and wants Julia to have sex with him against her will. Julia and Aga, a Polish hotel worker, share moments of recognition around gender oppression, captured through shared empathy and affection, but there is also a moment when Aga simply touches Julia by way of recognition. Two very poignant monologues end the piece, one when John rationalises his decision to kill himself, partly because he feels he cannot provide but also because of his indebtedness to a drug dealer. Agreeing to one couriering job for the dealer did not end at that. In the other narrative, Julia traumatically reflects on her separation from her two sons. The play’s pattern is one of fall, and further fall, giving the work a sense of fatalism – as opposed to fall and rise or rise and fall. Once Upon a Time and Not So Long Ago: Intercultural Challenges Of those born elsewhere who came to Ireland during the 1990s, most were economic migrants and some asylum seekers and refugees seeking a home and employment in both jurisdictions. Many got good jobs based on professional qualifications and experience in information technology and healthcare for instance; some got jobs not in line with their training or qualifications; some stayed, married, started families and bought property; others never intended to stay longer term and returned home, while others decided to leave Ireland during the period of austerity from 2008–2015. Integration was not discussed in ways heard in other countries.18 As the founder of the Irish-based African theatre company Arambe Productions (2003),19 Bisi Adigun and the casts wrote Once Upon a Time (2005) and Not So Long Ago (2006), two shorter pieces of work that were eventually performed together. In Not So Long Ago, performers deliver different stories from sub-Saharan Africa by way of communicating the instructive and comforting nature of stories, backdropped by African games, dancing, mime, music and various African languages spoken. Adigun notes that the stories were selected to ‘highlight the vastness of the cultural diversity of the continent of Africa’: ‘Why do we tell Stories’ and ‘Moremi’ [are] from Nigeria; ‘Talk’ and ‘Bitter Pill’ from Ghana; ‘Truth and Falsehood’ from Senegal; ‘The Jackal’s Lawsuit’, ‘Justice’ and ‘How a Woman Tamed Her Husband’ from Ethiopia; and ‘Where do stories come from?’ from South Africa (2018, 549). Each story accounts for life choices, compromises and different ways of viewing and seeing the world, ranging from how nature and inanimate objects in many African communities have a spiritual dimension to relationships between peoples, their rulers and gods, and from how a closed

Intersectional/Intercultural Conflicts  187 mind is not always the most productive starting point when engaging with others to how thinking about self-sacrifice and concerns for justice are not just contemporary challenges. The presentational intent is to share this tradition of stories and its myths and values and how audiences might wonder about similarities and differences between various times and their own cultures and societies. The premise of the second play is that a theatre company is invited to a chat show, The Great Great Show – similar to The Late Late Show – to showcase some short scenarios of intercultural/inter-racial encounters. The host and the female theatre director of ‘Arambe Productions’ discuss the scenarios and what the pertinent issues are around these intercultural exchanges. Some of the scenes deal with interpersonal non-cooperation, unconscious bias and racism; a white woman on a plane to South Africa does not want to sit beside a man of African origin, and when the cabin crew upgrade a passenger to business class, it is he and not she who is offered the seat. There are two scenes based on casting; a mixed-race actor, Sarah Byrne, is deemed not right for one production, as she ‘Doesn’t look Irish’ (Not, 211), and for another, she is deemed ‘not . . . black black’ (Not, 243), demonstrating preconceptions and prejudices in different cultures. In another scenario, the assumption that a black person would not have local knowledge about the location of a community centre is proved incorrect. Questions about origins and belonging lead to a scene where one character fails to understand that a shop assistant regards Ireland as her home and not Zimbabwe, where she is originally from. During dating scenarios, one couple, Ruth and Kayus, negotiate a complex splitting of the bill and the cost of cinema tickets to follow, regardless of who is the wealthier, while Seán wants to split the bill with Tracy roughly according to what each has ordered. Tracy, an African woman, has to use her rent money to pay for her share, having not anticipated that Seán would have that expectation. In Africa, a man asking a woman out on a date ends up paying for everything by way of ‘giving the impression that he will always take care of the girl’ (Not, 231). Socio-cultural gaps between different communities are most polarised in a scenario where an Irish paediatrician will not perform elective surgery on a child, Isaac, until he is one year old. In this instance it is a request to have the male child circumcised. The father, Abidemi, feels any delay is in breach of his tradition and defies Catherine’s wishes and pays a circumcisionist to carry out the procedure illegally. The child bleeds to death. The scenario is based on a true-life incident reported widely in the media at that time. As the scenes are played out, dialectical discussions between the director and the compere tease out the conflicts and the offering of multiple perspectives on a scenario that addresses the challenges facing a society less traditionally exposed to racial and ethnic diversity. The piece ends with a rendition

188  Intersectional/Intercultural Conflicts of Michael Jackson’s ‘Black and White’ sung collectively by way of marking what unites more than what divides. Despite the historic tradition of racism and xenophobia, as mentioned earlier, and despite there being some resistance to the new race/nationality mix, it is possible to argue that in Ireland there is much less of the reflexive, right-wing racism or systemic racism with a long history found in America, Britain or some European states.20 It could be argued that Ireland, unlike so many other countries, was not built on imported labour and the exploitation of slavery; there is no equivalent to the Britain’s Windrush Generation, Caribbean and commonwealth citizens arriving in Britain between 1948 and 1971, to be told later that their entry was illegal. In addition, across the island, if systems of policing and justice have been accused of sectarianism and classism, it could be argued that they have not embedded long-held racist practices that might be evident in other jurisdictions. Recent right-wing agitation in 2023 around the accommodating of refugees and those seeking international protection would prompt caution around such optimistic arguments. Additionally, the Direct Provision system of housing asylum seekers and refugees is likely to haunt future citizens the way that industrial and reformatory schools, mother and baby homes and Magdalene laundries trouble a contemporary generation. Quietly: Irreconcilable Sectarianism? In Reid’s The Hidden Curriculum (1982), loyalist tribal identity, sectarian affiliations and a clear demarcation of those deemed the enemy offer security, protection and sanctuary but only to a point; one day a character might be on the sectarian inside and another labelled an enemy. Such precarity brings distrust and paranoia not just to constructions of communities of belonging but also to mythologies and ideologies upon which such communities are built. Tribal cohesion is easier when there is a sense of a rival, reprehensible ‘other’, and the ideological drivers of such a disposition are nearly always unthinking, unnuanced and exploitative by those captivated and co-opted by such strategies. Owen McCafferty’s realist work Quietly (2012) is set in a Belfast pub in 2009 on the evening that Northern Ireland plays Poland in a football World Cup qualifier. It complicates Mark Phelan’s earlier cited notion of a ‘ethnonational’ conflict. On 3 July 1974, this pub was the location where six people, five customers and the barman, lost their lives when a bomb was thrown into the pub by a UVF hit squad as customers watched another football match between Germany and Poland. Jimmy was sixteen when he came across the bombed-out pub and witnessed his father’s remains. That death left his widowed mother grief stricken, incapable of living unencumbered from a fundamental sense of loss. Jimmy was not capable of supporting her.

Intersectional/Intercultural Conflicts  189 Accepting an invitation to meet with Ian Gibson, their encounter starts with Jimmy headbutting Ian, who wants to acknowledge the role his sixteen-year-old-self had in the loyalist bombing that resulted in him serving jail time. (Jimmy also spent some time in jail for unspecified actions.) Jimmy’s head-butting signals his rage more broadly as to how the Catholic minority perceives itself, abused, violated, treated abysmally, something that matches other generic sectarian narratives of causation and accountability. Although Ian and Jimmy are clearly working-class characters, they don’t see the conflict as anything other than a sectarian one. Paramilitarism was embedded in working-class communities, through community protection, activism and distrust in the police/armed forces, even if the ideology of sectarianism was greatly shaped by middle and elite figures.21 Sectarian/paramilitary practices are foregrounded in how working-class teenagers are manipulated, lured in and initiated; in other contexts, they would be labelled ‘child soldiers’. Ian feels that his murderous actions need to be understood; he was young, looked up to key figures in his community and abided by their instruction, and because his community felt so besieged, they retaliated to Republican/Nationalist provocations. Ian is not willing to offer Jimmy answers to the questions he may have. What Ian has to offer is his story, suggesting ‘There’s more to the truth than facts’ (Quietly, 35). Truth is hampered by the fact that many remain uncommitted to it for fear of implicating themselves in the actions of the past and possible criminal charges; others want not to be the first to fess up, regarding the other side as the more responsible cohort, and others find the idea of truth constricted by what their own communities will tolerate by way of admission. The notion that there can be no peace without justice lingers as a mantra of sorts, but justice is endlessly deferred, with trauma enduring. Many like to signal truth quests as the ultimate delusion. The mantra of ‘no hierarchy of victimhood’ is conveniently rolled out, declining to distinguish between someone who had a bomb strapped to them and was forced to drive into a military barracks and someone who dies while carrying a bomb with the intent of mass slaughter. No hierarchy of victimhood is laced with self-justification and evasion of accountability. If the term had been coined by a postmodernist, he or she would be accused of an irresponsible sleight-of-hand in the face of a refusal to address the differentiation of actions. Yet if there is no hierarchy of victimhood, there is an explicit hierarchy of perpetrator. Such logic is as twisted, self-serving and non-inclusive as it is vengeful, victim-blaming and accusative. The viewpoints of both sides of the sectarian divide on the atrocities they perpetrated are divisive, objectifying, vilifying and less self-accusative. There is little by way of empathy coming from Jimmy, reminding Ian of the 20,000 loyalists that marched by his street, opposing their presence.

190  Intersectional/Intercultural Conflicts Jimmy wonders if Ian is terminally ill or has been prompted by a suicide attempt to talk about his actions. Ian admits to dislocation and disorientation but no clear motive. Ian has to tell his history his ‘own way’ (Quietly, 35). For Jimmy, Ian is only there because he has permitted it. Jimmy is fundamentally cynical and brutal. Their exchanges demonstrate a resistance to any notion of fundamental truths but offer opportunities for each to account for their experiences with no need for these stories to mesh or coalesce, even as they overlap through the murder of Jimmy’s father. There is no unconditional apology, nor the satisfaction of forgiveness being offered. If Ian wants to reveal his actions and expose himself to the hostility of Jimmy, there are grounds for hope in that gesture but also in Jimmy’s responses that are neither accepting nor rejecting. They cannot bond over the past, their jail stories or their losses; truth and loss do not bind them. Although they shake hands, Jimmy tells Ian not to return. Phelan observes: ‘one of the fascinating, though fraught issues with the vast number of plays which engage with working-class communities and culture is the extent to which they replicated sectarian divisions by staging only one community’ (2018, 356). Again, to McCafferty’s credit, he stages more than one. Additionally, class is layered by sectarianism but also triangulated by the fact that the barman, Robert, is a Polish migrant. As a working-class male with a partner and family, he is neither adjudicator nor confessor, but he does become a witness to the transaction between Jimmy and Ian and, in turn, makes their actions, in and of themselves, revelatory and performative. Jimmy ironically remarks that Robert ‘will be our truth and reconciliation committee’ (Quietly, 30). Robert faces a barrage of racist chants from the hooligans outside on the streets. Being told to go back to where he came from is part and parcel of a multi-cultural Northern Ireland, where cultural diversity adds further strands to the traditional sectarian binaries that were always far more complex than Unionist/Loyalist and Nationalist/Republican. Antagonisms echo many of the previous sectarian barbs, based on othering, inclusion/ exclusion, suspicion and hatred. Jimmy remarks to Robert: ‘But then this place probably hasn’t looked after me as well as it’s looked after you’ (Quietly, 13), an indictment that is as questionable as it is provocative. Cross-Connections In O’Casey’s The Plough and the Stars (1926), the tenement home of the working-class Clitheroes is described as being furnished ‘towards a finer expression of domestic life’. The original marble fireplace has been stripped out by landlords, and the building itself is ‘struggling for its life against the assaults of time and the more savage assaults of the tenants’ (Plough: 135). Landlord negligence is matched if not trumped by many of the occupants,

Intersectional/Intercultural Conflicts  191 contributing to the decline of their own environments, a viewpoint inconsistent with those who like to see the poor as passive victims of elites. Theatricalised relationships between rich and poor are more fraught than is generally acknowledged in criticism. Conn in Dion Boucicault’s The Shaughraun (1874) is more than happy to subvert imperial order and challenge indigenous corruption but submits to a ranked relationship with his overlord. In Pygmalion (1913), G.B. Shaw ironically distinguishes between the deserving and undeserving London poor while he explores how class can be performed by Eliza after some etiquette and elocution training. Shaw’s notion of performance is provocative; more troubling is the notion of coercive gender performance by way of the interventions of Professor Higgins and Colonel Pickering, which appear to be part of a salacious, exploitative game with Eliza as a gendered and classed disposable object of their experimentation and curiosity. Irish theatre has offered multiple representations of British characters, particularly soldiers, in the work of O’Casey, Friel and Devlin. In Thomas Kilroy’s Double Cross (1986), Irish-born Brendan Bracken feigns a backstory that affords him access to the British elite, and they indulge him but see his behaviour/performances as not just improvisational and mimicking but also as something ‘refreshing’ but distastefully ‘aboriginal’ (Double, 30). Earlier, I discussed internal class rank within the Geoghan family in The Whiteheaded Boy, as well as the normalisation of cordial, subservient relationships between servants and master in Professor Tim (1925). In contrast, Reid’s Joyriders (1986) ends with no handshake across the gender/ class divide, with Sandra rejecting Kate’s offer to meet up. Many plays are also keen to show how within working-class communities, there is ample evidence of gender violence and intraclass oppressions, as in Spallen’s Pumpgirl (2006). Characters can also operate from mixed classed spaces, and, as in Devlin’s After Easter (1994, there can be different classes within family units. Intraclass tensions sometimes suggest little of the mutuality and cohesiveness upon which a position on class struggle depends. Emmet Kirwan’s Accents (2022) deals with class disparities, the oppressive nature of middle-class cultural capital and its attempts to silence the hard questions that Kirwan puts out in the media. Kirwan variously ridicules the middle classes in a performance about property, economic precarity and childbirth, delivered in the form of free-verse rap. A working-class community’s intolerance of difference is captured in an account of a savage beating that Kirwan experiences from other teenagers while growing up. Pat Kinevane’s Underneath (2014) gives expression to class rage, in which a wealthy male murders a working-class woman. In Murphy’s The Wake (1998), Finbar is from the New Estate, also called the Punjab, which is labelled as a sort of no-go area (Wake, 96). A ‘Knacker’s doorstep’ is Mary-Jane’s description of Finbar’s home (Wake, 109), and ‘living with

192  Intersectional/Intercultural Conflicts the tinkers’ is Marcia’s take (Wake, 99). Class hostility is blatant in all of these views. Class conflicts are also gendered and internationalised in McGuinness’s Mary and Lizzie (1989), which dramatises the triangular relationship the wealthy, factory-owning Frederick Engels had with Irish working-class migrants Mary and Lizzie Burns, who take him to task over his view on the poor, evident in The Condition of the Working Class in England (1845). Challenges to Karl Marx’s theoretical thinking come from wife Jenny, who wonders why a man who cannot feed his family wants to feed the world. Many contemporary plays feature characters with diverse nationalities, ethnicities and races, such as Donal O’Kelly’s Asylum! Asylum! (1994), Roddy Doyle’s Guess Who’s Coming for the Dinner (2001), Jim O’Hanlon’s The Buddhist of Castleknock (2002) and British-born but then Irish-based Liz Kuti’s The Sugar Wife (2005). In Christina Reid’s Joyriders (1986), Tommy is of mixed-race background, and Maureen’s lover is an international student. In Mark O’Halloran’s Conversations After Sex (2021), B is Brazilian, as are some characters in Dermot Bolger’s The Townlands of Brazil (2006), where South American characters suffer ‘compounded exclusions’ (Pierse 2018a, 17) Rosemary Jenkinson’s Lives In Translation (2017) is about an asylum-seeking Somalian woman; it took ten years for her application to be processed, moving between Dublin, Belfast and other parts of the United Kingdom. There is now less reluctance by some Irish writers to locate work outside of the island. Most of the previous have Irish locations, but Enda Walsh’s The Walworth Farce (2006) is set in contemporary London, and Conor McPherson’s Girl from the North Country (2017) is set in Duluth Minnesota in 1934 and features a pregnant, adopted African American, Marianne. Martin McDonagh’s A Very Very Dark Matter (2018) is set in the Copenhagen home of Hans Christian Andersen, where he keeps Mbute/ Marjory, a Congolese woman, small in stature, imprisoned in a cage, forcing her to write stories that he claims as his own. Sonja Kelly’s Once Upon a Bridge (2021) is set in London, and in The Last Returns (2022), location is not given, but both feature mixed-race casts.22 Discussing Sally Rooney’s Normal People, Zélie Asava remarks: The series differs from the novel in explicitly portraying its public realm as multiracial. In a first for Irish screen culture, Normal People’s cast includes Irish-Asian, Irish-African, Black British, British-Asian, SwedishAfrican and other multiracial actors. But the adaptation fails to address the impact of race on lived experience, leading to a visual diversity that belies missed opportunities for colour-conscious characterisations, most notably in terms of Helen’s role. (2022, 125)

Intersectional/Intercultural Conflicts  193 Azava’s remarks are cautionary around casting.23 Deirdre Kinahan’s Wild Notes (2018) includes two Irish characters, Margaret, who is antagonistic towards British colonialism post-Great Famine, and Rita, whose learning challenges are exploited to such an extent that she is in servitude to Irish criminals in a contemporary context. Margaret encounters African American Frederick Douglass, who travels to Ireland to promote his views on abolition. There is also a Ugandan Black woman, Kabite, and Kalief, a African American New Yorker; the former is held captive and sexually assaulted, forced to harm her sister, before escaping; the latter is a victim of racial profiling and police discrimination who is detained in prison for three years, awaiting trial for a crime he did not commit, because his mother cannot afford to pay his bail. Charlotte McIvor argues for the need to ‘turn the gaze around’, the need for narratives ‘of how migrant individuals and communities see Ireland, rather than prioritizing accounts of how Ireland sees migrants’ (2020, 75). One awaits more work by non-Irish and Irish-born Black writers or secondgeneration writers whose families migrated from Europe, South America or Africa to Ireland. It is a gap that will be addressed in the near future, as ethnopluralism is happening more frequently in music, poetry and fiction, as well as in sport, including soccer, rugby and GAA. Conclusion Many of the plays discussed prior to this chapter have been inclined to be quarantined, either in elite/middle or precarious working-class contexts, with minimal emphasis on the intersections between classes, races and ethnicities. However, Purgatory gives expression to elite hatred towards the working classes, and The House is not a riposte to it, as the de Burcas do not know the disdain Christy holds for them. Their middle-class empathy and care do not trigger respect and reciprocation, but Christy’s vengeance is unmotivated by inequalities. In Juno, Bentham’s actions are a form of class betrayal, even if it is based on incompetence rather than something more self-serving or sinister. If the spoiled will in Juno has huge consequences, Walls and Windows has tragic outcomes because of a lack of money, where characters cannot effect decisions that impact their lives. If Mrs Sweeney offers a hostile view on gender and class conflict, not everything is as divisive, as Little Gem proposes. If reconciliation is a complex drawn-out, if not impossible, process, the violence that shapes sectarianism can easily default to xenophobia as Quietly proposes. The intercultural, inter-gender and inter- and intraclass encounters in this chapter reveal many of the codes that larger society declines to acknowledge openly. Few characters are willing to forfeit their privileges for the benefit of others, as Brothers of the Brush and Da suggest. Success

194  Intersectional/Intercultural Conflicts nearly always comes at the expense of another. The notion of the variously marginalised being acted upon comes up again and again, but characters kicks down, out, back and up in ways that complicate notions of inequality and justice. Notes 1 Private and public spaces are not divisible in the way that they are for the elite and middle-class families like the Geoghan’s in The Whiteheaded Boy. 2 Paul Murphy argues ‘sentimentalization of victims’ is central to O’Casey’s ‘representations of socially subordinate characters,’ especially when comedy ‘mediates class disparity’ (2008, 69). 3 Humour is evident in the way that the younger Charlie wishes the older Charlie had done better for himself; stage directions note that ‘his clothes are too neat for him to be prosperous’ (Da, 167). 4 Making-do inventiveness leads to two ‘ill-matching’ shirts being sown together, embarrassing Charlie (Da, 177). 5 When Da seeks out extra work to get new clothes for Charlie before he starts his career, he does not price the work but leaves it to the property owner to decide what the work is worth to them, an action that is as trusting and underconfident as it is naive. 6 Sweeney’s madness, of course, is inspired by the old Mad Sweeney myth. 7 Oweny offers a world view based on curious snippets of information; he has a theory for most things and a viewpoint on everything: conspiracy theories about indoctrination, subliminal messaging, eugenics, chromatics, ‘systemic pesticides,’ time warping, demonic possession, tantric sex, chakras and the impact of the moon on behaviour (Sweeney, 413). 8 In Juno and the Paycock, although Mary has no time for the workmate penalised by the employer, collective action is more important to her than personal feelings. 9 Classical references to Romeo and Juliet and Wuthering Heights form part of the play’s cultural landscape and resonators. 10 While this play has little of the sexual repression evident in John B. Keane’s Sive (1959), it does mimic some of the more intimacy-averse instincts of Irish playwriting. 11 John Brannigan provides a comprehensive reflection on the transformation of An Giall (1958) into The Hostage, unpacking the unreliability of Joan Littlewood and Behan’s accounts, and he sees it less as the latter being a betrayal of the former, exposes the flaws in thinking about the changes in terms of failures of authenticity, but more about ‘transposition, shifting of register from tragedy to farce, opening up post-colonial discontents to include Cyprus and Ireland, and cultural subversion, and hybridity’ (2002, 100–125). 12 Later Leslie sings the racist lines: ‘But I wish the Irish and the ni**ers and the w*gs, Were kicked out and sent back home’ (Hostage, 206). 13 Characters with Traveller backgrounds feature in J.M. Synge’s The Tinker’s Wedding (1909), John B. Keane’s Sive (1959) and Marina Carr’s By the Bog of Cats . . . (1998). In Peter Sheridan and Mannix Flynn’s The Liberty Suit (1977) ‘a Traveller, bullied and anathematised by working-class Dubliners, takes his own life’ (Pierse 2018, 18).

Intersectional/Intercultural Conflicts  195 14 Jason Byrne directed the work, and it initially featured Sorcha Fox and later Sarah Morris in the lead role, none of whom has a Traveller background, playing opposite John Connors, a successful actor/writer/campaigner and highly visible member of the Travelling community. McDonagh notes ‘Handing my work over to a settled man was challenging and terrifying’ (2021). 15 In A Whistle in the Dark, when the postmaster’s kid strikes another with a stone, Michael is blamed and told: ‘Go home, you tinker!’ (Whistle, 135). ‘Tinker’ is a class-based disparagement expressed towards someone not part of that ethnic group. The word ‘kn**er’ is used pejoratively on many public occasions. 16 John Baker et al. note ‘Travellers are much more clearly a group for whom the generative cause of inequality has been a prolonged history of cultural exclusion, marginalization and depreciation. While they also experience economic and political marginalization, these seem to originate in prior exclusions that are cultural in origin, including the lack of a culturally sensitive education, exclusion from mainstream schooling and prejudicial attitudes fostered by the educational system, the mass media and other culturally important institutions’ (2009, 68). 17 Current graduates of Travellers from Irish universities show some reversal of that trend. McDonagh herself attained a PhD. 18 Zélie Asava notes: ‘By 2005, a report from the NGO Alliance argued that, in pandering to dog-whistle politics, government policies had contributed to a culture of racism. In 2009, a Gallup survey for the European Union Agency for Fundamental Rights reported that 73% of black Africans in Ireland found ethnic discrimination to be “widespread”. The Irish Network Against Racism’s (INAR) 2015 report on Afrophobia stressed the need for policies addressing structural, institutional and cultural racism. In 2018, the Economic and Social Research Institute reported that black people were five times more likely to experience discrimination when seeking employment’ (2022, 130). 19 There is also George Seremba’s monologue Come Good Rain (1993) about his experiences of a ‘botched execution attempt’ on him in Uganda (Singleton 2011, 151). Seremba performed this work, was cast in Asylum! Asylum! and studied in Trinity College for a master’s and PhD. 20 That is not to downplay the significance of anyone’s poor treatment. 21 Middle-class communities were better protected and insulated from some of the most intense horrors of the conflict. 22 Michael Pierse notes that Joe O’Byrne’s It Come Up Sun (2000) features an ‘Eastern European woman’ who ‘emerges from a container in the Docklands’ (2011, 256). 23 The Abbey Theatre’s 2022 production of The Weir has Indian American Jolly Abraham playing Valerie. The play never specifies that Valerie is Irish, but that casting choice raises especially complex issues about colour-blind or -sensitive casting and also about how casting inflects issues of race. To include reflections on this complicates further the issues of intersectionality and interculturalism. McIvor reflects on the casting of Ruth Negga, an Ethiopian-Irish performer, as Pegeen Mike for Druid’s production of Synge’s The Playboy of the Western World for the 2005 Perth Festival that only played for six performances, and later she played the same role for London’s Old Vic production in 2011 (2016, 47–48). The casting of the Ghanaian-born British actor Hugh Quarshie to play Edward, an American academic, in Frank McGuinness’s Someone Who’ll Watch Over Me (1992a) was not foreseen by the playwright.

8 The Solidarity Paradox Inter-Meshing Cultural and Social Capital in Lieu of Economic Capital?

Introduction There are religious, commemorative, sporting, political, ceremonial, funeral and festive occasions during which people gather to celebrate and commemorate. Collective protests are mounted against political, ­ideological, cultural, religious, legislative, environmental and social norms, conditions and regulations. Agitations take various forms from revolts, terrorism, paramilitarism, riots, lockouts, boycotts, petitions and chainings to hunger strikes, marches, secondary picketing, acts of sabotage and vandalism and the occupation of spaces.1 The right to peaceful protest is a right granted by most democratic societies.2 Protest can be grassroots in origin or top-down driven and can be meritorious or seditious, and the consequences of protest are seldom fully anticipated. Often people choose or feel compelled to affiliate with a cause, which grants, however temporarily, a common intent and outcome-oriented sense of purpose. Solidarity requires the identification of collective actions and objectives, even if there is little agreement on means and ends. It is easier to battle on one front than many.3 There can also be a siege-mindset solidarity. Those in positions of power can face off, grandstand, negotiate, concede, fight back, oppress further or partake in a propaganda war, including briefing negatively, doing side deals or triggering division amongst protesters. In the face of kickback and resistance or the upping of the ante, protesting groups risk fracturing, losing focus, energy and commitment. Collective actions are not just about chasing after change or correcting a wrong, they are also about affirming systemic accountability. With any group, however collegial or idealistic, keeping a group cohesive is challenging. For a common purpose to hold, there has to be a huge investment of time and energy. Minority groups are often better at driving change.4 Jill Dolan references David Harvey’s remark: ‘We know a great deal about what divides people, but nowhere near enough about what they have in common.  .  .  . Without translation, collective forms of action become

DOI: 10.4324/9781003180074-9

The Solidarity Paradox  197 impossible’ (Dolan 2005, 82 citing Harvey 2000, 245). Yuval Noah Harari adds that it was co-operation that gave Homo sapiens ‘a crucial edge over other human species’ (2014, 46). He adds ‘the real differences between us and chimpanzees is the mythical glue that binds together large numbers of individuals, families and groups’ (Harari 2014, 38). Trauma, violation, abandonment and neglect hyper-individualise characters, as they dissociate from or cannot accommodate their pain, and this makes them more isolated, marginalised, distrusting and likely to strike out, evidenced in Marina Carr’s Portia Coughlan (1996) and By the Bog of Cats . . . (1998). Portia has friends of a somewhat similar disposition, like Maggie May and Stasia. Yet Portia declines compromise and is alone and unreachable. Hester instinctively and correctly distrusts the motive and actions of others and is uncannily self-aware of her own internal divisions. Traumatised by abandonment and rejection, Hester cannot even take her own side: cannot choose to do what will preserve her. Neither in sync with those around them nor trusted because of their relentless commitment to speak truth to power, the intensities of Portia and Hester are seen as excesses that are as uncontainable as they are to be feared. Without an ability to self-nurture, self-regulate or tolerate others, it is difficult for such figures to veer away from self-destructive impulses and make demands that are reasonable and proportionate. Families feature as the source of division and disunity. Family spaces are marked more by betrayal, trauma, separation and division than compassion, empathy, togetherness or unity. Characters opposing inequalities and injustices are easy to identify with if there is a clear protagonist/antagonist demarcation, and often that is the case with history plays. Sometimes opposition is subtle, as in Doalty’s moving of theodolite equipment, or the resistance more malicious, as with the disappearance of a British army officer Yolland in Translations (1980).5 Some dramas are forthright about the idea of rebellion as an individualised action. Sometimes protest is seen as an agreed expression of solidarity, while other plays remain suspicious of the notion of allegiance in terms of collective campaigning, activism, advocacy, volunteering or donating. If writing tends to be vague about or non-committal on the necessity of solidarity, to what extent might it be seen as solidarity-phobic?6 This chapter’s focus is less on the theatre sector as campaigning or as a site of protest and more about how plays dramatise acts of solidarity and the tensions between individual and collective actions. Cathleen ni Houlihan: Sacrifice as Solidarity There is a long history of revolutionary sacrifice serving as the fundamental gesture of solidarity, but it is invariably countered by the costs

198  The Solidarity Paradox associated with the deed, as well as the ideology that shapes such actions. Some prompt sacrifices; others make the sacrifices. Now acknowledged as co-written by Augusta Gregory and W.B. Yeats, but once attributed to Yeats only, Cathleen ni Houlihan (1902) is a mystical work set in a cottage in Killala in 1798, as French forces are landing to support revolutionary efforts, while the Gillane household is readying itself for a wedding between Michael and Delia Cahel. It is a union based on a love bond, consolidated by a significant dowry, to be invested to enhance their wealth. Bridget and Peter Gillane never imagined that the material conditions of their children would have improved so radically. Bridget is riled by Peter’s regret that he got no dowry when he married, because if she did not bring much, he was not wealthy. Bridget has worked extremely hard, cut corners and demanded little. Their successes leave a bad taste, even though they are hungry for more. For Bridget, Michael is a good catch, someone who will be conscientious and not wasteful. Michael’s motivations are different to those of his parents; their wealth gives him advantages and alternative perspectives. Michael has the luxury of noting: ‘The fortune only lasts for a while, but the woman will be there always’ (Cathleen, 21). Michael’s rejection of material or mercenary motives and his emphasis on a romantic sensibility make him ripe for another form of seduction. Rumours abound of a strange woman who wanders the lands during times of war and agrarian unrest. When an Old Woman arrives, Michael is not keen on her presence but grows inquisitive. The Old Woman’s language is inconsistent with realistic speech norms; instead it is rich, diverse, elusive and incantatory, drawing on metaphor, allegory and symbolism by way of enriched cultural capital. The Old Woman is a wanderer, a victim of occupation, having ‘too many strangers in the house’, and has lost her ‘four beautiful green fields’ (Cathleen, 23). The Old Woman wants neither food, drink nor money but something more valuable. Those who fight on her behalf will be injured, expelled to foreign shores and lose their lives, but it is a price worth paying. Their legacy will be culturally embedded in songs and reminiscences, in the eternal memory of nationhood and appreciation of their services to nation formation. The Old Woman is recruitment officer, hypnotist and weaver of seductive revolutionary outcomes but does not consummate her romances. Michael sets aside his affections for Delia: the prospect of capital abundance and children are trumped by the symbolic and sacrificial capital of insurgency and political independence and by the eternal aspects of cultural capital. Michael’s investment in altruistic, patriotic sacrifice leads to the Old Woman’s symbolic transformation from an elderly person to a young woman/queen, ensuring that her royal standing and youthfulness displace her original appearance. While Cathleen ni Houilhan foregrounds

The Solidarity Paradox  199 revolt as the ultimate sacrifice for one’s colonised country, protest in the form of revolutionary activities is complicated by many other plays. The Pillowman: Fairytale Habitus Martin McDonagh’s The Pillowman (2003) can be read in relation to totalitarianism and its oppressions and can be viewed in terms of how stories indoctrinate and constitute citizens and nations and as a play about creativity, inspiration and literary influence or as one about justice. The ill treatment of detainees speaks to the many causes-célèbre around the miscarriages of justice in Britain experienced by the Birmingham Six, Guildford Four and Maguire Seven under illegitimate policing and judicial practices partially licensed by the Prevention of Terrorism Act (1974). The Pillowman is also very much a play about families; socialisation; the chaos of familial relationships; the protection family might afford; and the instincts, choices, randomness and destruction at the core of familial social capital. Set in the unspecified Kamenice, assumed to be a central or eastern European state in an undetermined time period, a family uses their two sons, Katurian and Michal, to carry out a sadistic experiment. Katurian is hot-housed in a way that nurtures his creative talent, whereas Michal is routinely tortured by way of inspiring his sibling’s imagination, with the violation only ending with Katurian’s slaying of his parents. Michal morphs Katurian’s grisly stories about child violation into a series of child murders, as he is incapable of reading allegorically or metaphorically or distinguishing between fact and fiction (see Worthen and Worthen 2006, 155–173). If Michal cannot recognise the trauma he causes, under most regimes he would not be found guilty by reason of diminished responsibility. Katurian’s mercy killing of his brother is a way of protecting him from execution, and Katurian’s confession to multiple murders is his means of negotiating the survival of his writings and a measure of his willingness to incriminate himself to save his stories, sacrifice as a surrendering of social capital by way of preserving cultural capital. Executed without recourse to the courts or legal representation, Katurian’s final moments are from beyond the grave. The play marks a movement away from the grimness of the endings to ‘The Pillowman’ or ‘The Little Jesus’ stories. In the final narrative, Katurian re-orients ‘The Pillowman’ story in which a pillowman figure offers children a way of evading suffering by staging suicides prior to the endless trauma they are destined to endure; either die tragically as a child assisted by him in a way that makes it seem like an accident or live with horrific suffering, followed by a horrendous death. Both Katurian and Michal had partly identified with the Pillowman’s distress for the suffering of others, and empathy serves as a form of social capital. ‘In lieu of a prayer’ (Pillowman, 102), Katurian imagines

200  The Solidarity Paradox Michal being visited by the Pillowman just prior to when his childhood torture begins and the Pillowman offering Michal the option of an early death. In Michal’s opting for suffering, there is something substantial laid down about empathy but also fraternal relationships. What could be written off as some patriarchal fantasy about brotherhood and toxic masculinity is much more than that. Not only is there contempt for the chaos and emotional and social capital deficits the parents bring into their lives, but there is also a challenge to the wider state that offers no protection to its most vulnerable.7 Carthaginians: Bound by Unruly Grief Frank McGuinness’s work is solidarity obsessed. Carthaginians (1988) is set in a graveyard where characters gather, hoping to witness the dead rise. The play gives expression to the horrors associated with Bloody Sunday, 28 January  1972, when British Army paratroopers shot at a civil rights protest on the streets of Derry/Londonderry, leaving fourteen dead, many injured, and a community in prolonged grief.8 Despite the gross inadequacies of the findings of the Widgery Tribunal (1972), it would only be with the Saville Inquiry in 2005 that a fairer and less politically motivated investigation would reach conclusions in line with what most of the city’s Catholic/Nationalist population held to be true. There was no justification for the shootings.9 In Carthaginians, almost every character is connected to the events of Bloody Sunday. Most had been protesting in the civil rights march, while Maela had been dealing with the death of her child. Dido, a young gay male, who provides provisions for a fee to those gathered in the graveyard, is least associated with that day. In response to the horrors that befell a protesting community, McGuinness allows his characters to re-form as a collective of visionaries; the miracle of the dead rising is the only outcome that will appease their loss. Social connections are reinforced by way of intercultural reference and shared knowledge. The play relies on the intertextual positioning of multiple other texts and other histories by way of circulating diverse forms of cultural capital and by affording characters access to self-understanding. Carthaginians cites The Merchant of Venice and references the historic destruction of Carthage through the song ‘When I Am Dead and Laid in Earth’ by way of Henry Purcell’s opera Dido and Aeneas (c 1688), and McGuinness also recontextualises the story of Dido and Aeneas through Dido as Gay Queen of Derry. Equally, McGuinness, palimpsest-like, links the falls of Rome and Carthage with Derry. Parody features in the rendition of Martin Luther King’s ‘I Have a Dream’ speech and in the parodic referencing of maternal grief central to O’Casey’s Juno and the Paycock

The Solidarity Paradox  201 (1924). Character tensions are eased by the affection they have for one another, their collective histories, the sharing of stories of guilt and loss and exchanges of dirty jokes.10 Adopting the personae of a French writer, Fionnuala McGonigle, and dressed in drag, Dido’s transgressive playlet The Burning Balaclava is written in response to the carnage of ‘The Troubles’. Dido’s script references multiple texts and genres and brings on board misrule, celebration of excesses, indulgences, trickery, impersonation, revelation, transgressions and the breaking of taboos, the mingling of that which is not normally aligned, and the temporary shifting of hierarchies.11 Parodied are the literary representations of the victims and perpetrators of the Northern Irish conflict, and the tropes associated with the conflict are mocked, monitored and sabotaged, including representations of love across the divide and breaches of human rights under police interrogation. The working-class British solider, who bemoans his presence in Northern Ireland, is the initiator of the violence. Almost all roles are played crossgender. The characters allow themselves to be steered by Dido’s instruction, based partly on trust, partly on a need to re-connect to a sense of self, but also to invest in the foolishness and anarchy of the moment. It is not that freedom from grief is triggered by the playlet, more that play creates a sense of transitional space by which grief can be tangentially, even vicariously, processed by way of a cultural performative. Maela acknowledges that her daughter has died for the first time. Although Seph had spoken once previously, there is new clarity to his mind about his informing. Later the characters collectively deliver Walter de La Mere’s ‘The Listeners’, a poem that grounds them in their collective schooling, followed by a choric naming of those who died on Bloody Sunday. Moving amongst the sleeping characters, Dido names the living, the survivors, a collective bound by grief, an unsavoury but consoling solidarity nonetheless, and expresses the invitation to ‘play’ (Carthaginians, 379). Laughter shifts the embeddedness of individual and collective trauma, and a cultural consciousness licenses the possibility of renewal for characters from various classes who bond, support and cohere into a collective community. Social and cultural capital intersect to expose the consequences of a reprehensible politicised action by the military agents of the state, who facilitated killing to consolidate its political capital. Lay Up Your Ends: To the ‘Bitter End’ Written collaboratively by Martin Lynch and the Charabanc Theatre company, comprising Sarah (Marie) Jones, Maureen Mcauley, Eleanor Methven, Carol Scanlan (Moore) and Brenda Winter, Lay Up Your Ends (1983)

202  The Solidarity Paradox is a series of agitprop, non-illusionistic scenes in which actors play multiple roles, inspired by field research amongst former millworkers.12 Set in 1911, the play’s focus is on the walkout by women workers in one of the many linen factories that dotted the manufacturing landscape of Belfast. Brenda Winter remarks that ‘Linen, along with ship-building and rope, had been central to the prosperity of Belfast since the Industrial Revolution’ (2008, 26).13 The women characters are living hand to mouth, working six days a week under poor conditions, where serious illness is a consequence of wet floors and dust in the atmosphere – ‘the pouce’ or ‘mill fever’ (Lay, 73). The mill owners also own the houses in which the workers live, giving them additional control over their employees. As orders are lower, Eric Bingham wants to trigger shorter working hours and wage cuts and sets out to enforce draconian workplace policies about talking while working, toilet breaks, hair combing and singing. Already workers are variously fined for minor indiscretions. After Mary is suspended without pay and not given a return-to-work date, Belle declares: ‘Bingham has as much as declared war agin us with his shorter hours, and fines and suspensions and rules and demands’ (Lay, 65). If Belle blends all their grievances, Bingham sees wage cuts and shorter hours as his priorities; the enforcement of rules, fines and suspensions are a distracting tactic. Although the linen industry is one of the many manufacturing industries in decline, there is a clear sense that the workers want to see themselves earn more than will cover the bare basics. There are different types of couples and household formations in the play. Ethna has had eight children, Florrie minds four of her siblings, Mary is readying for marriage. In many instances households rely on both partners going out to work, and even with that, there is little more than subsistence living standards possible. Belle lives with brown paper on the windows and newspaper covering the kitchen table; Ethna steals and pawns her mother-in-law’s pillowcases, has to borrow so that a child can go to a doctor and is indebted to money lenders. Ethna takes in extra clothes to wash, and Belle cleanses the dead by way of adding to her income. The characters may make the best linen in the world, but none of it finds its way into their homes. A male figure calls the strikers ‘dirty millies’ (Lay, 53). Ethna’s man beats her; Lizzie says that Charlie does not. Charlie’s ethos is to ‘bate’ women not with fist but the mind, as he tries to manipulate Lizzie away from strike action (Lay, 79). There are two opposing views on industrial action. Mary Galway, leader of the Society of Textile Operators, coordinates workers across the sector and wants to negotiate with employers; strike action is not even a last resort, and then there is the figure of James Connolly, leader of the Workers’ Union, who encourages the organisation of labour and strikes. By way

The Solidarity Paradox  203 of dismissing Connolly’s ideas, he is said to be a supporter of Home Rule, and Connolly’s non-sectarian band is seen as ‘all a big plot’ by Charlie (Lay, 78). Once a strike is called, with three factories and over 2,000 workers refusing to work, a fund needs to be established to keep food on the table, and collections ensure that. Belle and Florie as ringleaders are to be targeted and not allowed to return to work (Lay, 69). One of the very notable moments in the play is a scene in Bingham’s home, where his wife Ursula and friends Myrtle, Amy, Elizabeth and Lydia gather to discuss art, music and charitable work. Notable is the collusion of middle-class women characters with the mechanisms of capital. Gendered relationships are based on charity and giving second chances to those who are addicted and unfortunate. As a female cohort they are satirised, their thinking deemed inappropriate.14 Newspapers purposefully conspire to give no coverage of the story. Although the striker’s intention was to take their fight to the ‘bitter end’ (Lay, 66), within two weeks, poverty and hunger hinder their resolve. Claudia Harris notes ‘They may appear to have made no headway, but they have gained a sense of their own power as workers’ (2006, xv). As the final cohort of strikers return to work, they sing a song that mocks supervisor Jim Doran and plan for a very deliberate collective response to the rules as set out by management. If any worker is threatened to be penalised for combing their hair, they will all do the same; if one worker is reprimanded for laughing, then they will all laugh; and if one is warned about singing, then they will all sing. Such is their coherence of their social capital. The play ends with the announcement of the formation of a union, with Mary as its secretary. Florrie announces that two weeks after they went back to work, ‘the first branch of the Irish Transport and General Workers’ Union was formed’ (Lay, 112). With actors playing multiple roles across genders and across class; in the female performers mimicking their employer’s conversation; and with characters being so articulate, insightful, insolent, and collectively connected, the play captures what a united front looks like, despite the pressures, subtle or otherwise, to undermine that stance. If their victory is not an economic one, a united front is their option. The Unmanageable Sisters: Fractured Belonging In Deirdre Kinahan’s The Unmanageable Sisters (2018), at Ger Lawless’s ‘stamp-licking party’, friends and family are expected to not only delight in her winning one million Green Shield Stamps but also assist with the onerous task of transferring the stamps into booklets so that she can claim a series of prizes that will transform her home (Unmanageable, 10). The party delivers visible gender tensions between different cohorts of women, some who are socially mobile, others because they are unhappy

204  The Solidarity Paradox with conservative gender norms and want to bring about social changes. Diverse attitudes towards religion, sex, contraception, marriage, divorce, abortion, domestic labour, employment opportunities and education, as well about the merits of risk and change, divide the fifteen members of the all-female cast. The complex social bonds that exist between them are seen in how they rival, challenge and sympathise with, regulate and encourage one another.15 Lilly has left the locality and lives nearby in Glasnevin; her upward mobility licences negative, prejudiced, discriminatory class-related views about her former neighbours. Gendered, working-class solidarity seems incompatible with social mobility. Patsy is the most ambitious, assertive and street-smart character and has set up a successful nightclub business with Charlie. When the relationship breaks down, she loses everything, as the law offers her no protections in relation to her business partnership and fails to recognise her cohabiting status. Using a choric device present in Tremblay’s original, but also something that Kinahan has frequently utilised in her own work, many of the women characters are afforded moments of direct address whereby they can articulate a viewpoint or perspective that neither intercharacter dialogue nor the rules of collective engagement afford, bringing a form of harmony or cohesion absent during intercharacter conflicts. Collective complaints about the drudgery of their routinised everyday are countered by the ‘Ode to Bingo’, which celebrates the need to win. The women characters are variously obsessed with winning, some stating that they do not know what it is like to win, having had so few opportunities in life to do so. Even when the dispositions of characters are negative, repressive and recalcitrant, characters can still wish for something different for themselves or for their children, often using fear rather than personal examples of initiative to foster agency. Despite how powerful, inhibiting and restraining the dominant ideological forces are, the younger characters have enough instincts and insights to disrupt, defy and unnerve such hegemonic imperatives. Ger’s winning of the Green Shield stamps symbolises the rewards of liberal capital accruing to very few, the lacks that people experience under such regimes and the outrage they possess towards those that succeed. Most characters steal stamps with no consideration as to what Ger might voluntarily share at the evening’s end. Stealing is seen as a form of perverse agency, a redress of disproportionate gain. Ger is unwilling to share or even to consider that her neighbours might have an expectation of some token reward in exchange for their generosity and labour. Economic, cultural and social capital interconnect strongly, and while all the women are seldom on the same page collectively, there are micro groupings that are, and these benefit from collective questioning, enthusiasm and

The Solidarity Paradox  205 a willingness to change. In relation to Tremblay’s original text, Jane Koustas notes how the idea of a ‘sisterhood deferred’ and ‘the absence of a cohesive solidarity antagonised some audiences’, but that is not her view (2021, 46). The play is less about the deferral of sisterhood, and it is more that the characters are bound by a sense of ‘fractured togetherness’, which Lynn Nottage so brilliantly captures in Sweat (Sweat, 119). The Field: Conspired Connections Land dispossession, exploitative landlords, evictions, boycotts, land agitation and reclaiming of ownership are part of the rural Irish agrarian consciousness.16 First produced in 1965, with the script revised for the 1987 production at the Abbey Theatre, John B. Keane’s naturalistic The Field is set in Carraigthomond. Local publican/auctioneer Mick Flanagan promises the widowed Maggie Butler that she will not be ‘wronged’ in her request to get the ‘best price’ for almost 4 acres of land (Field, 95). Having leased the land for five years and done much to improve the quality of the soil, Bull McCabe, and his son, Tadhg, are willing to pay a ‘fair price’ of 200 Irish pounds in contrast to the 800 pounds Maggie estimates the land to be worth (Field, 108). If Mick initially balks at the ‘illegality’ of McCabe’s plan to lure solicitor Nesbitt away from the auction, his qualms are settled once he is to get paid (Field, 109). Keane’s Carraigthomond is inhospitable towards its women, who are intimidated, assaulted, manipulated and undermined by oppressive patriarchal values. McCabe’s wife, who goes unnamed, has not slept with or spoken to him for eighteen years after he ‘walloped’ her because she had allowed the pony of a tinker’s widow to graze in their field and then he shot the pony (Field, 141). Maimie Flanagan, who has nine children, was assaulted by her husband after he eavesdropped on her having a group of young men back to the pub after a dance. Maimie notes the local draper will not display women’s underwear in the window. Maimie is aware of her own sexual and bodily needs but seems to have regulated and deprioritised herself, as her society demands of her. In Dandy McCabe’s mock auction of his wife, there is both transgressive playfulness but also a sinister reminder of gendered objectification that women are subjected to within the patriarchal economy. Traditionally this gender oppression ties into the symbolic association of women with land, and second, the field, as an expression of economic capital, is linked to female rather than male ownership. In the aftermath of the accidental death of Dee, a rival bidder, whom the McCabes assault, the bishop threatens to withdraw church services if the community does not reveal what they know about the death. Attempts by the police sergeant, accompanied by the local curate, to uncover the

206  The Solidarity Paradox truth in a visit to the pub are also resisted. Maimie, Mick, Bird O’Donnell, Dandy and Mrs McCabe have all sworn to provide Bull and Tadhg with alibis. The collective silence is partly motivated by fear and loyalty to Bull and by the belief that the outsider had no legitimate right to purchase. Precarity is one driver of McCabe’s actions, as is his veneration of the land, and he is particularly troubled by the fact that Dee is willing to concrete over some of the land – a sacrilegious transgressive dismissal of the sacrifices long associated with the land struggle and its symbolic relevance but also ownership from a class perspective. Bull states for the middle classes, ‘there’s a way out and the law is law no more’ (Field, 165), whereas ‘there’s no law for us’ (Field, 166). The rich have legal protections and options; priests and police officers can move elsewhere, but if there is no grass, ‘that’s the end of him’ (Field, 166). McCabe and his wife’s relations can declare a boycott of Flanagan’s shop/pub/auctioneer business, oppose church and state with their silence and make a perverse form of solidarity advantageous towards Bull. Those less privileged can collude and establish other claims on justice and wilfully ensure the purchase of an asset in Bull’s favour and at Maggie’s expense. Digging for Fire: Nostalgic Bonds Declan Hughes’s reunion play Digging for Fire (1991) is set on the cusp of the Celtic Tiger period: people in jobs are making money, fewer are worried about unemployment and migration is optional. Graduate friends get together to celebrate the homecoming of Emily and Danny, both based in New York. A night of serious drinking and cannabis consumption echoes student day parties. Each character has progressed into various careers in the ten years since graduating: one couple, Brendan and Clare, are a doctor and teacher, respectively; another, Breda and Steve, are in radio producing and advertising, and Rory is a solicitor and opera critic, single and gay, and attends at least four dinner parties weekly. Emily is an artist with an AIDS diagnosis, and Danny, the group’s rebellious, outspoken critical thinker, is a wannabe writer; reports of a publication in The New Yorker are untrue, and he is working as a sub-editor, far from the literary grandeur his friends imagine for him. Danny is happy to deceive, and they are happy to self-deceive, doing nothing to confirm his achievement or otherwise. All of the characters have a degree of privileged cosmopolitanism and mock those lower down and higher up the social scale. Danny is teased about being working-class Castleknock, which he is not; Breda, when addressing where Steve is from, differentiates between working-class Darndale and middle-class Killiney. A recalled student party in Greystones in the home of Anglo-Irish background figures is mocked, while the tendency

The Solidarity Paradox  207 for money to ‘make money out of money’ within these circles is duly noted (Digging, 19). If there is a degree of affluence associated with Clare and Brendan’s home, she finds it tasteless and unoriginal. If some class-related comments are in bad taste, their occasional casualised homophobic rapport is unnerving. Characters are embedded in popular and high culture through music, literature and sport trivia; references range from Enid Blyton and Wanderly Wagon to Thomas Pynchon and music groups the Pixies, Tom Waits, Iggy and the Stooges and the Sex Pistols. Almost all have public-facing careers, and all have invested in cultural ambitions when young, believing in the relevance, necessity and purpose of art. (Clare feels she has been coerced into teaching; the profession stifles her.) The host, ‘Bolshevik Brain’ Reynolds (Digging, 9), of the radio show that Breda works on, has his left-wing student radicalism questioned; as shock jock and agony uncle, he exploits the trauma and sexual desires of others, knowing how to milk the contributions of broadcast interviewees, and sensationalises without concern for the feelings or consequences of his confessionally inclined and all-too-trusting callers. Radio is a form of false solidarity, reliant on listeners telling their ‘intimate secrets’ to a selfpromotional host, feeding his ‘demented egotism’ (Digging, 36). Danny wanted to be like the child characters in Blyton’s work: distant relatives; freely roaming children; freed from parents, locality, history, roots and ‘community’ – with ‘no great “shared vision”, no sense of solidarity or common purpose’ (Digging, 36). A college fling between Danny and Clare while they wrote plays and revues together was fundamental to her sense of intense creativity and purpose. Two years previously they had rekindled their connection with another affair, this time when Clare was married, and that infidelity lingers over the evening’s events. When Clare informs Brendan about it, he is violent towards her before thinking that they can recover from the breach of sexual trust. Steve is a serial adulterer, including sleeping with Emily in New York, and while Breda is in a drunken stupor late that evening, he tries to rekindle the affair. Revelations about Steve’s multiple affairs by Emily are denied by Brendan, and Breda disputes Emily’s motivation. Brendan is most invested in the party and in their friendship’s survival. Discovering that all his friends know about the affair is disconcerting. Then, challenging his own perceptions of their friendship, Brendan raises the issue of him reaching out and supporting others, loaning money they all discreetly agree is not to be paid back, or the times he assisted with friends moving accommodation or picking them up from the airport. His investment of energy and resources is in anticipation of some form of future tit-for-tat reciprocation. Steve is keen to puncture Brendan’s delusions about unbreakable friendship, which seem to be based on some 1960s

208  The Solidarity Paradox attitude towards solidarity, belonging and duty. For Rory: ‘We’ve nothing for each other anymore’ (Digging, 60). The unity Brendan thought bound them is fragile, delusional, unsustainable, built on habits and conveniences rather than some sense of belonging. Brendan revels now in being indiscreet, calling his friends out in the face of their discretionary inclinations to leave things unsaid and undealt with. These friends may not meet again under current circumstances, and what seemingly united them previously is no longer binding, particularly as it is based on lies, little commitment and deceit. The characters head back to their own worlds, most more alone. Danny will return to Dublin to start a fire ‘or dredge out of the wreckage’ (Digging, 74). He gives Clare a tape of New Order’s ‘True Faith’ to remind her of the last time he saw her dance two years previously, by way of prompting her to reconnect with that sense of abandoned self, who looked as if she was ‘in heaven’ (Digging, 40). If during one part of the evening Claire wanted to be with Danny in New York, that has changed, and not because he is coming home or because he is a fake. The play ends with Clare engrossed in the music, asserting herself, dancing alone, and that aloneness announces the absence of solidarity, and the prompt towards self-discovery that comes from cultural capital. The Cavalcaders: Betrayal/Mutuality Billy Roche’s tragi-comic memory play The Cavalcaders (1993) is set in Wexford town, where everyone knows each other’s business and secrets. The past is as immediate as the present, and although Terry and Breda run small businesses, and all of the characters are in employment, money is not plentiful. The shop setting reiterates Roche’s general preference for public-facing over private-oriented family spaces in his work, social capital expressed outside of family units. Roche remarks that the play is ‘a “Camelot in blue jeans” tale – would open in the here and now with the [shoe]shop dark and lifeless (à la The Waste Land)’ (Roche 2022, Web). The play blends the present and past in a complicated fashion. In the present, Terry has just sold his business to a former employee, Rory, who plans to transform the old shoe shop into something more contemporary; the space is to be redecorated, machines will do much of the work, three weeks of training will displace the year it took to acquire the necessary skills to repair footwear and customers will have repairs done while they wait instead of being obliged to wait three weeks (Cavalcaders, 2). In scenes from the past, Terry’s employer/employee relationship with Josie, Ted and Rory, his shoemaker staff, is complicated by friendships and by all of them being part of a barbershop quartet, the Cavalcaders,

The Solidarity Paradox  209 led by Terry. Singing together bonds this barbershop quartet and gives them purpose and passion. Singing gives the quartet local kudos – symbolic capital; Terry’s uncle Eamon gets admiration for the mass he writes, and the community takes pride in local creativity and successes. The Cavalcaders’ ambitions are limited, acquiring a twenty-five-song repertoire in their years together. Homosocial bonds are defined by other common interests, by ogling women passing by – less darkly voyeuristic and more unrequited longing – by affirming one another’s significance through story and by the seeming care invested in each other’s life outcomes. As Kevin Kerrane notes ‘music – like adultery – is not just a dramatic element; it’s substantive’ (2012, 166). Friendships and intimate relationships are also marked by breaches of trust. Rogan betrays Terry’s friendship by sleeping with his wife, who goes unnamed. Terry hopes that his friend will come back and apologise, and he keeps a picture of her in his wallet for twenty years. Terry is hurt by his friend’s actions even more than by his wife’s infidelity, and Terry’s current relationships are distorted by his fears. An affair with hairdresser Breda is on/off, and a newer one with the far younger Nuala ends with her utterly distraught and furious about Terry’s ruthless rejection and dismissal. Later attempts to underplay his previous comments to Nuala are pathetic to a point but suggest Terry’s prior horrid behaviours are triggered by intimacy-phobia. There is little by way of repression, but there is also little that is sexually carefree; sex is consequence laden. Male desire is sometimes voyeuristic, misogynistic, commitmentphobic and conservatively traditional in many ways, and women’s desires are resolute, neither passive nor second order, noted in the flashbacks to early moments in Terry and Nuala’s affair, which are not marked by unease and insecurity but by consent, playful dialogue and erotic attraction. Nuala’s later affair with Poe, an undertaker, is more troubling; they engage in rough sex in the basement of a funeral home, where his father had died, and young Poe found him. Rory and Ted fall out when Ted sleeps with Ursula, then later moves in with her and has a baby. Ursula has got under his skin, and there is no way for him to discount that. Ursula initiated the affair. Although Terry does not know who his father is and his uncle Eamon is a substitute and benign paternal figure, Terry sleeps with his wife. After Terry sleeps with her, Josie declines a similar opportunity, unsettled by her grief. While she was willing to have sex with two teenagers, her tears are not explained, but her infidelity was not a once-off. Her relating of the encounter to Eamon soils Terry’s relationship with him. The legacy of unfaithfulness lingers harshly and traumatically. The pregnant Nuala takes her own life, but Breda and Terry end up as a benign, supportive couple. Breda has been Terry’s shadow partner, biding

210  The Solidarity Paradox her time, flirtatious when appropriate but also dismissive of his advances. Terry’s song, ‘Sayonara Street’, addresses loss and can be understood in relation to his feelings about Nuala as much as Josie’s death. The care and respect for those who have died is important – belated or otherwise – as is the affection in which Josie is held prior to and during his treatment for cancer. In a work that takes comfort from myth, death, illness and betrayal,17 the characters are less propelled by conscious choice. Nuala’s suicidal action is despair driven, and Terry’s cruelty and rejection play their part; he has blood of sorts on his hands. The guilt Josie articulates around his willingness to sleep with Eamon’s wife, and the cyclicality of betrayal (prompted by the Camelot myth), ensure that trust is eroded easily and commitment is fraught. Rory’s willingness to move on is part of his forgiving nature. Guilt and letting others down are countered by leisure activities as ­cultural engagement, the harmony and sense of purpose achieved while singing, the redemptive nature of music itself, community holding out the possibility of a safe harbour and the comforts and consolations of intimate companionship, where cultural and social capital are not substitutes or compensations for economic lack. The Weir: Reciprocal Capital Noted for its sequence of interlocking spectral stories told across an evening’s drinking in a pub, Conor McPherson’s The Weir (1997) is remarkable for other reasons, including how it interdigitates various forms of capital, social, cultural and economic. In the first instance, the pub is a social space that affords different characters the chance to share unnerving stories, some closer to their lives than others. In that sharing, there is a degree of equality in turn-taking or the type of tit-for-tat reciprocation central to one of the four types of relationality that anthropologist Alan Fiske promotes. Fiske devised a taxonomy of relationality based on work by social psychologists Richard Shweder and Jonathan Haidt. Steven Pinker unpacks Fiske’s four modes of relationality: ‘Equality Matching’ is based on give and take, a loose mode of tabulation or ‘loose accounting’ (2011, 758). ‘Communal Sharing’ is the free sharing of resources without keeping score, based on in-group loyalty, kinship, bonding and rituals of togetherness (Pinker 2011, 756). ‘Authority Ranking’ is a hierarchical model reliant on status, dominance, loyalty and obligation (Pinker 2011, 766). ‘The Market Pricing’ aspect of the model is based on the invisible hand of the market to set prices and on legal frameworks within which to do business (Pinker 2011, 756–758).18 Various approaches have strengths and weaknesses, but, as Pinker argues, each model offers a ‘grammar for social norms’ (2011, 759). Pinker also highlights the notion

The Solidarity Paradox  211 of ‘relational mismatch’ (2011, 761) when people operate from different modes or misunderstand the modes others are applying. In the play, the rounds of drinking are not just a form of collective sharing, but there are subtle incidents, such as the skipping of Jim’s round or the others declining to add to the order when he does purchase a drink. Characters are from different classes. Jim does odd jobs and is his mother’s carer. Jack’s garage business is not very quick or efficient with repairs. Valerie seems to have quit a permanent job, area not specified, in Dublin City University to live in the country. Finbar exemplifies a type of opportunistic business acumen after he has had numerous successes in hospitality and property. Brendan owns a pub and farm, but how he runs his pub is not consistent with Finbar’s profit-oriented approach. Perceptibly, in allowing Jim to take home a naggin of whiskey for free and the volume of drinks on the house offered out, there is the suggestion that on this evening, at least, the pub is a not-for-profit venture and more a venue for hosting social gatherings for neighbours or friends. Jack asks Brendan about doing something with the top field, and his sisters are pressuring him about selling some land so that they can fund new cars for their husbands, but Brendan is not so inclined. Indeed, apart from international tourists, both a source of income and an encumbrance, Brendan has enough to keep him occupied: he is neither dictated to by entrepreneurial opportunity nor is he sweating his assets to generate more wealth. The play begins with Jack, finding the proprietor absent, going behind the counter to serve himself a drink; he opens the till and pays for it. Not only is this action out of step with normal customer/proprietor practices, but later when Jack pays for a drink, Brendan accepts an amount close enough to the price. Opening a till in many business premises might find someone threatened with facing the rigors of the law. The Weir’s storytelling as cultural capital exchanges are marked by equality, even if there is no gender proportionality; Valerie is one woman amongst four men. While Valerie is a newcomer, she tells a personal story that unnerves them all about the loss of her child, Niamh. Moreover, the social capital that exists between Brendan, Jim and Jack is supportive and non-judgemental, even if Finbar wants to signal his alpha-male competitive status and is naturally inclined to rile Jack. The social/public space serves as one that is both pastoral and recuperative, social and culturally oriented rather than economic. Through storytelling, Valerie gives testimony to her loss, Jim can demarcate an overwhelming fear around death through an uncanny story about a paedophile and Jack and Finbar can tell stories about local hauntings and superstitions. The late revelation that Jack sabotaged a significant relationship in his life and that he discloses his regret is partly prompted by Valerie’s story of loss but is also relayed as a cautionary tale to Brendan,

212  The Solidarity Paradox warning him not to miss life opportunities because it is easier to think that your ways are settled and others are not worth the effort. If the trajectory is darkly downward in the aftermath of Valerie’s story, McPherson replaces that mood with optimism. Furthermore, in moving towards a degree of solidarity, McPherson is marking out this space as an egalitarian, benign one. Kevin Kerrane calls the ending a moment of ‘grace’ (2006, 121), and Helen Lojek views it as offering a ‘temporary sense of belonging, during an evening of shared fellowship’ (2011, 61).19 Moreover, whether one describes the play’s dynamic as a form of equality matching, as a type of communitas or as an expression of ‘conspicuous community’, as I have done, it is appropriate to speak about the play as an affirmation of solidarity. Solidarity is based on trust, initiative, giving and taking and is less about rivalries or competitiveness. The play foregrounds social capital in terms of mutuality, cooperation, an engagement with diversity and difference and celebration of cultural common purpose and good, in a play partly shadowed by the spectre of economic growth associated with the Celtic Tiger period and the widespread more mercenary attitude to wealth which it fostered, without it being simply about that period. The Weir is out of step with that economic reality, siding instead with modes of being instinctively inimical to economic abundance and excess. In the play, social and cultural capital serve as a counterbalance to form relationality over-determined by economic capital. Stones in His Pockets: Carnivalised Synchronicities Located in Kerry on the film set of big budget The Quiet Valley, Marie Jones’s Stones in His Pockets (2000) dramatises complex issues of hierarchy, rank and representations and interfaces social, cultural and economic capital in complex ways as it teases out relationships between film crew, Hollywood stars and film extras. Two extras, Jake Quinn and Charlie Conlon, play between them fifteen characters in total, relying on a performer’s ability to bring a diverse array of characters to life as they play across nationalities, genders, ages and classes. A  security guard, dialect coach, assistants to the director, Hollywood star, the last surviving extra from The Quiet Man, a Christian brother and a media reporter are amongst the many characters played. Attitudes towards the film industry of celebrity performer Caroline Giovanni, who is on a six-million-dollar contract, could not be more different to the very grateful and enthused extras who are paid forty Irish pounds daily. The film industry best exemplifies the neoliberal marketplace model of supply and demand; some involved are paid large amounts, others very little, and those in between something again. Charlie is living out of a tent, having gone on the run from Ballycastle, Northern Ireland, after a failed

The Solidarity Paradox  213 video rental venture, incapable of competing with a chain store. Charlie’s public-facing good cheer hides heartache and an attempted suicide. Jake’s migration to America has been unsuccessful, and his inability to settle down and find himself leaves him directionless. Their precarity contrasts with the self-assurance of Simon, first assistant director, who is signalled as an ‘ambitious Dublin 4 type’ (Stones, 8), and third assistant director Aisling, so keen to impress those on high as to be indifferent to all others. Her dream is to produce her own films like her father; for Charlie, ‘it wouldn’t even cross her mind that she might not’ (Stones, 18). Shameless opportunism is everywhere; Caroline, who is having trouble with her accent, calls upon Jake for some native input, and the local publican will use an invitation to Caroline to have an egg and onion sandwich in order to advertise later that she dined there. Obsessed with the notion of authenticity, Caroline takes herself far too seriously, immersing herself in a fictional world that has no relationship to fact, where she is hung up on accent. Historically, Maeve would likely to have been British educated and had an Ascendency, Anglo-Irish accent, not one shared by the past or current locals and definitely not Jake’s accent, which Caroline hopes to study in order to deepen her performance. Yet if Hollywood is a ruthless, dog-eat-dog universe, the historical film in the making is a wilful cultural fantasy. Mark Phelan notes that The Quiet ­Valley is a ‘self-conscious, parodic composite’ of John Ford’s The Quiet Man, David Lean’s Ryan’s Daughter, and more recent Hollywood fodder in the form of Far and Away’ (2009, 243–244). In The Quiet ­Valley, Maeve, of the big house, marries Rory, the son of an evicted family, during the Land War (1879–82). As fictionalised, the eviction is not met with protest and is ironised when Aisling, demanding passivity, remarks: ‘You are defeated broken men’ (Stones, 43). The extras take great delight in undermining representations of their dispossessedness. Once married, Rory hands the land back to ‘the people’ (Stones, 36), a gesture that serves as some fanciful indication of restorative, natural justice, inconsistent with most economic practices. Clearly there is a sentimentalisation of interclass solidarity and wealth equality that Jones indulges but does not share in, as it is only within Hollywood’s gift, culturally speaking, but it is not in alignment with Hollywood’s notorious ruthlessness and exploitativeness. One cannot imagine Caroline or the others involved sharing their fee across the whole production team. When a difficult, drug-addicted teenager, Sean Quin, dies by suicide, Hollywood is accused of ‘filling’ heads with ‘dreams’ (Stones, 43). Extras, as a demonstration of solidarity, refuse to stick to the filming schedule in order to attend Sean’s funeral, forcing the production into a costly overrun. Their leverage is based on the fact that much of the film is already filmed, so they cannot be displaced, much to the chagrin of the director.

214  The Solidarity Paradox Jake and Charlie aspire to make a film about their tangential experiences on the film set. Through the newly formed Canvas Productions, they will collaborate to foreground Sean’s story, his sense of loss and the conviction that cultural expression feeds ambitions and daydreams to young people that are false and unrealisable. By way of a carnivalesque reversal, the ‘stars become the extras and the extras stars’ (Stones, 55). After they run their idea past Clem, he proposes a more optimistic narrative based on overcoming obstacles; Sean’s friend Fin should be a woman and a romance should bloom, and Sean should survive his attempt to take his own life. In performance, the play opens as if the theatre spectator is sitting in a cinema about to watch the fruits of Jake and Charlie’s labour. Indeed, an advertisement for the upcoming The Quiet Valley is played, suggesting that Jake and Charlie succeeded and found general release for their work. In that success there is huge optimism, perhaps naïveté, few reflections of the funding, investment requirements for films, of the implications of the absence of industry experience of either Jake or Charlie. There is a feel good factor nonetheless in their cultural victory over the odds. Effectively, the play out-Hollywoods Hollywood. The neoliberal market’s impartial neutrality purportedly serves as a guarantor of opportunity, fairness and a reward for hard work, ability and persistence, and the successful outcome for Charlie and Jake seems to be an affirmation of sorts, but only in a fingers-crossed way. Social cooperation in the form of the defiance of the precarious extras and the rewards of cultural capital success, even as a fantastical celebration of a notion of victory against the odds, serve as a grand, excessive riposte to the neo-liberal film industry. Cross-Connections O’Casey’s querying of blood sacrifice in The Plough and The Stars (1926) caused huge controversy when it premiered, where revolutionary motives range from venial to idealist, from selfishness to indifference, while the gap between believing one is doing something on behalf of others and the consequences for them is unbridgeable. In Deirdre Kinahan’s War of Independence play Embargo (2020), Jane leaves Kiernan, her sexual exploiter, for dead. Jack (Gracie) Grace helps Jane flee to Belfast by train, breaching his trade union and IRA embargo on the transporting of British soldiers. Gracie gives individual good priority over a collaborative form of resistance, for which he is severely punished. In McGuinness’s Observe the Sons of Ulster Marching Towards the Somme (1985), eight males from different class backgrounds, three pairs of friends and one same-sex coupling, are additionally linked by their Unionist beliefs. They are diversely bonded and united in their differences, but it is their collective actions in risking themselves to demonstrate the loyalty to

The Solidarity Paradox  215 their tribe and to the Union that give their fighting the appearance of collective coherence. McGuinness does not disavow their claim on the union with Britain and details their sacrifice as sacrosanct rather than misconceived, however much of it is also driven by a dark blood lust. The play is also informed by a provisional revoking of ideological authority outside of their smaller collective, suffused with challenges to army hierarchy and tribal leaders, and by the unsettling of the tribal certainties and myth convictions with which the volunteers started out. Elder Pyper’s later attempt to misappropriate the sacrifices of his peers is undermined.20 Stewart Parker’s Pentecost (1987) captures the rabid solidarity of the Loyalist workers’ strike of 1974 that brought an end to the Sunningdale Agreement. Peter remarks: ‘This is not what we call a protest movement, this is what is historically known as root-and-branch fascism’ (Pentecost, 215). Additionally, Peter talks about a standoff at an American university between armed Black students who locked themselves into a university building and armed police officers circling outside, separated by a cohort of white liberals, who positioned themselves between both so that the situation did not escalate. In Devlin’s After Easter (1994), Greta sits on the road and hands out un-consecrated eucharistic hosts by way of protest. The play’s ending is a form of sisterly solidarity. Christina Reid’s Joyriders (1986) circulates rival ways of thinking about the broader context in which the trainees find themselves, partially by tapping into the songs of dissent written by the Divis Flats community and the energy of protest that greets the visit of Jeremy Saunders from the Home Office. If change is difficult, the work also taps into popular culture through Nick Kershaw’s song ‘Wouldn’t It Be Good to Be in Your Shoes’ by way of fancifully flagging something sentimental, impeded by classism, gender inequality, sectarianism and inadequate political leadership. In McGuinness’s The Factory Girls (1982), the protesting stance taken to barricade the characters inside the office of their manager is a collegial form of communal praxis, based on the grit, bonds, intelligence and imagination of a socially marginalised working-class cohort of women. They do not get the backing of the wider community, but their gendered community matters, but neither social nor cultural capital are alternatives to or equivalent compensations for the lack of economic capital.21 In O’Halloran’s Conversations After Sex (2021), for SHE, there is solace and provisional solidarity in multiple casual couplings; for some the common outcome is pleasure, and for others grief is also something that temporarily binds them. Adigun’s Not So Long Ago (2006) ends with a celebratory form of solidarity, whereas, writing about The King of Spain’s Daughter (1935) and Katie Roche (1936), Cathy Leeney notes, ‘Deevy is not concerned to idealize her heroines’ attempts at resistance; the plays create a space for their imaginative wilfulness that counters narrative stability’ (2010, 179).

216  The Solidarity Paradox McPherson’s The Seafarer (2006) demonstrates an even greater resistance towards a market-oriented viewpoint by virtue of the fact that success over Mr Lockhart, the devil, is not hard earned and does not accrue to the virtuous; it is more because of chance and excess. A  troubled, coherent solid sense of purposeful solidarity exists in the bonds of friendship and fraternity. In Bernard Farrell’s The Last Apache Reunion (1993), there is a futile call upon solidarity. Maurice, as compere of the evening, asks: ‘why don’t we show a bit of solidarity’ by indulging in a singsong to end the evening (Apache, 182). Harry rips up the evening’s programme; old friends have to be kept physically apart. Their victimising of someone younger and isolated is their deviant bond. If wakes were once a form of ceremonial solidarity, then the wake in Murphy’s The Wake (1998) is about the ‘acceptance of irredeemable isolation’ (Grene 2017, 99). In Thompson’s Over The Bridge (1960), Davy believes in the necessity of ‘unity, tolerance, loyalty’ (Bridge, 38); each proves unachievable. If Over the Bridge’s collective union endeavour results in negative outcomes, Tracy Ryan’s Strike! (2010), about the real-life two-and-a-half year Dunne Store’s workers protest starting in 1984 over the handling of South African fruit during apartheid, has a positive outcome, at least for the protest, less so for the individuals who led it. Equally, team spirit, overturning of the odds and an underdog consciousness are evident in John Breen’s Alone It Stands (2002), a metatheatrical realisation of Munster’s defeat of the allconquering, touring All-Blacks rugby team in 1978. In Charlie O’Neill’s Hurl (2003), a group of multi-ethnic asylum seekers take up the game of hurling and are successful in a provincial club championship, having overcome numerous impediments associated with class and race. Engagement with a traditional form of cultural capital enhances self-expression. O’Neill ignores the realities of the skills-base of that sport, and the single year’s committed training for the majority of his players, who are new to the sport, would never amount to the necessary practice to be anything other than basically competent, let alone collectively competitive. But their inversions of norms have a contagious quality, despite their un-groundedness in the real. Conclusion The plays featured in this chapter are responses to power, deficits in economic capital and systematic inequalities and turn towards social and cultural capital by way of insisting on the collective dilemmas faced by the marginalised and disenfranchised. Hesitant but participatory dramatic communities, out of reluctance, disinclination, fear and need, can assert some will towards truth and justice, but if its challenges are economic inequalities or justice related, there are often not enough successes.

The Solidarity Paradox  217 As theatre makes visible the coherence and cabal-like nature of dominant ideology, its seditious intent, the weapons, soft and hard, at its disposal, it is essential for a tradition of writing to demonstrate the difficulties and necessity of oppositionality. Notions like ‘we are all in it together’ stretch the credibility of most, because when the chips are down, that is seldom the case.22. Savage suggests: ‘tastes and interests are seen to be legitimate – socially approved – and seen as respectable and worthy. While there may be “limitless types”, of culture, not all types of cultural capital are equally valued’ (2015, 95). Elites prefer ‘prestigious forms of culture’, such as opera, classical music and theatre (Savage 2015, 318). Savage suggests that ‘Cultural capital operates through the organisation of cultural hierarchies which operate differentially across social classes’ (Savage 2015, 337). He extends this point: This may be expressed by consuming the ‘right’ kind of pop culture, legitimate pop, so to speak, but equally it may be about consuming the ‘wrong kind’ of (vulgar) pop culture in the right way. You only have to think of the image of the contemporary ‘hipster’, for example, whose tastes are a veritable assemblage of ‘ironic’ and ‘kitsch’ cultural consumption, to get a sense of what the successful execution of this emerging capital may look like in practice. In any case what is most central here is a particular style of aesthetic appreciation, a certain detached, knowing orientation to popular culture that demonstrates both an eclectic knowledge and a privileged understanding. (Savage 2015, 118) Michael Pierse illustrates how Richard Hoggart and the Frankfurt School (Adorno and Horkheimer) see the influence of mass culture as ‘corrosive’, whereas he sees it as ‘participatory’ (2011, 196). Many plays in this section include not just popular culture but use culture as a counter-cultural vehicle.23 Cultural capital is not just rated, ranked, ratified and consumed, it is also absorbed, ‘participatory’, transformed and performed. Oppositional collective purpose, however provisional or even utopian, is often animated by way of narrative, poem and song, sometimes popular but also classical, as with McGuinness’s work. Rewarding via cultural and collective investment in social capital creates gaps, spaces and underminings that appeal, which can be playful, ironically deployed, even with a knowingness apparent, but there is nothing that could be seen as ‘kitsch’ or hipsteresque. The wriggle room afforded by cultural expression is less by compensation or substitution and more by way of displacement or re-orientation; less the interfacing of social and cultural capital in lieu of economic and

218  The Solidarity Paradox legal gains and more empowering awarenesses about collective endeavour and about amplifying the positives of synchronicity in the face of massive inequalities. Seldom is there a form of resolution or poetic justice or victory against the odds but something more fluid than that. Irish theatre’s reflections on solidarity ensure we know some more about what binds and unites rather than divides, but also what our obligations might be to one another. Can one argue for different types of resistances by marginalised cohorts, but less easily that there are different sets of values by which characters live? Solidarity as dramatised has little purchase on sentiment, offers hybrid forms of social capital and often relies on a mutuality of humorous understanding and intent amongst diverse characters. About that we can be optimistic.

Notes 1 These include suffragette protests, anti-colonial, anti-war or anti-military occupation movements, Greenpeace, Poland’s Solidarity Trade Union, #MeToo, #blacklivesmatters, France’s Mouvement des gilets jaunes, Occupy Wall Street, pro-democracy marches, sportspeople taking the knee, flashmobs, counterprotests, conscientious objectors, Arab Spring and Extinction Rebellion. There are also the far-right, anti-migration protesters and blockaders as more toxic examples. 2 Ireland’s history is marked by various types of protest, including collective revolt against British imperialism, against Home Rule in Ulster, agrarian boycotts, trade union strikes, the protests of the women’s liberation movement and various protests and alleged miscarriages of justice and more recently grey protests, Pro-Life/Pro Choice campaigns, equality legislation activism, Save the Streets, Love Ulster or #WakingtheFeminists. 3 Reflecting on the concepts of liberty, equality and fraternity, Baker et al. suggest: ‘Solidarity in this sense stands in strong contrast to the ideology of selfinterest and individualism fostered by capitalist social relations. We take it as obvious that people in general have a basic need for solidary relationships and that these relationships help to enable them to live successful lives.  .  .  . [B]ecause people who feel solidarity with each other are more likely to be willing to endorse egalitarian principles that give the same weight to the needs and interests of others as to their own. That kind of mutual concern makes it easier for people to be willing to accept their fair share of resources, to cooperate in developing egalitarian arrangements for working and learning and to renounce the opportunity to wield power over others (2009, 52). 4 Michael Sandel notes how current social bonds have ‘unravelled’ at the expense of the common good (2020, 6). 5 Rejecting norms and defiance of order and expectation, acts of rebelliousness can be seen in works as various as Augusta Gregory’s Grania (1912), Billy Roche’s A Handful of Stars (1988) or Dermot Bolger’s The Lament for Arthur Cleary (1989). There is Pyper’s tribal, sexual and class defiances in McGuinness’s Observe the Sons of Ulster Marching Towards the Somme (1985). 6 Michael Pierse deploys the term ‘Hibernocentric Solidarity’ (2020b, 25).

The Solidarity Paradox  219 7 It feeds into the wider notion of extreme and distorted sacrifice by way of solidarity that McDonagh lingers after in much of his other work: Fr Welsh’s burning of his hands and suicide in The Lonesome West (1997). 8 Civil rights protests in Northern Ireland were a response to discrimination against a significant Catholic minority in terms of political vote rigging (gerrymandering), health, social, housing, employment and cultural discriminations that were rampant. 9 The Saville Inquiry found those killed or wounded fleeing the scene were not involved in any paramilitary actions; they were protesters or bystanders. The Saville Inquiry, www.gov.uk/government/publications/report-of-the-bloodysunday-inquiry [Accessed 10 September 2022]. 10 Sue Vice articulates the importance of comic verbal compositions, billingsgate, oaths, curses, satires, carnivalesque parody, crowning and uncrowning, mesalliance, grotesque bodies, reversal, death and renewal, and how the solace of laughter offers a victory over fear in carnivalesque frameworks (1997, 149–159). 11 The spirit of laughter that McGuinness hearkens after is akin to the dark laughter associated with the laughing competition evident in Murphy’s Bailegangaire (1985), which also works through grief towards solidarity. 12 Brenda Winter notes that the decision to cross-dress was pragmatic, ‘though enriching,’ as they could not find a male actor who had been out of work for six months so that he would qualify for the ‘government job-creation scheme’ (2008, 31). 13 The play relies on the fact that the mills had both Catholic and Protestant workers and had cross-sectarian appeal, in part because it played in traditional and non-traditional spaces. 14 Classed criticism of middle-class women characters is also evident in Jones’s A Night in November (1994) and Reid’s Joyriders (1986). There is less evidence of it in the tradition more broadly, perhaps the male and female middle-class theatre goers in Bolger’s The Lament for Arthur Cleary (1989) or Mrs Prynne in Leonard’s Da (1973). 15 The males in the offstage space, priests, husbands, boyfriends, fathers and lovers, are not just demanding and offensive but, apart from a few exceptions, are content to allow traditional social norms and patriarchal practices to perpetuate themselves. 16 Land obsession can be seen in plays as various as Edward Martyn’s The Heather Field (1899), Carr’s By the Bog of Cats . . . (1998) and Tom Mac Intyre’s 1983 stage version of Patrick Kavanagh’s poem The Great Hunger. 17 Roche remarks, ‘The Waste Land, The Golden Bough, Tennyson’s  Idylls of The King, From Ritual to Romance, and The White Goddess, all helped me to marry myth to reality and vice-versa. Of course, I didn’t know all the ins and outs of it then’ (2022, Web). 18 I am revising arguments that I applied to The Weir in The Theatre and Films of Conor McPherson: Conspicuous Communities (2019, 137–154). 19 Ben Brantley’s review of The Girl from the North Country notes ‘the blessed synchronicity of people ineffably tuned into one another’ (2017, Web). 20 Out of situations of tragic distress and horror, moments of connection and communion triumph over individualised actions in McGuinness’s works as diverse as Someone Who’ll Watch Over Me (1992a) and Mutabilitie (1997); in the former it is friendships that move beyond xenophobia and stereotype out of a hostage situation in Beirut; in the latter, it is collective care of a lost child of war, born to the ‘other’ side.

220  The Solidarity Paradox 21 In McGuinness’ The Breadman (1990), Sinner Courtney talks about setting fire to money by way of protest against the worsening situation in Northern Ireland in the early 1970s. 22 The recent Covid-19 pandemic, as Michael Sandel reminds us, evoked a fear of contagion, as ‘solidarity and separation’ coincided (2020, 4). He adds, ‘the moral paradox of solidarity through separation highlighted a certain hollowness in the assurance that “We are all in this together.” It did not describe a sense of community embodied in an ongoing practice of mutual obligation and shared sacrifice. To the contrary, it appeared on the scene at a time of nearly unprecedented inequality and partisan rancour’ (Sandel 2020, 4–5). 23 Savage remarks: ‘The transmission of cultural capital, however, is opaque, and is necessarily masked in a language of meritocratic achievement and hard work’ (2015, 50).

Conclusion

Protestation Whether a commentator, spectator or reader has a close to non-existent, rudimentary, solid or encyclopaedic overview of modern and contemporary Irish theatre, the dominant disposition is to regard this work as being directly, tangentially or implicitly related to, rooted in or representative of the major moments or epochs in Irish history, even if the details of such histories are unknown. In the tendency to foreground traumas, grievances, injustices and inequalities, Irish theatre has a major advantage because theatre audiences like situations where underdog characters face down oppressive forces where the odds of victory are slight. Few spectators like to chime with characters who easily or nefariously impose their will on others. Whether it is riots, legal controversies, censorship or the opposition to various productions,1 incendiary moments give rise to the idea that the arts in Ireland have socio-political significance and purpose. Further, cultural expression can be to the fore of and responsive to the multiple tensions that exist within any society. However, Irish theatre can be afforded a prominence and profile that it may otherwise lack in the general everyday of a society.2 Without subscribing to the notion of theatre-making as delusional vanguardism, by way of acquiescence to power or to its essentiality, it is important to recognise that most of the theatre made in Ireland for the past century and more has been variously subvented and underfunded, making it difficult to converse with the view that sees theatre and performances as entirely complicit with a dominant ideology and subservient in the dissemination, vectorisation and adjudication of its values, beliefs and narratives. However, this book argues that the ideological viewpoints or dispositions of most plays are never as blatant, conclusive or straightforward as some would suggest. Dramaturgical practices can simultaneously question, camouflage, normalise, disrupt, reinforce and undermine exploitative forms DOI: 10.4324/9781003180074-10

222  Conclusion of relationality. Plays can be comfortable rather than discommoded by ambiguity and incompatibilities, robust and resonant in their polyvocality, even when the challenges are not entirely satisfactory or successful.3 Incongruity makes work more interesting. The belief that a cultural sector is always in the vanguard of change is nothing other than a myth of cultural significance. This publication has mapped only some of the socio-economic, cultural and political conditions across both of the island’s jurisdictions, without, I reiterate, trying to propose that theatre practices mediate or are reflective or anticipative of these ever-changing realities or the inequalities that exist. In terms of absences, a book like this might warrant individual chapters on capital and sport, leisure, ecology, technology and social media and focus on characters that are differently aged and abled. Indeed, the individual chapters themselves here warrant an entire monograph in their own right. Signalling insufficiency is not to be defensive, more to suggest there is much more to do. My approach has been to trace across a writing tradition how various forms of capital, cultural, social and economic, are circulated. By focusing on the intersectional nature of these capitals, I have explored property, marriage, wealth, labour, education, intimacy and solidarity with the intent of not only affirming their interconnectivity but also to demonstrate conflicts, disparities and inequalities that are sometimes gender, race, ethnicity, sectarian and class related. I account for co-dependencies, complicities, mutualities and tolerances that Irish dramaturgy seems to propose – which some scholarship declines to recognise – as much as for the conflicts, antagonisms, prejudices and struggles experienced in the encounters between characters who are nuanced and stereotypically imagined, raced, gendered and classed. Race, ethnicity, class, sectarian and gender categories are constructed and performed, serve as identity markers and evolve over time, so analytically it is necessary to dwell on the particulars, commonalities and differentials but most of all to see these as non-siloed categories shaped by inequality and oppression. This is always from the critical perspective that I am contextualising from my own contemporary times details of plays that are written and embedded in their own historicised cultural moments, at odds with my own. Networked Inequalities Issues of victimisation and perpetration, hegemonic and non-hegemonic, subordination and insubordination, contempt and suspicion, and indispensability and disposability stalk my analysis in relation to inequality. While not disputing the many merits of capitalism, inequality is built in as a tolerable, consequential cost. Early modern Irish plays, with their emphasis

Conclusion  223 on property, land, marriage, pragmatism and romance, have complex things to say about how assets were acquired and inherited, especially in the context of British imperialism and disputations about rightful ownership. Marriage is troubled both as a form of asset consolidation but also as a reinforcement of patriarchal exchange. There are very few children as a consequence of marriage, which is set against the far greater number of children born ‘outside of wedlock’ or the frequency with which dead babies haunt plays. If there was as certain dramaturgical hostility towards the notions of embourgeoisement, many of the plays from the 1950s forward deal with asset ownership by stressing capital acquisition less by legitimate and more often by illegitimate means. While foregrounding excessive greed, illegality, a disregard for others and risk-taking in relation to the law, there is an assumption of leniency or consequence-free actions. Yet it would be a folly to think that in Irish playwriting corruption and success only go hand in hand. There are economic gains that are fairly won. Is there too much of a put-down for those characters who are entrepreneurial, persevere and take risks and, conversely, too many rewards for those who complain and throw in the towel, and if so, what does one make of this fetishisation of victimisation? Dramaturgically, the disdain shown towards economic capital is surprisingly consistent across the tradition. The offspring of wealthy characters are nearly always poorly motivated, unambitious, ineffective, incompetent or peculiar. Very frequently wealthy characters are not able or willing to extend the family line. Furthermore, there is a wholesale discounting of middle-class existential dilemmas and the disparagement of the challenges such characters face. Most other playwriting traditions have less discomfort with middle-class pain. Irish middle-class characters are more likely to think about injustices in existential, societal, ethnic, gender or race terms rather from a class standpoint. Very often middle-class characters are indifferent to the suffering of others, and their agency is more easily thwarted. If there is a degree of impostor syndrome for socially mobile characters, there is little bourgeois shame. Few characters feel the need to unravel their own privileges. It is all too easy to villainise the middle classes in a dramaturgy; it is troubling to note that in reality, middle, ruling and elite classes have far greater interdependency, motivation, resolve, stability and successes than theatre writing would suggest. The failure to show the resilience of the middleclasses and their ability to hang tough is a curious one. As Stones in His Pockets (2000) demonstrates, Jones’s middle-class film crew characters normalise successes and life chances and are presumptuous about opportunity. Most of all, bourgeois inheritances and succession are more inclined to be theatricalised negatively. Simultaneous with this dramaturgical obsession

224  Conclusion with wealth precarity is the lived, historic and contemporary accumulation and furtherance of assets and their intergenerational transfer in plain sight, unencumbered and not humbled by such rhetorical delusions.4 One could argue that wealth precarity is an admonitory gesture; that by suggesting that wealth is temporary, it can be motivating; or that the writing urges vigilance and caution rather than a signalling of some future comeuppance, or one could see it as a false crumb of comfort to those who lack. The generic disdain for and precarity of wealth unsettles, partially because it addresses wealth disparities in the way that power tolerates, even likes, and partially because it makes the holding to account of excessive wealth effectively unnecessary or redundant. In the eagerness, tendency and conviction to pattern wealth precarity and diminution rather than accumulation, foreground character weakness and thwart agency, is there a grand deception? Fundamentally, the bourgeoisie, lower, middle and upper, are complicit with capitalism, but most are neither the massive beneficiaries nor the unique upholders of tyranny that some viewpoints might designate them to be. Irish theatre’s nouveauriche are never the über rich, the 1 per centers, global holders and influencers of capital. Regardless, there is a form of ‘elite bashing’.5 The working classes are also beneficiaries of global capitalism, albeit very differently and even more marginally. With few exceptions, apart from the global flow of capital in Hughes’ Shiver (2003), wealth in Irish plays is overly localised. (There is little evidence of material spending on leisure, like holidays or experiences.) More troublingly, contemporary neoliberalism’s oppressive, divisive and invidious all-pervasiveness is seldom countenanced. Nor is, as David Harvey notes, neoliberalism’s intent to ‘privatise profits and to socialise risk’ (2011, 10). Under a libertarian neoliberalism, economic gains are deemed deserving and virtuous based on the tyranny of merit.6 Simultaneously, there seems to be a vicarious if not sadistic delight in highlighting the vicissitudes of poverty.7 To the libertarian viewpoint, an allegedly dependent, resource hungry, idle, undermotivated and unambitious cohort is their rationale for a scaled-back welfare state; welfare is not social protection but a form of handout, if not theft, that merely encourages laziness and dysfunction. Poverty is neither a necessity nor inevitable in a world of such abundance.8 As Mike Savage cautions: Contemporary capitalism is not new, dynamic, and turbo-charged (that is, in the terms that many of its champions position it) but is in fact marked by the increasing weight of older historical formations. Piketty links this to the return of what he calls ‘patrimonial capitalism’, harking back to the aristocratic world of the nineteenth-century belle époque. (Savage 2021, 76)

Conclusion  225 Many Irish plays are not only marked by hand-to-mouth subsistence living circumstances for male and female characters, but also by appalling injustices, depravations, addictions (drink, drugs, gambling, smoking) and traumas, sometimes caused by unemployment, sexual abuse and political violence and sometimes because of the reach of criminality into communities – often there is little by way of a safety net.9 Poverty invariably begets greater poverty; it is seldom motivating, although there are contrary examples.10 Too often addiction and suicide are overrelied upon to signal the impacts of poverty. We need to distinguish between extreme lack, having very little and having just a bit more than enough. In McMahon’s Come on Home (2018), Martina’s remark is telling: ‘It takes me all of every day to deal with what I was given without wastin’ any time on wantin’’ (Home, 99). Such are the pressures of having very little with regard to desires, dreams and wishes. If fortunate characters in Irish plays never dwell on their privileges, those less off, even the working poor, are obsessed with the immediate; seldom are they as antagonistic towards inequality as one might expect. Despite their plights, they are disinclined to take themselves too seriously, which can be seen either as a suspect standpoint or a lauding of their selfperseverance. In McGuinness’s The Factory Girls (1982) and Meehan’s Mrs Sweeney (1997), laughter serves as one part of a networking of different types of social capital and as a form of gendered, communal defiance. Characters who are poor seldom speak as one; there is a diversity of thought, a range of inconsistent, provisional viewpoints that does not correspond to a coherent class consciousness. Pilkington argues that poverty might be invalidated or subordinated by the degree to which O’Casey’s impoverished characters are allowed to be viewed as ‘innately histrionic,’ thereby ‘making light of’ their ‘economic circumstances and of its political demands’ (2010, 6). Although I have a degree of alignment with this viewpoint, I am more inclined to suggest that humour and performativity also serve as a form of compensation for economic want. It is not simply about disguising or disavowing harrowing realities, not simply a rebalancing but more about making circumstances tolerable. In addition, it is about reinforcing the performative, as Paul Murphy argues To reconfigure class as performance in all its manifold complexity rather than as an identity predicated on a single aspect arguably is to engage more comprehensively with the problem of class disparity as it is manifest in theatre and society. (2012, 59) Regularly, poverty as represented becomes intolerable by way the rival points of view dissent from ‘common sense’ and cultural capital knowhow.11

226  Conclusion Even without pinpointing the source of the injustice that characters face, misnaming, polyvocality and multiple perspectives foreground multiple awarenesses that audiences can choose to unpack or not. However, regularly absent in Irish theatre are aspirational, successful working-class characters who have enough to get by, have ambition to own their own home and might not necessarily want to be classified or seen as middle class. Their class positioning is complicated by what they might buy, what they eat, where they live, who they hang about with, the schools their offspring attend and their complex relationship with cultural and social capital. Contradictory class markers maybe the norm. As with the middle-class characters that have made material advances, most plays suggest gains made by working-class characters are based on sharp practices, collusion and exploitative opportunism; take Rose in Devlin’s After Easter (1994), accused by Manus of exploiting poor neighbours. The Gibbons in Leonard’s The Patrick Pearse Motel (1971) shift class by way of corrupt business practices. In McPherson’s The Night Alive (2013) failed working-class entrepreneur Tommy is a rescuer and exploiter and falls in love with Aimee; after he comes to her aid, she swaps hand jobs for rent, and then he wants to run away to Finland with her. Michael Pierse notes the ‘role of class inequality in dehumanising workingclass people’ (2011, 252), yet in Irish theatre’s representations of the working classes, there is less of that ‘dehumanising’ but also little of the blatant demonisation the British working classes face in multiple representations that Owen Jones identifies (2012).12 If working class characters act in their own interests, it is more often than not at the expense of those close, whereas middle-class self-interest does not seem to have the same knock-on effects13 Working-class characters seem more self-aware.14 If marginalised characters are disposable, is that offset by the visibility of their traumas? I  understand the positive affirmation of the marginalised characters, and the complexities they are afforded, but too often they are regularly not as ruthless as their middle-class counterparts, unless excessively violent and criminal. That is a form of affirmative action that must be treated with suspicion. All types of characters need to be rooted in ruthlessness as much as compassion and generosity, in not caring in the least about their privileges or the inequalities of others as being empathetic, and in being as creative as self-sabotaging. The legibility of the marginalised is sometimes overdone. However, the notion that working-class characters fail to advance their own cause is deemed a failing of this Irish playwriting tradition, but such an accusation I have always found suspect. Perhaps characters decline to invest in improbable outcomes or failure and cannot but misarticulate their experiences.15 If the dramaturgical outcomes of many plays are where the criticism of wealth resides, seldom do characters express resentment about

Conclusion  227 their lack and the plenty of others. It is a tradition that is prosperity-phobic in many ways; suspiciously and all too easily, effort, innovation and investment have negative connotations. Irish theatre is more inclined to deny complementariness between classes, preferring intraclass collegiality. There are very few interclass relationships, even intimacy-based ones. Sectarianism is disinclined to be class aware. Bizarrely in Irish theatre, middle-class characters are more likely to be disdained and pathologised. If there is little evidence of working-class ­unpalatableness, there is little inclination to defend the unpalatability of middle-class characters.16 Additionally, based on media responses to working-class women, and based on representations on television, especially in comedy, Owen Jones notes ‘Class hatred and misogyny often overlap’ (2012, xiii). In Irish theatre, that could not be further from the truth; there is much evidence of working-class women characters experiencing misogyny, but seldom if ever are they the instrument of class hatred. Is there a greater visibility to gender outrage but a lot less by way of class outrage, and if so, why? Plays written by men and women highlight major gender inequalities; discrepancies; and exclusions in terms of relationships, employment and before the law.17 Repression, the punishment of unmarried mothers, the gendered regulation of bodies more broadly, the pressures to conform to expectations, denial of access to contraception and abortion are signalled by various plays.18 All too often women characters are marginalised, abused and violated, and the responses to that are varied. Feminist activism inspires Josie Dunn in Kinahan’s Wild Sky (2016), set around the 1916 Rising.19 In addressing overcrowded living conditions, Laverty complicates the necessity of the prioritisation of a married couple over an elderly male in Tolka Row (1951). Ní Gráda’s On Trial (1966) shows the appalling outcomes for vulnerable women and their offspring. In Carr’s work, female fury dominates Portia Coughlan (1996) and By the Bog of Cats . . . (1998); gender positioning rather than the class placing of the lead characters in both plays is an easier task. Revenge and outrage feature in Kinahan’s Embargo (2020) and Outrage (2022). There is not enough mythologising of mother/daughter relationships, as many critics have declared. Familial, gendered and class relationships are complex in Devlin’s After Easter (1994), and Sandra’s rejection of Kate’s friendship in Reid’s Joyriders (1986) is indicative of gendered classed divisions. In the work of male writers, many rely on women to counter male dominance/stupidity, as in Farrell’s The Last Apache Union (1993), and in O’Halloran’s Conversations After Sex (2021), SHE asserts her sexual freedoms and body autonomy. McGuinness’s work distinguishes between middle-class and working-class male and female characters and differentiates by sexual orientation. He affords class and gender cohorts to be kind, ruthless, caring and unsupportive, united and divided. Some women

228  Conclusion characters are ruthless in Tom Murphy’s work, but none are as callous and dangerous as Christy in The House (2000). It might be tempting to argue that in Irish women’s playwriting, there is less of an association between class and expressions of violence, less of that alienation and more outrage.20 Or it might be argued that when women writers bring characters to a point of destructiveness because of despair or epistemic uncertainty, the ferocity is less within and more without.21 If masculinity and toxicity, predominantly of the non-hegemonic kind, go hand in hand, in some ways it is an all-too-easy default setting, because often occluded is hegemonic masculinity, and when included it is seldom no more than stereotypical, too obvious.22 Many plays allow elite and middle-class men and women characters to be different beneficiaries of patriarchy’s dividends. Some plays seem to propose that on occasion middle-class women have more in common with middle-class men than working-class women characters per se, like Lay Up Your Ends (1983). Working-class characters can despise middle-class males and females. Are Lil’s fears true in Meehan’s Mrs Sweeney (1997) that the middle classes would exterminate the working classes if they could? Ireland belatedly came to many of the realities of interculturalism, because of its isolated geographic location, because of few economic opportunities and because its historic outward rather than inward migration pattern, to which there were some exceptions. Many of the intercultural interventions have been written by Irish writers, male and female. There is the huge provocation in The Walworth Farce (2006) when Dinny places moisturiser on African-British Hayley’s face so she can play Caucasian Maureen. McCafferty’s Quietly (2012) captures an emerging xenophobia just as sectarianism is declining in Northern Ireland. Adigun’s work is so important, not just because Arambe produced many African plays in Dublin and created important plays like Once Upon a Time/Not So Long Ago (2005/6), but he directed Jimmy Murphy’s The Kings of The Kilburn High Road (2006, 2007) before adapting it as the Paddies of Parnell Street (2013), replacing Irish migrants in London with Africans in Dublin. He also wrote The Butcher Babes (2010) performed in whiteface, a dramatisation of the story of two sisters, Charlotte and Linda Mulhall, who murder and decapitate Kenyan migrant Farah Swaleh Noor, disposing of the body by dumping it in a suitcase in the Royal Canal.23 I accept how Fanning and Brannigan have argued about race bias and prejudicial embeddedness being nothing new. Ireland does have some tradition of racism, no doubt, but there is no history of slavery, little or none of the despicable lynching, race rape fantasies and violations as circulated in other cultures. And yet, if I would be inclined to highlight the traditional absence of strong neo-Nazis, alt-right and white supremacist presences, the emergence of far-right activism in response to asylum seekers, refugees

Conclusion  229 and those seeking international protection in 2022–2023 gives particular cause for concern. The fear might be that it would not take much agitation for such far-right groups to gain great traction around issues of migration, labour, schooling and housing.24 (To that end, we need to distinguish between racism, Islamophobia, antisemitism and other forms of discrimination and hate crimes.) The population diversity and the significant percentage of those not born but living in Ireland, or children born in Ireland to parents reared other than in Ireland, who have not just a vested interest in cultural diversity and inclusion but these will ambitiously champion and demand equality. Interculturalism is a complex process of engagement, evolution, obstacle, encouragement, reluctance and retraction and inclusion, but integration is perceived as a simplistic objective by most, and hopefully, Ireland can learn from the errors of other nations. Race, gender, ethnic, sectarian and class polarisations in terms of dramaturgical legibility serves nobody. Inequality, whether it is class, sectarian, gender, ethnic or race related, needs addressing, and the targeting of the poor, marginalised and vulnerable, in particular, is intolerable. McGuinness argues that none of his characters can ‘see themselves as victims, as they cannot afford themselves that luxury’ (Jordan 1997, ix, citing an unpublished interview 5 January 1993). Notable also is Spallen’s idea that Pumpgirl would not see her life as disastrous or awful, and everything is ‘precious’ (Spallen, quoted by McBride 2017); there is little of the victimisation that some bring to performances and representations of the poor. Life for characters is precious, even when those around them do not want to treat them that way.25 Most working-class, ethnic and raced characters, male or female, neither feel a sense of self-shame, nor are they broken by poverty and life circumstances. Regularly, inequality is instead foregrounded as the shameful aspect. The plays discussed cover different types of work and workplaces, domestic labour, physical and industrial labour, child labour, sex work, cultural labour and the realities of unemployment. Earnings impacts not just dayto-day existence, the hand to mouth, but also chances of surviving childbirth, health outcomes, life choices and educational attainment. There is some distinction between restrictive and more loosely organised privileged labour, but there is little by way of engagement with more contemporary employment environments, where labour is marked by concerns for work/ life balance; employee wellbeing; or jobs that offer challenges, meaning and purpose.26 Work in most plays is seen as oppressive and unrewarding. If families and schooling are early life hotbeds of socialisation, knowledge, skill acquisition, curiosity, encouragement and inhibition, both arenas instruct people how to think, how to behave, what to believe in and value and how to give oneself purpose and understand oneself in the context of others. If the plays discussed demonstrate how firmly education is

230  Conclusion a class, ethnic and gender issue, and raise concerns about the failures of education (Reay 2017), they seldom argue that education is a process that leads to acquired hopelessness and helplessness for many or that education perpetuates recalcitrant ideologies. Plays are more likely to capture the silencing associated with education for the neurodiverse, like Donna in Golden and Horan’s Class (2018), the interventions around an impediment, as with Sarah in Translations (1980), the violence associated with educational institutions traditionally or the embedded class biases within teaching and curricular contexts, rather than account for educational deficits within working-class communities. If Reid’s Joyriders (1986), Class and Dunne’s The Waste Ground Party (2014) propose that there are societal and community barriers to education, a lot more students have become the first generation of their family to be third level educated, even if there remain stubbornly low percentages attending third-level education from some communities, and that is not to say that third-level education is the only pathway to a worthwhile career.27 The connections between education and life chances are seldom unpacked in plays, while in real-life education has proved to be enabling for many, even when challenges and obstacles can be near overwhelming. Despite the historic and contemporaneous attempts of church and state in both jurisdictions to police sex, desire and sexual orientation, and despite the self-censoring nature of the theatre sector, many plays have found ways of undermining conservative mindsets and values. In Irish theatre sexual activity is as much about intimacy, desire, freedom and consent as it is about puritanism, violatory, traumatic, exploitative and abusive practices when linked to assault, molestation, intimidation, rape and incest. Women’s bodies are the more violated, and there is a huge class dimension to it. Socioeconomic vulnerability exposes characters more to sexual predators in McDonagh’s Walls and Windows (2021), O’Halloran’s Trade (2011), Kinahan’s Bé Carna (1999) and BogBoy (2010) or Spallen’s Pumpgirl (2006), while non-coercive relationships as dramatised have different sorts of conscious and unconscious agreements in terms of freedom, power, expectation, mutuality, loyalty, differences, obligation and respect in most of the writing considered here. It is less rejection or unrequited love that troubles characters; rather, infidelity is the most consistent source of attritional conflict, the action most likely to destabilise the myths and dreams, expectations and illusions of monogamous coupling, which is an increasingly unstable and uninviting proposition amongst some contemporary young adults. Those who stray are both men and women, of all sexualities. The linking of sex to the heteropatriarchal economy leaves some speculating as to whether intimacy can ever be deemed between equals, as if it is not possible to reach a threshold of consent. From the perspective of the plays discussed, if intimacy and the erotic, economic, social

Conclusion  231 and cultural capital intersect in complex ways, violation remains the most troubling aspect. Intersecting Resistances and Fundamental Goods For Sandel, Protest against injustice looks outward; it complains that the system is rigged, that the winners have cheated or manipulated their way to the top. Protest against humiliation is psychologically more freighted. It combines resentment of the winners with nagging self-doubt: perhaps the rich are rich because they are more deserving than the poor; maybe the losers are complicit in their misfortune after all. (2020, 26) The global rise of the latter type of protest carries a caution; in Irish theatre, it is more likely to be the first type of protest. Resistant actions are much lauded by postcolonial, gender, race, class-informed and intersectional theorists.28 If Irish theatre seems to be somewhat suspicious of individual character actions, at times it is even more so of collective protest and solidarity. Some dramas overplay individual protests against an unjust enemy, tangible or intangible; others rely on characters that are hyper-individualised by trauma, whose worldviews are based on fervid certainty yet whose calls on justice are seldom timely, objective or proportionate enough. The coordination of collective endeavours by characters relies on degrees of trust, respect, suspension of rivalries, mutual application and desire to overcome a situation that, if tackled alone, would be less likely, even impossible, to achieve a successful outcome. Protesting characters can be side-tracked, intimidated, confused, out-manipulated and out-negotiated by the strategies, stamina and resources of those opposing their insistence on change. As power colludes, it takes so few to offset all complaints and resistance.29 Solidarities may not be as inclusive as they sound. Participatory acts of character solidarity may well be little more than aesthetic contestation and false triumphalism. Despite the imperative of solidarity in many plays, how significant is the persistent construction of solidarity as provisional and temporary? Or how regularly, peculiarly and excessively is solidarity seen as tangible only in terms of ultimate sacrifice or foolhardy rebellion? Yet, if protest is presented as futile, is it a prompt for audiences to think differently about it, or is it more to do with cultural submissiveness, more broadly? Sectarian solidarities bring little comfort in Reid’s The Hidden Curriculum (1986) and last only as long as the tribe grants characters insider status.

232  Conclusion With a few exceptions, plays seem more comfortable with female solidarities, whereas hegemonic or non-hegemonic males seem to be tainted by patriarchal privilege, no matter how tokenistic the dividends of privilege play out. And why does this tradition seem to propose that there is little middle-class necessity for solidarity? Maybe it is more to do with how the middle classes consolidate and what they prioritise, how collectively it faces fewer injustices and seldom is tested by the necessity to marshal themselves as an antagonistic force, because they are seldom in that position of divisive oppositionality, apart from on planning/environmental issues? Or maybe it is simply another of the many shorthands and dramaturgical myths that are so conveniently recycled in Irish plays, because in the lived world the middle classes benefit hugely from soft and hard connections, networks, school ties/skirts, their leisure and cultural engagements? If class dynamics make it more difficult for characters from different class backgrounds to unite, there are exceptions, like Roche’s The Cavalcaders (1993) or McPherson’s The Weir (1997). Yet numerous plays conclude with resistance, with acts of defiance, with improbable victories over the odds, like Charabanc and Lynch’s Lay Up Your Ends (1983) and Jones’ Stones in His Pockets (2000) whereby mutuality is born of necessity as much as tit-for-tat reciprocity. Many plays wonder if you can have solidarity, like sex, amongst unequals. Of course, representations of solidarity may serve as a navigator of change and disrupter of power and privilege in ways that easily fetishise resistance. While the sentimentalisation of protest might be seen as the ultimate delusion of influence, I would reject the idea that theatre as activism, protestation and calling out inequality is some sort of naïve positioning. It is better to be enamoured by the rhetoric of optimism, even when undeliverable, than by the inevitability of fatalism. Ultimately, cultural and social capital, by way of laughter, song, dance and partying combined, find ways of trumping unequal economic conditions not by way of substitution but more by way of circumvention. To think that plays presume the middle-classes simply collude and conspire and the working-classes are solidarity-inclined would be a false consciousness. A bourgeois loyalty to an ideology that binds and insulates is hardly ever visible in Irish theatre. Few plays thus far are protests against Sandel’s notion of humiliation. However, failures or unwillingness to represent directly or at least account for the ideologically most powerful and influential is a huge dramaturgical oversight. It could be argued that aspects of the dramaturgical tradition are not as liberal and fair-minded as considered to be, by audiences and critics. Or it could be argued, there is little served by being intensely or non-­ pragmatically radical. Persuasiveness perhaps needs to be more subtle, even a little manipulative. Most plays evaluated here neither champion nor are

Conclusion  233 certain about incremental or monumental change, especially with regard to inequality. Plays challenge the complex ways money is made, held on to, shared and inherited, as well as the consequences to having very little. Because most writing is writ large in terms of sectarianism, class, ethnicity, gender and race differences and differentials, that is not to suggest that such visibility does not distort, nor that such blatancy precludes concealment. Dramaturgically, is privilege and accumulation always undeserving, and are lack and precarity marked by honour? The plays demonstrate that it is easier to hold an elite cohort to account, but few invariably or reflexively apologise or explain away the negative actions of the disadvantaged. I have worked through complex dramaturgical practices, which are sometimes strange, comforting and challenging, by amplifying their regular, peculiar and irregular ideological beats and rhythms. My analysis has been about identifying the ways economic, social and cultural capital are circulated within dramaturgical practices but also about how no form of capital can be siloed or isolated from the other. My approach also has been about tracing the circulation of dominant ideological values, beliefs, concepts and mores and about how different types of writing question, hesitate and hurry away from and or tolerate that which is unfair and inequitable in class, gender, sectarian, ethnic and race terms. Some Irish plays are uncomfortable with ranked realities brought about by wealth; others seem less concerned and are more accommodating. While it is a theatre practice tremendously troubled by race inequities and gender denigration and injustices associated with ethnicity, it is not troubled in the same way by class disadvantages outside of a historic context. Is it less and less possible for writers to be race, sectarian, ethnicity and gender blind, but is class-blind thinking an increasing commonplace? It has been vital to stress race, gender, sectarian, ethnic and class pluralities; to avoid homogeneity, essentialisations, ahistorisations and rigid categorisations; and to reiterate unnecessary romanticisations, vilifications and demonisation of any category. Distinctions are regularly made between disadvantage, disparity and inequality. Disadvantage seems more likely to incite a response; disparities are somewhat acceptable; and some inequalities are more actionable than others, whether illegal or not. Today, for many people around the globe wage instability is on the rise. New types of inequality will emerge, in part thanks to climate change, Artificial Intelligence (AI), the dominance of a handful of multinationals in various sectors, and the consolidation of assets in fewer and fewer hands. Finally, returning to Piketty’s suggestion that regimes tell stories to disguise their inequalities, I would argue that there is less and less a need for such regimes to do so.30 Currently and globally, democracy is pressured by autocratic regimes mutually boosting each other with vague notions of illiberal democracy and strong leadership, proudly unafraid to think and

234  Conclusion behave tough, especially towards minorities and migrants. Democracy is a confederation of citizens/members unequally treated. Yet we are living in a world where if you cannot be enticed or persuaded to vote a particular way, then the next step is to potentially deprive you of that vote, which is worrying. Piketty endeavours to offer a rival narrative to the one of hyper-­ inegalitarianism by means of a new ‘universalistic egalitarian narrative’ based on a ‘new ideology of equality, social ownership, education, knowledge and power sharing’ (2020, 3), reliant on more progressive taxation and shared public ownership leading to a form of ‘participatory socialism’ and social federalism (2020, 41). Few Irish plays aspire to signal an aspirational view like Piketty’s, even as they pick apart issues of power and knowledge, private ownership, capital gain, labour, education, intimacy and solidarity. Is it reasonable to suggest that Irish theatre’s default setting is liberal-leaning, notionally anti-capital or at least capital-questioning, despite how it is subvented and sponsored, needing to be commercial and box-office oriented? But if this anti-capital inclination is a priced-in feature, does that diminish its impact? Piketty wonders: What is a just society?  .  .  . A  just society is one that allows all of its members access to the widest possible range of fundamental goods. Fundamental goods include education, health, the right to vote, and more generally to participate as fully as possible in the various forms of social, cultural, economic, civic, and political life. A just society organizes socioeconomic relations, property rights, and the distribution of income and wealth in such a way as to allow its least advantaged members to enjoy the highest possible life conditions. A  just society in no way requires absolute uniformity or equality. To the extent that income and wealth inequalities are the result of different aspirations and distinct life choices or permit improvement of the standard of living and expansion of the opportunities available to the disadvantaged, they may be considered just. But this must be demonstrated, not assumed, and this argument cannot be invoked to justify any degree of inequality whatsoever, as it too often is. (2020, 967–968) We cannot expect theatre to answer in a similar way but at the same time cannot afford to think that theatre is always asking the right questions. While I do not think there is too much self-congratulation in the Irish theatre sector for its avant-gardism and radicalness, I do at times think there is an overestimating of its impact and influence, even if not all writing is produced by writers who see themselves as activists. Are theatre’s reflections on unfairness preaching to the converted?

Conclusion  235 Sandel argues ‘any serious response to the gap between rich and poor must reckon directly with inequalities of power and wealth, rather than rest content with the project of helping people scramble up a ladder whose rungs grow farther and farther apart’ (2020, 24). If the playing field is unlikely ever to be an even one, one cannot wait for all inequalities to disappear. In the meantime, are Irish theatre’s resistant knowledge and protesting actions invariably insufficient? For many people, equality, inclusion and diversity matter, but in what ways? Maybe it is not enough to say that inequality is a trauma that is not just sectarian in outlook, classed, raced, gendered and ethnicised but to attest to how inequality is embedded in participatory democracy. It is crucial as spectators and citizens to realise what we are uncertain and ambivalent about as much as to know what our effectiveness to intervene might be, but most of all to attest to what we ourselves find indefensible and unbearable.

Notes 1 Barry Houlihan mentions multiple controversies, including the closing down of Williams’s The Rose Tattoo at the Pike in 1957 (139–144); O’Casey’s The Drums of Father Ned and an adaptation of Joyce’s Ulysses at the Dublin Theatre Festival in 1958, which were dropped (148–161); J.P. Donleavy’s The Ginger Man at the Gaiety Theatre in 1959 (139–161); The Speakers, an immersive piece by Joint Stock Theatre Company (222–224) at the Abbey in 1976; and Gay Sweatshop at the Project in 1976 with Mister X and Any Woman Can met with protests (2021, 221). See also Joan Fitzpatrick Dean on some of the same territory, especially Thompson’s Over the Bridge (2004, 146–176). 2 There is less critical focus on the implications of a wider public indifference to the artform or how a vocal minority of objectors to performances or hot-underthe-collar letter writers to newspaper and magazine editors are afforded undue consideration. 3 However complex theory might be, in the main theory’s effective need for declarative certainty excludes, erases, brushes over and edits out many if not most ambivalences and contradictions. A play’s specificity can undo or unhinge many clear-cut theoretical positions and propositions. 4 In Murphy’s The Wake (1998), Mary Jane’s husband Henry Lock-Browne, from a wealthy family, is a non-practising, drop-out, alcoholic lawyer, and Tom’s wife, Caitriona, a doctor’s daughter, has mental health issues. 5 But, as Savage argues, based on Joe Stiglitz’s 2011 Vanity Fair article, focus on the 1 per cents, ‘rather than looking at inequality from the perspective of poverty. Here wealth was the starting point, since this intervention, ‘elite bashing’ has become a major current of both academic and more popular discourses. This reversing of the telescope to look at the rich, rather than the poor, as the overwhelming social problem is of great pertinence’ (2021, 7). 6 For Sandel, if merit and success are deserved, a reward for virtue, then for those not so successful, that is the outcome they deserve as well, but not only that, ‘there is some punishment for their decrepitude’ (2020, 17–31).

236  Conclusion 7 For Piketty: ‘The discourse of meritocracy and entrepreneurship often seems to serve primarily as a way for the winners in today’s economy to justify any level of inequality whatsoever, while peremptorily blaming the losers for lacking talent, virtue, and diligence. In previous inequality regimes, the poor were not blamed for their own poverty, or at any rate not to the same extent; earlier justificatory narratives stressed instead the functional complementarity of different social groups’ (2020, 2). 8 Thanks in part to the Decade of Centenaries (2012–2022), history plays have been disproportionately resourced and staged. Decisions to dramatise key historic anniversaries are important. With the history play, there can be more visibility to power and greater clarity given to unequal relationships. Poignant trauma raised in these contexts has less contemporary resonance, and the persistent historicising grief, oppression and accountability seldom serves as an analogy for the present moment, nor should it be so obliged. 9 Conor McPherson notes how poverty gives busyness, urgency and restlessness to Sean O’Casey’s plays: ‘If the characters were all rich, they would not have anything like the energy they have. They have nothing and they are just looking to get something. People lie and argue and beg and fight and cajole in order to escape the misery of not having anything. . . . People who are uncomfortable and need something have to keep moving’ (in Jordan 2019, 158–159). 10 Writing about food, energy and period poverty in Britain, Jack Monroe reports: ‘poverty is exhausting. It requires time, effort, energy, organisation, impetus, an internal calculator and steely mental fortitude that those in the Treasury could only dream of possessing. And should it not kill you, in the end, from starvation or cold or mental ill health, should you scrabble somehow to the sunlit uplands of “just about managing”, I’m sorry to tell you that although your bank balance may be in the black one day, so too will your head’ (2022, web). 11 As David Harvey notes: ‘What Gramsci calls “common sense” (defined as “the sense held in common”) typically grounds consent. Common sense is constructed out of longstanding practices of cultural socialization often rooted deep in regional or national traditions. It is not the same as the “good sense” that can be constructed out of critical engagement with the issues of the day. Common sense can, therefore, be profoundly misleading, obfuscating or disguising real problems under cultural prejudices. Cultural and traditional values (such as belief in God and country or views on the position of women in society) and fears (of communists, immigrants, strangers, or “others”) can be mobilized to mask other realities’ (2005, 39). 12 Owen Jones remarks how aspects of Fleet Street caricature ‘working-class people as stupid, idle, racist, sexually promiscuous, dirty, and fond of vulgar clothes. Nothing of worth is seen to emanate from working-class Britain’ (2012, 119). Jones adds that working-class demonisation ‘serves a useful purpose in a divided society like our own, because it promotes the ideal that inequality is rational: it is an expression of differing talent and ability. Those at the bottom are supposedly there because they are stupid, lazy or otherwise morally questionable. Demonization is the ideological backbone of an unequal society’ (2012, xiii). In contrast, the ‘glorification of the middleclass – by making it the standard everyone should aspire for, however unrealistically – is a useful ideological prop for the class system’ (Jones 2012, 250). Mike Savage is concerned about ‘the growing intensity of stigmatization directed at the most disadvantaged’ (2015, 355).

Conclusion  237 13 In Joyriders, there are two moments when teenager characters instinctively try to console by way of touch, but stronger impulses override the instinct. 14 Working-class identity is performed with great self-awareness in G.B. Shaw’s John Bull’s Other Island (1904), while middle-class characters are far less class self-conscious, if precocious. 15 In McGuinness’s Someone Who’ll Watch Over Me (1992a), Edward claims that he is ‘One generation removed from the dispossessed,’ and there are those he holds responsible (Someone, 130), but he is neatly reprimanded by Michael. 16 The peculiarity of this middle-class disgust and scapegoating needs thinking through, but I remain deeply suspicious of it as a dramaturgical strategy. There is an imposed silence on working-class envy of middle-class opportunities and lifestyles. 17 This is not to suggest the plays are a snapshot of an author’s viewpoint or values or that the play’s anomalies are consciously or unconsciously his or hers. 18 The Irish Constitution’s interchangeability of woman and mother and linkage of woman to the domestic/inside space and to the sacrifice of a woman’s autonomy for the benefit of common good remains an ongoing insult to women. In the contemporary moment, women in relationships with men bear an unequal share of domestic duties and/or parental responsibilities. There are far greater numbers of women in the workforce across the island and in very well-paid, senior jobs. Workwise, there remain issues around parental leave, childcare, career progression, glass ceilings and equal pay. Income gaps between the genders have closed somewhat. Money concerns, divisions of domestic labour, issues surrounding fertility, child-rearing challenges and the value placed on careers bring various pressures on heterosexual, gay and non-binary r­elationship bonds, however complex commitments are. Today’s plays are more attentive to different types of household formations, single-adult households, cohabitors, blended families and same-sex and non-binary couples. 19 Dance teacher Annie Hennessey brought Josie to Dublin to witness first-hand the mobilisation and politicisation of Irish women, including the Inghinidhe na hÉireann and the Irish Women’s Suffrage League, ‘teachers and campaigners for Women’s Votes and Better Housing and Children’s Treats and School Meals, Democratisation, The Irish Language and a Women’s Worker’s Union’ (Wild Sky, 20)! Women also campaigned against British Army recruitment. Impassioned, Josie remarks: ‘These women talked about “Ireland”. Ireland like it was a country all of its own. And women’s votes. And women’s jobs. And women’s rights. And it all made sense’ (Wild Sky, 21). 20 For Cathy Leeney, alienation and ‘occlusion of female subjectivity’ became ‘programmed into Irish society and culture’ from the late 1920s forward (2010, 200). 21 In Lisa McGee’s Girls and Dolls (2006), Claire and Emma, both in their 30s, recall how they ended up kidnapping a child, Shannon, resulting in the child’s death after she fell from a treehouse after Claire had let her go. 22 How the high-end car, exclusive home, smart suit, briefcase and latest laptop signal corruption is even more apparent in television writing or long-form dramas. 23 Adigun co-wrote with Roddy Doyle the hugely successful version of The Playboy of the Western World (2007), and a major dispute between Adigun and the Abbey Theatre was settled in his favour before the courts. He wrote another version of The Playboy of the Western World called The Playboy of the Sunny Southeast (2010).

238  Conclusion 24 Although Ireland had no colonies, Irish people served imperial administrations and variously profited from businesses. Historically, Irish migrants to America and Britain were frequently demeaned, prejudicially treated and categorised alongside black people in many instances, even if they could assimilate more e­asily. More recently, Diane Negra proposes that Irishness currently serves as a form of ‘enriched whiteness’ in American contemporary popular culture (2006, 1). 25 Abbie Spallen, commenting on actress Samantha Heaney, who played Pumpgirl in the Lyric and Decadent Theatre productions, both directed by Andrew Flynn, remarks: ‘She is from Newry herself and she doesn’t judge the character . . . . I’ve met some actresses who would go “oh her life is so awful” and I’d say “you can’t really say that because Pumpgirl would look at your life and think it is awful. She really loves her life”. I remember someone reading the play once and saying, “the stakes aren’t very high for her” and I said, “they are to her” and Sammy gets that, she understands the area so well she doesn’t look down on Pumpgirl, she plays her as if everything in her life is precious’ (quoted by McBride 2017, Web). 26 Owen Jones distinguishes between an Oxford Don and a shelf-packer, old and new working classes, those who ‘lack power over their own labour’ (2012, 166). 27 Although there are additional supports for schools to help overcome deficits and disadvantages, schools remain unfairly resourced. That said, across the island, more students than ever are attending third-level courses; however, pupils from middle-class backgrounds are more likely to get the most highvalue courses. Although second level completion rates have improved, there are significant gaps between figures in North and South. Fewer students drop out in the Republic. Education in Northern Ireland remains substantially segregated. Notably, recent research has shown that migrant-origin children are doing as well as their Irish-origin counterparts (Darmondy et al. 2022, 81). That is one of the many substantial, positive outcomes of improved education provision and in part has led to the attraction to both North and South of much-needed foreign direct investment. 28 Amia Srinivasan argues that capitalism can absorb and co-opt anti-racist and feminist energy, and it is an error to underestimate the ‘genius of capital’ (2021, 176). 29 In today’s wider world, nationhood is less the fundamental fantasy of solidarity. Solidarity in favour of improved rights, in light of the hyper-individualism of neoliberalism, the authoritarianism of populism and the far right’s growing popularity, seems like an ever more precarious concept. People are increasingly incited to collectivise not to create more alliances but to divide and subjugate. 30 Savage remarks: ‘meritocracy is not a curb to escalating inequality; it is actually implicated within it’ (2015, 400).

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244  Works Cited Fitzpatrick, Lisa (2022) I Suppose I Feel Disappeared Meself: Shame and Silenced Characters in Deirdre Kinahan’s BogBoy, in The Theatre of Deirdre Kinahan: ‘I Love Craft. I  Love the Word’, edited by Lisa Fitzpatrick and Mária Kurdi, Oxford: Peter Lang, 133–155. Fitzpatrick, Lisa and Shonagh Hill, editors (2022) Plays by Women in Ireland (1926–1933): Feminist Theatres of Freedom and Resistance, London: Methuen. Fitzpatrick, Lisa and Mária Kurdi, editors (2022) The Theatre of Deirdre Kinahan: ‘I Love Craft. I Love the Word’, Oxford: Peter Lang. Fitzpatrick Dean, Joan (2004) Riot and Great Anger: Stage Censorship in TwentiethCentury Ireland, Madison: University of Wisconsin Press. Fogarty, Anne (2021) Reconfigurations of Gender in Contemporary Irish Stage Adaptations, 2019–2020: Deirdre Kinahan’s The Unmanageable Sisters, Edna O’Brien’s The Country Girls, Marina Carr’s Hecuba, and Michael West’s Solar Bones, in Stage Irish: Performance, Identity, Cultural Circulation, edited by Paul Fagan, Dieter Fuchs and Tamara Radak, Irish Studies in Europe, Trier: Wissenschaftlicher Verlag Trier, Vol. 10, 209–226. Foley, Imelda (2003) The Girls in the Big Picture: Gender in Contemporary Ulster Theatre, Belfast: Blackstaff Press. Gilbert, Helen and Joanne Thompkins (1996) Post-Colonial Drama, Theory, Practice, Politics, London: Routledge. Grene, Nicholas (1999) The Politics of Irish Drama: Plays in Context from Boucicault to Friel, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Grene, Nicholas (2017) The Theatre of Tom Murphy: Playwright Adventurer, London: Methuen. Halferty, Paul J. (2018) Performing Politics: Queer Theatre in Ireland, 1968–2017, in The Palgrave Handbook of Contemporary Irish Theatre and Performance, edited by Eamonn Jordan and Eric Weitz, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 181–199. Halferty, Paul J. (2022) I ♥ Alice ♥ (2010), in Fifty Key Irish Plays, edited by Shaun Richards, London: Routledge, 175–179. Harari, Yuval Noah (2014) Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind, London: Harvill Secker. Harris, Claudia W. (2006) Introduction, in Four Plays by the Charabanc Theatre Company: Inventing Women’s Work, Gerrards Cross: Colin Smythe. Harvey, David (2000) Spaces of Hope, Berkeley: University of California Press. Harvey, David (2005) A Brief History of Neoliberalism, Oxford: Oxford University Press, Kindle Edition. Harvey, David (2011) The Enigma of Capital and the Crises of Capitalism, London: Profile. Haughton, Miriam (2018) Staging Trauma: Bodies in Shadow, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Hickson, James (2013) Representation of Working-Class Dublin at the Dublin Theatre Festival, in ‘That Was Us’: Contemporary Irish Theatre and Performance, edited by Fintan Walsh, London: Oberon Books, 137–156. Hill, Shonagh (2019) Women and Embodied Mythmaking in Irish Theatre, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Works Cited  245 Hill Collins, Patricia (2019) Intersectionality as Critical Social Theory, Durham: Duke University Press, Kindle Edition. Hill Collins, Patricia and Sirma Bilge (2020) Intersectionality, Key Concepts, New Jersey: Wiley, Kindle Edition. Houlihan, Barry (2021) Theatre and Archival Memory: Irish Drama and Marginalised Histories, 1951–1977, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Howard, Vikki F., T. F. McLaughlin and Edward F. Vacha (1996) Educational Capital: A Proposed Model and Its Relationship to Academic and Social Behavior of Students at Risk, Journal of Behavioral Education, 6.2: 135–152, www.jstor.org/ stable/41824116. Hughes, Clair (1995) Death of the House: Molly Keane and the Anglo-Irish Gothic Novel, in Troubled Histories, Troubled Fictions: Twentieth-Century Anglo-Irish Prose, edited by Theo D’haen and José Lanters, Amsterdam: Rodopi, 119–128. Invest in Northern Ireland, www.investni.com/international-business/our-sectors [Accessed 17 January 2023]. Jones, Owen (2012) Chavs: The Demonisation of the Working Class, London: Verso, Second Edition. Jordan, Eamonn (1997) The Feast of Famine: The Plays of Frank McGuinness, Bern: Peter Lang. Jordan, Eamonn (2016) Irish Theatre and Historiography, in The Oxford Handbook of Modern Irish Theatre, edited by Nicholas Grene and Christopher Morash, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 673–695. Jordan, Eamonn (2018) Multiple Class Consciousnesses in Writing for Theatre during the Celtic Tiger Era, in A History of Irish Working-Class Writing, edited by Michael Pierse, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 378–396. Jordan, Eamonn (2019) The Theatre and Films of Conor McPherson: Conspicuous Communities, London: Methuen. Jordan, Eamonn (2021) Capital and Class in Irish Theatre: A Twenty-First Century Critical Snapshot, In Verbis, 2: 25–50. Jordan, Eamonn (2022) Enunciations and Avoidances of Capital and Class in Evolving Irish Theatre, in The Routledge Companion to Literature and Class, edited by Gloria L. McMillan, London and New York: Routledge, 233–246. Kelly, Morgan (2009) What Happened to Ireland? Irish Pages, 6.1: 7–19. Kelly, Morgan (2010) Whatever Happened Editors, to Ireland? Discussion Paper No. 7811, London: Centre for Economic Research, https://econpapers.repec.org/ paper/cprceprdp/7811.htm [Accessed 18 November 2016]. Kerrane, Kevin (2006) The Structural Elegance of Conor McPherson’s ‘The Weir’, New Hibernia Review, 10.4: 105–121. Kerrane, Kevin (2012) The Cavalcaders: Billy Roche’s Signature Play, in The Art of Billy Roche: Wexford as the World, edited by Kevin Kerrane, Dublin: Carysfort, 157–172. Kiberd, Declan (1995) Inventing Ireland, London: Jonathan Cape. Kirk, John (2009) The British Working Class in the Twentieth Century: Film, Literature and Television, Cardiff: University of Wales Press. Knowles, Ric (2010) Interculturalism and Theatre, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.

246  Works Cited Koustas, Jane (2021) Deirdre Kinahan’s Unmanageable Sisters: Michel Tremblay’s Belles-sœurs on the Irish Stage, Quebec Studies, 72.1: 33–57, https://doi. org/10.3828/qs.2021.16. Kurdi, Mária (2010a) Representations of Gender and Female Subjectivity in Contemporary Irish Drama by Women, Lewiston, NY: Edwin Mellen Press. Kurdi, Maria (2010b) A Woman Leaving Twice to Arrive: The Journey as Quest for a Gendered Diasporic Identity in Anne Devlin’s After Easter, Estudios Irlandeses – Journal of Irish Studies, 5: 58–67. Lanters, José (2018) The Theatre of Thomas Kilroy: No Absolutes, Cork: Cork University Press. Leeney, Cathy (2010) Irish Women Playwrights, 1900–1939: Gender & Violence on Stage, Bern: Peter Lang. Leeney, Cathy (2016) Women and Irish Theatre Before 1960, in The Oxford Handbook of Modern Irish Drama, edited by Chris Morash and Nicholas Grene, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 269–285. Leeney, Cathy (2018) Being Intercultural in Irish Theatre and Performance, in The Palgrave Handbook of Contemporary Irish Theatre and Performance, edited by Eamonn Jordan and Eric Weitz, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 527–545. Leeney, Cathy and Deirdre McFeely (2021) Social Class, Space, and Containment in 1950s Ireland: Maura Laverty’s ‘Dublin Trilogy’ (1951–1952), in The Golden Thread: Irish Women Playwrights (1716–1992), edited by David Clare, Fiona McDonagh and Justine Nakase, Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, Vol. 1, 233–256. Lehmann, Hans-Thies (2006) Postdramatic Theatre, translated by Karen Jurs Munby, London: Routledge. Lloyd, David (1993) Anomalous States, Irish Writing and the Post-Colonial Moment, Durham: Duke University Press. Lojek, Helen Heusner (2004) Contexts for Frank McGuinness’s Drama, Washington: Catholic University of America Press. Lojek, Helen Heusner (2011) The Spaces of Irish Drama: Stage and Place in Contemporary Plays, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Lonergan, Patrick (2019) Irish Drama and Theatre Since 1950, London: Methuen, Bloomsbury. Loomba, Ania (1998) Colonialism/Postcolonialism, London: Routledge. Lynch, Kathleen and Margaret Crean (2018) Economic Inequality and Class Privilege in Education: Why Equality of Economic Condition is Essential for Equality of Opportunity, in Education for All?: The Legacy of Free Post-Primary Education in Ireland, edited Judith Harford, Oxford: Peter Lang, 139–160. Lyotard, Jean-François (1991) The Inhuman, Reflections on Time, translated by Geoffrey Bennington and Rachel Bowlby, Cambridge: Polity. Maguire, Tom (2006) Making Theatre in Northern Ireland: Through and Beyond the Troubles, Exeter: Exeter University Press. Maguire, Tom (2018) The State We’re in: Violence and Working-Class Women on and Off the Contemporary Irish Stage, Journal of Contemporary Drama in English, 6.1: 160–175. McAuley, Gay (2000) Space in Performance: Making Meaning in Theatre, Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press. McBride, Charlie (2017) Pumpgirl and ‘a Sense of Speed’, Galway Advertiser, 1 June, www.advertiser.ie/galway/article/92841/pumpgirl-and-a-sense-of-speed [Accessed 23 August 2022].

Works Cited  247 McConachie, Bruce (2008) Engaging Audiences: A Cognitive Approach to Spectating in the Theatre, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. McCormack, W. J. (1991) Introduction to the Irish Gothic and After, in The Field Day Anthology of Irish Writing, edited by Seamus Deane, Derry: Field Day Publication, Vol. II, 831–854. McDonagh, Rosaleen (2018) The Making of Mainstream, in The Palgrave Handbook of Contemporary Irish Theatre and Performance, edited by Eamonn Jordan and Eric Weitz, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 435–442. McDonagh, Rosaleen (2021) Programme for Walls and Windows, https://abbeythe atre.wpenginepowered.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/08/3675_WallsandWin dows_Freesheet_FINAL_25-Aug.pdf [Accessed 2 November 2022]. McIvor, Charlotte (2011) Staging the ‘New Irish’: Interculturalism and the Future of the Post-Celtic Tiger Irish Theatre, Modern Drama, 54.3: 310–332. McIvor, Charlotte (2016) Migration and Performance in Contemporary Ireland: Towards a New Interculturalism, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. McIvor, Charlotte (2020) Migration: Migrant Artists Changing the Rules in PostCeltic Tiger Ireland, in The New Irish Studies, edited by Paige Reynolds, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 63–79. McIvor, Charlotte and Matthew Spangler (2014) Staging Intercultural Ireland: New Plays and Practitioner Perspectives, Cork: Cork University Press. McMillan, Gloria, editor (2022) The Routledge Companion to Literature and Class, New York: Routledge. McPherson, Conor (2019) In Conversation, in The Theatre and Films of Conor McPherson: Conspicuous Communities, edited by Eamonn Jordan, London: Methuen, 155–163. Meredith, Robbie (2021) BBC News, 4 December, www.bbc.com/news/uk-north ern-ireland-59641192 [Accessed 1 December 2022]. Merriman, Victor (2011) Because We Are Poor: Irish Theatre in the 1990s, Dublin: Carysfort Press. Merriman, Victor (2018) Locked Out: Working-Class Lives in Irish Drama 1958– 1998, in A History of Irish Working-Class Writing, edited by Michael Pierse, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 318–331. Mikami, Hiroko (2002) Frank McGuinness and his Theatre of Paradox, Gerrards Cross: Colin Smythe. Monbiot, George (2022) England’s Punitive Exam System Is Only Good at One Thing: Preserving Privilege, The Guardian, 27 April, www.theguardian.com/ commentisfree/2022/apr/27/england-exam-system-children-mental-health [Accessed 27 April 2022]. Monroe, Jack (2022) Poverty Leaves Scars for Life – I’m Still Scared of Strangers at the Door and Bills Through the Letterbox, The Guardian, 16 June, www. theguardian.com/commentisfree/2022/jun/16/poverty-scars-life-impact-cost-ofliving-crisis-felt-for-years [Accessed 1 December 2022]. Moran, James (2018) Class during the Irish Revolution: British Soldiers, 1916 and the Abject Body, in A History of Irish Working-Class Writing, edited by Michael Pierse, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 153–167. Moynihan, Maurice (1980) Speeches and Statements by Eamon de Valera 1917– 73, Dublin: Gill & Macmillan. Murphy, Paul (2008) Hegemony and Fantasy in Irish Drama, 1899–1949, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.

248  Works Cited Murphy, Paul (2012) Class and Performance in the Age of Global Capital, Theatre Research International, 37.1: 49–62. Murphy, Paul (2018) Drama, 1900–1950, in A History of Irish Working-Class Writing, edited by Michael Pierse, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 271–288. Murray, Christopher (1997) Twentieth-Century Irish Drama: Mirror Up to Nation, Manchester: Manchester University Press. Murray, Christopher (2000) Sean O’Casey, London: Faber & Faber. Murray, Christopher (2014) The Theatre of Brian Friel: Tradition and Modernity, London: Bloomsbury. Negra, Diane, editor (2006) The Irish in Us: Irishness, Performativity and Popular Culture, Durham and London: Duke University Press. Northern Ireland Statistics and Research Agency (NISRA) (2021) Long-Term International Migration Statistics for Northern Ireland (2020), www.nisra.gov.uk/ publications/long-term-international-migration-statistics-northern-ireland-2020 [Accessed 15 January 2023]. O’Brien, Cormac (2021) Masculinities and Manhood in Contemporary Irish Drama: Acting the Man, Cham: Palgrave Macmillan. O’Brien, Harvey (2010) Review Bogboy, Irish Theatre Magazine, 30 June, http://itmarchive.ie/web/Reviews/Current/Bogboy.aspx.html [Accessed 30 September 2020]. O’Reilly, Anne (2004) Sacred Play: Soul-Journeys in Contemporary Irish Theatre, Dublin: Carysfort Press. O’Toole, Fintan (1994) Tom Murphy: The Politics of Magic, Dublin: New Island Books. O’Toole, Fintan (2021) We Don’t Know Ourselves: A Person History of Ireland since 1958, London: Head of Zeus. The Panama Papers (2016) www.theguardian.com/news/series/panama-papers [Accessed 10 November 2022]. Paul, Salomé (2021) Writing Patriarchy Out of Tragedy? Marina Carr’s Translocation of the Atrides Myth in Ariel, Irish Studies Review, 29.4: 484–500. Pavis, Patrice, editor (1996) The Intercultural Performance Reader, London: Routledge. Pavis, Patrice (2004) Analyzing Performance: Theatre, Dance and Film, translated by David Williams, Ann Abor: University of Michigan Press. Perry, Caroline (2016) Research and Information Service, Briefing Paper, 8 August, www.niassembly.gov.uk/globalassets/documents/raise/publications/2016-2021/ 2016/education/4416.pdf [Accessed 21 November 2022]. Phelan, Mark (2009) ‘Authentic Reproductions’: Staging the ‘Wild West’ in Modern Irish Drama, Theatre Journal, 61.2: 235–248. Phelan, Mark (2011) Not So Innocent Landscapes: Remembrance, Representation and the Disappeared, in Violence Performed: Local Roots and Global Routes of Conflict, edited by Patrick Anderson and Jisha Menon, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 285–316. Phelan, Mark (2016) From Troubles to Post-Conflict Theatre, in The Oxford Handbook of Modern Irish Drama, edited by Chris Morash and Nicholas Grene, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 372–388.

Works Cited  249 Phelan, Mark (2018) Class Politics and Performance in Troubles Drama: ‘History isn’t Over Yet’, in A History of Irish Working-Class Writing, edited by Michael Pierse, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 348–363. Pierse, Michael (2011) Writing Ireland’s Working-Class, Dublin After O’Casey, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Pierse, Michael, editor (2018a) A History of Irish Working-Class Writing, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Pierse, Michael (2018b) An sinne a bhí sa chónra? Writing Death on the Margins of Twentieth-Century Irish Working-Class Writing, in A History of Irish WorkingClass Writing, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 168–194. Pierse, Michael (2020a) Ireland’s Working-Class Literature: Neglected Themes, Amphibian Academics, and the Challenges Ahead, Irish University Review, 50.1: 67–81. Pierse, Michael (2020b) People: Race and Class on the Contemporary Irish Stage, in The New Irish Studies, edited by Paige Reynolds, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 25–46. Pierse, Michael (2022) The Hostage (1958), in Fifty Key Irish Plays, edited by Shaun Richards, London: Routledge, 81–84. Piketty, Thomas (2020) Capital and Ideology, translated by Arthur Goldhammer, Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press. Piketty, Thomas (2021) A Brief History of Equality, translated by Steven Rendall, Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press. Pilkington, Lionel (2001) Theatre and the State in Twentieth-Century Ireland, Cultivating the People, London: Routledge. Pilkington, Lionel (2010) Theatre and Ireland, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Pilný, Ondřej (2006) Irony and Identity in Modern Irish Drama, Prague: Litteraria Pragensia. Pine, Emilie (2020) The Memory Marketplace: Witnessing Pain in Contemporary Irish and International Theatre, Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Pinker, Steven (2011) The Better Angels of Our Nature: A History of Violence and Humanity, London: Penguin Books. Postlewait, Thomas (2009) The Cambridge Introduction to Theatre Historiography, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Power, Jack (2022) Ireland Is Worst in OECD for Education Spending as Percentage of GDP, Report Finds, The Irish Times, 3 October, www.irishtimes.com/ ireland/education/2022/10/03/ireland-spends-less-on-education-than-otheroecd-countries-report-finds/ [Accessed 3 October 2022]. Rancière, Jacques (2009) The Emancipated Spectator, translated by Gregory Elliott, New York: Verso, Kindle Edition. Reay, Dianne (2017) Miseducation: Inequality, Education and the Working Classes, Bristol: Policy Press. Richards, Shaun, editor (2022) Fifty Key Irish Plays, London: Routledge. Richtarik, Marilynn (2012) Stewart Parker: A  Life, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Roche, Anthony (2011) Brian Friel: Theatre and Politics, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Roche, Anthony (2013) Synge and the Making of Modern Irish Drama, Dublin: Carysfort Press.

250  Works Cited Roche, Anthony (2015) The Irish Dramatic Revival 1899–1939, London: Bloomsbury. Roche, Billy (2022) When in Doubt, Sing! Billy Roche on the Return of The Cavalcaders, RTÉ Website, 16 May, www.rte.ie/culture/2022/0414/1292367when-in-doubt-sing-billy-roche-on-the-return-of-the-cavalcaders/ [Accessed 10 August 2022]. Rothfeld, Becca (2021) Pleasure and Justice, Boston Review, 20 September, https:// bostonreview.net/philosophy-religion-law-justice-gender-sexuality/becca-roth feld-pleasure-and-justice [Accessed 28 November 2022]. Ruane, Aileen (2022) Translation, Adaptation and Feminism: Revealing a Familiar Reflex of the Repressed in Deirdre Kinahan’s The Unmanageable Sisters, in The Theatre of Deirdre Kinahan: ‘I Love Craft. I  Love the Word, edited by Lisa Fitzpatrick and Mária Kurdi, Oxford: Peter Lang, 71–95. Sandel, Michael (2009) Justice: What’s the Right Thing to Do? New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Sandel, Michael (2012) What Money Can’t Buy: The Moral Limits of Markets, London: Penguin Books, Kindle Edition. Sandel, Michael (2020) The Tyranny of Merit, What’s Become of the Common Good? London: Allen Lane. Savage Mike with Fiona Devine, Niall Cunningham, Mark Taylor, Yaojun Li, Johannes Hjellbrekke, Brigitte Le Roux, Andrew Miles and Sam Friedman (2015) Social Class in the 21st Century, London: Penguin Books, Kindle Edition. Savage, Mike (2021) The Return of Inequality: Social Change and the Weight of the Past, Cambridge: Harvard University Press. The Saville Inquiry, www.gov.uk/government/publications/report-of-the-bloodysunday-inquiry [Accessed 10 November 2022]. Share, Perry, Hilary Tovey and Mary P. Corcoran (2007) A Sociology of Ireland, Dublin: Gill and Macmillan, Third Edition. Shira, Melissa (2007) Women in Irish Drama: A  Century of Authorship and ­Representation, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Shira, Melissa (2018) Marina Carr: Pastures of the Unknown, Cham: Palgrave Macmillan. Singleton, Brian (2011) Masculinities, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Smith Emer et al. (2023) Education Across the Island of Ireland: Examining Educational Outcomes, Earnings and Intergenerational Mobility, https://www.esri. ie/publications/education-across-the-island-of-ireland-examining-educationaloutcomes-earnings [Accessed 3 May 2023]. Social Justice Ireland (2023) Discrimination in Ireland, https://www.socialjustice. ie/article/discrimination-ireland [Accessed 5 May 2023]. Srinivasan, Amia (2021) The Right to Sex, London: Bloomsbury. Steger, Manfred B. and Ravi K. Roy (2009) Neoliberalism: A Very Short Introduction, Very Short Introductions Series, Oxford: Oxford University Press, Kindle Edition. Sweeney, Bernadette (2008) Performing the Body in Irish Theatre, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Thomas, Keith (1971) Religion and the Decline of Magic, London: Penguin.

Works Cited  251 Trench, Rhona (2010) Bloody Living: The Loss of Selfhood in the Plays of Marina Carr, Bern: Peter Lang. Trier, James (2010) Representations of Education in HBO’s The Wire, Season 4, Teacher Education Quarterly, 37.2: 179–200. Trotter, Mary (2008) Modern Irish Theatre, London: Polity. Urban, Eva (2011) Community Politics and the Peace Process in Contemporary Norther Irish Drama, Oxford: Peter Lang. Urban, Eva (2018) Intercultural Arrivals and Encounters with Trauma in Contemporary Irish Drama, in The Palgrave Handbook of Contemporary Irish Theatre and Performance, edited by Eamonn Jordan and Eric Weitz, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 555–573. Urquhart, Diane, A History of Irish Divorce, www.liverpool.ac.uk/irish-studies/ research/research-projects/irish-divorce/ [Accessed 29 November 2022]. Vice, Sue (1997) Introducing Bakhtin, Manchester: Manchester University Press. Wallace, Abby (2021a) Integrated Education in Northern Ireland is Urgent – Why Can’t Our Leaders See That? The Guardian, 2 December, www.theguardian. com/commentisfree/2021/dec/02/integrated-education-northern-ireland-school [Accessed 2 December 2021]. Wallace, Clare (2006) Suspect Cultures: Narrative, Identity and Citation in 1990s New Drama, Prague: Litterraria Pragensia. Wallace, Clare (2021b) Set Piece, Set Peace? Negative Emotions and the Possibility of Change in Recent Stage Images of the North, in Stage Irish: Performance, Identity, Cultural Circulation, edited by Paul Fagan, Dieter Fuchs and Tamara Radak, Irish Studies in Europe, Trier: Wissenschaftlicher Verlag Trier, Vol. 10, 227–240. Walsh, Ian R. (2013) Experimental Irish Theatre After W. B. Yeats, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Whelan, Feargal (2021) Máiréad Ní Ghráda’s An Triail/On Trial, 1964: Hiding Hypocrisy in Plain Sight, in  The Golden Thread: Irish Women Playwrights, 1716–1992, edited by David Clare, Fiona McDonagh and Justine Nakase, Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, Vol. 1, 257–266. Williams, Raymond (1978) Marxism in Literature, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Winter, Brenda (2008) Introduction, in Lay Up Your Ends, edited by Martin Lynch and The Charabanc Theatre Company, Belfast: Lagan Press.Worthen, Hana and William B. Worthen. (2006). The Pillowman and the Ethics of Allegory, Modern Drama, 49: 155–173. Young, Harvey (2013) Theatre and Race, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Žižek, Slavoj (2009) Violence, London: Profile Books.

Index

Abbey Theatre 27, 32, 45n25, 132, 172, 183, 195, 205, 235n1, 237n23 abjection 42, 47n41, 155 Adigun, Bisi 15, 31, 92, 228, 237n23; The Butcher Babes 228; Once Upon a Time & Not So Long Ago 131, 186 – 188; Paddies of Parnell Street 228; The Playboy of the Sunny Southeast 238n23 agrarian 49, 198, 205, 218 Amnesty International 106 Asava, Zélie 195n18, 192 asylum seekers 15, 31, 186, 188, 192 audience/spectator 18n15, 47n39, 50, 81, 83, 109, 115, 124, 135, 146 – 147, 159 – 160, 177, 187, 205, 214, 221, 226, 230 – 232 austerity 10, 21, 64, 70, 186 Baker, John 18n3, 121, 142n3, 195n16, 218n3 bankruptcy 10, 52, 65 Barry, Sebastian 1, 43n9; Hinterland 92; The Steward of Christendom 67 Barthes, Roland 23 Beckett, Samuel 1 Behan, Brendan 1, 43n11, 45n25; The Hostage 15, 33, 165, 182 – 183, 194n11; Richard Cork’s Leg 45n25 Belsey, Catherine 18n7, 23 – 24, 42n1, 43n7 Bertha, Csilla 118n23 Bhandari, Humnath 44n17 Bilge, Sirma 7, 46n32 Bloody Sunday 18n8, 16, 200 – 201

Bolger, Dermot 1, 43n11, 94n9, 192; The Consequences of Lightning 10, 78 – 79; The Lament for Arthur Cleary 12, 104 – 106, 218n5, 219n14; The Passion of Jerome 14, 69, 155 – 156 border 5, 33, 49, 62, 145, 151, 183 borrowing 19n26, 57, 65, 91, 116n2, 138, 202 Boucicault, Dion: The Shaughraun 191 Bourdieu, Pierre 19n20, 26, 28 – 29, 67 Brah, Avtar 43n2 Brannigan John 7, 18n9, 30, 32, 45n25, 182, 194n11, 228 Brantley, Ben 219n19 Breen, John: Alone it Stands 216 Brenton, Howard 93 British Army 33, 54, 65, 94, 122, 142n8, 197, 237n19 brokentalkers 6, 12; The Blue Boy 108 – 110, 165; The Examination 95; Masterclass 115; Woman Undone 165 Brown, Wendy 11, 22n54, 73, 94 Burke-Brogan, Patricia: Eclipsed 166, 168n6 Bush, Sophie 106 Butterworth, Jez 34 Cairns, David 24 Cannon Harris, Susan 25, 70n21 Carbado, Devon W. 46n31 carnival 17, 57, 173, 182, 212, 219n10 Carr, Marina 1, 6, 194n10; Ariel 4, 66, 84 – 85; By the Bog of Cats. . . 3, 57, 81, 91, 95n14, 118n23, 195, 197, 219n16,

Index 227; Marble 14, 66, 116, 157; Portia Coughlan 197, 227; On Raftery’s Hill 153, 165 Celtic Tiger 9, 20n37, 63 – 65, 68, 70n22, 91, 94n7, 95n18, 171, 177, 181, 206, 212 Charabanc Theatre Company 6, 16, 114, 201 – 203, 232; Lay Up Your Ends- written with Martin Lynch 201 – 203, 232 Churchill, Caryl 6, 93 Civil Rights Movement 33, 126, 170, 200, 219n8 Civil War (Irish) 14, 49, 53, 165, 170, 172, 174 Coffey, Edel 116n2 Cogan, Karen, Drip Feed 164 Coleman Coffey, Fiona 18n2, 152 colonialism 4, 7, 8, 16, 26, 30, 54, 193 Commission to Inquire into Child Abuse, The Ryan Report 108 – 109, 168n2 Connell, Raewyn W. 26 Conroy, Amy 14, 43n9, 169n19; I ♥ Alice ♥ 14, 66, 157 – 158 Crenshaw, Kimberlé 20n32 criminality 10, 56, 85, 88 – 93, 95n13, 145, 150, 165, 167n1, 169, 188, 225 – 226 criticism 4 – 5, 9, 23, 25 – 26, 43n2, 44n17 cultural capital 27 – 29, 36, 44n19, 49 – 50, 76, 80, 94n3, 103 – 104, 112, 116, 121, 126, 143n17, 152, 171 – 173, 191, 198 – 201, 211 – 212, 214 – 217, 220n23 cultural materialism 4, 24, 43n9 Davis, Angela Y. 20n31, 98 dead children 65, 108 Deane, Seamus 174 Deevy, Teresa 1; Katie Roche 8, 21n45, 55 – 56, 68, 113, 215; The King of Spain’s Daughter 14, 154, 215 de Valera, Éamon 21n42, 91 Devlin, Anne 1, 33, 191; After Easter 10, 33, 66, 75 – 76, 138, 226 – 227; Ourselves Alone 33 Dolan, Jill 43n7, 196 domestic abuse 62, 159, 176 Donoghue, Emma, I Know My Own Heart 164

253

Downing Street Declaration 33, 63 dramaturgy 1, 3, 8, 24, 29 – 31, 39 – 42, 53, 67, 75, 91, 104, 122, 126, 132, 141, 156, 167, 173 – 174, 183, 185, 221 – 223, 226, 229 – 233, 237n16 Dunne, Shaun: The Waste Ground Party 13, 134 – 136 Dyas, Grace: Heroin 194n11 economic capital 2, 12, 15 – 17, 28, 37 – 42, 48 – 71, 72 – 95, 121, 144, 167, 169 – 170, 196 – 220, 221 – 239 education 2, 12 – 13, 19n19, 20n36, 21n46, 28 – 30, 33, 45n21, 52, 55, 76 – 77, 84 – 85, 93, 96, 101, 106, 109, 120 – 143, 145 – 146, 151, 155, 166, 174, 184, 195n16, 204, 222, 229 – 230, 234, 238n27 EEC 9, 117n3 entrepreneurship 3, 9 – 11, 21n43, 68, 72 – 95, 127, 133, 221, 223, 226, 236n7 equality 2, 12, 17, 18n3, 21n4, 22n49, 30, 38, 56, 74, 94, 96 – 97, 121, 131, 142n10, 158, 167, 184, 210 – 213, 218n3, 229, 234 – 235 Equal Status Act 30 eviction 8, 49, 53 – 54.58, 67 – 68, 99, 122, 185, 205, 213 Fanning, Bryan 7, 228 Farrell, Bernard 1; Bookworms 91, 163; Forty-Four, Sycamore 10, 66, 76 – 78, 92; The Last Apache Reunion 13, 137 – 138, 216, 227 Feehily, Stella: Duck 10, 86 – 88, 115 feminism 4, 25, 106, 162 Ferriter, Diarmaid 48, 145, 168n7, 169n16 Fishamble 6 Fitzpatrick Dean, Joan 235n1 Fitzpatrick, Lisa 4, 16, 18n11, 22n50, 25, 94n5, 148, 165 – 166, 167n13, 169n18. Flynn, Mannix 43n11, 194n13; James X 139, 165 Fogarty, Anne 132 Foley, Imelda 18n2, 25, 94n4

254 Index Friel, Brian 1, 6, 33, 118n20, 191; Aristocrats 8, 60 – 61, 140; The Gentle Island 163; Philadelphia, Here, I Come! 10, 73 – 74, 138, 162; Translations 12, 122 – 123 gender violence 184, 191 Gilbert, Helen and Joanne Thompkins 16 globalisation 12, 24, 97 Golden, Iseult and David Horan: Class 13, 129 – 132 Good Friday Agreement 10, 33, 49, 89, 177 Gramsci, Antonio 18n9, 27, 236n11 Great Depression 9, 100 Gregg, Stacey: Scorched 164 Gregory, Augusta 1, 16, 25, 27, 31 – 32, 44n15; Cathleen ni Houlihan (with W. B. Yeats) 66, 114, 197 – 199; Grania 218n5 Grene, Nicholas 25, 43n9, 50, 179 – 180 Halferty, Paul J. 138, 158, 169n19 Harari, Yuval Noah 17, 120, 197 Hare, David 93 Harris Claudia W. 203 Harris, Nancy 1; The Beacon 12, 110 – 112, 164; No Romance 14, 159 Harvey, David 21n43, 73, 81, 196 – 197, 224, 236n11 Haughton, Miriam 25, 168n2, 169n20 Hickson, James 43n9 Hill Collins, Patricia 7, 16, 34, 125 Hill, Shonagh 18n11, 25, 177 Historiography 4, 24 – 27 Houlihan, Barry 235n1 Hughes, Clair 70n12 Hughes, Declan 1; Digging for Fire 16, 115, 140, 206, 208; Shiver 10, 80 – 81, 157, 224; Twenty Grand 92 ideology/ideological 2 – 3, 15, 17, 21n4, 21n42, 21n44, 23, 25, 27, 30, 32, 35, 39, 42n1, 56, 65, 81, 91, 93, 97, 107, 112, 121, 136, 154 – 155, 167, 173 – 174, 183, 188 – 189, 196, 198, 204, 215, 217, 218n3, 221, 232 – 234, 236n12

inequality 2, 4, 6, 11, 14, 17, 18n4, 19n19, 19n23, 21n41, 22n49, 23 – 47, 55 – 56, 59, 72, 85, 90 – 91, 93 – 94, 96 – 97, 121, 141, 145, 158, 175, 194, 195n16, 215, 220n22, 222, 225 – 226, 229, 232 – 235, 235n5, 236n7, 236n12, 238n29 Inghinidhe na hÉireann/Daughters of Ireland 32, 237n19 inheritance 8 – 10, 19n26, 49, 51, 57 – 58, 66, 69, 85 – 86, 91 – 92, 150, 173, 175, 223 injustice 2 – 3, 7, 15, 17, 19n19, 32 – 33, 39, 42, 58, 88, 93, 158, 167, 197, 221, 223, 225 – 226, 231 – 233 intercultural 2, 6 – 7, 14 – 15, 20n29, 24, 31 – 32, 170 – 195, 200, 228 – 229 internment 55, 142n8 intersectionality/intersectional 7, 14, 16 – 17, 20n32, 31, 34, 44, 44n16, 46n31, 46n32, 170 – 195, 195n23, 222, 231 intimacy 13 – 14, 55 – 56, 111, 144 – 169, 194n10, 209, 222, 227, 230, 234 Irish Free State 9, 49, 56, 70n10, 92, 170, 172, 183 Irish Literary Theatre 32 Jones, Marie 1, 33, 155; A Night in November 219n14; Stones in his Pockets 17, 212 – 214, 223, 232 Jones, Owen 18n5, 47n43, 226, 229, 236n12, 238n26 Keane, John B. 1; Big Maggie 163; The Field 16, 66, 114 – 115, 205 – 206; Sive 14, 66, 114, 154 – 155, 194n10, 194n13 Kelly, Morgan 71n22 Kelly, Sonja: The Last Returns 192; Once Upon a Bridge 192 Kerrane, Kevin 209, 222 Kiberd, Declan 24, 174 Kilroy, Thomas 1, 118n23; Christ Deliver Us! 14, 139, 146 – 147; The Death and Resurrection of Mr Roche 163; Double Cross 191

Index Kinahan, Deirdre 1; Bé Carna 12, 116 – 118, 139, 230; BogBoy 14, 34, 147 – 148, 230; Embargo 114, 165, 214, 227; Moment 115; Our Saviour 165; Outrage 165, 227; Rathmines Road 165, 169n19; The Unmanageable Sisters: A New Version of Michel Tremblay’s Les Belles Sœurs 13, 16, 21n45, 91, 114, 132 – 134, 136, 163, 203 – 205; Wild Notes 193; Wild Sky 227, 237n19 Kinevane, Pat 1; Silent 67, 164; Underneath 191 Kirk, John 5 Kirwan, Emmet: Accents 191; Dublin Oldschool 140 Knowles, Ric 6 Koustas, Jane 132, 205 Kristeva, Julia 43n7, 47n41 Kurdi Mária 25, 94n5 labour 6 – 7, 11 – 12, 19n17, 21n45, 24, 45n24, 26, 39, 56, 62, 69n1, 70n13, 83, 96 – 119, 173 – 174, 178, 188, 202, 204, 214, 222, 229, 234, 237n18, 238n26 Lanters, José 169n14 Laverty, Maura 1, 43n9, 43n11; Tolka Row 11, 66, 91, 97 – 99, 117n8, 227 law 22, 33, 48 – 49, 61, 70n14, 72, 85, 90, 97, 109, 114, 118n18, 140, 145, 167, 168n3, 168n8, 169n18, 180, 204, 206, 223, 227 Leeney Cathy 25 – 26, 31, 43n9, 117n9, 215, 237n20 Leonard, Hugh 1; Da 15, 114, 139, 174 – 175, 219n14; The Patrick Pearse Motel 10, 81 – 83, 226 Lojek Heusner, Helen 25, 43n9, 215 Lonergan, Patrick 25, 43n2 Loomba, Ania 20n33 Lynch, Kathleen and Margaret Crean 22, 42n10 Lynch, Martin 16, 33; Lay Up Your Ends (With Charabanc Theatre Company) 114, 201 – 203 Lyotard, Jean-François 24 Lyric Players Theatre 33, 238n25

255

Mac Intyre, Tom: Only an Apple 92 MacNamara, Gerald 33 Madden Aodhán: Sea Urchins 138 Maguire, Tom 5, 18n2, 33, 43n9, 63 marriage 8 – 9, 13 – 14, 18n11, 38, 48 – 52, 54 – 59, 65 – 67, 69, 74, 77, 116n2, 119n28, 123, 145, 151, 155, 158, 168, 168n1, 175, 184, 202, 204, 222 – 223 Martyn, Edward 1, 32; The Heather Field 219; Maeve 66 Mayne, Rutherford 1, 32 McAuley, Gay 36, 43n7 McCafferty, Owen 1; Quietly 15, 31, 34, 139, 165, 188–190, 193, 228 McCarthy, Nicola 31 McConachie, Bruce 36 McCormack, W.J. 70n20 McDonagh, Martin 1; The Beauty Queen of Leenane 66; The Lieutenant of Inishmore 10, 33, 88 – 89; The Lonesome West 219; The Pillowman 16, 199 – 200; A Very Very Very Dark Matter 192 McDonagh, Rosaleen 31; Walls and Windows 15, 67, 139, 163, 183 – 186 McFeely, Deirdre 43n9 McGee, Lisa 1; Girls and Dolls 139, 237n21 McGuinness, Frank 1, 33, 118n23; The Breadman 220n21; Carthaginians 16, 118n16, 200 – 201; Dolly West’s Kitchen 66, 118n16; The Factory Girls 12, 102 – 104, 116, 118n16, 164, 215, 225; Gates of Gold 66; Greta Garbo Comes to Donegal 66; Innocence 115, 118n16; Mary and Lizzie 118n16, 192; The Match Box 118n16; Mutabilitie 219n20; Observe the Sons of Ulster Marching towards the Somme 33, 214, 218n8; Someone Who’ll Watch Over Me 104, 195n23, 219n20, 237n15; There Came a Gypsy Riding 118n16 McIvor, Charlotte 6 – 7, 31, 193

256 Index McMahon, Philip: Come on Home 14, 115, 150 – 151, 225 McMillan, Gloria 5 McPherson, Conor 1, 236n9; The Birds 67; Come on Over 165; Girl from the North Country 67, 192; The Night Alive 91, 226; Rum and Vodka 140, 165; The Seafarer 216; Shining City 67, 115; This Lime Tree Bower 92; The Veil 9, 64 – 65, 68; The Weir 16, 91, 195n23, 210 – 212, 211 Meade, Paul: Mushroom 31, 114 Meehan, Paula: Mrs Sweeney 15, 44n11, 139, 175 – 177, 194n6, 194n7, 225, 228 Mercier, Paul 44n11 merit/meritocracy 3, 10 – 12, 17, 18n5, 19n22, 21n41, 21n43, 35 – 37, 46, 74, 83 – 84, 93, 101, 112, 115, 121, 128, 136, 141, 175, 196, 204, 220n23, 224, 235n6, 236n7, 238n30 Merriman, Victor 5, 24, 43n9, 116n1, 173 migration 9, 12, 27, 30 – 31, 38, 44n16, 75, 105, 170, 206, 213, 218n1, 228 – 229 Mikami, Hiroko 118n15 Milligan, Alice 1, 32 Monbiot, George 142n4 monologue 114, 140, 151, 180 – 181, 186, 195n19 Monroe Jack 236n10 Moran, James 47n41 Moxley, Gina: Danti-Dan 165 Murphy, Colin: Guaranteed! 92 Murphy, Jimmy: Bothers of the Brush 15, 114, 177 – 179; The Kings of the Kilburn High Road 228 Murphy, Tom: Bailegangaire 66, 219n11; Conversations on a Homecoming 91, 138; The House 15, 66, 179 – 180, 193, 228; The Wake 10, 85 – 86, 92 – 93, 115, 169n21, 235n4; A Whistle in the Dark 12 – 13, 43n9, 101 – 102, 128 – 129, 195n15

Murphy Elaine: Little Gem 15, 189 – 191, 193; Shush 9, 63 – 64 Murphy Paul 16, 19n20, 26 – 27, 50, 69n1, 70n6, 70n7, 174, 194n2, 225 Murray, Christopher 25, 70n10, 122, 169n11, 172, 174 Negra, Diane 238n24 neoliberalism 7, 10, 20n28, 21n43, 36 – 37, 65, 71 – 73, 80 – 81, 83, 93, 97, 116, 120, 136, 212, 214, 234, 238n29 Ní Ghráda, Máiréad 1; On Trial (English version of An Triail) 8 – 9, 58 – 59, 68, 113, 227 Northern Ireland 5, 9, 10, 12, 14, 18n2, 20n36, 20n38, 33, 43n4, 45n26, 62, 68, 71n22, 92, 118n21, 143n12, 145, 151, 168n2, 168n8, 170, 183, 188, 190, 201, 212, 219n8, 220n21, 228, 238n27 Nottage, Lynn: Sweat 205 O’Brien, Cormac 26, 149 O’Brien, Eugene: Eden 163 O’Brien, Harvey 147 O’Byrne, Joe 44; It Come Up Sun 195n22 O’Casey, Sean 1, 6, 27, 32, 43n9, 44n11, 66, 169n15, 191, 194n1, 225, 235n1, 236n9; Juno and the Paycock 14, 113, 123, 138, 172 – 174, 200; The Plough and the Stars 162, 190, 214; A Shadow of a Gunman 123 O’Halloran, Mark 43n9; Conversations After Sex 14, 159 – 162, 192, 215, 227; Trade 115, 230 O’Kelly, Donal: Asylum! Asylum! 31, 192, 195n19; The Cambria 31 O’Neill, Charlie: Hurl 31, 216 O’Reilly, Anne 25, 63, 94n5 O’Rowe, Mark 1, 118n23; Howie the Rookie 114, 169n17; Made in China 92; Our Few and Evil Days 14, 153

Index O’Toole, Fintan 18n2, 22n53, 43n9, 70n14, 168n4, 169n15 ownership 8 – 9, 30, 48 – 49, 53, 58, 62 – 65, 67 – 68, 69n2, 69n4, 69n5, 70n18, 92, 95, 180, 205 – 206, 223, 234 Panama Papers 94n2 Pan Pan 6, 31 Panti: A Woman in Progress 164 paramilitarism 16, 67, 88 – 89, 123 – 125, 148, 181, 219n9 Parker, Stewart 1, 33; Pentecost 9, 61 – 63, 215 patriarchy/patriarchal 2, 4, 7 – 9, 25 – 27, 55 – 56, 59, 68 – 69, 81, 98, 102, 106, 108, 115, 144, 147 – 148,154 – 155, 162, 165, 176, 200, 205, 219n15, 223, 228, 230, 232 Paul, Salomé 43n10, 194n10 Pavis, Patrice 6, 36 Perel, Ester 118n28, 167 Phelan, Mark 5, 34, 148, 188 Pierse Michael 19n16, 19n24, 26–29, 31–32, 43n11, 44n12, 44n14, 44n16, 47n42, 96, 101, 143n18, 179, 183, 192, 219n13, 217, 218n6, 226, 5,18n14 Pike Theatre 235n1 Piketty Thomas 2, 3, 17, 42, 49, 65, 68 – 69, 72, 93, 118n26, 121, 141, 224, 233 – 234, 236n7 Pilkington, Lionel 24, 43n9, 172, 174 Pilný, Ondřej 63, 70n19 Pine, Emilie 43n5 Pinker, Steven 210 popular culture 29 – 30, 103, 133, 215, 217, 238n24 populism 238n29 post-Celtic Tiger 9, 63, 91 postcolonial 4, 26, 231 Postlewait, Thomas 4 poverty 2 – 3, 13 – 14, 19n19, 27 – 28, 36, 40, 78 – 79, 105 – 107, 114, 116, 118n26, 121, 125, 132, 138 – 139, 148, 173 – 176, 181, 203, 224 – 225, 229, 235n5, 236n7, 236n9, 236n10 Project Arts Centre 235n1 proletarian 18n9, 19n23, 44n14

257

property 2, 3, 5, 8, 10 – 11, 13, 19n26, 21n39, 21n43, 22n50, 28, 30, 48 – 71, 73, 89, 91 – 92, 118n22, 121, 141, 171, 186, 191, 194n5, 221 – 223, 234 prostitution/ sex work 12, 14, 89, 106 – 108, 115 – 116, 118n25, 139, 147, 169n16, 180, 229 Rancière, Jacques 26, 56, 121, 131 Reay, Dianne 140 – 141, 230 Reid, Christina 1, 33; Joyriders 13, 33, 45n27, 67, 114, 125 – 128, 176, 191 – 192, 215, 219n14, 225, 227, 230, 235n1, 236n9, 237n13 Reid, Graham 1, 33; The Hidden Curriculum 12, 33, 123 – 125, 188, 231 Rendulic, Mirjana 31; Broken Promised Land 31 Republic of Ireland 9 – 10, 12, 18n12, 20n38, 21n39, 30, 45n26, 68, 70n22, 94n6, 116n2, 143n14, 145, 168n8, 170, 238n27 Revolution of Easter 1916 9, 49, 56, 70n11, 82, 173, 227 Richards, Shaun 31 Richtarik, Marilynn 63 Robinson, Lennox 1; The Big House 8, 27, 45, 53 – 55; The Whiteheaded Boy 8, 52 – 53, 68, 191, 194n1 Roche, Anthony 43n9, 56, 95n16 Roche, Billy 1; Cavalcaders 114, 163, 208 – 210; A Handful of Stars 218n5 Rooney, Sally: Normal People 143n16, 192 Rothfeld, Becca 161 – 162 Ruane, Aileen 132 rural 30, 45n21, 48 – 49, 51, 55, 58, 90, 98, 110, 117n6, 170, 185, 205 Ryan, Tracy: Strike! 216 Sandel, Michael 11, 21n40, 93, 106, 121, 143n19, 218n4, 220n22, 231 – 232, 235, 235n6 Sarma Rani Ursula 1; Orpheus Road 31 Savage Mike 2, 6, 11, 18n4, 19n21, 19n23, 19n25, 20n27, 21n41,

258

Index

22n47, 28 – 30, 32, 34, 44n18, 44n19, 44n20, 46n29, 47n44, 68, 69n5, 72, 93, 95n17, 103, 116, 119n29, 121, 134, 136, 142n1, 143n17, 152, 217, 220n23, 224, 235n5, 236n12, 238n30 Saville Inquiry 200, 219n9 Sepunick, Teya 34 Share, Perry 45n22 Shaw, George Bernard 1; John Bull’s Other Island 237n14; Pygmalion 191 Sheridan, Peter 44n11, 194n13 Shiels, George 32, 44n15; Professor Tim 8, 51 – 52, 66, 91 Shira, Melissa 18n13, 25, 56 – 57, 67 Singleton, Brian 26, 45n23, 145, 195n19 social capital 6, 15 – 17, 28, 44n17, 44n18, 46n30, 49, 60, 74 – 75, 91, 103, 121, 140, 160, 196 – 220, 225 – 226, 232 social housing 67, 70n22, 81, 94n7, 170, 185, 219n8 solidarity 7, 15 – 16, 22n52, 30, 33, 42, 85, 100, 173 – 174, 178 – 179, 196 – 220, 222, 231 – 232, 234, 238n24 sovereignty 9, 30, 70n22 Spallen, Abbie 1, 238n25; Pumpgirl 14, 33, 114, 151 – 153, 191, 229 – 230 Srinivasan, Amia 4, 14, 18n10, 20n34, 22n51, 47n40, 106, 108, 118n25, 117n12, 162, 166 – 167, 168n3, 169n12, 238n28 Steger, Manfred B. and Ravi K. Roy 21n43 Stembridge, Gerard: The Gay Detective 10, 89 – 91, 115; That Was Then 10, 66, 83 – 84 subaltern 16, 19, 25, 44n20 subsistence 15, 49, 66, 105, 132, 181, 202, 225 suburbia 59, 63, 66, 80, 92, 100, 143n11, 156 – 159, 178 – 179 suicide 8, 65, 77, 80, 85, 138, 143n11, 146, 160, 164, 184, 199, 213, 219n7, 225 Sunningdale Agreement 62 – 63, 142n8, 215 Sweeney, Bernadette 25

Synge, J. M. 1, 27, 32, 44n15; The Playboy of the Western World 8, 49 – 51, 70n6, 92, 195n23; Riders to the Sea 31; The Shadow of a Glen 193; The Tinker’s Wedding 194n13 THEATREclub: The Game 115 Thompson, Sam 1; Over the Bridge 12, 33, 99 – 101, 116, 179, 216, 235n1 Tomelty, Joseph 33 traveller community 15, 30, 57, 139, 155, 165, 183 – 185, 194n13, 195n14, 195n16, 195n17 Trench, Rhona 25, 157 Trier, James 142n9 Trotter, Mary 25 Troubles (The) 5, 9 – 10, 33 – 34, 63, 68, 75, 125 – 126, 170, 183, 201 Ulster Literary Theatre 32 Urban, Eva 18n2, 31 Vice, Sue 218n10 Wallace, Clare 25, 43n4 Walsh, Enda 1, 43n4; The Walworth Farce 12, 112–113, 118n23, 192 Walsh, Ian R 46 War of Independence 49, 53, 214 Watkins, Neil 14; The Year of Magical Wanking 14, 149 – 150 West, Michael: Freefall 163 Whelan, Feargal 59 Whitaker, T. K. 20n37 Widgery Tribunal 200 Wilde, Oscar 1 Williams, Raymond 18n8, 26 Winter, Brenda 201 – 202, 219n12 Winters, Carmel: B for Baby 165 Women’s Liberation Movement 4, 96, 132, 218n2 Yeats, W.B. 1, 27, 31 – 32, 44n14, 53, 60, 70n15, 93, 118n23, 153; Cathleen ni Houlihan (with Augusta Gregory) 66, 114, 197 – 199; Purgatory 14, 66, 171 – 172 Young, Harvey 32 Žižek, Slavoj 27, 93